I have heard of electric guitars, but this takes it to the HNL. I don’t know who this guy is, and I am too lazy to do much research, but what you are seeing or about to see is a guy playing a guitar through a Tesla coil. I am sure it is incredibly dangerous…he seems to be standing a long way back, but the sound it creates is incredibly interesting.

The Tesla coil makes the sound by creating bunches of tiny lightning bolts. Each bolt “pops” at its own frequency or pitch. If you string a number of those bolts together, you get music.

I want one of these. Or maybe better stated, I would like to play through one of these. After that, I don’t know what I would do with the coil.

Wow, what an ingenious way to repurpose a toy into something amazingly musical. As a guitarist myself, this is pretty interesting

I have been able to do it for over two or three weeks now, but I am able to solve the Rubik’s cube.  What a deal.  I remember fooling around with these things as a child convinced that I would never be able to do it.  But, now I can.

I don’t know what spurred it, but sometime last year, I bought a Rubik’s cube on a whim.  They still sell them at Wal-Mart, believe it or not. Anyway, now they come with instructions. Fantastic.  The problem is that it takes a spatial genius to follow the instructions.  Even with the instructions, it took me around a month of noodling with it to finally do it once.

Once I had done it, I left it alone for over a year.  In the meantime, I received the 80’s edition of Trivial Pursuit.  That came packaged with another Rubik’s cube.  Now I had two, the one I had conquered finally and this one.  I got the second one out of its packaging feeling safe that I had at least one cube standing as a tribute to my Rubik’s prowess. My safety cube allowed me to play with the second one with reckless abandon.

The second cube also came with the instructions.  With those instructions, I set out to beat the cube for a second time.  After about a week of hard core twisting and turning, I finally got to the point where I could finish the cube as long as I had a copy of the instructions around…hardly impressive.

I found that I could memorize one of the steps each day.  The way I do it there are 6 steps, each of which get more complicated than the last. After roughly a week, I had all the steps mastered and now I can do it.

A co-worker of mine also go the bug and purchased a cube at the Walgreens one morning as he was checking out.  He watched the videos on www.rubiks.com to learn how to solve the cube.  You can go there and watch the videos, they are dizzying to say the least.  Now he can do the cube and he does it differently than me.  The next step is to learn his way of doing it.  From the looks of it, it is faster.

I have a very interesting dilemma.  Yesterday Me and the #1 son went to Wal-Mart and bought two brand-new, behemoth Rubbermaid 50-Gallon trash cans.  They are a sight to behold.  All other trash cans in my neighborhood are bowing their heads in shame in the glory that is my new trash cans.

My old trash can is just about to fall apart.  The handle is connected on just one side which meant that every time I took the trash to the curb, it would bow out at a clumsy angle threatening rip off at any moment.  The wheels have long since fallen off making the journey from where my trash lives on a daily basis to the curb a shaky tug-of-war with a failing plastic bin.  To call it a sad situation is to vastly under state the situation.

Garbage cans aren’t something the normal person looks forward to spending money on so needless to say, I have put off this investment for a long time.  The straw that finally broke the camel’s back was our family’s fall cleaning spree.  We cleaned our house top to bottom.  We uncovered trash that should have been taken out weeks, months, years ago.  My paltry excuse for a trash can was filled to overflowing, and I couldn’t take it any longer.

A quick trip to Wal-Mart, and we are the proud owners of two of the most majestic trash cans I’ve ever seen.

Now to my dilemma.  I still have the old trash can and I want to throw it away.  How do I go about doing that? Trash men are trained to dispose of the contents of trash cans, not the can itself.  It’s quite a pickle.  How does someone throw away the trash can itself?

What, are you kidding me? Today in the office I was trying to explain the sound of the Speak and Spell toy from Texas Instruments. It was a little laptop type game from the early eighties that looks ridiculous now but was the stuff back when it came out. Just like the Atari, this is one of those games that takes you right back to your childhood if you are currently in your 30’s like me.

You need to check out this online Speak and Spell. It works just like you remember. It even has the On and Off song/sound effect that I was trying to explain to my co-worker.