I have twelve wigs. I know that seems excessive for a four-year endeavor. But I need a wig for work, one for high heat (eating next to a fire / blowing molten glass), one for water (rain / water balloon fights), one for lying on my back (doctor visits and … no, just doctor visits).

Add in Labor Day sales and I got the itch for the first time in almost a year.

This is the first page that came up.

”When did they hire robot models?” I wondered. “They all look scary. Except for that woman in the lower right.”

Ranked by level of creepiness points:

0 pts. Bottom right. I have seen his photo before. Normal.

1 pts. Top middle. Her eye-smile doesn’t match her mouth-smile.

4 pts. Top right. Okay, sure, she looks way too perfect, but she at least looks human.

5 pts. Bottom left. I feel like this isn’t an image of a human being. It looks assembled.

10 pts. Top left. That looks like a perfectly good photo of a pretty human that the alien overlords behind this have deliberately distorted. Orherwise why are her eyes so big yet expressionless? What did they do to her?

15 pts. Bottom middle. That’s a mean spy robot the aliens have created. That’s not a human.

The creepiness hit me so hard I thought I was having some Oliver Sacks Capgras delusion thing Then I supposed it could be some AI sweetening.

Is it just me? Is that unnatural?

An utterly lovely woman at work with a wholesome natural style heard I was intrigued by this Polishey system for nail polish.

”I am intrigued by this thing where you draw the polish on your nails with something that seems like a marker,” I said, and she had actually just bought it, and her family had joined in to give her manicures.

I knew that wouldn’t be happening, but the cool girl had it so I needed it for my own.

I suspect I haven’t worn nail polish in six years, except maybe one time on my toes per Spunky’s demands.

Anyway, it came and I love it.

That’s a bad photo. But it was remarkably easy, and when it got nicked I just scribbled over it. I thought it would be tricky to do my right hand by drawing with my left, but I just used my left to hold the pen steady, and then moved my right hand around under it.

Anyway, Polishey, seems good so far.

I finished this in one day last year, and the glass on the left is wrong. Well, really, the entire bottom half is wrong.

Just watch, it will take weeks to try to get it right, like my grandmother’s portrait, and I still won’t succeed. Or perhaps not.

Sometimes I work on the edges of programming scripts and the standards and protocols needed to get a device and a script to talk to each other. Most of the time I just use them. I tell my Mini application to honk my car’s horn so I can find it. The code in my phone would send a message to my device, which is my car.

There is a protocol that both the phone and the car device use. The protocol says what to do if the device gets the message (Honk) and also how to explain itself if there’s a error performing the required action (Car horn currently disabled.).

On April Fool’s day in the 1990s someone created a very detailed protocol, a Hypertext protocol, for a different type of device — not a car but a coffee pot. Not broad humor. Subtle humor.

I mean, here you go, see how detailed it is.

It was an April Fool’s joke, and I think also a reference to the famed Trojan Room Coffee Pot I encountered in the ‘90s.

The best part is that every error is identified. Say my phone tries to contact my coffeepot to tell it to “BREW,” and if brewing does not begin, the device needs to send back the reason it cannot brew. Pot not closed, no water in pot, etc.

Each error has a number. It’s just like when you try to get to a web page that is gone, and instead of sending back the latest post it sends you a page that says Error 404, Page not found.

The Coffee pot protocol is designed to send back my new favorite error: Error 418, I am a teapot.

Sadly, some people want to use the lighthearted error number 418 for legit reasons, and they want to change the I am a teapot error code.

Here is the reference in Google’s offical list of error codes.

418 I’m a teapot

The HTTP 418 I'm a teapot status response code indicates that the server refuses to brew coffee because it is, permanently, a teapot. A combined coffee/tea pot that is temporarily out of coffee should instead return 503. This error is a reference to Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol defined in April Fools’ jokes in 1998 and 2014.

While originally defined in RFC 2324 as an April Fools’ joke, this status code was formally reserved in RFC 9110 due to its wide deployment as a joke, so it cannot be assigned any non-joke semantics for the foreseeable future.

Some websites use this response for requests they do not wish to handle, such as automated queries.

There was a time when I designed a database, so now I am really fighting the urge to have some key combination like Control-t-p generate error 418.

Wisely, the Powers That Be have taken the edit rights to that database away from me.

In preparation for my MRI, the nurse asked, “Do you have an IUD?”

My left eyebrow said something along the lines of, “I have been asked my date of birth five times since I walked into this hospital, you know how old I am, no I don’t have an IUD.”

The nurse answered my left eyebrow with, “I ask everyone now, ever since I had a 75-year-old lady come in with an IUD.”

I didn’t say anything, but I thought, “You go, 75-year-old lady.”

The nurse continued, “I can’t think of why she had it. It had something to do with her hormones, she said, but she shouldn’t have had any hormones left at her age.”

I thought, “Maybe she had it in there so long that her uterus grew around it and encapsulated it like those trees that grow around bicycles.”

I suppose it was made of copper and didn’t react to magnets, so it didn’t keep her from getting her MRI.

After the MRI (#NoNewLesions!), I waited in a long slow coffee line.

I heard a woman behind me get on her phone and say, “Hey, I’m in line for coffee and it’s really slow. Can you give the lady in Room 5 a belly rub? You can? … Thanks … bye.”

I think I paused a whole half a second before spinning around to say, “Did I just hear you say belly rub?”

She explained, “I’m an OB-GYN nurse, and after delivery we rub the woman’s uterus so it stays in shape.”

Evidently this has been going on even in the last half of the 20th century, even during my birth, and like the geriatric IUDs this is the first time I have heard of it.

Tell me, did all of you get one of the special super-secret belly rubs?

Here’s the previous:

Here’s the progress:

Here is where I started this round:

When it was originally this:

This does not bring me any joy. This toy bank makes no sense to me.