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Hellboy Animated Comic

Apple has an animated comic up promoting the new Hellboy and the Golden Army movie. It's worth checking out for you Hellboy fans.

Hellboy Animated Comic Teaser

Sometimes I make things

Things that will cut you!

This is a roughed out knife blank for a type of carving knife I'm making. I'll show you the finished product in a few days. God willing and the creek don't rise.

Monday Jam: My Morning Jacket - Remnants

Unless you are living under a rock then you already know that My Morning Jacket's new album, Evil Urges has been released. 2008 is the year of the Jacket. So far they have been on Saturday Night Live, Conan, and the covers of all the important music mags. They are on tour for summer, and last but not least they will be closing out 2008 by playing the New Year's Eve show at the Garden in New York city. Go go hometown heroes!

Here's my favorite rocker from the new album, Remnants

Two Quickies

Imagine if your architect designed you, free of charge, a A New York Apartment that was also a hidden puzzle.

The hero you think you are, but you aren't. You're just an idiot George Saunder's pitch for a new TV show in the New Yorker.

Monday Jam: They Call Me Gutter-Man!

First a story, and then the Monday Jam

Home Repair Hilarity
I spent this Saturday and last Saturday 20 feet in the air hanging off a ladder removing 50 feet of gutter and the rotted out gutter board behind it.

Why did my gutter board rot and tear away from the house taking the gutter with it? Well that is a question for the ages, but the primary reasons are:
1. I suck at home maintenance because I'm lazy and afraid of heights.
2. Last year I hired the town's dope dealer who also runs a roofing company as a front company. I did not know that my roofer was also selling OZs of Matanuska Thunderf*&k off the back of his truck. I did not know, at the time, he was the town's "connection" or I would never have hired him. I would have used the illegal immigrants my insurance company was trying to stick me with. I'm not trying to "harsh anyone's mellow", but I am little concerned that someone replaced the roof of my house while stoned out of their minds.

Anyways, lesson learned, next time hire the Mexicans. They are faster, cheaper, and better. Or at least better than stoned white guys who didn't even have a functioning air compressor for their nailers when they showed up.

Back to our story, when I examined the gutter I immediately saw that the reason it had fallen was the combined weight of 1 ass ton of roofing gravel plus a metric butt load of ROOFING NAILS.

Is this a good time to mention that my "roofer" had promised to clean my gutters when they were done? I don't want to jump to conclusions though. I am not a roofer. Maybe they left the nails in so that the iron would strengthen my gutters? Maybe the dope head S.O.B. is owns with the local tire store too? Or has stock in a tetanus shot manufacturer.

Whichever the case there was clearly too many nails and too much sediment for my poor little gutter to handle. So he overflowed water onto the gutter board, thus rotting it, and finally the whole assembly decided to commit suicided by leaping off from the house and onto my air conditioner.

I do not know what the air conditioner did to deserve this fate. But he survived. The gutters were dead though.

So, there I am, standing on a ladder with a crowbar and a framing hammer looking at the remains of this tragic accident and wondering what to do. Obviously there is only one answer, pull the carcass of the gutter off my roof. And so there I was a beating and hammering and a pulling and a tossing and a thinking about Alice's Restaurant when I remembered that there's nothing in this world like a run on sentence about doing demolition work 20 feet in the sky on a rickety old ladder.

Did I mention that I am afraid of heights?

This Saturday I was back up on that same rickety ladder beating and hammering and reattaching all the soffitt to the new gutter board.

This involved nailing tiny 1 inch roofing tacks into a 1 inch wide board over my head. With 22oz waffle head framing hammer. This is delicate work, and when you miss the nail and bring that meat tenderizing hammer down on your finger like the mighty John Henry the following three things will happen:
1. You will tenderize the finger into a throbbing swollen mess of raw hamburger.
2. You will cuss so loud, so much, and with such creativity that your neighborhood association will file 6 seperate class action lawsuits against you.
3. You will execute a hilarious traditional folk dance called "I just hit my finger with a hammer and I am trying to curse, suck my finger, not drop the hammer, and not fall off the ladder all at the same time."

Finally the work was done and my wife expressed her appropriate wifely respect for my manliness by saying (and this really deserves its own line with italics):

"I don't know why you think you should be appreciated for doing something you are supposed to do anyways."

And god bless us everyone!

My life, my wife, and therefore this Monday Jam calls for only thing, Straight Strychnine.

How To: Flatten a Work Bench Top With Hand Planes

Today Conrad is going to show you how I flattened my workbench.

Its important to have a flat work bench when you're making furniture for two reasons, first because it acts as a reference surface for you to determine how flat your furniture parts are, and two you need a solid clamping surface that will hold the work straight and flat. If your bench is out of flat you risk introducing twist and wind into your work when clamping it to the uneven surface.

Wood is constantly moving and over the last 4 years my bench top had slowly grown uneven, so it was time to reflatten it. Here's how we did it.

These instructions are good for rough flattening any large surface, and the general principles can be applied to flattenening any panel.

The two primary planes you'll need are a jack plane (my jack plane is a Stanely 5 and 1/4, commonly called a "junior" jack plane) and a long jointing plane. I have a 30" long wooden jointer I picked up on eBay 3 years ago.

The reason we're using hand planes is because the bench is too big and heavy to move to my stationery power tools. Don't worry though, the hand planing is pretty easy in this situation.

Typically when we need to flatten something we can start with the long jointer plane. Its long surface rides from high spot to high spot quickly removing them. But, as you can see in my illustration, on a long gradual crown the jointer will ride over the crown instead of removing it.

So instead take a straight edge and find the large high areas. Circle them with a pencil. Now take your jack plane and work locally within those areas to bring them down to roughly the same plane as the rest of the bench. Set the plane iron to take a thick shaving and then work perpendicular to the grain. The wood fibers will cut very easily as you traverse them and this will allow you to hog off a lot of wood very quickly. Don't worry about how rough it leaves your bench, we'll be cleaning that up later.

Above is a picture of how your jack plane should be oriented to the grain.

Keep using your straight edge and pencil to find the high spots and then work them down with your jack plane. After you have worked all the high spots down into roughly the same plane you will have a bumpy bench with lots of small variations across it.

Now take the jointer plane and set it for a medium fine cut. Again working perpendicular to the grain you move across the surface and knock down all the little high spots. As you can see in my exaggerated illustration above, the long sole of the plane will ride across the tops of the high spots. You will know you are done with a section when you get a continous cut across the bench.

Keep using your straight edge and work slowly to refine the surface into flat. Since this is a wooden work bench top, it doesn't have to be as flat as a machinists reference plate. Just work it down until its useable for you and the way you work.

Above you can see the differences between shavings that go with the grain versus across the grain. Going across the grain produces little continous toothpicks.

After you are done using the jointer across the grain set it to as fine a cut as you can and then take long strokes with the grain to smooth out the roughness left from working across the grain.

Alternately you can use a good smoothing plane (pictured above) to refine the surface. Remember that the sole of the smoothing plane is very short and if you work too much in one area you will create a dip in the surface and ruin your efforts. So take it easy!

After you are done you'll have a nice flat bench and plenty of shavings for your hamster cage.

Remember that not every problem can be solved with a power tool, there are a lot of instances where hand tools can accomplish the same thing just as fast and with more control.

Phone Sex Operators Slide Shows

The Morning News brings us a nice collection of slides and anecdotes from the phone sex industry: Phone Sex Operators (This is an actual new story from an actual news site, so its more or less safe for work.)

To be honest I'm a bit surprised that with the internet and everything that there is still a phone sex industry.

I keep wanting to make some kind of Paul Harvey rest of the story joke here, but I can't make it work out. If you come up with one, let me know.

Fast Food Doesn't Make You Fat (Calories do)

Fast Doesn't make you fat from the good people at the economics blog, Odd Numbers, who profile a working paper that basically proves what you've known in your gut (literally) all along, that 100 calories of McDonalds doesn't have a magic property to make you fatter than 100 calories of an organic peanut butter sandwich on whole wheat bread.

America (and maybe the world, I don't know I just live in America) has a sick obsession with reductionism. Especially when it comes to causality. Combined with man's natural tendency to avoid taking responsibility for himself this creates bizarre statements. Nowhere is this more obvious than US Foreign Policy and US Diets.

Today, it's diets.

In the 90's it was "don't eat fat." So we all ate fat free bread and gained weight.

Then it was don't eat carbs (because of all that bread we were eating), so everyone ate fat and meat and lettuce, and yet we gained weight.

And now we're trying to blame Fast Food* companies for our bulging middles... The problem is that it always comes back to one thing: we're fat because we eat too much.

I hope this doesn't come off as an over simplification of the problem. In spite of the obvious fact that eating more means gaining weight the actual weight gain and loss is far more problematic than a simple "Eat more." or "Eat less." I can say this confidently as someone who tried desperately to gain weight for years, and who is now trying desperately trying to lose weight. Deliberately trying to go in either direction is HARD!

*The marketing of fast food companies constantly exhorting us to eat more and more and more and more because everything is so cheap is something else entirely.