Category Archives: Personal posts

Car; Politics

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Today is my wife’s birthday, Happy Birthday! She just turned way younger than me. There will be a time when I am like 104 (well I smoke, so let’s be honest, 64) and she will declare that I am still just robbing the cradle, since she is eternally 25. Why is it that most men will lie about their age to add years while women do the same to subtract years? That will be tomorrow on “springer”.

• I wanted to help out my mom, so I gave her our old car, it was an ’86 Chevy Nova, it still runs, but won’t drive because of some problem with the engine that can not be fixed even by the manufacturer. I gave that to her since 1) the tires were the same size as the tires on one of here cars. 2) they had the same bolt pattern. 3) it has been sitting here for like a year or more just looking for someone to pick it up.

I have never in my life given away a car that you could turn the key to start, until now. This car still starts, idles, the air-conditioning works pretty good (though you have to keep your foot a bit on the gas pedal to make it do it while idling). The only problem with the car is that the second you try to use the gas pedal to accelerate it dies. It doesn’t actually die, it just starts to spew out really nasty smoke, and it won’t move. If you let it run for about ten minutes (long enough to get the engine up to operating temperature) the idle goes to a normal idle level and you can drive it, but with the thickest dark-blue smoke that you have ever seen billowing out behind it.

I did tell her that she might not get anything more than the tires and the battery from the car, and I think I was pretty much right. Those are probably the only parts of that car that can be swapped over to whatever decent car that they have. I could also be wrong, though, as my mother lives right next door to a pretty good mechanic who could make that car live again. I would like to see that happen, as my wife spent like 900 dollars on it, then spent over 2,000 dollars to replace the shocks, struts, CV joints, alternator, radiator, brake master cylinder. Hell, there were so many parts that she had to replace that the old Nova might as well been brand new. Actually, if they were to replace the rack and pinion, everything would be brand new, except the engine, and that is where the problem is.

I don’t know how much the price of a toyota motor has gone up in the last 10-12 years, but you used to be able to get a complete one for about 700 dollars. If that is still the case, my Mom will have gotten a car that she can drive for the next ‘indefinite term’ absolutely free. Yes, I would love to be able to just buy her a Ferrari, but we both have to scrimp and scrape to get what we have.

We all have something in common here, right, you pay taxes, I pay taxes. Why don’t we start to take charge of what our tax dollars pay for? That would seem, what, almost Democratic. The people in the U.S. should be able to vote for every measure that goes through the house or senate, because it(the fact the the average person is not represented in any way) is being exploited. The ‘house of representatives’ is at least a pretty good view of that area’s take on something. Then we have to send it to the senate. Hundreds of thousands of votes being weighed by two guys (per region) before they cast their vote. How is/could that be the voice of the people?

I know that this has all worked in the past, and that it was actually to the advantage of some former presidents. I just want to know why. The system of checks and measures is there only to keep the president from abusing his power. When the president does, invariably, abuse his power, you have to again start talking about why he had the power in the first place. Dead discussion.

Dogs; Diablo

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Our puppy, Zelda, took it upon herself last night to start chewing on a pair of glasses that my wife had just bought, instead of the normal rawhide things that she is allowed to chew on. She has drug some of the wife’s high heels out in the past and chewed on them also, but dogs and shoes are pretty much linked by the oral tradition of our society, so that is to be expected. But, eyewear? There is just the tiny little piece of plastic on each arm, why would a dog find interest in that? A pair of slippers I could understand, especially if they were fuzzy, but glasses? What the hell was that dog thinking?

That is rhetorical, of course, and something that I may have been better off not to mention since I am the one trying to say that dogs are the more intelligent pet. The thing about training a dog is that there is a point where a puppy who can’t really understand discipline turns into a dog that knows that what it is doing is wrong, and you have to figure out at what point that happens.

Just like children, dogs go through a teething process. It is a bit different because the dogs will continue to chew on any item available until their teeth have completely grown in. I am assuming that this is because of their base animal instinct, knowing (however subconciously it is) that they must have strong teeth to tear apart their prey. I am speaking only from observation and have done absolutely zero research into it, but that is what I theorize from what I have seen.

Having been a dog owner since I was very young (3 or 4 years old at best), I have found that certain things do not help in teaching a dog what it should and should not chew on. Like the glasses, if you find them on the floor and they have been chewed on, showing them to the dog and smacking the dog seems to make it just hate them and want to chew on them the very next time it is possible. On the other hand, if you catch the dog chewing on something that they should stay away from it just takes a quick smack on the snout and the word “No” spoken firmly to make them never touch that item, or any similar item, again. I think that is why our puppy only drags her high heels out of the closet, since she has been smacked for dragging sneakers outside but has yet to be caught with a heel.

One other odd thing that she likes to chew on is bras. There is nothing crunchy on a bra, even the underwire ones only have a little piece of metal below the cup. I didn’t know that dogs would really chew on metal, but there are several old soup cans in my back yard that can prove that they do. We do try to keep rawhide chews available for her all the time, but those things can get expensive when she is going through one every day ( I mean like a bone, not just a strip ), and even then when it is gone she will start chewing on things like the laundry detergent bottle that is in the room they stay in while we are not home. With a bit of luck, and patience, she will grow up to be a much better dog than most pit bulls get credit for, unless she decides to start eating the wife’s jewelry next, in which case I will call a buy a gun and call a taxidermist, and then she will truly be a very good dog.

D2 talk below, may as well turn away now if you don’t play it.

Well, I spent entirely too much time playing Diablo today. Or to be more precise, Diablo II: Lord of Destruction version 1.10. Way too much time. It started out innocently enough, just screwing around with the new single player character that I created shortly after the release of the patch, but then I decided to go check on the on-line characters that I have remaining. I lost about 80% of my on-line characters through lack of play while I was playing everquest waiting for them to put out the patch for Diablo. The sad part is that had I sold some of the gear that I had over ebay I could be a couple hundred dollars richer because of it, instead, it is just gone.

I had a level 67 paladin that had just killed Baal in nightmare before I put the game on the shelf for a couple of months. He is one of the few characters that I still have remaining. I had not really tried to do anything in hell level since the patch was released, so I figured I would give him a go, just to see. They certainly have increased the difficulty in hell level. I am not saying that is a bad thing, just that it was obvious from stepping out the game that they had.

There are Super-Unique monsters galore. It wasn’t too bad going through the first couple of zones, I was able to survive using only potions and running like hell a lot of the time. Blood Raven was a lot more difficult than I remember her, but it has been a long time since I have faced her on hell level. Even longer since I have faced her on hell level with a melee character. It wasn’t that it was particularly hard to kill her, but it was significantly harder than it was prior to the patch.

The theme of having tons of Super-Unique monsters continued through as far as I got in act 1, and they are pretty tough sometimes. It wasn’t until I got to the Black Marsh (beyond the Dark Wood) that I started to get my ass handed to me pretty regularly. I happened upon four Super-uniques that were in about a four-screen range of each other. Two were Shamans, and were taken care of pretty easily, the other two were the two guys I am going to put pictures of below.

Any time they are stone skin and immune to physical a melee fighter has to cringe, but the lightning immunity made it even worse for me, since my weapon only does lightning damage. Luckily, this is the character that I had built to survive against physical immune creatures, so he has vengeance maxxed also, but this was still a pretty tough battle. My mercenary died a few times, and I got way too close a time or two myself. Then I decided to do the tower.

The tower might as well be a hack that was added to the game later, judging by the number of people that actually do the quest, but that could also be said for the majority of act 3, so who’s to say. I died in the tower. I am not sure if this guy had died before, but he died in the tower, on the first level. There were, again, at least four super-uniques on the first level of the tower. The fourth pack that I encountered were the ones that killed me, I did not have time to see what exactly their attributes were, but one had curse and spectral hit. I died with a full belt (16) full rejuv potions. Dead before I could hit a button. Thank god I don’t play hardcore.

I have read a lot about people thinking that the patch is too easy, or too hard, I think that it is just about right, you really have to think about your actions, and pay attention to what you do. It is certainly not a cake walk, but if you play it right it can be done with less than elite gear. So instead of bitching about how it is too hard or too easy, I am gonna say that they got it just about right. You have to really TRY to beat monsters at the higher levels, while you can just beat them up at the lower levels. Isn’t that the whole point of a game? To make the beginning easy enough for novices while having an ending that challenges the most seasoned player?

If I ever happen upon a game in my lifetime with the infinite replayability of D2:LOD, I will probably never have to buy another game.

Addiction; My dad

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I had intentions of actually doing something useful with my time today, but as it turns out, Diablo was a lot tougher than I have ever given him credit for. The other thing that is strange about this game is that it is like a time warp. You can sit down one minute, stand up about four minutes later, and find that you have just pissed away six hours on it. I suppose that the mindset that a serious gamer has when he tries to do ‘just one more’ quest is very similar to the way that the alcoholic needs ‘just one more’ drink. They are both addictions, they both must be sated to make the user happy, and they both ruin families and leave shattered homes in their wake. Though I would like to think that your average Diablo player doesn’t abuse his wife or children as the average alcoholic does.

I could certainly never be a mouth-piece for either side in the addiction category, since I seem to be addicted to both video games and alcohol, but it is certainly an issue that someone should try to tackle at some point. Is it really worse to drink your life away in the real world, or spend your life manipulating pixels to your own end? Each action will result in you dying too early, each will also result in the lack of people that you know (I am not counting on-line contacts there), both addictions are extremely unhealthy, but only one has counselors in place to handle it.

Any addiction is a bad thing. Relying on any substance/stimulus to give you pleasure is always going to result in an addiction. Regardless of what that thing may be you will just want more and more. Eventually the addiction will consume you, and you will die wondering where the hell your life went. If there is any sort of an afterlife, you will look at the time that you spent doing this or that, and wish that you had spent it with your friends and family. At some point it will hit you that you were never able to make time to see your Aunt in Cleveland all those years, yet, somehow you were able to clear your schedule to make it to her funeral. She had been asking you to visit for years, but with work, and your time on-line, you just never found a chance to make it up to her place. That is a shitty position to be in, ehh?

My father taught me a lot and most of it was wrong. One thing that he told me, that I will never forget, is that, “It is better to regret something that you haven’t done than to regret something that you have.” I had really believed that all my life, but I don’t think that I do anymore.

Case 1:

I was sixteen, and I was watching my father die. He had been at home for two days after being released from the hospital, and he was in bad shape. The Hospital had released him to the jail because he had a warrant for his arrest (never found out what that was for, but it was probably a ‘DUI’). The jail would not hold him because he was in a condition where he needed medical attention, so the jail released him to go get medical attention. He ended up at home. He had a punctured lung, which happened to make it past the hospital that day, two broken legs, one broken arm and a broken pelvis. He was casted from head to toe.

This man, the man who started my life, the man who would not walk out the door without cologne, he was going poo in a coffee can (that I had to empty) for those last two days. I knew that he was in a bad way, I wanted to call an ambulance, but he forbid it. I pleaded for him to let me call an ambulance. He would not let me.

Just barely sixteen years old, I watched my father die, knowing that I could have prevented it if I had just disobeyed him and called for medical attention even an hour sooner. There was no one else there, I was the only one that could have done it. God damn it, I let him die…

I think about that damn near every day, it was my fault. I basically made the decision to let him die as opposed to having him be mad at me for calling the ambulance that could save his life. When the ambulance did arrive, he was unresponsive and I didn’t even stay in the room to see if they could revive him, I started calling the relatives to let them know that he had died. I did that while they were still working on him, I knew that he was dead. He made a noise three or four minutes before the ambulance got there that I have never heard in my life, it has never been replicated in a film, it was just a noise that I knew was his last breath. I certainly hope that I will never hear that noise again, as that will mean that I am next to yet another person who is dying. My only hope is that if I do hear that noise again, I will be able to help the person.

Possibly, that is why I think that is better to regret something that you have done, at least you didn’t kill your father.

Site stats; Dad

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Well, I have decided that I am going to start taking wednesdays off. I just don’t have the energy in the evening to write anything here after getting off of work late. Officially, next week will have no post for wednesday, while I am putting this one up just to let my legion of fan know (no, those weren’t meant to be plural).

One thing that I did find a bit disappointing was that the things I wrote about yesterday I really thought would make one of the few people reading email about. Most particularly that I used the wrong name for who is chef on South Park (I changed it before I uploaded it to the archives). I was pretty sure that everyone who actually views this site would know his name, so I was expecting someone to correct me, didn’t happen. Oh well.

That brings me to another issue, that being the site statistics that are available through the hosting service. They give you a lot of information, but not a damn bit is very useful. Say I have 69 hits one day, but only 3 visits, and 12 pages. How does one determine from that how many people actually visited the site? Could those three visits have resulted in 69 hits? It is all a bit odd. I am going to take the time tomorrow to get a third party counter that will actually just tells me who loads the front page, it seems to be a lot more accurate for trying to see how many people actually hit the page on a given day. It is not like I am expecting the number to be over five, but something that I am curious to know.

That will be all for today. Just to take up a bit of space, I am going to throw in a picture of my father with myself and my two brothers.

That is, of course, my father in the back, he died on Christmas eve in 1990. My two brothers are on either side of him. The little guy in the front, the one with Way too much hair, and a really bad ‘bowl cut’ would be me, your humble webmaster. Possibly a lot more humble after digging this photo out. Something that I just noticed while looking at this photo, doesn’t it look a bit like all the noses in the photo are superimposed? Hmmm. maybe it is just me, but it does look a bit odd.

Anyway, that is all for today. I will be back tomorrow with more compelling reasons why you should just never read my site.

hodgepodge

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Well I don’t have anything really planned for writing today, so I am going to go into a brief talk about the weather, and how it relates to yesterdays evaporative cooler talk. Throw up a couple of probably rhetorical questions about things that were going through my mind today, and then type just a few paragraghs about South Park. That is the plan anyway, we will see what actually happens as it goes.

The weather in Arizona is notoriously hot, most of the time. The last week has been even more than us locals could bear. This is the time of the year when the temperatures are usually in the mid 70’s with occasional jumps into the mid 80’s. That is what we call ‘Spring’, it usually lasts for about three or four weeks. This year it lasted exactly one day. I am not even slightly exaggerating when I say that two weeks ago it was cold enough overnight that it would put frost on the windshield of your car, this Sunday we broke a record high, before 11am, it was more than 93degrees before 11am, that is too damn hot! No one should have to see weather like that in March, it’s just not normal.

I am not sure if I ever actually did write about the temperature on the site ( I did email a few people about it) but I would have been wrong if I had. I thought that we had record breaking temperature all last week, and it turns out that we only tied the record on two days, broke it two days (by 4degrees on Sunday) and were just very near it all the other days. So to be technical it wasn’t record breaking stuff all week, but I am gonna call it that because it sure as hell felt like it.

When I started to write about the evaporative cooler yesterday I was going to talk about this a bit because it just sucked for me, but that is my luck. The hours that I spent on the roof working on that cooler were from 11am to 3pm, the hottest part of the day. The roof is painted with an elastomeric coating that is almost day-glow white, (very few houses down here use shingled roofs because the asphalt composition that can take extreme lows in the temperatures will turn to dust in four or five years down here. Most all of the new housing is going with those terra cotta ceramic type roofs, since they last a lot longer, while most of the old building opt to go with the ‘spray foam’ since most of them don’t have enough structural support to hold up the ceramic shingles. It is quite an odd site to look at the houses on the street, which appear to be covered in snow, then you realize that it is 120degrees, and you are in Arizona.), which reflects the sun way too well, and adds to the heat index as well. It is usually 20 degrees hotter on the roof of this place than the reported temperature, so call it about 110 while I was up there working. I drank at least a gallon of water in those four hours and ended up with a pretty severe sunburn.

This time I was at least smart enough to keep all of my clothing on while working, that usually kills me most years. When I start to get too hot I throw my shirt aside, allowing the rays to pour down on my chest and back, then the burn usually will all but immobilize me for a day or two. Sunburn only really hurts me when it is on the pasty portion of my skin (chest and back) while I can burn my arms and they will peel in a day or so and then my skin is a couple of pigments darker. Same with my face and legs. In fact the only part that really hurt about the sunburn was on the back of my neck, where my t-shirt didn’t cover, and even that doesn’t really hurt anymore. I guess it went well for what I was doing. But I certainly wouldn’t recommend that any idiot climb up on a white roof and work there for the four hottest hours of the day, especially in Arizona, especially when the heat is record breaking. So why did this idiot do it? Funny you should ask.

Every year I service these coolers, there are two of them, each has 8 grills and hold a total of 16 pads. Every year I hope to be able to complete the both of them in about ten hours, each year I also miss that goal because of unforseen circumstances (the worst was one year when I actually had to run about 75 feet of new water supply line because the old line was so horribly corroded that it was pouring more water onto the roof than into the coolers.) This year I wanted to get one of the damn things done by the day I said I would have it done, and by God I did, that is why I was up there in all that heat. I got it done on Sunday just like I said I would. That is the first time in the nine years that I have been servicing those coolers that I got either one of them done on time, that is the only positive that I can take from the experience.

Now, what really pisses me off is that I really did that all as a matter of pride, to finally get one of them done on time. Now I hear on the news that we are going to be back in the mid to low 80’s for the rest of the week. After I did all that work when it was damn near 100, that just sucks! The good news is that I only have one cooler left to service and I should be able to work on it an hour or so in the evenings this week, when it is like 80 and the sun has already set to the point that I won’t be able to get a sunburn. So I should have the second one done by this weekend and hopefully that will result in me not being so wiped out when I sit down to type. But who knows.

What is the actual point of the traffic choppers on radio stations? I am usually at work when they are on and listen to them because I don’t really have any options. The ones that I hear on the station that I listen to day in and day out are exactly the same. Something like, “Slow and go on the 60, the ‘stack interchange’ is backed up to ‘x’ point, slowing on the 202 near ‘x’ offramp”. The same every day, well sometimes the x is a different spot, but it is all the same. It may just be the station that I am forced to listen to, but I would think it is probably similar with most stations here in the valley, and probably in every major metropolitan area in the U.S. If you do that commute on a daily basis you probably know that it is going to be ‘slow and go’ at whatever point, know that the ‘stack interchange’ is going to be backed up to the ‘x’. The things that would concern you would be things like, oh accidents, cars broken down in the middle of the freeway, godzilla running amok. These things all happen of course, but it seems that they are always on surface streets (90% of the time at least according to the one that I have to listen to).

Then when something does happen, say a collision with a rollover and fatality (that is going to shut down the entire road for quite some time) they don’t go into that at the end of the song, no, they wait until they do the official: This traffic report is brought to you by ‘whoever’. Would the average person rather hear a bunch of pre-scheduled traffic updates that are the same crap brought to you by whoever, or just have the one or two that really matter, and take an extra five minutes of commercials per hour to counter that? Curious question, let me know what you think.

Lawyer’s commercials. Why is it that every damn accident/injury lawyer’s commercials all have these people in them that sound so staged? Do they really think that the average person can not read a cue card? They put things on the bottom of the screen that says “actual clients”, as if one could mistake them for actors? I could read the ingredients off the back of a shampoo bottle in a live auditorium and make it sound more like something that I had spoken off of the top of my head than the idiots that they get to try to read that crap. Maybe that’s what they’re going for though. They want you to think that if they can get 250,000 dollars for this guy that can barely read you would fare a lot better? Or maybe they are just trying to emphasize the point that the people are not actors (that certainly needs no emphasis) that they had hired? Again, I just don’t know.

In a retail situation, why do certain people think that the rules don’t apply to them? Pick any rule you want, there will always be someone who thinks that it doesn’t apply to them. I even tried that once when I wanted to return a game that I had already opened and installed, when it didn’t work I took it back. They had a policy of “no returns on video game purchases”, so I just sucked it up. I knew that that was the policy, I explained that I had not been able to register the game, so it was still brand new, they said no, I walked away. I didn’t make a scene, scream that they were raping my children by not giving me back the twenty bucks, I just walked away. I didn’t even ask for them to call a manager who could come out and clarify the store policy, then not give me back the twenty bucks, while making everyone behind me wait longer for their (possibly) legitimate claims.

I suppose that I am a bit more tolerant of people who do this, since I do work in retail. We really want every person to be happy when they walk out the door, but sometimes it is a bit much. For instance, there is a little platform at the register (where I work) for people to place their checkbook while they write the check. On top of that platform is a HUGE sign that says: “There is a $25.00 fee for all returned checks”. That should be pretty simple to understand. I believe that it costs us about $18.00 up front for the returned check, then whatever amount it takes for the time and resources to actually get the person to pay up. The number one claim is that it was a banking error that made the check get returned (that translates to, I didn’t have the money in their that day, but three days later I did), and that is not an acceptable answer. If the bank made a mistake they are always quite happy to rectify it, else you would bank elsewhere, but for some reason these people always expect us to believe it. On occasion, we will actually try to verify the funds for the check while the customer is still there bitching about it being a bank error and find that they still don’t have enough money in their account to cover it, another bank error, of course…

There was this one woman that was so brazen that she offerd to write a check for the amount from a different account, at a different bank, with check number 101, we of course called to verify funds, and there was yet another bank error since the money wasn’t in that account either. This was all over a four dollar check. It could have been a bank error, in fact I think it likely that they had pulled her monthly fee before they processed that check and that is why it bounced. It is not her fault (if that did happen) but it is certainly not our fault either. Her problem would be with her bank (if they do not cover her check when she has overdrafted by a dollar or two she probably has had other instances where she has done it. I overdrafted my account by 613.52 by mistake last month – forgot to deposit a check- and they covered it, didn’t even charge me, but I would have paid the 27 dollar fee that the company posted for returned checks because that was what I agreed to when I wrote the check in the first place).

South Park:

Just going to be a few random musings about the show ‘South Park’ here. The first is that I just can not really believe what they are able to get away with. There are many times that I am watching the show and thinking to myself “how did they get that by the censors”, but I guess the censors are a bit more lenient to shows that do not air on abc, cbs and nbc. Honestly the censors for cable networks are just about non-existent. South Park deals with a lot of issues, has very fresh writing, and can get away with doing whatever the hell they want. Must be a golden position to be in. They can do no wrong, well, they can, but the network will air the show anyway. That is why I really do adore the show so.

Point in the first, they have a kid called ‘token’ who is, of course, the only black person in the entire show, well that is not true, since they also have Chef who is played by Isaac Hayes, but token is the only black kid, and the show is mostly about the antics of the four kids. In one episode, Eric Cartman tells Token to go get a ‘Bass Guitar’ out of his basement. Token says that they don’t have one, but looks anyway at Cartman’s urging, and yes he did have a bass in the basement. Cartman tells him to “give me a ‘bass-line'”, token says that he can not play bass, and Cartman says, “God damn it, Token, you are black, you can play bass.” Token tries it, and yep, he can play bass, he says, “God damn it!” and we go to the next scene. There is no way that that would have ever aired on a network tv show.

In that same episode, Eric Cartman spoke a line that I will never forget, well sang it really, and that line was; “I want to get down on my knees and start pleasing Jesus, I want to feel his salvation all over my face”. There is no way that you are gonna get that line by a network censor.

In the most recent show, the kids all buy weapons at a local fair and think that they are ninjas. Whenever it is just the kids in the shot, it shows them all in their ninja gear and larger than life, when their parents (any parent) is around, it is back to lame 2-d animation. They certainly show with the episode that they would be able to make it a much more believable animated series if they want to, but I don’t think that they would stoop to that level. It is what it is, and it is the funniest thing that I have ever seen because of it.

The thing that I really love about the show is that in the aforementioned episode they made two referrences to the Mel Gibson movie “The Passion of the Christ”, only a couple of weeks after it came out. And, at the end, they made referrence back to the “wardrobe malfunction” when one of the kids is actually seen naked. This is only weeks after the things happened, and why I love it so. The animation may seem a bit dated, but the ideas and morals that they are using within the story just seem so dead-on that you have to watch more.

God I love South Park.

Coolers; Pets

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Well, again, there was nothing new posted here yesterday. I would like to blame that on a lot of things, but the fact is that the blame should all go directly onto me. Sunday is, after all, the only day of the week when I don’t have to go to work, so I should certainly be able to stab out a few paragraghs at least, right?

The thing is that I had promised my boss that I would make one of the coolers on the roof be on-line by Sunday (as a side job). The hours that I worked this week made it so that I had to go through the entire process on Sunday, as I was not able to get up there to take care of some of the minor problems that can turn major on this type of cooler. I am not talking about something like changing the filter in your air conditoner, I am talking about servicing an evaporative cooler that is industrial-sized. I doubt that anyone that does not live in the state of arizona actually knows what an evaporative cooler is (strike that, I bet a lot of people who live in deserts in the middle east are pretty fond of them also).

I think that the name of the product may be a bit misleading though. Technically, water has to reach 216 degrees fahrenheit before it evaporates, that is 100 degrees celsius, and damn hot. Evaporative coolers can lower the air temperature by as much as 30 degrees in a zero humidity climate. The water doesn’t actually evaporate (I don’t think). Yet, I just googled it up and that page is Here. It really does evaporate the water. How water can be heated to the point that it evaporates being spewed into a room can cool a room is something that I still don’t understand.

I still don’t believe that it is actually evaporating that water, well, maybe I do, to a point. Water can hold it’s temperature a lot better than air can. That is likely why the oceans stay at within a degree or two of their average temperature year round. That is also why the air temperature can be cooled by the evporation process (maybe), the air that is being pushed through the pads is picking up molecules of water that have been underground, and as such are at the roughly 72 degree temperature that we consider normal. That does result in a nice cool breeze (if that is the way it works at all) but, I am a happy man either way.

If the cooler actually does ‘evaporate’ any of the water, that hot air is magically exchaged for the cold air that it blows into my house. I can deal with that.

There are lots of things in your average home that you could not explain how or why they work, take your computer for instance, it works, do you know why it works? Could you build one if you had to? I am not talking about taking pieces that you buy at a store and assembling them, I mean if you were stuck on a desert island, could you use the resources there to create a computer? or an evaporative cooler? Hell, even a can-opener?

I am 100% sure that I could not build any of those things. I could build all three of them, if I was given the parts to do so, and I coulld also beat a can against a rock until I finally got into it, but that is hardly the point. Technology may simplify our lives, but it makes us ever more reliant on people who know a particular trade and will take advantage of our ignorance of it.

Puppies vs. Pussies

I had every intention of getting some pictures of ‘Zelda’ up here today, the thing is that we have only a precious few of them, and they are all locked in a little disposable camera that has yet to be developed. Just take my word for it, she is a good dog at least 10-12% of the time, the rest of the time you just want to beat her senseless and forget that you ever had a dog…Not a good premise for where I am planning to go with this, but it has been written, and I do not edit.

It is not often that someone can see a very rich, important woman lugging around her pussy, but, she might be lugging around her bitch. Why the ‘American Dream’, or the myth that it has since created, has to involve a dog is far beyond me. The ‘American Dream’ also says that you have 2.6 children, so do you start lopping off your children’s appendages until you fall into that demographic? Hopefully not.

That is the entire reason I am going to go on about this, there seem to be pretty clear lines drawn between the ‘dog people’ and the ‘cat people’. Why? Pick a pet and go with it. If you like cats, that would be your choice. If you like dogs, that would be your choice. Pretty simple.

Stand next to your pet cat, throw a ball, what happens? Likely the cat will look at you like you are some sort of idiot for throwing the damn thing in the first place.

Stand next to your dog and do the same thing. He/she will chase the ball down, pick it up, and bring it back to you. The dog may or may not drop it depending on the level of training.

Stand next to your cat again, point towards something that is some distance away, the cat will just stare at your finger (in most cases), while the dog will look where you are pointing.

When you come home from work, wich one will jump up and wag their tail, just so happy to see you? Which one just looks up from their bed waiting for you to open a new can of food?

I think that dog is certainly the way to go for a pet, but cat is a very popular pet also. When you can make your cat sit, shake each paw (by saying left or right), beg and stand all for one single treat, I may consider them equal…Yet most cat owners will tell you that their animal is so smart that it doesn’t fall for those tricks… Okay, I didn’t want your stupid cat here anyway…

Feedback-PC Vs. Mac; Childhood

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Well the most unfortunate thing happened this morning, I woke up to find that Viacom and Echostar had reached an agreement and my channels were back on the air. I suppose that should have me rejoicing since I can now watch South Park, but the thing is I had another lengthy bitch that I was going to get into yesterday about the issue and now that the issue is resolved it would be a bit pointless to write about it. Fear not, I have more, even less interesting things to talk about today!

First, there was a sign on the bulletin board at my local post office that I found pretty amusing. It said, “New construction company looking for someone who can read a tape measure and not show up for work drunk or high” There were of course phone numbers hanging from the bottom of it, and several had already been plucked off. I noticed that they weren’t even saying how much the job paid, I guess that one must assume that the type of people who would apply to an ad like that would probably be happy with minimum wage, or an amount close to it. I am happy to say that for the first time in my life I actually think that I may be a bit over-qualified for that job.

Yesterdays very short musings resulted in two emails, this time with a bit of an argument regearding the Microsoft security alert that I bitched about yesterday, the first one said;

Hey. I was just reading your website and caught your quote about Windows vs Mac when it comes to security issues. I just wanted to share with you an opinion that I have become very comfortable in believing. If you think about it, the ratio of Windows users to Mac users has got to be an ungodly large number. The hackers know this as well as anyone else. When you get a guy sitting behind his desk making a malicious program, most likely the main thing on his mind is to harm the most number of people, and would therefore not even bother writing a virus for other platforms. You always hear news of MS finding this or that security issue because they most likely have a huge team working solely on security, where as the Mac guys are probably sitting back in their chairs laughing at the pains that having a monopoly brings.

Just when I logged into my email to cut and paste that line, I had received the second email, which said, in part;

There just aren’t enough OS X users around to make a statement if a virus is released. We’re only 5% of the market.
Having said that, my friend who works in Mac support for a major university says that OS X is incredibly stable and most importantly, safe. According to her, it would take years to hack through some of the encryption codes the OS uses.

I read both of those and I really think it is a bit funny at the approach each person is using at presenting the same argument. The first email is obviously from a Windows user, and his angle seems to be that no one cares about Macintosh, but they would be just as easy to hack if someone put their mind to it. That may or may not be true but the fact is that you just NEVER hear about any problems with the security on Mac machines. I mean any type of security even like stolen credit card numbers and bank info and all of those type of things seem to only happen on Windows based systems.

After reading the second email, which is from an OS X user, it seems that the mac users concede that their is such a small base of users that even if their security ever failed it wouldn’t make headlines. I am not sure if that was really what the emailer was trying to get at, but that is kind of what I got to after having read both emails. The thing is that there is nothing further from the truth than that.

I strongly believe that if a single OS X system anywhere on the face of the earth encountered security issues, Microsoft would be on it like maggots to rotting flesh. Macintosh has been a thorn in the side of Microsoft for decades and the thought of them not attacking mac if even one person ever had security issues is ludicrous. It would be in every Microsoft commercial and ad campaign from here until the end of time. If you are thinking, no, Microsoft would not attack them for something like that, since they have had so many problems of their own…Sober up…

Do you remember a couple of years ago when Macintosh starting doing those commercials where real people told the story of why they switched from Windows based PCs? Microsoft immediately started hiring actors and giving them false stories to read about why the switched from Mac back to the PC. I can’t find any articles about it right now, but I seem to remember that they got in a lot of trouble for not specifying that the people in the commercials were actors and not actual Mac users. Now if a company will openly break the law when faced with someone else talking about the shortcomings of their product, I would bet my nuts that they would take every advantage of the shortcomings of their competitor’s product. The mere fact that they have not yet been able to do so is, I think, the best advertising the Mac has ever had.

One other thing of note to put up here. I was looking through my site stats today and noticed that I have a referral from a googlebot and two search strings that led to people clicking my site. Woo-hoo google has finally found me! I feel a bit sorry for the people who searched for “comedy central is gone” and “nail gun movie -massacre” as I probably didn’t have quite the information that they were looking for on my site. But, you see, that is why I chose to name the site shadowtwin.com even though donnieburgess.com was available. I really didn’t think anyone would click on a link to donnieburgess.com since it looks like it is probably just a personal page, where shadowtwin.com could really be anything. Except animal porn.

A thought occured to me today as I was again thinking about children. More specifically I was thinking about everyone and their sister asking my wife and myself why we don’t want to have children. I had long thought that it was just some internal drive that some people have and some don’t. I don’t mean like libido, but some sort of maternal/paternal thing that some people just have more than others. I had often noticed that more affluent couples seem to have less(if any) children than poorer couples in the same area and had surmised that more money meant more joy, so they did not need children to brighten up their lives. I don’t really think that I believe that anymore.

The next series of thoughts involved a child’s upbringing contributing to whether or not they would, in turn, want to have children. I really believe that far too many people are having children because they are not happy about the way they were brought up. Like when you were a kid, and at some point you said, “when I have kids I won’t treat them like this.” to your parents -come on, you know you did- some people just seem to take that to the next level and have children so they can spoil them just to piss off their parents.

Sometime while thinking about upbringing, I think I found the reason that I don’t want to have children. Life -much like shit- happens. Most of the time you don’t have control over your current situation, it is more in the reverse, your situation has control over you. If you are buying a house, buying a car basically being a consumer, you are bound to your job as if it was your own skin. If you lose that job for whatever reason, you have to find other work. If other work is far away from your current location you really don’t have a choice, you would have to sell your house and relocate. That is why I don’t want to have children.

I really hated my childhood after about the third grade, and by no small coincidence that was when I started moving around a lot. I am sure that many people have had to experience being the new kid in school and were able to overcome it. That never really happened for me. I was always the new kid, over and over, new friends that I would lose in a couple of months, learning from different school books, it was just horrible. Here I will do my best to list my scholastic career:

1st grade: Riverside elementary
2nd grade: Fir Grove elementary
3rd grade: Fir Grove elementary
4th grade: Eastwood elementary, Benson elementary, Tombstone elementary, Benson elementary, Cochise elementary
5th grade: Cochise elementary
6th grade: Rose elementary
7th grade: Riddle middle school, Fremont middle school
8th grade: Fremont middle school, Winston middle school
9th grade: Douglas High
10th grade: Douglas High
11th grade: Douglas High, Roseburg High
12th grade: Roseburg high, Douglas High, Roseburg High

With the exception of the last two years, all of the different schools that I attened were due to moving about with my mother or father. Of course the grammar school years are when you are supposed to be developing all of your social skills, and I was doing quite well with it, right until the fourth grade. When it all went to hell. If there is anyone still reading this, I will break down why the moves were made from school to school to the best of my recollection -and, as per what my parents told me at the time.-

Riverside closed down after my first year there, it was quite close to a very busy street and a river, and the parents had a vote and it was closed. Half of the kids went to Fir Grove, half of them went to Rose, varying by region. My parents divorced while I was in the third grade and my mother drove me to Fir Grove for the remainder of the year, but we moved very close to Eastwood over the summer break, so that is where I started school the next year. After about two months of school at Eastwood, I got a note that I was supposed to go to the office and I was in horrible fear about what I had done, but it turned out that I had been pulled out of the school by my mother and we were moving to Arizona.

We found a house in a place called Dragoon and it had bus service to Benson, but the house was condemned after we had lived there for a month or so and we moved to Tombstone. Only about six weeks in Tombstone I think, and the house that had been condemned in Dragoon was repaired to where we were able to move back in, so back to Benson. Benson quit sending a bus to dragoon since they were only picking up 3 kids and it was a forty-minute round trip, so the parents started car-pooling us to Cochise. I spent a few months and then an entire year at cochise, but 1st-8th grade there were only 52 kids in the whole school, so not a lot of friends to be had.

I spent my entire 6th grade year with my father and went to Rose, some of the friends that I had had in the first grade still went there, but we knew each other only in name, and it was not quite what I had hoped it would be.

Seventh grade was spent with my mother in Riddle, I don’t remember exactly why we started going to Freemont from there (yes I do, it was because Freemont had a free lunch program and Riddle didn’t) so I spent the last six weeks or so there. Eighth grade started with Freemont, but I went back to live with dad which put me in Winston, where I graduated with my class and spent the first two and a half years at Douglas high with them. That was when it was my fault that I moved so much.

I didn’t actually move after that, it was just that I was working full time after my dad died, and I was missing too much school. If I missed more than 12 days in a semester I would not get credit, but Roseburg High and Douglas High are only about 15 miles apart, so if I got close to the 12 days per semester I would transfer to the other school which would give me a clean slate.

That is something that I would not want to put a child through. If I were wealthy enough that I would never have to worry about something like that, I would surely have a different opinion about children. But I am not, and I don’t.

Comedy Central; Pictures

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Well it turns out that Flux over at Blackchampagne had a link to my site in his blog today. The good news is that it did make me have quite a spike in site traffic, the bad news is that there was not much worth reading on my post. Whether there is ever anything worth reading here could be debated till the end of time, so I won’t go there. It is the thought that counts.

I awoke this morning (I am using the term ‘morning’ very loosely here) and flipped on my television to find out that some jack-ass had taken comedy central off the air. There had been ads running on Comedy Central all week that said that Dish Network was going to quit carrying the channel, but I just assumed that was a ploy to get a bunch of people to call Dish Network and say “I want my Comedy Central!”. Well if that was the case I guess not enough people called, or Dish Network just didn’t seem to care, since it is certainly gone now. Other networks that were ripped from the lineup include Mtv, Vh1, Nickelodeon and a bunch of others. To put it bluntly, my “top 50” package is now more of a “top 35” due to this.

Wy wife called to ask if the stations were really gone, and I assured her that yup, we’re fucked. But, at least we still have our CBS affiliate, as they have removed CBS from the lineup in many major markets including New York and Los Angeles. So it could be worse, I guess.

Once home from work I really wanted to go see just what the whole fuss was about, and I found it in heaps. I went to Yahoo News and did a search for ‘Viacom’ (who own the stations in question) and found at least a dozen stories there that had been added within the last three hours. Every on of them was about Viacom and Echostar’s (the company that owns dish network) dispute. I read about ten of them, starting with the earliest post. It just sickened me. The following quotes are taken from this article

Viacom officials said EchoStar was fighting over what amounted to 6 cents more per customer per month.

I am not sure which side is telling a version of the story that is closer to the truth, but if I just take viacom’s claim and Dish Network’s claim and average them it still comes out to being an increase of like 30 cents. 30 cents for all of those channels on a monthly basis, a penny a day, hell I would pay that in a heartbeat if it would get Comedy Central back on.

I can certainly see where each side is coming from after having read all of the articles though. Viacom is constantly stressing the pennies per person per day thing, while Echostar is talking about Hundreds of millions of dollars over the next four years. I am pretty sure that they are using the exact same number but it sure seems a lot bigger when you say hundreds of millions of dollars. Don’t get me wrong, I bet that if everyone that subscribed to Dish Network would send my six cents per month I could easily retire and buy that new Ferrari Enzo I have had my eyes on.

I had been siding with Echostar on this, thinking that Viacom was really trying to be a mean old bully and beat us up for our milk money, then I saw this particular quote;

EchoStar said it planned to give $1 monthly credits to customers who lose CBS programming, and another $1 for those who subscribe to additional Viacom channels. Besides CBS, media conglomerate Viacom also owns MTV and the Paramount movie studio.

So what they are telling me is that I am going to get a dollar a month credit for losing 15 channels? One dollar off of my $34.98 bill for losing 15 channels? I mean what the fuck? There are probably a lot more than 15 channels, those are just the ones that are on the list we look through daily, and that is only one dollar? I am starting to think that both sides may just be mean old bullies trying to steal my milk money.

What burns me worst of all about this whole situation is that I only signed up for Dish Network for two reasons. The first reason was that it was about three dollars a month cheaper than my local cable, the second was that they had Comedy Central. Now what am I to do? If they do not bring back Comedy Central I may well just go back to local cable since I could then get high speed internet access in a package deal with the cable and save myself a bit of cash. In case you had not yet noticed, this whole thing just really has me pissed off.

I got yet another email today, that is like two in two days. I don’t know how I am going to deal with this constant barrage of email… Seriously, though, this one was from an old friend who was wanting to know if I had any pictures on the site since his wife has never seen myself or my wife. I feel quite obligated to throw a couple of pictures up here because, well, I don’t really know why. So here are a couple of pictures. As always click on them for a full size pic.

Here is one of me playing guitar. This picture is a bit dated, but I really don’t look that much different now, unless you want to count that strange third arm that recently grew out of my forehead. The problem is that while I am usually quite photogenic, that requires that I be near a camera while someone is clicking it, and for some reason that is something that I really try to avoid.

Here is yet another rather dated photo of me, maybe three or four years old. I am standing in front of the grand canyon if you were not able to guess. I really actually hate this picture because it makes me look like I have one of those little Fu-man-shu moustache type things. I am pretty sure that I hadn’t shaved that day, but still.

Here is one of my wife and myself at the wedding ceremony. For some reason the camera has made the color of my flesh look a lot more red than it actually is, but it did the same thing to the Pastor. This may have been one of the photos taken with the cheap disposable cameras that we left on all of the guests tables, I am not really sure. It certainly does look like I have been holding my breath for about three minutes though. This was the best photo I could find that really showed how beautiful my wife’s dress was. Of course you need to look at the full size shot to see that.

Well, that should be enough photos to sate you all for roughly the rest of your natural lives. I had never actually seen these shots side by side before, and I think that I really look just about the same in all of them. Sure I have more gray hair now than I did in the photos, but with just a bit of selective plucking or some “just for men gel” I could probably take a photo in a similar pose and be able to fool people into thinking that they were taken at the same time. If I am ever reduced to that, though, it will probably be at about the same time as I buy a convertible and start cruising for women twenty years my junior. Since I am quite happily married, and I really think that it would be sick and wrong to look for dates at a gradeschool, I will let that thought go for now, and hopefully the rest of my life.

Now on a side note. If any of you are reading this after having linked through from blackchampagne yesterday, I would really like to know your thoughts, good or bad, about my little site thing. What, if anything you like, what, if anything you hate kind of thing. I do enjoy email.

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.

Crosby; pain

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I did only work for four hours today, but they were the wrong four. The pain that I feel in my neck has now spread to the point that I always have a head-ache and a lower back ache at the same time. That is because I can only even attempt to sleep in a few postitions, when I try anything else the pain is just death. I have to turn over while I sleep, first because my neck starts to hurt if I stay in one position too long, second because my back does also.

If I have ever bitched about anyone elses’ pain, then I think that this is my retribution, but, I don’t think that I have ever done that. The fact that my neck now seems to be the least of my problems does concern me though. It seems like the problems with my neck are working themselves out just fine, but I still end up with a throbbing head-ache, and my lower back has been in pain for two or three days -that is directly related to not being able to move around a lot in my sleep-.

I really can not emphasize ehough just how much Pain I am feeling right now, and even if I could I am not sure that anyone would really believe it. In fact, I am going to just stop typing now and go and lay down.

It is Saturday, March 06, 2004

Well, in case you didn’t notice, I did not do an update yesterday. I found the beginning of it here, and decided to just leave it as is, since today’s will be more of the same. I certainly wish that I had something more profound to write about than all the pain that I am feeling, unfortunately the dice have not rolled as such and I don’t like to just sit at home and bitch about how much pain I am in -well, I guess I do, but when you are reading it you do have the liberty of being able to just skip past it-.

Last night I slept like something that sleeps for a really long time without ever waking up from pain. That is the way that I guess a lot of humans sleep, I am just not one of them. Even before I had the injury in my neck I often would wake up with pain in my back and be forced to pop it a bit before being able to get back to sleep. Last night I slept for at least ten hours, and I did not wake up even once, I was just that exhausted. Upon waking I stayed in bed and let myself drift in and out of sleep for a couple more hours, just happy that I was not feeling any pain in my neck or head.

I got up to take a shower at about 11:30 and found that I had a bit of lower back pain but my head and neck were holding up pretty well. Since I didn’t have to be to work until 2:00, I just layed there in bed and watched some mindless dribble on t.v. I ate a couple of cheeseburgers also.

I didn’t take any Ibuprofen to work with me, sicne I was feeling so good, that turned out to be a big mistake. The thing is that I can lay or sit for just about any length of time without having any problems. When I am both standing and moving around (especially if I am moving around with things in my hands) the pain starts to come back. I thought that it was possible that this would not be the case today, since I just felt so wonderful when I did go in to work.

The first two and a half hours or so really did go quite good, I was not feeling any pain in my neck at all, only a bit of lower back pain. At about the three hour point my neck was hurting again, and then came the head-ache. I did not have any Ibuprofen with me, so I asked the boss for whatever pain killer they had available. The only thing that they had were these 81mg aspirin pills. I read the back of the bottle and it said that you should take 8 every four hours or 12 every six hours, not to exceed 48 pills in 24 hours. I really thought that they must have the numbers backwards on that, I mean really 12 pills, I took six of them, and they did nothing.

At about 7:00 my head was throbbing to the point that I was able to count the “lubs” and “dubs”, by some stroke of luck my wife came in for something and I asked her to bring me some Ibuprofen, which she did. I gobbled down one more of those pills than I was supposed to (800mg) and it did not start to kick in until well after I had gotten home. The funny thing is that after all the aspirin, Ibuprofen and about 5 beers, my head-ache is now gone and I am finally starting to feel the pain in my neck again…

There is one news item that I simply have to put down here, I don’t know why, maybe the insanity is finally starting to kick in and I will be using my shoe for a telephone by the end of the week. Anyway, the headline is “David Crosby arrested on gun, drug charges in NY” and you can find the story Here

The 62-year-old musician, who rose to fame with the Byrds and later Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young in the late 1960s and 1970s, was charged with criminal possession of a weapon and unlawful drug possession, said Manhattan District Attorney spokeswoman Barbara Thompson.

As you can certainly tell by the photo, this man is a hardened criminal. He is one of the guys that are out there “banging” to protect his “hood”.. At his age I think that any drug he does should be considered ‘medicinal’ and the most likely reason that he has a gun is just in case the pressure/pain of his life becomes overwhelming and he just wants to end it all. He looks far more like Santa Claus than a musician and I bet he has arthritis and other such maladies that he is not able to take care of with over-the-counter pills. Would you hold your wallet/purse any tighter if you saw him board a plane?

The story goes on to say this;

Crosby later gained notoriety when he donated sperm to fellow rocker Melissa Etheridge so she and her lesbian partner could have a baby through artificial insemination.

Now I have nothing against homosexuals, but Egads man, what are they expecting the child to look like? It is probably possible that there could be two sets of genes that would result in a child less attrictive than that particular pairing but you would really have to look for them.

At any rate, I really don’t think that Crosby was going to try to take over any embassies in New York, and it is funny (to me) that this is getting any press coverage at all. There are far more important things going on in the world than a rocker 30 years passed his prime getting arrested for possesion of miniscule amounts of marijuana, and a firearm.

If John Lennon had realized that his life was in danger, so long after he was out of the public eye, he may have carried a firearm, and as such he may be alive today. Let us not fault persons who live in situations that only they can understand.