Author: bob

A Happy New Year Covered Entirely By Plant Matter

I’ve always wanted to see the Tournament of Roses Parade. This morning we got something a lot better. We went to the float staging area and hung out with the constructors at midnight.

The neat thing about it is that you can get really close to the floats to see how they’re built. Flax, seeds, weeds, flowers (of course), grasses, husks, hulls…

The mood was jovial…

…and kinda crowded for a chilly evening in Pasadena.

We started the evening at the Firefly Bistro, immediately eschewing their fixed price New Year’s Eve menu (seventy five dollars a head!). I opted instead for the pan-seared Ahi filet on a bed of delicious but undercooked lentils and tempura asparagus (who the hell thought of that?) with “portabello chips” (read: overcooked mushroom nuggets). A much cheaper option. By the way, did I mention that we dined in a tent? They normally serve in an outdoor patio environment, but as I mentioned, Pasadena was a little chilly so they applied the easy ambiance of tent flaps.

I wonder if the kids serving in Iraq were treated to such elegance. Clearly not. Our tent was white, theirs was likely O.D. Green. I’m sure that if they were served a gingerbread tarte tatin as we were, they would’ve enjoyed it as much as we did.

Then the oddest thing happened…

The bill for the whole thing after tip (for the spotty service) was two hundred bucks, so we left a Franklin and five Jacksons. We laid the cash down, closed the leather folder and left. As we made our way to the car, the waitress hurried out behind us. “Excuse me! I don’t think you left enough!” “Really?” I asked. “What about the hundred under your thumb?” “Oh!”

Yeah, oh.

…and some random stranger (redundant, I know) handed my Beautiful and Talented Bride™ a bottle of champagne last night. No rhyme, no reason. the guy was just feeling jovial I suppose. He got a hug and a “thank you” out of the deal, likely the best offer he’d had all night.

So, how was your evening?

Your pal,

bob

Contest Time!

It’s time to redesign this site. I know that, you know that, even the little baby Jeebus knows that. The question is, what should the new design be?

Everyone on this little green and blue ball is some sort of art critic or design expert (just ask them!), so now is the time to suggest a new design for the new year of Monsieur Jaunty.

Send your best effort to the mail link in the bar on the right in any format you see fit (I can read nearly all of them, including MacPaint, Atari, Amiga graphics, even Windows!). I’ll post them all, select the one I like the best, and send the winner of the design contest a neat prize of my selection from the 1912 House™ Prize Attic worth not less than twenty five dollars (American).

Here are the rules: The text must be readable. If you pick a gooney display font, please tell its name, or send me the font itself so I can reconstruct your masterwork to fit here. Also be aware that not everyone can display the same font in their browser, so body copy fonts should be the standard-issue serif and sans-serif styles like Ariel, Verdana, and like that. Go nuts with the colors, have a field day with the layout, the styles, the feel. You get the picture. All I ask is that you give me room to maintain the links, archives, and the shameless plugs (for myself at bobtherieau.com, as well as the pitybox for amazon.com, and the San Diego Bloggers link).

Of course if you break all of those rules, I must still consider your entry, and if you break them in a very compelling way, I must consider you the winner. So I guess the rules are merely guidelines, eh?

I’d like to have the redesign up before the end of January, so I’d appreciate entries well before then.

Yes, this is fun.

– bob

No Youting!*

Happy Christmas to both of you. I appreciate your patronage throughout the year. This is the brief story of how we all got sick. It didn’t start with this, but it came close:

It actually started when my brother, his wife, and two daughters arrived here from Chicago. They showed up with a raging case of the flu…

…or was it the Billy Goat Curse?

Be that as it may, the kids were slobbery and their parents had the creeping crud. T’was the season of giving, so they gave. And gave. And gave.

And we’re all sick.

But we all had a great Christmas, and we got everything we wanted…

…which was to be together.

Your pal,

bob

* – New word coined by The Cutest Nephew In The Whole World.

It’s a grand combination of “yelling” and “shouting,” don’t you think?

P.S: As I actually place my actual email address on this site, the bad, angry robots that crawl the Innernut looking to sell me cut-rate Viagra (no need, but thanks for thinking of us) have latched on. Naturally, I bounce their email back to them, mostly the bouncing is returned to me as a mail administrator notice. Most of them are ritual, out-of-the box responses; “delivery failed, sender unknown” (here’s a cool tip for you administrators out there: ARE YOU CHECKING YOUR FREAKING LOGS TO SEE IF YOUR SYSTEMS ARE BEING USED AS RELAYS FOR SPAMMERS! And if not, why not?). One of today’s bounce failure notices was cute though…

“Hi. This is the qmail-send program at thai.com.

I’m afraid I wasn’t able to deliver your message to the following addresses.

This is a permanent error; I’ve given up. Sorry it didn’t work out.”

See? They’re not checking their logs either, but at least they’re putting some effort into the enterprise. Maybe.

Earthquake News

Two dead in Paso Robles, several injured by falling wine barrels, this is Southern California. The magnitude 6.5 quake was not felt here in San Diego, but it may have been felt in Scotland. After all, The Scotsman only reports “Scottish news direct from Scotland.”

Please pray for the Scots.

…and the poor people on our beautiful and breathtaking Central Coast.

Your pal,

bob

BREAKING NEWS UPDATE! The Inland Empire was unaffected! Whew!

(via the pathetic Riverside Press-Enterprise)

SERIOUS UPDATE: (about time. – ed) The Los Angeles Times has a cute human interest story about the quake. [subscription required, use “laexaminer” as your name and password if you don’t have one already, courtesy of your friends at LA Examiner.]

Let’s Visit The Referral Logs!

As both of you know, I have tracker set up for this little endeavor of mine so that I can not only see you when you’re sleeping and awake, but I know when you visit, so visit for goodness sake! (Very amusing. – ed)

Frankly, I’m glad that anyone shows up at all, but some of the log entries are, well, intriguing. First off is the visitor from Israel who needed the secret code to program a Motorola phone. I don’t know if you’ve ever been to Google Israel, but this is as good a time as any, don’t you think?

Meanwhile, MSN directed a visitor from Kuwait here by searching for “f***ing lady from karachi.” (Thanks for obscuring the f-bomb. – ed You’re welcome. – bob)

“Karachi” was mentioned in a Question at one time, but the rest? And how does MSN take those search terms, string them together and naturally point some hapless, inquisitive soul in the direction of this little mess? And why search on that anyway? Is it the first line from a limerick?

“There once was a f***ing lady from Karachi,

who cooked lamb kabobs on a Hibachi…

At any rate, welcome friends from the Middle East!

…or something like that.

Your pal,

bob

P.S. Happy holiday posts, including the Solstice Party Wrap-Up, to come!

Old Macs Die Hard

My client’s Blue and White Macintosh G3 tower has been dying. You might say that its time is up and you might be right, it is almost seven years old now, more or less. Its original hard drive (I think) was coughing up a bloody digital lung, the first sign of its infirmity. Of course, the machine has been an important print production tool for my client and has been treated to a processor upgrade, its innards stuffed with as much RAM as it can handle (more, actually. It can only see 512 MB but it has another 128 MB stick in it for good measure), and a SCSI card. The one thing they didn’t count on was, well, it being a nearly seven year old Blue and White G3.

With a dead hard drive controller on the motherboard.

I was confounded for what, three days now? I simply thought that the hard drive was dying. “No problem, I’ll just install a new one!” After all, the utilities were saying things that happen to old hard drives; dropped links, bad sectors, dead blocks. The client ordered a new drive and I spent a full day (that’s like, you know, 24 hours) trying to reload the operating system with no success. How was I to know that the controller itself was bad?

You could’ve looked on the Innernut.

Oh yeah, that. The bad controller is well documented. If I had bothered to actually look before I leapt, I would have known that and informed my client that a new controller was needed. Another hundred bucks later and today everything seems to be in good shape. OS 9 and OS X installed without a hitch, and I’m even saving the old drive to use as a backup. The data looks to be in good shape, so maybe I can call this a win for the good guys (me) and a stunning defeat for the hard drive controller chip manufacturers (I suspect links to Al Qaeda).

Bastards.

Your best pal,

bob

DR UNC BOB – ANTIGRV BOOTS R COOL! THX!

Would you rather…

be visited by the Ghost of Christmas Past,

or

the Ghost of Christmas Future?

a) Remember that crappy present you got me?

b) Noooo! No more slippers!

Maybe it was a bit of tainted textured vegetable protein,

– bob

Okay, This One Is Going To Blow Out

Would you rather…

hibernate through the holidays,

or

wear only Christmas-themed attire throughout December?

a) The alarm is set for 2004.

b) Honey, have you seen my “Frosty” boxers?

Zzzzzzz,

– bob

We Had To Find Something To Do With Them

Would you rather…

cover the floor of your 5,000 sq. ft. house with engineered hickory chips,

or

use shellacked fruit cake slices as tile accents in your new kitchen counter?

a) They smell better than Pergo.

b) Heat- and stain-resistant!

I prefer cedar,

– bob

The Wind Blows Like Putin!

Would you rather…

forgot to turn your phone on after a nap and miss a call from Howard Dean,

or

allow the United Nations to name local weather phenomena?

a) “This list from the Chevy dealer is terrible…”

b) “Fire Danger High, De Villepin Winds Blowing Through Southland”

I’m on the Do Not Call list,

– bob

“Oh Hell!” UPDATE: “forgot to turn your phone on”? What the hell is that Bob? How about “forget to turn your phone back on”? Jeebus jumpin’ criminy! This is what happens when I’m rushed to get the thing out.

Maybe envisioning a calm blue ocean might help.

Got Him!

Would you rather…

comb through the author’s names at Barnes & Noble trying to remember the names of your friends’ children,

or

ask a recently deposed dictator his advice on the perfect Ramadan gift?

a) “Um, little Armistad?”

b) “I like to give Scratchers…”

Let’s see, Brandon and Plimpton?

– bob

Lice To Meet You

So, Mr. Hussein, the rat hole wasn’t to your liking? That’s a terrible pity.

How about a shave?

Maybe a nice, comfy cell at an undisclosed location? Sound better?

That’s what I thought.

Good job guys.

– bob

We’re All Winners

The Great Question Submission Event was an underwhelming success. Most of the submissions came from only a couple people, and I’m reproducing them all here for your dining and dancing pleasure.

The submissions here are edited to fit our format, but otherwise left as they were sent to us and presented in the reverse order of receipt here at Question Central. Enjoy (if you can).

Would you rather…

sell bat guano Christmas ornaments,

or

be the gift wrapper at WalMart?

a) and in the spring, just tuck one under your tulip bulbs..

b) no sir, I will not wrap it in that…

Would you rather…

have your biography published on The Smoking Gun,

or

have your biography ghost-written by 8-year-olds?

Would you rather…

dine with cannibals,

or

have Christmas dinner where a food fight could end in fatalities?

Would you rather…

de-marginalize the unmarginalizable,

or

disenfranchise the enfranchised?

a) huh?

b) wha?

Would you rather…

stick it where the light don’t shine,

or

hide your light under a bushel?

Would you rather…

wake-up and smell the coffee,

or

wake-up and pee cuz the world’s on fire?

Would you rather…

eat a peach,

or

squeeze your lemon till the juice runs down your leg?

Would you rather…

defend Dubya for crimes against stupidity,

or

discover that John Ashcroft was head of your fraternity?

Would you rather…

hold the exclusive franchise for Hooters in Iraq,

or

breed cute & fuzzy missile delivery pets?

Would you rather…

super-size your Humvee,

or

hum your way across the alps?

And here’s the tough section. These are the requests (in italics) followed by our stab at writing a Question to fit. I’ve re-assembled the Question Team to work on these, and I WON’T TAKE NO FOR AN ANSWER!

Oh, uh… I was kinda thinkin the biggie vs. tupac rift – other than

that, I don’t have a lot of info re: the big thang between eastside vs

westside gangstas. I just wanted to hear your dizzle sizzle…

Would you rather…

haunt the studio exec that produced your posthumous biopic,

or

hire an upstart ad agency to create a friendly gansta image for you?

a) Ridiculous Thug: Resurrection

b) Focus groupizzle

only be able to listen to Christmas music for 365 day a year

Would you rather…

work in a Hallmark store that played nothing 365 days a year but Christmas carols sung by William Shatner,

or

convince Rage Against the Machine to produce a 78 that you can play at your Grandma’s house?

a) Hark!……….theheraldangels…….sing!

b) Trimming In The Name Of!

Gee, this thing practically writes itself!

bob

Just Make Sure It’s Funny, Slappy

Would you rather…

we take your idea and make it into a Question,

or

we use your Question as-is?

a) Something about kittens, I like kittens.

b) Would you rather be big or tall…get it?

It’s not that hard to do,

bob

That’s right, we’re soliciting your Question ideas. Send mail with your idea or fully baked Question by 4:00 PM Pacific Time today, and we’ll run all of your Question ideas tomorrow. Sounds like fun, no?

UPDATE: Time! Time everyone!

My Ways And Means Committee Collector Plates Are Ruined!

Would you rather…

be able to tell Al Sharpton he can really be president without laughing,

or

overreact to a minor earthquake in Washington D.C?

a) I think you’ll do well in Iowa.

b) We escaped with no major damage or injuries!

It should be a cakewalk,

bob