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I believe I did.  My good buddy Dudeman was at out of town on my birthday. After getting back to town, he recently was at a swapmeet, when he noticed this thing and decided that it would be the perfect gift. I agree. Let’s just say that it’s the perfect grocery-getter, or the perfect barley-blaster, or the perfect festival-finder, or even the perfect parade-pedaler.  Read ‘em and weep…

I’d go ahead and say something silly like, “My shoes for the other bike are more expensive than this bike.”, but let’s face it…pretty much any of the supplemental gear that I use for the main bike is going to be more expensive than Mr Nutter Butter. Even brand new it might have been $50. Dudeman paid $15.

That’s one pair of socks.

After rebuilding it from the ground up, I’m going to see about putting ONE really expensive item on the bike so that those who know will see that it’s a serious ride seriously stupid ride, as far as beater, swap-meet bikes go.  I can’t tell from the picture (I haven’t actually taken delivery of it yet) some of the specifics of the various parts, so I’m not certain if it will take 9/16 or 1/2 pedals, but if I can’t get a $200 pair of pedals I might have to look into a $100 saddle or a carbon seatpost or something.

I’m psyched!

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Ever since I first saw this phenomenon, I thought Tilt-Shift Photography was cool. If you search the term, you’ll find that people are using certain lenses and/or Photoshop to make normal images seem like miniature models of the subject matter. Here’s a cool video found out there on the internets, it’s called Bathtub IV, by Keith Loutit…

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Way back in ’95 I moved from AK to Seattle. At the time, I thought I’d visit my buddy Zeno and his brother Brint in Florida. I had no reason to rush to Seattle so I hung out with them in Jacksonville for 2 weeks. At the end of the visit we took a roadtrip to Tampa and went to Busch Gardens. That was a blast and to this day I’ve never been on a bigger, faster rollercoaster. Definitely a fun place. While there, we decided to get a caricature done of us for no good reason and I brought it home and yippee…we got a stupid picture done.

This last February, Brint came through town and as we were driving around Seattle trying to find the Perfect Beer, that caricature drawing came up. “Where did that thing go? That was a hilarious picture. What a fun trip that was.” A bunch of crap like that.

Not even a week later, another friend called me to say that he was cleaning out his dungeon when he came across this weird drawing of what appeared to be me, Brint and Zeno. Dave had met both of them before, so he would know, and sure enough it was the very caricature that Brint and I had been talking about. Hilarious!

Today I was learning about PHP when I decided that I’d had it and needed to do something to expend mental energy. So I took a photo of the caricature, imported it to Photoshop  and colorized it. I’d gotten a ways into it, when I realized that doing the proper hair color was one thing, but I have no idea what color Z and B’s gorgeously dreamy eyes are…so I texted Zeno.

“What color are Brint’s eyes? Yours are green?”

Mine are blue.  B is hazel.

“Hazel?  You homo, what color are they!?”

His woman says they are blue but he was born with hazel eyes.

“Hazel…Are your sheets mauve and your thong peach?  Idiot…”

So…what the hell do I do with that?  HAZEL???  I’m a guy, I don’t know what the hell color that is, and besides, for most guys doesn’t it come down to the simplest box of crayons?  There are only 8 colors in that one: black, white, blue, red, yellow, orange, violet and green.  That’s it, that’s the whole rainbow! When another guy asks you about your brother’s eyes (THREE men in that equation), you use one of those 8 colors.  Actually, bloodshot would be a perfectly valid answer too, but that’s not the point.  The point is that we don’t do hazel.  And on top of all that!??!  This answer came from a construction worker in Alaska!  Holy crap!

I got so flustered I made B’s eyes blue and Z’s eyes green.  I thought hazel was a shade of blue…what?!  Whatever, it’s all good.  As always, click the image for a larger one.

Special thanks to Zeno’s monobrow for making an appearance. Good on ya, mate!

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Here I am, at Delta Foxtrot’s pad, waiting for their flight.  I’ve been housesitting for the last week and now I have just another hour before I need to go pick them up.  Can’t drink.  Took my guitar home, although that doesn’t mean much cuz he’s got, like, 6 in the jam room…  But the point is that I’m in Finished Mode.  I’m done with this place.  The cats are fucking weird.  One has stayed hidden for the entire week.  I give them the wet food from the can just to make sure that she’s still here and alive cuz she won’t make an appearance for the dry shit, while the other just lets you know that he is indeed here by meowing nonstop for the first 15 minutes after you arrive home from work or wherever.  Hell, he just meows cuz he’s a cat and he can, dammit!

So here I am.  Empire Strikes Back is on TV, but I could do a one-man play of that movie with no rehearsal, so it’s on strictly to keep me company while I surf the web.  Did you know that Han Solo thought that tauntauns smelled bad on the outside, and yet he found that they smell REALLY bad on the inside too?  Yeah, he did.  He was trying to save Luke’s life out in the icy wilds of Hoth after Luke didn’t report in after going to look after what he thought was a meteor, but it really turned out to be an Imperial Probe Droid, aka a Probot.

Holy crap.

So I’m surfing around and I find this little nugget.  This comes courtesy of The Stranger, an alt weekly here in Seattle.  They have their I Saw U ads where if you saw somebody interesting, but didn’t have the time/guts to talk to them, you can place an ad and maybe something will come of it.  In addition to seeing if somebody spotted you out in the streets, it’s also fun to see ads like this.

Now, let’s just take a look at this shall we?  Firstly, she thought the guy was incredibly, no, ridiculously hot.  That right there was enough to inspire her to place the I Saw U ad.  However, he’ll have to wait for a different life, because apparently having a job at Subway (during a recession, mind you) makes one a loser.

See how I did that?  I made a point of bringing attention to the fact that this person is an idiot because she’s making fun of a person who actually has a job during times of record unemployment in our country.  But then I silently went about spelling the word “loser” correctly without pointing out that this idiot shouldn’t throw stones at people with jobs when she can’t spell or use punctuation OR proper grammar in her ad that does nothing positive for ANYBODY.

Well, it does good stuff for me, cuz I get to call her an idiot on the internet, thus making myself feel better about myself, or something like that?  Sure, that.

Only one more hour.  I hope that this relationship between Princess Leia and Han Solo actually goes somewhere.  Her planting a kiss on Luke in the infirmary gave me the creeps for some reason…

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There’s this thing going around Facebook right now.  What you do is you, well…here it is.

Album Cover Design Time

1 – Go to “wikipedia.” Hit “random… Read More… Read More” or click http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random

The first random wikipedia article you get is the name of your band. (alternatively, if the first article you hit is short, hit Random Article two more times.)

2 – Go to “Random quotations”
or click http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3

The last four or five words of the very last quote of the page is the title of your first album.

3 – Go to flickr and click on “explore the last seven days” or click http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days

Third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.

4 – Use photoshop or Picnik.com or other photo editor to put it all together.

I went ahead and did it, but I can’t post it on Facebook, because they’ve changed their homepage/format and I can’t find any of the tools or see how to implement them anymore.  However it’s such an all-star that I’ve decided to post it here.

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Try this out.

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Folks, if you ever look at the links page at this site, you’ll notice a link to Engrish.com.  This is a hilarious site where you’ll find hundreds of photos of signs where the English phrases have been butchered to the point of gut-busting hilarity.

Well, I saw one of my own this morning and I thought it good enough to send to the fine folks at Engrish.com.

Please to enjoy…

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When I was in Albuquerque a couple weeks ago, I could hear my sister pause for deep thought one night.  You know how when you have a sibling and you can just tell when they’re up to something?  So all the way from the kitchen she says to me, “Did you walk through an oilslick or something?”

I’m thinking, “What the hell, did I track a bunch of shit in onto her carpet? What is she bitching about?” So I look up from what I’m doing and try to formulate an answer, when she just holds up one of my shoes.

“Cuz this just won’t do.”, she says, “This black crap all over your once-white shoes. How do you get them this dirty?”

Ummm, I wear them every day because they’re my Every Day Shoes? Does that work?

Whatever…we then went out and looked for some new Adidas Rod Lavers in my size, but apparently Albuquerque doesn’t carry those, so….here you go Nan. I bought some new ones.

You happy now?

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I’m in Albuquerque, NM visiting with my sister.  One thing she wanted to do while I was here was to do a roadtrip out to some touristy places so that I can see what NM is like and the new state she lives in and all that.  She had recently (a couple years ago) moved out here with her job and is starting to get a feel for what is what in New Mexico, so she wanted to take me to some neat spots.  Sounds good to me, let’s go!

Roswell – site of the 1947 UFO crash

I’ve always been fascinated by UFOs and the alien phenomenon and stuff like that, so I thought that hitting Roswell on our trip would be fun.  I didn’t know exactly what to expect, although I knew I wouldn’t be going to any actual crash site and I wouldn’t be viewing any actual UFO.  I don’t know what had more impact on me: the quaintness of all the alien-themed businesses and signs and whatnot, or the bummer that was the UFO Museum and Research Center.  I know, I know…it’s a tourist trap and one with a decidedly left-field subject matter, but what a hunk of crap!  You walk in and it’s just a big room with all the “official” military and government files blown up to poster size on the wall.  Then there are some small 3D models of the site itself, but honestly they’re not as good as what your average train hobbyist can do to his firstborn’s former bedroom.  Be that as it may, we hit the gift shop and got some postcards.  I picked up some golfballs for Dudeman and some guitar picks for Delta Foxtrot and we were on to the next stop.

I wanted coffee, so we went to the Not of This World coffee shop.  The only thing alien-themed about this place was the name.  It had a Tuscan theme on the inside which wasn’t half bad, but even the bathroom had no evidence of an alien presence.  Whatever, get the coffee and move on to…

Roswell Space Center!  This was another cheesy tourist shop.  Oh well, we looked around and picked up a couple more postcards and some stickers for my former Webmaster and left there in about 5.6 minutes flat.

On the way out of town we hit an airfield.  It’s an airfield that is home to what appears to be retired airplanes from all walks of life.  Right up front and center was a FedEx plane with its jet intakes covered up.  But what I was wondering was, “Why here? Why Roswell?”  I know that there’s a big boneyard out in the desert in California somewhere, but why here.  And all these planes looked like they were capable of flight.  They weren’t parted out or cannibalized, they were just mothballed and winterized.  Hmmmm…strange.  Also, we couldn’t just go out onto the tarmac and check them out, I had to take pics from outside the fence.  That made me wonder if we were going to have some friends come up to us and ask for ID, because we were in the middle of what appeared to be some kind of base.  I saw a B-1B Lancer taking off from somewhere behind the fence and there was a building that was called The International Law Enforcement Academy, however, it appeared about as international as Juneau International Airport, so whatever…  But there I was, outside a fenced-off area, with my camera, just shooting away.  Oh yeah, and did I mention that I was wearing my camo pants?  I felt a little weird out there.

After hitting the road, it sort of dawned on me that everything about Roswell was pretty much stuck in the 50s.  There aren’t really any modern buildings there and everything had that old grey engineer’s drafting table quality to it.  Oh well, been there, done that now.  I may want to go back some time, but I can say I’ve been to Roswell now.

Carlsbad Caverns – a big hole in the ground

Nancy had told me about her trip to Carlsbad Caverns one time.  She mentioned how they were there when all the bats flew out of the cave and how the sheer numbers were just amazing.  Well, we weren’t going there for that, since it is the wrong time of year, but we can still take a tour of the caves and see that.  So we did.  I’m not an especially claustrophobic person, but when you close your eyes and visualize that you are 800 ft under the surface and then you think to yourself, as I’m sure everybody does, “What if this place caves in?”

Screw that.

Unfortunately, the tour itself was being given by one of those guides who thought themselves quite witty.  Maybe I’m not old enough to fit the demographic she was going for, but her jokes were horrible and her overall demeanor was SO NICE, I wanted to break stuff.  I’ve worked in tourism, and I’ve actually had to guide a few times, so I know what parameters she had to deal with.  However, like any time you have to speak in front of a crowd or if you have to sell something, I feel like if I’m interacting with a character and not the real person playing the character, then I feel shortchanged.  Or maybe I feel like the person is shortchanging themselves.  Either way, the experience winds up lacking something vital.  The cavern itself was pretty cool though, with the stalactites and stalagmites and draperies and popcorn and a bunch of other terms for the various formations we were being shown.  And that’s pretty much that.  Well, the caves themselves anyway.  I did have a Mickey Rooney lookalike in front of me who kept farting every time we moved from one room to another.  Nancy had said that if I wanted to take pictures, then we should be the last in the group so that we weren’t holding people up as I took pics when we all walked from one area to the next, so we did exactly that.  Much to my enjoyment, Mickey Rooney was a bit of a shutterbug himself and a gaseous one at that, so I had the pleasure of walking through the clouds he was laying down in front of me.  DIRECTLY in front of me.  I should have gotten his ass kicked out for leaving a chemical trail that would accelerate erosion of the pristine environment we were in, but I’d already had enough of humans at that point, so I just shut the hell up.

After that, we jumped in the truck and drove for a long time to…

White Sands National Monument!

I had NO idea what this was going to be all about.  I knew there was a missile range with the same name, but the term National Monument is sort of ambiguous.  Is it an actual man-made monument, like you find in Washington DC, or is it a plot of land that they just decided to call a Monument?  I don’t know.  Or at least I didn’t until Friday.

White Sands is a beautiful place.  I’d almost come back strictly and simply for a photo safari, because it is an alien environment once you get inside the area itself.  White Sands National Monument is a place where gypsum has been deposited and has made the sand in the area white.  The white sandy dunes cover an area that is 275 sq miles and you can drive out into it on days when the military isn’t testing missiles, as the White Sands Missile Range surrounds the area.  Anyway, you get out into the dunes themselves and the brain starts to play tricks on you.  Okay, yeah, it’s warm out and I’m only in a t-shirt, but it LOOKS like snow all around and even the way the road has been plowed looks like the street I grew up on in the winter time.  I kept viewing stuff as though everything was going to melt.

We hit the place right before sunset, so I was able to get some daylight shots and some sunset shots.  Either way, if you ever get the chance to show up there, give it a shot.  White Sands is strange and beautiful.

After that, we hit the road again and got back to Nancy’s place around 11pm.  It was a long 48hrs, and of course, in Roadtrip Time, it felt like a week had gone by.  Good fun though.  The end result of all of it is: Go to Roswell. Sure why not?  Carlsbad is your call…I don’t need to go back.  White Sands?  GO!  It’s beautiful.

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I got a call from Whitty this morning. “Check your email, you gotta see this.” So I did while we were on the phone and AWESOME!

I asked, “How long did they last?”

“They get to keep them until Monday, they went to school like that today.”

OH MY GOD, that is completely AWESOME!!!

I love how Alex (left) is so intent on looking like a badass that he forgot how to make his hands form the devil horns.  What are you doing, pointing?  At what?  And that’s not really a good pointer either!  Neither hand is making a decent pointer!  That and the fact that he’s such a sweet kid, he can’t quite pull off Badass anyway.  Tyson on the other hand?  He’ll make his first call from jail by the time he’s 18.

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