Mister Clean

Tuesday May 10, 2005 • Howard Tayler

A few of you have called my attention to this article in the Online Sun (that paragon of UK journalism) about Blair's 16-Million Reserve, which is hotter than Tabasco in the same way that stellar thermonuclear fusion is hotter than your bathwater.

I love hot sauce, but this stuff is beyond hot. It's pure capsaicin (the molecule in peppers that reacts with your pain receptors, tricking you into thinking your mouth just caught fire), and the "16 Million" in its name is the number of equal parts of water you'd need to add to it before the "heat" flavor would vanish.

To put it in perspective, Tabasco rates around 2500 on that same scale. Blair's Sudden Death Sauce (the stuff I mixed into the barbecue sauce I basted last night's chicken with) rates around 60,000. Police-grade pepper spray rates around 3 million. In short, you'd have to dilute the contents of Blair's 16 Million Reserve bottle five-to-one with aerosols and a liquid carrier in order to use it as a weapon.

So no, I don't want you to buy any for me. Keeping this around the house as an additive for making foods spicier would be like keeping a metric ton of gunpowder, along with the accompanying brass and bullets, for purposes of home defense. Sure, it'll last a long time, but it would be entirely too easy to accidentally kill everyone in the neighborhood.

Mister Clean
In other news, I shaved. If you want the whole story, you'll need to link over to my Live Journal, where there are before-and-after pictures.

State of the Buffer
It's been a while since I've said anything about the buffer. This is not because "no news is good news." It's because I've been busy. As of this writing, the buffer is down around 4. I really, really need to get my game back on. Penguicon took a lot out of me, and I'm only just now back up to "fighting trim." I've got two weeks of scripts printed out, and hope to have those pencilled, inked, and colored by Friday. Then I need to do that again NEXT week, and the week after, and I'll have the buffer back up at a respectable four-week level.

Being a professional cartoonist is harder than it looks. I have no idea how I was maintaining things while also working full-time for Novell. The rumors about elven slave-labor were patently false (there's no way Sandra would let me keep elves in the house), but it IS possible that I spent four years borrowing time from someplace else. I'm hoping it doesn't show up on my own personal balance sheet, because Life Is Good, and I'd rather not die four years early.

Are you interested in having me come to your city? Your convention? Your HOUSE? Pay my way and pay my stay, and we can make it happen. The BEST way is to convince the convention organizers that I'm worthy of "GoH" status, but there are alternatives. Email me if you've got an event in mind.