Hunt or Harvest?

Before we got all sophisiticated and domesticated, the human race was a people of hunting and gathering. Searching for their desires… mostly food. They would use their abilities to find the tasiest and most nutritious. It’s a survival thing.

I am in the process of moving. Because of this, I have dropped pretty much every performance/comedy related thing in my life for the next couple weeks. Not the Renaissance Festival, because there is NO other place I can tell the jokes I do and get the kind of response I get…

Q: Why are fish so smart?
A: Because they swim in SCHOOLS all day.

No other audience is going to find that funny. The Ren Faire audience goes to that venue expecting to find the entertainment they’re seeking. They know that in the land of surreal, anything can happen, and that this is the place to hunt for stupid, wacky humor and entertainment.

So, instead of doing auditions, tonight I searched for boxes with my brother. We went to Kinko’s, where I had been promised that a veritable harvest of boxes would await me. But the harvest had already been collected an hour previous. We went to another Kinko’s, where boxes were out of season. I was handed one box. I’m sorry, but my library is not going to fit into one box, no matter how many games of tetris I’ve mastered. I was told they had boxes for sale, but that didn’t really fit my budget. Besides, where’s the sport in that?

I decided to go grocery shopping. Just a couple things so I could feed any helpers I get over the next couple days. At the check out line, I asked the cashier if they had any boxes. The cashier got really excited about banana boxes. He swears by them. They are the sturdiest boxes ever.

Banana boxes have giant holes in the bottom. I don’t care how sturdy they are. If they can’t actually hold anything, they’re not going to do me any good. Just put cardboard in the bottom… What’s the point of a box that I have to finish building? If I want one of those, I’ll go to Ikea.

The security officer on duty (cause I shop at the classy places) then told me that at the end of the strip mall, there was a Family Dollar store (really classy), and behind it, a dumpster full of boxes just ripe for the taking.

Taking things from a dumpster is a misdemeanor. It violates privacy and other such things. But is it really stealing if the guy who is hired to protect the property tells you to take it?

My brother and I went to the dumpster. The boxes were perfect. It’s possible my brother made spy movie sneaking music when we were getting the boxes. He may have ducked down a lot and flattened himself against the car, shifting his focus to and fro. It’s possible we were breaking the law. He grabbed a couple boxes full of boxes, and we were off, the hunt victorious and the harvest plentiful.

Over the weekend, I will again be at the Renaissance Festival, to tell stupid jokes and entertain the masses. There is a field of audience out there just ripe for the picking. And they want to be picked.

Tags: hunting, gathering, MN+Renaissance+Festival, Ren+Faire, humor, comedy, boxes, dumpster+diving, brother, harvest, fish, moving, jokes, food, Kinko’s, security+officer

0110100110100101011101001011101000101001110101001

A couple weeks ago, my son asked me about binary. And I explained to him about how in our counting system, when we get to 10, we go to double digits, and 100 (10×10) is when we go to three digits… and then I explained about how in binary there is only 1 and 0, and that once you got to 2, that was when it went t0 double digit. Then I counted up to 8 for him, and explained it all out, and he got it (in his words “11 is the new 3”). Then I explained how computers only understood on and off, or 1 and 0. And how programming languages got interpreted to binary. Like, to a computer, what we see as the letter A, it will recognize as a couple of 0s and 1s.

There is about a 5 minute pause in conversation.

Then my child starts up “Mama, letters and numbers are just symbols we use to tell ideas. And lets say there are a bunch of letters in a row. That makes a word which tells us an idea. and a bunch of words together are sentences, that make up an idea. And a bunch of sentences make a paragraph, and that’s an even bigger idea.” And I agreed, and asked if all ideas were the same or not. And he said “No, or we wouldn’t fight.” Then we talked about my dog analogy… that we can both picture dogs, and both be right, but have two different dogs in out heads. eventually he got bored, but he brought it up again with his father later.

Because my kid is bloody fucking BRILLIANT. He is seriously wicked smart, and he gives me joy. He is my Brilliance.

Tags: binary, code, computers, son, brilliance, words, symbols, letters, idea, concept