Category Archives: Humorous

My father’s voice; amusing bumper sticker

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Well I don’t really have a lot on my mind today, so there will likely not be much here worth reading. That could be argued for just about every day that I do take the time to write something though, so I guess this will be just about the same as usual. Only I have only a couple of random musings in mind and nothing to totally rant on.

• Shortly after waking up this morning, while in the half asleep/half awake strange dreamworld kind of thing, I had a realization; I can no longer remember what my Father’s voice sounded like. If that sounds a bit strange I do apologize. I am pretty sure that everyone can remember voices, you know you sort of replay the phrases through your head and are able to hear exactly what it sounded like. Much like the way that you can play an old favorite song in your mind, you can hear every vocal and instrument as if the song was actually playing. I can no longer do that with any phrase that my Father spoke to me. I can clearly see his face, remember the situation where the event from memory was taking place and the such, but the words that play through my mind are no longer in his voice, they are in my own voice.

I am not really sure if there is any significance at all to this. The only thing that sticks out in my mind is that it means that I have lost a bit more of him. I am left to wonder, now fourteen years since his death, if I would still remember what he looked like were it not for the single picture that I have of him hanging in the guest bedroom (I mean the picture of him is hanging in the guest bedroom, not that I have a photo of him hanging, which happens to be in the guest bedroom).

After all, once you die the only part of you that remains is your memory, when even that begins to go away then it is more like you never existed at all. Kind of a frightening prospect, yet each day I realize more and more that the growing older thing, which I thought would never happen to me, is happening to me. It turns out that you don’t just turn 70 and all of a sudden lose all of your memories, no no, it is like you lose older memories as you gain newer ones, at least I hope I am going to remember the new memories. I suppose that it goes pretty much the same for everyone and I am only focused on it since I am so introspective, who knows. Hell now that everyone (virtually) has a video camera of some sort I may be in the last generation of people that actually try to use their mind to preserve memories of loved ones. As I read the last line, though, I realize that it isn’t true in the least. There seems to be a much deeper emotion involved with actual memories than there is to a photo or even a home video, that is why they are memories isn’t it?

Memories, as I see them, all seem to have a deep emotional tie to an event, be it good or bad, that both happened and played a role in shaping you into who you are today. Yet it seems that the memories somehow etch theirselves into you moral consciousness to the point that it is a part of your being. The memory may fade, but the ideals that the memory built into you remain. Who knows, maybe the memories themselves have a time stamp on them and can go away when they are no longer necessary.

It may be true that I can no longer remember the stern, disapproving voice of my Father when he scolded me. Nor can I hear the calm, sympathetic voice of my Father when I was injured, be it physically or emotionally. I do not believe that his soul has moved to ‘heaven’ or some ‘higher plane of existance’ , no, he is dead. I find it unfortunate that I can no longer hear the tones and nuances of his voice when I see him in dreams, but I am not going to think about that too much. Through his discipline and love (as well as my Mother) I have become who I am today.

It may not be much, but what I have was earned through hard work. Work done by my own hands (with the wife’s assistance, of course). My Father may have been a lot of things, an alcoholic, unfaithful to his wife, unfaithful to his girlfriends, but he worked for everything that he owned. I know that he took pride in that, and I know that he would take pride in my following in his footsteps as far as working for what I have. He might even have taken pride in my being able to ‘keep it in my pants’, who knows.

What I do know is that the only thing left of my Father is his legacy. Not much on that front. He was horribly in debt at the time that he died, had way more cars than he could afford, at least four or five girlfriends that regularly shared his company on the weekends. Hell, his memorial service was a “who’s who” of sluts in the county. I have taken a more subdued approach to women (monogamy, no, it is not a type of wood), which has resulted in a marriage that has lasted several years so far, I think that this would also have made him proud.

It is (or should be) every parent’s dream that their offspring will better them. It doesn’t really have to be about the size of the house or the number of toys, or any of that material crap. Happiness should really factor in. I may hate my job more than my father ever did, I may hate a lot of things more than my father ever did, but, when you come home to someone that you love, someone that also loves you, isn’t that better than a thousand one-night-stands?

Okay, so that went all over the place, hope you’re still with me.

• I am sure that you have seen this photo on tons of cars everywhere. They do change what is getting pissed on though. I have seen the kid pissing on everything from a chevy logo to GOD. I have always found it pretty humorous, in a tongue-in-cheek kind of way, when they show him pissing on certain things. I have seen that little kid peeing on “My Ex”, “Bush”, “Censorship”, seems he will pose to piss on anything.

What my wife and I saw today just went a bit too far. The little ‘Calvin looking character’ was pissing on P.E.T.A. I certainly don’t count myself as an activist for animal rights, but come on. Sure the PETA people take it a bit too far sometimes, but the piss on PETA sticker looks pretty bad. The car that the sticker was on kind of explained it all though, it was one of those huge SUV’s. The wife thinks that it was a Ford Expedition. I barely saw the nameplate on the back of it, but it looks about the right size/shape to be the one we saw with that bumper sticker.

Anyone who is driving a vehicle that they pay in excess of 30,000 dollars for, with a fuel economy of 15mpg, is not likely to give a hoot about the fact that they are destroying the earth with their excess, especially since there was only one person in that huge SUV. Perhaps they should consider a smaller, more fuel-efficient ride for the ten-second run to the local grocery store, but no, this particular vehicle had a “Piss on PETA” sticker on it. I suppose that the logic is: there will still be an environment, we will adapt to it.”

I did say that I do not support PETA, yet, in this case, I may be right behind them in executing whoever was in that huge SUV.

Rental repairs; Amusing news

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There has been nothing at all that I felt like bitching about for the last few days, not that my life doesn’t suck every bit as badly as it always has, just that I am tired of talking about it. Life sucks, I’m used to it.

I have been doing a bit of work on one of the Owner’s rental houses over the last couple of days as well. Just hanging blinds and some general maintenance kind of stuff, but it has been taking a hell of a lot longer than it had ever taken me in the past. The reasons for this are multiple, depending on the particular window. Some of them have old screws and such that have been painted and plastered over, thus requiring me to find new ways of making window dressings be centered when there is no way to hang them in a central location. Don’t get me wrong, I did hang eleven blinds in this house, with the help of my brother-in-law on the first five, two of them were vertical, tall blinds, the other nine were simple, horizontal(venetian) blinds. Of all of the blinds that I did install there is only one blind that I has to install totally off from center, and that blind is less than a half of an inch off from center, i.e. if you weren’t looking for it, you wouldn’t find it.

The most annoying part of this project has been that I have not ever actually had a key to unlock the door of this rental house. That meant that I had to actually “break in” to the house, which was a very simple task, I mean it doesn’t have a lock on the majority of the windows, and the ones that do have locks just have simple pins that can be pushed out with an ink pen. It is not a lot of fun to have to actually “break in” to a house that you are working on though. It seems kind of shady, but that was my only option, that or drive all the way back to get another key (which I found out later also didn’t work anyway). I need now only to put up a couple of replacement pieces of glass over the light fixtures in a couple of the rooms and that will be that. At least as far as what I am being paid for.

I suppose that I should let him know that none of the electrical outlets in the kitchen work, that all of the outlets througout the house are not secured to the walls, that there is no way an electrical inspector (or a building inspector for that matter) would let a house be rented or sold without ground fault circuit interruptors in the bathroom and near the kitchen sink. I might mention this all if the opportunity presents itself, but chances are the opportunity will never be there.

Enough about that though.

I read the news over there at yahoo today and found a story that I just loved. The headline is, “Priest, Nun Convicted After ‘Sex Act’ in Car”.

My first thought was ‘since when are priests attracted to women?’ My second thought was ‘Since when are women attracted to priests?’ I guess that I should be concerned that the sanctity of the priesthood is being challenged, but, come on, he is a guy. I bet when GOD ‘calls’ people to the priesthood he doesn’t mention that there will be certain things that you will feel inside your pants that you can only alleviate in one way, that way is forbidden. I suppose that it is no wonder the priests start looking at young boys as…well…warm spots really. I suppose there comes a point where even a priest will have desires. Why he can’t take care of that desire with a local prostitute is unknown to me.

I guess that the nuns are attracted to the money, the power, all of the stuff that goes along with being a priest, but then I saw this particular quote in that news artical:

Passers by alerted police at Lilongwe International Airport after the parked Toyota Corolla, which had tinted windows, began shaking in what police described as “a funny manner.”

Damn, it only takes a Toyota Corolla to land a NUN? I am at least one step up from there with my car, still I doubt I could land a NUN! Of course, I am not going to have the Papal authority to land a NUN in the first place, but neither does your average priest. As I previously stated, I find this surprising ONLY because there was a woman involved. Had it been another priest raping pre-teen males I would have just thought it was the status quo. When that priest starts treading on my turf (you know, hetrosexual women) that is the point where the Church has overstepped their boundaries! To be fair, I guess both Priests and Nuns aren’t allowed to have sex, so to put it in simpler terms, it is like Fucking your sister if you happen to be religious.

The problem then becomes that no rational man or woman would ever sign up to be involved in a religious cult if they knew that it would cost them the freedom to use their body as they see fit. I understand that there are those that would say that any sexual temptation that a new priest feels is “the devil’s try” but, that is every priest who has ever lived! Now they have taken to having sex with anything that wiggles. Is that really how you want your little priest to grow up? No! you want him to be molesting children for the next fifty years, right? That is the only advantage of the Priesthood after all.

Bleh. Done for now.

Zelda; Drive-Thru commandments

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Well, as I predicted in my last update I was not able to do anything on the site for the last few days. Well, that is not exactly true, I could have done stuff on the site but I chose not to. When your options are sleep before working all day or staying awake to write something that no one reads the choice seems pretty simple. Most of the time anyway.

What is thankful/unfortunate about the few days of the absence of the bosses is that nothing really strange or catastrophic happened. That is good for me as far as their opinion of me, but bad for trying to think of entertaining little things to write. I have so little on my mind that I just might have to show a little nipple to make this one interesting.

•

Before I get into anything else, I must mention that we are having a problem with our little puppy “Zelda”. She was fine when I left for work this morning, running, playing, barking and otherwise just annoying the hell out of me. Sometime after that something happened. (Once again to note that the previous sentence is one of the worst ever written.) Just before I was to come home for lunch, my wife showed up at the store to say that there was something wrong with one of little Zelda’s hind legs and that she was not able to walk. What could possibly have happened to her (the dog) in that span of only a couple of hours remains a mystery.

I should mention that Zelda has never really quite been a ‘normal’ dog. She has what we call a “Roach Back” instead of being flat. She constantly looks like she really needs to just stretch her back out but never does, whether that is due to inability, pain or other we just don’t know. Possibly as a result of whatever the issue is with her back, lower back specifically, she has always walked with a bit of a limp. I had always assumed that this was probably due to an unusual birth that left her with a broken bone that just didn’t heal correctly. With this new problem she is having I am beginning to think that possibly it is something worse.

I am not going to go into speculation about what the particular malady could be as it is just to soon to do so. After all I do remember a time not so long ago when I could not really stand or walk and it just turned out to be a cervical strain. What is to say that she just didn’t do a little doggy version of a sprained ankle? She appears to be getting better as the day progresses, yet she is also on drugs, well aspirin if you really can count that. Being that she is a dog she probably doesn’t have any concept that the pain has gone away because of medicine, so she probably thinks that she is getting better also. I sure do hope that it is just something minor, it is amazing how attached one can become to a pet in only a few months time.

• Now for a drive-thru story.

I have certainly watched enough shows on the history channel to know that the drive-thru came into being for the purpose of making fast food even faster. One of the shows that I saw was saying that the goal of a drive-thru was to go from the order to the car leaving with the food in 90 seconds. I think that 90 seconds might be a bit hopeful, but certainly three or four minutes should be possible, right? Nope.

There is only one fast food joint here in town, well only one place to get food fast through a drive-thru. It is a Burger King, and while I don’t really like the food there so much that I would eat it if I had any real options, I do eat it once or twice a week. The drive-thru experience usually does only take a couple of minutes, though often times we don’t have quite what it was that we had ordered. If you lived where I live you would understand that the simple fact that we got the food from there at all is enough incentive not to bitch.

I have always assumed that the worst case scenario at a drive-thru would be that someone ordered a burger that was not yet cooked, and that would result in having to wait the two minutes or so that it takes to get one done. Boy was I ever wrong.

On Saturday I worked another split shift, while that left me with a three hour lunch break, I still wanted to be home within ten minutes or so in case the people left to run the store needed to call me. I decided that I would grab a burger from the drive-thru, unless there were more than two cars there in which case I was going to just buy a sandwich at a convenience store. It turned out that there were only two cars at the drive-thru so I figured the experience to be about six minutes at most. In some alternate universe it may have even happened that way, it sure as hell didn’t here.

I have come up with a short set of “Drive-Thru Commandements” based on my experience on Saturday. I will list those here while bitching about my particular experience.

Thou Shalt Not Exit Thy Vehicle

The second car up from me had to wait for a minute or so while the one at the window (which I was not able to see in my earlier two car assessment) was waiting for their food. During this period of time you could clearly see that the woman was talking on a cell phone. Once the car that was in front of her had left, she pulled forward. About thirty seconds after she had arrived at the window I saw her put her cell phone down on the seat. Then she got out of her truck. My first thought was that maybe her window would not roll down, we have all been there, right?

Thou Shalt Have Thy Coin Ready

When the woman got out of her truck she proceeded to spend about two minutes digging through the pockets of her pants, handing the cashier a bill or a coin each time she found one. There seemed to be bills and coins in every pocket of the pants. Must be some new-fangled accounting system or something, yet if you are gonna do it, do it right. Maybe One dollars bills in the front right pocket, fives in the front left pocket, tens in the rear right, twenties in the rear left, and use your imagination for larger denominations.

Thou Shalt Not Order So Much Food As To Confuse Astrophysicists

The woman was alone, driving in a mini truck (I think it was a Chevy S-10), yet she got enough food for an army. The drink count was five, as they came out one at a time they were easy to count, especially since she then had to get into the truck to secure each drink, one by one. After the drinks came the food, four bags total, four big bags.

Thou Shalt Pull Forward To Check Thy Order When Others Are Waiting

While holding her receipt in her hand (the receipt was longer than many a college thesis), she proceeded to go through each bag, one by one, and place a mark through each item on her receipt. When she had completed the fourth bag I saw her holding the receipt to the cashier, I am sure that she was saying something like, “Well, I didn’t get this one”.

Thou Shalt Dispute Orders INSIDE The Establishment

The woman then handed back all four bags of food and the receipt to the window person. Thankfully the drinks must not have been in question as they did not go back. There must have been some sort of an audit going on inside the building but we will never know. About three minutes later the window opened, once again, and four bags of food were again provided. Again the woman went through them item by item.

Thou Shalt Leave The Pick-Up Window Immediately On Completion Of Transaction

The woman then got back into her truck, thankfully. Yet instead of driving away she picked her cell phone back up and dialed a number. This particular sequence only took thirty seconds or so, but it pissed me off more than the rest of it combined. If you are buying food for half a dozen people you really should go ahead and go into the place. Especially if you are going to get out of your car and stand there for over eight minutes disputing the order and looking for cash.

Thou Shalt Put A Stone Through The Skull Of Any Person Who Has Broken All Of These Commandments

I will admit that I did not put a stone through her skull, but I had no stone you see…If I would have had a stone I would likely be making this update from prison. I do not know why anyone would try to make such a large order through a drive-thru. It would be one thing if you were doing all value meals or something (which was not the case here for sure), why would you try to order all of that crap, then continue to break all of these commandments?

Just as a ‘for instance’, the guy that was in front of me had his cash ready, paid the girl and threw the bag on the seat. Total time at the pick-up window, about 12 seconds. My transaction was even faster since I told them to keep the extra penny. If I had been in posesession of a Penny Gun like they created over there at MythBusters (they were trying to see what velocity a penny would have to reach to penetrate human flesh/skulls), I may be in prison also.

That is about enough for today. Take the “Drive-Thru Commandments” to heart or you may be the first victim.

Puzzles; PC; Left-Handed Whopper

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Well there was not a post yesterday, it was late, I was tired, I have a couple dozen more excuses, if you really want to hear them. As always, direct your complaints Here.

The thing that was actually occupying all of my time last night was trying to find a good example of one of the puzzles that I completed in the Sherlock Holmes game, the game that I have mentioned a bit about in the last few days. This was the single most difficult puzzle that I have ever done in any game. It was not that the puzzle itself was hard, it is that it gave you absolutely no directions at all. You are sitting there with a bunch of tiles of two different colors, and a blank graph. There are numbers around the edges of the graph, but nothing that made me say, oh, I need to put so many of this color here, and the other color there.

Searching by the name of the game on Yahoo, I was able to find a page that linked to many puzzles that are like it. The one that I found that actually had a really good description of how to do the puzzles, as well as a tutorial was found at Conceptis Puzzles. The puzzle in the game was not nearly as tough as the ones that you find on this site, with the exception of the fact that you go into it without a single clue as to the rules of the game. After having seen the demo for the “pic a pix” puzzle, I was pretty easily able to solve the one in the Sherlock Holmes game.

Then, for some reason, I was taking to solving other ‘Conceptis’ puzzles, just to make sure I could. I don’t know what it is with me, any puzzles that are just simply Logic puzzles seem to consume me. If I were to leave that puzzle unsolved, hundreds of thousands of other people would solve it, the universe would not go out of alignment, yet I feel compelled to do it anyway. Hopefully this obsession won’t have the same fate as the obsession with the Lights Out game from tiger toys, where I was so obsessed with it that I made a version of it in java, which can be found Here. I must also note that it took me almost an hour to find the link to that damn game, and it doesn’t look anything like it did when I was playing it back in ’97 or so. I bet the puzzles are all still the same though, and my java-based game has all of the original puzzles, as well as the original hint moves for the first twenty-five boards. My programming of it is a bit lacking, but it is really quite faithful to the original.

So, Mom came and picked up her new computer today. I did my best to try to explain everything that they were going to need to know once they got it home, I even fired up the internet with it, and added AntiVirus.com to her favorites list. Then I figure I would go ahead and download AdAware6, I am pretty sure that the link won’t work, so the program is called “adaware6.0” and it is quite a usefull bit of freeware. It will get rid of tracking software like “gator” and “timesink”. I really do use that program on a weekly basis and it really speeds up my connection by deleting useless/harmfull crap.

I am left wondering why didn’t I do that a couple of weeks ago when I actually bought the machine. It was an office pull, after all. I mean they could have had a bunch of tracking crap on there, even some trojans, well, It does have an updated norton, so likely not. There could have been tracking software on it galore, though, and there was. I forget the name of the program, but it was described on the internet as being able to download code, and upload statistics without you ever knowing. That is a crock of stinky crap.

I have to run that “ad aware” program on my system pretty frequently. For the most part all I find are cookies that I get from visiting sites like DiabloII.net, where they aren’t really trying to harm your machine, but they have to pay for web hosting somehow. I am pretty sure that the cookies aren’t really a big deal, with the possible exception of your transfer speed, I notice that particularly since I am typing this on a modem connection. The real baddies that you can get, as far as information sharing, are the ones that you get when you download free games or anything else that you choose to download. Cookies are harmless to your system, but if you download something from that site there is a really good chance that there will be a virus in it, which is why I had to buy mom a new pc in the first place.

Why do I feel like I am trying to teach an internet 101 class? If that email came from someone you know and has an attachment, make sure you know what the attachment is before you open it. Most people do not simply send attachments to their freinds without descriptions of the attachment. “Safe attachment, open now” is not the type of message that I would expect anyone I know to send to me. If it says, “DJ beat his dad with a shovel for the first time today”, I would read that one, yet families differ. If you have never asked for or gotten, a really weird screen-saver from your family members, why would you think they would start to send them now?

So, I guess what I am saying is that you should never read your email, everyone is out to get you..

• I am gonna be damn near a month late on this one, but I read this story through a link over there at BlackChampagne, it was all about April Fools Day hoxes. I didn’t find the humor in a lot of them, but I am American and relatively young. Lots of the hoaxes that it lists were of the ‘Greatest of all time’ sort, and thus get lost to people looking at it with 21st century eyes. One did catch my attention.

The place that I stole this can be found Here. The story reads as follows:

#8: The Left-Handed Whopper:
In 1998 Burger King published a full page advertisement in USA Today announcing the introduction of a new item to their menu: a “Left-Handed Whopper” specially designed for the 32 million left-handed Americans. According to the advertisement, the new whopper included the same ingredients as the original Whopper (lettuce, tomato, hamburger patty, etc.), but all the condiments were rotated 180 degrees for the benefit of their left-handed customers. The following day Burger King issued a follow-up release revealing that although the Left-Handed Whopper was a hoax, thousands of customers had gone into restaurants to request the new sandwich. Simultaneously, according to the press release, “many others requested their own ‘right handed’ version.”

I lagughed long and hard about this. Your basic fast food burger is always circular, if you rotate it 180 degrees, you are simply turning it a half a turn. The fact that anyone fell for this is certainly proof that some of us should not be allowed to procreate. If you can not figure out how to turn the hamburger with your own two hands, and thumbs, you may be better off dead.

As I said, I am young and American, the rest of the hoaxes may be more humorous to you if you are not from America, and, as such, can find the humor in what they are doing.

Odd news; Warlock

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Before I start to go into something else, I want to mention that when I read my update from yesterday I noticed that I had left out a detail I really wanted to include in my bitching about the movie ‘Signs’. The particular detail was about the fact that water is toxic to the aliens. The part that I forgot to mention was humidity -you know, the amount of water in the air-, so depending on what particular month the story supposedly happened there should have been enough moisture in the air to kill them on the spot. Then there is the issue with rain…but it is going way beyond what the small time/scale of the movie was going for, so we will assume that they just never thought it would rain. But, enough about that.

In other developements, I found that I have a site reader that I did not know I had. This person sent me an email with a request. Despite the request I am not going to quit doing these updates ;), The request was for more doggy pictures and stories, and the story of how I ended up two ‘vicious pit bulls’ is one that I think could be entertaining, or at least informative, so I will go into that below.

There is a very odd and short news thing that I have to put here today;

SYDNEY (Reuters) – An Australian handyman admitted he was stupid to shoot himself in the head with a nail gun in a misguided prank that left him with a nail lodged in his brain.Brad Shorten, a father of three from Victoria state, was enjoying a few beers with friends after working on his house when they began joking about industrial accidents.

Shorten, 33, picked up a nail gun that he thought was empty, pointed it at his head and pulled the trigger.

He later said he had turned off the gun’s compressor and taken out its nail cartridge but did not realize there was still enough pressure in the gun to fire a nail.

“My mates and I were talking about construction site accidents and taking your eye out with a nail gun, and I foolishly put the gun to my head and pulled the trigger,” Shorten told the Sunday Herald Sun newspaper.

“I did a very stupid thing,” he said.

The bizarre mishap left him with a 1.25-inch nail counter-sunk through his skull just behind his temple.

Royal Melbourne Hospital neurosurgeons removed the nail in a delicate four-hour operation even though Shorten, who was expected to make a full recovery, had offered to take the nail out with a pair of pliers.

Isn’t it funny that they were joking about this exact thing when some jack ass decides that holding a nail gun to his head and pulling the trigger would be a good idea? I think he should be put to death (or at the very least castrated) to keep his idiot gene from passing to another generation. I am all about protecting the children after all…

Puppies!

You know, some people think that canines are no longer ‘puppies’ when they hit the fifty pound mark, but I know the truth, as long as you have control over them they are still puppies. Sure one of my puppies has eclipsed the 50 pound mark and ran with it, but he is well behaved and as such Is still my ‘pup’, well technically that is my wife’s pup, but the idea stays the same. A well controlled dog, regardless of size, will always be your puppy.

Here is the story of how we got our first dog;

When my wife and I moved from a studio apartment to the house that we are now buying, we thought that (well she thought really) that a dog would be a good addition to the non-existent back yard. We kicked the idea around for at least a month, maybe six weeks, before we decided to go ahead and get a dog. Once the decision was made that we were going to get a dog, we went to an animal shelter in the Mesa/Phoenix area to try to find one. We chose to go to the shelter to find a pet for the simple fact that if they are not adopted they will be put to death sleep. It seemed more logical to us to take a pick of the dogs in the pound than to pay someone for a pure-bred.

We walked all up and down the aisles at this place. I was hoping to find a small dog and I am not sure what my wife was looking for. She ended up picking out this guy, who we named ‘Warlock’. He was the only dog in the entire place that was not barking or jumping, he was just laying there in his cell waiting for someone to let him out. He did drag my ass when I was trying to lead him to the car, but once there he just jumped into the back seat and layed down to sleep for the duration of the roughly one hour trip home. Once home, I broke out my cheap-ass digital camera and took the above shot of him (which really doesn’t do him justice).

We were initially worried that he would mess in the house, but that never happened. He has never made a poop or a pee inside the house, though he did once vomit, but he licked it up before we could clean it up.

He was not only house-trained, but he was also quick to learn commamds like ‘sit, stay, lay down, shake, My wife actually has him trained so that he will do a certain trick depending on how many fingers she is holding up. I think those are some damn good results from a dog that was on the “half price” rack at the pound. (at our pound they go on the ‘half price rack’ the day before they are to be executed euthanised).

The story of how we got Zelda will come sometime in the next few days, but, for now you should just appreciate your pets and thank the random fluxuations of time and space that they are still in your home.

Pain; News; FTP

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Well, I didn’t do an update yesterday. The most significant reason for that was that the pain that I thought was subsiding on Sunday came back in full-force on Monday. I am trying not to take the prescribed muscle realaxants, but I have had to take four or five over the last few days. I am not sure if it is actually an issue of building up a tolerence (as I often claim, fearing that if I need to use the pills when I am older and in desperate need they will not help me) or if it is simply a matter of pride. If it is, in fact, a matter of pride then I have to say that I have swallowed that pride, in a convenient pill form, happily a few times.

The pain has been subsiding a bit over the days though. I am now only in pain when I am standing, bending down or laying down. That means that as long as I am sitting I am not in pain, well in less pain anyway. The pain is still here as I again sit typing, but the pain is centralized to just the lower portion of my neck. When I stand the pain tends to spread and make my head and fingers start to throb, as is the same when I try to bend down. I have gotten pretty good at controlling my breathing to take deep breaths when my head begins to pound, and this makes that sensation go away pretty quickly, but feeling that pain for even one second is at least 3/4 of a second longer than I would like to feel it.

Laying down is a bit tricky also. The instructions given to me on the release form from the hospital say that I should lay on my back with a small pillow on each side of my head to keep my neck in line. The inherent problem with that is my neck is in the most pain when I lay flat on my back. That would be sort of like telling someone with a broken leg that instead of a cast, he should just hit the fracture with a big mallet every ten minutes or so. Just not going to happen. Anyway, if I lay on my right side one pillow is too much, where as if I lay on my left side I need two. Either way my neck still hurts, but while laying on my left side it seems to hurt a bit less. I have to move while I sleep though, as, if I lay in one position much longer than an hour my back begins to hurt. Yeah, cry me a river, I know. This will pass and I will look back on this and think that it didn’t really hurt that bad, then I will probably scoff at other people who think that something like this hurts, but I hope not.

This is the first day since the injury that I have actually felt able to do most of the things that I normally do. I mean that I am able to get up and move around, pick things up off of the floor, beat the dogs when necessary. The only time I really feel the pain is, well, not really clear. I went to the bathroom earlier and as I turned to sit it just hit me and a few seconds later it was gone. I had been standing opening my mail when the phone rang, I reached for the phone and it hit me. I am beginning to think that there may really be a god and that he is punishing me for my atheist ways, that or the human body is a very complex system that can not be understood or explained.

But enough about my pain in the neck.

There is a weird news story today that I just absolutely love, on a lot of levels. It is quite a short little story, so I will simply quote it all here;

WINNIPEG, Manitoba (Reuters) – For a 73-year-old Canadian man, 20 months in a smoke-free jail looked just too long, so instead he took 24 months in a prison where he can smoke cigarettes.
Angelo Foti was sentenced to 20 months for shooting and wounding a man in his backyard who was trying to repossess a snowmobile sold to Foti’s son, the Winnipeg Free Press reported Tuesday.

In court Monday, Angelo Foti was agitated when he realized the sentence would mean he would be in a provincial jail, where smoking is banned, the newspaper said.

Foti’s lawyer pleaded for a 24-month sentence instead, which means the man will go to a federal prison, where smoking is allowed.

In accepting the longer term, Foti, a dedicated pack-a-day man, ignored the wishes of this family.

“Dad, they’re just cigarettes — give them up. Quit smoking: you’ll be healthier,” his son Angelo Jr. said in court. “Just take the 20 months.”

I just love that story. The guy is 73 years old FFS, he is not likely to change his day to day behavior just since he is in jail. He has likely smoked since he was ten or twelve years old -since they only really started to care about the age restrictions on tobacco within the last decade or so. He just wants his smokes. The amazing part is that he is that old and still smoking. At his age, and being a smoker, either term 20 or 24 months could be a death sentence. He chooses to defy all logic by taking a longer sentence so that he can kill himself just a bit more.

Don’t get me wrong, I am a smoker myself, and I would love nothing more than to be able to quit. Being locked in a cell in a local jail for twenty months would likely be the spur that I needed to achieve that end. Perhaps I am just not seeing his point of view.

Now, why the hell is he in jail anyway? The article clearly states that “Angelo Foti was sentenced to 20 months for shooting and wounding a man in his backyard.” it does go on to explain that the man was trying to repossess a snowmobile, but it was not in Angelo’s name. I think that if someone is in your yard, trying to take a snowmobile -whether it is yours, your son’s, or even the neighbor’s bastard son’s step-sister’s, he is taking it from your private property-, he is fair game.

That article doesn’t mention whether the person announced that they were ‘repossessing’ the snowmobile, nor do I think it really matters. If that guy shows up in my back yard, he is gonna get shot again. And, knowing that I am going to go to jail for protecting my property I may just shoot to kill, as opposed to shooting to injure. -I do know that the story is out of Canada, but I thought that our judicial systems were pretty similar….Until now-

FTP Clients

When I began doing these updates I had no FTP client. I searched through download.com to find one. I was quite worried about having to put the username and password for the ftp server into a program that I was not sure about. There are literally thousands of these programs out there, and you don’t know which one/ones may be malicious. At first I took the high road and picked one of the most popular ones, which had a free trial period and some pretty cool features. Also if you lie about whether or not you are a student you can get a bare bones version of it for free. That program is at this website WS_FTP PRO LE

I did not pay any attention to how long was left on my trial period of that, since I am on like day 1,226 of my thirty day trial on other programs, but that one just quit working on the 30th day. I was forced to go back and try to find a freeware ftp client.

Here is the information for any of you who really need a freeware ftp client. I downloaded and installed more than a dozen freeware ftp clients, more than 90% of them had some sort of tracking software bundled in the installation files. This one client is the only one I found that does not freeze a windows 98 system AND does not have any tracking software (to my knowledge, none that I have been able to find anyway). It also has a very small file size. You can find it Right here. It takes a few minutes to get used to the interface, but that is a lot better than actually having to pay for an ftp client.

I am currently using this ftp client, if I find a better one I will let you know.

Morrowind; amusing acendotes

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So I went ahead and spent a bit more time playing Morrowind tonight. I still don’t have a real concrete impression of the game. The graphics (as I stated in a previous update) are just awesome. It is by far the best game I have ever seen as far as graphics are concerned. The game play is a bit hit and miss though. If you happen to have an item in your inventory that you can use on something in the game world you can not equip it -I am speaking about locks in particular at this point- I have a lock pick which I must equip to try to pick a lock, yet, when I found a key to open a certain lock it would not let me equip it. When I tried to physically take the key from my inventory and click it on the lock, I dropped it on the ground…Through various guess and check methods I was able to find out that if you had something in your inventory that would unlock an otherwise inaccesible area it would do it on its own……..Way to go Mr. No Info Owner’s Manual……

After that minor set-back I charged in to the fight. I would tell you exactly how long the fight lasted, but my watch does not have milliseconds on it, and there were only about three of them that passed before I was seeing a screen asking if I would like to load my previous save. I am all for better AI to make the game more challenging and all, but I died before I could even see that S.O.B., and he was behind me, so I had to turn around -that means that I quit running- so by the time I caught a glimpse of the guy I was already dead.

I used the Google to find out what the hell I was doing wrong, but found that you are supposed to get your ass kicked for a long time (20-30 hours by one estimate) before you can actually start to advance the story line (well get the quests activated that do anyway).

It was at the same site that I found that you do not get levels by killing things. You get levels by advancing your skills in …literally everything… Once you have increased any of your base skill levels by 10 points (that is, any skill that you possess that goes up by one point will take away from the 10 points that you need to get to reach the next level.) I have so far increased my acrobatics by about 4 points, my mercantile by 2, so I must be getting close. I would love to increase my killing with the weapon skill, but the thing is that, in this game, once you kill it, it is dead. Like forever, it will never respawn. You can’t simply quit and restart the game, ’cause it is already dead, and never comes back. That will ..hopefully.. be a very good thing later in the game.

If you had ever tried to play Everquest on a system as archaic as mine, I am sure that you would certainly love the graphics in this game. The fact that it is not an MMORPG, but just a cRPG may be the reason that it hit the market with a heavy ‘thud’.

They have made a world far too immense to take in or conquer with a single character, yet, that is the only option I see available. If you had the option of having friends lending their abilities in certain situations, this game would be a lot better. Similarly, if you had a single button that would attack with a single motion (as opposed to the attack happening when you release the button as it is now.) That would also improve the gameplay.

I guess the next few years will see which direction the company that made this game will go. They are certainly heavy-weights with the graphics, and I am sure that they are the first company ever to offer the mmorpg thing in a single player format -WHICH DOES NOT WORK- but they may make the next ‘Myst’ for all I know.

The Daily Bitch

The daily bitch today will not be an actual bitch, but two anecdotes. The good news is that neither of them involve my childhood and as such this should go pretty smoothly.

The First

This one will go about a sentence deep until you figure out the end, but I laughed long and hard about it. That was because the person involved told me, so if this is an urban legend of some type, just give me a call.

So, (I will call her Kay) Kay was nervous about a date that she had invited to her house. She really liked the guy, but was not entirely sure how he would take the fact that she had a child. She decided to open the bottle of wine a bit early – to calm her nerves-. She could not find a cork- screw, so she figured she would just break the neck off of the bottle. She went outside to break the neck off of the bottle -so that she would not stain her carpet-. Once she broke the neck off of the bottle, much of the shattered glass fell back inside the bottle. She decided that she would strain the wine through a cloth and still use it. She fastened a cloth to the end of the broken bottle, and poured the fifty dollar bottle of wine down the drain….Shortly after she realized what she had done and (even though she was blonde) thought that it was really funny and wanted to spread the word.

The Second I will leave the intro a bit short, just understand that I hate this guy….Anyway, I am walking down to get my mail one day, and I see this car. It must be like a ’72 or ’73 Ford LTD. The material on the top of the car has been eaten away by time and replaced by rust, the car has at least 3 different colors on the quarterpanels. If this is not a stolen car, it should be in the junkyard. It really makes the car the blues brothers drive look like factory quality…

Anyway, I was walking down to the post office the other day, and I saw this guy locking “The Club” onto that piece of shit. I laughed for a long time about that, I mean it is funny. Yet, today when I was telling one of our distrubutors about it, he suggested that the guy might be putting the club on the car to make sure that he doesn’t lose the club.

I had never thought of the possibility that your car could be worth less than your security decvice, but in this case, it was certain. I am not sure if that was the angle he was going for or not. I have a simple rule. If it sounds fake, or looks fake, it is likely fake. I guess he should thank his stars that I was not his insurance agent…

Keyboard; Belly shirts

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Yesterday’s update was by far the shortest in the brief history of this site. There was no real reason for that, well there was, but I don’t want to get into it, so just believe what I tell you.

I thought that this new keyboard had been doing pretty well, and it has, but I am still having some issues with a lot of it. For one, my last keyboard tapered very slowly from the desk to the keys, this one is almost rounded on the way there, it forces my wrists to be higher than they usually are when I type, and it is a bit painful. Another involves the keys to the right of the letters. Instead of having the print screen, scroll lock, and pause at the same level where the F keys are, they are right down against the insert, home, and page up keys, then after the delete, end, and page down keys, the up arrow is right there touching the end key. I am sure this will not be that difficult to get used to, the only real problem is that when I try to hit the insert key, most of the time I get the print screen, since it is exactly where the insert was on my last keyboard. Similarly, when I try to page up I am getting the pause key, while when I try to page down I am getting the page up.

Makes me wonder if I shouldn’t have just gone ahead and bought the microsoft one, since if they continue to use their format, I bet all the other companies will soon start to do it as well -regardless of how non-sensical it is. As it looks now, I am literlly going to have to learn a new keyboard every time I am required to buy one. Makes me wish I had the means to just go buy about a dozen or so of this one so I would never need to, but, even if I had the means, I am sure that in two years there wont be USB ports on computers anymore so I would just have a dozen obsolete keyboards. Technology sucks.

The last thing about the keyboard that is giving me problems is that it is new. I am sure that everyone knows that when they are new you kind of have to really mean it when you hit a key. Once you have been using it for a few years just a gentle touch will get a letter on the screen, when it is new you really have to push down to get it. It doesn’t really affect my typing speed, as I am pretty quick in that respect, but it does affect my accuracy as I will often see that I am missing about every fifth letter, but by the time I see that I have missed one letter my fingers have already thrown up a few more. It is quicker for me to just backspace and re-write the few that I delete than to try to arrow key it back, then fix the typo, then arrow key it forward.
So, bear with me over the next couple of weeks as I am breaking this thing in, there will likely be a lot of typos, and as I have previously stated I do not have the ability to spell check. As I have also stated I do not proof read before posting. I fear that if I did proof read I would change everything all around, I think that would kind of cheapen the whole concept of doing this daily update in the first place. I am not entirely sure if it would actually be possible to cheapen the daily update itself, but I would like to think so.

One other thing regarding computers and this site. I keep forgetting to change my why I’m mad today, don’t care and fun to hate things. Of course this doesn’t really matter so much at this point, since my readership is pretty much only me, I just fear that I may not get into the habit of doing them every day if I continue to wait until the rest of this is written. It was my goal to make them thematically linked to what I had written here, and since I never know what I am going to write here until I sit down and get it about 2/3 of the way done I can’t really change them in advance. If I do continue to forget to update them I will likely do them first and then try to make this section relate to them, but I think that would not work nearly as well, as I seem to write better with a blank slate than I do with a particular set of topics in mind. That being said, on to the bitching!

I was originally planning to do something about Ded Bob today. That has changed due to unforseen circumstances.

Belly Shirts

Belly shirts are a wonderful thing, if you can pull it off. There is the problem. While I was out recently, I noticed a disturbing trend… Low cut jeans with belly shirts are on the rise, as well as the relative size of people wearing them…

I saw about 10-12 women with the low-cut jeans and belly shirts on the day in question, perhaps one of them had the body to pull it off. There was one particular woman (that my wife and I spoke of later) who looked like she was, or could have been, 5-6 months pregnant that was going for that look. It certainly DID NOT WORK. Another woman who was going for this look was pulling it off, kind of, from the front, but a quick turn-and-look revealed what looked like an inner-tube hanging over the side and back of her low cut pants.

Mind you, I am in no position to bitch about fitness or the state of the body, but I did quit wearing half-shirts when what used to be a six-pack had somehow transformed into more of a keg.

If one wishes to follow a trend, one should choose a trend that is more suited to them. If one is anything other than a teen-ager, one should keep in mind that the little whores like “Britney” will not be remebered in about like 11 seconds. The ‘muscle shirt’ from the eighties lasted only about three years. Spandex made their run in like two years (though to this day I would swear that every overweight single woman that goes to the laundromat still wears them). Mesh shirts have also gone the way of the “Dodobird”. Todays fashion is tomorrow’s ‘faux-pa’.

My solution for this is simple: Become one with the Shadowtwinian’s. After that you can do as you please. I run a pretty loose religion over here, I am open to any input, as long as you don’t have 68 pounds of ass and gut hanging out of a pair of jeans and shirt that fit you back when you were like seven…