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The Little Jaunty Players
– Proudly Present –
– The Proud Return –
– Once Again –
– of –
– An Ongoing Feature –
– Of This Self Same Blog –
– Proudly Entitled –
Two Sentences From A Book
“In the first week of May a power storm dropped an ocean of rain on Chicago and again caused the Chicago River to reverse flow. Again the sewage threatened the city’s water supply.”
Thank you! Really, please stop. Oh, this is embarrassing.
You really like us! You really, really like us!
Oh please…
Think about journalism for a minute. What could we learn if some busybody just went out with a little Flip video camera and started talking to people and posted that video? No editing, just a conversation with somebody interesting. Maybe somebody whose views are pretty far from yours who you wouldn’t normally confront by yourself. Certainly you’d need someone to be your proxy to ask the questions you couldn’t. You’d perhaps like that somebody to be me. Wanna try it? Let’s try it!
Put your ideas in the comments and we’ll chat about it.
Your pal,
bob
Pals,
Through a circuitous route, I decided that I needed to do something about the utter lack of Beatles in my music collection. (the spell check in mac os x flags “beatles” as misspelled. will apple issue a correction when sir paul finally agrees to add the catalog to itunes? get on this right away. this story is hot, hot, hot. -ed I’ll contact my sources right away.) After importing the six albums I thought would cover a good bit, I find that iTunes is messing with the song order. So here’s a simple bleg for you—is there a way to keep the order intact both on the computer and on an iPod? It’s a little frustrating.
Oh, in other news here at the Lodge, there are job prospects that may end up allowing me to stay in town. I know you love to hear about the harrowing commute, but I could frankly do without it. Naturally, since I’ve sent off my fairly eclectic resume fifteen minutes ago, I will now begin my obsessive fit. I haven’t heard back from them! Not yet! Not even now! Cripes, what could take so long? (it’s nighttime. – ed But the thing is so brilliant, shouldn’t it have woken them? easy there, stressball.)
More fun bits tomorrow. In the meanwhile, here’s something that I should’ve posted days ago. A very cute girl I know pretty well said she was bringing an Easter gift for my niece, but who knew it’d be this?
– bob
Oh no!
The robot uprising has begun…
In fact, 80 percent to 90 percent of global warming involves heating up ocean waters. They hold much more heat than the atmosphere can. So Willis has been studying the ocean with a fleet of robotic instruments called the Argo system. The buoys can dive 3,000 feet down and measure ocean temperature. Since the system was fully deployed in 2003, it has recorded no warming of the global oceans.
The oceans are cooling or, um, not warming? Wait a sec. How will Master Gorebot crush this dissent?
In recent years, heat has actually been flowing out of the ocean and into the air. This is a feature of the weather phenomenon known as El Nino. So it is indeed possible the air has warmed but the ocean has not. But it’s also possible that something more mysterious is going on.
Mysterious heat is escaping! Our greenhouse isn’t working. No more hothouse tomatoes, apparently. What could be happening?
One possibility is that the sea has, in fact, warmed and expanded — and scientists are somehow misinterpreting the data from the diving buoys.
Stupid scientists.
Trenberth and Willis agree that a few mild years have no effect on the long-term trend of global warming. But they say there are still things to learn about how our planet copes with the heat.
Of course. These strange readings that don’t fit our preconceptions so we’ll need more data to make the statistics work with our models.
Essentially, we’re doomed by the non-dooming. Wake up warm people!
Sigh,
– bob
Watch first, read about the joke later…
Oscar Petersson, sorta.
The Tijuana guitar monster, Mister Carlos Santana—in a way…
…and a tender ballad from the flying fingers of the incomparable Eric Clapton.
Makes you want to cry, doesn’t it?
– bob
From Stinko, via BoingBoing via The Panopticist! Whew!
Sure, Senator Obama’s Irish. Everybody knows that…
But what about Hillary? British. Sorry.
John McCain? Irish.
So we’re going to have an all-Irish general election? This is dangerous. They’ll be taking orders straight from Dublin!
– bob
EDITOR’S NOTE: We’re terribly, terribly sorry for this post. We’d especially like to apologize to people who are still voting for Ron Paul. -ed
UPDATE: A touching rendition of Danny Boy by the Swedish Chef, Animal, and Beaker. Did I mention that it’s touching?
Thanks BoingBoing!
No snow yesterday. A bunch of snow overnight. Pretty pictures for you today. For free!
Everybody loves a good cloud formation. Can you see the marshmallow Peeps?
Maybe more people love a good antique Jeep picture. Very dramatic. Very butch.
Other people love a shot of a pristine, unmolested sledding run. That’s my front yard, by the way.
Teak is great for patio furniture. Not so swell for holding up a patio umbrella overloaded with snow. This is not good news for sheltering the Clam’s tide pool. Maybe she’ll know when it’s snowing now.
Your pal,
bob
Friends,
I don’t know if I should stop addressing everyone as friends, since John McCain does it in his speeches and while we should remember he was tortured (who can forget? -ed), I find him icky. In a creepy Bush Administration Forever kind of way. Feel free to throw down an opinion in the comments on whether you’d like to be known as friends or not. Kind of the anti-Facebook effect, don’t you think?
It seems that I’ve caught a mild form of whatever mutated flu bug has been creeping around the Festival Of Dirt. Aches, pains, close and lengthy examinations of the wallpaper in the water closet, the whole thing. I had the privilege of spending a gorgeous but chilly day inside napping today. Not such a bad thing, but the dreams were hallucinatory in nature. While seated at an outdoor bar in Palm Springs (just outside my mountain cabin’s front door) during a book signing party, I found that I had to gouge Johnny Depp’s eyes out. Not the current Depp, but the 21 Jump Street Depp. Then in the dream, I woke up briefly to see an Indian wearing an orange Soroptimist’s vest and tall black hat with an eagle feather walking across my deck. Naturally, as happens in dreams, I tried to get up to follow him but couldn’t.
Semi-consciousness was the highlight of my afternoon. How was yours?
Maybe not yet coherent,
– bob
Again, what’s Accuweather thinking? They’re predicting snow this Saturday and Sunday. It’s been in the late 60s all week, so, um, what’s going on here? Scary cloudy bits. Big chilly clouds full of watery things!
Of course they had to radically adjust their temp numbers down to fit their snow predictions, but what can you do? Get it right?
Please.
– Clam
UPDATE: Oh no! It’s snowing! In your face, Clam! Oh, wait…
Friends,
Jalopnik has a review up of the new WRX (which I find hideous) by Wes Siler (who seems to be new to the site) that includes a nice drive description of my daily drive. It’s a good read and worth your time, but the pictures are lively as well. Here’s one of those pictures (that’s nowhere near the mountain)…
Grant Ray’s photography is lovely, but no shots of The Hill. Sadly.
Is there a nice looking car extant that can do what the WRX can do? Audi, I guess, if you’re talking about all wheel drive. MazdaSpeed 6 as well, if you want a sedan. And a turbo. How about something under $30k with over 25 MPG? Yeah, I can’t think of one either.
Your best pal ever in the whole wide world,
– bob
Friends,
You’ve got to be kidding me. This is super fun playtime hijinks?
“Okay, you be the fey European tourist and I’ll wear my black patent leather TSA outfit and hold the metal detector wand …”
Creepy.
– bob
Friends,
Here are a couple things that just made me smile. You’ll note that there’s nothing here about work. There’s a reason for that.
One Laptop Per Nephew – I was finally able to deliver the tiny laptop to my six-year old nephew’s Charge d’Affaires and gave her a little instruction on its operation. No real manual is available and my help was minimal, but the printed Quick Start guide give a nod toward serendipity. She sent this note:
I just had to write you a quick note about the laptop. So Maxi was eating his breakfast as I jumped into the shower. I could hear him shout, “YES!” I finished up and he yelled to me, “Mama, I got on the internet!”
He was sitting on the couch with the computer in his lap and sure enough, he was on the net. He was so proud of himself. He said, “Mama, I figured it out before you could.” Then he showed me a map of Europe. “Here’s Sweden.” He went on and on exploring different countries.
I think in a way it is good that there is no instruction b/c he was really excited to figure it out on his own and then show me how to use it.
Thanks so much.This is really an amazing present.
“Here’s Sweden.” Good gravy, he’s already smarter than the rest of us. I always thought that Sweden was a county in Wisconsin.
The Mighty Road Racing Dakota – I out-drove and out-handled a guy in a late model Porsche Carrera 4 running down the hill this morning. In a crappy (but free) ten year old, four-cylinder mid-size American pickup. I found it a completely bizarre and hilarious development. It’s so wrong.
Primaries – Obama won Texas after all by three delegates? Breaks the narrative of Hillary as comeback kid, doesn’t it? Dad’s already bored by this thing though. We usually have a long chat about the latest results on the phone, but this week he couldn’t care less. And he watches fishing shows—on purpose!
The Mollusk Channel – The Clam has been doing very well with the weather predictions lately. Everyone else (except for Yahoo!, who we don’t track regularly) has been wildly inaccurate. Your winning lottery numbers are forthcoming…
Your pal,
– bob
Dear Friends,
Today was absurd, but the weekend in America’s Finest Most Run-Down Clearly Done Dingiest City was good fun. I managed to convince a very cute girl to try Indian food, which went well. What else would you expect at India Palace? It’s worth trying if you’re in the neighborhood.
I dropped off the pups with their keeper on Saturday. They immediately forgot about me and went about their business of checking the perimeter of The 1912 House. Expected, but sad nonetheless. My thoughts about rescuing my own dog bubbled back up to the surface until I remembered that my day at the Festival Of Dirt combined with my commute would keep me away far too long. Not what you’d hope for if you were being rescued.
More tomorrow, when the need for sleep shouldn’t be so dire. Thanks for hanging in there.
Your pal,
bob
Friends,
You’ll recall a post about my vivacious writing partner’s move to East Texas and her pet cows Sid and Nancy…
It appears that somebody has been busy lately. Meet the new calf.
Working title—The Squeaky Veal. Yeah, I know.
I know!
– bob
Go visit garfield minus garfield. You take out the most annoying part of the strip, and it becomes a “…comic about schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and the empty desperation of modern life.” You’ll see. It’s better.
Thanks, daringfireball!
– bob