Friends,
Just a quick note about ice on walkways: it’s pretty slippery. C’mon, ask me how I know.
– bob
P.S. Brother, can you spare an elbow? And a hip? And some spinal joints in the neighborhood of L5 and S1?
Storm Watch 2010! Photo Blort! Edition!
Friends,
You may have heard that we had a little storm up here in the gateway to America’s Cleanest Forest (more on that later). A modest amount of snow fell…
And now that I have a set of snow shoes, I don’t get a lot of frozen, wet intrusion in the top of my boots. That makes getting nice shots much easier…
I found that this was important to get quick snaps before the next storm rolled in…
What better plan than to work from home last Friday? The roads weren’t plowed regularly, but when they were, the ice sheet was exposed. Forget it, I thought. Time to light a fire and use my bandwidth instead of the failed network at the Festival of Dirt.
My DSL stayed up at this Secret Alpine Laboratory, but the genius monopolies of AT&T and Verizon combined to allow the big pipe at work to fail. Oh, and they decided to take the weekend off and got around to working on the problem today. Towards the end of the day, the connection came up but they didn’t tell us. “Just figure it out yourselves. By the way, we really value you as a customer.”
Of course they do.
– bob
Storm Watch! 2010! OMFG!!one! Edition!
Friends,
This storm thing has been pummeling Southern California for a few days now and it’s been a joy. By joy, of course, I mean that we’ve seen everything you want to see in a winter storm. You want your hail? Squalls? Snow? Rock porridge? We’ve got it all.
We’ll even have something that I’ve never heard before. I’ll let the National Weather Service breathlessly blort it out in all-caps…
POST FRONTAL INSTABILITY WILL RESULT IN WIDELY SCATTERED SHOWERS TONIGHT…WITH SNOW ABOVE 5500 FEET. SOME RAIN AND SNOW SHOWERS COULD BE HEAVY. PERIODS OF SNOW OR GRAUPEL ARE ALSO POSSIBLE DOWN TO 5000 FEET OR LOWER DURING HEAVY SHOWERS.
Graupel? What is this thing? Jewish wontons? No, dear reader, it’s simultaneously more bizarre and more common. It’s the balls of snow that seem like styrofoam rolling off your windshield. Weird? Not so much, but I’d never heard the term before. It’s almost like we English speakers have hundreds of words for snow or something.
Chilly, but fun,
– bob
Sloppy
Friends,
A series of storms are set to pummel my little town (and to be honest, the rest of the state) all week, but I’m taking no chances. I’ve created a series of channels and ravines to divert water away from my back door, I’ve laid up enough wood in the house to last for a week, and I’ve had a chat with Mme. Puppy Dog about how the moisture falling out of the sky is harmless and shouldn’t deter her from using the facilities. The latter argument has fallen on deaf but pricked up ears, which suggests to me that she cares that I’m speaking, just not that concerned with the content. Before you suggest that dogs are perky, bounding idiots incapable of recognizing human speech, why must we then spell out w-a-l-k and c-o-o-k-i-e? Yeah, I thought so.
So once again, in the consequence- and largely history-free mind of my dog, I’m to blame for this downpour. These storms, clearly, are my invention, having conjured my very own El Nino current in the Pacific, for as far as she knows, this hairless ape is all-powerful (I do control the light, heat, and food—my power knows no bounds), so why not the skies?
After we get our two feet of snow (!) this week, I’ll think about letting it dry out for a while, but in the meanwhile, go outside and stop looking at me like that.
– bob
Two Sentences From A Book – The Chosen Edition
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.
Ask Your Doctor If Yaris Is Right For You
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…
Planet? No, It Just Kinda Happened.
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
Happy Brand New Year That’s Better Than The Last One!
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
Jaunty Dumptruck O’ News: Nigerian Wiener Bomb Update
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
The Idyllwild Weather Clam Presents – Typing Class
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
Mountain Driving – Eyes Slammed Shut Edition
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
Saab Dead
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
Glowball Wharmining Legislation – Forehead Slap Edition
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!
Jaunty Dumptruck O’ News: Pizza Edition
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
I’m The CEO! Marketing Edition
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!