Category Archives: the mindlab

The Moss Pit – A Memory

In high school I was on the swim team. Though generally it’s least male exponent, I remained an active participant for the last three years of school as swimming seemed to bolster my health over the winter months. There are alot of random aspects of the experience I recall here and there:

  • Friends and aquaintences of interesting character, now gone their separate ways.
  • The various away pools: one with salty water, one with disinfectant troughs you had to walk through when entering the locker-room, and a third that was so sauna-like it sapped your strength.
  • Painting a ceiling tile in the guy’s locker-room with the words to Simon & Garfunkel’s “The Boxer”.
  • The day I swam several hundred extra yards until everyone else had left, in order to avoid getting my hair shaved in solidarity with the rest of the team.

But the one thing that really stands out in my mind is the moss pit.

Continue reading The Moss Pit – A Memory

The Shredder

Recently at my place of employment, our shredder broke, and I had to purchase a new one. My criteria going into the purchase were to find a shredder that did a fine cut and was around $50-60. I ended up buying the Ativa DQ81M*.

Shred IT!

The Ativa DQ81M was in the price range, did 8-sheets a go in a diamond cut and also came with one feature I hadn’t expected. To see the mystery-shredder-feature watch this movie of my use of the shredder.

Did you notice anything odd? It is okay if you didn’t. Behold, I have a second movie for you to watch, of Bob and I shredding in the dark.

What did you see? You saw a light, not from my Mini Mag-Lite, but from on the shredder itself.

Think about that.

I have my own conclusions as to why a shredder would come equipped with a light, but rather than expound on them, I wanted to pose the question to the wider Protozoic forum. So:

  1. Why would a shredder need a light?
  2. Are there any further-reaching, perhaps darker, implications of shredders with lights on them?

Recipe: Blue Crab Stuffed with Squirrel Meat
(A Maryland Eastern Shore Traditional Dish)

There are a lot of great crab recipes on the web and I thought I would add to the mix by providing a recipe for a little known Maryland crab dish. While it goes without saying that Maryland is for crabs, I have a funny feeling that all you Shoreheads out there are going to particularly love this one.

Blue Crab Stuffed with Squirrel Meat

Ingredients:






  • Blue Crab
  • Squirrel
  • Old Bay Seasoning
  • Butter
  • Cream
  • Salt
  • Instructions

    1. Choke* the crab (discard the dead man but keep crab meat see step 6).
    2. Clean, gut and de-bone squirrel (keep the giblets and skin but discard the gizzard – see steps 4 and 6).
    3. Mince squirrel meat and season liberally with Old Bay brand seasoning mix.
    4. Stuff crab shell with squirrel meat and wrap the shell in the squirrel skin.*
    5. Heat oven to 450°C and cook crab stuffed with squirrel meat for 15-20 minutes or until done.
    6. Mince giblets and crab meat. Add 1 teaspoon of salt and 5 teapoons of butter (vegans may substitute extra virgin olive oil or EVOO if desired with no decrease in flavor).
    7. Bring 1/2 cup of water or 1/2 cup of cream to a boil and add giblets-crab mince. Boil for approximately 15-20 minutes until a
      thick creamy sauce clots on the surface. Add ice water as necessary to help the sauce congeal and skim from the surface.
    8. Remove crab from oven. Dispose of squirrel skin. Pour the gibblet-crab sauce you’ve skimmed over crab shell and serve with lager or cola.

    • Choke – Old Eastern Shore dialect for picking a crab.
    • Don’t eat the skin! The skin is only used to cover the crab shell and seal in flavors.

    Note: Dragon helped me transcribe this recipe.

    Current Employment

    These days I’ve been doing some testing that involves gel electrophoresis. This is a process often used to separate out different chemicals in a mixture (for example a mixture of DNA fragments with assorted lengths), typically in aqueous solution, on the basis of the individual component’s size and charge.

    To accomplish this you basically make half inch thick slab out of gelatin (well “agarose” technically) and cover the “gel” with a sufficient quantity of buffer solution (say a 1x concentration of Tris/Acetate/EDTA solution). Then you insert some of the mixture to be separated into little holes in one end of this gel.

    Continue reading Current Employment

    Dungeons and Dragons Cartoon – Nude Shot of Diana???

    In the 9th episode of the Dungeons and Dragons cartoon, “Quest of the Skeleton Warrior”, the kids have to retrieve the Circle of Power to save Dekion, an enslaved Celestial Knight. On the way the party has to face their greatest fears. Hank’s is that he’ll be a bad leader, Sheila’s that she’ll be alone, Presto’s that he’ll be without his glasses, Eric’s that he’ll be the laughing stock, Bobby’s that he’ll be treated like a baby and Diana’s – well, Diana’s is that when she grows old her tit will flop out.

    Sure, the actual nipple isn’t colored in, but it is clearly there for all to see. And to think, with all the hubbub created by the National Coalition on Television Violence around the “The Dragon’s Graveyard” episode, Diana’s droopy dug went right out her animal-skin top and under parental radar.

    So, big shout out to the horn-dog animators behind the Dungeons and Dragons cartoon, because now along with “puffy pussies”, “presto pizzazz” and “really free mp3s”, “Dungeon and Dragons’ cartoon nude pictures” will be among the top search terms for our site.

    Thank goodness most of our potential new readership won’t be surfing in and looking at any of the content we actually spend time on or want people to see.

    Nude blooper pics of Diana follow. Click individual pictures for a bigger wilted boob.

    Continue reading Dungeons and Dragons Cartoon – Nude Shot of Diana???

    Galactic Noir: Dead On Arrival

    I wrote this story in 2001 as part of a “Galactic Noir” setting I was working on back then. In it’s tone Galactic Noir was largely inspired by short stories by George R.R. Martin, specifically those from his now out of print Sandkings short story collection (though not so much by the titular story). But it also drew heavy thematic inspiration from the Orion’s Arm group I was participating with at the time, as well as the old World of Darkness gameline by White Wolf.

    Unfortunately, after fleshing out several ideas for this setting via e-mail with a few guys from one of the World of Darkness forums (Bryan Conlon, Gabe Carlson, and “Wolf”), the computer on which I stored all our correspondence had pretty much every one of it’s I/O devices break in some way. As a result the relevant information languished for years on the machine’s inaccessable hard drive.

    However, this past Christmas season, while rummaging through Circuit City trying to figure out what to spend a gift certificate on, I stumbled across a kit to convert old hard disks for use as external drives. Now that I have access to this stuff again I’ll probably be sticking at least some of it on the web in the near future.

    Dead On Arrival is the only actual story I can remember writing for the setting, and consequently also the only “stand alone” piece of writing that my brief perusal could dig up. So here it is.

    Note: This one’s going out to the folks on the Dragonstar mailing list in the hopes that it’ll contribute to the currently ongoing discussion of vampires… in… space…

    Keep on keepin’ the faith over there guys.

    Continue reading Galactic Noir: Dead On Arrival