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“My body is a temple where junk food goes to worship”
One of my weaknesses. Fruit Stripe Bubblegum.
Generally my whole pack gets used up in about an hour, stuffing each unusually flavored stick into my mouth in an effort to absorb as much junky goodness as my mouth can handle.
In my childhood, I might have kept it a bit longer, but my jaw gets tired (and sore) after about 15 minutes. This is good, because Fruit Stripe is notorious for the quick loss of flavor.
If it didn’t remind me so much of Fruity Pebbles in gum form, I probably wouldn’t ever buy it – but occasionally the nostalgic neurons start firing up at the sight of the psychoholic wrapper.
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“The point, as Marx saw it, is that dreams never come true.” Hannah Arend
Lovin’ it.
It sounded like two dogs wrestling in my attic. And a lot of thumping and scratching. There’s a few wild guesses. It’s either raccoon or opossum (or both).
*sigh*
There’s no wait time, the team will be here tomorrow to scope out the attic. It’s one of those things where I get settled in, things are calm….then *pop*.
Two steps forward, two steps back.
I guess the worst part is they’re about to be tearing up my street for 6-8 weeks. That means I can’t trap the 6 or 7 cats I have in my yard either since animal control won’t be able to get in.
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“If your children ever find out how lame you really are, they’ll murder you in your sleep” Frank Zappa
This poster has two things going for it – Tea Leoni’s legs, and a lame tag line. Really, “The Wild Sexy Comedy!” ? That kind of gives you the indication of what kind of movie it is. Had been meaning to get back to watching it – it really started me on my Southern Culture on the Skids fandom back in the 90’s.
It came out when I worked at the movie theater back in 1996. Working in the theater, there were really only two or three types of movies. Blockbusters, critically acclaimed, and then..uhh….filler. Filler wasn’t bad per se, they just didn’t draw in the crowds. The above could be pretty much counted on for an empty theater that you could wander in and out of when you were bored.
Ben Stiller really kind of hit it big in the late 90’s and onward, this movie was one of his early outings as …..well, the same characters he has played since then. Bumbling, neurotic, clumsy. Flirting had an all-star cast, and really wasn’t too bad, but I still couldn’t make it all the way through. I was even drinking Scotch. It’s a lot like going back and watching Pulp Fiction. That style has been done better since, and watching something like that now echos the cliches that the genre creates itself as it gets more successful. So, it’s hard to watch now.
Somehow right around the time that I was getting back into rockabilly (mid 90’s), I wandered into the end of this movie – lo and behold, there was some twangy guitar. I dug it.
I immediately went to the local record store (well, CD store) that I can’t remember the name of. It was in Meyerland Plaza and eventually became a Borders which closed. The only CD they had by SCOTs happened to be Ditch Diggin’. It wasn’t as rockabilly as I wanted so I listened to it off and on for a few months.
Eventually, I picked up Dirt Track Date which included the track that was included in Flirting With Disaster, and realized that every song on every disc was solid. Very solid. So I became a fan, simple as that. Now I’m a super fan.
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“Never let your persistence and passion turn into stubbornness and ignorance.” Anthony J. D’Angelo
The great website migration of 2013 just got completed last night.
I’m sure a bunch of sites got a slew of re-notifications that someone linked to their site (sorry JYuenger), but I had to move thethousandyard stare to a hosted site.
After years of using the free wordpress site with some small financial additions, I realized that I could shift it to the host that hosts one of my other websites with zero cost.
So….more flexibility with my blog, zero space/media restrictions and then zero cost? Sign me up!
Much thanks to the two support techs at Bluehost.com – the two things I couldn’t figure out (quickly) they handled in a matter of minutes.
Other than that, it’s an icy wasteland here – rather unusual for this area, but it is what it is.
Again, the menagerie of cats in my yard far exceeded my expectations.
They like the new electrical box. Most of the cats aren’t in this picture. There’s another four or five cats that were wandering in other parts of the yard when I snapped this.If you look closely, you can see the Southern Culture on the Skids sticker I put on the side.
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“All of these activities are much more dangerous than we thought before.” Charlie Klauer
Geez, I don’t get on here much any more.
Busy times for busy lives I guess.
Part of my lack of blogging really has more to do with how much writing I’m doing at work. I’ve turned into a documentarian. Everything that comes up ends up with a question – “Has this been documented?”
And then I create a fantastic, thorough, extensive working documents……which then nobody reads.
Repeat this process daily about three or four times a day, then it can be seen how blogging has lost some magic. That, and there’s nothing really exciting going on.
I feel somewhat obliged to provide a picture of my “sad” trees. It’s freezing here, and the ice is weighting everything down.
I had asked my lawn guy multiple times (since they also do construction) to tear down the arbor above my back patio. I’ve been pestering him on and off for about two months now, they’ve had to push it back several times. It’s about to fall down and I was afraid of the first freeze/snow/ice that it would be too weighted down. Yes, it’s propped up by boards. It’s got some lean….some might say my porch has swagger.
It looks somewhat better camouflaged by sad bushes though:
There’s also an opossum or raccoon that has occupied my attic which is somewhat disconcerting.
I did do something that I haven’t ever really done seriously: Karaoke
We were out on the town and decided to hit a local watering (boozing) hole (and hole-in-the-wall) and do some sang-ing.
My range sucks. And my song choices are strange too. I choose less on what I think I can sing than what kind of risk I’m taking on performing it.
I started with this, and it didn’t go badly:
I think I followed it up with some Huey Lewis and the News, Billy Idol, Stray Cats and a crowd favorite:
I don’t have much to add except it was fun.
Carry on.
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Slippery Smooth and In the Groove
If I wasn’t an atheist, this might be what heaven sounds like.
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“We knew he was in the oil business; we didn’t know it was snake oil.” Paul Begala
Yesterday I got pitched by a pro. This guy was truly good. Sometimes i think that having lived a little does eventually teach you something.
Credit: http://www.kevinredpath.co.uk/ To start, I was having a great morning. Seriously, a GREAT morning, where even though I was late to work nobody cared, I was getting all my stuff done and pretty much knocking it out of the park. Around 1:30, I felt like I’d accomplished enough and could take a break.*
Heading over to the Starbucks local to my office, I ordered and went to sit down in one of the cushy chairs. It was angled slightly toward the guy in the corner, but that didn’t really matter to me, it didn’t look like anyone was sitting there.**
http://nancib.files.wordpress.com/2008/05/starbucks_seating1.jpg “Is anyone sitting here?”, I politely asked.
“There is now”, the man said with a large smile on his face.
He started the conversation innocently enough.
“How is your day going?”
We bantered a bit. I was in a great mood, so I kept batting back inane comments and quips to make him chuckle. I didn’t have anything immediately pressing back at work so it was just a means of hanging out for a minute. We discussed how this Starbucks was close to the airport, and how people there tended to be travelers. It neatly segued into
“So, what do you do, if I may ask?”
I discussed it briefly, omitting where I actually worked and instead named the contracting company that actually pays me. i’d already overheard someone not three feet from me on my right that was discussing some information that had to do with my company, so I wanted to be a little careful.
There was a slight pause. Since I’m conversationally challenged some times, I did decide to go down that path. “So, what do you do?”. Now, my hesitancy doesn’t really have anything to do with being shy, or understanding how conversation works. It really has more to do with me not really caring what other people do for a living. I don’t put much stock in people that I meet randomly, because you can never tell who they really are. I doubt that I will meet a guy at Starbucks and it turns into someone I consider a life-long friend. Cynical? Yeah. Sorry.
This guy was soooo good, he didn’t immediately talk about what he did. He eased into it so gradually that I didn’t see it coming. He talked about: Racism in hiring practices (which was immediately astonishing, but reflecting back, not likely), scraping the bottom of the barrel in applying for jobs, being over qualified, being in the military, dis-illusionment with media and society in general, supporting his family, owning his own home, the american dream.
About 10 minutes in, honestly, I was ready to bolt. I realized that this guy was going to talk forever. ***
But at work right now, I’m relatively indispensable so I knew that if I was gone a little longer than normal, nobody was going to really worry about it. That’s how good the day was going.So inbetween my, “Wow, that’s crazy” and nods of agreement, and shakes of the head against “the man”, he finally, FINALLY gets to the original answer. And he didn’t answer it directly. He had peppered his initial stores with “self employeed”, “my own boss” and “owning my own company”. As I fell deeper into his rabbit hole, he got a little closer to what he actually does.
When he finally got around to it, he started at the periphery and worked his way inward. Like an onion. I can’t even type this up as eloquently as he brought it around, but it started with things like “My wife is retiring at the end of this year”, “I’ll be retiring soon”. As he got closer to the core, the details start coming in. “Thanks to the deregulation, and who doesn’t use electricity?”, and “When people hear that they could be paying single digits for a kilowatt hour, and most are paying double digits, they immediately are interested, even if they’re not interested in contacting people, they still want to save money”. Note at this point, he has not told me ANYTHING directly about what he does. Finally, the key line emerges, “so I get paid not only when they sign up, but when the sign other people up and then every time they pay their bill.”
From there it went into a VERY roundabout discussion about how he has friends that I don’t have and that I have friends that he doesn’t have. My spider sense has been building up.
When the key line above hits my ear hole, i put all the pieces together, and realize that he’s involved in one of the pyramid schemes for electricity.
Back in the 90’s, one of my very dear friends that I’ve known since I was five, approach me with something similar. Back in the 90’s, however, we weren’t as connected as we are now. Smart phones hadn’t been invented, the internet was truly in it’s infancy. The horror of dialing long distance (and getting billed outrageously for it) was still a very real thing. So calling cards became the rage. Then, calling card pyramid schemes became the rage.
His family had fallen into that trap. I went to their family meeting essentially under the influence and asked a few bizarre, potentially inappropriate questions. After the meeting, I knew I wasn’t interested, but he was one of my oldest friends, so I gave him the $100 and wrote it off. I knew I was never going to do anything with it, and I knew that he wasn’t either.
There’s a lot on the internet about pyramid schemes, so I don’t need to lay it out.
http://money.howstuffworks.com/pyramid-scheme1.htm Back to the guy at Starbucks.
He’s laid a ton of groundwork. Once I’ve figured out what was happening, I said a few things about how deregulation was good for the electricity industry. I wasn’t buying it. He’d put out hook after hook, after hook and I wasn’t biting. I don’t think he ever got the feeling that he was about to reel me in, and honestly I don’t think he was too concerned. His angle seemed to be the pitch. He enjoyed it. Signing people up would be a bonus. So eventually (it had been about an hour), I said, ” Well, I’m glad you got that stability you were looking for.” He complimented my shoes **** and I departed.
During one of his long stories, a barista walked in and said hello to him by name. By this time I knew what he was up to, so I jokingly asked if the guy had sold the barista electricity. He said, “No, I just come here all the time.” I thought to myself, “This guy just sits in Starbucks all day and pitches. What a job.” The more I thought about it, the more I wondered how much was truth, and then how much was the pitch.
Either way, he was good at it.
There are two lessons I feel like I need to impart here:
1) Energy deregulation is a good thing for lowering prices for consumers. Go to powertochoose.org if you live in Texas and want to see if you can lower your kw/hr amount. I did it, there’s nothing to be scared of, I even like how they now rate complaints against the provider. Really, it’s still the two or three main electrical providers providing the electricity, the companies are just subcontracting the electrical rate and administration of your account.
2) Always remember that if it sounds like it’s too good to be true, it normally is. Pitches where anyone makes money off of your involvement should be avoided at any cost. It’s hard to see this when you’re younger, but eventually you’ll learn the hard way. Hopefully it doesn’t sting too much.
* Accomplishing things also included buying an amplifier off of ebay that I didn’t really need. But it is pretty.
** Was the chair angled on purpose? I tend to think it was, this guy was THAT good.
*** Which is another reason why I don’t start conversations with strangers.
**** Ragged out checkerboard vans. Really?
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The Parents Music Resource Center
I remember hearing that Al was going to be VP and I was like, “Hey, isn’t his wife responsible for that lunacy that was the PMRC?” Nobody but us old age folks remember how dumb that witch hunt was.
