At some point (while I wasn’t paying attention) it seems that the Rooskie Olympics started. I guess this means that I won’t be seeing the stuff I usually record on NBC for a couple of weeks (for last night, that means no Grimm or Dracula – bummer). I will mostly be ignoring the Olympics as much as is possible (not an easy feat), but I did hear that the Russian team marched into the opening ceremony to a Russian knockoff band’s rendition of Queen’s “We are the Champions” as Vladimir Putin grooved to the music.

I’m not an expert on Russian law, but I’m pretty sure the whole bunch of them should be tossed in a gulag for violating the “promoting gay lifestyle” law. What in Stalin’s name will they do when the figure skating competition starts?

This one’s for you, Putie-Poot! :bf:

Apparently they had a little technical glitch, though.

The opening ceremony at the Winter Games hit a bump when only four of the five rings materialized in a wintry opening scene. The five were supposed to join together and erupt in fireworks. But one snowflake never expanded, and the pyrotechnics never went off.

Aw. How sad. Must’ve been a bummer for everybody watching on the teevee.

…everything worked fine for viewers of the Rossiya 1, the Russian host broadcaster.

As the fifth ring got stuck, Rossiya cut away to rehearsal footage. All five rings came together, and the fireworks exploded on cue.

“It didn’t show on television, thank God,” Jean Claude-Killy, the French ski great who heads the IOC coordination commission for the Sochi Games, told The Associated Press.

Producers confirmed the switch, saying it was important to preserve the imagery of the Olympic symbols.

Jean Claude-Killy? Now there’s a blast from the past. For those too young to remember, Jean Claude-Killy was like the Secretariat of Alpine Skiing. Of course if you don’t remember him, then you don’t remember Secretariat, either. He was the Jack Nicklaus of horse racing. Jack was kind of the Beatles of…. Never mind. I guess I have no way to relate to the young people anymore. 🙁

Please pay for my Social Security anyway, ‘kay?

The unveiling of the rings is always one of the most iconic moments of an opening ceremony…

OK. I’ll have to take your word for that.

…and President Vladimir Putin has been determined to use the ceremony as an introduction of the new Russia to the world.

The show’s artistic director George Tsypin said the malfunction was caused by a bad command from a stage manager.

A former stage manager, who I don’t think we’ll be hearing from for a while. On the bright side, he should get about 30 years worth of free concerts from a certain Queen tribute band.

Here’s a story I missed: Colorado Springs Airport installs amnesty boxes for marijuana

The Colorado Springs Airport on Wednesday installed amnesty boxes for people who didn’t realize that it’s illegal to possess marijuana on a plane or even at the airport.

No only did I miss the story, I feel as though I’ve missed a real opportunity to install my own alternative amnesty boxes. The article doesn’t say what they do with the collected material, but let’s just say I wouldn’t mind an invite to the Colorado Springs Airport maintenance department’s Christmas party next year.

I’m really starting to tire of this whole “Polar Express” crapola. For one thing, the name sounds like it should be a 64 oz beverage at a non-NYC 7/11 (either that or the train that takes you to visit Santa). Mostly, though, it’s ‘cuz I’m getting too old for this shit. My stuff hurts enough when it’s nice out. What I really need is to spend about 12 hours a day in a nice warm pool. Or maybe I should buy a hot tub. Nah, if I had that kind of money, I’d get a plow truck (imagine that – plowing snow from inside a vehicle with the heater cranked and the radio on, drinking a beer :nod: ).

Sunny this morning though, so no plowing required, thank goodness.

Looks like we made it through another week. Well, once we get through today, anyway. It’s bright and sunny here – but kinda cold. Good thing I don’t really need to go out (except maybe to the store – I need to go count the beer in the fridge). I looked at my time accruals yesterday, and lo-and-behold I got a vacation bonus day for surviving another year of work. This means I’m back up to the theoretical max of 40 vacation days (as long as I get my balance back down to 40 by December 31, I won’t lose any time, though). I also have three holiday comp days in the bank – and I earn another one on the 12th. Clearly, I need to take some time off. Too bad I always seem to have yet another project (or two) due, because what I really feel like doing is hibernating for the next couple of months. Wake me up when the leaves start popping out.

I don’t know if anybody out there has Comcast, but I thought this story was pretty interesting.

Comcast customer Ronaldo Boschulte didn’t know exactly what he was getting when the company swapped his malfunctioning modem for a new one. The cable modem doubles as a Wi-Fi router—that much he was expecting. But he didn’t realize the router would, by default, broadcast a public Wi-Fi network that anyone with a Comcast account could connect to.
[…]
Customers can turn the second signal off if they choose, but it’s definitely an opt-out program rather than opt-in.

…Comcast doesn’t provide instructions for turning it off manually. You have to call Comcast for that.

“You will always have the ability to disable the XFINITY Wi-Fi feature on your Wireless Gateway by calling 1-800-XFINITY,” the company says. Presumably, a customer service representative will try to talk you out of disabling it.

“We encourage all subscribers to keep this feature enabled as it allows more people to enjoy the benefits of XFINITY Wi-Fi around the neighborhood,” the company says.

Yet another reason to not get the Cable Modem/WiFi Router bundled together from your ISP.

Here’s another reason to move to England – people there apparently don’t know shit about the fairy stories in the bible.

Widespread ignorance exists among children and parents about the contents of the Bible, research has suggested. Surveys for the Bible Society found almost three in 10 young people were unaware the story of the birth of Jesus came from the Bible. A similar number of children had never read or heard about tales of the Crucifixion or Adam and Eve.

The report was based on a poll of 800 children aged eight to 15 and about 1,100 parents.

I guess once they unloaded all their religious fanatics on the poor unsuspecting natives in North America, they were able to get back to living normal lives. Probably explains why they have such un-Christian institutions like Universal Healthcare.

Oh well, time to get back to work. Only another 6-7 hours to kill.

So yesterday was a pain in the ass. They originally said it would snow for morning rush hour, then taper off and snow some more in the afternoon. Instead, it basically decided to keep snowing until about 7:00 or so last night. So not only was the drive in a hassle, but the drive home sucked, too. And then I had to sit on the tractor and plow the driveway (my wife was kind enough to shovel out the end of the driveway so I could get in, and I barely made it to the garage through the foot+ of snow that had piled up). Fortunately it also turned cold and windy – dropping from a balmy 26° or so to, of I dunno, about -1 on my thermometer as I write this. Looks like the forecast for at least the next week is friggin’ cold with occasional snow. At the risk of sounding like an Atlantan, I must say that this is getting rather tiresome.

This just in from Bizzaro World: Pat Robertson made sense yesterday while discussing the Nye v. Ham debate.

“Let’s face it,” Robertson said, “there was a Bishop [Ussher] who added up the dates listed in Genesis and he came up with the world had been around for 6,000 years.”

“There ain’t no way that’s possible,” he continued. “To say that it all came about in 6,000 years is just nonsense and I think it’s time we come off of that stuff and say this isn’t possible.”

“Let’s be real, let’s not make a joke of ourselves.”

“We’ve got to be realistic,” he concluded, and admit “that the dating of Bishop Ussher just doesn’t comport with anything that is found in science and you can’t just totally deny the geological formations that are out there.”

That’s not the only thing that makes you a joke, Pat, but it’s nice to know you don’t deny incontrovertible science.

Televangelist Pat Robertson pointed to the cold U.S. weather on Tuesday — and the fact that there were no “SUVs driving around in Jupiter” — to assert that global warming was a scam created by scientists.

Oh. Alrighty then.

I think I now know why all the Super Bowl ads (that I saw, anyway) sucked. It’s because the Puritans sailed over on the Mayflower and bred a small but virulent group of uptight cockroaches that continue to influence this country’s social mores even to this day. Therefore, all the good ads got banned. I haven’t seen them all yet, but the ones I’ve seen haven’t been ban-worthy (though the PETA one with scantily clad hot females basically having sex with veggies was maybe pushing it a bit – “think of the children!“).

Of those I’ve seen, I think this one is my favorite (and one that, IMHO, could be enjoyed by the whole family):

Last night was the great debate – Bill Nye the Science Guy vs. Ken Ham the, um, whatever-the-fuck-he-is guy. I have not had a chance to watch it, but if you’ve got a couple of hours to kill, you can catch it here on the Christian Today website. Then you can vote in the “who won the debate” poll they have going.

You might be surprised to hear that with close to 16,000 having voted so far, Bill Nye is in the lead 92% to 8%. So either Satan got the message out on Twitter to go rig the vote, or Christians (at least the ones capable of using computers) aren’t as stupid as we think they are (which could either be rather good or extremely terrifying news, depending on your perspective). As I understand it, Bill said “geological evidence” and Ken said, “the bible says so.” And Bill said “carbon and radioactive dating” and Ken said “Christian Mingle. Plus the bible says so.” And Bill said, “speed of light and distance between galaxies” and Ken said, “the bible says so.”

So Ken wins. Duh.

I saw a link at the Crappington Post for “Nine Pieces of Advice Every Woman Needs,” so I clicked on it, ‘cuz my wife never tires of me giving her unsolicited advice, and I thought there might be some useful shit in there like “just because the toilet tank lid is flat doesn’t mean you should pile shit on top of it,” or “if you wanna watch teevee, just turn on the teevee and the receiver, makes sure it’s set to ‘CBL/SAT’ for DirecTV or DVD for the Roku or DVD player, then turn on the DirecTV box (or DVD player – Roku is always on), then use the appropriate remote to navigate the menus to watch what you want. It’s easy, honest,” or “just because the lid to the pellet stove hopper is flat doesn’t mean you should pile shit on top of it,” or “it’s really not that hard to put air in your tires, honest, give it a try,” or “it really is a good idea to keep that jump starter thingie with the light and the compressor and even a USB port on it in your car in case of emergency,” or “it’s really not that hard to use that portable jump starter thingie to jump-start your car,” or “if you have a hard time getting out of the driveway on Sunday, you should really let me know sometime before I have to go to work on Monday morning.”

But instead it turned out to mostly a bunch of sappy quotes that would apply to both men and women equally.

Congrats, Huff Post – you got me again.

Speaking of not getting out of the driveway, we’re supposed to get deluged with snow this morning. They’re saying like maybe a foot – most of it coming in just the next couple of hours. All the schools preëmptively closed, so that’s a good thing. School buses are pain in the ass enough in good weather. I still don’t understand why, since I’m paying for them, they don’t have to pull over and get out of my way when they see me coming. Plus, they seem to pick these kids up right at their driveways. We never had curb service (not that we have curbs out here) when I was a kid. Plus they’ll sit there and wait with their flashers on for the little bastards darlings to come out of the house. Hey, if they’re not out there when the bus comes, fuck ’em. Maybe their parents will get them up and out the door a little earlier tomorrow.

Damn hippies coddled the current generation of young adults, and they turned out to be pretentious whiners that don’t think they have an obligation to pay for my Medicare and Social Security. Little turd balls.

Oh well, time to start thinking about getting out there and seizing the day.

Yesterday was a tough day for me. Mostly because when I got to work it felt as if somebody was driving a very sharp ice pick into my ankle all day long. I honestly wish I was exaggerating about that. My foot was bigtime swollen, too – it looked like the Underdog’s foot in the Macy’s T-Day parade or something (except all red, not white). This is most likely because I’ve been feeling pretty good lately, and have gotten really tired of just sitting on my ass all the time like a fat lazy schlub. So I went up and down the stairs a few times trying to get a tiny fraction of a few things done over the weekend (and maybe because I imbibed just a wee bit more than my quota on Saturday evening – but, hey, I had a good excuse), and did some tractor-type stuff, plowed the driveway out while it was warm (been kind of neglecting it, and the drifting had made it pretty narrow).

My foot was a little stiff in the morning (actually both feet – my right Achilles tendon has been feeling pretty stiff lately, too), but as I’ve been pretty darn good lately (almost as if I was a regular person who could do simple things like walk without pain) and figured things would improve as I loosened up, I didn’t feel a need to bring any ibuprofen to the office with me (bad move). Things got steadily (and rapidly) worse as the day went on.

Normally, it only hurts when I walk (or maybe when I’m trying to sleep) but yesterday there was a sharp constant pain in my ankle (mostly my ankle, though not exclusively) that refused to go away no matter what I did. Thank goodness my office mate wasn’t there, since I had my sock off and was waving my foot all over the place, trying to find a position that made things feel better.

At one point I pulled a couple of gallon jugs filled with water out of my little refrigerator and stuck my foot between them, which did help some, but not enough. Driving home was very unpleasant (not to mention just the walk out to the car) and when I got home I found the dog had left me a very stinky present in the bedroom (which I really wasn’t in the mood to clean up – all I wanted to do was take some ibuprofen and get my foot on ice.

After a couple of hours in snow water, things calmed down a bit, but it was a pretty sleepless night last night (more so than usual, even). If I could figure out how to sleep with my foot in a bucket of ice water, I would.

Thank goodness I’m working from home today and can rest it, but they say there’s snow coming just in time for the Wednesday morning commute, so tomorrow should suck (and if I manage to survive the commute, I immediately have to go to our stupid monthly meeting). Fortunately the wife is off, so I don’t have to worry about her getting to work and the snow really doesn’t bother me all that much – it’s just the idiots out there in my way who don’t know how to drive in it (I think we must have a lot of transplanted Atlantans up here or something).

It appears that I totally missed Groundhog Day the other day. The media must really be slipping – normally there’s nothing more important going on. But I guess not even Punxsutawney Phil can compete with the Super Bowl. It was sunny out in Punxsutawney PA, so I guess that means there’s another six weeks of winter (which is always the case at the beginning of February, which is why I never understood this whole stupid thing). I can’t remember all the way back to Sunday, so I can’t tell you if it was sunny here or not, but I didn’t see any woodchucks popping their little heads out of the ground so I don’t think we’ll be having any early spring.

So now I’m sitting here at home trying to rehab my foot before I have to go back to work tomorrow by keeping it in a bucket of snow water for as long as I can stand it while trying to get some work done. I got a little chilly (which isn’t a surprise, I guess), so I reached over to switch on my electric heater and I thought, “gee, seems like I saw something similar to this in one of those OSHA safety videos they used to make us watch.”

Better to be electrocuted at your desk than to die in the shower or while takin’ a dump like Elvis was, I guess.

Oh well, my water’s warming up. Guess I’d better go grab some more snow.

There have been some “super” Super Bowls over the years. Last night wasn’t one of them. I was kind of hoping it would at least be a fun game to watch. I’m glad I didn’t stay up past halftime. Not that you’d know it from how tired I feel this morning – it would be nice to be able to sleep for more than three or four hours again. Part of the problem, I think, was that I’d finally gotten around to staining a CD rack somebody gave me about 30 years ago. Been meaning to get to that, so there’s one more thing to cross off my bucket list. I mounted it on the wall in my office, but unfortunately it wasn’t really dry yet and the fumes were really getting to me. My lips were even getting numb. I guess it wasn’t low VOC stain. Even this morning, I can smell it. Best part is, I don’t even have a CD/DVD player in here so it’s really for display purposes only. I’m gonna have to find a place to display all my LPs, too.

A real shame about Phillip Seymour Hoffman. I’m not quite sure I buy the whole “found with a needle in his arm” thing. Not if it was heroin, or cut with something bad, anyway. A heroin overdose just doesn’t work that way – it takes hours for your respiratory and circulatory systems to shut down and kill you. It’s not the kind of thing that puts you down mid injection. Or so I’ve read, anyway. Fortunately heroin is not one of the places my life’s taken me.

If you watch his Oscar acceptance, you see him thank his mom for, among other things, watching the NCAA Final Four with him. I wonder if he was a fan of any team(s) in particular. I mean, he was born and grew up in Fairport, NY, which is a suburb of Rochester. So, hey, not a lot of teams to choose from – not like St. John Fisher or RIT are basketball powerhouses.

One great and perhaps little known Hoffman film was “Flawless.” Robert DeNiro plays a homophobic cop who has a stroke, and part of his rehab includes taking singing lessons from his neighbor – a pre-op transgender drag queen “Rusty” played by Hoffman. By the end, DeNiro comes to like and respect Rusty and his group of friends. So naturally Rusty winds up getting beaten to death by some homophobic asshole. An uplifting story.

Of course the role he won an Oscar for was Capote, and he did a great job. If you’re around my age, you remember seeing Truman Capote on, like the Mike Douglas Show and Dick Cavett and maybe even Firing Line. God, I was watching some clips on YouTube yesterday, and William F. Buckley was such an infuriatingly annoying pompous windbag. My mom used to call him “the Crocodile” because he spoke so slowly and never seemed to move. I also remember some really good feuds between Capote and Gore Vidal. Of course, there were some really good feuds back then – Capote, Vidal, Buckley, Norman Mailer…. Not exactly at the same level as you see today – Bill O’Reilly sniping at Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity being whatever the fuck it is he is.

Oh well, it’s not quite time for work, but it’s getting there. Monday’s suck.

First half of the sports weekend down, day two set to get started. I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty darn tired this morning. Dunno know how many of you follow college basketball (though I imagine it’s not many), but yesterday was a tough day for a lot of the Top 10 teams. Most notably, #1 Arizona lost (a shame, that), as did #6 Kansas, #7 Michigan State, and #8 OK State. My condolences to all of them and their fans. Now I guess we move on to the SuperBowl. Since it’s like 35° here, I’m assuming it’s nice and warm down there in New Jersey, so there’s no excuse not to head down there (assuming you have tickets and you don’t want to tailgate, which is verboten though they will allow you to sit in your car and eat, which is mighty big of them). And the best part is, you don’t have to cross the George Washington Bridge to get there (at least not if you’re coming from Central NY).

I’m trying to decide my next move, here (which definitely won’t be making the 4-hour drive to Jersey). We’re supposed to get some snow later this week, and I’m in need of diesel for the tractor, so I should probably head out and get some. Normally on Sundays I travel to the bustling metropolis of Auburn, NY (or Pixley, as I like to think of it) to hit up the shopping “club” for a week’s worth of vittles and to fill my gas tank. But I don’t really need food this week (that is, I already have food and actually got an Amazon “Subscribe and Save” package that if I ration carefully I could survive on ’til spring).

I do need gas, though down to a quarter of a tank, which will get me to work and back tomorrow, but I might as well fill up while the weather’s warm. The gas is cheaper at the “club” – like 14¢ a gallon. But it’s 24 miles round trip, which uses, give or take, about a gallon of gas. I think I need about 10 gallons to fill my tank right now, and that would save $1.40 – so it would actually cost more to go buy cheaper gas so I guess it aint really worth it (I mean, otherwise I’d just drive to Billings, MT where GasBuddy says the price per gallon is a mere $2.899 – as opposed to $3.619 at the station here in Hooterville).

Of course, if I drive to the club, I can stop in and buy some shit food to chow on during the SuperBowl, what with my stock of shit food having dwindled to virtually nothing. That’s not really much motivation, though. It’s not like I have friends coming over or anybody to watch the game with, and if I feel the need I can always womp up a batch of my famous boneless chicken wings (actually boneless, skinless organic chicken thighs – I know, I know, I really shouldn’t eat anything with a mother, but I lack the necessary knowledge to figure out how to be vegan, so unless somebody wants to come cook for me or at least send me recipes and shopping lists I gotta stick with what I know).

Besides, they are just so gosh darn good. I sauté them for a bit in olive or coconut oil (whichever I happen to find first) with balsamic vinegar, a little flour, some Italian breadcrumbs, garlic (shit, I think I’m out of garlic), onions, Frank’s Red Hot, black pepper, cayenne pepper, and whatever else happens to fall into the pan. Then I roast them until slightly crunchy on the outside and melt in your mouth on the inside. Then I toss ’em in a bowl and lather on my secret hot sauce.

After that, it’s just gobble ’em up and wait for the burning diarrhea to kick in (typically 4-6 hours). Mmm, mmm, good.

I have so far not been able to bring myself to watch Friday’s Realtime. As you may or may not know, my other brother Daryl Issa was on, and I consider him to be a worthless piece of shit who I really don’t want to listen to. And since Maher has a tendency to suck up to “Conservatives” (I think he believes they’re doing him a favor by being on the show), I can only imagine Issa monopolizing the conversation, obfuscating, filibustering, and just being a generally annoying pain in the ass douchebag (hey Bill, why not have Dana Pigfucker Rohrabacher and that whiny little prick Jack Kingston on at the same time and get your asshole quota taken care of all in one week). I just don’t know that I want to put myself through that (already spent a couple hours last night with a markedly elevated heart rate and increased blood pressure – not sure I want to do that again today).

Well, it appears I missed the window to drive to Pixley (if I don’t get there right at 9:00, too damn many people show up and then I have to wait behind some idiot who insists on using the self checkout even though they’re clearly too stupid), so I guess I’ll just settle on getting gas and diesel.

Then maybe I’ll come back and take a nap.