Mental Hygiene the best thing you've done for your brain all day

okay. if you’ve watched TV on pretty much any channel in the last few months, you’ve seen this thing advertised.

it’s a pasta pot. with holes in the lid.

the commercials would lead us to believe this is a miraculous “invention,” but i’m skeptical. exactly how much manual dexterity is necessary, anyway, to operate a simple collander?

the way i see it, you can spend the $20 on the pot with holes in the top, or you can spend 4 bucks on a top of the line collander and still keep your self respect. sounds like a bargain to me….

I had a thought the other day. Why are there no double-sided CDs?

I’ve wondered for a while if it were possible, considering the number of CDs in my collection that are part of multiple-disc sets. I even have a couple of DVDs that are double-sided – with the full-screen version of the movie on one side and the wide-screen version on the other – so I expect that it’s not much of a technical hurdle to put data on both sides of the disc.

It would solve the ever-present problem of how to stuff multple CDs into a jewel case that can still fit in the standard CD racks. The sketchy solutions that are out there now are fragile at best, and it seems no two are made the same.

Sure, there’d be the potential for scratches on both surfaces, and the plastic protective layer would be thinner, but if DVDs can do it and survive…

Anyhoo, just another idea. Share and enjoy.

A picture is worth a thousand words. Somebody dead and famous said that. He was probably killed by a falling tree for being so damned witty.

All that being said, here is my 5,000 word (give or take) essay on the recent ice storms in North Carolina. Bear in mind that these photos were taken by a very old polaroid Land Camera with questionable film in temperatures well below the recommended operating environment for black and white developing. That, and the sun was just coming up.

Hard to make out in this fuzzy, poorly lit shot, but that is a large pine bough, dangling from the power line that leads to my house. During a previous hurricane, it was ripped down by a similar branch, and the new line was installed with a reinforcing braided steel wire along its length, preventing outages due to falling branches. This came in handy in a storm shortly after I moved into my house, in which the stump of a dead tree fell toward the house, hit the power line, and rolled off it, into the back yard – instead of into the master bedroom. This is all well and good, but doesn’t help much if the transformer across the street happens to blow up…

I woke up thursday morning just in time to see this one fall. It went over slowly, bringing along a handful of branches from neighboring trees, and came to rest, gently, intersecting my storage shed.

The damage to the shed is pretty much complete, though the padlock keeping the doors closed (not that anyone is going to steal my lawnmower, but safety first!) is still intact. Also, the roof, though taco-shaped, seems to be effectively keeping rain out, so the items in the shed are safe for now.

This is where I try to get artistic and capture the beauty of nature. This is made all the more difficult when one’s hands are shivering in the cold.

This is my cable. Time Warner, in their infinite wisdom, ran their cable from the same pole as the power line comes in, and attached it to the same point on the side of the house as the power line. Did they attach it to the reinforcing steel wire? No. The other end of this cable was in a pile, a foot of copper coax exposed where it had been ripped out of its junction box.

Thus ends today’s lesson.

Me? I survived just fine. I helped my neighbors and some folks I didn’t know to get their cars out of blocked driveways to be helpful, pulled downed trees and limbs out of the road to keep busy, and slept with four blankets and two cats at night to keep warm.

The beauty of nature. The power of gravity.

If a tree falls in the forest, and there’s no shed for it to hit, is it covered by homeowner’s insurance? read on…

i’m sick of the whole getting older business. it’s not that i have a problem being old. it’s the getting there that sucks so much.

i wouldn’t gripe too much if tomorrow, i woke up and all my hair had suddenly gone, i had a tremendous gut, no energy, and wrinkles. it wouldn’t be my best day, to be certain, but it would sure beat the slow, decades-long, downhill tumble that i can see stretching before me.

is my hairline moving back? i can’t tell. as far as i know, my hair has always looked like this. am i getting fatter? probably. my pants all still fit, but that doesn’t mean that the part of my gut that hangs out over my belt isn’t getting progressively larger…

moving sucks.

moving sucks.

moving sucks.

at the grocery store today, i was struck by an idea.

it seems like all the major chains are offering some kind of card for people to carry that gives them discounts on certain items in their stores. most places you go, if you don’t have one of their cards, they’ll just swipe the one they have behind the counter and you save money anyway.

(this turned into a longer rant than i had intended. read the rest here.

at the grocery store today, i was struck by an idea.

it seems like all the major chains are offering some kid of card for people to carry that gives them discounts on certain items in their stores. most places you go, if you don’t have one of their cards, they’ll just swipe the one they have behind the counter and you save money anyway.

my question was, why don’t they just make the prices that much lower for everybody, and do away with the whole membership cards thing?

the reason they can afford to “give away” money is that the opt-in lists built up from their cardmembers are worth something. they are worth a lot, if they’re sold to the right people – people who want a targeted list of addresses and phone numbers, as well as their shopping habits.

a list like that would be worth a lot to the right people. of course, it means if you’re on the list, you get a lot of telemarketers calling you, and a bunch more junk mail. fun.

today at Kroger, the manager, who was working the register since the place was packed with sunday afternoon milk-and-eggers, pushed me on the membership card angle. normally, i shop at a different store, where they swipe the card the keep on the register when you don’t have one, so i passed. but she was insistent. i brought up the subject of my privacy, and the fact that i already get more junkmail than my share.

she said “you don’t have to put your real address on it. pshh!”

well, dang. you’re the manager, i thought, and you’re telling me to put a fake name and address on my membership card application?

what if everyone did that? why… then their mailing list wouldn’t be worth a damn.

imagine that. imagine if everyone who got a membership card at a major grocery store put down bogus address and phone information when they filled out the application. the telemarketers, unknowingly would still pay through the nose for the lists (the grocery stores would, therefore, still be able to offer the discounts), but the lists would be half garbage.

more garbage in the list means higher operating costs for those trying to use the lists, in weeding out and verifying what is valid and what isn’t. you see what i’m getting at.

…and anything that sticks it to the telemarketers and bulkmailers is a Good Thing in my book.

apparently there’s a serial killer stalking around in my town. there was a lengthy description of him and his last known whereabouts on the news. they described his M.O. and noted that he was, and i quote “socially inept around women“

great. now i’m going to get pulled over because i “fit a description”.

i’m not sure what it is about the feline anatomy that makes it so that, when a smallish, 10 pound cat decides it’s going to hork up a hairball, it sounds remarkably like a wet sack of billiard balls being juggled.

or, for that matter, why mine seem to wait for me to go to bed and work my way into a deep, dream-filled slumber before attempting said hairball hork. that way, at least, i’m nicely rested when i have to get out the carpet cleaner and all the hairball-removal implements…