I hate garage sales. That said, you can imagine how disgusted I am that it’s 6:54 on a Saturday morning and I’m sitting in the driveway waiting for people to come and haggle over stuff I’d rather just throw away. We’ve already had customers. Two women on bicycles stopped in at 6:05 and promised to come back for the Playskool scooter and a very nice set of youth golf clubs. Let the fun begin!
7:03 You know, I’m actually sort of proud of the signs I put up at 5:45am. I hate when people put out shabby, hand-drawn signs that look like they were made by mental patients. Keep an eye out for those. Actual mental patients probably price their items poorly, yielding big deals! 7:05 Walkers stop by and promise to come back later. Great! See you then! 7:32 Zack is going around re-pricing things he thinks are worth more. It’s tough seeing your treasured playthings sold for $.25. 7:47 First cash transaction: $50 for a huge pile of assorted junk. $50? Maybe I was wrong about this… 8:10 Holy crap! It’s getting crowded…people are buying our garbage. Amazing. (more…)
If I pause for even a second near the reading material in Price Chopper, I end up bringing home one of those quickie true crime books. Last weekend I grabbed this cheery volume: Heartless: The True Story of Neil Entwistle and the Cold Blooded Murder of his Wife and Child. I was familiar with the case but couldn’t remember how it ended, so I figured it would provide a few hours of wholesome entertainment. The true crime genre is wildly uneven. Some of it’s great, like Vincent Bugliosi’s Helter Skelter —and some of it’s awful, like Steve Ference’s hilariously bad book about the Porco case, November Memories.
Anyway, here I am with about 30 pages to go and I see this headline from the Boston Herald: Entwistle Defense Rests Without Calling a Single Witness. What?! No wonder I couldn’t remember how the story ended: the story hadn’t ended yet! WTF?! I bought a book with no ending! Remarkably, publisher St. Martin’s put crime reporter Michele McPhee’s book out without waiting for the case to conclude, as it did this week with Entwistle’s conviction. I didn’t bother with the last 30 pages.
It’s easy to hear this story and and call the publisher stupid, but they did manage to get $6.99 out of my pocket, didn’t they?
The truth about women is that women rule the world. They are sensible and sane, and when driven to action they are extremely effective. Don’t cross them. The Glens Falls Post Star this morning reports:
FORT ANN — A 43-year-old woman has been charged with felony assault for allegedly beating a man with a piece of lumber, police said. Barbara A. Weaver, of Route 40, allegedly hit a man she knows in the back of the head twice, causing injuries that required treatment at Glens Falls Hospital.
As for women being effective, watch this video of a woman catching a bat in her house. Yeah, that’s cool —but look closely and you can see her male companion cowering outside the door, handing her the bat catching supplies. Dude!
I’m not the oldest person on Facebook, but I’d guess I’m in the top 5%. At my age, it’s nice to know you’ve made it to the top 5% in something. Anyway, I joined up because I read that I needed to take control of my “personal brand identity” and that Facebook is one of the essential tools. I think what they mean is that you need to keep a grip on what people find when they search your name. And what they don’t find. And what I didn’t want found was my running times.
After almost 15 years of running, I’m still not one of those sleek, fast people who look natural doing it. I never will be. That’s OK, but since everything’s on the web these days, my race results were right at the top of my online life. Was that bad? Probably not. Most normal people would find running in races a positive thing. But runners? No, they would look at it is and say, “He’s, SLOWWW. VERRRY slow. Look at THIS: a 1:28 15K! And, oh my God: a FIVE HOUR marathon!” Yeah, five hours. Worst five hours of my life.
For better or worse, I’ve pretty much buried the slow race results behind all the other crap I’m doing online. But I’m not sure it worked out the way I wanted. And look at it this way: five hours is a long time, but I was out there running for two-and-a-half hours longer than the winner, right? That’s gotta count for something.
Sorry to neglect Keyboard Krumbs, but work’s been a beast. And I really needed to deal with that mulch situation.
Look, I never guaranteed that the mulch would be gone on Memorial Day, I just said that I’d start working on it. Good thing, because had I made a guarantee, it would have ended up filed in the same place as Rick Dutrow’s guarantee, but not Joe Namath’s guarantee. So what did I do on Father’s Day? I got out there and finally eliminated what was left of the %$!&# mulch pile that had been mocking me for three weeks. I hope no one notices how thick it is in certain spots, or how well mulched the areas way under the bushes are, or how some of it may have inadvertently fallen over my neighbor’s fence. Ooops.
Father’s Day is to Mother’s Day as President’s Day is to Christmas: no big deal.
And that’s OK.
We dads don’t really expect anything on Father’s Day —and besides, most of the Father’s Day gifts you see advertised are things involving work: tools, grills, and other mechanical implements. Hey, thanks! Cordless hedge trimmers! I can’t wait to get out there and trim the bushes on Father’s Day. Nope. We dads are happy to go quietly about our work without anyone making a big fuss over us. A card? Sure, but don’t spend any money. Really.
However, if you insist on giving dad a gift, he might be interested in the Nikon 18-200 mm ED-IF AF DX VR lens. This is the glass that Nikon fanboy Ken Rockwell calls “a miracle,” and “life changing.” It would allow dad to take nicer pictures of your children and your dog, so it’s not really a gift for him, it’s a gift for yourself. Is it expensive? Absolutely, but what are your memories worth?
The local youth softball outfit is called the Bethlehem Tomboys. This bothers me but I can’t quite articulate why.
It could bother her because it’s an interesting example of how society’s always been conflicted over the place where femininity meets athleticism. They came up with the name Tomboys when it was OK to suggest that a girl playing softball was boyish. Today? Not so much. You’d never get away with naming them that in 2008, not in these days when teams like the Warriors and Indians are getting hard to find. This was not a problem where I grew up. We were -and remain- the Carle Place Frogs.
For all the damage the ad world has done in terms of how we view women and the way they view themselves, Nike deserves credit for breaking stereotypes. Their advertising is full of strong women who are anything but “tomboys.” My favorite example is this 2006 spot that features Maria Sharapova on her way to play at the U.S. Open. It’s not just an ad, but a biting piece of satire —and maybe the best use of music in any commercial ever. Plus the casting and directing is brilliant. Here’s a link to a clean version if you can’t stand the crummy YouTube embed…
There was a bumblebee perched on the kneeler in the pew in front of us at church. Ann and Zack urged me to kill it because they were worried it would sting somebody.
Jesus wouldn’t kill that bee, I told them.
“Jesus overturned the tables of the money changers,” Zack whispered. “One of them could have landed on a bee.” That would be an accident, I whispered back. Besides, if there was a bee in the temple, Jesus would have sent it to sting the money changers.
He was satisfied by that, so we watched and waited and made dumb jokes, like “Peace BEE with you,” and “Thanks BEE to God.” We get a big kick out of ourselves. When mass was over, we grabbed a plastic cup and went to capture the bee. He asked if I was afraid of being stung. I pulled out the reply I use whenever the kids question my manhood:
“Zack, I go into burning buildings and stare down the red devil. I’m not afraid of a bee.” Shuts then up every time.
We carefully transported the bee outside and before releasing it into the wild showed it to the priest. I guess we figured he would commend us for saving a life, but instead he says, “Nice work, St. Francis. I would have just smooshed it.”
In our house, leaving your sneakers around is a major offense. People are constantly being reminded to pick them up, put them away —just get them out of sight, for god’s sake. And don’t walk in here with dirty shoes, OK?
The Albany County Sheriff’s Department says they arrested a local man after finding his sneakers at the scene of a burglary. He’d removed them before entering the house and allegedly left them behind when he was discovered and ran away. By matching DNA found on the shoes (yuck) they identified him as the suspect. Where’d they get his DNA? Glad you asked. It was taken after a January 2007 burglary arrest —and in 2007 he was identified by the muddy footprints he tracked all over the house. Footprints from his sneakers.
So let’s recap: he learned not to walk through the house with muddy sneakers, but dropped the ball on leaving them laying around. If that’s not proof that you should always listen to your parents, I don’t know what is.
Word came up from the newsroom that they were doing a story on neti pots. “Neti pots,” said a coworker. “Who the hell is neti pots?”
In some places the neti pot is as common as the toothbrush. It’s the tool used in the ancient ritual of jala neti, the practice of cleansing your sinus cavities with saline solution. You stick the stem of the neti pot in your nose, tilt your head and allow the fluid to drain out your other nostril. It sounds crazy, but let me tell you, this allergy season has been trouble free. I first heard about it on NPR. That figures, doesn’t it?
Pouring warm salt water in your nose takes a little getting used to. My first time was a disastrous mess, and since I used too much salt it burned like mad —but with a little practice I was soon a neti master. I shot a video of myself doing this, but it was so bizarre and revolting that I recorded over it. Fortunately, there are something like 175 neti pot videos on YouTube. I don’t recommend doing it at the kitchen sink like this guy, or after smoking pot like these women, but watch a few and you’ll get the idea. Below is the least offensive one I could find. If you suffer from allergies and sinus issues you may want to try this. It’s odd, but come on: you do grosser things in the bathroom.
I hate garage sales. That said, you can imagine how disgusted I am that it’s 6:54 on a Saturday morning and I’m sitting in the driveway waiting for people to come and haggle over stuff I’d rather just throw away. We’ve already had customers. Two women on bicycles stopped in at 6:05 and promised to come back for the Playskool scooter and a very nice set of youth golf clubs. Let the fun begin!
7:03 You know, I’m actually sort of proud of the signs I put up at 5:45am. I hate when people put out shabby, hand-drawn signs that look like they were made by mental patients. Keep an eye out for those. Actual mental patients probably price their items poorly, yielding big deals!
