Success!!!

I Am The Master Of The Universe King Of The Truffle...



I finally forced myself to go into the kitchen and open up the refrigerator and drag the Truffle guts I made yesterday out and try to do something with them.

The second batch, made with a combination of some really expensive raw chocolate (I forget the brand) and some unidentified grocery store crappy chunk stuff we had laying around had set up rock hard yesterday when I put it in the fridge.

So I set everything out on the counter to come up to room temperature and after a couple of hours I discovered that the hard stuff was quite workable by hand, so I cut the 20 gram lumps down to 16 grams each and then made everything up in 16 gram balls and went to town rolling and covering and dipping.

Things went much better because I had been through the process already (I gave away all of yesterday's efforts to the waitresses and to the wives of some friends at one of our local watering holes), and after only about an hour of fooling around here's what I had in return for my efforts...



Being anal retentive a perfectionist at heart, I couldn't just settle for handing out exotic candy in a zip lock baggie or tin foil, so last year I bought a couple hundred little truffle boxes and here's a look at the packaging process.



And here's today's efforts all boxed up and ready to be delivered to my next set of victims...



BTW the KEY to making Truffles is temperature, Temperature, TEMPERATURE.

Temperature of EVERYTHING...the air, your pots, your pans, and most importantly your HANDS while handling them makes a HUGE difference in the outcome.

After today's effort I have a new little spring in my step because I think that with a little more practice I'll never buy a Truffle again.

Get to work guys and you can do it too on Valentines Day...(make Truffles, that is...and whatever else is up to you and your imagination...)

Mid Winter Hallucinations Fantasies

I Want To Build A Houseboat...



I'm sitting around here this morning afraid to go back into my kitchen because I have a load of Grenache lurking in the Fridge and on the counter top taunting me to try to roll it into little 16 gram balls and cover it with something without getting it in my hair (ok..on my scalp since most of my hair has fallen out.)

Then I started looking around for something new to draw and design and generally distract myself from reality, and a couple of things came to mind.

In the past year I've built a deck on my house (ok...half a Deck, but still...)

I've built a shop in the basement.

Building an airplane is out since the FAA grounded me for medical reasons about 15 years ago, but now, after being "Boatless" for going on eight years, and living near the Mighty Tennessee River, it occurs to me of my need and desire and practical possibility of owning another boat.

Not just any boat mind you...A...

H O U S E B O A T.

Something like this would be nice, but with newer lumber and a little bigger living space...




The guy said he'd make me a good deal, but I hate using someone else's used bed and bathroom, and I think that I want a little more horsepower and a generator.

Time to do some more googling...

Feeding Time...

I'm Afraid To Wonder What The Litter Box Looks Like?

Global Warming Pounding DC Politicians

Owl Gore Peeing His Pants...


I'm not sorry, but I'm afraid that it's easy for me to sit here in the relative warmth of Knoxtown this morning and want to laugh at the Federal Government morons having to "shut down" operations yesterday because they couldn't get out of their driveways.

And in the case of Nasty Pelosi and some of the other elitist political class snobs, I guess that their limo's probably couldn't come pick them up Monday morning so they stayed home, which in retrospect was a good thing because by shutting the government down they couldn't VOTE to come to my house and steal some more of my money to spend on their feckless, obtuse, inane "stimulus programs.".

I wonder if Pelosi even made it back to town on her hijacked Air Force jet from the Left Coast San Francisco, because Reagan National and Andrews AFB were both pushing mountains of snow around after the weekend's storm and air traffic was limited as a result.

Of course if she did it was because "Madam Speaker" went to the head of the air traffic control line as the little common taxpayers people stranded since Friday awaited the availability of an airliner and a departure gate three days later.

Looking at the Weather Channel, there's another "winter event" barrelling down on the Eastern seaboard for today and tomorrow, and yet another one coming in on Friday which has a good chance of delivering more frozen precipitation here to the Turbo Pup Compound on the banks of the Mighty Tennessee River.

Any rational person that's older than about forty years of age knows that, in spite of the media hysteria, what is happening this winter is a gradual return to historical "NORMAL" winter weather patterns which we had up until the early 1980's in the eastern US.

Just like the spike in Hurricane activity in the 1990's after a relatively quiet period in the 1970's and 1980's, people--particularly politicians and the "lamestream media" idiots--have a short memory and further, love to take anything which is a little different from last week or last month or last year and turn it into a news story or an opportunity to pass a new law and steal a little bit more of our constitutional, God given freedoms.

And weird crap you'd never expect to happen suddenly becomes material news headlines are made of...

stuff like that Cities and Counties all over the country are running out of money and equipment for snow removal because, during the relative warm winters over the past couple of decades, they've stolen the money and spent it on "social programs" and on raises for bureaucrats while their heavy equipment aged and wasn't replaced with new machinery.

Even here in Knoxville they've basically already spent the entire season's budget on winter road clearing and treatment, and their fleet of trucks is old and reduced in capacity because they didn't buy new trucks with plows and sand spreaders when things warmed up.

See...that's what politicians do...they THROW MONEY at things that are popular, or things that are on fire, or things that are festering and bleeding, or the groups of people that scream the loudest.

Meanwhile people like me are too busy making plans and putting personal emergency and contingency plans in place...and more importantly...working to make Money to pay my OWN WAY...rather than spending a disproportionate amount of my income "keeping up with the Jones' "--buying houses and cars and taking vacations I can't afford, walking around wearing $100 tennis shoes, and buying giant HD TV's while at the same time ignoring the gathering storm clouds on the horizon.

Unfortunately for me and my peers, the gathering clouds today are not made by Mother Nature.

The clouds I see are man-made...the shadows of an ever growing Government, in all its forms--dark and ominous and energized by millions of ignorant, security seeking, nanny-state voters.

Instead of snowing me in, or flooding me out, I'm fearful of the impact this man-made storm and their mandates and programs and stimulus packages are going to have on my wallet and long term net worth.

Regardless of the outcome, I still take a great deal of enjoyment in the effects this cold winter has had on Owl Gore and his bands of tie died, Kumbaya singing, patchouli stinking, tree hugging, sniveling, booger eating, bed wetting, man-made Global Warming Zombies.

The silence is deafening...don't you think?

I'm Making A Ganache?

Somebody Pass Me My Double Boiler...


So this weekend I was stumbling through the Godiva Chocolatier website looking at all of the fancy boxes of stuff they want to sell me in anticipation of St. Valentines Day.

I've been getting at least one e-mail per day from them and Proflowers and FTD for the past six weeks.

Any way, looking at my schedule this week I have to wait on rebuild kits for the new valve order so I have a couple of days to fool around with the "Jamaican Me Cajun Green Butt Chili Shack" design, and I figure that since Pat had perfected the recipe for home made truffles over the past couple of years that it was time for me to show her how to do it better to use all of the tools we have special purchased to handle chocolate in our kitchen.

I even bought one hundred fancy foil covered boxes last year sized to hold two truffles each in their little paper cups.

Getting back to my title, a "Ganache" is the French term for what you get by combining boiling heavy cream and melted chocolate.

Depending on the proportions you can get something which can be used to ice a cake, or by making a thicker mixture you get that rich, soft stuff you find inside Truffles and other candies.

The thing about making your own truffles is that you have to have cool temperatures and low humidity or they won't set up properly. Winter in Knoxtown must be good for something, and truffle making is one of those things.

So any way, I'm thinking about making four kinds of Truffles this week...plain chocolate with a powdered coco dusting on the outside, a chocolate raspberry flavored truffle with a hard dark chocolate coating, a chocolate amaretto truffle with toasted almond crumbles on the outside, and probably an orange liqueur flavored chocolate truffle with a hard white chocolate coating.

Each has to be processed in individual batches because you have a limited working time and don't have time to be fooling around adding stuff while things are cooling off and setting up.

On that note, I guess that it's time to finish some paperwork and go dirty up the kitchen I guess...

photos to follow...

MORE:...2:00 PM

I've discovered the secret of the PERFECT Truffle!!!

Ready?

Go into your Kitchen.

Get out your credit card.

Dial the 1-800 Godiva phone number (or go on-line)

Place your order.

The other way is to melt about twenty dollars worth of fancy chocolate in a bowl, dump scalding cream over it, stand around outside the refrigerator for an hour and one half, then utter these sounds before you begin...

"Ah hu eeh haah aaahh hhuuu eeh hoo eeh hoo aaaaahhhhhhhhhhHHHHH."

(you're going to end up screaming something and at least that phrase is rated PG...)

You see, everything goes well until you start scooping out your cold set Ganache from your refrigerated bowl...then the process degenerates up there in complexity with things like solving Differential Equations and herding cats.

Seriously, as far as I can tell it's nigh onto an impossible task getting the stuff out on a sheet of waxed paper in uniform sized balls that don't melt and stick to your hands and the the inside of closed cabinet doors and your eyelids and every other surface within a 6 foot perimeter.

I've got to go back now and mop the ceiling and try to wrestle this stuff into some sort of presentable form.

Wish me luck

Your Sunday Morning Bluegrass Music

...From The "Darlin's"...and Ernest T. Bass...




(Real fans of the Andy Griffith show know that "the Darlin' Boys" were really a bluegrass band from Missouri called The Dillards.)

MORE:

And then I just found this classic:




eeeaaaannnnddddd...You're Welcome...Have a LOVELY Day Now

Saturday Morning Chuckle

He Must Have Had REALLY Dry Skin...


Long time readers may remember years ago when I used to post wierd news stuff here all the time just to take up space, but more recently I've advanced to posting more original material or pointing out what my Blog Friends and Idols are up to.

That said, I just can't resist reverting back to my former self and showing you this story from MyFoxBoston.com :


Man Arrested Had 75 Bottles of Lotion in His Pants

Police say a Massachusetts man who allegedly stuffed 75 bottles of body lotion in his pants couldn't make a smooth getaway, hampered by slacks that were nearly bursting at the seams.

Springfield police say 30-year-old Chamil Guadarrama of Framingham was charged with larceny after the incident Wednesday night at Bath and Body Works in the Eastfield Mall.

Police say mall security officers chased Guadarrama, but he had stuffed so many of the eight-ounce lotion containers in his pants that he could barely run.

Police say he could not bend over to get in the police cruiser until some of the bottles were removed.

It could not immediately be determined if Guadarrama has an attorney. A telephone number for Guadarrama could not immediately be located Thursday.

Being lazy and distracted this morning, I think that I'll just let that stand there by itself and let you do your own commentary. Everybody give me a 100 word essay on the subject and have it turned in by Monday morning.

Don't Make Me Beat You To Death With My Walker Umbrella

...And Run Over What's Left With My Shopping Cart Full Of Pork


It's going to be miserable again here this weekend, but about 3 to 5 degrees above an actual "winter weather" event according to the current forecast.

Regardless, looking at possibly doing a bunch of extra cooking over the next couple of days including another prototype test batch of my soon to be famous "Jamaican Me Cajun 'Green Butt' Chili," we ventured out early this morning to try to beat the lunchtime crowd on the Pike and at the local Kroger.

The place was basically as quiet as a Tomb, so my spirit rose as I flew through the produce section only tripping over one little guy busy with a giant overloaded cart of boxes of new inventory he was stocking on the shelves and display cases.

Then I hit somewhere...it was either row two or row three, and there was this young guy, dressed in all Black like a Johnny Cash Impersonator or something, standing at the far end of the isle "conversing" on his cell phone.

By "conversing" I mean he was having an animated conversation, and in between whatever disagreement he was having with the "she" or "he" he was talking to he was going through the motions of acting like he was shopping, except he didn't have a basket in his hands and there was no shopping cart within 25 yards of the idiot my lovely fellow grocery patron.

Problem was, apparently his eyes and ears weren't working he was so engrossed in the cell phone tempest, because if I had to say "excuse me" once to the SOB I said it TEN TIMES within five minutes over the geographical space of six grocery isles.

He was just standing there in a trance blithering and looking somewhere close to exactly the opposite way I was coming from.

I finally skipped a whole row around the guy who was going BACKWARDS to the "normal" path that people take in MY store when shopping.

He must have gone down the "tutti fruity" organic granola and soy milk isle (thus probably being a sniveling, booger eating, tree hugging Owl Gore following Progressive bed wetter) that me and every other red blooded, God fearing, American man born before about 1965 SKIPS because we want saturated fats and extra glycerol in our food and think Tofu is something delivered by the Russians to make us too weak to fight back when they finally take over Niagara Falls and move on down into NYC.

So any way, everything came out good in the end and I returned home with about FIFTEEN POUNDS of Boston Butt and Whole Pork Tenderloin.

The Tenderloin will be butchered into giant chops and big end cut roast and dumped into the deep freezer before the end of the day, and the Butt is going into a nice brine to sit overnight before the calculators, scales, micrometers, and clipboards and spreadsheets are activated and I get serious about fine tuning this year's chili cooking process.

The event, St. Simons Island Rotary Red Hot Chili Cook-Off is exactly four weeks away tomorrow, and I have a lot of work to do still in order to standardize the process which has been all over the map the first three tries.

In the mean time, don't let me catch you wandering the isles of a grocery store talking on the cell phone asking "do we have blaa blaa blaa?...do we have any of THAT?"

Here's a hint...

Take a pen or pencil and a piece of paper, and make a LIST...else risk some angry guy with a calculator and an attitude putting shopping cart tire prints on your forehead or down the middle of your back.

O-Tay?

Gripes, Observations, Contemplations, and Re-Runs

I'm Out of My Mind...And Onto My Keyboard...


First thing this morning, I have to ask if anybody but me starts losing their mind when, disgusted with everything else that's showing on the other 99 cable channels, they turn over to Food Network at 1 AM and all they've got is the fifth re-run of the day of the same episode of "Ace Of Cakes"?

Don't get me wrong, I like watching "Ace of Cakes" but once in 24 hours is enough already, you know?

While I'm at it the same applies to Alton Brown's "Good Eats" and "Iron Chef" and most of the rest of their shows....wait a minute...Giada de Larentiis and Rachel Ray are OK the second or third viewing depending on my mood on some days...

Moving along, have you had the chance to start looking at your income taxes this year?

I spent about ten hours on Monday finishing the Corporate taxes, and now I have about twenty in the overall process so far, but let me tell those of you that don't do your own taxes that some of the things that they make you do to file a 1040 long form with anything but a single W-2 and the standard deductions will make your hair fall out.

You'll want to pull what's left out before you get through schedule C and D and E and the Capitol Gains Schedule.

By the way, did anyone but me know that if you have a long term capitol gain in a given year you have to pay capitol gain taxes on the ENTIRE AMOUNT OF THE GAIN, but if you only have a LOSS in a given year you can only deduct the first $3,000 no matter how much your loss was (unless you have a gain to offset it against)?

So until I sell another piece of property and make some money, I have a lovely fun gift basket full of fun little $3,000 capitol losses, forcing me to file the extra capitol gains/loss form for the next seven or eight years before I recover everything.

Bastards....it looks like the IRS spent years and years putting that "gift" together...

And finally, that last comment reminds me of something else.

Since Valentines day is coming up, I just have to comment on that stupid Valentine Bear TV commercial and the Pajamagram commercials where the announcer says to the guys:

"she'll think that you spent [hours & hours...weeks...months...your whole life...(pick one)] putting it together..."

...taking a big breath....

Any guy that actually buys that line, and in the process believes that WOMEN don't watch the same TV commercials that they do, and goes down on February 14th and hands his wife/girlfriend (or wife at dinner and girlfriend at lunch) a package from these people and says...

"it took me a week to put this together...Dear"

deserves to have to make a visit to the local Emergency Room by ambulance and have to explain to the attending physician how the package got to where it was inside his abdominal cavity.

Which reminds me, I wrote an interesting piece on this subject last year. Being lazy and needing to get back to work designing the official "Jamaican Me Cajun 'Green Butt' Chili Shack," I'm going to reprint it here in its entirity for your enjoyment:


Virgil's Valentine Bear Company

If You Can't Join 'Em, Beat 'Em...

Anyone but me tired of watching the antics of the three stripper chicks on the Vermont Teddy Bear commercials?

On the late night version...I swear to God...the bimbo recipient says this line:

"...it's so much bigger than I thought...(other girls squealing in the background)...I could just kiss it and kiss it..."

Pluuuueeeeeeaaaassssseeeee...Spare me the innuendo.

UPDATE: I found the long ad in YouTube here:



As an equal opportunity insulter, the guys featured in the ad certainly look like losers that would buy the bears based on the appearance of the girls and the rhetoric delivered in the process of opening a box of goods that virtually everyone in America has heard "will make her think you spent days coming up with..."

No...you saw the ad, googled "Vermont Valentine Bear," gave them your credit card number, and hung up the phone on your way to go buy condoms and cheep wine.

Any way...I checked out the web site and wrote about this same subject tongue and cheek (excuse the pun) a few years ago.

This morning I thought I'd revisit the subject again because looking at the site I see that they're somewhat insensitive and exclusionary in their selection and obvious exploitation of certain societal and racial stereotypes of men this Valentines day.

If I were running my own competing "Virgil's Valentine Bear Company" I'd expect to be forced by government equality mandate to include products based on a WIDE cross section of our ever broadening melting pot society.

Not just white people or black people or construction workers or PHD's like Vermont Bear does.

I've taken a preliminary look this evening in some other places and come up with a few pretty good ideas I think.

As a tribute to the undervalued and oft overlooked American Sanitation Engineer, I'd do something using this guy as the model:

Pretty good...huh. After all, everyone doesn't want a CEO Bear or a Donald Trump Bear because it might hurt an ego or two.

Then, while looking through the Vermont Bear offerings I noticed a lack of "diversity" when it came to products aimed at the LGBT (lesbian, gay, bi-sexual, transgendered) market and I immediately thought of these guys:



That covers a lot of ground in my book, how about you?

And not to leave out the angry lesbian part of the LGBT equation I thought of this lovely woman...


That particular model would definitely have to be fully clothed and offered in a extra heavy, extra large cardboard box so the price would put it in a different category from say...the Skinny Gay "Brokeback Mountain" Cowboy Bear or the "Indian Chief with the vibrating tommahawk Caricature Bear."

And finally, I noticed lots of "blue collar" offerings on the Vermont site, but they were all mostly based on "Caucasian" Americans. How about a Bear based on one of the hard working guys from another land country that supports our glorious American way of life?

Someone like this "Taxi Driver Bear" guy from the middle east?



...or this cuddly little fellow, "Construction Worker Bear on His Day Off" from south of the border?


I know, I know, I know..you're probably all excited about the idea by now, and I'm hard at work in my spare time working on my bear prototypes but I'm afraid my products won't be making it to market by February 14th.

Bear with me here (no pun intended) as I get organized, and please keep me in mind for next year. I'll keep you informed as things develop.

Heh...

Virtual Piano?

Coolest Thing I've Seen In A While...


If you play piano (or just want to fool around without getting in trouble at the mall or in church) then go HERE:

http://www.thevirtualpiano.com/

Writing's probably going to be light tonight because I'm tired from building and shipping valves all day yesterday... and another load is coming in Friday so I got to go clean up my shop and do some paperwork.

Regards Y'all...

TSA Passenger Profiling...Right or Wrong?

A Multiple-Choice Test...


As I've said about ten million dozens and dozens of times here before on this blog, I've about had it up to here (pointing to the very top of my ever greying, ever balding head) with the BS associated with everything from our inability to "profile" when checking the intentions and possessions of potential airline passengers to the Government allowing the wholesale issuing of "student visas" and "work permits" to people from places like China and Lebanon and Syria under preposterous, unbelievable circumstances.

Most of this ingrained mental characteristic is simply based on my innate common sense, although the sniveling booger eating patchouli stinking tree hugging government subsidized liberals progressives in the crowd will be inclined to just stand up and point their fingers at me and scream "racist" and "bigot" and "closed minded" and you name all of the other possible labels in my direction.

I have to admit that part of this blithering here this morning is based on my own personal experiences over the past ten years of flying.

You can call me self-important or self-absorbed I guess, but still...

I don't really know why, but thinking back I'm pretty sure that EVERY SINGLE TIME I've gotten on a Commercial Jet since about the year 2000 I've been subjected to "enhanced screening," generally along with another half dozen dumpy white middle aged people (mostly men carrying laptop computers.)

While Pat passes effortlessly through baggage check and security in her stocking feet, I'm diverted the minute I enter the door to the Airport Terminal into the "special line" where the people with blue or green rubber gloves pass my checked baggage through Geiger Counters and MRI's and Cat Scans and God knows what other forms of "screening."

Half the time when I open my "checked" luggage at the Hotel I find a little tag or greeting card informing me why my formerly neatly folded socks and underwear have been scrambled into a knot...the reason being that after I left my belongings in the care of the GOVERNMENT the bag was opened and "inspected" by one of the aforementioned lovely glove wearing TSA employees.

Meanwhile me and my carry on bag and computer are diverted sideways through those little velvet covered ropes on posts like they have at the bank to a separate Plexiglas enclosed area, what I call a "holding tank," to wait another five or ten additional minutes for some gloved rocket scientist TSA employee to wave me over to a table where they go through my possessions and rub their hands all over me and wand me with a hand held metal detector.

Since I see them go through my stuff I don't even get the tag or the "inspected by" greeting card.

Maybe next time I travel I should insist that I'm not leaving the "screening area" until they tie one of those little tags onto my toe or other designated "appendage."

....zip

..."Thank you Miss."



OK, while I've delivered most of the above ranting and raving in a tongue and cheek manner because I have no control of the process, I also represent that every bit of it is true, including that they "enhance" my screening every time I fly, and I'm sure that I'm not the only one out there who has had similar experiences at least a few times.

And more importantly, what I'm trying to say here AGAIN is that "security screening" in it's present form makes no sense and no difference in your actual level of security while in the air on an airplane (or anywhere else for that matter.)

Most people just shrug their shoulders at the process but truth is that in their ignorance they FEEL BETTER and the government knows that.

When...not IF...the next major successful terrorist event happens here in the US, I promise you that all your government is going to do is further stick their head in the sand (or up the first available body orifice.)

And then the Community Organizer President and his talking head sock puppet Rob Gibbs will be on TV almost 24/7...

and after offering a big old sloppy Presidential "Whoopsy Daisy" they'll simply go back to assuring everyone hiding in their linen closets and under their desks that the Authorities have everything under control and that they're looking at new "enhanced measures" while at the same time saying...

"GOLLY GEE...DON'T BLAME US...LOOK AT ALL THE STUFF WE'VE ALREADY BEEN DOING..."


(pause...sigh...taking a big breath here boss...)

See Folks, my problem with all of this high cost bureaucratic insanity is that while the expenses have been going through the ceiling for "Homeland Security," they're spending 99.3141597% (statistic per the Rogers' In-Congressional Budget Office, or RICBO for short) of the money looking in the wrong direction, at the wrong time, and at the WRONG PEOPLE.

I say that it's pretty easy to know where to look and who to inspect, and bringing this rambling dialogue back to my original point made in this Blog posting title, having come this far with me I ask that you spend another couple of minutes here this morning and take the following little multiple-choice test, designed explicitly to determine your ability to vote for the people who make "Homeland Security" policy, and if you're unemployed, possibly your suitability to get a job working with the TSA if you want to.


Ready?


Here we go...


1. 1968 Bobby Kennedy was shot and killed by:

a. Superman
b. Jay Leno
c. Harry Potter
d. Muslim male extremist between the ages of 17 and 40


2. In 1972 at the Munich Olympics, athletes were kidnapped and massacred by :

a. Olga Corbett
b. Sitting Bull
c. Arnold Schwarzenegger
d. Muslim male extremists mostly between the ages of 17 and 40


3. In 1979, the US embassy in Iran was taken over by:

a. Lost Norwegians
b. Elvis
c. A tour bus full of 80-year-old women
d . Muslim male extremists mostly between the ages of 17 and 40


4. During the 1980's a number of Americans were kidnapped in Lebanon by:

a. John Dillinger
b. Michael Jackson
c. The Boy Scouts
d. Muslim male extremists mostly between the ages of 17 and 40


5. In 1983, the US Marine barracks in Beirut was blown up by:

a. A pizza delivery boy
b. Pee Wee Herman
c. Geraldo Rivera
d. Muslim male extremists mostly between the ages of 17 and 40


6. In 1985 the cruise ship Achille Lauro was hijacked and a 70 year old American passenger was murdered and thrown overboard in his wheelchair by:

a. The Smurfs
b. Davey Jones
c. The Little Mermaid
d. Muslim male extremists mostly between the ages of 17 and 40


7. In 1985 TWA flight 847 was hijacked at Athens , and a US Navy diver trying to rescue passengers was murdered by:

a. Captain Kidd
b. Charles Lindberg
c. Mother Teresa
d. Muslim male extremists mostly between the ages of 17 and 40


8. In 1988, Pan Am Flight 103 was blown out of the sky over Lockerby, Scotland:

a. Scooby Doo
b. The Tooth Fairy
c. The Sundance Kid
d. Muslim male extremists mostly between the ages of 17 and 40


9. In 1993 the World Trade Center was bombed the first time by:

a. Richard Simmons
b. Grandma Moses
c. Michael Jordan
d. Muslim male extremists mostly between the ages of 17 and 40


10. In 1998, the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were bombed by:

a. Mr. Rogers (the guy with the TV show...not me)
b. Hillary Clinton, to distract attention from Wild Bill's women problems
c. The World Wrestling Federation
d. Muslim male extremists mostly between the ages of 17 and 40


11. On 9/11/01, four airliners were hijacked; two were used as missiles to take out the World Trade Centers and of the remaining two, one crashed into the US Pentagon and the other was diverted and crashed by the passengers. Thousands of people were killed by:

a. Bugs Bunny, Wiley E. Coyote, Daffy Duck and Elmer Fudd
b. The Supreme Court of Florida
c. Mr Bean
d. Muslim male extremists mostly between the ages of 17 and 40


12. Since 2002 the United States has fought a war in Iraq against:

a. Enron
b. The Lutheran Church
c. The NFL
d. Muslim male extremists mostly between the ages of 17 and 40


13. In 2002 reporter Daniel Pearl was kidnapped and murdered by:

a. Bonnie and Clyde
b. Captain Kangaroo, Mr. Green Jeans, Bunny Rabit, and the Dancing Bear
c. Billy Graham, Jimmy Swaggert, and Jim and Tammy Baker
d. Muslim male extremists mostly between the ages of 17 and 40


14. On November 5, 2009 in a building at Ft. Hood, Texas 13 people were murdered and another 30 were injured in a premeditated attack by:

a. Lady Gaga
b. A young family of five including an infant and two Toddlers
c. Jeff Foxworthy
d. Muslim male extremists mostly between the ages of 17 and 40


15. On Christmas day, 2009, an attempt was made to blow up an Airliner in route from Europe to the United States, thereby killing 288 passengers by:

a. Shrek
b. A Blogger named Virgil
c. Don Knotts
d. Muslim male extremists mostly between the ages of 17 and 40


If I wanted to sit here and rack my brain and Google the subject I could easily get another 15 questions, but I think that you get my point this morning.

So will somebody tell me WHY we're sitting around doing things the way we're doing things?

I'm waiting ...

(Que the sounds of crickets chirping...)

BTW, if you scored less than 15 out of 15, and I find out, I'm coming to your house and mowing the word "Dangerous Moron" in your grass with my Weed Eater.

Don't make me come over there...


(Thanks to Rodger over at Curmudgeonly and Skeptical and his Cuzzin Ricky for the idea and link)


MORE...at 6:00 AM...

Answers to the Questions for those to old or young to remember...

1. Sirhan_Sirhan

2. Black_September, a group with ties to Yasser_Arafat and the PLO.
(extra credit given to re-read the story here on wikipedia: Munich_Olympics_Massacre

3. I think everybody remembers this story, but I'm rapidly approaching being older than dirt (it happened THIRTY ONE YEARS AGO while World UN and Dictator Whore and Appeasers President Jumma "Smile When You Say That" Carter was busy playing the Banjo or something in the White House. Go here on Wiki for the answer... Iran_Hostage_Crisis.

4. You're on your own on this one, but I know it happened and am too lazy to spend time Googleing because my point is made elsewhere.

5. Islamic_Jihad

6. Palestine Liberation Front

7. Lebanese Shia Terrorists

8. Lybian moron Abdelbaset_Ali_Mohmed_Al_Megrahi

9. Khaled_Shaikh_Mohammed...I leave it up to you to guess where he went to church, but here's a clue...HE WASN'T A BAPTIST...

10.Egyptian Islamist Jihad

11. If you don't know this I'm coming over to your front yard...see earlier threat...

12. If you don't know this you fail and I'm too impatient to tell you right now.

13. al Quaeda

14. A domestically raised Dumbass Islamist Jihadist...if you don't know this your fail...

15. Some little Dumbass from Africa...if you don't know this you fail...


How'd you do?

Doesn't matter really I guess...

Now go get something productive done while I get back to re-building valves...

What Caused The End Of The Last Ice Age?

Cave Man Al???


Scroll down for the answer...


















Yes, I propose that way back then it was man's discovery of fire and that, combined with all of the Woolly Mammoth and Saber Toothed Tiger farts, caused things to get out of control.

I know that you feel as good as I do about the government trying to stop things from warming up further, right?

Something to think about...

Grey Eagles

WWII Mustang Pilots...

Go watch this video when you have about 15 minutes, then come back and try to tell me what's happened to our country and many of our population since.

[Link to "Grey Eagles"]

One of my early mentors in business, a guy named Sam Watson that ran a steel fab shop in the Atlanta area, was a North American P-51 Mustang pilot during the war and continued on as a flight instructor flying them in the Air Force reserve at Dobbins Air Force Base into the late 1950's.

Like Major Jim Brooks shown in the film, he didn't talk about the war much either, but he did talk about the machine and his love of flying the Mustang.

Sam's been dead for a long time now, and as they say...

They don't make 'em like that any more.

(...and you're welcome if you liked the film...)

Back To The Grind

Making Money Overshadows Fooling Around...


Last night we left the house in the car for the first time since lunchtime Friday and wandered down the Pike and grabbed a quick dinner out, then I came home and continued slogging my way through tax records getting ready to file the two obligatory annual 1040's with the associated schedules and forms, and now a corporate tax return for the first time in ten years.

There's something incredibly wrong when a private citizen is punished for living and breathing and making a little money here and there and in order to answer the Government's questions in the process you have to generate a stack of file folders almost A FOOT HIGH.

I read somewhere where the Federal Tax Laws have now exploded from about 400 pages when it was first enacted in 1913 to over SEVENTY THOUSAND PAGES in it's present form (excuse the pun)today.

That's just stupid, and all the people out there that benefit from running to H&R Block, filing returns and not only not owing any money but getting a "return" in the form of "earned income credits" and other "refundable credits" for non-achievement (then walking away giving up 25% interest in return for your "Tax Return Anticipation Check" so you can go buy a new car while I own a 15 year old Suburban) need to realize that, while it might be legal, to ME it's the same thing as coming to my house with a gun and making me give you a portion of my life and labor and possessions...

except you elect vote to allow the GOVERNMENT to do it on your behalf...under the guise that I don't NEED all of the money I earn...and because you're too chicken shit to come take it yourself.

You'll have to excuse me now because I have to go do some WORK in order to earn my money, and hopefully earn enought between now and April 15th to pay my fair share of the costs of roads and the military--things I want to pay for--and probably a couple of tax cheat deadbeats riding on my back courtesy of the US government.

That will be all...for now.


MORE 45 Minutes later...

No...I'm not Manic Depressive although my apparent mood swings here in this blog might indicate otherwise, it's just that I hate the IRS and I hate the BS sold to the population about higher income taxpayers.

I'm not one today but I aspire to be one (a "high income earner") again. One of my best friends made almost a million dollars over the past four years and he definitely doesn't "OWE" anyone nearly $350,000 in taxes in return for the privilege of getting three college degrees and working his ass off sacrificing marriage and ever having any kids of his own...

I too worked my ass off to get through college and have paid tons of money to accountant's over the years to keep me and my corporations out of trouble with the IRS, and I ELECTED to NOT have any children also because I was too busy working to raise a family.

I've screwed up in many areas of my life, but I've also managed to make some smart choices and maybe had a little luck along the way, and still I say that sleeping your way through high school and then going out and squirting babies out right and left that you can't afford shouldn't entitle you to winning the government lottery paying you "living wage" income and "free" health care health insurance and retirement benefits by shaving the top off of the incomes of me and my peers.

Sorry...just call me selfish I guess...

Initial Test Flight Test Slide(s) Results Inconclusive

Equipment Back In The Shop For Fine Tuning...


It was 20 degrees F here this morning, and I finally got up and forced myself to re-install my spandex get dressed in two layers and contemplate my fate with my home made sled.

After going over the undercarriage and checking all of the razor sharp edges on the skis which I had previously filed down during construction, every thing looked OK ("OK" having various meanings depending on your perspective as to my sanity), then I walked the contraption out the basement door and did a short test slide on the lawn which only went about 25 feet.

OK, but the snow was a little crunchy and soft underneath so I moved over to the driveway and checked for traffic on the street in front of the house. Since everything is iced over most rational people were staying home and apparently we only have one or two morons with a death wish (besides me) living on our street.

No land speed records were set, but I did make it down the driveway to the street once and took another short slide before that covering about half the length of the asphalt strip.

I was winded after draggin the 30 pound monster back up the driveway, but the good news is that the braking system works fine (of course when your going about as fast as the speed of sound smell that's easy.)

Bad news, the steering works only occasionally and trying to turn left might just make you turn right... so now I'm fooling around with the ski geometry and some other stuff on the front end to see if I can make more of my weight transfer forward.

More bad news, the road with the loooonnnggg steep hill I was planning on sledding on nearby was treated with Ice melt compound so I'm stuck on my 75' long drive way for the duration of the testing.

And meanwhile, I'm thinking maybe at my age and bulk I need a "Sleigh" rather than a "Sled", so now I'm thinking about building one of these...



out of PVC pipe and an old refrigerator body.

I know, I know, I know what you're thinking...

Stay tuned to this channel for more developments...

Downhill Conditions Improving

New Afternoon Snow Elevates Spirits...


Surprisingly enough we picked up probably another inch or two of snow mid afternoon yesterday as the temperature started it's plunge down to the current reading of 22 degrees F on the back yard weather station.

I was in a cooking mood since there was no way I could get Pat and the Turbo Pup to venture out in the car, so I produced a late morning Brunch and then scrounged around in the fridges and freezer and pantry and found that I had the ingredients for a Moroccan Beef Stew I've cooked once before called Tagine (click on the link for the recipe) which features tomatoes and carrots and cinnamon and cumin and Chickpeas and I used Beef Tenderloin tips and a couple of older Tenderloins which I cut up into bite sized pieces.

Served over Couscous made with butter and chicken stock instead of plain water, and I'd put the dish up against anything found in any Mediterranean restaurant I've ever been to.

While the stew was cooking down I put back on the new ill fitting so called "long underwear" and "waterproof" top garments and wandered down the street for the purpose of generally being nosey and taking a few photos.

Here's my ancient mailbox...circa 1963...on the far right sitting in the snow at the end of the drive:



That sucker is mounted in a METAL DAIRY MILK JUG buried in the ground and filled with concrete. (There's no way I'm digging it up and putting in a new post and box, but I may get energized enough when it stops snowing this spring to grind the old silver paint off and install a new finish and street number.)

Here's a look down the street nearby...



and one of the small "mini-farms" nearby which haven't sold out to be turned into subdivisions (If we ended up maintaining a presence in knoxtown I want to move over there...)






On a sad note I found this somber sight of this year's Christmas Tree laying in the brush pile in the back yard...




and then I found a couple of happy snow covered fellows down the street which made me feel a little better...



I guess I'll go now and do some work fussing with stupid income taxes, then take a nap in anticipation of polishing up the skis on the sled and trying to stay out of the newspaper and off the evening TV news.

Anybody Want A "Mushy Slushy"?

Just Add Sugar & Food Coloring...


Dang it, I want my money back.

For what...you might ask?

How about the crappy XXL Long Johns I bought at Wal Mart which must be designed for people in China that consider themselves to be of the size "XXL" but really wear Boy's size 6x, and then there's the crappy Ski Bib pants we rushed out and bought at Burlington Coat Factory for $29.99 at lunch on Friday, also in size "XXL"...but which make me look like some mutated cross between "The Michelin Man" and "The Pillsbury Dough boy" (think Ghost busters) when I put them on this morning.

If I were 6'6" tall they might fit correctly.

I put everything on and walked outside and all of the birds took off and flew away and a neighbor's dog peed on itself before running away as I stomped through what is left of a nice snow and sleet storm on the way to the mailbox to pick up the newspaper this morning.

I don't blame them because I was pretty alien looking lumbering along with excess fabric surrounding a man basically wearing a couple of rubber bands around his middle and thighs and ankles underneath a circus tent.

Any way...I'm pretty pissed off now because our weather turned to "almost freezing rain" about 3:30 AM this morning and moushed and sqoushed and slopped everything that had fallen earlier up into something about the consistency of a cheep Daiquiri or Snow Cone, so sledding is out today unless things drop back below freezing, but tonight things are going down into the teens over night so I guess I might get a few test runs in tomorrow.

The other thing that bothers me is that with the sloppy wet mush the scenery is hardly worth shooting photos of which takes away my other aspirations for the day.

At least we missed a utility interrupting Ice storm but going from 7" to 11" forecast to what we have outside should make Owl Gore and the tie dyed, Patchouli stinking sniveling tree hugging booger eating Global Warming Alarmist shut the &^%$ up and leave my wallet alone for the next 25 years because the guys wearing coats and ties at the National Weather Service and The Weather Channel blew it in my opinion.

So nobody better come to my house in the next month and tell me about Spotted Owls and Polar Bears and melting Glaciers in the Himalayas unless you want a giant man in ill fitting clothing to punch you in the nose with his calculator.

Time to calm down and go cook breakfast I guess...

Virgil's Vexing Vexations

Out Of The Frying Pan...


OK, it's about 3:30 AM and our snow and sleet has converted to freezing rain since midnight, further packing things down in the yard and on the deck and causing the tree limbs to start glistening and making me nervous about the integrity of our electrical power services.

Meanwhile, having mastered the design of crazy adult sized sleds made of surplus beach chair parts I've turned my attention back to my up coming St. Simons Island Rotary Red Hot Chili Cookoff and the recipe and booth supporting the cooking and presentation thereof.

As is normal in my life, instead of taking the easy route and just breaking the old booth out of storage on the island and doing some touch up paint, after Googling around looking at Caribbean theme photos I found this picture of a little patio bar



and I've decided that with John's permission I have to attempt to modify our existing structure in an effort to replicate something like this for this year's Chili event.

So now I have a couple of hours into doing preliminary sketches on grid paper and after taking a nap I'll refine things and do a bill of materials and see where the weather takes us.

Stay tuned to this channel Y'all...

The Weather's Here

Wish I Were Beautiful Was 20 Years Younger


OK, we officially have a winter storm going on outside my back door.

The forecast has bounced all over the chart today, steadily rising from the 4" to 6" range this morning to a high of 8" to 12" around dinner time, then settling back to 7" to 11" right now...looking at the deck we've already had a couple of inches and they say most will come after midnight.

Toss on top of that the predicted extra 3 or so inches tomorrow and this will probably set my personal record for the second or third largest snowfall outside a building I owned.

Of course the "Blizzard of '93" in Atlanta is still the record for me and will hopefully continue to be if I have anything to say about getting the hell out of here and back to the Georgia Coast sometime in late 2010 or early 2011.

I like snow still, don't get me wrong...I used to love it and pay money to travel to ski slopes and ride cabled contraptions to the top of mountains so I could slide down on a pair of expensive rented planks, but with my bad circulation in my legs and torso and 50 years of mileage on the rest of my body a good snow once or twice every ten years is about all I need to feel fulfilled in life.

You know you're getting old when you see a "snow event" as they call it on the Weather Channel as an annoying inconvienance or a "Photo Opportunity" rather than a good reason to miss school or work and run around outside like an idiot doing cartwheels and getting soaking wet and risking frostbite.

Since everyone at my house works from home, and since this storm hit on a Friday it really doesn't provide anything but a little drama and an opportunity to try out the new snow shovel and sled tomorrow.

Twenty five years ago I'd already be outside walking around in the stuff as it comes down tonight, but more recently we've had three or four small snows in the past two winters that I didn't even put on shoes and leave the house until most of it had melted.

I guess that there's a time for most everything in life, but these day's I just look for some Spanish Moss draped Live Oaks, a little beach sand, and warm coastal breezes and leave the frozen powder to the youngsters.

New Sled Takes Shape

Rube Goldberg Hits The Slopes...


Well, I made it through the evening keeping one eyeball on the Weather Channel while cooking dinner, and then I tried to lay down and sleep for six or so hours but I was so engrossed in design problems relating to how to convert a beach chair into a workable sled that I gave up about 12:30 AM and got up and got dressed and came down here to the shop.

Since then I've been making sawdust, managing to set the smoke detector off a couple of times grinding my way through some 45 degree bevel cuts with the only old carbide blade I have in the building.

This is what I have come up with so far. Remember that I started out with a used version of one of these:



and then I cut it apart and started fooling around with some scrap lumber I had laying around in the shop and an old reflector off of a 4' two lamp florescent shop light that had died.




upside down mounting the main skis/runners:




Things started taking shape and just kept growing and growing until I had this silly looking thing when I was finished...





It ain't pretty but it is definitely strong.

I have a couple of cans of green spray paint to color the bare wood but I'm too lazy to put it on there right now and I don't want to get paint on me and my clothes since it looks like I'll get to give it a test ride/slide in the next 48 hours.



As you can see it has a steerable front end and even a brake function to keep me from breaking the sound barrier or knocking down people and trees hopefully.

I'd like to be able to say that I insist that anything I ride on or in weigh a few thousand pounds more than I do (remember I have a Chevy Suburban) and, while if I keep adding wood and bolts this monstrosity could come close to my 240 pound bulk I think that by restraining my enthusiasm it's still going to actually end up a few hundred pounds less than me in the process.

Still, I may need to call the Tennessee DOT and see if I need a tag or some sort of permit or possibly a "wide load" sign and an escort truck with a flashing light if I ride the thing down the nearby hill on David Lane.

Pay attention to the national news and the ASSociated Press story's on the storm because there may be something written about them having to pry me out from under a tractor trailer or hoist me out of a tree or off of the roof of a house if this thing works like I think it will.

If we get ice or sleet instead of wet snow I may just be able to set some sort of downhill land speed record.

Anybody want to take up a collection to buy me a ticket to the Winter Olympics?

New Forecast

Caught Without Water Proof Pants...


No, I'm not talking about "Depends" or other "Adult Diaper" products...the water I'm worrying about could be infiltrating from the outside because I just noticed that the Weather Nerds and Computer Models have updated the forecast here in Knoxtown to include somewhere between 4 and 8 inches of snow falling Friday night.

I take that to mean we will at least see two snowflakes in my back yard, with the possibility of suffering power outages and having to slog through two feet of stuff to make it to the bank or post office if they're still open when the "winter weather event" arrives.

Regardless, I guess that we'll run out for drinks at happy hour, then come home and after I cook dinner I'll be forced to retire to the basement workshop to fine tune the details and drill some holes and drive some screws into the raw assemblage which is taking shape as a home made adult sized snow sled.

I'm pretty pissed that I have managed to buy Pat a set of water resistant ski bibs while I'll be running around shivering, soaking wet because I currently don't own a pair of jumbo sized bibs--the old pair were victims of the house fire--although I do have pretty good gloves and a nice parka.

The emergency supply cabinet is in good shape however, with fresh batteries for the flashlights and drinking water and lamp oil for old fashioned lamps with wicks and there's five gallons of gas for the generator and an extra 40 gallons in the Suburban .

The only thing we're missing is a fireplace, something that almost every other house on this street has but our previous owner apparently didn't want or appreciate when the house was built.

A good fireplace is worth it's weight in gold when weather like this approaches with the peace of mind that you know that you can stay warm and at least boil water if someone is having a baby for coffee and other hot drinks or just to wash your arm pits. Our house on St. Simons even had a fireplace which we used a few weeks out of each year.

Any way, wish us luck and pray for snow instead of sleet and freezing rain and we'll probably be no worse the wear come Monday.

Regards Y'all...photos to follow...

New Beach Chair Sled In Process

Up-Coming Weather Conditions Require new Equipment And Technology


Regular readers know that recently I've spent some time drawing cartoons, making calculations, and stacking up blocks of wood and left over metal and fabric parts from an old beach chair for the past couple of weeks now trying to get some sort of conveyance put together in anticipation of the next bout of winter weather.

I was until last night starting to get all excited and wanting to get into a hurry, but unfortunately for the school kids and the grown kids like me they've reduced our snowfall accumulation estimates for this coming storm down to around 1 inch this morning.

That doesn't matter to me however...and as usual things could change by 9 AM or sometime after lunch time.

Any way, after laying around here being useless for a couple of days thinking about people and things I shouldn't be thinking about, I'm now resolute in forcing myself up vertical, getting off of my butt and going down into the basement and bolting together what I call my ultimate adult sled...

The patented and trademarked "Rogers Crazy Turbosonic Suicide Sliding Machine."

That would be the "RCTSSM" for short--helping those of you taking notes and wanting to write about my demise after the obituary is published.

Speaking of obituaries, I just learned that a good friend and drinking buddy of mine, St. Simons Barrister Tom Swift (no relation to the storybook character), passed away this week after fighting diabetes and more recently pancreatic cancer.

Tom left behind a wife and two daughters and an Island full of people who, along with the passing of his 90 plus year old father last year, will miss the gentle character and intellectual whit of two gentlemen who were singular institutions on our little coastal Georgia island.

RIP Mr. Swift, and say hello to your father for me...

Blogging Re-runs

Falling Back On My Previous "Body Of Work"


I'm feeling sort of lazy this morning, so I was poking around the Blogger site and looking at statistics and stuff and I realized something worth writing about.

All of y'all out there that aren't bloggers probably don't know the amount of information that my "Site Meter" can give me about who's reading and where they're reading from and how many times they stop by in any given day to see what I'm up to.

Just in case you haven't been paying attention, you can scroll down on this blog and down there in the left hand column is a little box called "Site Meter" which is generally intended to stoke the ego of the blogger and be used to monitor demographics and other readership details for the purpose of making money selling blog ads...

but I'm too stubborn to make you have to wade through ads for silly consumer crap you have plenty of opportunities to buy while slogging your way through the rest of the internet to get to me and my ramblings.

So you don't see commercial ads on this web page but know that I'm sitting here watching YOU and I know if you've stopped by and I like it...torturing you with my demented thinking and humor.

You can go down there right now and double click on it (my "Site meter") and see things like that I average about 50 "hits" a day and I have regular readers living everywhere around the world--from the former classmates and friends down on the Gulf coast in Florida, to my fellow Blogger up in Kentucky going through some traumatic events needing God's Grace, and the frequent commenter over in Louisiana and let me just say that everyone is welcome and appreciated although I don't attempt to make a dime for my efforts here other than ensuring my own personal sanity and/or insanity such as it is.

Any way, using "Site meter," every now and then I end up noticing a spike in readership based on some particular topic.

Over at my cooking blog, The Redneck Gourmet, it is historically seasonal with the words "Grilled Crab Legs" and "Pork Butt" leading the way most of the year. The holiday season causes things to ramp up, and the summer holidays like Memorial Day and July 4th and Labor Day get a lot of views on the page with people trying to grill things and otherwise cook things I've already mastered and written about.

Over here at this blog, for some silly reason, my Gaza Stripper photo archive on Google gets the largest consistent number of hits...generally from the Middle East...so if I turn up with my head cut off I guess that you can assume that I succumbed to a" fatwa" issued by some third rate Islamic Cleric in a fit of yelling at me and all of the rest of the infidels out here in the world.

All of that said, I was cruising around "Site Meter" this morning and noticed a couple of hits from the same city in California--a state where the liberal residents generally avoid me like the plague or E-Coli, and when I checked the incoming link out it led me to a particularly eloquent piece I wrote back in August of 2005, entitled...

Why Does Government Fund The Arts?

After All, It's A Really, Really Bad Idea

I'm learning late in life that there has been an artist hiding inside my body. It must have been there all along because I haven’t had any surgery or an out of body experience or anything, but it’s rather surprising to me just the same.

I knew from a fairly young age that I liked music—learning to play at various ages and abilities the guitar, the piano, the trumpet and more recently taking to dragging a briefcase full of harmonicas around with me on the occasional musical evening out.

I actually like "blowin' the harp" the best because, although I have the least time and financial investment in the endeavor, I’m 200% better than I ever was on any of the other instruments. On the Harp I have the ability to improvise and “take a ride”—something I envied in a few trumpet players I knew back in high school and college.

I’ve also started working part time with water colors and acrylics and believe that I could really do some good, marketable work if I’d buckle down and stop wasting time blogging and watching the news.

My acting and theater adventures are pretty much over for the time being, not because I lacked the motivation and talent, but because of my inability to tolerate the petty politics and insufferable moronic ineptitude of the slovenly people that are currently posing as board members and individual show managers. Talk about EGOS…

Perhaps part of the problems I had with the “artsy theater crowd” here on the island was they were all flaming, bedwetting, sniveling LIBERALS and I’m such a blazing conservative LIBERTARIAN.

Just for fun I would go to rehearsals or to weekend set builds wearing my “Celebrate Diversity” T-shirt that features a dozen and a half different brands and calibers of handguns in a chart on the back.


My favorite Tee

Then again, it might have been my insistence to bringing MY radio into the theater during the week when I was working solo on the sets and listening to talk show hosts Neil Boortz, Rush Limbaugh, and Sean Hannity.

On a number of occasions people would come into the theater while I was working and out of the clear blue demand that they be allowed to change the station on MY RADIO to guess what—National Public Radio. I usually resorted to turning the radio off when someone else came in because I’d rather listen to “Nine Inch Nails” or “Tiny Tim’s Complete Greatest Hits” than listen to NPR for five minutes.

I think that it is a great idea for parents to encourage their kids to participate in the arts. Simple things like buying your kids a box of Crayola Crayons and a ream of plain office paper at a total cost of $5.00 is a great start. Buy your kid a cheep piano and make your boys learn to play like Billy Joel so they can date girls like Kristy Brinkley....er...um...any way...I think that it's great that our public schools have music class, art class, and drama classes for all ages of students and I’m completely behind the use of taxpayer dollars to pay for marching bands and class plays.

I guess what I’m saying is that I fully support government funding for the arts when it comes to ARTS EDUCATION, what burns my aching butt is other forms of government funding involving supporting unemployed, unemployable, idiots and morons that paint cows purple or put a Crucifix in a jar of human urine (brought to you with tax dollars by the National Endowment for the Arts), or guys like this that sew a dead fetus’ head on the body of a bird and display it as ART?!?!?!? WTF?

BEIJING --A Chinese artist who grafted the head of a human fetus onto the body of a bird has defended his work as art after a Swiss museum withdrew the piece from an exhibit.

"It's precisely because I respect all life that I did this," artist Xiao Yu said Tuesday. He said the bird and fetus "died because there was something wrong with them. ... I thought putting them together like this was a way for them to have another life."

Swiss museum visitor Adrien de Riedmatten, 29, filed a complaint on Monday with the district attorney of Bern, Switzerland, calling for an investigation into the piece, which was on display at the Bern Art Museum.

"I want to know where this baby comes from and if it was killed for this work," de Riedmatten said.

"We know about the problems of late-term abortions in China and we have the right to ask ourselves questions."


What was he thinking?

The work was removed, curator Bernhard Fibicher said Tuesday, because museum directors didn't want the controversy surrounding it to overshadow the rest of the "Mahjong" exhibit, which features avant-garde Chinese works from the last 25 years. The museum is planning an Aug. 22 symposium with artists, philosophers and ethics experts before deciding whether to re-exhibit the piece.

I know that I’m taking the story slightly out of context because it didn’t happen here in the United States—it happened in Switzerland—but I suspect that if the piece was offered for display in San Fransisco or NY City, the “usual suspects” and the rest of the “Artsy” crowd would somehow manage to crack open the government’s wallet and toss a few thousand dollars at the cost of the production of the show.

My question is, should the government be paying for the production, acquisition, or display of ANY ART unless the artist and the works have attained a status of bona fied historical value?

It seems quite acceptable to me for the Smithsonian Institution to attempt to acquire Vincent Van Gogh’s masterpiece “Starry Night” using government money (tax dollars) because the piece has historical significance and besides—it’s bound to go up in value.


Starry Night...

On the other hand, tossing my hard earned tax dollars at some starving asshole living in a sweltering Soho loft with his tie-dyed hairy legged girlfriend is NOT, in my considered Redneck opinion, making a good investment.

Just look at most crap they put on pedestals out in front of and hang on the walls of most public buildings. Most of this shit you’d have to pay someone to haul off after a yard sale, but the government and their “Artsy” consultants see fit to toss ridiculous sums of your and my money to support these struggling businessmen.

I have a message for all the little kids out there and their parents that think that they are raising the next Grandma Moses or Picasso—teach your offspring to read, write, and do math FIRST—then encourage them to draw, paint, etch, sing, act, sculpt, chisel, make wood chips in the floor, sew doll heads on stuffed animals, or whatever else you deem to be classified as ART.

What you don’t need to do is expect to raise an ignorant “Artsy” moron that can’t hold a job for two months waiting tables at a Pizza Hut and then expect to clamor and lobby the government to INCREASE FUNDING FOR THE ARTS.

OVER MY COLD, DEAD, DECOMPOSING BODY...

It’s just that simple...


That was a pretty darn good piece of writing right there, even if I do say so Myself...

ANY QUESTIONS???

Anybody Want Some Championship Chili?

Good...I Have It Coming Out Of My Ears...


Long story short even longer (hey I'm writing a blog and I have to have something to write about, RIGHT?)

My regular readers may remember when I got into the competition chili cooking business a couple of years ago.

Since then it's been a strange combination of death and illness and hyperventilation and finally near perfection and success, but I digress...

The first year, 2008, found me sitting on St. Simons Island with an invitation to supply the recipe and cook with my good friend and fellow Georgia Tech alumni--restaurant owner John Howton--representing his Blackwater Grill ( http://www.blackwatergrill.com/ ) restaurant in the "Rotary Red Hot Chili Cook off."

Problem was, I got sick and spent most of the month of February in the hospital, and then the week before the event one of John's Chef's got killed in an auto accident on the causeway leading from the mainland to the island.

The funeral was in Albany, GA and was the same day as the Chili event, and in light of John's need to attend and pay his respects and me limping around like a three legged dog barely able to hold my head up longer than fifteen minutes we reluctantly had to withdraw from participating.

Turns out the weather sucked and I needed the rest any way so I just stayed home and kept cooking Chili.

Then last year, in spite of having moved away from our little Island to Knoxtown, John called and re-extended the invitation to be the guest chef and bring my recipe, and we said not yes but "Hell Yes" and drove south, spending five glorious days with good SSI spring weather building a front end of our booth and putting together about fifteen gallons of chili based on Top Round Steak.

Here's a look at things on that Saturday morning as we unloaded the Chili Ingrediants first and then proceeded to build my rendition of a "Bayou Cajun Fishin' Shack":

(click on the images to enlarge if you can stand it...I'm the giant guy with the ever greying, ever balding head/pony tail in the overalls...)

That whole thing is actually built out of "blue board" foam insulation like you use on a new house, supported with lightweight wood framing and designed to be transported in a single trip in a Ford Explorer and stored in a garage or storage building in a minimal footprint.

Pretty Cool Huh?

I cooked the giant pot(s) of chili back behind in the back and the rest of the team stood behind the porch wall and reached out and served the chili tasting cups out of the door and windows giving a nice effect.

Any way, when the dust finally settled we ended up claiming "Second Prize-People's Choice" out of 31 teams, which was really equal to first prize because we came in second to the Glynn County School System Team which, as you can imagine, had everybody with a kid in school voting for them by default.



(That's John and Rhonda and Pat and Missy the Turbo Pup and I celebrating after a LooOOOG Day)

We're re-using the Bayou Chili Shack again this year but I'm going to re-paint it to look a little more colorful...sort of a Cajun meets Jamaican or Bohemian/Key West with some pastels and and other brighter colors just for fun.

I might even wear my Dreadlocks wig this year at the risk of scaring the women and small children in the process...

The thing about making competition chili is that you're torn between making something which people could sit down and eat a bowl full of, and just falling back to dumping some meat and beans into the pot and a few thousand pounds of hot peppers along with spices which will somehow get the judges attention over all of the other crap cooked that day in giant pots by a bunch of drunks who have been up all night partying.

I'm not being arrogant when I tell you that there is some crap cooked at these events that tastes like what it looks like...CRAP. How in the world people can show up and waste their time not having a clue what they are actually producing and how it will taste is beyond my spiritual and intellectual understanding.

I make a dedicated effort to cook serious, edible chili which doesn't rely on Napalm for effect and doesn't taste like raw kidney beans and Kerosene when I'm finished. I think that our recognation from the crowd last year justified my efforts and makes me want to do an even better job in 2010.

Just like last year when I based my recipe on Top round steak and home made beef/chicken stock (most people just use ground beef and canned stock), this year's "Green Butt" Chili recipe is going to be based on Boston Butts, slow cooked down and hand processed into shreds and chunks.

I just got through eating the last of this week's effort--the third cooking of the basic recipe--yielding about 3/4 gallons which took two days to put together and then sat simmering on and off another couple of days on the stove top.

The rules for the event say that you can cut and prep all of your ingredients before the morning of the cook off, so we start on Thursday making stock and slow cooking the meat, then we bring everything down to the waterfront park on Saturday morning in giant covered plastic and stainless steel tubs and light the propane fire about 8 AM in preparation for having something available for the "Judges Random Tasting" about 11 AM.

I don't see any way a person could compete in this process without owning or being associated with a restaurant or other commercial kitchen because the quantities of food and the sizes of the containers is beyond what I want to own and buy on E-Bay.

So any way, as is usual with my cooking efforts, the first time I put things together this year was the best texture and flavor so far, with the second and third pots being very edible but falling short of my semi-professional "Green Butt" standards.

I think that it's down really to adjusting the cooking time and possibly fine tuning the chili powder/spice mixture in order to keep the meat from falling apart too much giving a "mushy" mouth feel when you eat a spoon full.

I wish everyone could come over to St. Simons Island on March 6th, enjoy our beautiful little slice of the Atlantic coast, and have a taste of our chili and help raise money for charity, but in any event I know many of you will be there at least in spirit cheering us on.

There's no amount of money which can buy the opportunity to do stuff like this--last year we raised nearly $50,000--and I'm just happy to be able to contribute to the Rotary Club's efforts and have so much fun in the process.

Time to finish cleaning up the kitchen and get back to studying industrial hard chroming processes for my valve rebuilding project I guess.

Y'all have a Lovely DAY now, and somebody send up a flare if we get snowed in and you don't hear from me for a couple of days...

Snowing Potato Chips

Quick...Everybody Run To The Grocery Store...


It's too warm to stick today, but we're getting some nice little snow showers here in Eastern Tennessee on the banks of the Mighty Tennessee River.

The forecast for Thursday night and Friday/Saturday is a little more interesting, and I guess the key to what happens will be when the cold air gets here versus when the moisture arrives.

I still haven't gotten a good feel for how Knoxtown handles winter precipitation because last winter was so hot due to Global Warming and we've only had one giant cold snap that lasted a couple of weeks the first of this month and it only snowed a few inches before staying below freezing for what seemed like a month but was only two weeks on the calendar.

While living in Atlanta for 27 years I was always amazed at how people would watch the TV weather and run screaming to the stores and clammor around buying bread and milk and peanut butter and toilet paper like the world was ending if a single snow flake was predicted to fall.

People here don't seem to be quite so hysterical when it comes to frozen water falling out of the sky, but just in case I have to go now and buy toilet paper and peanut butter and bread and milk just in case...

that's what you're supposed to do isn't it?

What...Who...Where...???

Winter Induced Mental Lethargy


Oh...I don't know...where to start this morning?

As a preface, I guess that you can just consider this posting to be one completed out of duty rather than out of passion, because I guess I can consider myself to be semi-speechless...stuck here in Eastern Tennessee overwhelmed by my own insanity.

After a week of weather verging on being springlike, the past couple of days here yielded rainfall totaling over two inches, then yesterday the temperature plummeted as the rain moved out and to my amazement it was snowing about 2 PM but just lightly with no accumulation.

Snow is predicted again this weekend, so I guess I may have to turn my attention back to the beach chair sled project and see if I can get it bolted together in order to facilitate sliding down a hill if the opportunity presents itself.

The good news is that my client in the Midwest is happy with my PLC panel and reports that they will have it installed and start testing later this morning, so with some initial feedback in hand I can finish the second panel and get it in the box and shipped off to New England later this week.

In other news on the business front, I got another shipment of fancy three-way valves and a purchase order giving me the go ahead to rebuild them to some new specifications I'm developing. What started out as a simple mechanical exercise has turned into a fairly complex engineering effort which could possibly yield a nice monthly revenue stream in fiscal 2010 if things go the way I've planned.

I'm not the smartest guy on the planet, but I have this queer ability to dwell on little details, even when people tell me that it doesn't matter, and sometimes I end up tripping over something which really is important buried in the minutia which distracts all of the other so-called "experts."

I just hope that the stupid government will stay out of my way and let me do what it is that I know how to do, and not make me spend too much time filling out forms and mailing giant chunks of money I manage to earn in to some office in Nashville or Atlanta.

The Turbo Pup will probably spend this morning sitting by the kitchen door awaiting the return of her mom around lunchtime. She did very well considering she's spent so little time by herself or with just me and her sitting around all by our lonesome.

All of that said...or unsaid...time to straighten up the place and do a little reading before getting back to work I guess.

Regards Y'all...

Rainy Night In Georga All Day In Tennessee

Slow Cooking Chili With The Turbo Pup


Well folks, I spent most of the day Sunday living a bit out of character as a "stay home dad" with our little Missy The Turbo Pup looking at me and wondering where her mom was and when she was coming back.

This morning the Turbo Pup's Mom had to pack her bags for her first business trip in over two years, and then when everything was in the proper quantity or quality and in it's FAA/TSA approved position she flew south to Sarasota, Florida (on an airliner because at her age her arms get tired) for a business meeting all day tomorrow, and the Pup is facing only her third night alone without her Mom in the past three years...the first two nights being about a year ago when I was in Indianapolis on business and Pat had to go back to Pennsylvania to attend a funeral.

It's our own fault that it's such a traumatic experience for our fuzzy little girl, but we enjoy her company as much as she enjoys being in charge of the proceedings generally and the first couple of days of this week will just have to serve to train her that she can get by on her own if mom and/or dad have other things to do besides sit around the house all day.

Meanwhile, in the middle of this "Puppy Drama" I'm engrossed with the task of cooking my third batch of my soon to be world famous "Green Butt Chili" which I'm trying to get together for this years St. Simons Island Rotary Club Chili Cook off in early March.

Beating the "Second Place-Peoples' Choice" Award will be difficult but I'm forced to try again if I'm going to compete in the process.

In fact I think that I hear the kitchen timer going off so you will have to excuse me while I go poke at my pot now...

The Day Obamacare Died...

Drove My Chevy 'Cross The Levy...





Heh...

Re: No Re-Bar In Haiti?

Stealing Steeling Safety & Prosperity


A couple of things have bothered me the past couple of weeks as I have watched the TV news footage and look at newspaper photos of the damage and desperation after the earthquake down in Haiti.

I'm not talking about looking at things from the standpoint of being a God fearing Human faced with unbelievable amounts of carnage and death. What I'm talking about this morning is a subtle point which to the layman could be easily missed when in passing you see all of the scenes of death and destruction and suffering...

UNLESS you can take the time to clear you mind and see the details beyond the humanity and mortal horrors you're seeing.

Excuse me if I am wrong, but I'm pretty darn sure that I haven't seen much if any structural steel reinforcement---what we call "re-bar"--in the concrete walls and floors and ceilings in most of the photos of the collapsed buildings in Haiti be it a Cathedral or a "Palace" or a peasant's home on the side of a hill.

I guess it's just my "Forensic Injuneer" senses activating when I see something that has broke and hurt/killed someone.

In my considered Redneck opinion, I say that the people of Haiti, sitting on a known seismic fault line (which is beyond most of the indigenous population's control) and building everything out of hand mixed and hand poured concrete or cement or whatever they call their "cast and precast masonry construction methods," without secondary steel tension reinforcing, are the victims of a horrid infrastructural framework which could have done nothing but lead to eventual failure and disaster.

Any second year engineering student which has taken Statics and Dynamics and Deformable Bodies and a couple of quarters of materials science knows this to be a fact.

I ask myself..."Where do they go from here?"

I've spent a good deal of time in South Florida, the Florida Keys, the Bahamas and the Caribbean and have always been envious of the solid concrete construction methods covered with stucco and tile.

Problem is, that in practice these methods as implemented originate with the "tabby" form of primitive concrete fabrication also used here in Coastal Georgia and Florida in the 17th and 18th century by colonial settlers who, faced with limited wood resources (or in Georgia trees so huge like the giant "Live Oaks" so as to be unsuitable for being used for construction of anything smaller than a navy sailing ship keel.)

Salty water and sand and limestone in the form of ground up sea shells and bits of ancient coral reef fragments make a lovely fireplace or impromptu footing for a patio gazebo and is fairly stable when the wind blows at hurricane force.

But when the ground starts jumping up and down and shakes five feet from side to side things aren't worth a crap unless there is some steel inside, in the form of high strength rods buried somewhere there in the middle or a couple of inches in from each surface.

In the end it's all a reality of simple physics...readily understood today.

And yet it doesn't take new and improved and ever more intrusive "building codes" to drive home this grim realization...but that seems to be the only rationalization and realization and solution I keep hearing tendered by the idiot talking heads in the newspaper and TV news blurbs.

All of that said, my problem is...

What can we do about it all?

Passing a new building code won't undo the destruction which has already been done, and raising the cost of construction to meet codes like those in Atlanta or San Francisco or Knoxtown or on the gulf coast in Panama City Beach Florida today in Haiti-- a country which can't afford running water and indoor toilets--is counter-productive if implemented in a typical government induced heavy handed fashion.

Earlier this morning I wandered over to the Habitat for Humanity Website trying to see what they were up to, but all I see is platitudes and requests for money to send down to Haiti.

I'm proud to tell you that I'm not sending the government and country of Haiti one single dollar until I see some resolution to change what has been going on down there over the past TWO HUNDRED YEARS.

Encouraging poor people to live in mud stucco huts while they produce generation after Generation after GENERATION of little humans in squalor, without any hope of financial success and a lifestyle above abject poverty unless they escape to the US or get a job in major league baseball of the NBA is not in my mind a good use of my time and effort and currently limited financial resources.

Falling back on my experience as a volunteer project manager with Habitat for Humanity, I would, however, enjoy the opportunity to help design and build some sort of shelter or home or condo or abode of any/every other description which is feasable for erection in this geographic situation.

I guess it's just a little too soon to get started with the implementation of that sort of effort until the dust settles. It would be cool to come up with some idea besides government trailers like FEMA foisted on the Katrina Victims, but maybe that's the way to go.

Hey, that's it...let's put all of those used and new left over government trailers which were misused and abused three and four and five years after the hurricane onto a boat and ship them down to Haiti.

You and I have already paid for them with our tax dollars, and selling them for scrap is an inferior resolution to GIVING them to someone that actually deserves them and could put them to good use.

Works for me...

How about YOU?

Thirty Days In The Hole Overnight In The Basement

Wrestling With My Own Inadequacies...


So after ignoring PLC Panel #2 a.k.a. "Eva" for about 24 hours (Ava arrived at the job site in the midwest yesterday morning), I wandered back down into my basement about midnight last night with a new resolve to conquer my mental programming demons.

I managed to avoid fooling around with the "beach chair sled project" and the endless balsa wood model airplane project and the scale model wooden canoe debacle and, with one eye cast on Fox News and the other on the laptop monitor, nearly seven hours later here I am with substantial progress made toward having the Beta version of the hardware/software for my Horner Touch Screen PLC based blow molded PET bottle panel (HTSPLCBBPETBP for short) ready for shipment.

Right now the target ship date is MONDAY, but things could change if the last 1% of the software effort takes as long as it did on the last epic saga.

Basically the new has worn off the fun I found in my initial panel design/programming efforts, and now I just want to get this thing finished, packed in a box full of foam peanuts, and launched toward Maryland so someone will start writing me a check in the next year and one half.

Of course having started a company in 2009, spent a bunch of money on government mandated fees and licenses, the obligatory office supplies and the materials/hardware needed to actually build something to sell, but not collecting one thin dime in the process (did I mention working about 500 hours in the past three months?), my guess is that my only reward will be the added government benefit of having to file a Federal and State tax return for the Business in addition to doing taxes for me and Pat and the Turbo Pup.

Isn't that just a lovely howdy do?

Meanwhile, in other news, just as it pissed me off that Obama was younger than me when he was elected president, it thoroughly pleases me that Senator Brown graduated from high school the same year I did--1977.

Isn't it nice to see the mongrel bitch Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi's transition from Pit Bull to yapping ShitsuShiz'Su puppy this week as a result of the Senatorial Election results in Massachusetts?

Dingy Harry Reid and Dick "Turbin" Durbin and Mad Jack "Eyebrows" Murtha and Barbara Boxer can pretty much kiss their cushy government jobs goodbye in November if the current trend of public opinion continues.

All I say is that the stupid "Moderate" Republicans better keep their pandering butts in line or there could be some more shake-ups in 2012 if they give us three more years of "reaching across the isle" acting like tax and spend Dems.

Ok, I got all of that off my chest and onto my keyboard...I feel like reading the Newspaper and taking a nap now.

Y'all have a LOVELY day...

Hayseed Bohemian Rhapsody?

Burt Reynolds & Ned Beaty Beware...








"That's right there is funny...I don't care who you are..."

--Larry "The Cable Guy"


Wait...

I'm just back from YouTube...and there's More...



heh..

Excessive Scrolling Causes Heartburn

Internet Form Induced Late Night Insanity...


Does anyone but me get chafed when, in the process of filling out that final form you always have to do in order to buy something on E-Bay or Amazon or Paypal, you get down to the part where they ask for your "Country" and instead of having "USA" or "United States of 'Merica" at the top of the list you have to poke at the scroll bar and slide down the "computerized world tour" all the way from Albania to the bottom near Zimbabwe to find the name of the place where we all live?

I find that many if not most companies--even those solidly situated here in the good old US of A--today use web forms which insist on placing our country's name at the bottom of the list rather than at the top.

So what's up with that?

Add to my petty ill "formed" aggravations the realization that in the past couple of years since we moved from Georgia to the Turbo Pup Compound here on the banks of the Mighty Tennessee River I'm also forced to scroll down past Alabama and Florida and Georgia to find Tennessee on the "State" list.

Alabama and Georgia and Florida appear when you first hit that blank on the form, while Tennessee is stuck down there with Texas and the Mormons in Utah...you know?

And inevitably I manage to screw up both the country and the state at least once in my haste and have to hit the back arrow once I get to the checkout page because I don't want to send industrial electrical parts to Uganda having paid for the overnight FedEX on my Debit Card.

And now finally I have to admit the truth....because all of the above aside what really got me going on this topic this morning was that while punching in my personal information into a Web Site page selling of all things "wiper seals" for these stupid expensive valves I'm getting paid to re-build, when I got to the DOB blank on the form I had to watch 49 numbers go by...from 2010 down to 1959...before I could hit "Enter" followed by the "Tab" key.

(In a few more years it will be quicker for me if they put 1900 first and the current year last on the list I guess.)

In closing, wandering back to my initial "Country Listing in the Internet Form" complaints, on second thought I have to admit that I can sorta kinda see the rational of foreign companies or domestic companies with huge foreign market share including us (the US) at the bottom of the list, but if all you sell is parts for old Chevy Camaros and Ford Mustangs, Crotchless overalls from the "Frederics of Hooterville" Dutch Quaker Lingerie Collection, or those stupid fake fireplaces made by the Pennsylvania Amish...do you really think the Austrians or Australians are going to come clamoring to your Internet doorstep with a credit card number in hand???

Thereby causing me to have to wear out my mouse button finger scrolling around looking for the wealthiest part of North America in your list of countries???

Think about it people...

In the mean time, I have to go put a new water pump on my Camaro, then jump in the shower before donning my new overalls in time to sit in front of the bay window waiting for the UPS driver to deliver my ventless electric fireplace with a real hand made wooden cabinet.

Talk to y'all later...

PANTS ON THE GROUND?

Seen This?





Heh...

CNN & MSNBC Anchors Committing Suicide

"Tea Bagged" Out Of Office...


Generally you have to duct tape me to a chair and take the TV remote control away from me to make me watch CNN (or any other legacy product from Ted Turner's former media empire) or MSNBC.

Thus I spend about five minutes each year watching either network unless I'm stuck in a "departure lounge" at the airport or sitting in a bar/restaurant where the idiot kid bartenders think people want to watch the drivel spewing out of Anderson Cooper's retarded mouth.

Tonight I made an exception to my viewing habits and, after Scott Brown's US Senate victory in Massachusetts, I turned over to CNN see what the tone was like.

I don't believe I've seen a group of people with sadder, longer faces (and poop stains on their skirts and pants) in the past 25 years.

These people were in disbelief, and still, in the moments following the loss of what I call the "Kennedy Memorial Life Guard Chair" instead of an actual "Senate Seat," they're turning their attention to how Obama and the Obamamaniacs can continue to ram the current stinky smelly pile of crappy legislation down the voters throats or up our behinds.

It's going to be real damn interesting to see what unfolds over the next couple of weeks in the US House and Senate relating to continuing along the path of the past year or shifting gears/changing tracks in an effort to avoid a giant negative landslide in November.

If you're not paying attention or you're just hiding in the closet afraid to say anything, I hope that this will be a wake up call to all of the people out there that just wandered to the voting booth last year after hearing jingoisms and slogans and voted for what was sold to you as "Hope and Change."

Based on what I've seen so far, all I can do is "Hope for a Change" else the last few decades of my life could end up being a hellish existence in a foreign country...that country being the one I grew up in and was stolen from me and my family.

Think about it...

I Put That Sucker In A Box...

And Shipped That %$#@#er Down The Road...


If you read this blog you probably know what I'm talking about this afternoon, and if you don't you probably wouldn't care or won't understand.

Time for a half bottle of Bourbon and a Cigar, if you will excuse me...

Thanks For Reading

Another Dubious Milestone

More People I Want To Be More Like...

Hey...I Can DREAM...Can't I?


The ultimate Ladies Man:


"...don't mess with my Belovid Ramona..."

and the Ultimate salesman:



"Mr. Douglas...have I got a deal for you..."

Absolutely No Comparison

RIP Dr. King

















(We all got the short end of that political stick today I'd say...)

Obscure Musical Stuff I Know

And Things I Think That You Should Know Too...


Have I mentioned that I spent a good deal of my life with a Trumpet in my hands a long time ago?

Probably not, because I never really mastered the instrument beyond a tolerable level of competence although I played it through junior high, high school, and into college in the GT Naval ROTC band.

In fact, the first time I went to Mardi Gras in New Orleans I was actually IN Mardi Gras, trumpet in hand, as our band was invited to march and play in three major parades--Bacchus, Edymoyn and Poydras (I think)--on Canal Street and in the Superdome.

Any way, today I currently own an old Holton B flat trumpet and a cheap Chinese Fluglehorn like Chuck "Feels So Good" Mangione plays, but best intentions aside they spend most of their time in their cases these days as my lips have lost their finely tuned pucker as a result of disuse. (By disuse I mean that talking and eating don't qualify for keeping your skills using an instrument with a mouthpiece in tune...)

I also have a real Australian Didgeridoo, a genuine Hawaiian Ukulele, and a whole box full of Horner and Lee Oscar Harmonicas laying around in my office at any given time, and I can make strange noises with my armpits and wet my hands and make funny fart like sounds and wait a minute...I lost my train of thought here...

...wait...

...I've got it...

...I know, what I was saying was that I consider myself to be sort of a musical person on and off through the years, and I pride myself in carrying fairly high standards when it comes to the music I listen to because I find silence or the roar of a power tool to be vastly superior to much of the stuff put out on CD since they stopped making 8 track tapes and vinyl records.

Any way, I've been working on singing the Blues when we do our karaoke nights out the past half year and you already saw the Elvis Presley's "Tryin' To Get To You" and some other stuff I've put up here in the past.

Tonight I present for your enjoyment a man I greatly admire--Big Joe Turner --who's career spanned 60 years from the 1920's until he died in 1985.

As I understand it, Big Joe started out singing without a microphone or electricity in taverns and juke joints and a result became famous not only for his singing but for belting out his lyrics at a HUGE volume, with no amplification.

I'm a fan of his work and if you Google him or go to Best Buy and check out the blues section you'll be surprised of the volume of his work and the songs he did that other people like Elvis covered in later years.

Here's a couple of links to YouTube showing Big Joe doing what he did best at the Apollo Theater in about 1954:




...then about ten years later in 1965:





And if you haven't had enough, listen to this:



I find it to be comforting to find stuff like this recorded for posterity on YouTube...maybe some day a hundred years from now people will see me singing Big Joe's hits at the local karaoke bar...

Then again...Probably not, but that will be all...for now...

Can I Get Any More Lazy?

Professionally Frivolously Distracted...


Oh...I don't know...where to start blithering this morning...

I'm sitting here looking at the boxes and giant bags of packing peanuts laying in a pile in one corner of the shop, but I've been paralyzed the past day and one half trying to get the final details checked off the punch list on these PLC Panels, and even with hiring a software programming consultant last week I managed to go backwards on Friday and Saturday because he did the revisions in version 9.0 of the Cscape software and I was running version 8.8 on both my computers.

And did I mention that my customer asked for some changes on the second panel that required "free" software and hardware revisions and the associated delay so we could make both panels match each other since they were both still laying here in the building?

And of course as usual with the downloading and updating of new technical non-consumer software, it was generally a pain in the butt requiring me to do cartwheels and mental hand stands and back flips before getting things back to normal...a couple of extra unplanned hours when it was all said and done.

Just now when I thought I was "home free" with regard to shipping things out on Monday my Infrared Sensors seem to have lost their collective minds and so when I get through writing here I'm going to have to take a hammer and beat the crap out of everything go back through the calibration process and see if I can make the temperature readings make sense.

Apparently I'm smart, but inevitably not smart enough many times when I'm allowed to wander off in the business world and start selling things I sometimes shouldn't be allowed to get involved in I guess.

Do me a favor and hang up if I call your house and in a fit of entrepreneurial fever offer you some sort of new super duper gun or a hand grenade or a new slimming, form fitting Kevlar/Spandex/Nomex fire proof bra and/or girdle for your wife or Grandmother.

Somebody save me from myself...

PLEASE???

(did I tell you about my new Rogers' Turbo-Sonic Hydrodynamic Pulse Doppler Laser Nippleometer?)

Gun Porn

I Wish I'd Said That...

A good friend sent this to me in an E-Mail this afternoon and I couldn't resist putting it up here on the blog because it's good stuff if you are a law abiding gun owner...here goes...


Clint Smith, Director of Thunder Ranch, is part drill instructor, and part time stand-up comic (Thunder Ranch is a firearms training facility in Arizona ).

Here are a few of his observation on tactics, firearms, self-defense and life as we know it in the civilized world.

"The most important rule in a gunfight is: Always win and cheat if necessary."

"Don't forget, incoming fire has the right of way..."

"Make your attacker advance through a wall of bullets. You may get killed with your own gun, but he'll have to beat you to death with it, cause it's going to be empty."

"If you're not shootin', you should be loading'. If you're not loadin', you should be movin', and if you're not movin', someone's gonna cut your head off and put it on a stick."

"When you reload in low light encounters, don't put your flashlight in your back pocket.... If you light yourself up, you'll look like an angel or the tooth fairy...and you're gonna be one of 'em pretty soon."

"Do something. It may be wrong, but do something."

"Shoot what's available, as long as it's available, until something else becomes available."

"If you carry a gun, people will call you paranoid. That's ridiculous. If you have a gun, what in the hell do you have to be paranoid for?"

"Don't shoot fast, unless you also shoot good..."

"You can say 'stop' or 'alto' or use any other word you think will work, but I've found that a large bore muzzle pointed at someone's head is pretty much a universal language."

"You have the rest of your life to solve your problems... How long you live depends on how well you do it."

"You cannot save the planet but you may be able to save yourself and your family."

"Thunder Ranch will be here as long as you'll have us or until someone makes us go away, and either way, it will be exciting."

More Excellent Gun Wisdom.......

The purpose of fighting is to win.

There is no possible victory in defense.

The sword is more important than the shield, and skill is more important than either.

The final weapon is the brain. All else is supplemental.

1. Don't pick a fight with an old man. If he is too old to fight, he'll Just kill you
(blogger note...at this point in my life...that would be ME .)

2. If you find yourself in a fair fight, your tactics suck.

3. I carry a gun cause a cop is too heavy.

4. When seconds count, the cops are just minutes away .

5. A reporter did a human-interest piece on the Texas Rangers. The reporter recognized the Colt Model 1911 the Ranger was carrying and asked him

'Why do you carry a 45?'

The Ranger responded, 'Because they don't make a 46.'

6. An armed man will kill an unarmed man with monotonous regularity.

7. The old sheriff was attending an awards dinner when a lady commented on his wearing his sidearm. 'Sheriff, I see you have your pistol. Are you expecting trouble?'

'No ma'am. If I were expecting trouble, I would have brought my rifle.'

8. Beware of the man who only has one gun, because he probably knows how
to use it very well.

"The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him."
---G. K. Chesterton---

A people that values its privileges above its principles will soon lose both.

"Those who hammer their guns into plows will plow for those who do not.."

---Thomas Jefferson----


And I think that THOSE words pretty well sums things up here on a warm balmy (it's 53 degrees F here in my back yard) Friday afternoon...

Stuff I Don't Usually Talk About

Not Braggin'...Just Sayin'...


I'm sitting around here this morning waiting on a couple of things to happen regarding paperwork and the Internet and project stuff, and I keep glancing with one eyeball at FOX News' coverage of the hellish situation going on down in Haiti since the Earthquake.

I can't even begin to tell you how my heart goes out to the private citizens of that country, and the amount of anger I feel toward the corrupt, abusive government and government "officials" which in past and present administrations have taken advantage of and in the process neglected innocent men and women and children over the past 200 years the country has been free from the French.

The song lyrics from Janice Joplin comes to mind saying "Freedom's just another word for...Nuthin' left to lose" when it comes to thinking about Haiti.

And I have to ask where Jessi Jackson and Al Sharpton and all of our other demagogue "race war-lords" are when stuff like this happens outside of Watts or Harlem or anywhere USA and the leaders are BLACK taking advantage of other BLACKS?

The scenes of people digging through the rubble of crushed houses and apartments and hospitals and orphanages with their bare hands has brought back to me this week some uncomfortable memories of my time spent in the Philippines back in the late 1970's while that country was still under the rule of Ferdinand Marcos.

Like Haiti today, the Philippines was and is a country of vast social and economic stratification, with a very thin upper class and almost as thin middle class sitting over and around a giant group of people living in abject poverty--which when I was there meant living on less that $1000 per year.

They would offer to sell a young Midshipman in the US Navy EVERYTHING and ANYTHING for any minimal piece or part of the equivalent of $18,000 per year stipend we earned while wallowing around on a ship in Subic Bay on our summer orientation cruises.

Any way, it was Monsoon season while I was there stationed on the USS New Orleans LPH-11 Amphibious Assault Carrier (a boat load of "Squids" and "Jar Heads" and clunky helicopters) and it rained almost every day and some days it rained so much that the sides of the surrounding mountains would get so wet that they decided to slide over and cover the crude roadways carved out between the little towns and villages surrounding the Naval and Air Force Base.

They had this one big rain and mud slide and word came out for volunteers to go help look for survivors and dig people and some cars and a bus and other stuff out of the debris.

I went.

I lasted a half day.

After hitting a dead woman in the head with a shovel before excavating the rest of her body and finding a purple colored cold wet tattered kid--striking him in the arm and making a cut that didn't bleed--I had to leave the recovery effort along with several other young 19 year old men because it was obvious there were no survivors and the more experienced guys were tired of watching us suffer in an operation which was beyond our capacity to process mentally and emotionally.

They let me leave on the first truck out, and I hate to admit that I was actually glad to get out of that situation because I guess I was just not up to it all in the end.

In my considered Redneck opinion, it's real easy to sit around and watch TV and pontificate about how you would do things in any given situation, but I'm here to tell you that what's going on down there in Haiti right now would drive most average Americans mad, and I'm fairly certain that most of the idiots we've elected to our House and Senate would run screaming from the scene if they actually had to face the realities on the street there.

And still, look at the fundamental, critical, vital role that the US and the US Military is playing... and how utterly useless the United Nations is in this process, and then please consider reality rather than wish for "hope and change" the next time you go to the polling booth to vote in an election.

New Toilet Seat

I'm So Excited I Can Hardly Set Down...


But when I do...it's C O M F O R T A B L E

Dead Internet Service

Creative Juices All Backed Up...


I think that I need some "Mental Liquid Plumber" this morning as I look at the back yard weather station display showing a temperature of 19 deg F.

That would be because my synapses are starting to feel clogged up if not frozen for a variety of reasons beyond my control this week.

If you stopped by here before 8 AM you only found yesterday's ramblings because by the time I got through working on fine tuning PLC #1 (a.k.a. Ava) I couldn't get to the Internet to write anything.

Comcast apparently was performing maintenance and had a "system outage" allowing me to still have cable TV so I could watch Food Network reruns with Alton Brown--at the same time preventing me from accessing the www since some time around 3 AM until just now.

I'm probably only one of two people over the age of 45 in Knoxtown that regularly gets pissed off when my Internet provider decides to cut a wire or fiber optic cable in the wee hours of the morning...of course all of the perverts and college students are inconvenienced because they have to log off and stop looking at photos of naked strangers and Twittering about what they ate for dinner or the hot babe/guy that made eye contact with them walking down the street.

Then of course after the outage I had to perform my usual ritual of bowing down to the Technology Voodoo Gods, scurrying around the house with a painted face, splashing goat's blood on random surfaces with a petrified Rooster's foot & chanting gibberish while rebooting the server PC and two laptops and two VoIP boxes AND the wireless router to get things back up and running.

In the mean time the lost couple of hours of Internet time not only stopped my blogging, but also ended some work I was doing putting together the owner's manuals for the PLC's (a.k.a. sisters Ava and Eva.)

As you probably know, very few companies actually send you an owner's manual these days when they sell you anything made from China or Silicon Valley no matter whether it cost $9.99 plus shipping and handling or a months salary...they make you go online and spend your money on paper and printer ink if you want a real hard copy of the instructions rather than clicking on the "Help" button and wading through a list of unrelated topics a couple of miles long.

So now it's time to try to chase my programming consultant down on the telephone and get back to downloading some stuff for Ava and Eva's documentation and other than that...

y'all have a FANDAMTABULOUS day...

If you will...

Crap What Pisses Me Off

I've had Better Days...


Sometimes on this blog I enjoy indulging myself by screaming and ranting and raving and yelling and uttering explicatives like %$#@%$#@ and *$&# and bluuuuuuuuuuaaaaaaaahhhhhh youuuuuuuuuuaaaaaaah to my heart's content.

Then there's day's like yesterday when I'm angry and upset and generally out of sorts but I prefer to keep my discontent to myself and suffer in silence.

Yesterday was most definitely one of those days.

Still, having suffered a couple of month long visits to the hospital in the past couple of years and disappearing from the Internet as a result, and having developed a semi-regular following, and not wanting to appear to be a "drama queen/king", I pretty much try to put something up here every day just to try to make a few people laugh and let the balance of the population that find me more annoying than funny know that I'm still alive and well and still breathing.

All of that said, just know that it seems that when I do as little as I manage to do all day for as many days as I do or don't do it, it's sometimes hard to remain upbeat when I don't accomplish anything at all for large periods of time.

I often pride myself in and with my sloven-ness and devil may care attitude toward life, but in then end I'd like to be remembered for having carried my fair share of the freight around here...and I'm afraid I might be a wee bit short of that task when looking at the black ink---falling into the red column of the ledger books if I don't straighten up here shortly.

I beg of you to please excuse my terse, tense tone if and when I let it leak out, and await the day when the warm balmy winds & salty breezes awaken the lofty, carefree wisps of my spirit allowing the eruption of steaming, stinky BS which would otherwise normally tumble out of my mind...

...through my fingertips...

...across my computer keyboard...

on to your expensive finger print smudged monitor for your enjoyment and/or dismay.

(did I just write that?)


Then...in the words of "Emily Latella"...

... never mind...

It's A L I V E !!!

Still Stupid, But Better Looking Than The First Model...











And don't do anything to make me cause it to "probe" your temperature because it knows several places to look...

Yawnnnnnnnn

Somebody Poke Me With A Pointy Stick...


I guess that about says it all this morning. I have a serious case of lethargy complicated by sunlight deprivation.

Years ago when things got like this I just started looking at airfares to the Florida Keys or Jamaica.

Today I guess I have no choice but to put on a sweatshirt, go down to the shop, and turn up the heater and go to work...

...trying to avoid the unfinished sled on one workbench and concentrate on the nearly finished PLC panel on the other.

Y'all have a LOVELY day...if you will...

Better Send Over The Guys With The White Coats And The Net

My "Transformer" Beach Chair...


So here I am, sitting around today looking at the heat wave we have going on outside--it's up in the HIGH 20's right now on the other side of my front door--and it occurred to me that rather than fighting the inevitable weather conditions I should just go with the flow and come up with some way to enjoy the coming twenty couple of feet of snow we're going to get between now and April.

Then I started looking around for some sort of plans for a cool sled that I could build to replace the three sleds that burned up when my house burned down in 2001.

The problem I have with most sleds is that I am 6'-3" tall and now weigh about 240 to 250 pounds, depending on how much Chili and Ribs and Pizza and Liquor have been through the house in the past week.

And most commercial sleds, at least the ones you can find at Ace hardware and Toys-R-Us and the other local home improvement stores, are designed for children and midgets and women that do underwear and weight loss "system" commercials that could ride down a snow covered hill on a potato chip or a sheet of heavy duty aluminum foil.

I, on the other hand, want and NEED a real sled--a MANLY SLED--something that will take my bulk and is actually able to handle different kinds of snow and ice conditions and most of all can actually turn a little so I can avoid busting my brains out against the local oak tree or wedging myself under a Volvo SUV going 30 MPH.

Then I found this website selling this sled and I was in LOVE instantly...

Problem is, I can't really justify spending $345 plus freight for something I'm pretty sure won't work on the beach in July.

And since I'm resolute that we won't be living anywhere more than a couple miles from the beach as soon as possible i.e. NEXT WINTER I won't really need a sled unless I open a Ruby Tuesdays or Applebees Restaurant and want to hang it from the wall or ceiling in the bar area for very long.

Then I said to myself...I says...

"Virgil, you're an Injuneer, Right?"

"And you've got that new high tech workshop with all of those power tools from your previous home and investment property renovation work, Right?"

"And you, being a pack rat at heart, also have a bunch of scrap stuff--metal and lumber and pieces of old cars and washing machines--laying around your property in various boxes and bins and piles just waiting for your next invention to come along, Right?"

So...

"Why not B U I L D your own version of the ultimate adult sled, and use familiar, surplus parts and pieces to accomplish your plan."

Then instead of answering myself directly by talking to myself, I went to work this afternoon on the project, and here's a look at what's currently happening in my basement...with only a couple of hours of thought and a little bit of grinding and drilling and otherwise making sharp metal chips.

I took an old used beach chair like this (this one is still new):



And the reflector off of a cheap old Home Depot shop light that had crapped out last year, then I cut everything apart and now I'm in the final stages of the AutoCAD drawings for a suspension and steering mechanism to make this haul my lumbering Butt down my front yard or the side streets in the neighborhood the next time we get any significant frozen precipitation:





The front handles you see there will ultimately allow me to hold on for dear life and once I cut the "skis" apart into two sets in theory I'll be able to steer the silly thing around barking dogs and police cars and maybe I can get my own reality show or at least make it onto FOX news in the process.

More photos and Autopsy results to follow later...

Wish me luck

Sittin' Around Doin' Nuthin'

I Got A Bad Case Of Winter Malaise...


Well, it's the tenth day of December, 2010 here on the calendar at the Turbo Pup Compound on the banks of the Mighty Tennessee River, and I'm pretty sure that the temperature hasn't made it above freezing yet this year.

Looking at the wireless display on the backyard weather station, it's 19 outside right now as I write...an improvement of 5 or 6 degrees over the past half dozen overnight lows.

I don't care who you are, but if you live more than a few inches south of the Mason Dixon line that's cold weather by most standards.

Since I'm actually working sorta-kinda part time these days I've indulged myself in doing ABSOLUTELY nothing so far this weekend if you don't count blogging and otherwise fooling around on the computer...

...wait a minute, I did work on a project spreadsheet and write a couple of invoices yesterday in anticipation of FINALLY shipping these stupid PLC panels out of my basement this week.

I know that starting a business requires an investment in time and money, but if I actually tracked the hours I have invested in getting the Alpha and Beta versions of this Touch Screen PLC based Infared Temperature Sensor Panel (TSPLCITSP for short) put together and fine tuned I made something like $0.025999 per hour.

The good news is that if they work as advertised our customer is threatening us with needing another DOZEN panels this year, and phase Two of our efforts is a new, even bigger and complex custom panel designed to monitor the performance and energy usage on an air dryer system which will also be utilized in multiple locations once the concept is proven.

Continuing in my description of my slovenly-ness, I did manage to take the time to watch the Georgia Tech Basketball Team (previously ranked #17 in the country in spite of losing to UGA last week) solidly BEAT the Duke Blue Devils (formerly ranked NUMBER FIVE in the country) yesterday.

Oh...and I made a new kind of White Pizza with a real home made white sauce for dinner that came out pretty good.

I also trimmed my nose hair and cut a few extra inches off a couple of toe nails while wallowing around in the bed reading the newspaper and looking at junk mail and sales ads did most of the laundry and sharpened my other domestic skills in anticipation of resuming my responsibilities of being a "kept man" as Patricia re-enters the workforce, in the process earning about five times more than I made last year as a professional beach bum and part time brain surgeon, rocket scientist, political commenter, and forensic injuneer.

Time now I guess to grab a early morning nap before resuming my efforts in doing nothing all day (possibly interrupted with some work finishing the control panels...)

Regards Y'all...

Happy 75th Birthday Elvis

Sorry I'm A Day Late...


Up or down, in or out, here's a look at "The King" in his prime in 1968:




...RIP Mr. Presley

I Bought A SNOW SHOVEL?

Just Shoot Me I Guess...


I went out yesterday and did something I SWORE that I'd NEVER, ever, Ever, EVER do no matter what, but early in the process of spending our second winter owning a house in a city at the northernmost latitude I've ever lived in I felt compelled to do it.

I came home from Home Depot with two bags of sand in the trunk and a Snow Shovel laying in the floor of the back seat.

The sand was purchased to add weight to the ridiculously light back end of our
Chrysler 300 (which is also rear wheel drive,) but I felt better when I rationalized that the sand will do double duty in June this spring when things finally thaw out because we can add it to the beach area in the Turbo Pup Pool Compound.

The bad news was that they were out of their $8.00 per bag "Ice Melt" stuff, some of which I had used earlier on our driveway in order to rescue the car from it's parking place in the grass.

I'm resolute that as soon as they get another shipment anywhere in Knoxtown (Lowes, Home depot, and the grocers were all out of it I heard) I'm going to buy an entire tractor trailer load pick up a few hundred pounds of the stuff in anticipation of needing it to be able to get to the grocery store to buy bread, peanut butter, and toilet paper later this month.

(I wonder how the left over stuff would taste on the rim of a Margarita glass...Roy?)

And does anyone but me think that I'm too old to be involuntarily learning this "Winterization Process", and thereby see a basic problem with this picture in general?

Let me explain.

Here you have a guy (that would be me) which spent most of the first 42 years of his life waiting to go on vacation...where?

Not sitting around in snow in Ski Apparel.

Not sitting in front of a slot machine in Las Vegas or Atlantic City.

Not sitting around or playing golf in the Desert in Arizona or Southern California.

Try sitting around with his feet in the sand, hand wrapped around a cold adult beverage, looking at the OCEAN.

Then FINALLY, realizing a lifetime of dreaming, I was fortunate enough to be able to give up just Vacationing and spend most of the next SEVEN years of my life actually LIVING on or near the beach on the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean.

Fast forward to TODAY, AND I find myself not only not sitting in the sand...but ACTUALLY BUYING sand and hauling it around in my car trunk, and BUYING giant shovels which are good for nothing but shoveling WATER...

FROZEN water.

Problem is...I don't want to SHOVEL W A T E R.

I want to wade in and lay in and swim in water.

L I Q U I D Water, preferably in it's WARMER forms.

That said, all I want to know is...

Who's idea was this Frozen CRAP any way?

Two People = SIX Phone Lines???

A Tale of Two Three Cities...


Man I have to tell you, I'm worn out mentally and now physically because in the middle of all of the other stuff going on around here I just got through dragging a heavy duty 100' extension cord and my hammer drill with a 15" long concrete bit on it around two sides of my house in the snow and ice.

"Why would you be doing THAT...Mr. Rogers?" most sane people might inquire?

Because the idiots at AT&T jerked us around since Wednesday waiting for them to send a so-called "technician" out to install Pat's new business phone line, and after the 8 AM appointment deadline passed we found that all they really needed to do was throw a switch at NASA or in Washington DC or maybe at the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia and we'd have a dial tone.

Earlier this morning I walked outside with an old trimline phone in my hand, plugged it into the "network interface", and found that they'd turned the stupid thing on quite by accident.

So any way, all complaining about Utility companies aside, did I mention that with Pat's new company supplied land line and cell phone that we have...

Get ready...

SIX TELEPHONE LINES FOR TWO PEOPLE (and ONE TURBO PUP who doesn't have thumbs and doesn't dial the phone very often.)

I know, I know I KNOW...maybe an explanation is in order so I can get all of this straight myself, and in the process see if I can rationalize paring things down a little because I think that there's an itty bitty chance that we're spending WayyyyYYYY too much money taking unsolicited offers of insurance and debt consolidation and God knows what else these days on all of these communication devices.

First of all there's MY cell phone, something I've had in various incarnations since about 1990 before every man woman and infant on the entire planet had one and felt the need to walk and drive around blabbing all day.

It currently has our old home number from Vinings, Georgia ported over to it so bill collectors people we knew in the Atlanta area could find us when we moved to St. Simons. It's a 404 area code which constantly confuses people when they call and I say I live in Knoxville.

Then there is our home phone, which is actually a Vonage VOiP phone and phone number that we got when we lived on St. Simons. The wierd thing was that while south Georgia has a 912 area code, that it wasn't available on VOiP so Vonage gave us another 404 Area Code. In the process we eliminated AT&T/Bell South from our lives in regard to land lines and telecommunications as of 2003.

Next there's Pat's cell phone, which has her old Atlanta era cell phone number which we never changed as we moved from city to city and from Bellsouth/Cingular to T-Mobile and now to Verizon.

Confused yet?

Well, I actually am, because with speed dial, since I never actually DIAL any of our numbers I can only remember one of them most of the time without bursting a blood vessel thinking about it.

Next comes along my new company, and in the interest of trying to look like a real business enterprise I decided that it would be nice if when my customers called me here in Knoxville they actually called a Knoxville number, and when my suppliers here in town called they didn't have to call long distances soooooo...

Along comes phone number number FOUR.

We bounced along quite comfortably from October to this week running around the house playing hide and seek with the EIGHT WIRELESS HANDSETS answering FOUR TELEPHONE NUMBERS...

looking in sofa cushions and under the bed sheets and in other out of the way places when something started making noise or we actually wanted to of all things place a phone call.

For some reason there must be a law or a rule or something that says that no matter how many phones you have there is never one closer than 25 feet through at least two pieces of Sheetrock from you when it rings or you want to call and talk to someone or order Pizza.

All of that rambling aside, it brings us to this week when Pat finished her paper work and the last hour when I went out and drilled a hole through 12" of brick and concrete block and 2x4's and poked a wire through the wall (the old wiring was 46 years old and I didn't want to fool with making it work.)

So now we have our third dial tone in the building, the first associated with a "land line" in almost seven years, and with this week's experience I can tell you that the legacy phone companies' customer service is still operating in a "Monopoly mentality" and it's no wonder people continue to eliminate "Ma Bell" or whatever incarnation they call themselves from their lives.

And then finally, with the arrival of the package containing the new Cell phone any day now, I'm fairly certain that I'm going to literally DROWN in A SEA OF DIAL TONES AND DIFFERENT RINGS.

Six phone lines and ten phones.

I must be out of my freaking mind.

Would somebody PLEASE wrap a phone cord around my neck and put me out of my suffering???

And don't write, CALL...operators are standing by....

Frozen Out Of My Own Driveway

Mother Nature Laughs At Global Warming Zombies...


So we sat around most of the day yesterday waiting on the predicted "winter weather" to arrive and all it managed to do until about 3 PM was spit and sputter and produce maybe a dozen snowflakes in my yard.

Then I walked outside about 3:05 and it was sleeting lightly as the temperature at the back yard weather station rose toward freezing, then things turned to snow shortly thereafter and the temperature started to slide back south on the thermometer.

Then of course the inevitable happened and I managed to break the only #8-32 tap available in the building which I was using to cut threads in some holes in the steel back plate of the latest PLC control panel, so we ran out the door to the bank and Home Depot and on the way home stopped at our local watering hole for some drinks, fried green tomatoes, and "naked" chicken wings for dinner.

Things kept going down hill but since they had closed schools early and a bunch of people had already left work we ended up arrogantly sitting around talking to our friend "Barber Bob" (who has actually trimmed my hair a little twice in the past two years.

Then we headed home and things were fine on Kingston Pike but the streets in our neighborhood were getting a little slick and when we got to our driveway we discovered that it was impossible to make it up past about the half way point.

I tried it forward.

I tried it backward.

I tried driving with two wheels on the grass but without positraction all I ended up doing was making a wound on the grass I'll have to repair when things finally thaw out--probably in March.

So the good news is that we don't have to worry about sliding down the driveway if we have to go anywhere in the next week, but the bad news is our car is parked off the street in the edge of my front yard as a target for the asshead vandals to put a cinder block through the windshield or beat with a baseball bat.

OK, we really don't have that kind of crap going on here in this area of West Knox but still I hate leaving things to temptation because in my experience many people generally lose their mind when it snows and the aforementioned kids will be out of school, unsupervised, and some won't be able to resist getting out and risking life and limb driving around doing nothing (except denting my fenders.)

...more...

Good God, I just re-read what I just wrote and realized I've officially become an old curmudgeon...without even trying.

That said...everybody better not act up...don't make me come over and beat you with my walker...