Miscellany

mis⋅cel⋅la⋅ny [mi-sel-uh-nee]
–noun, plural -nies.
1. a miscellaneous collection or group of various or somewhat unrelated items.
2. a miscellaneous collection of literary compositions or pieces by several authors, dealing with various topics, assembled in a volume or book.
3. a miscellaneous collection of little bits of crap that Linus can't stretch into full posts by themselves.


- Only one day left to vote in the "Why Do You Read the Ministry?" poll. At this point, there seems to be clear consensus... it's fear that drives you to read my ravings.

Results
For the laughs: 3 (16%)
For the angst: 2 (11%)
For the social commentary: 3 (16%)
For the spiritual guidance: 1 (5%)
For my own good (HSBP knows where I live...): 9 (50%)

A full 50% of you chose the threat and innuendo answer; my work here is done.

Tomorrow we will begin a new poll, and you'll all have a new opportunity to make your opinion part of another godless database. God DAMN I love the smell of statistics in the morning!

- In other news, I had to take the nifty search engine gadget off the sidebar. It worked really well - unless you wanted to search ALL of the archive. I guess the folks at Google said, "Why the fuck would you want to find a post from 2007? That shit is HISTORY! Nope - we're Google, and we say the only posts that matter are those from the last 12 months. How you gonna' argue with Google, bitch?"

Because of Google's bad attitude, we're back to using the trusty old Blogger NavBar up top. It's ugly, it doesn't match the page theme, but it works - beat THAT Google, you bunch of over-caffeinated code monkeys.

- Which brings me to our next item: caffeine. We all know gamers and computer geeks are famous for using stupid amounts of it, mostly in drink form. Some of you may not be aware that they can also get their fix from mints, cookies, gum, soap, body wash, lollipops, and lip balm - all courtesy of the warped people at Think Geek.

Some of you are, no doubt, surprised by this - both by this obsession with caffeine, and with the shocking number of grooming products on the list. I'm pretty sure that most of the hardcore gamers I've known only buy the caffeine soap and body wash as desk ornaments - they are just opened for a quick sample of their scents, and certainly never used.

Never the less, gamer grooming must be an up and coming market, as I did stumble upon two products on Think Geek's caffeine page that I had never seen before, specifically dealing with the breath.

Remember Listerine Breath Strips? I loved those things - used to carry a pack around all the time. By the way, if you leave them in your pocket when you put your shirt in the wash they all dissolve, leaving you with the disappointing empty container. It does, however, impart a fresh minty zip to your laundry.

Anyway, you can get those with caffeine now. Diablo Caffeinated Energy Strips. Each strip is a rapidly deployed 25mg of caffeine, and they taste kind of orange-ish, I guess.

If letting those little guys dissolve on your tongue isn't fast enough for you, technology is here to help, with what the folks at Think Geek called, "just about the most perfect caffeine deployment system ever devised." Behold: Primer Caffeinated Breath Spray!

Yeah, it's basically Binaca with 33mg of caffeine in each spritz. That means that three squirts is more caffeine than most energy drinks. The really amazing part is this - each 8ml canister contains 1400mg of caffeine. For the sake of comparison, this little sucker has more caffeine than 17 bottles of Bawls. If you shot the whole can in one sitting, you might die. Cool.