Friends,
My brother Stinko’s birthday was yesterday. I gave him a call last evening to wish him well on his 40th, launched into a cheap impression of Gabby Hayes for ten seconds, then he ended the call. So, um, Happy Birthday!
– bob
Idyllwild Weather Clam Asks…
What is Accuweather smoking? A daytime high of 73° is just not gonna happen and is so far outside the realm of possibility that they’ll need to have their infrabranchial chambers examined.
They must have a severe case of the munchies right now.
– Clam
Boyd Coddington Dies
The grand master of making ’32 Ford Roadsters into different ’32 Ford Roadsters passed away today from unreleased circumstances. He’d been hospitalized recently and was only 63. Love him or hate him (too many tantrums on his “reality” show for my taste), but he sure made some pretty cars. If you like shiny things, as we all do, he will be missed.
Your pal,
bob
La Mesa, Jewel Of The Hills
You may not enjoy this as much as I do, but La Mesa mayor Art Madrid was found by police near his home drunk, and in a pool of his own sick. (“Um, Mr. Mayor, would you mind coming with us?”) Two things make this story much better: an equally drunk city employee was in his Ford Exploder with her feet hanging out the window, plus the La Mesa City Council hauled his sorry butt into chambers to read him the riot act.
At last night’s meeting, Madrid would only say that “it was unfortunate for me. It’s embarrassing and humiliating, and I promise it will never happen again.”
Next time he’ll drive the pickup.
– bob
Thanks, Pakistan!
Friends,
You may have noticed that YouTube and another great big pile of Google sites died yesterday. The speculation is that when Pakistan banned YouTube for hosting “unauthorized videos,” they crapped all over the routing tables. “Oooh, tech-speak,” you must be thinking. Points to my reliance on the internet gizmos, maybe yours as well. So my advice to you is to break out your inkjet and print copies of everything on your computer, then chuck your peecee out the window.
Or stop using ‘net services that are exposed to other countries.
Oh.
Where’s my Levenger catalog?
– bob
Sunday Rainy Day Yoohoo Toob!
Friends,
It’s too sloppy to go outside and play, so while poking around in the internets I tripped over this—a compilation of Trunk Monkey videos. Produced by the Suburban Auto Group, they’ve played on local teevee for a few years. You’ll want one…
Try to stay dry, won’t you?
– bob
From Laughing Squid, via BoingBoing. Thanks!
Liveblogging The Democratic Debate…
Who am I kidding? Boring.
How about some crappy cellphone pictures instead? Here’s a nice shot from a few weeks ago of the sun setting over my neighbor’s house…
As you know, the dogs hate the chilly weather up here. Not surprising, since my yard is essentially their playground AND bathroom. Here’s that girly dog waiting for me to make the snow stop falling…
And from the big fat charity place preparing for a fundraising event, a labeled box…
Care to guess what was stored in that box? Makes the “it’s it’s its” battle seem petty, doesn’t it?
Your best pal ever,
– bob
P.S. Commenter inky, send me an email with the subject “Clam!” about your transportation problems. It’ll be fun!
No-Pants Wednesday
Friends,
The joke is this; one of the managers here at The Festival Of Dirt arrived here this morning then realized that he’d forgotten his pants. The reality, however, isn’t nearly as funny so I’ll spare you the generic OTB** sleep meds.
Here are other things you can do today without pants on:
- Watch a lunar eclipse. It might be a little chilly without pants, but in some parts of the country, the moon may appear to be glowing red. Like your knees. When you’re not wearing pants.
- Download a new podcast. I’ve been enjoying ESPN’s Pardon The Interruption podcast (link to MP3 download) lately. I almost exclusively listen while I’m wearing pants, but who am I to say that you have to?
- Drop out of the race. People will hardly mention your tear-filled concession speech, once they realize that you’re not wearing pants. Detractors will become confused as on the one hand they praise your decision as “for the good of the party” and “healing the ideological rift” but on the other feel that you should really get a little more exercise. If you know what I mean.
- Get pregnant. A former coworker stopped by for a visit at the Festival Of Dirt this morning and she’s working on child number eight at the moment. And by working, I presume she’s not smuggling a basketball under her shirt.
Is it a little breezy in here?
– bob
** Over The Blog
Super Delicious Cheese Tuesday
Well, well, well…
What have we here? It seems that Mister Obama has won Wisconsin this evening. Isn’t that nice? Does this make Mrs. Clinton yesterday’s news? Kaus put up some speculation that there might be a sympathy vote for her in Texas and Ohio now that she appears to be on the ropes. I don’t buy it.
Call me a sexist if you want (and boy, are you itching to do that right now. you know where the comments link is…) but I really can’t stand to listen to her lecture America. I never want to hear the hectoring, not now, not for the next four years. Yeah, there are policy differences between the two. Sure. I simply can’t take her campaign’s negativity. I can’t stand Mister Clinton’s finger wagging. His red-faced admonishment of the press, and of us by extension for caring about the details.
Dear Wisconsin. You may have ended up putting a merciful end to part one of this snipe-fest. I propose that we Californians declare a moratorium on harassing you about your dairy products. It’s the least we can do for the favor you’ve done us.
Your pal,
– bob
Tuesday Is The New Monday
Friends,
Thank you for your indulgence over the long holiday weekend. I took a trip to America’s Finest Mediocre Ramshackle Urgently Requiring Remediation Spy Satellite Landing Site of a City to pick up various puppy dogs and to see a certain cute girl. You’ll be pleased to know that all of those creatures, furry and otherwise, are doing well.
This is being posted fairly early in the morning. 3:30 rolled around this morning and seemed like a perfectly reasonable time to get started. All of the things I really need to take care of today need to happen before 8:00, so the early start should help. By the way, is there such a thing as higher high beams? The Mighty Dakota’s less than dazzling displays of illumination left a lot to be desired this morning. That, or it was really freaking dark.
– bob
F is for Friday
Friends,
I thought it best to avoid the icy roads this morning and am spending the day working from home. The sun’s out and the thermometer has rocketed to a tropical 30 degrees. Oh sure, there’s still ice on the roads, it’s just hidden in the shade now. At some point I’ll have to spin around in it today since this is when I pick up various pups for their annual Winter torture. The weird snow storm couldn’t have come at a better time. They’ll surely disagree.
More later…
– bob
Happy Valentine’s Day!
Friends,
This came from a member of my nephew’s staff…
It’s true!
– bob
Forty Five Degrees
Pals,
How about this? Obama and McCain seem to have swept today’s primaries. Who might be their respective party’s nominees? Hard to know…
Oh, right. Superdelegates. They’ll surely fix it. What were we thinking?
Spent the weekend at the folks’ place doing a little finish carpentry. The stay—with more gifts and more cake—continues my Birthday Holiday Season, so you needn’t worry about that. There are more events planned next weekend, so I’ll try to stay up past 9:00 for those. Advancing age, you know.
Now for a little housekeeping: the podcast is purely in the planning stages at this time. I stumbled across some new tricks to make the thing work, so we’re that much closer. Have something to contribute? Send an email with “a jaunty little podcast” to avoid the spambot if you want to be a guest. We’re going to post at bobtherieau.com, register at iTunes, and link from here. Clearly you’re an expert at something (or maybe you need email alerts just to remember when to breathe, but hey, let’s hear about how you set up the alerts.) so we want to hear from you. I’m pretty sure we want to hear from you. Maybe. Hopefully.
By the way, the Idyllwild Weather Clam missed badly yesterday. It was warm and the Clam went too low. I asked her about this, and she seemed embarrassed by the error. She has promised to do better next time though. You gotta love contrition in any bivalve, much more so in a mile-high bivalve.
So yeah. Birthday Holiday Season—good, ongoing, gifts. Podcast—a show about everything, nothing without your help. Clam—She’s real sorry, will predict weather much better next time.
There you have it. Hello, Tuesday.
– bob
Jaunty Sooooper Dewper Whoopdie Dooo Tooosday – Update
Friends,
MSNBC projects that Hillary wins California with 15 percent of the returns reported. Great job, knuckleheads. Just to get ahead of the predictions, I’m gonna project Bill Richardson wins Guam with none-percent. How’s that for wild speculation? Gravel wins Saskatchewan! Tancredo trounces the competition in Santee!
Cripes. Our Secretary of State, bless her heart, wouldn’t certify the electronic voting machines for this election so our ballots up here, for instance, will be trucked down the hill to the waiting optical readers. The early votes that MSNBC is looking at are from, er, early and absentee voters. Those are folks who haven’t been moved by the events of the last week or so and perhaps listened to the evil polls to place their votes. Don’t get me wrong, some of my best friends voted early. I think, however, that they should’ve held out and waited for some of the dynamics to play out. Maybe even go to their polling place. What could be more fun?
Where do you suppose California’s crack security experts have gone? Couldn’t they help secure our two year old voting machines? That we bought? With our money? It’s a shame that we don’t have any software developers in this state.
Challenge: Apple iParticipate. Touch screen interface. Pictures of the candidates on screen with brief candidate video statements. Good lord, a great big voting iPod would be a winner. OS X is inherently secure and mostly open to scrutiny by security researchers. Mr. Ive, break out your golden pen and design it. We’ll wait.
Your comments are always welcome.
Your pal,
bob
Love vs. Hate
Friends,
I just needed a diversion from delegate counts and work this evening, so I checked the mail…
While I love the new Apple Wireless Keyboard I received from my generous sweetie. I find that I’m a big fan of typing on the chiclets that remind me of the Timex Sinclair 1000 from our Ancient Technology Collection…
…but I can’t get over this bit. I haven’t had my 8GB iPod Touch very long, and now they’ve sent me an email announcing a 32GB version:
How many Daffy Duck cartoons could I fit on this thing? Good gravy, it could be Rabbit Season every day for a month.
Brother, can you spare five hundred bucks?
More on the primaries later…
– bob