It’s Friday the 31 – a day that will no doubt bring bad luck to dyslexics everywhere. I had the foresight to take the day off, which I’m quite happy about at the moment. I’d rather have taken Monday off (Mondays just seem eminently better to miss than Fridays), but I’m on call next week, so I went with today to burn one of my use-it-or-lose-it vacation days. Right now, that seems like it was a pretty good idea. In fact, all day yesterday it seemed like a really good idea too – it was all I could do to get through the day.

So I don’t know if you saw it, but they have the “Amazon Fire Stick” available for preorder, and up until Wednesday Prime customers could get it for $19. So I figured, what the hell (it won’t actually be getting here until the end of December, so I guess it looked like a good deal to lots of people). It really won’t do much more than the Roku does, but what the heck.

I’ve also been wanting to get a Chromecast, and since they’re only $28 or so, I ordered one of those, too. That, fortunately, wasn’t a backorder pre-order kind of thing, so I got it on Wednesday. What with me being already so far up Google’s ass highly invested in the Googleshpere, it’s working out quite well. The thing I’ve used it for more than anything else so far is “casting” music to my stereo (both the collection I’ve uploaded to the Google “cloud” and from my all-access music subscription).

My plan, I think, is to drop satellite service when my current contract is up (which, fortuitously, should be right around the time I can get HBO w/o a cable/sat subscription). This means I’ll need to mount an outdoor antenna on the roof for OTA teevee and build a DVR to record stuff (there’s not a lot of “regular” tv that I watch, but there are a few things – and the local PBS station, in particular, has very spotty reception out here).

There are things I’ll miss (SU sports on the cable networks, for instance – though we may be entering some rather bleak times around here), but it’s all just too damn much money for what amounts to at most a few hours a week that would be better spent reading a book.

I’m currently in the final month of all my DirecTV “incentives” so I need to cut my service back anyway. In fact, I’m trying to decide if DIY is worth paying $7 a month for, or if I can live with just HGTV. They both recycle each others’ content, but I like DIY better (mostly for Renovation Realities, where I get to make fun of all the happy homeowners doing stupid shit that thank goodness nobody ever caught me doing on camera).

Well, I’ve got time to think it all over – and, hey, I might not even be alive in a year.

Happy Halloween, if you’re into that kinda thing. I used to sit around with the curtains drawn and the lights out to discourage the little bastids from ringing the bell and getting the dogs all worked up, but now that we’re out in the middle of nowhere and way off the road, that’s no longer a problem.

Unfortunately, it also makes it more difficult for Santa to find us.

Congratulations to you San Francisco fans out there on winning yet another World Series. Enjoy it while you can, San Fran, because your ungodly way of life is set to end come election day. By all indications, it appears that Republicans will not only remain in control of the House (in fact, my less-than-wonderful Democrat representative appears poised to lose his race), but will also take the Senate. The first thing I figure they’ll do is get rid of the filibuster entirely. If you thought things sucked before (and by “you” I of course refer to wildlife, women, minorities, working people, and the poor), you aint seen nothing yet, ‘cuz as we all know, the only thing worse than Democrats is Republicans.

Republicans also seem to be about to take control of a record number of state legislatures and even in places where there are “Democratic” governors, many of them (such as Governor Snotball) are really just Republicans anyway.

I’m once again fearing for my Social Security and retirement. My only hope is that I’ll squeak by on the low end of the group they decide to grandfather (so to speak) in. Either that, or Obama realizes the only thing he’s got is the veto and he won’t play Chamberlain to the Republicans’ Nazis.

History is not on our side with that hope. So my Plan B is to die before I retire, which isn’t an unlikely scenario, all things considered.

I think it’s gonna be a long, cold winter.

My parents were married 68 years ago today. Holy shit. That means my oldest brother is pretty damn old, what with him coming along nine months and nine weeks later. They didn’t waste a lot of time back then, right after the war. My folks had to get married in the rectory, what with my dad being “one of them.” Yeah, a Lutheran. A disciple of that dirty Kraut who screwed up the good thing the Catholic church had going back then. I mean, selling people shit that they won’t realize they’ve gotten swindled until after they die is one helluva scam. Just look at the size of those mega churches out there.

So I don’t’ know if you’ve heard this or not, but there’s a consortium of retailers (that include the likes of Walmart, Best Buy, 7-Eleven, and Rite Aid) that are planning an alternative payment system called CurrenC (not to be confused with CurrenC SF, which should totally sue). They want to bypass credit card companies (and processing fees), and some of them are shutting down their NFC card readers in order to thwart Apple Pay (not to mention Google Wallet and SoftCard – nee ISIS. They changed their name for obvious reasons – both of which were around for quite a long time before Apple “revolutionized” everything and adopted NFC).

Hmm. Greedy retailers like Wal-Mart vs. greedy credit card companies. Tough call there. The CurrenC app requires you to give direct access to your bank account to this “consortium,” which is a dealbreaker for me. With Wallet or Apple Pay, I can use a credit card complete with fraud protection, or I can give my bank info to a single company – Apple or Google – but only if I want to.

It’s pretty handy to be able to tap my phone to pay, but I don’t really use it much, because I have to pull my phone out, turn on NFC (which I don’t keep on all the time – they say it uses negligible battery, but I don’t buy it), and then make sure the app is turned on and available. Whereas with my credit card, I pretty much already have my wallet out because I need to show ID to buy beer (even at my advanced age), and if I’m in a store, I’m pretty much buying beer.

I checked a lot of prices online yesterday between BJs, Costco, and Amazon. Not really a lot of difference there. I would say that Costco sells a wider variety of shit than BJs (you can actually buy caskets from their website), but that’s about it.

UPDATE You can get caskets at BJs online, too. Amazing.

It did remind me I should get busy building a casket for myself. Though I’m kind of leaning toward cremation at this point. I always thought it would be a waste of energy to burn my carcass (I mean, decomposition is free), and I kind of thought a “natural” burial would be better (basically, toss me in a hole). With a coffin something like this (maybe a nice tie-dye one) filled with those cornstarch packing peanuts.

But as I get older, I’m thinking that’s all a lot more trouble than anybody wants to deal with as far as I’m concerned. Find a natural burial “park” (the closest one around here is a fair drive away), the casket or shroud (I guess I could pre-order that), and then scramble to get me in the ground in hurry before I get too stinky.

I mean, if I’m the last one standing (so to speak), by the time they find me I’ll probably be more of a pile of bones in a puddle of goo that they’ll have to use a Shop-Vac to clean up, or somebody I know will have to deal with everything at a time when they shoudl just be enjoying the insurance money. Who wants the bother?

Speaking of bother, I guess I better think about getting ready for work. It’s supposed to be 76° out there today, and a high of 38° with perhaps some snow by Saturday. Whoopie.

We got an e-mail at work yesterday informing us that, pursuant to a CDC-issued Level 3 travel warning, we are not allowed to travel to Guinea, Liberia or Sierra Leone. Or at least, not on the company dime. Apparently there is also a Level 2 travel warning issued to “…travelers to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, urging them to protect themselves by avoiding contact with the blood and body fluids of people who are sick with Ebola.” I’ll keep that in mind. I’m not a doctor or a contagious disease expert (or even an MBA), but I’d think “avoiding contact with the blood and body fluids of people who are sick with Ebola” would be a good idea no matter where your Halloween party is located. Like, “sorry, but if you’ve got the Ebola, no apple-bobbing for you.” On the bright side, travel to Nigeria has now been downgraded to Alert – Level 1. So if you’re headed there for Thanksgiving, you should be good to go.

There’s good news for you if you happen to need a heart transplant. Previously, the protocol called for a still-beating heart to be removed from a donor and then put in a cooler full of ice. This meant donors had to be in one of two categories: Chinese prisoners (such as the one that Dick Cheney no doubt had harvested), or the brain dead. But Australian doctors have found a way around that.

Two months ago, doctors in Australia transplanted a “dead heart” — a heart that had stopped beating inside a donor’s chest — into a 57-year-old woman, reports the BBC. The operation, which has been deemed success, was unlike any other, because for the first time, it didn’t involve a brain-dead donor who’s heart was still beating.

This shows us two thing: first, you don’t gotta write good English to publish stories at “The Verge,” and second, you no longer need to get your heart transplant from a brain dead Republican, and can instead opt for a dead Liberal.

Big news yesterday as we got our first area Costco. Previously, you’d have had to drive to Kingston, ON. This would be great for me, were it not for the fact that my union worked out a deal for BJs (perhaps I should say, “at” BJs) which is like Costco in that you have to pay for the privilege of going there to spend money. We not only get a reduced rate, but we get a 15-month membership instead of 12.

I’d prefer to go to Costco, because it looks like they have some good shit, their gas is even cheaper than BJs, I hear they treat their employees well, and they have really big Teddy bears. So hopefully the union will reach out to them and at the very least ignite a bidding war.

It’s not a particularly pleasant-looking day out there today, but I’m gonna try and cut the grass one last time and get ready for winter. Not a pleasant thought, really, but the snow could fly at any time now. I really should get the storm windows in and see if the heat still works, too.

I think this image tweeted by Scott Bixby yesterday really sums up the differences between the US and Canada.

Our for-profit media pushes terror, and their public news pushes…. News. I bet they’re not even all that afraid of Ebola up there. Though I hope if any actual highly communicable disease outbreak occurs, nobody goes to Texas for treatment, ‘cuz they just don’t seem to take this isolation shit seriously. Probably ‘cuz “Universal Precautions” sounds too much like socialism or something.

Speaking of socialism and undermining the American way of life, if you work for the right company, you may get cheap solar power as a benefit.

On Wednesday, three major companies — Cisco Systems, 3M, and Kimberly-Clark — announced they will now give employees a deeply discounted way of buying or leasing solar panels for their homes.

Called the Solar Community Initiative, the program promises a flat rate that is on average 35 percent lower than the national average and roughly 50 percent less expensive than average electric utility rates. According to the announcement, the offer will start as a benefit to more than 100,000 employees. If one percent choose to power their homes with solar, more than 74,500 metric tons of carbon emissions would be avoided each year.

Offered through Geostellar, a cost comparison site for solar panels, the program will also include options for employees’ friends and families in the United States and parts of Canada.

That ought to piss off a lot of teabaggers and Koch fiends. Needless to say, if anybody out there works for one one of those companies, please add me to your “friends and family” list.

I noticed that there might be some of you (OK, mostly one of you) running afoul of the anti-spam plugin I’m using now. It’s mostly there to prevent the annoying spam registrations that occur at the rate of about 20 per day, give or take. It also tests comments for spam, though that’s not really needed since you need to be registered to comment. It did allow me to turn trackbacks and pingbacks on again (not that that is really important, since we don’t get many here and they were a major source of spam for a while before I turned them off).

So, anyway, I don’t see an option to turn off the comment spam checker and it looks like we’re stuck with it. There are a bunch of algorithms that it apparently uses, but I turned logging on and noticed a bunch of legit-looking comments getting blocked. Really, just one comment, but somebody tried it a whole bunch of times. Here’s the only thing I can see about it that doesn’t look Kosher:


<a href=\"http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/ben-bradlee-legendary-washington-post-editor-dies-at-93/2014/10/21/3e4cc1fc-c59c-11df-8dce-7a7dc354d1b1_story.html?hpid=z1\">Ben Bradlee, legendary Washington Post editor, dies at 93</a>


See that backwards slash right after the href= and before the “http://” part? That aint right. Neither is the one at the end before the closing ” in the link. I don’t know how those got there (tried duplicating it, but to no avail), or why they’d cause the comment to be considered spam. Maybe that wasn’t it, but that’s all I could see that looked funky.

So, anyway, if you find your comments disappearing, before you post, click on the “source” button and you’ll see the non-formatted code. You can try taking out anything that looks odd, or you can copy and paste the code and e-mail it to me, and I’ll see if I can figger out what’s wrong.

Oh well, time to get back to work.

For the first time in more than a month, Syracuse actually found a football team worse than they are – and we thank the kind folks in Winston-Salem North Carolina and Wake Forest University for the much needed ass-kicking they allowed us to give them yesterday. I don’t bring this up to rehash a sports event that I know nobody really cares about, but rather to mention how much I miss the olden days.

Back in the day, when SU won a football game on Saturday, I had to wait until Sunday in order to devour the newspaper sports section. Now with the Internet and online news sites, I’d already read everything there is to read – which is basically the lo-cal “paper” site and the same AP story recycled on ESPN, SI, USA Today, and the other national sites.

Of course, it’s not just Sundays during football season that I miss. There once was a time when I’d go out and get the local Sunday paper as well as the Sunday NY Times (and even the Daily News, more for the amusement factor than the news) and spend all Sunday drinking coffee (and smoking cigarettes and/or pot, back when I used to do that sort of thing), reading the papers, and doing the crossword puzzles.

Ah, those were the days. Not that there aren’t advantages to how things work today, of course. For one thing, I don’t have to fiddle with the shortwave radio to get the BBC or play with the rabbit ears to get the CBC news on Channel 11 from Kingston. But there was just something about sitting around amidst piles of newspaper that really took the edge off the end of the weekend.

The pot helped, too.

The hospital for which I work has been declared as one of eight official Ebola centers in NY by Governor Snotball (my boss passed along a memo from our head of Emergency Preparedness, who I know is qualified because he’s got an MBA). I’m fairly certain this distinction comes without a budget, but I’m pleased nonetheless because it’s very important. As we all know, Ebola is easier to get than mono at a frat party, and we’re all pretty much gonna die horrible deaths from this “outbreak.” Right now, hundreds of thousands of Ebola Zombies (mostly from Kenya and Mexico, but probably a few Canadians, too) are staggering across our borders at this very moment, looking to infect us normal (and by normal, I mean “white”) folks. Thanks, Obama.

The other reason I’m pleased is that it’s mid-October, and, were it not for this Eboma (or is it Obola?) stuff, the media would be wetting their pants over flu season and how if you don’t get a flu shot, you’re gonna die from the flu (but not before infecting innocent children and people who are allergic to eggs). It’s nice that they have something else to obsess over, even if ti’s just for a little while.

Speaking of death, I have to go to a wake tonight after work. This is one of those unpleasant grownup things that you have to do even though you really don’t want to. Like going to weddings or not passing a stopped school bus. This one is for the father of someone who used to be a very good friend of mine, but who I rarely see these days what with him not living around here anymore. And having been on the other side of these things (that is, as a family member of the deceased, not, as of yet, the guest of honor), about all I know is that it’s weird and it sucks, and there’s really nothing anybody can say or do that will stop it from sucking but on some way it actually does help to know that there are people who care.

So you do the right thing and you go and you kneel in front of the casket and pretend to pray (I guess that’s what you’re supposed to be doing, right?) and then you go and make small talk and see a bunch of people you haven’t seen in a while (and may never see again – at least, not vertically) and try to pretend there isn’t a dead guy (or gal) up there in the front of the room.

But, hey, at least it’s Friday.

I caught about 15 minutes worth of a documentary about the Cowsills this morning. If you’re my age or older, then you know who they were and if you’re much younger than that (like Google Chrome spellchecker, apparently), then you don’t. I’d say they to the Partridge Family as the Beatles were to the Monkees, except you probably wouldn’t know who the hell the Partridge Family was either (plus however they came into being, the Monkees actually had some good stuff, whereas the Partridge Family, not so much).

Anyhow, I had no idea that Bud “daddy” Cowsill was such a dick, but apparently he was. I had to leave just as the grown up (by that I mean “old”) Cowsills were getting ready to sing the National Anthem or something at Fenway Park, and one Cowsill was being a dick to another Cowsill because the second one apparently wasn’t singing right. Or something. I dunno, I was trying to get ready for work.

I also watched an hour or so of Ron Howard’s “Rush,” which is about the Formula One rivalry between James Hunt and Niki Lauda. I’ll be honest, auto racing isn’t a subject I’m particularly interested in (though if I was going to pay attention to any of it, it would be Formula One – though the couple of times I went to DIRT races, it was fun watching them kick all that dust and dirt everywhere). When I was a kid, they used to have Figure Eight races on the Wide World of Sports, and got a kick out of them and the demolition derby.

Anyhow, what I saw of the movie was really good, and I may have to watch it from beginning to end one of these days. I’d also like to google Suzy Sparkle, just ‘cuz I love the name. Unfortunately, I was experiencing network difficulties last night, which I mostly tracked down to a bad cable this morning (upon further review, I’m expecting to find mouse-related damage – further strengthening my resolve to wage all-out war, if not genocide on the little bastards).

So now I have network connectivity to my home office for my Genie Mini, PlayStation, and Roku – but sadly there still seems to be an issue at my main computer. Which I’ll need to fuck around with some more tonight.

Looks like I picked a good time to give up giving up drinking (though to be honest, I gave giving that up a while ago).

Seeing as we’re all gonna die horrible deaths from Ebola, what’s the point in abstaining?

As usually happens, this four-day week is proving to be a long one. I’m not sure how all this time warp stuff works, but yesterday felt like Monday all day long, so I should technically be a day ahead. But today for some reason feels like Thursday (I even keep checking the calendar to make sure), so I’m mentally a day behind. It’s like I have to work six days instead of five (never mind four).

It just aint right.

It was on this date back in 1978 that Jimmy Carter signed H.R. 1337, amending the Internal Revenue Code of 1954 with respect to excise tax on (among other things) home production of beer and wine, thereby making home brewing legal. For that, and because I never actually got drafted, I forgive him for reinstating military draft registration two years later (starting with males born in the year 1960 – making me one of the first to be forced to go down to the post office and register since the draft was abolished in 1974). I really should celebrate by digging out (and cleaning) all my homebrew equipment that has languished in my basement since moving four years ago. But I need to do kegs, ‘cuz I aint messing with any more bottles.

Happy Columbus Day! There are those that turn their noses up at today being a holiday, but I say fuck ’em. A day off’s a day off. Hell, if they wanna give me a day off for Hitler’s birthday, I’ll take that, too (though it wouldn’t be Nazi paraphernalia I’d be celebrating 4/20 with). It’s definitely a good time for a three-day weekend, and I’ve even been slightly productive.

On Saturday, I cleaned my bathroom, which was starting to get kind of a gas station vibe (and there was what appeared to be a small black and gray dog sleeping in one corner) going since it’s become my exclusive domain (it’s the master bathroom, and I of course, am the master) and we apparently fired the cleaning lady. So, twice year, whether it needs it or not, I give it as good a cleaning as I can manage given that I’m not all that fussy.

Well, I cleaned the shower and toilet, anyway. The vanity, I think I’ll just get a new one one of these days. And the floor. I should replace that, too. The big problem seems to me to be that somewhere along the line they “improved” all the cleaning equipment to the point where they’re basically useless.

We don’t even have a freakin’ toilet brush. We have these plastic sticks that hold really crappy scrubby pad/ sponge-type things (with a button on the stick that you’d think would squeeze the water out of the pad, but you’d be wrong because it actually releases – more like “launches” – the pad into the toilet bowl.

And after about two seconds of manly scrubbing action, the pads are worn and worthless. The advice I got was to do it “every week.”

Hah! Like that’s gonna happen.

I also wanted a scrub brush with a long handle (so as not to have to grovel on my knees) to clean the shower. When I asked if we had such a thing, I got the kind of look you’d give a crazy person. Instead I got this “glass surface” cleaner with a telescoping handle (that would have extended it from about 12 inches to 18 inches – not exactly what I had in mind – if the thing that locked it into place actually locked it into place, which it did not) and a head that – according to the box – you were supposed to cover with a “microfiber” cleaning cloth. Which of course was not in the box, but wouldn’t have helped anyway because I needed to do some good old-fashioned hard scrubbing (somebody had allowed several layers of what I would describe as “soap scum” and some other stuff that if I didn’t know better might have mistaken for mold).

At any rate, I managed to get things fairly clean. I’d have cleaned the floor, too, but another thing they have apparently decided to “improve” are mops. ‘Cuz as far as I know, we don’t have one (you know, the kind with a sponge and a scrubby thing that you pull the handle and it wrings out the mop instead of launching it across the room like that poor excuse of a toilet cleaning thing).

Oh we’ve got a plethora of other devices (some of which even plug in, for what purpose I do not know) that look to be somewhat related to mops, but I have no idea how to use any of them and they all appear to require some sort of disposable pad type of thing (what the fuck is it with throwing everything away these days?), but if we have any of those I have no idea where they are. And I can’t ask, because whenever I ask where something is, it turns into a recitation on how much I suck – a fact to which I am more than willing to stipulate, and which, frankly has been already entered into evidence repeatedly.

So screw it. I did the best I could with what I had to work with. Some time between now and April, I’ll just have to order some regular cleaning supplies (assuming they still make that kind of stuff).

Anyhow, so that was Saturday. Well, that and watching SU lose but not as badly as we all expected to #1 Florida State. In fact, it was entirely watchable, all things considered. In fact we did well enough to drop FSU from #1 to #2 despite the fact that they beat us by 18 points (which tells you a bit about what the pollsters think of us). So, not a win but not the 59-3 debacle of last year, either.

I got the pool closed up yesterday (I will now commence to spending all winter worrying that I did something wrong) and put the cover on.

Mice managed to eat some pretty large holes in the cover (after four years, they’ve suddenly decided it was tasty?), the little bastards. I’ve now decided to declare a full-out war on mice. Yesterday, I ordered $50 worth of mouse traps from Amazon to add to my mouse trap collection, and I’m pledging to be diligent in placing, checking, and replacing them. Enough is enough. I’d rather not have to kill them, but I’ve tried reasoning with them and threatening them, and now I’m afraid the little assholes are just gonna have to die.

Sorry PETA.

Speaking of death, it appears that God has lifted His veil of protection from Texas. Hurricanes, drought, floods, and now Ebola. It’s time to build a fence around Texas and hire border patrol agents to keep them from sneaking out. I might be willing to make Austin kind of an East/West Berlin type of thing. We’ll see.

Today I’m trying to decide if I should cut the grass one last time and get the mower off, or (since it doesn’t really need it) wait a week. I think I’m leaning toward waiting ’til next week. After all, it’s Columbus Day!