Shannon Larratt is Zentastic

We went to the mall today and little remote control cars (pretty cool that they can make fully functional RC cars about the size of a Hotwheels) were $25 off, so we got the car and radio package for a whopping $4.96, picking up one for each of us. At that price, if someone wanted to build little robot projects, you’d be getting micro-servos, motor controls, and RC interfaces for far less than parts cost!

At the mall Nefarious also stopped at one of the kiosks that sells makeup and did herself up in clown makeup. I’m not sure if that sort of thing is frowned on or not but it was also quite fun.

We read for about two hours today, starting with the somewhat sad but beautiful “Blue Stone” by Jimmy Liao but the bulk of the time was spent reading “Trick of the Tail”, which has great illustrations by Tomislav Tomic and is nicely written as well — it’s shocking how hard it is to find good books, as most kids literature is complete junk. I shop at Another Story, which helps a lot as they’ve got a superior selection of stuff that’s quite hard to find.

Other than that I got my knee x-rayed again. Not too exciting but there’s some concern that there are going to be follow-up issues other than just nerve damage. You can see the lump on the side of the bone where the tumor was originally removed. I’m not sure how much of that is regrowth if any; either way it’s a very slow growing benign hunk of bone. It’s definitely not something I’m particularly concerned about, but I sure learned my lesson the first time around and if it’s something that needs intervention, it’s not going to happen after 15 years of pain again!!! (Duh!)

PS. I added more “ducks”.

Here’s something that probably would be best if it were only remembered by the people involved. This is “Suckmord”, a movie that I did with some friends in highschool — below is the late Scott Fox, playing Codger the Morgue Attendant. You can click the thumbnail to watch it, or, since it really makes no sense and I would be shocked if any people actually got through it, here’s an explanation and story. This is captured off a very old VHS…

So I think “harassment” (as in getting harassed, not as in doing it) is my middle name right now, sheesh… I was driving down the street with Nefarious with a cop car following me. After about a block and a half it lit up and pulled me over. I hadn’t done anything wrong, so of course the first thing I asked her was, “can I ask why you pulled me over?”

For those who’ve forgotten, this is my truck:

“You don’t have mudflaps,” she tells me. Now, I have a second, much larger truck and I do know the laws regarding mudflaps. First of all, this truck isn’t that large or that lifted — 33″ tires on a 5″ lift — and I have aftermarket wide fender flares so the tires are 100% covered. There’s no excess space between the tires and the body, and the fenders are trimmed only enough to keep the tires from rubbing. The actual law as to how much coverage is required is somewhat discretionary, but to actually give you a ticket they’re supposed to see a problem occurring (ie. debris flying, serious splashing, and so on) — so it shouldn’t happen on a sunny, rainfree summer day like today.

I explain all of this to her, but it turns out that she’s the type of cop that when they discover they’re wrong, fight even harder to find something to charge you with. So instead of just letting me on my way, she asks for my license, registration, and proof of insurance. I grab the first two, and then I’m rummaging through my wallet for the last when I pull out the insurance paper for my other car. She asks me if that’s it, and I tell her no, it’s for my other car but it’s the same policy. She tells me that’s fine and takes it, with no request for the one for the truck.

For fifteen minutes I watch her reading the rule book and making calls — it’s clear she doesn’t actually know the law. She comes back a couple of times to measure my tires and various bits of the truck. I get out and ask her if the rules specify an exact distance, and exactly where she wanted the mudflap to be — she couldn’t give me an answer, and just said that it was “at her discretion” but refused to give any specifics. I told her that to give me a ticket, she had to have a reason or a legitimate concern, and that in the time we’d been standing there, a dozen other trucks with more lift and larger tires had driven past. She told me that she was sick of talking to me and wasn’t interested in discussing it anywhere other than in the presence of a judge.

So then she delays another five minutes or so as she writes up the paperwork, and comes back not with one ticket but with two. The first was for “no mud flaps”, and the second was for “refused to give insurance card”… When I saw that, I objected, and told her that she’d told me what I had given her was fine, and that I had the insurance paperwork for the truck with me and was perfectly happy to show it to her, but again, she just said to take it up with a judge.

Really, it’s this kind of police officer that earns the name “pig”.

Here’s a shot of my rear tire/fender from above. As you can see the tire is completely covered. The tickets — both of them — are completely bullshit, nothing but police harassment, and will get tossed out in court if not before (as they’re a total waste of time and money for the courts)… but still, a complete waste of my time and money as well.

In more pleasant news, while Nefarious has chickenpox, she’s got my immune system so it’s barely affected her and we’ve had tons of fun playing as usual. Thankfully she did not inherit my light sleeping, having grown up in the city — she slept through a Chinese family reunion last night that made me want to murder my neighbors… Anyway, I had to go downtown with her today for imaging on my leg as there’s some worries that my tumor is recurring, so we got to play on the big artificial rocks on Cumberland, and then we’ve been having a big squirt gun war in the driveway and on the balconies. Summer fun!

The other good news is that I got my power supply for my laptop back, so I’ll be able to get my various sites that had the plug pulled on them back online soon, as well as post all the new things that look like ducks, and capture and post the movie I made in highschool, something I’ve meant to do for, oh, a decade. It’s embarrassing, but nice memories.