Stand or Die - online satire

 

Memorandum

To: Midwest accounting office staff, Epistemological Trucking Company

From: Guy Sadique, PhD. Ergonomist and Pain Researcher, Marquis de Sade Institute for Pain and Ergonomics Montreal, Canada

Re: Ergonomic study

I know many of you are concerned about the hazards of sitting and some of you have even read that sitting is killing people. Rest assured, the forward-thinking leaders at your corporate headquarters have reached out to moi out of great concern for your welfare.

To prevent these workplace killings, Corporate has thoughtfully enrolled you as test subjects my workplace experiment titled: se tenir debout ou mourir (stand or die).

By the end of this week, Corporate will complete the removal of all unauthorized office chairs at the Midwest office. Your office will be posted as a chair free zone. Only individuals with a valid permit to sit will be allowed to have a chair. These chair permit carriers must submit to a government background check and take a 40-hour class on chair safety.

Please review the new sitting policy and enclosed handouts about the link between sitting and cognitive impairment. As part of this new policy, anyone choosing to sit must submit to mandatory random FMRI brain scans. These employees must sign a waiver absolving the Epistemological Trucking Company from any liability attributed to cerebral sit syndrome.

Corporate wants to ensure the success of this new way of working while standing. That is why I, Guy Sadique, will travel to your workplace to personally review each workstation to assure they are optimized for you.

I understand that none of you have proper standing desks. Do not worry. The company shipping department has collected various sized boxes to facilitate the conversion to a standing desk. For the ladies, if you desire to switch between flats and heels, I suggested keeping an extra box to adjust your
keyboard and mouse height.

For uniformity, Corporate wanted everyone to use gray duct tape on your boxes. I personally requested some personalization and you will be allowed to use designer style duct tapes including the popular bacon for the non-vegans. Unfortunately, as Corporate will be providing the funds for the gray duct tape, any other duct tape style must be self-financed.

I am acutely aware that these minor workplace modifications may increase pain for some people. Please keep these points in mind.

• Standing for long periods increases grit and resilience.

• Pain is good. It is an assurance that you are alive!

• Standing on a concrete floor until your feet are on fire is most necessary because sitting kills!

I know for some of you any change is painful. Please be assured that corporate leadership is looking out for your best interest. I am confident that if you trust in the process you will gain new insight into the lifetime benefits of pain. I hope your enthusiasm for this life extending change may even surpass mine. I am truly thrilled to be a part of this exquisite initiative.

Warmest Regards,

Guy Sadique, PhD

P.S. During the course of this experiment, corporate expects there will be several early retirements. At the end of the month I am informed that you will have the traditional aloha group retirement celebration with fresh brewed coffee, pineapple cream cheese, and a fine selection of day old bagels.

Bon appetit!

Open letter of gratitude to the teenagers who egged my house - online satire piece.

 

A big shout out to those teenagers who egged my house for the third time this year. Super stoked that the eggs hit my bedroom window and woke me up at 2:40 am! This gave me the opportunity to test my sure-fire technique to rapidly fall asleep after unexpectedly waking at night. Based on this real-life example, I’m nearly done with the first chapter of my rapid sleep book that I plan to market to parents of newborns. Buoyed by my prediction of personal success, I’ve boldly asked a publisher to sign me onto a $10,000 advance.

Amazingly my Facebook post describing the best method to remove eggs from window screens got over a hundred likes and 20 hearts. When I combined hot water, a soft bristle brush, laundry detergent, a snow bank, and a dash of elbow grease the screens were as good as new! I also posted the clean-up video on YouTube. I am anticipating this will go viral putting me one step closer to my dream of monetizing my site.

Truly grateful that the teenage eggers have lousy aim. Fewer than one third of the three dozen eggs hit the house. As a result, my Kickstarter fund for a Udemy master class on proper egging techniques has really taken off. With the twenty dollars I have so far as seed money, I am well on my way to achieving my goal of producing a five-part certificate course on Udemy. Once the money starts rolling in I’ll use the profits to develop a popular TED talk about my experience. Then it’ll be time to build up my frequent flier miles while making it big on the speaker circuit.

My dog also appreciated the eggs that missed the house. He’d grown a bit tired of his dried dog food and he thoroughly enjoyed supplementing his bland diet with an unexpected bounty of albumin and complex yolk proteins. There must have been something in those eggs because the vet downgraded his canine malaise from level IV to level I. He will now visually follow the path of my thrown frisbee and wag his tail vigorously when I retrieve it for him. How cool is that?

Major props to these wonderful teenage eggers for their tireless efforts to transform my life from theprimordial sludge of untapped potential to a world of endless opportunities!

Soot sample collection using static electricity

Soot from an electrical fire provided this excellent tape sampling opportunity.

Soot sample collection - 1 minute 7 seconds

Sheetrock mold growth time lapse

Seventeen days of mold growth on sheetrock compressed into 35 seconds

Sheetrock mold growth 17 days - 33 seconds

Frog sounds in April at Silverwood Park

Turn up the volume on this one. The landscape will be turning green soon.  The frogs voices were in good form.

Frogs at Silverwood - 33 seconds

Mirrored Meditations by N.G. Carlson

The latest in a series of mirror image photography books from N.G. Carlson is now available in Mirrored Meditations -paperback and  Mirrored Meditations- Kindle from Amazon.

Kaleidoscope image of a rusty pipe

These indoor and outdoor mirrored photos from the cold and snowy Minnesota Winter of 2019 provide a visual guide for meditation. This includes outdoor images images from decks and parks and inside buildings with frozen pipes that burst when the polar vortex moved north. The New Bell Museum provides a visual delight with wholly mammoths and a close encounter with the sun. A brief trip to Walt Disney World in Florida provides a warm respite and a welcome change of scenery.

The video below uses some if the images from the book with further images inspired by the book.

Mirrored Meditations - 1 minute 46 seconds

Fireworks, Flowers, Forests and the Minnesota State Fair by N.G. Carlson

The fourth in a series of mirror image photography books is now complete with shots taken from Minnesota during 2018. The book departs slightly from the format of earlier books with the inclusion of wildflower photos with no mirror imaging. Many of these photos reveal the intimate relationship between flowers and their insect pollinators.

The paperback version of Fireworks, Flowers, Forests, and the Minnesota State Fair: Image Reflections from Minnesota is available from Amazon.  There is also a kindle version of
Fireworks, Flowers, Forests, and the Minnesota State Fair: Image Reflections from Minnesota that is best viewed from a portrait orientation.

All photos were taken with Samsung cellphone cameras. The mirror image photos were taken using the Camera 360 app.

Mall of America floor mirrored - N. Carlson

The early section of the book shows the interiors of the Mall of America and Target Center. Photos from the University of Minnesota and Silverwood Park cover early spring through the fall.

Fireworks from both St. Anthony Villagefest and the Minnesota State Fair provide interesting photos of alien creatures, animals, and other images that will spark the imagination.

The video below uses some of the wildflower images from this the book.

Tom Petty - Wildflowers  3 minutes and 13 seconds