Category Archives: Personal posts

Holidays and birds

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So, just a quick recap of my last couple of posts. I/we own birds, Diamond Darrel died. Yup that pretty much sums it all up.

That all led me to remember about the little headstone that I made for the first bird, Elvis. Which you can see here. It doesn’t look quite the same in digital form as it does in person, however, that really bad writing on it looks just the same either way. I never realized how difficult it would be to use a small brush to write on concrete before I made this little headstone. Now that I do know, I will likely never try to do it again. As the little pine needles in the front make it a bit difficult to read, I will mention that the date on the stone is 5-20-02. Which was, obviously, the day he died.

Never in my life did I ever imagine that I would feel such an emotional attachment to a pet that I would actually place a headstone above the grave, yet, in this case I did. I didn’t even feel that close to the little bird Elvis, but I did have to bury him. While it would be nice to not feel any emotion while performing such a task, I was overcome with emotion when it got to the point of putting the little bird into his grave. My eyes teared more for my wife than for myself, but they did tear. That is why I made that little crappy headstone for Elvis; It is extremely difficult to deal with the death of a pet, especially if you have to play the role of the one who lays the pet to rest.

Much on a side note, I buried Elvis outside of the block fence, since we had just acquired our first dog at about the same time. It turns out that my paranoia was reasonable, as our second dog is prone to digging holes all over the yard. The last thing that you want/need to see is one of your pets carrying the mummified or rotten corpse of a different pet towards you.

I really haven’t liked the birds since we first got them, and I don’t think my sentiment has changed much in all these years, however, I did create the only headstone I have ever created for the sake of one of those birds. In thinking about it, I realize that I created that much more for my wife than for myself.

Hindsight is always 20/20, isn’t it?

• Being damn near Christmas already, I went ahead and took care of the festive house light situation. Since I didn’t take the lights down last year, you would think it was easy. Unfortunately, time had knocked off a major strand in the back, screwed up the arrangement on the ones on the side and made the string in the front take a bit more coaxing to get going. If you are going to be lazy, make sure that you buy strands of strings that can handle your laziness. They should absolutely be waterproof, windproof, sunproof, hell everything proof. If you can’t find lights that meet those criteria, maybe you should just leave them up for the christmas season and store them away after.

• There are ways to avoid the Christmas decoration Snafu. Most of them involve the death of at least on relative, and are not recommened. However, if you can kill only one person and make a perfect Christmas, I would really like to shake your hand (LOL or email). That would take some doing.

One must remember that the majority of people who celebrate Christmas are parasites. No one ever offers their home or services for the purpose of the meal right until it is on the table. Of course they only offer to butter bread after that. Which sucks, since they aren’t gonna stay around to wash the butter off of the dishes either.

Holidays Suck

Pearl Harbor and pets

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Being that it is the seventh of December, and me being American, I must mention that this is the anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. This happened well over thirty years before I was born, mind you, and I know of it only from the shows that I see on television, along with the history that I saw in text books. The most famous quote of all being from F.D.R.(?) saying that “this will be a day that will live in infamy.”

Much like any other historical event, I didn’t really have any perspective on the Pearl Harbor attack. History just seems to be all in black and white, and we don’t think about it until it happens again. While the attacks on 9/11 were not the same type of attacks, that is the closest thing that I have seen to relate to Pearl Harbor. For some reason, the attacks of 9/11 made the attack at Pearl Harbor seem more real to me.

I know that this is all pretty faulty logic. Japan did what they did as a nation declaring war on another nation. The 9/11 attacks were done by a few random guys, from a small terrorist cell, and can not possibly be compared to an all out strategic war against my/our homeland. This is, of course, just me trying to find a frame of reference, of course there are none.

Not to mention that I am going nowhere with that train of thought. I just wanted to mention the date, since I remembered long before I saw anything in the news. That is something that did not happen prior to 9/11.

• Now on to trains of thought that actually lead somewhere (I hope).

I have often shown myself to be a very proud dog owner, and voiced my dislike for cats. Here at the house, though, we are certainly not a ‘one pet’ monopoly. In addition to the two dogs, we also have quite the collection of cockatiels. One of which you can see to the right.

When I say that we have a collection of cockatiels, that does not even start to scrape the surface of our cockatiel ownership over the last few years… It started out rather innocolously, you see. My mother-in-law bought my wife a pair of cockatiels for christmas a few years ago. They were brother and sister, and subsequently named ‘Elvis’ and ‘Belle’. Unfortunately, Elvis died only a few months after we had gotten him (I made him a little headstone when I buried him, perhaps I will take a picture of the headstone at a later date). Anyhow, that left the wife with one living bird. The wife was unhappy with just a single living bird, so we had to get another bird. And, as luck would have it, we got one that was extremely fertile.

Over the next six months, the new male bird and the original bird, Belle, managed to pump out an amazing number of offspring. That number is exactly 12 (I just fact-checked that with the wife).

Of those twelve birds, we were able to sell seven of them, well eight really, but one of the buyers returned the bird later saying that she just couldn’t stand his ‘ornory behavior’. Here I must note that birds are not tame creatures by nature. You see, they are usually living in the wild. If you want to have a tame bird, it will require constant handling of the bird. If you lock them in the cage (as we have done for, well, since they were born) and don’t make the effort to play with/entertain them, you are going to end up with birds that are not tame. We did try to tame the babies at the start, but then the parents started screeching, neither of us was home often enough to take them out, etc.

While our birds may not be the most tame, I bet that they are the most beautiful. The two images that I posted were of some of the offspring of the original birds (well, not Elvis). The fact that both of those birds are also male makes them a unique investment for breeders. Most cockatiels (of the male persuasian) are just solid grey, no coloring in the face at all. Combining that with the fact that our breeding pair made not only a lot of colors on the little boys, but also produced a few Lutinos, makes the little guys a virtual gold mine.

If you happen to have a pair of birds that can produce both many-colored males, as well as the coveted ‘Lutino female’, you have yourself a damn nice (and financially gaining) set of birds. Of course, after all this time, we just want the birds to quit reproducing. We put them into separate cages to try to expedite the ‘non-reproducing’ agenda. When they mate it does yield very pretty, pretty birds, but it is also a lot of work. Work that we no longer want to deal with. That is why I showed the pictures that I did today, they are birds that have been sold to a breeder. The line will continue, thankfully, I won’t have to be actively involved in it.


Kodak and Zelda

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Following on the dog theme over the last couple of posts, I was happily snapping away with my little digital camera. While it is a refurbished, bottom of the barrel Kokak CX4200, I am pretty happy with the results. I do suppose that your average ‘professional photographer’ would have all kinds of issues with the thing, but then, your average ‘professional photographer’ wouldn’t have been doing bottom-of-the-barrel shopping in the first place…would he? I am sure that this is not the camera for you if you plan to make museum quality prints, but when your venue is the internet and you just want it to look pretty good (as opposed to looking jaw-droppingly beautiful), 59 bucks for a used one of these will kick the shit out of a thousand for whatever the next ‘change the world’ digital recorder happens to be. Mark my words, “I will never pay more than 100 dollars for a camera” (might need to include a clause relating to inflation in that statement), last year’s model works wonderfully, thank you. Yes, additional optical zoom would be great, since just seeing the flower didn’t give me the ‘true essence’ of its beauty, while looking at it through a microscope would, and etc.

But, it is my intention to talk, once again, about our little puppies. So I shall.

Previously, I posted a little picture of the puppy Zelda doing her best to look like the sphinx. While that didn’t generate any feedback (hell, nothing I write ever does), I wanted to do a bit more to illustrate the condition that she has. That is where the camera comes in.

Usually, it is pretty hard to get a photo of Zelda doing anything. She moves pretty quickly. As in the photo that you see to your right. She moved a bit too quickly for the camera to catch the weird angles that her hind legs were in only a fraction of a second ago. Still it is an unusual pose; How can any dog manage to work its Stifle joint in that way? Let alone the hock? It is just the way that Zelda lays.

This second photo is of Zelda’s rear end, when I caught her by surprise. In this photo (which can be viewed at a much larger scale if you click on it, as well as the previous photo), you can see just how far away from the norm her laying position is. I know that it looks ‘Photo shopped’, but I swear that it is not. This is how Zelda lays much of the time. I even just loaded the much larger version, and it still looks like a fake to me, but I took the picture, and it isn’t fake. Perhaps, in the future, I will be able to get a shot of Zelda when she is ‘not quite’ looking freakish, but for now all I have is normal or freakish. It is not my fault that I wasn’t able to get her in better light before I started to snap away. It is not her fault that she always jumps up and licks me when I am in the room, yet, it is unfortunate that I wasn’t able to get a good shot of that leg that didn’t look like I faked it.

Now I must thank the little puppy Zelda for giving me a few days of bitching fodder, as well as some nice photos. Zelda is a very happy, affectionate little pup, but when the time comes to decide between hip surgery or death, unfortunately, I fear, Zelda might receive the latter.

Now that I have stated publicly that money is more important than a pet, I leave you with only this thought. Do you actually ever cry when you lose money? What about a pet?

Christmas trees and puppies

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Holy Fuck! When did it turn into December? Damn it, last I knew it was still July and I was dealing with issues that didn’t relate to last minute Christmas shopping. I suppose I should have seen December coming, what with the whole passing of Labor day, Halloween, Veteran’s Day and Thanksgiving. Yet, somehow, I am still caught a bit off guard. Christmas is only supposed to happen near the end of December, and while it concerns me (in the gifting portion), it is not to be thought about or spoken of for the rest of the year. Unfortunately, that time is now upon us, that means that my usual cop-outs don’t really apply. Damn this modern society.

Thankfully, my wife is far more into the spirit of Christmas than I am. She is a crafty little devil, and makes some sort of trinket for most of the friends and family every year. Usually, she just hand paints some of the ceramic ornaments (which are really cheap at every craft store), but this year she decided to do something a bit different. That something different involved this particular item on the right.

It is not, as I had assumed, some sort of a weird, French, sexual device, no, no, way more mundane than that. Just her mock-up of a christmas tree. Note that it is complete with a little pot to stand in, and it is painted the traditional color for the said tree. Note also that the top is adorned with a star, as opposed to an Angel (while I did not ask the wife if there was any significant reason why, I am pretty sure that there are exactly two reasons. The first is that she, also, is not religious. The second is that I bet it would be damn hard to find an angel that small to top a tree.). The whole thing stands about, roughly, 10 or 12 inches tall, and never makes it past being about three inches wide. Well, never until she starts to decorate it. That little sucker looks better and better as the ornaments go on, and not just visually…

Here we see the finished product (placed on the left side of the screen for the purpose of variety). For some reason it looks like everything was photoshopped onto the initial picture, I assure you that that is not the case (likely the reduction of color depth makes it look a bit cartoonish, but what am I to do? The image would have been 1.4 megs if I hadn’t tried to reduce it…). Her little Christmas tree is ornamented by a whole bunch of little candies, which she attached to it with straight pins. I am really not sure where she got the idea to try it, but it really does look nice -much better in person-. Between the little pots, the foam cones, the stars and all of the candy, not to mention the paint, and the time that it took her to build them, she is probably, monetarily, about five dollars into each one of these little guys (not counting for time spent, of course). Of course, as with anyone with an ability for crafting, the end result seems to be the payoff.

What are the odds that you are going to be opening up presents this year, come to one from Uncle Jed, and find something so unique? It certainly beats socks, as a gift.


• It seems that I can not talk enough about my dogs puppies. Today I will present the other side of the lovable little guys.

Here we see one of their faux death matches. While it appears that Zelda (the nearer one in the photo) has all four feet on the ground, the reality is that Warlock has one paw on her neck and one paw on the ground, while Zelda is swiping at Warlock’s front leg. She did hit that front leg at the conclusion of this little sparring session, that left Warlock on his back and pretty much defenseless. Then they both got up, drank some water, went outside and started barking at the world in general.

I think that I, more than most, understand that the dogs are just playing. However, when you see this nice little shot of Warlock, you might think that his intentions are not to be playful. Zelda was going for his throat, of course, but man that is a really menacing smile (with pearly white teeth, I might add, we do take care of our little dogs puppies). Of course, Warlock was on the bottom of that battle, as he always is. Warlock always submits to Zelda, regardless of the fact that he weighs almost twice as much as she does. My wife tells me that it is ‘normal behavior’ for pack animals. The Wolves are always led by a dominant female, that sort of thing. I got nothing against that, but, dear God, Warlock is damn near 80 pounds. Zelda, on the other hand, is like 40 pounds, soaking wet. Gain some machismo, Warlock.

Yet, I suppose, at the end of the day, if you are going to be getting your ass kicked this badly, you may as well concede victory. If I am ever in a battle, then take on the fetal position, I will likely begin to beg for my life. I am only as proud as my circumstances dictate. The most thankfull part of that whole scenario is that I have the knowledge and ability to use a doorknob. If dogs ever decide to stop licking their asses, hell, cats even, for an extended period of time, they may figure out that doorknobs are just not that big of an obstacle.

I certainly fear the day when our pets rise up and overthrow us, mostly because there will be cats involved. I don’t really have anything against cats, per se, but my wife is allergic to their fur, and I have never felt the need to have one around me. Not that I dislike cats, just that it is nice to point to something and have your pet stare at something other than your finger.


I suppose my two cents isn’t worth much.


Warlock and Zelda

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Unfortunately, I did not get any email about the movie discussion yesterday. That really leaves me without a lot of bitching fodder. Of course that is the main reason why my posts have become less frequent in the first place. Not that I am actively looking for publicity or anything, just that it would be nice to think that someone other than myself, or my wife, was/is reading what I write. That, too, is a bit of a catch-22; more people would likely read if I were to update more often, while I would update more often if more people were reading…

That is the beauty of having my own website. There is certainly no one wanting to advertise here, nor are there any sponsors. That allows me to say what I want, when I want. How this differs from starting a site at Blogspot is that I can use profanity to make a point. Which, when I think about it, doesn’t really seem to be worth the price I pay to host the site. Noting that, I will call this site a hobby, something I do to keep me from doing something worse… You know, like, becoming a priest.

• Now that it is pretty well established that I do not have a point to talk about (not that you would expect one, had you read the site previously), I will move on to a subject that is sure to please the masses. I am sure that you are asking yourself what subject that could be, well, puppies, of course.

Here we see the puppy ‘Zelda’ (who is a vicious pit bull, and thus a confirmed killer), doing her best to look exactly like the Sphinx. This is how she lays down all the time, not a pose. Well, when she is sleeping she doesn’t lay this way, but the rest of the time she does. Usually her head is resting on her paws, but when she sees someone looking at her she gets all Egyptian. Most dogs are not able to lay just like that, her hind legs are not actually under her body, they are sticking out behind. That is why it looks like her back end is as wide as her shoulders. This is something that she has always done, however, we are forced to feed her gluosamine for that malady (which I think may be Canine Hip Dysplasia, but certainly hope is not). She lays like that with or without the glucosomine, but she seems to be in much less pain when she gets her daily pill.

Yes, I know there will be arthritis problem much later in her life. I know that she will be in a lot of pain until she dies, but when you see how happy she is now, you kind of have to disregard the future. Take yourself, for instance, if someone was able to tell you what you would die from (be it kidney failure, car accident, etc.), would you want to die just then? Chances are that you would want to live as long as possible. Which is the goal with the puppy ‘Zelda’. She will be alive right until the time that she no longer seems to be happy. If she is in constant pain, it would be better to ease the pain for the pet than to prolong the pain for both her and us. Now I am getting misty-eyed thinking about that decision, which is many years away. Glucosamine is working for her now, she is happy and healthy, we will destroy bridges once they are reached (and hopefully after we cross them).

Fear not! We have multiple puppies!

Some might argue that dogs are no longer ‘puppies’ once they reach a certain size or weight. I am not ‘some’. Can you look at those cute little puppies lying there and try to call them dogs? Here we see both Warlock and Zelda viciously killing what they kill most of the time, that being the better part of a day. Perhaps they were off mauling children earlier in the day, being vicious dogs, I dunno, I doubt it. Unfortunately, both of the dogs looked up when I stood up with the camera, else you would have seen them laying with their backs/bodies/heads right together (it was cute, trust me).

Okay, that was the puppy story for the next random amount of time.

Vicious, vicious killers. Stay away from them, they might lick you right to death.

An interesting side note, both of the dogs really hate mexicans. I am not saying that to be stereotypical, I am saying that because of you are hispanic, and you knock on our door, the dogs will be extremely vicious. If you are anything other than hispanic, the dogs will jump up and lick you. I don’t have any explanation for this behavior, but I do find it both unfortunate and humorous.

Strange dream; Team America: World Police; The System Has Failed

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I took a few days off around the website in case you haven’t noticed. Again the problem was just an utter lack of anything to say, I won’t let that little fact stop me today!

If anyone out there is into dream analysis, here’s one for you. In this dream I am standing in front of a shopping center in the town where I grew up. There is an ambulance parked nearby. Next to me (in the same general area anyway) are two paramedics and a young kid that I don’t recognize. After a few moments a black Chevelle with blacked out windows comes around the corner, the passenger window comes down, a rifle comes out and fires three shots, about a half a second apart. The Chevelle speeds away.

The three shots seem to have hit their intended targets. The two paramedics are both very obviously dead; each having been hit in the head and missing a great deal of the skull. The kid that I don’t recognize is hit also, but in the chest. He is breathing but barely. I can’t be certain what the bullet actually hit, but in my best estimation it looks like it probably missed his heart, I think he had a collapsed lung though, as he was coughing up blood.

My shouts for help go unanswered, the shopping center is deserted. In fact I don’t think there is a single car in the lot with the exception of the ambulance. I remove the stretcher from the back of the ambulance and put the kid onto it. I manage to get the stretcher into the back of the ambulance but I can not figure out how to secure the kid to the stretcher, or how to keep the stretcher from rolling/sliding. After a minute or so of trying to figure it out I decide it is better to bang him up a bit on the way to the hospital than to let him die while I am fucking with the straps.

I have never seen the driver’s seat of an ambulance but in my dream there are so many switches that it puts me in mind of a jet. All I want to do is start it and go, which I figure out quickly enough. The second I am on the road in front of the shopping center though there are cars backed up going both ways with no way to get around them. I start messing with the switches hoping to find the siren or the lights, and eventually find the one for the lights, yet the cars don’t seem to see them, as they don’t make way for me to pass. I do eventually find the siren (bear with me I know this is weird), it is a hand crank on passenger side of the cabin. In order to use the siren I have to put the ambulance in park, move to the passenger seat and crank it. I do this and the cars immediately all make their way to the side of the road, but by the time I am back in the driver’s seat the noise has faded and the cars are all back in front of me.

Through experimentation I am able to figure out that if I give the thing a good crank, five revolutions or so, I am able to get back to the driver’s seat and make it a couple of car lengths before I am boxed in again. A couple of dozen times of doing that and I make it to a cross street that I take towards the hospital (in my dream the location of the hospital is actually the location of the court, but that is another story). The four streets that surround the hospital are all one way, I was of course on the wrong street and had to make my way all the way around the thing to reach the entrance. When I come to a stop at the emergency entrance I crank the siren once more and a bunch of people rush out of the hospital. When I open the back of the ambulance to get the kid out, he is just sitting there on the stretcher with no sign of an injury at all. As I stare around confused, looking back and forth between the kid and the doctors, the black Chevelle pulls up behind the ambulance. I duck to the ground instinctively, but when the doors open the two paramedics from the shopping center get out. Suddenly a police car appears, I am in handcuffs, the hospital (which is in the location of the courthouse in the actual town layout) has turned into the police station and I am in a room being questioned about stealing the ambulance when the dream ends.

So what does that all mean?

•With the Megadeth concert being only two weeks away, I finally decided I had better go ahead and buy the new cd. The System Has Failed is the latest release, which I have just listened to twice. I have a couple of comments about it. First, they sure did go back to their roots as far as speed and power. I am not sure if it could hold a candle to ‘Rust in Piece’, but it is certainly on par with ‘Countdown to Extinction’. The second thing of note is that a lot of the lyrics are pretty sub par for Megadeth. The songs make sense (as much as a song can) but they just don’t seem to be of the same caliber as most of the older stuff. I suppose one can only write about so many great poems beforing running out of brilliant stories to tell.

One other thing that I took away from listening to it, I don’t think that Dave Mustaine thinks much of George W. Bush, or the situation in Iraq. That much is never actually said, but it is kind of implied. Even the albums cover art depicts someone, who looks an awful lot like dubya, paying off Vic the judge. The first song on the album, ‘Blackmail the Universe’, starts with air force one getting shot down and the president being detained by terrorists. One of the quotes in the song is, “I red, white and blew it.” That is a great line…

• The wife and I went out to take in a movie today. It was the first movie that I have seen on opening weekend since the original theatrical release of E.T. So what movie was so compelling as to make me see it on opening weekend, a movie so powerful to break a 22 year run of never seeing a movie on opening weekend? Well Team America: World Police, of course.

This is one of those movies that is certainly not for everyone. If you like it, you really like it, if you don’t like it, you actively hate it. A quick look at the reviews on RottenTomatoes will certainly evidence that. I am of the camp that really, really liked the movie. If you have yet to see it, I have only this to ask, “Jesus titty-fucking Christ!”, why not?

Now I am going to talk a little bit about the movie, not a review, more a list of things that I did/didn’t like about it. That means that there will be some spoilers. Of course this movie is pretty hard to spoil, I could likely read the entire script to you verbatim and you would still be blown away by it. That all being said, away I go.

First off, the movie took me completely by surprise. I had seen only one trailer for it ever. I mean there was only one t.v. commercial that I ever saw advertising the film, and that was a couple of months ago. All that I was able to gather from that was that it was done with marionettes, and that the minds that created ‘South Park’ were behind it. That was not a lot to go on. That was all that I knew about the movie when my butt hit the seat at the theatre (where we arrived a half an hour in advance, only to find that even at show start there were only about 20 people there).

To start with a few very specific examples of what I didn’t like about the movie. 1) There is a puking scene that goes on WAY longer than it needs to. The guy threw up, we get it, move on. It was not all that funny to just watch a marionette spit out pea soup for a minute and a half. 2) There is a quite unnecessary little song that the evil mastermind (Kim Jong Il?) sings, should have been on the cutting room floor, and likely would have been were it not for the childish humor in stereotyping the speech of all Asians by making all the ‘L’s sound like ‘R’s. The movie would have been better off without it. 3) There is just a lot of profanity for the sake of profanity. I know that they are Lampooning other movies and the such, but no one really ever says Fuck that often…Not even me and I am a potty-mouth. 4) The ‘running joke’ about the main character sucking ‘Spotswoods’ dick had lost most of its steam by the time that it actually happened. While I did find it a bit humorous, I don’t think it was actually necessary. I am sure that there are a few issues that I am overlooking, but I want to get on to the good stuff, so I will leave that all for a later date.

What I liked about the movie, now that is a tough one. I would probably have to list at least half of the movie to get all of that across. I will try to just list a few extreme laugh out loud (xlol) moments.

Xlol moment 1: This one is covering two scenes, the destruction in both Paris and Cairo. I was laughing so hard because that is just the way the rest of the world seems to look at the U.S.A., Destroying every precious, ageless monument, yet declaring victory after leaving the country in ruin.

Xlol moment 2: The twangy, country-western style song that Trey is singing while the main character makes up his mind about going to fight for his freedom. The song ends with something close to “Freedom isn’t free, it costs a buck-o-five”. I may have been the only one in the theatre laughing, but that one really tickled me. Take that all you country-western artsists that write songs about freedom, yet would never ‘slip on your boots’ to fight for it!

Xlol moment 3: The first time the team started to roll out of Mt. Rushmore, when they first started to sing “America, America” in a pretty dignified tone, then followed that with the hammering, “America, Fuck Yeah!” on our way to save the mother-fucking world, Fuck Yeah! Or however it actually goes, I damn near pissed myself with laughter. I think that was mostly because it reminded me a lot of the song from the old G.I. Joe cartoon themesong at least I thought it did right until I just listened to the g.i.joe theme again, not even close. Still, that was really, really funny when they broke that song out.

Xlol moment 4: There were a lot of times during this film that I laughed out loud, that is quite unusual for me as I try to never be noticed, ever. After the first half hour or so of the movie I was able to contain my laughter for the most part, and as such the fourth xlol moment was in the credits. There are the two separate sets of credits, the ‘team america’ credits (which appear to be in steel with rivets) and after that the actual, normal credits roll. During the first credits, while the ‘America, Fuck yeah!’ song is playing, they start throwing out random terms. Like, “the internet, Fuck Yeah!”. There are a lot of them that I didn’t actually hear, but one of the last ones was, “Slavery, Fuck Yeah!”. I nearly split my gut with laughter, while I guess my wife didn’t hear it at all.

Jesus titty-fucking Christ, that is the funniest movie of all time. Well the funniest movie in this century. Then again, this century is only four years old…The funniest movie counting the last two centuries then…But, I guess they didn’t have movies before then, so I guess it really must be the funniest movie of all time.

As far as the fact that the characters are just marionettes, it really only comes up when they really want you to see it. The first ‘fight scene’ illustrates that, but I am pretty sure that it is done on purpose. In the latter part of the movie, the marionettes do some hand to hand fighting that looks, at the very least, as realistic as most of the crap that Hollywood has to offer. Also, and unlike Hollywood prodcutions, with one exception, when the people are dead, they are dead. Having no head, splitting your torso in half, these things will keep you down for a while. No one in this movie gets slapped and then ignored for the duration.

I guess I better stop now, if I don’t I will likely go on forever. Just go watch the damn movie!

Telemarketers; Pool

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My little bitch about yet more people trying to cover (destroy) old songs yesterday did not result in any sort of feedback, which I have come to expect at this point. Makes me wonder if I should actually go ahead and try to write something worth reading, but, then again, that is hard. Much easier to throw out a bunch of dribble that no one ever reads than to actually take the time to write out some eloquent, poignant post that no one is ever going to read. I do pick my battles.

• So you know how the telemarketer’s call you, my stock response is, “is this a soliciting call?”, then, when pressed, the caller will admit to being the hated telemarketer. Today I happened upon a telemarketer that was alomost as smart as your average rock, of course I didn’t know that initially. The pitch was for long distance telephone service, my angle is usually to just hang up on those types of telemarketers, yet, today, I decided to fuck with him. Hilarity was the direct result.

When I answered the phone, there was a voice saying, “are you happy with your current long distance service?”. This would have been the point that I just hung up the phone most every time I get those calls, yet today I felt a bit ‘rowdy’, as it were.

Mind you, I am on the phone with this guy as we are speaking.

I asked him what company he was representing, he replied that he was representing ‘Verizon’, whom I don’t think actually offer home service in the first place. Yet, after watching a bit of ‘Crank Yankers’ last night, I just wanted to fuck with him.

His next question was, “are you happy with your current telephone provider?” Now, what I told him was both a blatant lie, and proof that I was fucking with him. I told him that I didn’t even have a telephone at home (while I was talking to him on it), because they had de-regulated some of the home service, my phone was one that got de-regulated, which caused my rates to triple and I just had it disconnected.

Well the guy seemed to be feeling sorry for me, and offered to transfer me to their wireless sales department, as they don’t offer local service in my area, so that I would at least have a phone of some sort. So, yes, the guy was as dumb as a rock. He did seem to catch on though. While I made him hold to answer call waiting he hung up on me. I sure hope that at some point while he was holding he realized what a complete idiot he was, that thought makes me smile.

That was one of the first times that I have ever decided to go ahead and fuck with a telemarketer, as such it was a pretty short experience. I am thinking now that I might try to do it once in a while just to see how long I can keep them on the phone, and how outrageous the stories I can get them to believe can get. They are the ones that are bothering me, after all, so making them look like complete idiots seems to be a pretty fair exchange. Trust me when I say that if I do this, as a scientific research project of course, you will be the first to hear the results.

It is Saturday, October 9, 2004

The last post got cut short, a bit abrubptly, when I asked the wife if she would like to go shoot a game of pool at the (remaining) local bar. We went ahead and walked on down there (drinking and driving is always a bad idea, even if it is only a few blocks) to find the place packed. Yet, strangely, there was no one around one of the three pool tables, I asked everyone near the table if there was someone with ‘ownership’ of the table (if you have never played pool in an arena where there are a lot of drunk men, you really need to find this out before attempting to drop your quarters into the thing. Men, especially when horribly drunk, can be a little bit less than understanding when you try to breach the etiquitte of ‘pool table ownership’.), but nope, it was ours to use as we pleased.

I had consumed a beverage or two (a lot of beer) before we went down there in the first place, and while I find that the beer does calm the nerves a bit (in small doses), it seems that I might have dosed myself a bit too much to play pool well that night. Of course we only do it for fun, so that is kind of the point.

I have a kind of ‘double-bell curve’ thing working when I play pool. I can not play worth a damn when I am stone sober, that is related to the fact that I am very shaky most of the time. Before you go trying to blame that on the consumption of alcohol, or lack thereof, let me state that I have had this problem since I was in my early teens and had never tasted that sweet nectar. Once my hands stop shaking, (enough of the alcohol depressant to slow my nervous system) I can play pretty well most of the time. I was, unfortunately, already past that portion of the newly created ‘double-bell curve’ at this point, yet not into the fourth part of the it. The third point of the ‘double-bell curve’ is that point when I am actually drunk and can’t hit a damn thing. Once again, and again unfortunately, I can not skirt the edges of that zone to get the pool prowess from the next zone. The final zone, in the ‘double-bell curve’ is absolute incoherence. That is when my pool is pretty much at it’s best. It is much easier to make the shot when you see three of every ball, and three pockets to get them into, and since they are all the same ball, and all the same pockets, all you have to do is sink it.

Last night’s pool play was dominated by my inability to make simple shots (indicative of the first or third levels of the double-bell curve), but ended with me playing pool with a man, whom I had never met, that wanted to “win” the table from me. At that point I was not able to hit the ocean with a rock, and wanted to just let him take the table, of course he would have none of it. Damn, those (we) drunkards do have our values. I did eventually lose that game, which was not much of a “throwing” of the match, since I couldn’t make a damn shot to start with. It did allow my wife and I to hobble home though, and I say hobble because I am pretty sure that walking kind of implies that you are on an invisible track, while hobbling could take you from curb to curb.

• This thought will be taken up in a future post.

Dreams; Joke email

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So yesterday I came up with a new idea for a side bar feature. You can see the evidence of that on this particular page! The new addition is, “Is It Porn?” The idea here is that you have to look at the name of a website and try to figure out who made it to get it registered first, either an actual business, or a porn site. The one that is currently there, the side-bar, was exactly the reason that I decided to do it in the first place. If you would have asked me a couple of days ago if I thought that Was.com was legitimate or a porn site, I would have thought it was definitely porn. That led me to try a few other common words, which really shouldn’t be porn, but about half of them were. So, I started thinking that there should be a guessing game involved in the process. While I currently only have a link to it (the first one), in the future I will likely place some ‘secret text’ below it so that you can see if you were right without having to download all the spyware and crap that you get from your average porn site.

• Yesterday’s call for email didn’t result in anything. Though when the wife asked for me to clarify exactly what I was asking later this evening, she decided that what I was asking sounded like normal dreaming. Now, see, I can only actually gain control of the dream perhaps 5% of the time, the rest of the time I am just dreaming and reacting to what happens in the dream world. When she, my wife, asked if I was able to make people appear and disappear once I had ‘control’ of the dream, I could answer it only partially true. I can make people appear, I can make things happen (not just things by my hand, but with other things in the dream) that change the surroundings and the people in the dream. It is certainly impossible to explain, but if you have ever had the type of dream where you can make people/animals/objects appear, then you remember doing that in the morning, you might be having the kind of dream that I am talking about.

I also say that I can do that in about 5% of my dreams, yet I think that might be a bit of a high end estimate. Possibly 50% of the times that I am dreaming I realize that it is a dream. Of that 50%, I may only be able to wake up or take control half of the time. Of that number, I would guess that the percentage of times that I simply wake up would be in the extremely high nineties. To stretch that one a bit further, I can take control of a dream roughly once or twice a month. That is not counting all dreams had in a night as one dream, but counting the times when I am able to take control. If I have five or six dreams in a night I may never be able to gain control of them, this could go on for weeks. If you have never gained control of one of your dreams, you will just sit there wondering WTF I am talking about, yet, if you have ever done so (gained control of a dream, that is), I would really like to Hear from you. Trust me when I say that you will know if you have ever done it.

No more on that subject today, I have more information to gather.

• The wife is a wonderful source of those CC emails that you really wish you never got, but only because you think that they are virus-ridden. For some reason or another, the last couple of emails that I got from my wife made me laugh. One for obvious reasons, one less so. At any rate, I am gonna post them both here, after clipping the names, email addresses and phone numbers of course:

George Bush met with the Queen of England. He asked her, “Your Majesty, how do you run such an efficient government? Are there any tips you can give to me?””Well,” said the Queen, “the most important thing is to surround yourself with intelligent people.”

Bush frowned. “But how do I know the people around me are really intelligent?”

The Queen took a sip of tea. “Oh, that’s easy. You just ask them to answer an intelligent riddle.” She then pushed a button on her intercom. “Please send Tony Blair in here, would you?”

Tony Blair walked into the room. “Yes, my Queen?”

The Queen smiled. “Answer me this, please, Tony. Your mother and father have a child. It is not your brother and it is not your sister. Who is it?”

Without pausing for a moment, Tony Blair answered, “That would be me.”

“Yes! Very good,” said the Queen.

Bush went home to ask Dick Cheney, his vice president, the same question. “Dick, answer this for me. Your mother and your father have a child. It’s not your brother and it’s not your sister. Who is it?”

“I’m not sure,” replied Dick. “Let me get back to you on that one.”

Cheney went to his advisors and asked every one, but none could give him an answer. Finally, he ended up in the men’s room. Recognizing Colin Powell’s shoes in the next stall, he shouted, “Colin! Can you answer this for me? Your mother and father have a child and it’s not your brother or your sister. Who is it?”

Colin Powell yelled back, “That’s easy. It’s me!”

Cheney smiled and said, “Thanks!” Then he went back to speak with Bush.

“Say, I did some research and I have the answer to that riddle. It’s Colin Powell.”

Bush got up, stomped over to Cheney, and angrily yelled into his face, “No, you idiot! It’s Tony Blair!”

Okay, so I am going to post only the one, as I realized the other one would not work quite as well in this format.

Shoe size

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Well, just a bit more shoe discussion today (dear random fluctuations of time and space, I hope I eventually come up with some actual content). The shoes that I bought on Sunday performed quite admirably in their first full day of use. Of course you can’t judge a shoe by the first ‘full day’ of use, but I can certainly tell you that most of the downfalls of the other shoes were non-existant in these ones. So much so, in fact, that I think I may finally understand why I can never find a comfortable pair of shoes in any price range. It turns out that I have wide feet.

The latest pair of shoes that I purchased are in a 9 1/2 size, but they are ‘extra wide’. It turns out that all of the foot discomfort that I had been getting from the other shoes might be directly related to the fact that I have wide feet. You see, your average Payless Shoe Source doesn’t have any person working for them that actually cares about your shoe size. The only thing that those type of stores care about is selling the next pair of ten dollar shoes (of which maybe 3 cents per shoe go to the kids in the warehouse that built them). I mention this only because I found it a bit humorous that the women at the shoe store I went to seemed a bit, I will say, less than educated at their craft.

There is a thing called a Brannock Device that can be used to measure the foot, in length and in width. There is always at least one of the damn things in every shoe store. The unfortunate thing is that they never use them, even worse, they don’t know how to use them. Using the device by myself, after I had already purchased the damn shoes, I found that I am actually a size 9 1/2. Beyond that, and not knowing how to use the device properly, I was not able to confirm this until I just googled up the link to the Brannock Device. It turns out that I really do have wide feet.

My usual shoe purchases are in the 10 1/2 to 11 range, and they seem to fit pretty well (after a week or so of expansion). The 9 1/2 extra wide shoes that I got, however, still seem to fit perfectly, no need for expansion or other weird shit to make them fit. The extra wide shoes just fit. If I had known that I had really wide feet when I was in high school, I may have been able to make my dad buy me shoes that actually fit onto my feet. Of course Dad was more ‘old school’ and would likely have told me to grin and bear it.

At least now I know that I have really wide feet and as such will make sure to mention that fact when I am trying to purchase shoes in the future. Honestly, today might be the first day in damn near a decade that I have not felt pain in my feet. Who knew that the pain could have been caused by the limited selection of shoes at the local Payless? Beyond that, who knew that if you wear a shoe that is a couple of sizes too big (if you have a wide foot) it will expand to fit the foot? This is all quite irritating to me, I am not blessed with a huge ‘Johnson’, I am not as tall as an ‘NBA’ player, I just have really wide feet. And you know what they say about people with really wide feet…They have short ‘Johnson’s’. Which is also not helpful.

If these shoes make it through the unloading of the truck tomorrow, then through the remainder of the day, I might call them the ‘Perfect Shoes’. Of course the odds of that happening are about the same as my odds of getting a pulitzer prize for the writing on this website…Not likely, enough said.

At the very least, even if you hate me, my feet don’t hurt and it was the discovery of extra wide shoes that made this all possible.

I don’t have anything to put after that. In the interest of making more readers turn liberal, I offer you this; The Washington Monthly. This site will give you the democratic view of the issues, like them, hate them, this is how we/they think.

New shoe discussion; Neighbor ships to Iraq

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This weekend left me without a lot of desire time to write anything. That is of course not true, but as the whole world now seems to just accept lies at face value I am gonna go with it. Today I will make up for the lack of any posting over the weekend by making sure to bore you to tears, and thus make you thankful that there was not any of this crap for the last couple of days. If all goes as planned anyway.

• Sunday was a day that I really dreaded. It was new shoe day. I dreaded it so much in fact that I have put off the occasion for the last two months, even though it was quite necessary. My old shoes have ripped to the point that it is possible to put my entire fist through the side of one of them where the leather meets the sole. In fact the only thing that kept my foot from slipping out through that enormous hole was the fact that it hadn’t quite made it all the way to the toe of the shoe, just damn close. Of course the rip was almost as bad two months ago, I just hate shoe shopping so much that I kept putting it off.

It hasn’t always been like this, no, no, I actually used to enjoy shopping for shoes. Of course I used to enjoy shopping for shoes when I was following the trends that everyone does in their teens. Back then I would intentionally add unnecessary wear to shoes so that I could go and find the latest ‘in’ ones to replace them. That was when it was still on dad’s dime, so of course I never got the shoes that I really wanted, but I could usually get a cheap knock-off copy of the ones that I did desire. Strange that now that I am buying them myself, and can buy any damn pair I want, I so loathe the experience.

I only own one pair of shoes at any given time, well technically two, but one is a pair of dress shoes that might make it out of the box once a year at best. The other shoes are my everything shoes. Some people have a different pair for things like work, hiking, yardwork, digging ditches in horrible rainstorms, etc. I use the same pair for everything. Sometimes I will wear flip-flops when I am using the weedeater, which is a really stupid thing to do, but it does keep me from having to pick all the little bits of grass out of my shoelaces. I guess if I ever get careless and amputate a toe in the process I will look back at how foolish it was and laugh, or not, depending on what kind of medication I am on at the time.

So why do I hate shoe shopping so much? There is just no longer any selection. I know that you can walk into any random shoe store and see several hundred different shoes for sale, ranging from a couple dollars to a couple hundred dollars, but they never have anything even approaching what I want. So am I some uber-picky shoe snob? I don’t think so. All that I ever ask for is a pair of leather shoes that are black (at least mostly black) and hightops. That’s it, just black, leather hightops, wouldn’t seem that tough to find would they? I haven’t actually acquired a pair of the elusive things in at least four years.

My preferred brand of footwear is Nike, not that I have actually had a pair of them in a few years, since they just never seem to release anything that meets my meager criteria. I prefer Nike not for the fit (as they are always too tight and hurt my feet badly for the first week or two) nor for the name, but for their durability. The last pair of Nike’s that I had kept my feet covered for about a year and a half, I still actually have them and I do actually wear them sometimes when I know that I am going to get really dirty. For comparison, my last two shoe purchases have been something called “Tuff Grip” that I purchased at Wal-Mart, and which lasted about two months, and some “Tx Traction” shoes (a christmas gift from the wife that we never got around to picking up until late January or early February due to the aforementioned hatred of shoe shopping. And while I could have had any shoe in the store I took the 29 dollar traction ones since they were the only ones that came even close to what I wanted), which lasted about four months, though I put off buying new ones for a couple of months after that. As you can see the Nike’s just last longer.

My job actually dictates what kind of shoes I must wear. Not like a dress code, more like something that I have discovered over time. First off, I cut meat while I am at work, this tends to leave the shoes getting blood dripped on them. Try going out to dinner sometime wearing just jeans and a T-shirt along with a pair of blood-stained white sneakers, maybe people aren’t actually looking at the shoes at all, but it does make me feel pretty self-conscious. For that same reason I am not able to wear shoes that have any woven fabric in them, sometimes the blood will actually seep through woven fabrics also and that is quite gross. That is why they need to be both black and leather, and I mean leather not suede. While Blood and Suede might make for a good Ray Stevens song, it is pretty nasty on shoes. I can get away with faux leather, as long as the tongue of the shoe is also made of the same material, but it rarely is in those faux leather shoes. The reason for wanting the shoes to be hightops just comes with the amount of lifting/pushing/pulling that I do while working. I don’t really believe that having the extra lace or two around my ankles is going to save me if the four-hundred pound cart that I am pushing up the ramp comes back on me, but they do keep my shoes from slipping off during that scenario. The worst thing that could possibly happen when trying to control an out of control cart would be to lose traction when a shoe slips off, and low top shoes seem to slip off a lot more frequently than the hightops.

I haven’t been able to find a decent pair of hightops in the last six or so years, all the ones that they sell now seem to be white with many other colors on them. Did the NBA actually start to require players to wear white shoes or what? The only way I was able to get black hightops was with basketball shoes. Also, all of the shoes that even approach midtop height these days, at least the black ones, seem to have both leather and suede on them. So it seems that I am destined to never have a pair of shoes that I really feel comfortable wearing.

To anyone who is now thinking, ‘why not just black work boots?’, the reason is that while I do all of the lifting, pushing, meat-cutting, etc. I also stock the shelves. This means that there is a lot of squatting and kneeling as well. I tried those black work boots when I first noticed how difficult it was to find the shoes I wanted, and a lot of kneeling and squatting in those boots will leave you with horrible bruises on the front of your ankles. That is not even mentioning how horribly uncomfortable they were in the first place.

The particular shoe shopping experience, this time, resulted in a pair of New Balance lowtops. Out of the available selection of shoes that were both black and leather, there were either these or a pair of Reebok’s that felt like they were an inch higher in the toe than they were in the heel. I had at least heard of New Balance, so hopefully the shoes will last longer than it takes me to write this damn post.

Completely on a side note, I was gonna link to the pair of shoes that I bought, but the New Balance website should be a poster child for how not to do website naviagation. You have to be a couple of page-loads in before it gives you the search option, the search option does not actually seem to allow you to search for the actual model number (or whatever it is that they print on the tag in the shoe), and on top of all of that you can’t even browse all the shoes; You have to select a category to browse by. How in the random fluctuation of time and space’s name am I supposed to know if the shoes are walking, running, training, cross-training, basketball, tennis, extreme sports or other? If it said it was a “CT190”, for instance, I would assume that the “CT” stood for cross-training. Yet every shoe on the damn site starts with an ‘M’, that makes it impossible to tell even what category the shoe I bought would be in. Since I browsed through about fifty shoes from the site though, I would guess that they just slap any random number on any damn shoe, as they all look exactly the same.

Well, at least I got some new shoes.

• In other news, the war in Iraq just got a whole hell of a lot closer to home. Right next door, in fact. It seems that my neighbor, who is at least six-and-a-half feet tall, has just re-signed into military service. He was still on Active Duty when the Desert Storm conflict was going on but never got shipped over. He has decided to go ahead and serve his country in the current war to (I suppose) fulfill some sort of patriotic duty. I really believe that that is an admirable thing to do, at least in most cases. I am certainly not going to fault any person that wants to defend our country (regardless of how wrong I think the conflict may be), I don’t have the courage or fortitude to do it, any man who does is either a better man than I, or possibly a bit insane, or both.

I certainly wish him the best of luck in his new endeavor, I believe he ships to a special training course in October and will be in Iraq by late December or early January. I guess he is only doing two years this time, and there will only be one year on the front line, while the six weeks of training and the reaminder of the two years will be stateside. Best of luck to you.

It is impossible for me to understand his logic in signing back up. When he was serving in the military back in the desert storm days, he was likely single and ready to give his all to defend his country. I am sure that he has the same mindset now, but a decade has passed. He is in his thirties, married, has two beautiful children, and has decided to ship off again to fight the baddies in the middle east. Again, I must admire his…well whatever it is that made him make the decision, but what happens if he doesn’t make it home? He will leave behind a widow and a couple of children that will likely spend the rest of their lives wondering why he decided to fight this fight. There is a very famous line from a movie (which I think was ‘Johnny got his gun’) where a child asks his father “Dad, when it comes my time, will you want me to go?” The response from the father being, “For democracy, any man would give his only begotten son.”

What happens when you are a father? You leave two generations to mourn if you don’t manage to make it back. I do admire the courage that it takes to go into a war, especially when you don’t really have to.

Here’s to hoping the neigbor makes it back in one piece. Best of luck to you.