Whatever

Friday The Thirteenth

In honor of today’s date, when it was time to pay for our weekly groceries at Kroger’s, we had the option of three different very short check out lines and we chose number thirteen.

I’m not going to create a separate page for the mods done to the Sonata like I did for the Miata, because the second and quite possibly last mod for it arrived in the mail from South Korea today. The first was tinting the windows and this one is a home market badge that goes on the right side of the trunk to balance out the Sonata one on the left. It reads F24GDi. The 24 stands for the 2.4 liter engine, I googled to find out that the GDi stands for Gasoline Direct injection, but the F I have no idea about. Four cylinders maybe?

We rode the bus (AKA the tandem) to work today and nary a single black cat crossed our path.

Paparecraft Propaganda

Papercraft Propaganda by Paper Tom. It is supposed to put you in mind of an old school Soviet statue.

I was out of contention in the NCAA Basketball Pool after last week and after this weekend’s games everyone is out of it. We still have the first winner, second place and third place winners, plus the Booby Prize for finishing last, but no one has any more points to gain. Of the teams in the Final Four, only 3 people had Kentucky, 2 people picked UCONN & one person picked Butler to make it that far. Of those 6 people, no one picked any of those three teams to move on, thus rendering next weekend’s Final Four irrelevant.

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Hello Mr. Aiken

In a story that would be perfect fodder for Garrison Keillor, Our Fair City(tm) yesterday unveiled a statue of a man that never set foot in the town named for him. Not only that, there were no known pictures of him, so the artist used photos of descendants and other folks from that time period to create his “likeness.” Read the whole story – Statue honoring Aiken’s founder makes its debut

In other news that could be just as well be set in Lake Wobegon, a new bar pub opened in the Alley on St. Patrick’s Day here. The alley is what serves for nightlife in the town that was founded by the president of the South Carolina Canal and Railroad Company. It has several popular eateries, most with their own bar area and one end is anchored by a micro brewery. Apparently, the good citizens are aghast at the attire of the waitresses, sort of Hooters-ish with an Irish twist. Tipsey McStumbles draws ire opening day over skirt length

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No Dam Blogging On Monday

Last night I didn’t watch House and I didn’t download the torrent today either. The show is now officially dead to me. It started a couple weeks ago with the dream sequence show, during which Dr. Taub showed up to deliver a machine gun for blowing up something while driving a Hyundai Sonata. At the next commercial break, guess which car company had the first ad? Right, Hyundai, you get 20 points. And ended with the movie/musical very special Greg falls off the the wagon into a bottle of vicodin because Cuddy might die and she rewards his mis-guided concern by breaking up with him.

Instead of House, I watched something more “exciting”, the last couple of innings of a spring training game between the FRS and the MFY. I did not recognize a single player name mentioned for either team.

The rest of last night and then again tonight was spent vacation planning. We are going on another trip out to the west coast. Nine days of visiting western Washington, western and central Oregon with a brief foray into northern California (as long as the radiation levels are not too bad.)

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All The News

We don’t get the local paper, we get our news through Yahoo (Donna) and Google (Brian.) On the Google News page there are the main stories on the left and in the right hand column there are headlines from various news outlets. These headlines get tailored to your tastes, both content and source, after time and to fill up tonight’s post I will give you excerpts, and then a link to, from 4 New York Times articles that I have interesting in the last week.

1) A more accurate description than ?100 percent natural whole-grain oats,? ?plump raisins,? ?sweet cranberries? and ?crisp fresh apples? would be ?oats, sugar, sweetened dried fruit, cream and 11 weird ingredients you would never keep in your kitchen.? – How to Make Oatmeal . . . Wrong

2) As anybody who has ever worked in any institution ? private or public ? knows, one of the primary ways employee effectiveness is judged is the performance review. And nothing could be less fair than that. – Why Your Boss Is Wrong About You

3) Consider what?s happened with lighting over the past three centuries. As people have switched from candles to oil-powered lamps to incandescent bulbs and beyond, the amount of energy needed to produce a unit of light has plummeted. Yet people have found so many new places to light that today we spend the same proportion of our income on light as our much poorer ancestors did in 1700… – When Energy Efficiency Sullies the Environment

4) The affected men were, in each case, those who?d trained the longest and hardest. Spending more years exercising strenuously or completing more marathon or ultramarathon races was, in this study, associated with a greater likelihood of heart damage. – When Exercise Is Too Much of a Good Thing

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Plugging Away

I would like to tell you the reason that I did not post anything yesterday was because it was National Day of Unplugging 2011, but it wasn’t, it was pure unadulterated BA. And if it wasn’t for me stumbling on news of this event I probably wouldn’t have written anything tonight either.

But now that I’m here I will update you on my day. Breakfast at the same old place, clothes shopping for the niece and nephew in WA at the Kidsignment Sale, followed by book shopping for the wife and I at the American Association of University Women Books ‘N’ Things Fair. We stopped at home to off-load our booty and then finished our outdoor activities with the weekly grocery shopping at Kroger after brief stops at Rite Aid & Home Depot.

The afternoon and evening were spent watching TV and eating.

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Randomness

Here at the Valve Store(tm) we play a Safety Bingo game. Each week day a new number is “called” and the idea is that when each employee checks for the number he or she will be reminded to be safe.

Normally bingo numbers are chosen by computer or the old fashioned way by a ball dropping out of a barrel, but here, the company nurse, AKA: The Bingo Coordinator, uses a deck of cards.

I don’t know how long this has been going on, I just noticed it with the current game (only because it started on a Monday), but a random number from a particular row is always called on a particular day (on Monday it is B, Tuesday is I, Wednesday it’s an N, etc.)

So my question is, how less random is that than calling a number from all 75 at once?

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