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Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").



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   frozen urinal
Sunday, December 2 2007
We had a little snow this morning and temperatures remained low, mostly in the 20s. At some point this afternoon I noticed that the flushless laboratory urinal wasn't draining effectively. This was a problem, since that PVC contraption is the main place I urinate and I urinate a lot. (I haven't stood pissing in any of the house's toilets since May.) The urine in this system flows through 3/4 inch PVC pipes through the garage on its way to a five-gallon sawdust-filled collection bucket in the back. The garage is unheated but insulated, with temperatures still in the mid-40s, so any freezing had to have happened in the short length of vinyl tubing connecting the garage to the bucket. I went around back and found this tube was indeed frozen solid, indicating urine remains frozen even with temperatures as high as 27 degrees.
Later on, in the wee hours of the night, rain began falling as a warm front came through. Temperatures rose through the freezing point and not long after that I heard my urinal glug-glugging as all the piss that had accumulated in it while it had been frozen drained out in a few seconds.
I'd foreseen the possibility of the urinal freezing in extremely cold weather, but I'd assumed such periods would be infrequent and brief. This period might have lasted for as long as a day, and it's only early December. This got me to thinking about perhaps building an overflow system that, in the case of a frozen outlet, will catch urine in a bucket in the garage, where temperatures may never actually drop below freezing.

This afternoon Gretchen and I watched Oceans 13, a movie with an unusually strong claim to non-originality: it's the sequel of a sequel of a remake. I'd enjoyed earlier versions of this franchise (and even the classic original, starring members of the Rat Pack), but I found 13 so disjointed that the only pleasure I derived from it was in the nerdy details. I'll always find something entertaining in the portrayal of smart, sympathetic criminals figuring out how to hack the system for fun and profit. (And since we're no longer in the days of the Hays Code, they can get away with it too!)

Later we brushed up on the history of 19th Century Europe by watching a couple installments of Fall of Eagles, which dramatizes the decline and fall of several European monarchies. It was more engrossing than I'd expected, though I couldn't sit through more than two episodes of the miniseries at one time.


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