Got this one in my email, too.  I'm putting it here because I don't often come across jokes that are family friendly!! Thanks Bob and Ellen!!! 

Lost Bagpiper

As a bagpiper, I was asked by a funeral director to play at a graveside
service for a homeless man who had no family or friends. The funeral
was to be held at a cemetery in the remote countryside and this man
would be the first to be laid to rest there.

As I was not familiar with the backwoods area, I became lost and being
a typical man, did not stop for directions. I finally arrived an hour
late. I saw the backhoe and the crew who were eating lunch but the
hearse was nowhere in sight.

I apologized to the workers for my tardiness and stepped to the side of
the open grave where I saw the vault lid already in place.

I assured the workers I would not hold them up for long but this was
the proper thing to do. The workers gathered around, still eating their
lunch. I played out my heart and soul.

As I played the workers began to weep.=2
0I played and I played like I'd
never played before, from Going Home and The Lord is My Shepherd to
Flowers of the  Forest . I closed the lengthy session with Amazing
Grace and walked to my car.

As I was opening the door and taking off my coat, I overheard one of
the workers saying to another, Sweet Jeezuz, Mary 'n Joseph, I have
never seen nothin' like that before and I've been putting in septic
tanks for twenty years.

Well, Leeanne got a whole bunch of free reusable shopping bags as part of promotions that various grocery stores were running, but we always had a lot of trouble remembering to bring them with us when it was time to shop.  Didn't really care, anyway.  I mean, we reuse our shopping bags to keep us from buying new plastic trash bags, so it's ok, right?

We found about 100 plastic shopping bags under the sink when we moved into the new place, and they are all clean and usable (since we'll just put trash in them anyway), so I thought to myself, "Self, why the hell would you need to get that many bags?"  I decided right then to make an effort to do some Green shopping and I went and collected all our reusable bags and put them in the back of the truck so we WOULDN'T forget them.

Fast forward to our next shopping trip.  We went to the local Food Lion, and voila, like magic, there were our fancy bags waiting for us.  We brought them in, piled the groceries up inside (boy are they strong!) and brought all our groceries home without using ANY bags, paper or plastic.  I sure was smug.  Of course, to get the groceries inside, you have to bring the BAGS inside.  And now I'm back at square one with the bags inside and me forgetting to put them in the truck.

When the ad said "saving the planet, one bag at a time" I didn't know it would be literally ONE bag at a time.

The death of the King of Pop, Michael Jackson, has touched some people deeper than I'd have thought.  I mean, you like the guy, but if you're not related to him, or he didn't bring you up out of poverty or something, you're willing to argue with somebody who starts talking smack, right?  How about pull a knife, though?   That's right, some old farts in South Florida (where I no longer live) got into a knife fight over an argument about whether MJ deserves to be remembered as a musician extrordinaire or a sick freak that liked touching kids. 

Enough about the youngest Jackson, though.  I guess the bus driver was the first to open his mouth, but somebody else on the bus agreed with the driver, and he was the one with the knife.  After the bus driver pulled over, he said he waited for the police to arrive, since he'd called dispatch with his situation.  I wonder if maybe he was really calling back home (because almost everyone in Florida seems to have lived in New York) to his Rochester personal injury lawyer and getting ready to get paid by the freaks on his bus.  I don't think public bus drivers get hazard pay.

Got this in my email.  I haven't checked the numbers yet, but it was good for a chuckle.  Maybe I'll stop chuckling when I check the numbers!!


This is from an article in the  St. Petersburg  Times Newspaper on
Sunday.  The Business Section asked readers for ideas on "How Would
You Fix the Economy?"  I think this guy nailed it!


Dear Mr. President:

Please find below my suggestion for fixing  Americas  economy.
Instead of giving billions of dollars to companies that will squander
the money on lavish parties and unearned bonuses, use the following
plan.

You can call it the Patriotic Retirement Plan:

There are about 40 million people over 50 in the work force.
Pay them $1 million apiece severance for early retirement with the
following
stipulations:
1) They MUST retire. Forty million job openings - Unemployment fixed.

2) They MUST buy a new American CAR. Forty million cars ordered - Auto
Industry
fixed.

3 They MUST either buy a house or pay off their mortgage - Housing
Crisis fixed.
It can't get any easier than that!

If more money is needed, have all members of Congress and their
constituents pay their taxes...   

So I got all excited last week about zune.net being down for the better part of a day.  I mean, the Zune HD is coming, the software hasn't had an update in a while, then the site goes down.  I thought for SURE we were going to have Zune 3.2 or 4.1 when it came back online.  And that it would let me make autoplaylists for podcasts.

I checked twice a day for an update to the software, and now, I give up.  It's not coming.  I'm not going to have it.  So I started looking again.

There is a program developed by a Zune user that allows iTunes playlists to be converted to Zune playlists, so maybe if I can build my playlists in iTunes (which was incredibly easy when I had and isuckpod), I can import them to Zune, and like magic, enjoy my podcasts again.

I'll let you know how it goes.

Well, here it is.  Somebody admitting that we don't really have the rigorous studies of fish oil and vitamin D that we all thought we had.  I mean, I've been buying "Vitamin D fortified" whole milk forever, and some of my friends don't even understand the concept of whole milk, and just call it "vitamin D milk." 

And then there's the "Omega 3 Fatty acid" crowd, who claim that dosing up on fish oil will do everything from help you control weight, ward off brain diseases, and help your heart by controlling your cholesterol levels (after all, Japanese people are skinny, smart, and never have heart attacks, right?). 

Then along comes the National Cancer Institute and the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute to say, "Well, sure, but we need a REAL study that says so."

Back to my main point.  People for DECADES have been trying to find some thing, some pill, some silver bullet that will help them live longer, live stronger, be happier, and it seems to me that 90 percent of it ends up being harmful.  Just like the hormone therapy for menopausal women, or the Zicam incident I blogged about last week. 

When people start learning to walk more, eat better, and put less crap into our bodies that isn't food, we'll all start to get a little better. 

Don't get me wrong, I'm all about medicine, but I think that it has a defined place, and that's not in my living room or at the GNC.  Doctor's are generally, well paid, very well educated, competent individuals who understand the effects of chemicals and nutrition on the human body.  And every doctor I've been able to talk to says "Eat well, get regular exercise, don't drink to much, don't do drugs, get some sleep."  When we can do all that, then MAYBE we should look at supplementing our lifestyle with extras, but for the vast majority of us only solidly proven supplements.  And I'm still working on getting some exercise.

And no, it's not because your next date might be your cousin, it's becuase s/he's more likely to have HIV.  According to a new study, Southerners have a higher percentage of HIV and AIDS infected individuals than other states.  I'm really not surprised.  After just moving from Florida, I can say that there is a huge difference in the percentage of immigrants in my community than there was as a Floridian.

And no, I don't hate immigrants and I don't think that immigrants carry HIV/AIDS because they're immigrants.  But I DO know that plenty of other countries, especially the ones around Florida that people can't stand so much that they risk their lives in the open ocean to come to Florida, don't spend a lot of money on STD awareness or safe sex education.  Hell, sometimes they just get it plain wrong.

I also think that lots of countries around the world view sex in general very differently than we, descended from puritans, and still 80 percent of us believing the creation myth from the bible word for word, Americans.

We can't fix how other countries educate their citizenry, but maybe we could do more in our multicural towns.  Oh wait, that would take money, and we don't seem to have much any more.

Some researchers are studying whether or not choline can help prevent alcohol related diseases in unborn babies.  I think it's kind of a shame that pregnant women can't manage to just STOP DRINKING for less than one year.  I mean, it's not critical to sustaining life, and the dangers of pregnant drinking are WELL documented and explained.

I'm very fortunate that Leeanne has the gumption to abstain from alcohol while she's been pregnant with all our children.  That's why I support her each time by not drinking either.  I think it's important for us to be in it together, and maybe that's part of the problem.  I know a lot of guys who would rationalize it away by saying that THEIR drinking isn't hurting anyone.  But I love this woman and I'm proud of her for not drinking, and I know that she wouldn't drink even if I did, but hell, I still open her car door, too.

I know she can do it on her own, but that's WHY I still do it.  To show her that I love her and that I'll go out of my way even for something as small as a car door.  Or a beer.
 

It seems like ever since we moved here, we've had nothing but rain and muggy weather every other day.  Everyone we talk to says it's very unusual for Virginia, so we're starting to think we brought Florida weather with us.  Leeanne thinks it's pretty much great that it rains so much, though.  I wish we had any one of a dozen patio furniture sets, but all we really have is a bench for her to sit on.

I want to get a set because we finally got some more propane after our movers wouldn't take my old can with them, and we didn't have enough room in our truck to take it with us, and tonight is the first night we didn't cook on it.  I LOVE to barbeque, and somehow, barbeque tastes better outside.  When it's not raining.

So this substitute teacher is coaching some dodgeball, and by the time the cops show up, a ten year old is on his way to the hospital with neck and back pain.

Was it a result of a sports injury? Nope.  Apparently the juvenile threw a punch at the sub after some heckling and the sub turned it in on him, locking him in a chokehold and dragging him away from the game.  No idea what the kid's story is, but he's going to have a hard time explaining a sub's motivation to manhandle him.  At least dodgeball is a team sport, so there will be witnesses.  The sub claims the kid threw a punch at him, and I hope that's what the investigation will say, too.

I really think that more and more kids today seem to be acting up and have little to no respect for authority figures.  In my world, you have to remember that if you are going to try to hit a man, you'd better be prepared to get hit LIKE a man.  He's fortunate that this sub was nearly sixty and is from a generation that managed to discipline it's children without destroying them.  Who knows?  A younger sub might have returned the attack in kind.

Now, do I think that getting rough-housed is going to change this kid's attitude?  Of course not.  But there is a good chance that something will...his friends pointing out he got his ass whipped by an old man!

Well, here we are again with another tale of why we shouldn't just turn our heads when anti-science rears it's ugly head.  The long and the short of it:  people are claiming that Zicam, the nasal spray that is supposed to end your cold sooner, is destroying their sense of smell.  I have so many feelings about this, that I scarce know where to start.  How bout a primer on what Zicam mostly is.

There is a category of treatments (not to be confused with medicine, though most people, even those who administer it do, confuse the two) that involve basically no active ingredients.  The classical recipe for making a homeopathic remedy is to take a little of whatever is deemed to be the medicine, or in most cases toxin, and dilute it in a certain amount of water.  One then shakes the container along three different axes, i.e., up and down, left and right, front and back, then removes a small amount, I think a tenth, and dilutes it further, repeating the shaking.  The mixture is diluted so far that the final dose will likely contain no measurable amount of anything but water.  This is supposed to cure all kinds of ailments, depending on what was dissolved in the original solution.

The proposed mechanism for this cure is that the water retains certain properties of the soluble with it's water-memory.  Basically, it's magic.  Pharmaceutical medicine involves traceable, identifiable chemical reactions and their effects on biologic creatures.  They will tell you that dose is everything. 

Since the active ingredient in homeopathic medicines is nil, the FDA doesn't even evaluate them under normal circumstances, and they don't have to be controlled.  This is why we have a problem with Zicam.

My guess is that we'll find that some other ingredient like a preservative, or a minty fresh additive is the culprit in the Zicam complaint, though people smarter than me, or at least more educated and familiar with human bodies, have pointed out that it could also be the colds being treated that are messing with the olfactories. 

Or I guess they could just be a bunch of people educated on the ineterweb trying to cash in on a very few people's hard luck and legitimate problems.

At any rate, none of this would be necessary if we had to critically evaluate EVERYTHING that claims to have any effect on our persons.  The way I see it, if you want to claim that your concoction does X, Y, or Z, YOU should be responsible for ponying up the cash to test it in third-party double blind experiments, and publishing those reports in public record and peer reviewed documents.  Hopefully the crowd of educated, saavy, skeptical, critical thinkers who have humanity and what's best for people at heart would win out over the voices of people like Dr. Oz of Oprah fame, Prince Edward, and all the people who still believe the tooth fairy left them that dollar.

Well, while I was at work today, a pipe under the sink in the new house went to crap.  Leeanne said water was pouring out straight sideways at her.  It probably isn't anything other than a loose pipe fitting, or maybe the basket gasket, but the sink is pretty old.  It's one of those sinks that can't be more than 6 inches deep, and I swear we can barely wash anything in it. 

Whenever we get around to buying a place, it will definately have zero radius sinks in the kitchen.  A radius, as far as sinks go, is a rounded corner, and these sinks don't have them.  That makes a whole lot more room in the sink for pots and pans and dishes.

I remember when I was little, having a crappy little sink like this one to wash dishes in.  We had some bigger sinks after I reached adulthood and moved out on my own, but I ususally had a dishwasher, too.  And boy, did I make those things work!!!  At any rate, all my time in restaurants has made them just feel like the right thing to have in a kitchen.  Which reminds me of something else.

About half the people I hear talking about their zero radius sinks are complaining about how hard they are to keep clean.  NEWS FLASH!! Restaurants use them EXCLUSIVELY for washing dishes and food prep.  If you walk into a modern kitchen, or even semi-modern, the only sink you'll find with radiused (sp?) curves is for handwashing.  And frankly, in some of the places I've been assigned to clean up, they were the dirtiest sinks in the building.  Which is odd because the food prep sinks got more use.  YOU do the math.

When I get my way, that's the kind of sink I'll get.

I'll be getting back on news and politics, maybe some science later this week, but for now I'm really enjoying all the extra time I get to spend at home, even though I'm back to work.  The other day, I woke up no earlier than I would have had to if I were going to my old job, but I had time to shop for groceries and drive an hour to get home and STILL was there by six, in plenty of time to play with my children and sit down to eat dinner with my family.

A year ago, I didn't think that there was any job on the planet that I could get with my skill set that wouldn't require me to work 55 plus hours a week to support my family.  I think with all my new time, I might have to take up a new sport.  Maybe learn some golf and help my boy win some golf trophies.

After, of course, I get my car running.

Holy crap, I feel SOOOO out of the loop.  You'd think that with me being off work for almost a month, I'd be WAY caught up on my politics and such.  Little did I know that I would spend the better part of all my days packing and cleaning, and that a good chunk of my time would be without internet or cable.  The only newspapers we bought were to wrap fragiles, and I heard not an ounce of decent politics.

I'm gonna have to start looking for the medical insurance ideas being kicked around.  I'd like to know if anybody has thought of an idea like this.

The way I see it, there are two basic kinds of plans being volleyed back and forth.  The first is that the government pays for all our healthcare in a system like Medicare for everyone, which will undoubtedly spiral out of control and bankrupt the country.  The second is that we just require people to have it, and charge them lots of money for not complying, which would undoubtedly bankrupt the citizens.

So here's my thought.  What if the government, through our TAXES, like it's being kicked around already, paid for basic health care and 1 or two wellness visits each year, then, as citizens, we could purchase a policy similar to a Medicare supplement  for catastrophic illnesses.  I mean, Canada pays for citizens' health care, and it seems to be fantastic for smaller emergencies and overall care.  The way I understand it, though, is that major health issues are typically not handled the way we would in America. 

It seems like a good compromise to me, and if you know of anybody who has sponsored a bill like this, or thrown that idea out on the table, let me know.

Well, after f-disking this computer late last year, I swore that I was going to take good care of it and not have to do it again for at least three more annums.  Then, Leeanne got a mini netbook for Mom's Day, (because the other pc was incredibly slow) and there we were with a pc that was looking at not getting used.  I had an 80gb disk in both pcs, a 250gb disk in the workhorse, and a 160gb in the dud.

I don't know how he figured out to turn the dud computer off, but the boy is getting faster and faster at shutting it down, so I decided to move both large disks to the working computer and bring all our music and movies with it, so there I am, formatting and installing windows again, which is kinda the point of the story.  At least it went more smoothly this time.  Here is some advice from what I learned.

-check for all your installation disks NOW.  Put them away somewhere they won't be broken, damaged, or lost.
-verify that all your hardware has a driver somewhere on a disk that you can access if you need to re-install windows
-verify that you have a backup of all your favorite software, whether or not it needs a serial number/license, and what that might be

Last time I did the install, I made sure to collect all my programs/drivers that weren't on my installation disks, and save them to a special folder on my second hard disk.  That really saved me a lot of time this go-round.  Last installation took just over three days.  This one took about 4-5 hours, and most of that was waiting on the computer and playing Sudoku on my Zune.

Well, so far the new job seems like a great place.  Everyone has been very professional, and all three of the stores I've been in were well maintained and extremely attractive.  What a change of pace for me!!  My new employer hired me to create enough room to open new stores, and my old employer hired me to clean up messes.

I can say I haven't talked to anyone who feels abused just yet either, and that's reassuring.  Admittedly, though, there is a fair amount of stress knowing that I'm learning something completely new and competing with people who have been doing this for sometimes as much as 20 years. 

Happy to be where I'm at, either way.

Well, it seems that we have pretty much everything unpacked now.  What a week.  I SOOOO meant to be able to post up to this thing while we were on the road, but that little bitty computer Leeanne has is just way too tough for me to fight with.  Aside from that, I did all the driving, so by the time I was done playing with the kids at the hotels, I just wanted to lay down. 

Aside from that, it looks like we lost my XD 45 case, so now I'm missing a couple holsters, my spare mag, and a tactical light clip.  I'm sure the light clip won't be missed, but I'm rather pissed off about the holsters and spare mag.  I think that's about $100 worth of accessories, and it really tips me over.

I need to go stew.

Leeanne finally got tired of screwing around with our second desktop pc.  The thing is years and years old, and has never really seen maintenance.  I wanted to format it and start over, but she had too much stuff saved to it and wouldn't let me.  It's so slow that she barely gets around to posting her blog, which bothers her quite a lot.

Enter the EEE pc netbook.  We got it at Best Buy for about $260 after tax, and boy is it tiny.  I think she likes that, so I don't try to put my ape-sized paws all over it.  Seriously, I can barely type on the damned thing.

But it sports a 160gb hard drive, which should make up for the lack of cd, floppy, or any other damned thing.  It's a really bare bones internet machine work-type of device, but she can use it anywhere in the house, thanks to our wireless network.  Since I have most of our files shared on the network, she can transfer her settings, favorites, and files from the second desktop, and she can even copy some of the ripped movies and music to her machine and use it as a portable media player on the road trip next week. 

This also will give me the opportunity to format the desktop, and see if I can make a school computer out of it for Nikki, and finally she can quit pretending she uses the thinkpad, and I can see how well it likes Linux.  Talk about a piece of crap, that laptop.  Altogether too old.

At any rate, it's good for what she does, and all the heavy lifting computer stuff, I end up doing anyway, so good for us, right? 

Well Leeanne and I finally signed up for the Zune Pass.  For anyone who's been living under  a rock, the Zune team at Microsoft put together a package similar to one that iTunes offers, where we can download and listen to any song in their library, with a few exceptions like Metallica, Led Zeppelin, and a few other groups with tough lawyers, for $15 a month.  The biggest difference is that we get to keep ten of them, each month, forever.  The rest become inaccessable if we ever quite paying, just like iTunes.

It also brings to us "channels" which are sets of music updated each week with songs we might like, and several groups of similar choices.  All in all, we're pretty happy right now.  But with the move coming up, I'm trying to rip all our music from old cds so we don't have to pack them.  I swear, one of these days, I'm just going to keep what will fit in a bag and throw the rest out.

Some jackass named Timothy Wyeni in the parliament of Swaziland (South Africa) suggested branding HIV positive PEOPLE on the ass, so potential partners could check first to see if they might catch AIDS.  Are you f'ing kidding me?  Branding them with a hot iron? Hell, even a tattoo is just wrong.

I don't know, maybe it's because I still think that people should have basic rights, or maybe it's because I think people are typically better than animals.  Then again, maybe it's because I think that cattle-izing people seems like a better idea to them than, I don't know, say, CONDOMS.

Another article details many of the short comings of AIDS treatment and awareness in South Africa, but the long and short of it is that it just hasn't been taken seriously, and maybe part of that is because these a-holes are spending too much time pretending to care and not enough time developing solutions.