Now there's something you don't see every day, Chauncey ...

It's hard to be a pedestrian in the city. But how else would I get to see the Wonder of the Age, the solar-powered trashcan.

You laugh. Behold the Big Belly, the pride of Seahorse Industries and the new secret weapon of Our Nation's Cities in the war against ism or litter, one:

This was even better than the forlorn Hillary supporters vainly trying to elicit any signifier of interest from commuters escaping from the subway tonight. Poor fools! Don't you know better than to get in the way of Very Important Suburbanites heading for their townhouses, so as to fire up their computers immediately upon entering and check their feeds for any updates more recent than when they left downtown an hour earlier?

See, you throw your trash into the belly of the beast; and then the solar-powered compactor solarly compacts your trash, carbonless footie-prints and all! Scoff scoff, I scoff at the PJM grid! By tossing my trash into this technological triumph, I strike a blow against the empire woo hoo!

Only thing is, it doesn't seem to work worth a patoot after dark. Maybe if I stood over it with a lit candle ...

It's okay, I'm with the bandwidth

In this Homely House we have one desktop, one laptop, one XBox in the shop, one VOIP phone modem, two Nintendo DSes and one PSP all simultaneously sucking bandwith through a Linksys router. I'm thinking that perhaps we might have some bandwidth issues, especially as it's supercritical to the guyses that they must connect their handheld goodies to the wery World Wide Web its own bad self. That Al Gore invented the internet just so's Little Michael can play Super Mario Pinheads in real time with some wowser in Upper Canuckistan, for which we are all eternally grateful I'm sure. However, in order for Little Michael to play Super Mario Pinheads in real time with some wowser in Upper Canuckistan, I shall have to Flash the Firmware. I'm attempting to do so while one of Our Andrew's heathen friends keeps popping up on screen, intent on IMing Our Andrew with his vulgar assessment of the rigors of the upcoming weekend Scout Campout. I have resisted replying to his IMing, since my instincts are to reply "This is Andrew's Dad. Do you want me to get him?" and hope that the IM screen just sort of puckers into oblivion while making a cartoon noise like the air being squeakily let out of a balloon, but that would be too much to hope for.

I think I would really rather turn this project over to a professional, like 9-year old Little Michael; somehow Flashing the Firmware-type operations usually result in the software equivalent of a sodden mess, followed by wiping the hard drive and starting over. So perhaps we would be better to attempt this foolishness in broad daylight.

Meanwhile, I think I will ask the IT wizards tomorrow if one desktop, one laptop, one XBox in the shop, one VOIP modem, two Nintendo DSes and one PSP all simultaneously sucking bandwidth through a Linksys router might create bandwidth issues. Ya think?