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The Little Jaunty Players
– Proudly Present –
– From The Computerniks at Jaunty Central –
– A Pekl Of Such Mishegoss –
– You Should Know From Nothing –
It’s Two Sentences From A Book!
“Say “Mazel tov! to a surgeon, dentist, etc., after the successful completion of a difficult operation. This congratulates him on his skill in performing what you now admit you knew was a risky business.”
Such a problem you should never have.
Friends,
Last weekend, the engine in my Tiny Racecar decided to give up on this whole starting and running thing about 150 miles away from my house. This earned it a trip on a flatbed truck to the local dealer there, and its keys dropped in a lock box. It also earned me the chance to rent an even smaller car—a 3-door Toyota Yaris, known to the rest of the world as a Toyota Aygo.
I can understand why they’d rename the car in the states, after so many unfortunate car names like Aspire and Charade, they must have thought that they’d be mocked for the aspirational “I go.” Oh, and then there’s this…
Enjoy the go, people.
– bob
UPDATE: The comment system doesn’t seem to be working at the moment. If you have left a comment, please be patient while I try to figure out what the problem is. Thanks.
UPDATE II: Word from the dealer is that the fuel pump was kaput. Happened kind of suddenly, didn’t it? Does this kind of thing actually happen without warning? I wouldn’t have thought so…
Friends,
Yesterday, NASA and JPL announced that the Kepler space telescope had discovered five planets outside of our solar system. This is good news if you took JPL in your Fantasy Number of Planets league and good news for folks already tired of this year’s cold weather. According to astronomers, the planets range in temperature between 2,200 and 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit. No more shoveling the driveway!
Sure, the telescope’s mission is to find planets that we can move to when things get too dicey here (I’m moving to the planet where playing Hip Hop or rap is a capital crime), and the announcement seems a bit apologetic for finding screaming hot planets Kepler 4b through 8b first, but I’m thrilled by the news. It’s the first step in the “too hot, too cold, just right” triumvirate, and at the rate they’re going, we’ll be moving off this rock by 2012.
Well, you’ll be moving off this rock. Right?
– bob
Friends,
We here at the vast Jaunty Little Media Empire wish you a happy, healthy, and joyous New Year. We’re planning interesting things for the new year while continuing to provide the same middling level of mild entertainments that you’ve come to expect from this hot mess. That’s our our promise to you! (which you can take to the bank, once it has emerged from bankruptcy protection. – ed)
Your very best pal in the whole wide world, bar none,
– bob
Friends,
I haven’t been paying attention to the news over the last few days, but returned to learn of 23-year old Nigerian national Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s attempt to blow up a Northwest Airlines plane over Christmas
Heckuva job, Janet.
– bob
Friends,
As you know, clams do not have hands, but our very own Idyllwild Weather Clam manages to get you the latest forecasts nearly everyday. Typing. Without hands.
We presume here in the offices at Jaunty Central that the folks at the paper of record actually do have hands, but that didn’t really help them yesterday:
It is cold and rainy this morning. It ha hailed a bit in twn adn looks as if some of th ehigher areas received some snow. Today, it is predicted to be cloudy with scattered showers and highs in the low 50s. Tonight is predicted to be partly cloudy with lows in the low 20s.
Bless their hearts.
– bob
Friends,
There was 50 feet of visibility for my drive off the hill this morning. Mme. Idyllwild Weather Clam did not predict this, but she didn’t know I’d have to leave even earlier than usual. And you know what happens when you throw a curve ball to a mollusk.
– bob
Friends,
Since GM can’t find a real, funded buyer for Saab, they’ve decided to fold the brand known best for its weirdness eccentricities. Its U.S. consumer base seemed to me to be centered in Vermont consisting largely of retired professors wearing tweed sportcoats with suede elbow patches. The pipe-smoking intelligentsia seems to have passed, or at least passed the flame to Subaru nowadays. Here’s the grim truth from our friends at The Truth About Cars…
The company’s U.S. high was 48,181 in 1986. In 2009 YTD, Saab sold 7,812 cars in the US.
So long, Swedish weirdos. We hardly knew ye.
– bob
Friends,
I went to a town hall meeting with our state assemblyman Brian Nestande last night in the Idyllwild School gymnasium. Yeah, he’s a Republican, but this is a pretty Republican town in a pretty Republican district (warning: PDF link. Scroll down to the 64th. Registration was 41.99% as of last May. – ed). Clearly, on his tour of the district he’s been really pounded on by other groups and it showed in his deference to the current assembly leadership. “I don’t want to get into the politics…” he said often while making a point about the broken politics in the legislature. Budgets? They’re terrible and likely to get worse. Legislative analyst projections of revenue? Wrong and increasingly wrong over the last few cycles. He’s recently been selected by his caucus to sit on the budget committee, which is fine (chief of staff for Sonny Bono a decade ago apparently is enough qualification), but his grasp of the details was pretty thin, I thought.
You’d think it would be a friendly crowd and they were pretty respectful on the whole. Questions asked, with petitioners trying to display their own level of wonkery, and questions answered. Teacher salaries, tax burdens, business stimulation, state employee compensation levels.
The standard bits were trotted out and everybody nodded and hummed and listened with finger on chin. The meeting was informative, but pretty staid and was starting to go long. Then the answer without a question came from our host. I’m going to paraphrase because my notes are crap…
“What bothers me about the global warming legislation in the state is that it creates a demand for green technologies. Wind and solar… But it creates the demand from foreign sources. The legislation won’t allow industries to build the equipment here in the state because of the emissions, but it sets up the demand. We’ll have to buy wind and solar from China or Tennessee or Alabama because they don’t have these rules, so we are going to demand these things and spend the money and send that money out of the state. I don’t get it.”
I’d never thought of this problem before, but it seems so obvious, especially in the context of building up the tax base to fund this budget of ours. The budget that, in the words of the assemblyman, “is diverging, between expenditures and revenue, and is getting worse.”
The, um, “green economy” is starting off famously, don’t you think? Here’s your unintended consequence.
– bob
P.S. The question that engendered the most crowd reaction was the complaint that the CalTrans snowplows were dumping snow in people’s driveways. Can’t something be done? Everybody was positively animated. Top issues, people!
Friends,
Now that the Riverside Press-Enterprise is outsourcing more and more of its news-gathering capabilities, we turn to City News Service for this breaking news bulletin (from yesterday. -ed):
“A 19-year-old reputed gang member who allegedly used a machete to rob a pizza deliveryman in Desert Hot Springs was free on bail today.
I hope they took Sparky’s big butter knife away when they let him out. We’ll pass over the middle of the story to see exactly what motivated the lad to audition for Tiger’s spot in the next Gilette commercial…
“Investigators believe [Machete Guy] and another young man were armed with machetes as waited in the driveway for the deliveryman. Two other alleged cohorts arrived in a vehicle during the holdup, according to [the sergeant].
[Machete Guy] is suspected of swinging a machete at the deliveryman, who was not injured, the sergeant said.
The men got away with $30 in cash and $30 worth of pizza, according to [the sergeant].
Got that? Four guys were willing to go to jail for one and a half yuppie food coupons, plus a couple mystery pizzas. That’s pretty cheap!
And they say Americans aren’t willing to take on the hard jobs…
– bob
Friends,
Since we here in the United States of America essentially own two car companies, now seems to be a perfect time to help our charges move some iron. Who wouldn’t want to get paid, after all? But really, so far the ads have been dismal…
No wonder the Obama administration thinks we’ll lose $30 billion on the bailout. What we need is chicks! Double entendre! Muscle cars! Incredible deals!
They’ll be streaming into the dealerships. Trust me.
– bob
Thanks to my new favorite place, TheAMCForum.com. Thanks!
Friends,
Head on over to SnowCrystals.com for some fine photography from the very clever (and well funded) folks over at Caltech. They have galleries, a new book, and other nifty stuff to download. Sure, sometimes big snow falls like one today can be inconvenient, but you must agree that it’s sure pretty.
– bob
from SnowCrystals.com via TreeHugger. Thanks!
Friends,
The big news today is that the Federal EPA is considering a rule to declare carbon dioxide, the gas that you exhale and that plants inhale, to be dangerous. It’s even been said that carbon dioxide is a main cause of the alarming malady once called “global warming,” now referred to under the more quaint title of “climate change.”
And while we’re constantly reminded not to equate the weather with the climate, I think it’s always interesting to look at what’s happening outside my window while considering the frequent flier miles all of the delegates in Copenhagen racked up to express their deep concern about all this warming.
It’s been said before, but worth repeating; I’ll treat climate change like a crisis when the people who keep telling us it’s a crisis starting treating it like a crisis. Which doesn’t seem to have happened yet.
Your best (chilly) pal,
– bob
Friends,
The little girly puppy dog is sick. Could be the religious extremist** in town poisoning dogs to remove the demons on earth, could be that she ate something bad while in the desert. It’s hard to know at this point, and while she didn’t eat at all yesterday or her breakfast this morning, she looked well enough that I decided to head down to the Festival of Dirt this morning.
I suppose I should be honored that the Indian Wells Police Department thinks my elderly Jeep Grand Livingroom can go as fast as they say it was going this morning, but there’s a reason that Lidar is pronounced “LIE-dahr.”
Stupid Tuesday, indeed.
– bob
** Thanks to frequent commenter KC and her finely tuned lingometer for pushing me in the direction of using “extremist” instead of “fundamentalist.” There’s a huge difference between the two, but I think the former is much more accurate in this case.
Friends,
We had thought a couple weeks ago that we’d spend Thanksgiving in L.A. County, but in the end we were happy to head on down to the desert for the holiday…
We all enjoyed the bountiful harvest…
…fun times with family and a generous spread left us a little sleepy though, so we turned in early…
…then got up early, had some breakfast and assembled for some happy snaps…
…but then it was time for us to make the unpopular decision to head back up the hill…
To this…
All of us up here at the Secret Alpine Laboratories of Jaunty Central wish you all the very best. Thanks again for stopping by.
Your pal,
bob