Jeeeee-hawwwwd! NASCAR Season!

Bubba bin-bubba al-Bubbah here again!  Glory to Aller, it's finally time fer gentlemen to start their injuns!  Well, by thats I means gentlemen and one dirty ho-bag who ain't got no right to be b'hind no wheel.  She otter be back at home, warshin' dishes and changin' diapers, not posin' in a bikini and goin' racin'.  Bet that right there's why Aller made it rain in Daytona yesterdee.  Betcha she wrecks out and blames it on the cramps or sumpthin, 'cuz she don't in no ways belong in that manly sport o' NASCAR.

So, lemme tell ya.  The other day my cousin Jamaal put some 42" Super Swampers on his F250 but the chassis started bouncin' around like Dolly Parton on a trampoline.  I told him he needs to put him on some of them steerin' dampeners on the front end.  Ya know, they look like shock absorbers but all sideways and stuff.  So he went ahead and did it.  'Cept he didn't go and get the real thing.  He took the shocks off'en his IROC-Z that's been up on blocks since 2002.  He welded up some brackety, but ol' Jamaal don't know how to weld worth a lick.  So he tried to mount them shocks, but the welds kept failin'.  Getting that truck runnin' right was trickier than pushin' steer snot up a waterslide, lemme tell ya.  Finally we went for a test drive.  All was well for about a block or three, then the hippy-hippy shake kicked in again.  Next thing ya know, we's hittin' the curb.  I just 'bout swallered my dentures, and ol' Jamaal flew out his seat and the shifter knob hit him right in the inkwell.  I ne'er knew Jamaal could sing that high, hoo-wee!  By the way, his shifter handle is chrome and shaped like the grips on a AK-47.  It is super cool.  And Aller willin', I'll have me one soon, too.  Turns out the faulty shocks were made by Bilstein.  Sounds Joosh to me.  Them sneaky Joos'll will sell ya faulty shocks ev'ry time if you let 'em.  (Note to self:  ask the imam if I should honor-kill Jamaal for usin' joosh shocks on his IROC)

Whoa, dunno where I was headed with all that.  Oh yeah!  The race!  Where wuz I?  Oh, yep.  That Juan Pablo guy.  With a name like that, he's prolly descended from crusaders.  He got all sideways and crashed right inta that jet fuel track dryin' truck.  Betcha it was none other than the Great and Merciful Aller himself that nudged that crusader car sideways!  And Junior!  What's it take for you to win a big race, for prophet's sake?  You were right there at the end and ya blew it!  The race was right there on a silver platter!  I even wore your daddy's #3 on my headgear!  C'mon!  It's like my granddaddy used to say: you can lead a horse to water, but a goat don't make as much noise when you're molestin' 'em.

That's all for now.  I'll see ya at the races!

Grueling weekend

Saturday.  Early AM.  Still dark.  Doing gruntwork restaurant job.  Noticing some cars in parking lot have snow on 'em.  Pondering having to drive a U-Haul through the Columbia River Gorge to pick up my brother-in-law and his stuff.  Ugh.

Yep, immediately after work I had to dash up to The Dalles and rent the truck and then head down US197 to the middle of B.F.E. to get BiL and his stuff.  The Gorge can be an amazingly scenic drive when the conditions are good.  But the canyon acts like a funnel.  Storms coming in from the coast get channeled into it and drastically amplified.  Turns out that the snowy cars were an omen and Saturday was a Storm Day.  Ugh.

Experienced the joy of driving a U-Haul in snow, rain, dust storm w/ about 50' of visibility, and STUPID winds.  After going down 197 and coming back to The Dalles we stopped for lunch.  Even the locals were griping about the wind, and they're supposedly used to it.  Driving the dang truck was like flying a kite.  Along about Cascade Locks there's a narrow, twisty bit on the interstate.  As we rounded the corner, there was a Dodge Dakota with a crunched front end, stalled sideways in the middle of the freeway.  He must've got crossed-up and hit the guardrail or something.  I *just* barely managed to get whoa'd up without center-punching the Dakota as its passengers scrambled out and hurried to the road shoulder.  Then the little voice in my head said "You're sitting dead still in the middle of a tight turn on the interstate during a wind and rainstorm.  This is going to be bad."  Thankfully we got around the truck and were able to help them push it out of the roadway.  Nobody was hurt, but we could have been one Inattentive Moron away from being in a dozen-car pileup.  Phew!

Finally got back to my place in Corvallis.  Spent the rest of my weekend rearranging the stuff to make room for BiL's stuff.  Remember that George Carlin bit about "Your house is just a place where you keep your stuff, while you go out and get... more stuff!"?  Yes, the inside of my house now looks like an overstuffed mini-storage unit.  But BiL is now out of a bad situation, so I guess there's that.

So...  Last night, wife and I get back from church.  There's a stack of scratch-off lotto tickets on the coffee table.  BiL says "I won a few bucks, but I saved one for you guys to scratch off."  I'm not into lotto games, but heck, if it's a gift I guess it's OK.  It was a poker kind of theme...

My wife scratched it off...  Holy Crap!!  "I just got a straight flush!  We just won $25,000!!!!"  BiL says "Are you sure!?  Check it carefully!  Read the back!"  On the reverse, the card reads "To redeem your winnings, take this ticket to any lotto retailer stupid enough to believe this is a valid lotto ticket."

Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha.

I am now taking suggestions on how to get BiL back for that little tee-hee that wasn't really all that funny.

Vid worth watching

She doesn't look like she's old enough to meet the Constitutional age requirement to be president.  Bummer.  Hopefully she makes it to that age without being strangled by some peaceful practitioner of the Religion of Peace ^TM

Five worst songs ever

Interesting conversation with a cow-orker this afternoon.  Topic?  Five most annoying songs of all time.  We came up with a list.  Of course, with a sample size of only two, it is likely inconclusive.  We desperately need your input in order to finalize this list.

Here's our starting point:

1.  Thomas Dolby - Blinded Me with Science
2.  Wham! - Wake Me Up Before You Go
3.  Toni Basil - Mickey
4.  Europe - Final Countdown
5.  Peter Gabriel - Sledgehammer

Lemme know what drives you most batcrap loco, and I'll try to compile the Ultimate List.  After that, dunno.  Maybe license it to the CIA for use in extracting information from terrorists.

Stuck inside these four walls

Yeesh, what a boring day.  Couple more hours of it, then I get to go home.  EXCEPT... We're My wife is babysitting 4 toddlers until tomorrow evening.  This is so some married couples can go to a church retreat this weekend, without their crumb crunchers tearing the hotel down.  Instead the crumb crunchers are tearing my house down and terrorizing my doggies.  If you don't hear from me after this, check the Benton County Jail inmate roster and look through the booking pics for the guy on a psych hold that pulled all his hair out.  That'll be me.

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Andy has a very interesting post regarding internet anonymity.  It looks like a really long, tedious post, but that's only because Andy uses a big font.  So go read it.  As for me, I use a pseudonym mainly because my real-life first name is the very generic "John."  Not that there is anything wrong with that name, but...  Yell "Hey, John!" at my church and half the guys turn around and say "Yeah, what?"  And my last name, while seemingly simple, just confounds the heck out of people.  I tell people "it rhymes with Bonham" and they are like "Whoa!  John Bonham!  You're the drummer for Led Zeppelin!  I though you were dead!" Then I'm so annoyed that I have to punch them in the gut and take their skateboard.  It gets old after a while.  Hence the nom-de-blog.

It's also interesting to do the self-google...

In other words, I'm so screwed.  There are usenet (anybody remember usenet?) articles I posted back in the '80s in the rec.pyrotechnics newsgroup about blowing things up with homemade bombs.  Like melons.  And tree stumps.  And... Well... I'm sure that Big Sis ("ve haff detailed files") Napolitano already knows all those things about me.  But I s'pose it'd still be prudent to shut up right about, umm, now.

All that junk is still archived and shows up when I google myself.  Of course, Rick Santorum thinks it is a sin to google yourself, so maybe I should just knock it off.   What I'm getting at, is that there is already such a wealth of stuff about me on the 'net that could be cherry-picked to make me look really bad.  Or really good.  Or really ordinary.  No way to put that genie back in the bottle, so I don't worry too much about what people try to find.  Perhaps you, though, actually have a decent reputation and would like to keep it that way.  Start by reading Andy's post.

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Scary-good overhead image courtesy of Google Earth.
(Image of me standing in the parking lot flipping off Google's satellite photoshopped out)

Here's a view of where I do my early morning grunt job.  It is never so bright and cheerful when I am there before sunrise, but that isn't the point.  The point is stupid people doing stupid things stupidly.  The "corral" is what we call the walled-off area where we store non-valuable things like the garden hoses, snow shovels, etc.  It also has our dumpsters, which we also share with the Chevron station that is partially visible at the top of the pic.  I know, none of that is the least bit interesting but I felt a strange compulsion to include all those details.

So... A customer came through the drive-thru.  The customer pondered the offerings on the menu, placed an order, paid for the order, received the order, and proceeded to leave.  This may seem like a routine event.  But it you stop and think of it, it is quite amazing.  Someone from 500 years ago would think it miraculous that we could travel about in big shiny machines and get a greasy breakfast burrito and coffee for $3, with all this happening under the goal-time of about 140 seconds.  They would conclude that man had reached a level of Higher Intelligence.  Then the time traveler would marvel at the Low Intelligence of said customer driving RIGHT INTO THE CORRAL.  Tearing up the wall, goobering up the door so it no longer swings freely, and then DRIVING AWAY leaving behind a mess of broken headlight glass and bits of bumper cover and fender trim.  Since none of the stuff in there is valuable, there is no surveillance camera pointed at it.  We don't know who did it. 

So I say to the hit-n-run moron:  This moment of stupidity will haunt you all your days, like exaggerated boasting of blowing up melons on the rec.pyrotechnics newsgroup.  Because I talked about you on the internet.  And the internet is forever. 

Award time, Barry Dire Campaign Issues, and miscellanea

The urge to blog had pretty much departed...  Not feeling it...  Then...

Odie (Woodsterman) gives me something special...  (Thankfully, the nurse gave me a shot and said the burning sensation should subside over the next 36 to 48 hours...)  Naw, that's not it... He gave me an Award!

Liebster is Austrian for "beloved" or "favorite." Thank you, Odie!  With that in mind, I suppose that I should follow the rules and pick me out some Liebster Blogs but I'll save that for the next post, because unlike Madame Clinton who ain't in no ways tard*, I am in many ways tard.  'Cuz last night grandbaby #6 made her arrival.   At a little after midnight - which may not seem that late to some of you young 'uns, but for an old fart that has to get up early that is HARSH.  Daughter-in-law (and wife) wanted me to be present right there in the delivery room.  Unh?  "Birth is so beautiful."  "Birth is such a miracle."  Yadda, yadda, trying to convince me.

No.

Birth is not beautiful.  Birth is just like that scene in Alien.  Except that instead of a cool little kick-azz monster, you get a noisy little helpless monster.  I can do without all that.  " I'll be waiting down in the car..."

Then today the contractors are in grinding down the concrete floor in the store.  Gonna sand it smooth, fill the cracks and clear coat it.  No more carpet.  Next time we flood we can clean the place up with a big squeegee (or a hobo on a stick) and be done with it.  'Cept the process is noisy as bleep and dusty as bleep-bleep.  The whole scenario leaves me a little grouchy.  I mean, even more than normal.

OK, OK...  Alright, enough complainin'.  On with the story...


Barry Dire Campaign Issues

Obama, Messina, Plouffe, Axelrod and Jarrett are holding a strategy session.

[Obama] "Those danged Catholics sure are stirring up a lot of grief about some pills and rubbers.  Geez.  It's not like I'm making them bow towards Mecca or something."

[Jarrett] "I recommend you keep the ban.  Don't wanna tick off the mean-faced clipped-hair types at Planned Parenthood.  We just saw the other day how they react when they don't get their quota of dead babies."

[Obama] "No kidding.  I could strangle Pelosi for putting such controversial material in that giant bill I never read before signing."

[Axelrod] "I tried to strangle Pelosi once.  All I could get was a handful of loose skin.  Not worth the bother."

[Messina] "Thankfully the Republicans are still being republicany and screwing themselves over."

[Plouffe] "Well, there is some worry there.  Santorum could take a lot of midwest and rust-belt states we need.  And Romney is talking about using a 50-state strategy to flat-out clobber us.  He wants a strong mandate, so he has the political cover to keep doing exactly what we're doing.  Plus, they're rolling out these..."

[Obama] "What the heck?"

[Plouffe] "They're a bunch of cardboard cutouts of Romney.  They going to put them everywhere.  OmniRomney they're calling it."

[Obama] "But they're plain and boring.  Completely without life or personality."

[Plouffe] "Which means people will believe they're meeting the real Mitt Romney!"


[Obama] "Holy ****! You're right!"

[Plouffe] "Not only that, shake OmniRomney's hand"

[Obama] "Crap!" [shakes hand again] "That's totally believable.  Everybody's gonna think they've personally met with him.  We're in real trouble!"

[Biden enters] "Hey guys!  Whassup?"

[Obama, fearful] "OmniRomney has come to destroy us!"

[Biden] "Really?  Lemme check this out." [shakes OmniRomney's hand] "Whoa.  Creepy.  Did ya hear that Roseanne Barr is running for President?"

[Obama] "No.  Am I supposed to care?"

[Biden] "She's running on the Green Tea ticket.  No doubt it'll attract a lot of eco- types, weed-burnin' stoners, probably even a few drunk Tea Party people.  Since 'tea' rhymes with 'pee', she'll attract all the Occupy people, too.  A formidable coalition."

[Obama, panicking] "Get Roseanne on the phone!"

Later that afternoon, Roseanne arrives at the White House.

[Obama, sternly] "How dare you run for president!"

[Barr, sarcastically.  Between words, little cracking noises from her chewing gum] "Yeah, well, let's just say you've been a serious letdown there, champ.  If this country is every going to be transformed, it's gonna need somebody in charge who can get things done."

[Obama] "And now you think you're The One for the job?"

[Barr] "See, Sparky, the rethuglicans suck.  All their candidates suck.  Yet they all poll well against you.  You are losing to 'pure suck'! Which puts you somewhere, oh, I dunno, somewhere beneath 'pure suck', wherever that is."

[Obama, sadly] "But Michelle said not to worry and that everything will be OK."[wipes tear]

[Barr, loudly] "What the **** does it take to get a ******* Snicker bar around here?  Hello!?"

A White House intern dashes in, dutifully unwraps a Snicker bar and offers it to Roseanne.

[Obama] "They never move that fast for me!"

[Barr] "See what I mean?  Not only that, I can belt out a mean National Anthem.  Wanna hear it?"

[Obama] "No!  OK, here's the deal.  Drop your presidential bid, and I'll give you a high cabinet position.  Wanna take over State from Hillary?"

[Barr] "Isn't it, like, illegal to offer jobs or other compensation to influence a candidate to run/not run?"

[Obama] "Yeah, like Holder is actually going to do anything about it."

[Barr] "Good point.  I'll have my agent give you a call.  Maybe we can make this work." [stands and gracelessly departs]

[Obama] "Phoo! That was close.  Now, what to do about OmniRomney?"

Irritation of the day

I'm not telling you anything you haven't already heard time and again.  I know that spouting all this will accomplish nothing.

But sometimes ya just gotta lance the boil...  (Since this is all true, I'm keeping this vague to protect the guilty)
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There is a person in my immediate or "almost immediate" family, who works an entry-level job at or just above minimum wage.  This job is not quite full-time.  This person has one child out-of-wedlock.  This person receives food stamps.  This person receives state-subsidized daycare.  This person gets OHP (Oregon's version of low-income health coverage).  This person gets Section 8 housing, so this person's out-of-pocket monthly rent is about $130.  By government standards, this person is living in poverty.

This person lives unmarried with a Significant Other.  This SO works a similar entry-level job, and pays roughly half of the household expenses (not that there are many).  This SO, however, is not listed as any kind of resident or breadwinner or contributor to the household.  The State is aware of this ruse.  But like a honey badger, the State just doesn't give a ****.

Haven't heard yet what the SO's taxes look like this year, but this person in my family is getting a $5600 tax "refund" this year.  This person is DRIPPING WITH EXCITEMENT about how they're just days away from having a 72" HDTV, a brand new washer and dryer, and some brand new furniture.  By government standards, this person is living in poverty.


Meanwhile, I work at least 55 hours a week and have none of those things.  My couch is sprouting holes.  The boy doggie is overdue for a vet visit, but we can't afford it right now.  Keeping up with the bills has been extra challenging the last few months.  By government standards, I am a fair bit above median income.

...with liberty and justice for all.