I’ve been wanting to use The ‘Fig again for months but couldn’t come up with a good way to do so. Then I found this old Zentraedi officer’s pod hiding in the closet, and… here you go.

I doubt my ability to top this in terms of pure, unalloyed geekery.

Don’t worry: Eventually, I’ll try to.

I like finding different ways to approach this particular kind of gag…

Of course there’s a small guardian of the forest here in Portland. We have a small forest inside our city, after all.

Look, it’s a cardinal rule of comedy: When in doubt? Homicidal robots.

Works every time.

The real kicker is that burning a few gigabytes at a time to shiny plastic platters is so darned time-consuming, and then getting the data back off of the platters again later is also so darned time-consuming, that the best solution lately seem to be simply keeping multiple copies on hard drives and hoping not all of the drives fail within too short a time frame.

There must be a better way coming. And soon.

So, that stress ball.

Back in the mists of time, HBO aired a series called “From The Earth To The Moon,” a miniseries about the Apollo program. When they were getting ready to promote it they sent out stress balls done up to look like a small Earth and a small Moon. One recipient of these cutesy giveaway items was a radio station known at the time as Earth 105, which Entercom bought up (by way of acquiring the oldies station in town) and renamed to Rosie 105. Then Rosey 105. Then The Buzz. Then I lost track because I don’t work there anymore and am no longer paid to care. At any rate, the stress balls were gathering dust in a promotions office as we moved the stations from downtown to the SoWhat area, so I nabbed a set because I enjoyed the hell out of that HBO series.

And now Rei’s using it to teach the ducklings about our solar system. Funny how the world works, eh?

Let’s not go into how long ago I ordered that last box of checks, shall we?

I’m sure that there are decent-yet-affordable hands-free Bluetooth devices out there which would make prolonged phone conversations less of a hassle for me.

That one wasn’t it, however.

Look, if Van Halen can get away with it, so can I.

Most sane people would think I’m picking on an easy target, but let’s remember that there are enough crazies buying into this garbage for us to still be talking about it.

But you know, whatever. Happy New Year, everyone!

Hey, I even remembered to change the date in the corner!