Category Archives: Opinion

Poll Skewer

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Yesterday I had a man with a clipboard gingerly ask me if I would be willing to take a survey.  He identified himself as being with a group for equality something or other.  The survey was about how people felt about homosexuality.  Except they didn’t really want to know how I felt, they wanted yes or no answers.  They asked loaded questions that begged other questions they didn’t ask and they in the end handed out a 2 page pamphlet about discrimination.

I answered some of the questions one way and others another, not because I was trying to skew the poll, but because I knew that they were trying to polarize folks with the questions and I wasn’t going to buy into their game.  About half way through the, “Survey [that] won’t take less than a minute of [my] time,” the guy dropped the F-bomb.  So, since he felt free to be working and talking to the public and swearing I felt free to tell him that I had taught a Sunday School class on what the Bible says about homosexuality.  He then quickly finished the survey and took off 🙂  Why do they want skewed numbers for a serious poll… unless this isn’t a serious poll.

Es Ist Einen Nasal Passage

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My nose and nasal passages have been all sorts of funky with allergies.  The plane ride had pressure inside of my head that was crazy.  I haven’t acclimated to the change in elevation yet and things are ringing… and no, Becky, they are not phones that I’m hearing ringing.   Speaking of which cell phones don’t ring any more.  People have MIDI files, MP3 files or various other things that sound off, but I don’t hear nearly as many annoying ‘bing, bing, bing, bong, bo-o-o-ong’ sounds as I used to.  I think we’ll hear them again in about 2 years when people think retro-cell sounds are cool again.

Toasted

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Do you have fond memories of your grandma?  I have fond memories of my Grandma Martin who would make me toast as a child that was based on a form of non-nutrition called ‘white bread.’  To further increase my chances of not getting any nutrition she would slather it with margerine.  It was salty, buttery nothingness that was probably as useful for me as rice cakes, but I won’t get into rice cakes.

Then, one year my whole family got sick with some sort of flu/cold thing and the only thing that tastes good to us was toast.  We used real butter, but I’m sure that we used lots of it and it tasted fantastic… and we could keep it down.  My mom made a lot of it, though my brother and I tried as well to make some.

As you can tell the important women in my life had a toast making knack.  Jessica however, did not start out making me toasted bread.  Instead she would try to make me pecan pies, because that is what I wanted to eat.  Unfortunately those toasted as well.  or underbaked, or overflowed, or sideways slipped into the trash can because she was fed up with them.  Fortunately many of them turned out and slid onto my fork and into my mouth down into my quickly expanding belly.

And as you may have surmised, pies have a crust, which needs to be baked, which is a lot like toast.  So I’m glad to have had toast in my life, it has had special sentimental value that rice cakes have not.

Next time I may share about my other Grandma having carob energy drinks and soy nuts – those are also sentimental but completely unrelated to toast.

Frogger: Senior Edition

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Do you remember the arcade game Grogger from back in the days of 0 bit graphics? OK, so maybe frogger was 8 bit graphics, but it was an early game. The object, for those of you who read this blog but are too young to recall, is to get a frog to jump across multiple lanes of traffic without getting hit. You could move the frog several directions if I recall correctly, but in the end, it wasn’t an amazing game by today’s standards. You can read more about it at Wikipedia.

Well, last week Jessica and I were driving down a busy road here in Aurora (Iliff on Google Maps) and we saw a man in a motorized wheel chair trying to cross the street. I commented that he would be best off getting to a cross walk and waiting for a light to allow him to cross safely. About a quarter mile later we saw a man who had narrowly crossed the same street with a walker! It was like Senior Frogger championships or something only the drivers of the cars did not know. When I get old enough to need assistance to be mobile, and I hope my girls read this and show it to me if I resist, please require me to be safe by going to intersections designed for pedestrians.

Oh, and if you happen to see old people doing dangerous things, try to get some footage of it, because I can totally see this as a reality TV show.

Linux for the Weekend

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This weekend I ended up installing Ubuntu Linux onto an old machine that was choking under Windows XP. Wow. I ended up Remote Desktopping into Windows from Ubuntu to do Windows only things and spent the rest of the weekend in Linux, including finishing up my handout for the Sunday School class that I had to teach yesterday morning. It even connected to my network printer without issues [Yes, I had to configure it a tiny bit, but it wasn’t hard]. If you haven’t tried Ubuntu, there are ‘live CD’ images available. You just download the image, burn it to a disk, and then reboot your computer. Ubuntu looks good, works fast, and makes the old Pentium III 1 Ghz 256 MB or RAM feel like a screamer.

Rattling My Innards

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Last night, for Jessica’s final part of her Birthday celebration we went to Rodizio in the LoDo part of Denver with our friends Craig & Krystal. It is a Brazilian grill. I have been to two of these before Rodizio, in Texas and knew that we were in for a treat. If you’ve not been to a restaurant like this before then you need to understand that this is an all you can eat food fest. This particular restaurant had various meats, seafoods and veggies that they served to some tables. Somehow our table only got meats. When you want their meat servers to bring various types of meat to your table you flip over a little wooden object that has red, yellow and green sections painted onto it. You flip this so that the green side is facing up into the air. As Craig said, this is turning on the meat spigot.

Between January and April they have ‘wild game’ feature meats. Yesterdays was Wild Boar and Rattlesnake Sausages. I had several rattlesnake sausage bit (they didn’t give you a whole sausage unless you asked for one, which is fine by me) and I quite enjoyed them. Our waiter was a young, spunky guy whose nametag read “Jeffizzle.” He had a funky liney beard. That’s the only words I can think to describe it shortly because the longer description would be a small 1/8th inch (2 millimeter) wide band that ran from his sideburns down around his chin up to the other side. Its an accent piece like a necklace, only made of hair. Yeah, it looked a wee weird.

Side Story
Craig had somehow escaped all of the noise about Brokeback Mountain in the last 4 months and found himself watch the video while exercising yesterday morning. He got 28 minutes into the film until the two men make lip contact. At which point he had to stop working out, had to go pour bleach into his eyes, and had to go find out more about the movie to see if this was just a funky one-time situation. To his dismay it was not and so he promptly wrapped up the DVD and sent it back to NetFlicks. I tell you that to tell you this. Jeffizzle was not afraid to break out into what he called his Brokeback Mountain routine when we had finally decided to turn off the meat spigot and survey the dessert options. He outlined the various options that were available for us in decadent desserts and when reaching a point in the dessert selection switched to a super accentuated ‘s’ lisp and described the dish in rather sensual terms. We chuckled and he moved on into the next item in his regular speach pattern. Craig was probably mentally having flashbacks of the morning and wanting to run for the Rockies, but restrained himself.

When it came time to pay the bill we did so with a slightly liberal tip, but one that reflected the service and the length of time we had squatted at the table [definition: squatting is sitting at a table for a particularly long time at a restaurant. This can prevent wait staff from serving other customers at that table and possibly decreasing their income from tips for the year]. As we left we hit the restrooms to do what people do there and happened to pass the waiter showing off our receipt exclaiming, “I went brokeback on another table again and look at this!”

We then strolled through part of downtown Denver to walk off some of the protein we’d glutted ourselves on. This is always fun because there are pan handlers, vagrants, other strollers and lots of carriages waiting to draw you. Lights, busses, some cars, cops and shops all looking particularly metropolitan make for a fun walk. As is always the case I ended up talking about programming practicies with Craig who patiently teaches me all about the things he learned by actually going to school for his carear path. He’s also got a lot more life experience in coding than I do so I have to say that I like to be a sponge when he shares things. Fortunately some of the things he shared with me last night were things I knew which tells me that I’m starting to have some competance in the area of coding after 5 years 🙂

We had a good time with the Kaes’, Jessica got to have a fun meal, and in the end we really enjoyed a great downtown Denver experience.

My Since Relyest Apologies

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So, when I was in 7th Grade my English teacher, Mrs. Daniels, taught us to remember how to spell sincerely. She said to remember that it it was spelled like a compound word: SinceRely. My sincerest apologies for the negative bent the more recent blog posts have had. I really should be writing happier stuff, funnier stuff and have more Abby and Evie posts.

I was chatting with a friend this morning and said that I realized that I was being negative. It is easy to be negative, especially when you think you’re being funny. Being funny and being negative are actually two dangerous things. You can be negative and you can be funny but you can be more of one than the other and the scales have tipped to mostly negative recently.

So I beg your forgiveness and hope that you will find it in your collective hearts (but seriously, if you collect hearts, um, where are you storing them? Do you have a walk in fridge?) to keep reading this funky blog and the silly stuff that spills from my fingers. Don’t worry, I have paper towels nearby to clean up the mess.

Worst Defense of Movie Theaters I’ve Read

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Mark Cuban, who is always referred to as the billionaire [apparently he doesn’t have value as a human being outside of his money to the editors of every major publication], is in charge of several media production companies. He has been pushing to get movies out on DVD at the same time they’re put on the silver screens so as to reduce piracy. The theory (that I agree with) is that if you release things to the masses in multiple formats they are less likely to steal the content from somewhere else. Wired magazine interviewed an opponent of this idea, the CEO of AMC movie theaters. In short it is the silliest defense of ‘the old way’ I’ve read yet. Sure, its possible that Wired edited the guy to look like a moron, but if you look at the text its clear that something is not right about this guy’s logic.

First he’s saying that the theaters only want to carry the best products, by which he means movies, and that Mark Cuban’s company’s movie wasn’t quality enough for his theaters. Then he’s saying that ticket sales were down last year because the quality of the movies were down. But then he sites that the quality of the movies were derided by reviewers. Does he know why there are movie reviewers out there? Because there are so many movies released that the masses have to get help to know which ones might be worth their time. If fewer movies were released, but had quality behind them, then I think folks would be inclined to go see them and reviewers would review them well because they were quality movies. You can’t seriously tell me that a movie theater that played “Kung Pow: Enter the Fist!” has discernment to say no to ‘Bubble’, Cuban’s movie [let it be known I own Kung Pow, but I consider it to be a goofy movie that few would enjoy unless theyr’e goofy like me].

In short its a political move but he’s dancing around like Mike Tyson before he bites your ear. Or in this case, your pocketbook.

A New Car Seat for Abby

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Two days ago Abby’s car seat started giving us serious grief and she rode him in the car with only a four point harness instead of 5 points. That was less than ideal but I disassembled part of it and tried to fix it. To no avail. So yesterday evening we dropped her off out our neighbors’ place for about an hour and ran over to Target (our favorite French store) and picked up a new one. Dang. Not only are there lots of options, but you can pay a lot of money for a really uncomfortable looking [and feeling] seat. Kudos to Target for having them at eye level so we could touch, smell and taste these expensive safety restraints.

We chose one that has cup holders. But in Abby’s case they’ll probably just hold her miniature stuffed animals most of the time 🙂