I Think That I'm Somewhere In Hawaii

But I Thought It Was South Alabama...


Well, we made it over to Ozark early yesterday morning with Missy the Turbo Pup in tow, and then we started realizing the obvious lessons that traveling with an animal teaches it's new pupils.

Lesson #1: Until you can check into your "pet friendly" hotel room, you will stay in your car with your AC running to avoid the ambient 90+ degree heat and a possible visit from the lunatics people at PETA or the ASPCA.

Lesson #2: You will also EAT breakfast in your car (see lesson #1).

Lesson #3: You cannot sneak in Wal Mart through the garden section with the aforementioned Turbo Pup because Wal Mart is NOT "Pet Friendly."

Thankfully I was able to sweet talk our front desk clerk at our "pet friendly" hotel into expediting the cleaning of our assigned room while we lounged at the "pet friendly" hotel's swimming pool for a little over an hour, and everyone (Pat, myself, and Missy the Turbo Pup) was basking the in air conditioned comfort of our room by 12:15 PM.

By the time we arrived at the hotel I had already received two shipments from Hawaii. The girls at the front desk were impressed.

The first package from Hawaiian Lei Company was clearly marked "flowers" and had instructions for special handling, and inside was one of these, an Orchid & Carnation "Double" Lei:

The second Lei was something called a "Kukui Nut & Mock Orange" Lei that looks like this:

(That one I bought for me to wear tonight)

Needless to say that Pat was surprised and impressed, even though they let the cat out of the bag a little early and I wasn't going to tell her until time to get dressed tonight.

Finally, in my attempt to adhere to dressing in Hawaiian attire for or upcoming celebration, the second package was from the Mele Ukulele Store and it contained one of these:

That's a little student model Soprano Ukulele--something I've thought about acquiring for several years now. It will go well with my ever growing collection of musical instruments.

So any way, with my new Hawaiian shirt on my torso, my straw hat on my head, my Kukui Nut Lei around my neck, and my shorts and flip flops adorning the lower half of my suntanned body, Pat and I hope to be be the best dressed couple at tonight's festivities.

In the mean time, I'll be skipping the golf tournament to spend yet another day lounging by the pool and tending to Missy the Turbo Pup's latest whims.

Wish me luck

Aloha

Pergatory

Internet & Otherwise...


This week's trip thus far has featured a broken home Air Conditioner and slow Internet service.

We trade slow Internet today for no Internet tonight, before moving on to a hotel for a couple of days of free high speed connection.

My fingers can hardly wait...

Ward Churchill Finally Relegated To History

Two Years Too Late...


After starting an investigation in the summer of 2005, last night the University of Colorado Boulder finally decided to remove the human turd, Ward "Little Eichmann's" Chuchill, from their payroll.

BOULDER – The University of Colorado Board of Regents voted to fire Ward Churchill on Tuesday evening, prompting the promise of a lawsuit from the embattled professor.

The Board of Regents passed a motion to accept the recommendation from CU President Hank Brown to fire Churchill from his position in the Ethnic Studies department.The measure passed with an 8 to 1 vote.

The vote was made just after 5:30 p.m. and Cindy Carlisle was the dissenting vote. The move came after academic committees found in 2006 that Churchill was guilty of academic misconduct, including plagiarism.

The board's decision came more than an hour after it was initially expected. It is unclear what caused the delay.

Immediately after the decision was announced people in the crowd booed and some swore at the board members.Churchill and his supporters then participated in a Native American ceremony outside of the building."

I am going nowhere," said Churchill. "This is not about break, this is not about bend, this is not about compromise."

This whole saga has been and probably will continue to be a sad but very public example of the level to which our colleges and universities have sunk over the past fifty years.

Many of the faculty offices and desks, in my opinion, are populated by a group of highly educated misfits that in another century would be relegated to a freaking circus sideshow tent.

Now they are given six figure salaries and something called TENURE.

Tenure, many times, is just another word for "job security for a incompetent bullshit artist", in my considered Redneck opinion.

I'd love to go back to school before I die and get a Masters or another undergrad degree from somewhere famous like Harvard or MIT, but in the back of my mind I know that the political climate on most campuses and my own political views would prevent me from getting a fair shake in the grade department.

It was, after all, not easy going in the 1970's and 1980's when academic liberal bias was still in the closet and everyone believed everything that Walter Cronkrite said on the evening news.

I KNEW That This Was Coming

Give Me Some Pork Fat, A Dozen Eggs, And A Glass Of Pure Cane Sugar...


I've been saying this for at LEAST thirty years, and my genius insight is proving to be true as
"scientists" have determined that "Diet Soft Drinks" can be linked to Cardiovascular health risks.

MONDAY, July 23 (HealthDay News) -- Drinking more than one soda a day -- even if it's the sugar-free diet kind -- is associated with an increased incidence of metabolic syndrome, a cluster of risk factors linked to the development of diabetes and cardiovascular disease, a study finds.

The link to diet soda found in the study was "striking" but not entirely a surprise, said Dr. Ramachandran Vasan, study senior author and professor of medicine at Boston University School of Medicine. There had been some hints of it in earlier studies, he said.
"But this is the first study to show the association in a prospective fashion and in a large population," Vasan said.

....

A variety of explanations, none proven, have been proposed for the link between diet soft drink consumption and metabolic syndrome, Vasan said. That association was evident even when the researchers accounted for other factors, such as levels of saturated fat and fiber in the diet, total calorie intake, smoking and physical activity.

One theory is that the high sweetness of all soft drinks makes a person more prone to eat sugary, fattening foods. Another is that the caramel content of soft drinks promotes metabolic changes that lead to insulin resistance. "These are hotly debated by nutritional experts," Vasan said.

You see, here's the deal with all of this food hysteria and dietary BS we have in the world today.

I say that if you sit at a desk all day and then come home and vegetate on the sofa watching Entertainment Tonight and playing Playstation games, and all you eat is McDonald's and pre-processed "cheese food" products in brightly colored packaging, you're gonna spend most of you life as a slovenly lardass.

It's just that simple.

Drinking a few diet Cokes won't make a damn bit of difference.

The same goes for your kids and your dog and cat.

The human body was designed to hunt and fish and survive on a sometimes pretty crappy diet, living and sleeping under stressful conditions back before global warming melted all of the Glaciers, and sitting in air conditioned comfort and walking from the sofa to the garage and from the car to the front door of Sears & Roebuck every weekend just doesn't get it when it comes to keeping the amazing machine that God gave us all in good working condition.

I've eaten eggs my entire life, in mass quantities, even when the "scientists" and "medical experts" said that eggs were going to kill me.

I have over two pounds of butter in my fridge and freezer right now.

When I cook bacon, I generally cook something using bacon grease within 24 hours.

I have at least fifty pounds of baby back pork ribs, a Boston pork butt, and beef tenderloin in my freezer right now, along with a few dozen pounds of shrimp, chicken, and crab.

As I've said so many times before, I KNOW that I'm eventually going to die of SOMETHING, and I want to CHOOSE my poison rather than letting everyone walk by my coffin and utter the words...

"Don't he look good?"

My funeral will be closed casket.

(Actually I'll be cremated.)

More Computer Crap

Outsmarting Myself...


Well, I'm up early this morning, trying to finish up some of my nerdy design work in anticipation of being out of town for most of a week, and to my horror I'm finding some problems with file corruption in some of my software.

I don't know if it is systemic or related to my recent bullshit spyware/adware/malware event, and I'm still checking things looking for problems--but a week or more of design work could be lost unless I can find clean copies of the spreadsheets.

The bad news is that I've run my Norton 360 software twice a day for the past month or so and the backup feature has apparently reduced everything to the same "gobbly-gook status" in the process.

Am I a "super genius" or what???

I'm so angry I'm ready to throw the computer out into the parking lot and start using an abacus and a big fat first grade pencil again.


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New House

Check It Out...


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I Want The Whole Kit & Kaboodle

Comcast Apparently Sucks...


OK, I've already said that we're moving, right?

In spite of risking making my head explode, I'm also traveling to Alabama on Wednesday to visit my mother, AND attend my 30th high school reunion next weekend, and that means that nothing can be done toward packing and getting ready to move until we return to our little island on the 29th--TWO or THREE days before the movers back a truck up to our front door.

Since we were paying to live here, I made Pat wait until yesterday to start tearing the place up and putting things into boxes. We had our final dinner party Thursday night and entertained out of town guests until noon Saturday and the place looked great if I do say so myself--even though we only finished decorating and furnishing it over the past three months or so.

Any way, yesterday morning I decided to tell my utility companies about our decision, and first on my list was our cable and Internet provider, Comcast.

I logged on to their website and rummaged around to find the section of customer non-service relating to moving service addresses and was merrily typing in our new address information (Alabama Street...ironically) and when I got the to part where I was supposed to tell them when to connect the new service and disconnect the old service, I ended up sitting in stunned silence for a while.

You see, Comcast, in their infinite wisdom, requires that you provide them a five day window between the date of disconnection of your old service and the connection of your new service.

Five Days?

FIVE DAYS?

FIVE DAYS?

I screwed around for another ten minutes or so, then just logged off and abandoned my order request in disgust.

Does Comcast seriously believe that people are willing to go FIVE DAYS without cable TV?

That I can handle, but FIVE DAYS without Internet service will cause me to have some kind of a conniption fit and cripple Pat's business activities for the duration since she telecommutes from home.

Five days...

Boy oh boy, the gene pool available for doing cable installation must be infinitesimally small these days to need a five day window of time because the new house is already wired for cable and as far as I know all the guy with the tool belt has to do is show up and twist a couple of coax connectors together to get things rolling.

Five DAYS...

Here's what I'm going to do later today in an attempt to remedy this situation. I'm going to call Comcast and attempt to speak with a human in English, then I'm going to request that they establish an entirely new Cable/Internet account under my name at the new address and leave the old account active in our condo.

Then I'm going to require the rocket scientists customer nonservice department to activate the new account on the appropriate day while deactivating the old account at the same time.

Seems simple enough to me, how about you?

THEN, if they still insist on making us wait and endure a five day window without service, I'll be calling the Bellsouth DSL people and the Satellite TV people and telling Comcast to kiss my grits.

Is it just ME...or WHAT?

ok, Time to get dressed and head over to Lowes to buy more lumber now.

Y'all have a nice day...

Packing My Life Away

Arrrrrrggggghhhhhh...


I HATE moving.

I'm too cheep to pay the movers to pack my stuff, plus it's just creepy to me to have someone handling all of my stuff in the first place.

I wish I had a transporter like they had on Star Trek so that we could just "beam" all of our stuff over to the new house in one pile on the driveway.

Better yet, it would be even cooler if you could tag each piece with GPS coordinates and beam it from where it sits in your old place over to the new place, in it's final location.

Of course Pat would probably beam all my stuff into the garage or something. That would be fair reprisal for me beaming all her "nicknacks and paddywhacks"--you know...glass statues and vases and crap girls keep laying around on shelves and in lighted glass cabinets--into the back yard or onto the sun porch.

Now where's my roll of tape and black magic marker...


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