When do we want it?
Now!
Yeah, what he said.
– bob
Thanks LawDog (via my vivacious writing partner!)
UPDATE: Sin! Damnation! Real fire and brimstone stuff…
Via the sweet-smelling Stinko. Thanks!
Happy Earth Day!
Friends,
I know you’ve heard stories about the Earth, and some of them are true, but I thought I’d take the time on this Earth Day to remember our home planet.
You could wake up early on a spring day, throw open the window and smell the pine trees. Maybe even hear the the creek gurgling by. We sure didn’t like the stinging insects though. That was a big problem back then.
The flowers were in bloom, the birds were chirping (and speed dating), and then the call rang out. We were all evacuated to this planet (which seems to be a pretty close approximation, actually) because of some global catastrophe (thanks a lot, President Gore), but to avoid panic they erased the minds of the slow-witted and…
Uh oh.
– bob
Best Wishes!
Friends,
First, I’d like to extend a warm welcome from this bitter nation, clinging as we do to our guns and religion, to Pope Benedict XVI. Happy birthday, Benny! Next, to the n00b in the blue Honda Civic who decided (on his own, with no help from me) to make his own turnout yesterday and remodel the right side of his car using a mountain, sorry about that (and “uh oh, better go to Maaco”). And finally to my sister who is not at all happy with me for skipping her daughter’s birthday, you were much better off. Trust me on this. Unless you wanted to watch me take a nap, which is pretty exciting.
So, happy Wednesday, everybody!
– bob
Self-Reproach
Friends,
My sister held my niece’s first birthday party today. I did not attend. There were fairly good reasons on my part to do that too, mostly involving driving fatigue—on my part and the fleet. None of that matters though. The targeting computers were locked on and the keys were turned to deploy a “guilt bomb” (no, I’m not making that up). As officers stationed in missile silos during the Cold War had to agree to launch their weapon, so did my siblings. The specs are simple:
guilt |gilt|
verb [ trans. ] informal
make (someone) feel guilty, especially in order to induce them to do something : Celeste had been guilted into going by her parents.
They failed in their inducement to drive to Los Angeles County on this overly warm Sunday. Where they succeeded was in making me feel terrible about resting up for another fine week down in the dirt. Pretty unfair in my humble opinion.
I hope the party went well, but my contribution would’ve been minor at best. What a bizarre state of affairs.
– bob
Are You Nuts? It’s Gorgeous!
Friends,
Today is picture day, just because the late Winter rains have encouraged some fantastic Springtime blooms. I’ll just keep updating this post throughout the day with camera and crappy cellphone shots. It’s too good to pass up!
By the way, if you have Spring photos to share, let me know. If they’re on Flickr, people here at La Gran Fiesta de Dirt won’t be able to see them, so let me know if I can host them somewhere else. Thanks!
– bob
UPDATE: Here’s one from the James Reserve up by my house…
UPDATE II: It’s very windy up here this Saturday morning, so it’s a wonder that the old Canon was able to catch this without a blur.
The Anti-Destination League: A Primer
Fellow Fangio Lovers,
I’ve had the opportunity over the last year to tangle daily with the various factions of The Anti-Destination League (a term that I believe is credited to the irascible and brilliant Brock Yates). I’ve had fun with this and have attempted to determine why any individual might wish to join this dark, life force draining cabal. I have theories!
- No Replacement For Low Displacement- This is going to be a big problem for everybody in the future. Gas prices go up, engine sizes and power go down. It’s free market economics, yet the productivity losses brought on by the time spent goosing the gerbils in the engine compartment of your new hyper-mileage transportation appliance don’t seem to factor into Adam Smith’s equation.
- Holiday Makers: Local 92210- This isn’t Alberta, or Saskatchewan, or Idaho, or Utah! We actually have things to do and, surprisingly, places to go. I hope you’re enjoying the leisurely pace your vacation is taking, because we’re not. Really.
- Amigos Del Slow- Ay carumba! The signs are en ingles! ¿Como se dice “turnout?”
- The Grey Panthers- Your eyesight is failing, reflexes slowing, we’ll pry that Oldsmobile’s steering wheel out of your cold dead hands. I get that. In fact, the trusty old Ninety-Eight is a visual clue to the rest of us to steer clear. What we can’t stand is the progeny of the Greatest Generation™ puttering about in Lamborghinis, twin-turbo Bentley Continentals, Land Rover Sports, et al. When we were kids, we exacted harsh penalties for party-goers spilling a single beer. A “beer crime” we called it. The only reason The Early Bird Special driving team gets away with the crime of under-utilizing this kind of vehicular firepower is because we don’t want to see their droopy naked butts long enough to paint them purple (it’s a long story).
- Doctor I. Don’t. Know.- Get off your phone. You’re not that important. Ever. Your inattentiveness is gonna get us killed. Hang up. Seriously. A wireless headset doesn’t count. You’re just not paying enough attention to piloting three tons of swerving mess.
Anything you’d like to add? Please do, just not while you’re driving. Thanks.
Your pal,
– bob
Out Of The Space
Friends,
So, anyway, I’ve taken a week away from the site. You needed a little break, didn’t you? I did, especially since the news has been either crappy or boring. The elections are beating us down with the sniping. My adorable little iBook crashed mightily and is enduring a restore at the moment. You’re backing up, aren’t you?
The old, old, old Powerbook (check this, it’s brown. classy in a west elm kind of way.) is in the shop at the moment to fix the video system. Same speed though, just much heavier. It has a beautiful and very large screen, when it works. Maybe I’ll move everything over there just for kicks. None of this funny Intel business for me!
This site, as well as bobtherieau.com has been flaky lately due to crashed servers at our webhost as well as security updates. With my production machine on its back (Oh, you had to go there, didn’t you?) I’ve taken way too long to fix stuff. Most everything is back up, just in time for the site updates. Brilliant!
Any news or interesting bits to share? Throw everything into the new, easy-to-use comments section!
Your pal,
bob
Valuable Advice Offered
Friends,
If you need good advice on anything whatsoever, go listen to Mr. Biggs. His call-in show is conveniently archived on his site on the Internet so you can catch up on past episodes.
– bob
Thanks boingboing!
Entertainments In This Fine Establishment
Ladies and Gentlemen,
I need help, so call this another bleg if you will. Where would you rather go for the podcasts? The Angry Sweeper videocasts are a long way off, but the audio version is very close to fruition. I’m thinking of adding a page to bobtherieau.com for audio and syndicating on iTunes. Should I just link to new shows or embed the audio here as well? It’ll slow down page loads, but do you really care? Are your connection speeds fast enough that embedding wouldn’t be an issue?
Speaking of entertainments, I just received a refurbished Airport Express base station and I love it. For the uninitiated, it’s a wireless base station the size of a pack of the old fat Marlboro Reds (oh c’mon, you remember those, don’t you? back in high school? pounding the things at parties looking tough, coughing your lungs out the next day?). It has an audio jack to connect to your stereo, so you can stream tunes from your computer through the ether. The sound quality is as good as the junky bitrate you encoded your songs in, and speaking for myself, the high end clipping is entirely due to my frugality in ripping CDs to keep the sizes down rather than the connection itself. The lavishly large AAC files I’ve created lately though, sound wonderful.
The price has dropped because there’s a new version that has much faster wireless transfer speeds. My crop of machines can’t use the extra speed, so the last generation works well for me. I love me some gizmos and this fits the bill quite nicely. You should pick one up before they’re gone.
Oh! There’s this too—both sites are due for a redesign. My thought is is that they should have a similar look. Same fonts. Similar banners. Same color schemes. Remember, if you don’t make suggestions I’m liable to stake out on my own and we all know how badly that can turn out. I’ll answer that for you…
Really quite badly.
– bob
Maintenance Of Some Sort – UPDATE
Dear Leaf Peepers,
It looks like my web host has taken down the server that my site was hosted on and backed up my site with a version from some time in 2007. Because of that, the webcam has crashed (my old site didn’t even have a webcam page) and we won’t know when the rain anticipated for my little burg will start falling.
Here’s surprising news—I’m not too happy about this.
– bob
UPDATE: Well, my site is up, but Mr. Anonymous’ site is still down. “Website Disabled” is the precise term. Apparently there was some “crash” of the “server” that stores all of the “scary quotation marks.” And you know how important those can be.
UPDATE II: Mr. Anonymous’ site is a version from a time long ago, before I fixed it. Now if I could only remember what I did…
New Highbrow Arts Feature!
The Idyllwild Little Tokyo Flower Drum Song Poetry Circle
– Proudly Presents –
– Another Ongoing Feature –
– Of This Very Same Blog –
– Entitled –
A Very Delightful Haiku
“Haikus are easy,
but sometimes they don’t make sense.
Refrigerator.
From Tony Kornheiser Show listener Murray Robb
Two Sentences From A Book Returns!
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!
Will Blog For Food
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
One and One and One Is Three
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
Robots Revolt!
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