¡Feliz Navidad!

(First an apology. My illustrations using YouTube videos have ads that you have to endure for a few seconds before you can dismiss them. YouTube needs to make money, after all.)

Years ago I was bewildered by the popularity of José Feliciano's Christmas tune "Feliz Navidad." It has a catchy tune and two lines that are repeated over and over and over.

A web site that gives us songs' lyrics gives us this:

Feliz Navidad

Feliz Navidad

Feliz Navidad

Prospero Año y Felicidad.

Feliz Navidad

Feliz Navidad

Feliz Navidad

Prospero Año y Felicidad.

I wanna wish you a Merry Christmas

I wanna wish you a Merry Christmas

I wanna wish you a Merry Christmas

From the bottom of my heart.

[Repeats]

"Repeats" is putting it mildly. 

The song got a lot of airplay when it was new. I didn't really like it then but the rest of the world seemed to love it. It came back year after year. I was hoping the interest in the song would wane and we could get back to more complex Christmas tunes.

I made a game of my bewilderment. I deemed a successful Christmas season as one when I didn't hear that tune played even once. It is difficult to avoid. Shopping malls play Christmas carols and you can't avoid shopping malls at Christmastime.

Its popularity spread...it's not just for shopping malls anymore. It has invaded classical radio. It can't be avoided. The Three Tenors™ sang a version of it. They livened it up a bit with some extra lines. Plácido gives us the line "I want to wish you a Merry Christmas with lots of presents to make you happy!" It doesn't help. It's a dull song even when given superstar treatment.

Christmas 2012 is not a success. I got to hear a very sappy rendition of it today in the bathroom of the restaurant we had lunch at today. Today is still September.

I don't think I have gone a year without hearing the song since I invented my game. Sigh.

One more day at the Grand Canyon

After breakfast with the ravens, I went out on Desert View Drive in search of a new spot for a movie. I ended up at Moran Point. I got my camera set up at 8:20 and had it click away until 10:30. I was alone for much of the first hour and the car was parked right by the camera. I was able to sit on something more comfortable than a rock, stump or wall now and then.

A couple from Michigan asked about my automatically clicking camera. I explained what was going on and dragged out my laptop and made them see a movie I had shot the day before. They were politely impressed and took off.

Later, I was sitting on the wall near the camera and I heard a voice behind me saying something like "Well, here's Charles!" I turned around and there was John from Encinitas.

John has a print hanging in his living room of the painting that Thomas Moran made from Moran Point. I had no knowledge of who the point had been named for. I think he said that the print was produced by Moran himself and isn't a modern, mass-produced reproduction.

I showed John the movie I was making when we visited the day before. He was more impressed with the result than the Michigan couple.

Now you have the opportunity to be impressed with watching two hours of the view from Moran Point in just over one minute. (Remember, you can press buttons on the player to show it in HD and full screen. I recommend both!)



Later, as I was turning onto the road to Lipan Point, there was John from Encinitas at the stop sign leaving the point. I didn't make a movie there. I had run out of patience for standing around for long periods. Besides, the camera's batteries were running low and it takes a long time being plugged in to get them recharged.

More clouds

I left Grandview Point and continued east. The last viewpoint on the rim (or first if you start at the east entrance) is Desert View. This has the Desert View Watchtower.

Watchtower (undergoing renovations)

The inside of the watchtower has murals on the ceiling.

Watchtower ceiling

And murals on the walls.

Watchtower wall

And views of the canyon.

Desert View view

I made a short video here. It was shot in only half an hour starting around 2:15, October 23, 2010. It was getting very cold and windy and I was getting discouraged with all the thick clouds. I wanted scattered, puffy clouds but had to deal with thick ones. You might be able to see the landscape shaking from all the wind. I need a sturdier tripod. And I need to check that the camera is horizontal.

Oh, What a Beautiful Day!

I left Yavapai Point where I had recorded the three hours of thick, morning clouds and headed east. I stopped at Grandview Point.

The clouds were finally breaking up so sunshine reached the canyon floor. This time we see not only clouds moving but their shadows as well.

This video captured the canyon and clouds from 11:20 till 1:00 Saturday, October 23, 2010.

Oh, What a Beautiful Gray Morning!

I set up an alarm on my iPod to wake me up at 6:00 Saturday morning with the hopes that the clouds might disappear overnight. I wanted to have a glorious sunrise to record.

I didn't get the greatest quality sleep that night because there was rain that beat on the tent and the pad wasn't fully inflated. But I was sound asleep when a very loud phone rang. It was the iPod doing what I had asked. It must have roused everyone in the campground who weren't already awake. I turned off the alarm and lay there for a while. The iPod rang again. I guess I just hit the snooze button.

I dragged myself out of the sleeping bag into the cold, damp world. The clouds were still there, thicker than before. A beautiful sunrise was not to be seen.

I took a little Sterno-burning "stove" to heat water for portable Starbucks coffee. But this first morning I didn't have time to heat water. Even though there were thick clouds I wanted to get to the rim and be set up for the time the sun was rising. So I just poured a packet of the coffee into cold water and drank it.

That's not the best way to prepare Starbucks Via. It didn't dissolve. But I figured that the clumps of coffee powder would digest and I'd get my caffeine dose. I ate my bagel with Jif peanut butter (if you can call it that).

How can a product that has more than just fresh peanuts taste "more like fresh peanuts" than peanut butter that's just peanuts and salt? Anyway, it doesn't need refrigeration. I suppose I could have taken a natural product and just stirred it well but it would have been a bit messier than Jif.

I went back to Yavapai Point where I had filmed the rain moving through the canyon the evening before.

There were a lot of low clouds. There was no sunrise to be seen that morning. But clouds breaking up and the sun coming out is a good subject for a time-lapse movie. And there's the Grand Canyon behind all those clouds!

So I set up the camera right at the edge of the canyon. There was a 300-foot drop just a couple of feet beyond the camera. The camera was pointed over the edge so I thought that there was going to be no chance that anyone would get between the camera and the canyon. But I was wrong. There are two frames with a Japanese tourist getting a picture of the canyon from the very edge of the canyon. If you blink, you'll miss her.

While I was standing there (I couldn't just wander around and leave the camera unattended), someone asked about what I was doing. We discussed our photography hobbies. He had just started taking landscape pictures. He has a very sturdy looking tripod. I need to get one myself. We introduced ourselves. John is from Encinitas. (Hey, the REI where I got the camping gear is in Encinitas...what a small world.)

I stood there from 7:00 to 10:00. The sun made only a few, very brief, appearances.

Here is what clouds moving through the Grand Canyon the morning of October 23, 2010, looked like. The three hours are reduced to a minute and 11 seconds. It starts out slow with just clouds visible. But the canyon eventually makes an appearance. Give it time to develop.

It was a Grand time

Jerry and a friend of his made their annual trip to Phoenix last weekend. I thought that since I was going to be alone for four days that I might as well get out of town myself. Ever since I got my time-lapse movie gadget, I had been thinking that clouds and shadows in the Grand Canyon might be interesting subjects for time-lapse movies.

I checked the lodges in the Grand Canyon Village but they were all completely booked for that weekend.

Then I checked the hotels in Tusayan, the smallest incorporated town in Arizona, that is just to the south of the park. There were some rooms available but I didn't really want have to travel all that distance every day.

I looked into other alternatives.

Home away from home

I thought that camping might be the way to go. I figured that I might be able to spend what I'd have had to spend for a hotel room on camping gear and end up with accommodations for future outings. Jerry and I headed over to REI to see what this gear would cost.

It turns out that they rent gear. What a deal, for less than what it costs to spend a night in a hotel room 20 miles from the canyon I could rent a tent, a sleeping bag and a pad for three nights! I could see if I enjoy camping before making the full investment. I reserved the gear and a campsite.

I went camping for the first time since the road trip from hell. (Actually, I think I never spent a night in the tent on that trip. I think I always slept on the coffin at the back of the Carryall.)

We went over to REI Thursday evening to pick up the equipment.

The week before my trip the weather here at home turned wintry. Lots of rain and gloominess. That weather headed to northern Arizona.  I drove up to the Grand Canyon on Friday and for much of the drive there was rain but it quit when I left I-40 at Williams. There was hope that the weekend would be dry!

I got to the campground at around 4:00pm. I pitched the tent between the channel that drains the campground and a shallower channel that looked like rain had recently run through. I then drove to Yavapai Point with my camera.

I got my camera and intervalometer set up around 5:20. Sunset was around 5:40 but there was no sun shining. The thick clouds hid it and were dropping rain in the canyon. But there was enough light for the camera. I had it take pictures of the canyon and the rain for a half hour.

Over the weekend I made several time-lapse movies. Mostly of the heavy cloud cover. There wasn't a lot of sunshine.

Here is the movie I shot that first evening. It shows a rain shower moving through the canyon.

I didn't have the best night's sleep the first night at the campground. I think that I didn't give the self-inflating pad enough time to puff up so it wasn't the softest possible bed. And it rained. The tent kept the water out but the rain beating on the tent was a noise I wasn't used to so it kept me awake much of the time. The sleeping bag kept me warm.

Camping might be a fun way to experience nature. At least in warmer and drier weather.

Blog Overload

Sorry about this.

Last week in Short Ride in a Fast Machine, I said that I wasn't going to post every time-lapse movie I make. Colleen wondered if that meant that I plan to make zillions of movies. I do plan on making a zillion movies but I don't want to devote What's Up, Chuck? to these things.

I thought that it might be kind of fun to show the world what I come up with. So...

I've started another blog that is devoted to my time-lapse movie making. If you want to follow along just click and go to The Barista's Cut. You should read from the bottom up.

I hope the name works. It's a play on "director's cut." Get it? The movies are caffeinated.

Does the name work? Should I change it?

I hope I make a zillion movies.

Compare and Contrast

We had some parties to celebrate my mother's 90th birthday over the Fourth of July weekend in Los Alamos, New Mexico. Between parties, I hauled my camera to the spot where the water tank used to be above the house I grew up in (and where three of my nieces are now growing up).

I love my new camera. It can do everything. And with the help of the few accessories I've gotten for it so far, it can do even more.

One of the accessories I've bought is a circular polarizing filter. One of the things that the filter can do is darken the sky without changing colors since the sky far from the sun is polarized a bit.

The first part of my picture project was to see the polarized filter in action.

First, here is a picture looking west at Burnt Mountain. This picture has the polarizing filter oriented so that it aligned with the sky's polarization. It doesn't darken the sky. 

Now I have rotated the filter 90˚. The sky has darkened and the clouds became more apparent. You can better see the quarter moon just to the left of the mountain (about half way up the mountain).

I didn't do any tweaking of the colors so the greenery has gotten lighter in the second picture since the automatic exposure has compensated for the darker part of the picture.

Another thing that the camera can do is take very long exposures. Here is the same shot (well, zoomed in a little...I didn't really mean to do that) later that day. This was about 10:30 that night and the exposure lasted 107 seconds, not quite two minutes.

If I had had the zoom set the same for the two pictures we should have been able to compare the lengths of the stars' trails to the diameter of the moon in the previous picture. It takes about two minutes for the moon (or the sun) to move its width across the sky. So the stars' trails should be about the same width as the moon. At least for the stars near the equator.

I repeated this exercise with the mountain to the north. First, with minimal darkening from the polarized filter.

And maximizing the sky's darkening.

And a 206-second exposure that night.

Though there is nothing to contrast this picture with, here is a 13-minute exposure of Polaris and its surrounding stars.

To the left of Polaris is a short track of a meteor or a satellite flare. Along the bottom of the picture you can see the dotted line of an airplane's navigation lights as it flew across the shot. And from around the middle of the bottom to the middle of the right side there is a solid line, either a satellite or a meteor (or maybe it's a flying saucer!).

Now I have to make myself a barn door tracker and try to shoot the sky without the stars leaving trails. But then, I don't make it to places with dark skies very often. When you live in the big city, you give up a lot of your stargazing.

---

It was Fate

There was a hobby that Jack introduced me to that I embraced completely.

For a long time I was fascinated by the paranormal.

Out of the blue, Jack got me an issue of Fate magazine. I guess I really enjoyed what I read. Jack got me a subscription to the magazine!

One of the first issues I got in the mail really got me hooked.

The article "Table Up! or How to Tilt a Table" got the ball rolling. This is a way to get answers to all of your questions.

It was easy. Three people sit at the east, south and west sides of a card table. You then rub your hands together until they are warm then place your hands on the table so that your thumbs are touching and your pinkies are touching the person's pinkies next to you. You then chant "Table Up! Table Up! Table Up!" After a short time the legs on the north side of the table rise off of the floor! The table then will answer your questions. You tell it to dip up and down to give the answers. For example, for a yes/no question, you could have it dip once for "yes" and twice for "no." I suppose you need to give it an option like three dips for "I'm not telling!"

It actually worked! Three of us got out the card table, sat around it, did the chanting, and, miracle of miracles!, the legs on the north side of the table rose from the floor! It did its dipping to answer our questions!

I can't remember what sort of questions we asked. I certainly don't remember if the answers were very accurate. But it was a miracle that the table ignored the laws of gravity and dipped out answers.

This led me to the 130s section of Mesa Public Library. I must have checked out every book of their paranormal collection.

I investigated dreams. I studied the Tarot. I got a Ouiji board. I read about UFOs. I thought about telepathy and psychokinesis.

A weird thing about the Ouiji board was that whenever Peggy was on the other side of the planchette, the board would give very rude or obscene answers. I guess Peggy was channelling unhappy spirits. I hope they have found their peace.

I never got good at reading the Tarot cards. I probably needed a teacher. Like most of the things I learned outside of school, I was self-taught. Book learning about mystical things isn't the best way to go. The knowledge probably has to be passed empathetically from master to student.

But mostly I learned about testing hypotheses.

I never saw that any of these mystical activities were shown to be real through reproducible tests.

Fate had features where readers would send in their proofs of survival (of this plane's life) and of mystic experiences. Most were rather silly. One woman told about waking up one night to see an otherworldly surgeon operating on her chronically sore hips. She woke up the next morning and the pain she had experienced for years was gone! She had scars on her hips that were proof that she had had the overnight surgery! Even though I was trying to be a believer and I was rather young, my eyes rolled and I thought, "Lady, you have stretch marks. Maybe you lost some weight and your hips aren't working as hard holding you up."

I couldn't be a believer. But I still have fond memories of my time trying to find more in this universe than can be experienced by our five traditional senses.

This hobby laid an egg

Chickens.

"Son, you want to raise chickens."

No, I didn't.

Another of Jack's hobby ideas was for me to be a chicken rancher. He was serious. He bought me books on the activity. This would be a 4-H project. I'd get a merit badge and he'd get eggs and chickens on the table.

An aside: I was in a 4-H club. Its focus was on electronics. I made a toolbox that was supposed to hold all of my electronics equipment. It was a simple plywood box with a hinged lid with a hasp we could lock it with. I never used it. It would have been pretty useless for tools. There was nothing in it to keep it organized.

I had mixed experiences in my 4-H career.

One year I went to a statewide 4-H competition where I demonstrated making an extension cord. To make things go smoothly, my 4-H leader had me precut the insulation at the proper places. In the demonstration I simply pantomimed the cutting. I removed the insulation from the wires on one end of the cord, fed it through the plug and tried to tie the Underwriter's knot that keeps the cord from being pulled out of the plug.

I tried and tried but the wires were too short for the knot. After struggling a long time (and after the judges told me to relax) I realized that I was working on the wrong end of the cord. Because there were different plugs on the ends of the cord, one end's wires needed to be shorter than the other's. I was working with the wrong end. I went well beyond my allotted time. I didn't win an award.

Electronics wasn't the only thing I did for 4-H.

I kept bees. For some reason, they gave me credit for entomology. I wasn't studying bugs. I would have thought that beekeeping would have been a 4-H category of its own.

And I cooked. I won a blue ribbon in the county fair for the biscuits I entered in the 4-H category. That let me send some biscuits to the state fair. No ribbons came back to me.

Chickens.

I read the books on raising chickens. There were many unpleasant things about raising chickens.

For one thing, you had to kill them. I didn't look forward to that. Poor things.

And you got to be an amateur veterinarian. One activity in the book that looked like was in my future was caponizing the roosters-to-be. The thought of castrating the little chickens scared the heck out of me.

The chicken ranch was going to be in the back yard around the shed. I think that we were going to convert the shed into a chicken coop.

I don't know how close we came to rounding up the initial flock of chickens.

But Chris came first!

Jack had a friend who had a golden retriever. Karen was in love with that dog. The pooch became a parent (I can't remember whether it was the mother or the father). The friend gave us, well, gave Karen, one of the litter. This was around Christmas, 1968. He was named Golden Duke's Christmas (after his father). Chris for short.

Thank god for Chris.

He got the part of the yard that was going to be for the chickens.

NO CHICKENS!

Chris and Karen, January 1969

Thank you, Chris!

Four months in the can

Can almost four months have already passed? Can it be the solstice? Can you remember when this all began? Can it, Chuckbert! Can we just get to the story?

Happy Summer Solstice, 2009!

Way back on February 28, I posted a little teaser where I showed pictures of some cans I put on the roof but didn't say what they were doing there. Izzy's guess about what was going on was pretty much correct. (Maybe it wasn't a guess. Maybe she knew but left it vague so not to spoil the surprise.)

The cans were pinhole cameras. Each had some Ilford photographic paper in it and a hole in its side. After I took the pictures of the cans I removed the tape covering their pinholes and just left them. Today I went up there, put some tape over their pinholes and brought them in to "process."

The processing is very simple. I just put the paper on my scanner's glass and scanned. No chemicals! No Costco 1-hour photo! Just scanning and tweaking with image editing software.

The whole point of this exercise was to watch the sun's progress through the months. We get to see the sun rise higher in the sky as the days go by. At least when there are no clouds. We get to see May Gray and June Gloom very well.

Here is the scene that the paint can strapped to south side of the chimney screen saw:
The sun was behind clouds where there are gaps in the white stripes.

I put the holes in the middles of the cans. That ended up getting a lot of the foreground but cut off the top of the sun's arcs. In this picture you can see the new solar powered attic fan and Solatube we had installed last year.

It's interesting how the sun shows through gaps between leaves of the ash tree even when it has fully leafed out. (The bottom trails of the sun go through the tree before it got all of its leaves.)

Here's a normal camera's view of that direction (though not nearly as wide angle):

This next picture is from the can on the east side of the chimney. The sun goes through an ash tree on the left and over another ash on the right. That's the same tree on the left side of the first picture above. You can see the Solatube on the roof of the garage.

This is the normal view showing the garage roof and the left hand ash tree from above.

This is the picture taken by the Guinness can strapped to the tripod of the weather station. This picture shows our May Gray and June Gloom pretty well. The sun's trails at the top of the arc got pretty sparse. We've had a very gloomy couple of months. The sun didn't make an appearance all day today.

This picture is from a Guinness can on an angled leg of the weather station's tripod. I set it up a few weeks after the others on the Spring Equinox. It's looking higher in the sky and a bit to the west of the other Guinness can. I'm not sure why there aren't many trails in the morning side of the picture. Maybe the paper inside the can wasn't right up against the can and shaded the sun.

This is the view from the tripod. That's the ash that the sun goes over.

I've put the paint cans and a Guinness can back up there. I am taking pictures from the Summer Solstice to the Winter Solstice. That's the longest exposure that you would want to take. You don't want to have a solstice in the middle of an exposure since you'd just get the sun retracing its path as it changes direction.

These new cameras have their pinholes higher so that they'll get more of the sky and less of the ground. The sky's the point of these pictures after all. But the foreground does make them more interesting. I wonder why the Guinness cans don't show any detail on the ground. Maybe they need bigger pinholes.

I made up four other Guinness cans. I'll have to figure out where to put them.

I learned about this technique from an Astronomy Picture of the Day. It's got links to sites that explain how you, too, can make solargraphs!

Peeps in Space!

One of our most-used appliances is our FoodSaver Vacuum Sealing System. We store food in the bags that it sucks the air out of then seals. Most things keep longer when they don't have air around them. The FoodSaver came with some canisters that you use when the food shouldn't be crushed (salad, for instance).

For entertainment, you can put marshmallows in a canister and suck the air out. The marshmallows are full of air that expands when the air around them goes away. The marshmallows grow quite a bit. If you leave the marshmallows in the vacuum they eventually lose much of the air to that made them grow and they shrink back to their original size. Then when you let the air back into the canister, the air pressure smooshes the marshmallows into tiny lumps.

I recently was pointed to Peep Research from an old article in the New York Times. In addition to studying such things as the effects of smoking and alcohol on Peeps and their solubility (well, lack of) in sulfuric acid, they studied Peeps in low-pressure environments.

With my FoodSaver I have the ability to subject Peeps to a low-pressure environment. So I did. Here's a short film of Peeps in Space!



Happy Easter.

---

A little update: I have Google send me alerts when news articles or blog posts appear that contain interesting keywords (for example, my last name). Apparently some people are notified of blog posts that contain the word "peeps." I got a nice note asking me to link to Marshmallow Peeps on the Internet - A Study. If you're interested in Peeps, this looks like a valuable resource.

MLM: Edmund Scientific

I loved the Edmund Scientific's catalog when I was a kid. It was filled with all sorts of fascinating stuff. They had scientific toys and fun pseudoscientific stuff (I got my Pyrex crystal ball from them). They had magnets and iron filings that let you see magnetic lines of force.

They had stuff that was way out of my reach that I could only dream about. There were the motor-driven Celestron telescopes with equatorial mounts! There were the oil immersion microscopes.

How I wished we were rich so I could have all of neat things in the catalog.

But it was a thrill getting less expensive things. It started with filling out the order form. You'd enter the quantity, the item's descripton, the catalog number, the unit price, and the total amount for the quantity ordered (usually just the unit price, darn it!). You'd add up all the lines and Mom or Dad would write a check (thanks Mom and Dad!) and send it off.

Then you'd wait.

Some time later the mailman would deliver a package and you'd get to live your dreams!

One of those packages had a set of fluorescent crayons.
I had a black light. This was back in the age of DayGlo posters that lit up spectacularly under black light. But those were for Hippies. I had better use for my black light. I had rocks and minerals that fluoresced (after all, the word comes from fluorite!). But while I was at it, do-it-yourself black light posters were a fun thing to make. Thus the crayons. Cool, huh?

You'll notice that three of the crayons are missing. Well, either Pough or Dough got into my box of fluorescent crayons and ate some of them. This made for an exciting tour of poop patrol duty. Crayons, you know, don't digest. They come out pretty much the way they go in. With a long extension cord and my black light, the bits of crayons in the Pough poo-poo (or the Dough doo-doo) made for easy pickins.

(By the way, I convinced Mom to throw that black light away instead of giving it to Casa Mesita. It had only a little cardboard taped to its back to keep little kids from being electrocuted.)

Stirring controversy

The videos I post to my blog through YouTube are available for the world to see. People all over the world have seen my little films and some of them take the time to make comments.

My Black and Tan movie has gotten three comments from the world. Two of them came about 20 minutes apart this afternoon. The comments I've gotten for it are (one is slightly edited for sensitive eyes):

• F**king awesome
• HERETIC! You can only make a real B&T with Guinness. You're hereby banished from me pub, blackheart!
• Murphys Is way better then guinness!! Nice pours. whats the bottom beer?

(The last two came in rapid succession.) This movie is getting about five views each day. It's going viral!

I've gotten comments on my How to See "Dial" from Inside the Bar of Soap contribution to WikiHow. Some people just aren't impressed. The comments on that how to are:

• Cool.
• ummm. interesting. kinda pointless tho...
• Who the h-e- double hockey sticks would do this? for entertainment? That is so sad, i'm going to cry!

I made somebody cry! That makes me sad.

But the how to has been improved by others. Somebody added links to related wikiHows and another added to the list of Things You'll Need. I had listed only two or more bars of Dial soap. Somebody added "water to wash in." Somebody else shortened that to simply "water."

It appears that the instructions for seeing the backside of "Dial" are important enough to improve. I'm feeling better now.

Though not controversial, one of my Blendtec Blender movies got a comment just hours after I posted it. I'm told "that is an amazing blender." It seems Blendtec Blender videos are popular. Mine have had many views and will be catching up with the Black and Tan movie soon.

By the way, I added annotations to my Blendtec movies. I added bubbles that tell my viewers what ingredients are going into the blender and tips on what I did that I shouldn't have. You can watch them again if you want to know what goes into the smoothie, tomato cheese soup, and blueberry ice cream.

YouTube insights

You might remember my movie of making Black and Tans. When I posted that message I just hit the "Add Video" button in the message composition box. That made a video that could be seen only through the blog message. After I started to use YouTube for my movies I decided to put my Black and Tan movie there. (I also put that version of the movie in my blog posting if you want to go back and watch it again.)

YouTube gives us insight into where people are when they watch our videos and how they find us. My Black and Tan movie has been watched in Ireland! Whoever watched it there found it by searching YouTube for "black and tans."

My other movies have been watched in India, Sweden, Japan, Germany, Canada, and England. My PB2 movie has gotten a 5-star rating from one person.

They like me! They really like me!

Backwards "Dial" on wikiHow

Colleen suggested that I post my Fun while naked accomplishment on wikiHow. Well, I've posted it there. Since it's a wiki, you all are free to refine my instructions.

Don't you just love the Internet?

Fun while naked

You know how whenever you start a new bar of Dial soap you always ask yourself "What would the 'Dial' look like from the inside of the bar?" For a while you think that maybe you can just hold the soap in front of a mirror but then you realize that you're still looking at the outside of the soap and it's just reversed. For the next few days at work you can't concentrate on your job and you don't contribute in your meetings. You're written up on your permanent record.

To help you keep your job and to let you finally know what the backside of the word "Dial" looks like I now present the Back of Dial:

Years ago I actually wondered if it is possible to wear down a bar of soap until the words on the top show through the back. I developed a process for using the back side of the soap and trying not to use to top. That is, I rub the back of the bar on me or my washcloth and try not to wear down the "Dial" side (but Dial will wash away). When this first bar gets to be somewhat thin I set its back side on a new bar of soap covering the word Dial. I continue washing the same way so that the new bar of soap is what wears down. If you had enough of the first bar of soap glued to the second one you can end up wearing though the second bar so that the incised "Dial" breaks through.

After my first success with this process I went on to my next quest. That was to get a bar of soap to say "Dial" on one side and "Dial" backwards on the other. This involves at least three bars of soap. The first one just to get one to glue to the second. You wash with bars one and two for a while but don't let Dial appear on the back. When the two bars are getting kind of thin you paste them onto a third bar. Now you wash it down till the Dial appears on the back of the third bar. If you're lucky the first bar will last nearly to this point and will wash away from the Dial of the second bar at the same time the back of number three is showing.

This is what the front that Holy Grail of Dial soap looks like:

I hadn't tried to do this for a long time ("been there, done that," you know) so imagine my surprise when I finished my shower this morning and discovered my accomplishment!

You, too, can do this. But only if you practice, practice, practice.

By the way, this is what a new bar of Dial soap looks like:

Keep clean.