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This video brought back memories of clinging to the luggage rack of speeding station wagons... and towing Charlie Peck through "downtown" Kennett on a skateboard behind my car.
By way of J-Walk Blog, by way of Cynical-C Blog, by way of who knows where.
Forgot to mention this. I loaned the Office-Cam (that feeds the still to this page every 30 sec) to Christie in IT so we'll be dark for a day or two. We got kind of an artsy image when we pulled the plug.
If you're up and online this Saturday at 9:30 a.m. Central, try to catch a few minutes of our live webcast from Yanis Coffee Zone here in Jefferson City. It's one of those "we're doing it just because we can" events. Taisir (Owner and Proprieter) is gonna set up a table in a corner and George Kopp and I will plug in the video camera and shoot the breeze.
If you want to chat, you need to a) create an account at UStream.tv or b) IM me at smaysdotcom. We'll probably go for 30 min or so, unless we start having a lot of fun. If you don't see any live video it means we screwed the pooch and will have to post some lame-ass excuse. We'll have the video player front and center here at smays.com.
On a typical day, we get about 300 visitors here. I'd like to see how many folks we can have watching at any one time.
I can't believe I haven't mentioned this band before. Hopefully, I'm the last one to discover The Evangenitals "...once a fictitious band - a fib on a phony website born to amuse its founders and maybe a few friends. On a whim, Juli Crockett, Lisa Dee, and Brett Lyda - who all worked at the same sex toy company in L.A. (like the Sex Pistols) - brought the ghost to life and debuted a handful of "hillbilly truck-stop lullabies."
Somewhere I stumbled across one of the songs from their latest CD ("Everlovin'"). A haunting ballad/anthem titled "Fuck 'em All."
I've looked high and low for the lyrics but that's just as well. You need to hear the song, not read the lyrics. It's only 99 cents. If you don't like it, I'll send you a buck.
PS: This post is number 3,500 here at smays.com. I normally miss things like this but just happened to notice this one. I promise not to bring this up again until 4,000.
It occurred to me today that some of my favorite songs are pretty depressing. I wondered how many I could come up with off the top of my head. Real quick.
This is just a starter-list, in no particular order. And I'm willing to bump some if you can come up with some that I like as well but still make me want to blow my brains out. Ten would be a good number, don't you think? Comments are open.
Our man in Pensecolda, Matt Zeni, files this review of Sheryl Crows performance at the civic center last Saturday night: 
"She talked about traveling to Panama City with her family many years ago and going to Mrs. Reed’s trailer park where they rented a space for a week or two with their “cool” Airstream trailer. She and the band traveled to Panama City Saturday and saw a lot of changes with many, many condos but Mrs. Reed and her trailer park are still there. She also mentioned that she ‘hangs out’ down the road in Destin.
She looks terrific for being 46 years young and all she had been through the past three years and she touched on the events in her life the past few years. She was incredible [photos]. First time I saw her in concert. I had the chance to talk with her about 5-10 minutes when she was (in Columbia, MO) about ten years ago. She was in town for a concert and for MU homecoming and she was at the station(s) with her parents.
She was amazing. I even called a friend back in Columbia while in the civic center before the show. She asked me to call her back when Sheryl played her favorite song, My Favorite Mistake. I did and Tracey enjoyed the 6-7 minutes thanks to T-Mobile. Nothing like a live concert on your cellphone! I saw quite a few cellphone and I-phones sending video and audio to all parts of the world."
Thanks for the report, Matt. Makes a boy wonder how concert promoters will stop thousands of fans from streaming live video from concerts like this. Or if they should try.
Amy Gahran is a former full-time journalist, editor, and managing editor. Today, her work mainly involves conversational online media (weblogs, forums, wikis, e-mail lists) as well as feeds, podcasting, and e-learning. Here are a couple of excerpts from her recent post at E-Meida Tidbits:
"I've been getting quite aggravated at the close-minded and helpless attitudes I'm still encountering from too many journalists about how the media landscape is changing. I realize that right now is a scary time for journalists who crave stability. I have immense sympathy for good, smart people (many of whom have families to support and retirements to plan) who fear the unknown. Many of the news orgs that have sheltered and supported these journalists as they ply their craft are crumbling due to their inability or unwillingness to adapt their business models -- leading to layoffs, buyouts, attrition, dwindling resources, overwork, and general demoralization.
I also know -- first hand -- that the prospect of learning new skills can be daunting. Plus, many of us have spent lots of money on j-school and many years in professional journalism honing our writing and reporting skills. We don't want to learn how to think like an entrepreneur, or an information architect, or a community manager. We just want to keep doing what we know how to do; we didn't sign up for all this extra stuff."
This is an insightful post, worth a full read. (Shirts available in S, M, L, and XXL)
My friend Chuck is in Washington D.C. at the National Association of Farm Broadcasters' Washington Watch. A few days ago he was sitting with me in the Jefferson City Coffee Zone where I showed him how we had been playing with live video streaming with UStream.
As I write this, Chuck is streaming a news conference with the U. S. Secretary of Agriculture. No satellite truck. No cameraman. No sound man. Just Chuck and his MacBook Pro. I assume he's recording and will post at AgWired.com.
Ag Secy is now praising "ag radio." How many of the reporters in the room are recording his remarks to chop up and put in a report they'll feed back to their stations for later broadcast? While Chuck is streaming live video.
Secy just said something about "you radio guys need 30 second sound bites and I can't do that." Uh, no Mr. Secretary, we're live here at AgWired.com so you can go as long as you need. It's not about sound bites anymore.
"The future is already here. It's just not evenly distributed yet." -- William Gibson
I'm always on the lookout for good (or bad) blogging stories. I found one in our own back yard during the last few days. The story isn't complicated but I think our corporate blog tells it better than I can. Just read the original post and the comments. It's all there.
I'm really proud of how our company and our CEO has used the blog to explain a difficult decision, and allow interested parties to tell us how they feel about it. I've been thinking about how this would have been handled pre-blog.
We might or might not have put out a news release. This had to do with an unpleasant decision. If the public wanted to tell us how they felt about it, they could write a letter or send an email, to which we might or might not have responded.
Whatever communication took place, it would have been slow and not very public. With a well-established corporate blog, our CEO just put it out there. The reasons for the action we took... comments... and his response to some of those comments.
Not everybody is happy with the outcome but nobody can say we haven't been open about it. As an employee --and blogger-- I'm proud of how this was handled.
Full disclosure: My wife works for a law firm that represents one of the companies mentioned in the post and comments.
I've never had a weight problem so I've never thought much about counting calories. But I seem to recall reading or hearing that 2,000 calories a day would be about right, depending on your weight and level of activity.
While I don't overeat, I do have a tendency to talk to much (and listen too little). I'm wondering if I could put myself on a "word diet."
If I allot myself 2,000 words over a 16 hour day, it works out to 125 words an hour.
If you knew you had a meeting with your boss coming up, you could be silent for an hour or two and bank the words you would need.
And if you could come in under 2,000 for the day... save 'em up for some emergency (drinking with your pals or a fight with your spouse).
The problem, of course, is counting the words. You'd need some device that monitors your speech and displays the number of words, with a little beep to warn you when you have less than 25 words in an hour.
If I could do this, I think I'd sound (be perceived as?) smart as hell. Deep. Thoughtful. And who knows, if you had to ration your words, you might choose them more carefully.
When you hear someone talking about what a great president Bush has been or McCain will be... instead of blurting out "Bull shit!"... you'd save those words rather than waste them.
I can't really count my words but I'm going to try a one day experiment and pretend that I can. I'm not going to say which day it is until after the fact. I'll report here.
Blog posts and tweets do not count against daily allotment.
Chris Pirillo was --and remains-- an early thought-leader for me. Blogging, RSS, video... Chris was always out there on the front edge. So, when he says Twitter has become one of his primary sources of information, I'm inclined to listen.
"Back in ‘the day’, we used to have to visit web pages to get our information. Those pages didn’t tell us when they updated, so we had to find out manually. Then, along came RSS. The idea was you could subscribe to something, and it would tell you when there was a new update. Now comes Twitter, with its flood of information that allows me to spot trends in general. Twitter has supplanted the information I used to receive in my news aggregator. I don’t follow many websites anymore, and don’t really ’subscribe’ to anything. For me, if something is going to be relevant, I’m going to read about it on Twitter. With Twitter, I’m able to follow people much easier. As disorganized as it is, it’s easier for me to learn about personalities. You can understand thoughts and feelings much easier than you could with a simple RSS feed."
I'm not quite there yet, in part because I don't "follow" as many people as Chris does. But I'm starting to see what he's talking about. A few of the folks I follow on Twitter are very plugged in and I can count on a line or two with a link when something in their area of interest breaks.
Lost Remote: "When the town of Orting, WA lost its hometown weekly - several residents banded together to keep the information flowing online. The Orting Gazette turned off the presses in March - but now the new Orting News online site features community news submitted by the public, with a special emphasis on high school sports."
Pretty much what I had in mind with this earlier post.
I started blogging on February 2, 2002 (I had been ranting a bit for a couple of years before that) and will soon reach 3,500 posts. George W. Bush took office on January 20, 2001, so I missed the opportunity to comment on the first year of his administration.
Between now and when he leaves office (assuming he DOES leave office), I'm going to go back and tag every post dealing with W and/or his henchmen with "Bush Years." Mine will be just one of thousands of records of his time in office.
If you haven't seen the film, here's the plot summary of Rendition:
"After a terrorist bombing kills an American envoy in a foreign country. An investigation leads to an Egyptian who has been living in the United States for years and who is married to an American. He is apprehended when he's on his way home. The U.S. sends him to the country where the incident occurs for interrogation which includes torture. An American CIA operative observes the interrogation and is at odds whether to keep it going or to stop it."
Back in the day when people debated the death penalty, you'd sometimes hear the question:
Would it be preferable to execute 100 guilty men, knowing that one of them was innocent... or to let 100 innocent men go free, knowing that one of them was guilty?
In the movie Rendition, Meryl Streep's character does a spin on that. Something along the lines of it would be worth torturing an innocent man if the use of torture produced intelligence that saved 7,000 lives (in London?).
I'm sad to say that a lot (most?) of folks I know would say, "Hell yes, do whatever it takes to get 'em to talk!"
Even if your son is the innocent victim?
A thought provoking movie... unless you've stopped think.
"James Karl Buck helped free himself from an Egyptian jail with a one-word blog post from his cell phone. Buck, a graduate student from the University of California-Berkeley, was in Mahalla, Egypt, covering an anti-government protest when he and his translator Mohammed Maree were arrested April 10.
On his way to the police station, Buck took out his cell phone and sent a message to his friends and contacts using the micro-blogging site Twitter.
The message only had one word. "Arrested."
Within seconds, colleagues in the United States and his blogger-friends in Egypt -- the same ones who had taught him the tool only a week earlier -- were alerted he was being held." [CNN]
I gotta get a better cell phone. And why NOT program some tweets?
"Arrested"
"Leave the house/office immediately!"
"Tivo The Office!"
[via Chuck]
Steve Rubel describes three "emerging digital careers" to watch. You can read his description of each here, but "Chief Customer Experience Officer" seems like a must-have to me:
"Want to know if a company is a good witch or a bad witch? It's easy. The web knows. Google, the media and online communities are littered with tales of companies that have exemplary products and customer service. However, it's often easier to find those that have been vilified for the opposite. That's the thesis of Pete Blackshaw's forthcoming book - Satisfied Customers Tell Three Friends, Angry Customers Tell 3,000.
Here's an experiment. For fun, enter any company into this special Google search engine I set up and let me know what you find. Brands are increasingly recognizing that customer experience is everything." [Thanks, David]
One of the best parts of having a blog is connecting with people. You could argue it's the only part. One of the first sites I created was a tribute to KBOA, the radio station where my father worked for many years and where I spent a dozen years. The site is packed with great photos, most of which were taken by the late Johnny "Mack" Reeder.
I captioned one of those photos [larger photo] "Unknown Hillbilly Band" because I had no idea who they were. Now I do, thanks to an email from one of the men in the photo, Charley Crawford:
"The name of the group is "The Senath Lions Quartet" and this was in1951. We started the quarter in Senath High School. The members are left to right front, Charley Crawford, Jimmy Milligan, behind Jim, right to left are Charles "Tod" Horner, James Allan and David Adams at the piano. We were on the radio every Saturday morning at 10:30 a.m., sponsored by the Senath Merchants."
Charlie was also a member of The Foggy Mountain Boys Hillbilly Band in 1948.
CORRECTION: I assumed --incorrectly-- Charlie was referring to The Foggy Mountain Boys featuring Flatt and Scruggs. Charlie and friends were in a local band of the same name.
The Foggy Mountain Boys was an influential bluegrass band that performed and recorded during the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s.
"Hey, can you do something for me real quick? Could you enlist in the
Army? I'm only asking because I was just wondering about it, because it
would be great, I think. If you joined the Army. And it would
definitely help me out."
This recruitment pitch is so compelling, I think I'd enlist. If I were 40 years younger and wanted to lose a foot for George Bush. But it sounds like the U. S. Army is finding "a few good men."
Those clever kids at Common Craft have created another useful explanation. This time, a simple intro to podcasting.
Barb's really too busy with work to spend as much time with her yard as she'd like but she still manages to plant some flowers. This year she planted about 300 tulips but the deer got a bunch of them and the moles probably got their share. But the ones that survived were very fetching in the late afternoon sunlight.
I'm no kind of serious photographer (that's my man, Henry). But I'm not bashful about taking photos and sharing them with the world. I know some very good amateur photographers that never put their work online because they don't think it's good enough. At least that's the reason they give and I tend to believe them.
I snapped these photos with my little Casio and they came out "good enough." Think of all the beautiful flowers that were never shared because someone thought the photos were not "good enough."
"In a good illustration of how media is becoming ever more conversational and interactive, United Media, “Dilbert’s” syndicate, is revamping Dilbert.com, letting the fans take up the cartoonist’s pen and tinker with, and then widely distribute, each strip.
When registered visitors to the new site click on a “mashups” tab, they can alter the text bubbles in each strip’s last panel. Soon, the syndicate says, visitors will be able to author entire strips, alone or collectively, and Mr. Adams himself will spar with fans and comment on the altered work. These new strips can be e-mailed or posted elsewhere on the Web." [New York Times]
Who gets the new web more than Scott Adams? What a brilliant move. Instead of suing people (like me) who love and "share" his strips, he's making it easy and even more fun.
"The Missouri House of Representatives has approved a bill, the main feature of which, would create the crime of coercing a woman to have an abortion. It also would require abortion clinics to offer women information about alternatives to abortion and about the fetus. The bill now goes to the Senate." [The Missourinet]
I tell people I'm from Bulgaria.
The War in 2020 is a terrific read. I'll bet I've read it every 4 or 5 years since it was published in 1991. Wikipedia classifies the novel as "military-adventure."
"The novel begins in the year 2005, when the South African Defense Force, equipped and trained by Japan, seizes mineral-rich areas of Shaba Province in Zaire. The United States sends the XVIII Airborne Corps along with associated air and naval assets to repel the aggression. The American expeditionary force is defeated due to a combination of technological inferiority (the South Africans' Japanese equipment has such innovations as onboard battle lasers,) lax security (a squadron of USAF B-2 Spirit bombers is destroyed on the ground by South Africans and local guerillas) and poor intelligence.
The American collapse is so swift that the XVIII Airborne Corps attempts to surrender. When the surrender offer is ignored, the American President orders a nuclear strike on Pretoria, forcing a cease-fire and a South African withdrawal from Zaire. The political cost paid by the United States is very high; post-war epidemics, and economic and political conflict with Japan reduces American power and influence. These events are summarized by a newspaper headline that reads: "THE END OF THE AMERICAN CENTURY".
Author Ralph Peters tells a great story. If you're digging Afghanistan and Iraq, you'll love The War in 2020.
WASHINGTON -- "Calling it the most effective tool to date in the War on Terror, the Pentagon announced Monday that it had developed a new chemical weapon called "ennui gas," a nerve agent that overwhelms its victims with sudden philosophical distress over the meaningless tedium of human life and a sinking sense that everything they have ever accomplished ultimately amounts to dust." [More at The Onion]
Follow-up to the NYT story on bloggers.
This snapshot captures where and how Barb and I spend a lot of our at-home time. If you're wondering where there are more laptops than people, one is for work stuff, the Mac is for fun. This weekend she's been ripping songs for the new iPod Touch.
We both have good sight lines to the TV and the pups have their spots under the table.
"If a person is relatively certain that going to war will end his ability to enjoy the rest of his life, one way or another, and the war does not present a plausible threat to the homeland, is such a person unpatriotic for dodging the draft to save himself?
The obvious answer is yes, he is unpatriotic. If your country calls on you, you need to go. End of story.
On the other hand, what is the point of a being patriotic to a country that intends to kill you for its own marginal benefit? Such a country would be your natural enemy, not your friend, so any question of patriotism would be nonsense in this particular situation."
Like most of Mr. Adam's posts, this one is well written and thought provoking. You need to read the full post before answering the (for the time being) hypothetical question.
A less-hypothetical quesion: Are you willing to sacrifice your son or daughter because George W. Bush wanted to prove something to his daddy?
From a Reuters story about a new grass-roots movement in which tech geeks, Internet addicts, BlackBerry thumbers and compulsive IMers are unplugging (if only for a day)
"I realized it was a problem when I would sit down to check my email and it was almost like I would wake up six hours later and find I was watching videos of puppies on YouTube.
"I'd try and think what I had been doing for the past two hours and I had no idea. I associate that kind of time loss with blackouts when you're drunk."
"I have dream blogged. I have surfed the Internet in my dreams sometimes. If I start hearing imaginary incoming message chimes on my computer when I am out in the back yard, it tells me I have spent too much time online."
I've posted before that I can't quite remember what I did before I started blogging. And it's even harder to recall what I did before the Internet captured my attention (and time). That's probably not a good sign. But what was I doing with my time before I got my first computer, sometime around '85 or '86?
Perhaps I'm just rationalizing, but I think the time I've spent online, blogging or reading blogs (and news), has been positive for me.
I'm less argumentative. Perhaps because I dump my views and opinions here and, somehow, feel less need to yak about them. I'm better informed about many more topics. I watch less television.
Some of my best friends are people I've met online.
But the greatest personal benefit has been the creative outlet. Bearing mind that "creative" is relative.
[Thanks, Chuck]
Our company once had a sales manager who said in a meeting with his staff (and I'm paraphrasing here):
"You should always be thinking about your accounts. When I'm on the floor, playing with my daughter, it doesn't take a lot of concentration. So I use that time to think about my accounts."
He was serious and didn't see (or understand) the freaked-out look in the eyes of his subordinates.
The Pope has been talking about the sex abuse scandal. The Saints down in Texas like their lovin' too. And like Lee, a blogger from down under, I've wondered about the 72 virgins promised (or so I'm told) to Islamic martyrs.
"Are they people, real people? I mean with thoughts and feelings of their own? If yes, then how can it be justified that they are given to someone else as slaves, and sex slaves to boot? And are they 'one shot wonders', discarded once their virginity is no more? If they are not real people, what are they? Zombies? Inflatable dolls?"
The post includes Steve Martin's amusing take on this heavenly reward. Lee calls his blog Hen Buddism and Other Religions.
Hans Van de Vorst --a photographer from the Netherlands-- took an amazing sequence of photos of a tourist at the Grand Canyon who was standing on a small rock atop a column of rocks with a camera on a tripod and taking pictures of a sunset. According to this entry at TruthorFiction, the pix are legit:
"Nearby in the picture is the edge of a cliff from which he apparently jumped and to which he will need to once again jump when he's finished. The pictures, and the narrative with the pictures, leave the impression that the drop between the column of rocks and the cliff was 900 meters (nearly 3,000 feet) to the bottom of the canyon.
In reality, however, there is shelf between them that is out of sight below what is seen in the picture. If the tourist had missed the cliff, he would have dropped to that shelf. It is still a death-defying act for him, however, because the drop from the front or either side of the rock is to the bottom of the canyon and even hitting the shelf safely is a risk. Van de Vorst said that he did not intend to hide the shelf. From where he was watching the tourist the shelf was not visible and he did not know of it until a later time."
I still can't get over the idea that he makes the jump in sandals.
The J-Walk Blog is very popular. For all the usual reasons. He writes well about interesting stuff and he posts every day. Usually several times a day.
John Walkenbach (Mr. J-Walk) was called away to a meeting and didn't post for a week. Upon his return, he checked his stats and did a little trending to determine he would lose all of his many readers in 17 days if he stopped posting altogether. One assumes it would take less time for blogs with fewer readers.
I wonder how long --if at all- it would take for visitors to return. And why would they?
"My cologne is distilled from the bilge water of Rupert Murdoch's yacht."
"When I find something I want, I don't let go. Like a Killer Whale going nuts on his trainer at Sea World."
"A stripper offered to give me a squeezer last night. A white stripper!"
"Save it for your iVillage blog."
"If reality TV has taught us anything, it's you can't keep people with no values down."
I've been around radio most of my life. My dad was a radio guy. I became a radio guy. And I was doing affiliate relations for our radio networks when things started to change in the late 90's, when federal media ownership rules were relaxed and companies like Clear Channel started buying up hundreds of local stations.
Alec Foege has written a book --Right of the Dial-- that tells the Clear Channel story. According to the review in the New York Times, Foege tried to give the company the benefit of the doubt.
“I was not out to do a hatchet job,” he writes in the preface to “Right of the Dial,” “but rather to get to the bottom of a company that I suspected had gotten a raw deal as its bad publicity had snowballed.”
The reader need wait only three paragraphs before Foege renders his final verdict: “Having spent a lot of time talking to some of the company’s most prominent critics, as well as some of its most devout supporters, I have concluded that Clear Channel is indeed to blame for much of what it has been accused of.”
The Internet and iTunes and all the rest were going to have a big impact on radio, no matter what. But I have to wonder if local radio stations might not have been better prepared for the challenges if they hadn't been gutted and commoditized by the Clear Channel's.
Nawww.
[Thanks, Henry]
I'm not a fan of those "you gotta see this" email forwards. I've usually seen them 40 or 50 times and feel no need to share them with everyone in my address books (who has also seen them 40 or 50 times).
But I do feel like I have to share the images that Tom forwarded to me today. He (and I) searched the web, looking for the source of these photos so we could properly attribute or link. No luck. So I've created a little album to share them with you.
If these are your images and you want me to pull them, I'll do so immediately.
I had to post these because they are the perfect follow-up to the video of the mountain path in Spain.
PS: And here's one for some of you long-time readers. I seem to recall posting a couple of photos of some guy taking pictures from the edge of the Grand Canyon (?) and he had to jump out to some tiny little column of rock... and then back. While holding his camera and tripod. In sandals. If anyone can help me find that, it belongs with these images.
Photo stolen from my friend Chuck. And David shares this disturbing video.
From Out & About: "Local Nashvillian and host of The Remix, a popular Christian youth show, Azariah Southworth, announced today that he has come out.
“This has been a long time coming. I’m in a place where I’m at peace with my faith, friends, family and more importantly myself. I know this will end my career in Christian television, but I must now live my life openly and honestly with everyone. This is my reason for doing this,” Southworth says.
Southworth has been hosting and producing the popular Christian TV show, The Remix for a year and a half. It is in syndication and can be seen in more than 128 million homes worldwide. It averages more than 200,000 viewers weekly on one of three networks."
As I read this I recalled my recent exchanges with anonymous (ok, pseudonymous) political bloggers who justified blogging from behind the curtain with concerns for their jobs.
Props to Mr. Southworth. That takes courage.
From a speech by NAB President-CEO David Rehr at the National Association of Broadcasters Conference:
"Rehr then turned to radio, first talking about a widely reported BusinessWeek column by Jon Fine, headed "Requiem for Old-Time Radio." Though Fine believes radio isn't well-suited to moving its business model online, he wrote that he remembers radio with "ridiculous fondness" and recalled "huddling with it long past bedtime, the volume set low, hoping to hear something I loved."
"Rehr said, "Ladies and gentlemen, that is romance, that's longing, that is a connection. Listeners still want what they've always wanted. Technology hasn't changed that -- it has just changed the devices of delivery."
According to Mr. Fine, Mr. Rehr missed the point of his article:
"You don’t need to huddle with a radio long after dark to hear new music; you can form that romance or connection with a hundred other things."
As you know, I've been blogging for my local java joint. With a name like "Coffee Zone," you'd expect there to be a few others out there. About 20,000, as it turns out. After just 23 days, the Zone blog is #11 in Google rank, which puts us at the top of page 2. NOT where we wanna be.
So I need a little link love. Just stick us in your blog roll or link to us from a post. Whatever you're comfortable with. I would dearly love to be #1 by the 4th of July. I know I can count on you.
What if God was one of us
Just a slob like one of us
Just a stranger on
the bus
Trying to make his way home
He's trying to make his way
home
Back up to heaven all alone
Nobody calling on the phone
Except for
the pope maybe in rome
-- Joan Osbourne
I've had my MacBook Pro for two years and I'm still discovering cool new features. Today I was putting it way when my hand brushed a tiny button on the bottom of the laptop and a row of tiny green lights came on. At first I couldn't figure out what it was and then I got it. A battery strength indicator.
Wanna check the charge on a PC laptop? Turn it on, wait for it to boot up, and check the charge. Mac users? Just touch the little button. I'm telling you...
Let me see if I have this right? The FLDS moms let their 13 year old daughters get "married" to 50 year old horn dogs... and they don't understand why their children were taken from them? Puh-leeze!
Why is it always the most "religious" who like to have sex with kids? Is it the same reason closeted gay Senators vote against gay marriage?
What happens when all these guys get to "heaven?" Pedophile priests, Islamic martyrs and polygamists pervs all locked in a room with no virgins and no kids. Bible/Koran study for eternity. And no lube.
This morning at 5:05, Seth Godin left his home outside of New York City. At 7:25 am, he was at the White House on Pennsylvania Avenue (for a meeting next door).
"No hassles, no affronts, no work stoppages, no FAA inspections, no surly overworked attendants, no lost items or near arrests or runway tie ups or traffic jams."
I think he's making a point about flying. I HATE everything about flying and will drive a long distance to avoid it. How far would you drive. I stuck a little poll thingy on the right side of the page.
I've been helping my friend Taisir feed and care for a blog for his coffee shop. It's a labor of love and I'm there every morning anyway. With help from Phil we got his domain in place.
In time, we hope to build an online community to compliment the one he has built with his customers.
It was in this spirit that I stopped by Our Ink Don't Stink and got my first body art.
There. I said it.
Given what we all know about the waste, corruption, inefficiency and stupidity of the people that run our government... and what we don't know... a big chunk of what we all pay in taxes every year goes down the shitter or into some politician-turned-lobbyist's pocket.
Remember the story about the $8.8 billion dollars (360 tons of cash) shipped on palettes to Baghdad? Pissed away, stolen, unaccounted for. My money was on one of those palettes. Along with yours.
You bet I'd cheat on my taxes if I knew I could get away with it. But I wouldn't think of it as cheating. Because I would do something good (for others) with the money. Yes, I think I can help more people than the nimrods in DC. All I lack is the larceny and the nerve.
Dinner with friends at Jeff City's newest eatery/brewery. Good pizza and beer. Excellent service. The name comes from the proximity to the old state penitentiary. The motif features lots of cell bars. We were fortunate to be on hand for an escape attempt.
Instead of the traditional birthday song by all the waiters, three very large bus boys grabbed the middle-aged birthday boy and dragged him into a storeroom and gang-raped him.
Not being a sports fan, I don't get all the hoopla surrounding play-by-play announcers. Our company hires and manages some of the biggies in collegiate sports and fans are heart-attack serious where these guys are concerned (no women announcers?).
But I finally found (over at With Leather) a play-by-play announcer I can relate to.
When I came home for lunch yesterday, Barb was watching the Tarzan the Ape Man (1932). The original Johnny Weissmuller/Maureen O'Sullivan classic. I grew up on Tarzan movies.
I came in on the scene where Jane and her father had been captured by pygmies who took them back to the village where they planned to drop them in a pit with a giant ape. This clip runs about 2:50.
If I could rent a time machine for just a few days, I'd go back to the filming of this movie, specifically to those breaks in filming when all the little people were standing around, waiting for their next scene. Everyone in costume with bones stuck in their pygmy wigs.
"Have you heard about this Wizard of Oz project? Word is they need a bunch of us to play Munchkins."
"What the fuck is a munchkin?"
"Search me but it can't be worse than getting stepped by an elephant."
