Category Archives: News

Getting My Mean On

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My Mean Face

My Mean Face

Harry, has for all that I have known him carries a 3” by 5” index card in his front shirt pocket. He calls it his mind, which when sometimes he misplaces it, we all joke that Harry has lost his mind. It is full of his to do and shopping lists and jotted down things to remember. For five years now, I’ve carried an iPhone in my pocket. Friends and fellow iPhone users call these handy little devices our hand brains, and because they are so good at thoughtfully informing our increasingly aged head brains, it is a wonder now that we could ever have existed without them.

In addition to my hand brain, I also carry my version of Harry’s mind, an index card. So, you could say that I am always of two minds. I do this, because work rules prohibit bring the iPhone into the office, so the old analog method persists. Someday though, the necessity for this dual brain system will disappear and my stack of unused index cards will cease to diminish and begin to gather dust and I will rely totally on my iPhone.

We picked the perfect week for our air-conditioner to die. Monday, Anne texted me, “Das AC is Kaput!” A serviceman had just tried to get it running again, but it appears that the compressor had locked-up. This is always a fatal condition for AC units. This pronouncement launched a frantic campaign to get a new unit installed, hopefully before the mercury climbs this weekend. We are currently enjoying a spate of nice weather. We had three contractors come by and bid, picked one, the same outfit that just did our furnace and then scheduled the install for Thursday. So far, the weatherman has been cool with all this.

“You have to get angry, you have to be MEAN! (Hits Gordon in the balls) You angry now?” – Patches O’Houlihan, Dodgeball

Well, since I’ve trotted out my mean face for this post, I better deliver. Actually, it is Dave’s mean face photo, but I stole it fair and square. Is that mean enough? No, I didn’t think so either. I don’t want to be mean to anyone who might actually read this post, so keep reading folks, because the minute this blog drops off your radar screen that’s when I’ll strike. Threatening the readers, that’s a little bit mean. I could be mean to some of the people at work, at least the ones that don’t read this blog, but lately, I don’t have much to be mean about. Frankly, with every passing day, they seem more and more irrelevant.

I know, Dennis Hastert, politician turned lobbyist, now revealed as a pedophile, I can get my mean on with him, except that the only crime that he has been charged with is trying to circumvent government surveillance. Hello, Uncle Sam, the Patriot Act was so last Sunday. I got it, FIFA President Sepp Blatter, I know I can be mean to him. What a scumbag. While, his house is burning around him, he gets himself reelected and then announces his resignation, but then forgets to name the date. Except that I’m an American, what do I care about soccer? Sorry, Carl, Jay, Rey and all you other readers. I just don’t feel like being really mean today. It is a waste of a great picture though. I guess that when I sat down to write this post, I really was of two minds. Wait, wait, I have an idea. I could recycle this photo whenever I do feel like being mean, then my mean could become a meme.

Hold Their Feet to the Fire

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Don't Fall In The Fireplace!

Don’t Fall In The Fireplace!

“I have no more campaigns to run.” [Republican applause] “I know, because I won both of them!” – President Barack Obama

To my dear Republican friends, you are wrong, but I still love you, in spite of yourselves. This sentence could apply summarize President Barack Obama’s sixth State of the Union (STOU) address. It was an impassioned speech, a departure from the usual dry laundry list that these SOTU addresses have devolved into as of late. While his speech was overtly partisan at times, he also beseeched his Republican colleagues to join with him in the spirit of bipartisan cooperation. This is a plea that he has been making since he first came into office and it has consistently fallen on deaf GOP ears. Now that they control both houses of Congress, they will have to go through him, if they want to get anything done and he made it abundantly clear last night that he is not about to rollover for them, but rather he is fully prepared to hold their feet to the fire.

What does Bill Belichick and European central bankers have in common? They are both worried about deflation.

In addition to Republican legislators, another organization that should have their feet held to the fire are the New England Patriots. They are cheaters, plain and simple. Their latest scandal, dubbed deflate-gate, involves the leaked finding that 11 of the 12 Patriot supplied game balls to last Sunday’s AFC championship were under inflated, making them easier to pass and catch. The losing Colts later claimed that this was also the case in November, when the two teams last met. The Patriots were actually found guilty of cheating and subsequently penalized, in what was then dubbed spy-gate. They were convicted of filming the play signals of the New York Jets. They are also supposedly the reason that on field coaches now hold a card up in front of their mouths when speaking. This is done because it was suspected that the Patriots lip-read the opposing coach’s speech. Now everyone has to suspect and defend against this illegal practice. The list of allegations against Patriot’s head coach Bill Belichick doesn’t stop there though. The day before the Super Bowl both teams hold private practices on the field where the game will be played. Every time that the Patriots have won the Super Bowl, they were the second team to practice. In order to prepare for their practices, Patriot personnel were allowed to set up video equipment to tape their practice, while the opposing team was still running theirs on the field.

Toilet Talk

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Our Little Tokyo Hotel Room Toilet
Toilet’s Safety Instructions
Toilet’s Control Panel

My inner 13-year-old is always struggling to get out, so when I read this week’s reprint of the Slate article by Forrest Wickman entitled, “A Brief History of Toilet-Based Animal Attacks”, there was no hope of containing my adolescent id. What precipitated Slate’s revisiting of this subject were news reports of a five-foot-long boa that had slithered out of a San Diego toilet earlier this week, but what I especially enjoyed about Mr. Wickman’s article was the following Times of Israel news report:

A man’s penis was bitten by a snake hiding in a toilet on Friday. According to an article in the Times of Israel, the man was sitting on the john when he was bitten and then “ran from the room in horror.” The man was rushed to the hospital where he was treated for “minor injuries.”

Less you think that dangers of snakes in toilets lie only in warmer more tropic climes than yours, Garrison Keillor on his Prairie Home Companion radio show sometimes warns of the danger of snow snakes in the upper Midwest. To prevent these snow snakes from biting you from behind, he hawks a safety seat add-on accessory for your toilet. This safety seat is locked, when not in use, to prevent snow snakes from sneaking into your house through the plumbing. When it is in use, the user is suspended a full three feet above the water, for their protection. I bet that that makes quite a splash!

While snakes attacking from toilets may grab all of the headlines they are not the only animal that attacks from below. Rats are common enough in the toilet bowls of one Seattle-area sewer system that the local government has posted a four-step method for dispatching the rodents. Jay, being a Seattle-area water professional, can you shed any additional light on this problem? I know that you normally do drinking water, but maybe you have heard about this too?

  • Stay Calm!
  • Keep the lid down so that it is unable to jump out.
  • Squirt some liquid dish soap in the toilet to help break the surface tension of the water. The soap degreases the oils on the rat’s fur so it cannot stay afloat in the water.
  • Flush the toilet! The rat will usually go back down the drain the same way it came up. You may need to flush multiple times.

I think that Wickman has overlooked the real danger here, which are not animals, but man himself. We encountered one such danger lurking in our Little Tokyo hotel room, last October. Yes folks, I’ve been sitting on these pictures since then. This toilet frankly scared the you-know-what out of me. I’ve never used a toilet before that also used an electrical outlet. Fortunately, we did not have any backup problems, if you know what I mean. The cute safety warning cartoons on the inside of the toilet seat did nothing to assuage my fear. I really do not need to have by butt burnt, while sitting on the toilet seat. Finally, the control panel for this toilet was more complicated than my first car’s dashboard. Come-on folks this is not rocket science. I did experiment with it, but since I’m of the school that one should either sh!t or get off the pot, it just seemed like a big waste of time.

Always remember to look before you sit. Let’s be careful in there!

Team America – LA Style

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Dan at the Los Angeles Gun Club

Dan at the Los Angeles Gun Club

This photo of Dan was taken by one of his friends when they visited the Los Angeles Gun Club’s range last weekend. It is located close to Dan’s studio. He was going for a Frenchman look with his attire, like Pepé Le Pew. Two visiting Austrians wanted to experience something American. So why not shoot something? They rented three guns, a Winchester that Dan is seen holding. This one was his favorite of the three. I’m thinking The Rifleman, but I’m sure that that is a TV references too old for Dan. The others were a revolver and an AR-15 that had been re-chambered to accept pistol rounds. Also in attendance was a couple that was no longer a couple. The woman chose a full torso target and aimed for a very sensitive spot near the bottom of the silhouette. She wanted to mess with her ex. According to Dan she had a tight grouping. Think Lorena Bobbitt goes to the gun range.

Also in LA news, even crowding out the Pope’s landmark deal between the US and Cuba this week, has been Sony’s, The Interview, debacle. Seth Rogen and James Franco have apparently come up emptier than a North Korean villager’s lunchbox with their assassination comedy about the rotund ruler Kim Jong-Un. According to a friend of Dan’s who saw the LA press screening of The Interview, it was a movie not worth banning.

America, F— Yeah!

Ebola

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Obama Hugging Ebola Nurse - From Whitehouse.gov

Obama Hugging Ebola Nurse – From Whitehouse.gov

Living in America, you are more likely to marry Kim Kardashian than contract Ebola (three husbands versus two nurses). It seems that a week or so ago the nation was boiling over with Ebola fever. Now the president is hugging one of the two formerly infected nurses. Was this an act of bravery? Is it too soon now to joke about Ebola? Like, could any Ebola joke told now possibly go viral? Could anybody really tell a killer Ebola joke? I have a candidate for you.

Did you hear the joke about Ebola?
You probably won’t get it.

Crime Report

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Axe Cop - Chop

Axe Cop – Chop

When I got home tonight, after working late today, Anne told me, “You left too early this morning. You missed all of the excitement.” According to news reports and neighbor’s eyewitness accounts at 7:30 this morning three young black men were burglarizing a home on the next block over, when a police officer pulled up to the house. KMOV posted a security camera photo of one of the individuals. The following is a summary of the subsequent events according to the KMOV news report:

According to police, the officer spotted a man walking out of the house carrying a safe. Police said that the man fled on foot. The officer said the other two suspects also fled, one escaped on foot, while the other got inside a white Subaru station wagon and drove away. According to police, another officer spotted the Subaru on a nearby street before the Subaru slowly reversed and stopped. Police said the officer thought the suspect was surrendering, so he got out of the patrol car. However, authorities said the suspect then drove towards the officer, missed him, but hit the driver’s side of the police car. The suspect then led police on a chase, but officers stopped chasing him because they deemed traffic conditions to be too dangerous to public safety for further pursuit.

I was already at work while all of this was transpiring, but Anne was still home. She first became aware of these events, when our next-door neighbor called her to warn her that he had just seen two men run down our driveway and into our backyard. Party Girl, the young women who lives behind us saw them scale the fence between our properties and then run down her driveway and into her street. From news reports it sounds like all three suspects are still at large. Our neighbor who works from home saw the police later in the day attempting to track the suspects with a bloodhound.

Several weeks ago, during our annual block party, a police captain showed up to do some community relations. I spoke with him and one of the messages that he was trying to get out to the public was that there was a gang of criminals that were burglarizing homes in the area. They would wait in their car until a homeowner left for work and then break in to the house. There are enough similarities between the officer’s story and today’s events to make me think that these are the same guys. At the block party he said that one eyewitness had thought of taking a picture, but didn’t. Now they have a photo.