Be a Hero

I just visited this website, where you can make your own superhero. You choose the gender and lots of different characteristics, and then they assign a superhero name based on what you chose.

Here's my first creation -- a guy who does some serious grocery shopping:



I next tried creating a female of steel:



Give it a try, if you're in one of those "I'm so bored I need some mindless fun" moods.

I'm Now a Tumblelogger

On a whim today, I took a little online discovery and decided to play with it a bit.

By listening to a recent Rocketboom podcast, and then doing a Google search and finding out some additional information, I decided to get in on what's called tumblelogging.

I went to one of the main tumblelogging site providers, Tumblr (sort of like blogger,com for traditional blogging), and within minutes I had set up my free account and designed my own tumblelog. I call it "Chain-link Deja Vu," and it's located here.

What, I hear you ask, is tumblelogging? Well, being fairly ignorant of the finer points (I still have no idea how it got started, or how many people are doing it), I can only give my impressions. From what I see, tumblelogging is designed for people who spend a fair amount of time online and who want to blog, but have very little time in which to do so. Another way I look at it is, it's blogging created by (and viewed by) people who, at least at some point during each day, have ADD-like attention spans.

Now, I still will keep on with Muley's World, this being the place where I will post when I want to really say something, especially when I want feedback from readers. But having a tumblelogging site, I think, won't really compete with Muley's World, but will complement it.

A tumblelogging site, in effect, is an online depository for all those neat or curious little things we find while surfing the Internet. We want to keep that stuff handy somewhere so we can experience it again, and we often want to let other people see it as well. But, we don't necessarily want to sit down and do a big descriptive post and manipulate a lot of screens and HTML language just to do that.

The tumblelogging site has buttons to let you add things such as quotes, pictures, videos, songs, text and even the transcripts of instant message conversations. Here's how it works. You download a little button on your bookmarks bar that says "Share on Tumblr." Then, if you happen to be surfing the Web and come across a neat photo or YouTube video or article, you just hit the "Share on Tumblr" button. You see a little screen come up with the item's URL code already entered. You give it a headline (if you wish) and maybe write a short explanatory description (if you wish), press the button, and it's automatically put on your Tumblr site. When you go later to look, it will be there.

I like quotations, and in Tumblr, all you do is hit the button marked Quotes, type in the quotation text and the name of the author, then send it to your site. It will automatically format it in quotation style for you. Neat.

Tumblelogging seems designed to be very simple, maybe too simple for some tastes. You can't do things like size photos, add tags or change posting dates and times, and there are no mechanisms for you to leave or receive comments, which I think is unfortunate. However, I think there might be a method they have of seeing what other people are "following" your blog, but I haven't investigated that yet.

I'm not sure how often I will use this. It might just be another one of those online nifties that lose their appeal after the newness wears off. But I'll still have a free way to store all my favorite online discoveries in one place, to revisit at my leisure. And that's worth something.

How Long Will You Live?

If you remember your Bible at all, you know it says again and again that our days are numbered, that only God knows what those numbers are, and that our earthly demise can come unannounced at any time.

Of course, sometimes we wish we knew just how long we actually have to live. I mean, if we knew we only had a few months left, we might cash in the CDs and probably wouldn't worry about doing winter maintenance on the lawnmower.

Despite the fact that mortality remains a mystery, there's always someone trying to make a science out of predicting how long we have to live, whether by examining the length of lines on our palms, reading the stars or looking into a crystal ball. Now, some high-tech geeks have gotten in on the act with an online tool.

When you go here, you'll find a panel that asks you questions about when you were born and how healthy your lifestyle is. When you fill everything out, it supposedly tells you the exact day you should die.

There are some bugs I should warn you about. Mrs. Muley and I figured out that when it asks you about your "medicine status," it doesn't want to know if you take prescription pills. It's asking if you abuse your body with harmful drugs. The reason why we figured this out is, when we checked "yes," it had us dying fairly quickly. And when Mrs. Muley's 77-year-old mother tried it out and answered in the affirmative to the drugs question, it told her that she should have died back in 1986, a fact that she found both comical and a bit bracing. When all of us changed our medicine status to the negative, however, the program changed its tune and gave us all much longer lives, even raising Mrs. Muley's mother from her early grave.

What did it tell me? Well, I am supposed to die on Saturday, September 18, 2049, which means that Mrs. Muley will have to teach 6th grade Sunday School by herself the next day. As far as Mrs. Muley goes, she is expected to shuffle off this mortal coil on what would have been my 98th birthday, July 11, 2058. That will leave her almost nine years of wild widowhood in her 90s to go out and party without me.

You'll probably either think this is too morbid to mess with, or you'll take it with a big grain of salt, as I did, and have fun with it. If you fall into the latter category, let me know what the mystical cyber swami tells you.

It's a Clock. It's Cool.

I found this today on John Gushue's blog. It's called a timeline clock. Moving from right to left, it shows the movement of seconds, minutes, hours, days, months, years...you get the idea. I guess you could use this as a screensaver if you wanted to, but I'd probably just sit there staring at it all day, getting nothing done.

Not that that's a bad thing, mind you.

Quote of the Day:

"I'm not going to vacuum 'til Sears makes one you can ride on."

--Rosanne Barr

A picture is worth a thousand posts

When movie directors don't have any gripping narrative or sparkling dialogue to offer, they film either a sex scene, a fight or a car chase. When movie stars don't have anything to talk to David Letterman about, they bring along clips of their upcoming movie.

When Muley desperately wants to put up a post but doesn't have anything to say that would captivate the attention even of lonely shut-ins, he displays some of the weird photos he's collected during his trips through cyberspace.

I've heard of someone being uncomfortable in their own skin, but this is ridiculous:


You might be interested to know I've been trying to play matchmaker lately. Maybe Fiddler on the Roof inspired me. Anyway, this woman was my first challenge:


I was having trouble finding a guy who not only wanted to talk science fiction 24/7, but who also loved dressing up in embarrassing sci-fi costumes in public. I knew it was true pung-phar, however, when I matched the Jedi princess with Mr. Tron:


For my next match, I wanted an even bigger challenge. On a recent trip I met this young woman, who for some reason was having trouble making it through the metal detectors at DFW Airport:


Here was my first proposed match, which I was sure was going to get her stapled flesh glowing:


However, the lady complained that the gentleman did not have enough piercings to whet her appetite. It took some time, but I was finally, with the aid of a large magnet, able to find a perfect match for her:


Please don't feel sorry for the rejected human pincushion first shown. I was able to introduce him to a woman who carried around even more iron and steel than he did:


Want the secret to family togetherness? One word: Mullets.


Father's Day is coming up in June. Still looking for the perfect gift for Dad or hubby? Consider some fine music for the CD player:


I don't know what to say about this except that I thought it was funny:


Finally, being a bit of a smartypants myself, this would probably be the kind of work I would turn out before getting fired at a sign company:

Get Out Your Hymnals

Make your own church sign here.