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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

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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…

sunrise, sunset, sunrise, sunset
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…

oh gawd, how I hate you
And from the big fat charity place preparing for a fundraising event, a labeled box…

cylindrical flora containers
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!

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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…

tippy, tappy, typing!
…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:

32 gigs? that's crazy.
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

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Jaunty Soooper Gooogly Mooogly Tooosday Voter Guide

Dear American Heroes,

If you, like we knuckleheads in California, are part of the primary voting cluster of democracy tomorrow, you’re no doubt excited about the possibilities. The possibility of having your vote on a ballot proposition overturned by an aggrieved loser in court. The possibility that your favorite candidate will change positions sometime in May to appeal to the important baby seal-clubbing voting block. The possibility that superdelegates will trump everything that you thought you were voting for at the convention.

This is the important turning point of our cherished democracy.

Well then, now that we’ve got all the pessimism out of the way, let’s get to The Jaunty Little Blog Recommendations For Filling In Those Tiny Dots!

  • Proposition 91 – Transportation Funds. Initiative Constitutional Amendment Please. Amending the state Constitution again? Stop it already. Vote no just on principle.
  • Proposition 92 – Community Colleges. Funding. Governance. Fees. Initiative Constitutional Amendment and Statute. Um, with the Constitution? No thanks.
  • Proposition 93 – Limits on Legislator’s Terms In Office. Initiative Constitutional Amendment. This one’s a stinker. Not only because it amends the Constitution like a drunken, um, Constitution amender, but because it grandfathers in current legislators for another 12 years when they would’ve been termed out now. Looking at you Perata and Nunez. Those guys and their cronies need to go away. Vote no on this one. Who knows, maybe you’ll see some cool Fabien Nunez For Dogcatcher mailers in November. Or they’ll go to court to overturn your vote.
  • Propositions 94 through 97 – Referenda on Amendments to Indian Gaming Compacts Wow. How much money has been spent on campaigning for and against these? The folks against own some dog tracks and Vegas casinos. Oh, and a couple smaller tribes who don’t like the new facilities these compacts afford four of the wealthiest tribes. We here at Jaunty Election Central think that’s just sour grapes. The smaller tribes can negotiate their own new compacts and the dog tracks can pound sand. In exchange, the tribes give the state some more money than they do now. They really don’t have to, being sovereign nations. Sounds like a winner to us.
  • Presidential Candidates Vote for the person you like. I like Mister Obama despite the looks and smell of his financial dealings in Chicago. I certainly can do without the crabby Clintons. I get my recommended daily allowance of mud slinging just getting out of my driveway in the morning, thankyouverymuch. Romney could theoretically convince me to buy a watch out of the J.C. Penney catalog (it looks good on him), but little else. McCain, or as we refer to his candidacy around the office here, George Bush’s third term? Yeah, um, no. We’re not saying, we’re just saying…

There you have it. We’ve staked our positions which should prove highly valuable if you’ve just landed here from Mars. Otherwise you’ve already made up your mind, made your choices, and for crissakes gone out and placed your vote. Remember, if you don’t vote, you can’t complain about the next Assistant Secretary of the Interior nominee…

Your pal,

– bob

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Happy Birthday Holiday Season!

Friends,

It’s officially the beginning my Birthday Holiday Season. What festivities are planned? Well, we’re holding a private dinner this evening, then a big football game tomorrow, a multi-state election on Tuesday…

You’re welcome!

– bob

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Powerful Sadness

Friends,

Listening to the Bluegrass station on Sirius on my way down the mountain this morning (“won’t have no more pain, ain’t gonna cry, when I go to bed this evenin’ just gonna curl up and die…” **sniff!** Tragic.) I had plenty of time to consider the car holding up the line. (Speaking of lines, did you know that Bluegrass music is almost completely obsessed with trains? Why not mules? Or perhaps corn liquor? The mind reels.)

The car holding up the line wasn’t a car at all. It was a Volkswagen Eurovan.

Styling by Kelvinator.

What ever happened to those things? I understood that they were okay drivers, if underpowered. The genius of communal speculation that is Wikipedia reports that they stopped selling in the states way back in 2003. This brings me to the saddest news of the week…

Isuzu has announced that they’re going to stop selling passenger vehicles in the United States. Their end date is a year from now but the worst part of all is you don’t even care.

Styling by committee.

How soon you forget about the mighty Isuzu Impulse. The diesel I-Mark. The fun and sporty Stylus!

Styling by some middle manager's nephew.

But most important of all were the Isuzu P’up/Chevrolet LUV twins. Just marvel at the flowing design… I’ll wait.

What may be the saddest part of this story, besides the crushing economic loss to the dealers and all the people who support them, would be the L.A. Times story itself. Clearly it would be difficult to provide analysis of the company’s failure so instead they interviewed David Leisure, the man who played Joe Isuzu on the teevee.

Yep. Journalism is dead. I think I’m gonna write a song about it.

Your pal,

bob