So this spam email arrives in my personal (not my work…there’s pretty good about blocking spam here at work) mailbox. Gain Inches The Easy Way…reads the subject line. Ah-ha…thinks I…of course it’s easy. Just stuff your face with cookies all day long and you’ll gain lots of inches. Er…around the waste. That’s what you meant…right???
Ever notice how much spam is targeted at male sexuality? Never mind the porn ads…just look at all the ads for bootleg Viagra, among other things. Either spammers think the entire world is gay (and that gay men like straight male pornography too) or they’re targeting all this to a mostly straight audience. Yet we gay men are the ones who are obsessed with sex, and have like, thousands of sexual partners every night or something…
Insulting The Owners Of Other Car Brands Is An Iffy Sales Plan
Via Benz Insider… Yes. I know. Mercedes sedans are owned by senile old rich guys. With trophy wives no less…
I’m really not sure who Audi is trying to sell their cars to here, but I’m guessing it’s people who don’t already own a BMW, Mercedes or Lexus. I have to say though…the two girls in the back of that Lexus SUV do the best Wednesday Adams since Christina Ricci in the Adams Family movie. That Lexus family should get its own show. The Adams Family, only instead of everyone being disturbed the same way, everyone is disturbed in their own special way.
As for the old guy in the Mercedes…look…I’ll gladly endure senility, if the ‘S’ class, the mansion, a hot young guy and a good cigar go with it. Was all that supposed to be a disincentive?
Today’s Weather: Dreary, With Brief Intervals Of Sunshine Followed By Holy Crap Which Way To The Ark??!!
I don’t think I’ve ever seen the sky over Maryland open up like it did just now. For a moment it felt like a waterfall had perched over Casa del Garrett. I’ve never heard rain pound my roof like it did just now. And half the sky is bright with sunshine.
I was laying in bed…my energy levels have been really weak lately…and I heard what I thought was hail smacking down on my aluminum window awnings. I rolled over and looked out and it wasn’t hail but those big fat raindrops that sometimes portend a sudden tropical downpour. Lots of them. And sure enough, what followed was a torrent of rain. No kidding…my neighborhood street had almost dried out from the past couple days of rain, rain, rain, and in under a minute it was soaked again with a fast moving stream of water rushing toward the Jones Falls creek bed. Then it stopped.
The sky to my east is dark as slate. To my west it’s all sun-shiny. Everything is soaked again. My poor front yard is a swamp. I’d been thinking about a certain someone who lives in Florida when I laid down and then I suddenly get a downpour that reminds me of the weather down there. I wish I could believe in that omen. But here’s what my logical analytical brain is telling me: If this is going to be a wet winter, better hope it’s a warm one or I could be digging out of three or four feet of snow every few weeks.
Every November I make a point to stock my basement supply shelves with things to last me through the winter so I don’t have to be going to the store all the time when the weather’s bad, and especially when it snows, because the people here in Maryland just dogpile on the stores whenever the forecast so much as breaths the word ‘snow’. I buy my entire November through March supply of non-perisable items and pick through it until winter goes away. I also make sure I have plenty of things on hand like batteries and over the counter remedies, soaps and cleaners and things for doing ad-hoc repairs. I’m not a survivalist, I just hate going outside when the streets are all snowed up and iced over, and everyone is dog piling on the stores because ohmygodit’sgoingtosnoweekeekeek… Winter is what bulk warehouse shopping was made for.
Oh look…the sun is out again…daring me to go for a walk…
So I check the weather before heading off to bed, and see that a tropical storm may form right off the Carolina coast and be blasting Baltimore tomorrow and Friday with high winds and rain. Wait…what..???
Damn. I thought these things were supposed to form in the tropics and then get a name or something before they bounce up the east coast…
Gold went up from around $783 to $862 today. Maybe I should hold on to my gold after all. I was going to sell it to pay off some debt. Maybe right now is not the time…
"A Brabus Maybach," he said, as she turned her head in time to see him give the wheel a little pat. "The firm of Brabus extensively tweaks the product of Maybach, to produce one of these."
-From chapter 17 of Spook Country by William Gibson
So it looks like tropical storm Fay might become a roaring hurricane before it makes landfall. The Florida Keys and Orlando, both of which occupy fond places in my heart for various reasons, are in its path. So I’m keeping an eye on it. Her. It. Whatever.
You know…they need to stop giving these dangerous things cutesy names. Instead of Fay, how about Insane Clown, or Babbling Homeless Man With An Axe, or Drunken Train Engineer or Laughing Pit Bull or Flying Anvil Swarm…
The German Health Ministry is reportedly preparing to establish maximum levels for uranium in drinking water after a study found the radioactive material in water supplies throughout the country.
So I’m in Portland for the fifth year in a row at the OSCON Open Source Developer’s Conference. And as in prior years, the Institute has put me up in the DoubleTree just a couple blocks away from the convention center. That’s do-able largely because of the deep discount the hotel gives to OSCON convention attendees.
The rooms I’ve had have ranged widely from the small to the large. Last year they put me in a really nice deluxe room. This year it’s one of their smallest. What’s going on I found out, is that the hotel basically fills in the blanks with conference goers. We get, at a very nice rate, whatever the hotel couldn’t book at the regular rate. And I am not complaining.
DoubleTree beds are decadent. I’ll reliably stay at a DoubleTree whenever I can afford it for the bed. I get, hands down, the best sleep ever on these beds. The chain has them custom made to their own specs, and you can actually buy one yourself. Swear to god one of these days I will…but they are not cheap.
It’s not just the mattress and box springs, it’s a whole system including a cushioned mattress cover, box baffled down blankets and triple sheets plus lovely jumbo down pillows. I was so looking forward to getting to my hotel after a long day’s flight, crammed into a tiny passenger jet seat, and lay down in one of these lovely beds. It’s been two nights of heaven so far.
MENDOTA HEIGHTS, Minn. – Fire investigators said a fire that destroyed a Mendota Heights home last week was caused by a flowerpot. Fire Chief John Maczko said a flowerpot on the home’s deck spontaneously combusted.
While rare, spontaneous combustion can happen to pots with the right mixture of soil, moisture and heat.
Homeowner Dan Stoven said it’s hard to believe, but said he’s just glad his 17-year-old daughter was able to escape when passers-by entered the home to wake her up.
Investigators said the soil was in a plastic pot that had become hot after several days of high temperatures and humidity. It ignited July 8, and wind helped the fire grow and spread to the deck and then to the house.
Next time I go shopping for flowers I need to check their flame retardant rating.
When Smirk entered the White House in 2001, the price of gasoline was bumping around the $1.80 mark. Crude was bumping around the $30 a barrel mark. You can’t blame that jackass and his idiot henchmen for all of the increase, but his splendid little war is one factor exacerbating it. The other is actually more Reagan’s fault then Bush’s. Reagan began the financial deregulation process that led straight to the sub prime mortgage meltdown we have now, and the resulting credit crunch. Investors, worried that all of a sudden real estate isn’t the safe haven for money it used to be, are putting their dough into buying commodities like…er…crude oil…which drives up the price.
Why it is that people assume republicans are better at managing an economy then democrats is beyond me, other then I guess people think that if you’re rich you must know how to make money. Some rich people do. Some rich people absolutely love to make money. And those people rise the standard of living for everyone. Their energy makes the world a better place. But others are rich because they merely hunger for wealth and they don’t care how they get it. The ones of low ambition turn to petty crime. The really ambitious ones build empires, corrupt governments, and legally rape everyone and everything around them blind. Guess which sort gravitate to the republican party.
After more than five years of petroleum price increases, American consumers appear to be expecting the worst. A CNN poll taken last week showed that 59 percent of Americans believe it is very likely that they will pay $5 a gallon for gasoline before the end of the year and that an additional 27 percent say it is somewhat likely.
Economists say these expectations make it more probable that people will change behavior rather than simply wait for a turn in the traditional up-and-down cycle of commodity prices. "People now realize that prices may come back down, but they’re not going down to where they were," said Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s Economy.com. "We’re going to have to live with higher energy prices for a while. And that’s affecting their behavior and what they buy and don’t buy."
For Rusty Davis, a handyman from Arlington, the high cost of gasoline is changing the way he runs his business. He has started to refuse jobs outside the county. When he does travel to jobs, he now takes his fuel-efficient car and leaves behind his work van, which gets only 12 miles to the gallon. He also used to do free estimates in person. Now he does them over the phone.
My brother does that kind of work for a living, and when I read that I thought of him. He doesn’t do estimates over the phone for the obvious reason that you need to see the situation you’re getting into before you bid on it if you don’t want any unpleasant surprises gulping down your profit margin. I would expect he just adds in the higher cost of gas to his bids now, if he has to go far afield. But much of his work is local so I doubt he drives very far, very often to a job. But I don’t think he’d turn down a job outright simply because it involved driving a distance. The thing to do is bid it for what it will cost you and if you don’t get it…well…you can’t work a job that’s going to cost you more then you make back from it.
My brother has a big Ford truck, but he also has a smaller one he can use when he doesn’t need the capacity of the big one. I expect that one’s getting a lot more use now. I remember when all those air foils started appearing on tractor-trailer rigs back in the late 70s and 80s. Before the first oil embargo it didn’t matter how much fuel one of those things burned because it was so cheap, and the profile of most of those big rigs was like a fist going down the highway. Then suddenly the truckers were having to find ways to squeeze out every little bit of milage they could and there was a new appreciation for air drag. Now you see them all the time on the big trucks. Something else I’m starting to see more of on American highways are the mid-sized and smaller European trucks and vans.
More fuel efficient automobiles will come and that’s a good thing, but if you really want to keep the cost of living down, investing in more fuel efficient trucks will do a lot more for the economy.
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