Category: Various

A while back I pinned the Plow and Hearth Corn Kerneler onto Pinterest, and it went sort of viral (currently 898 repins and 314 likes).

I emailed Plow and Hearth thinking I may get a free product out of all the leads I was sending them, but they told me it had generated no sales. They were thankful for the publicity and offered me a discount. Nah, too much hassle so I just went ahead and bought one 12 days ago. It was $12.95 plus $6.99 shipping via FedEx, and arrived today.

I was jazzed, it looked fairly well made with sharp jagged blades, and then I noticed the cracks. They sent this thing via FedEx in a bag with no internal padding! Pretty dumb…

SlideShow (Kerneler Review)

I just took the Political Party Quiz put out by the Pew Research Center. They have determined from my answers that I’m an ultra right wing conservative Republican.

How did they know I was voting for Mister Rogers?

Often I don’t remember what I had for dinner the previous night, but I remember vividly what I was doing when Neil Armstrong stepped on the Moon.

It was a beautiful Sunday in Berkeley, CA three days before my 23 birthday. I’d spent the morning playing tennis at the old Merritt College on Grove St. I guess I was looking cute in my white shorts as I hitch-hiked home because I snagged a ride with a tall, gorgeous UC Berkeley law student.

Instead of heading towards home, we hung out. She took me to a sorority house and introduced me to her girlfriends. All of these ladies were strong, opinionated black women. I really got an education on how they felt about their men back in 1969.

I ended up back at her apartment. I was laying on the floor in front of the TV with my head in her lap, both of us naked, as Armstrong spoke his famous words.

Now how could I ever forget that?

btw: Here’s my other moon landing story…

Upper Mesa Falls, backward.

Water flowing backwards with horses.

Do you remember that Neil Young video I posted a while back titled Old Man?

Well, here he is 14 years later performing live at Farm Aid in 1985.

It’s better to burn out, than to fade away because once your gone, you can’t come back…

I attended high school in Paradise, CA. back in the mid sixties. I pretty much hated it but I was a track star so I dealt with it. My average grade was a D. Halfway through my senior year I had to deliver an oral book review to my English class. I wrote it, presented it, and got an F. The teacher accused me of plagiarizing it because I was an idiot and couldn’t have written it myself.

I dropped out of Paradise high right after that, finished up at a night school in Chico, hung out at the intersection of Haight and Ashbury for a while and hitch-hiked around the country. I guess that’s what idiots did back in the sixties…

Five years later I started college and got my computer science degree, graduating at the top of my class with a 3.98 GPA. I’m not sure what the purpose of this post is, other than to tell that English teacher she was wrong!

I handed this twenty to a local vendor yesterday and she said “Wow, I haven’t seen one of these in a while”! I gave her another and held on to this one, which dates back to 1988, two years after Riley was born.

So, I put this bill on my scanner along with a newer twenty dollar bill for comparison. Every time the scan bar reached the bottom of the new twenty, the scan would fail. It finally dawned on me that the scanner software was detecting that bill, which means that the detection algorithm is built into the software! Mind = Blown.

I used to make a very good living back in the early 90’s developing scanner drivers in assembly language for PC Paintbrush. I know how complicated the process is. I now realize that the Fed’s are mandating that scanner driver developers refuse to scan U.S. currency, even if it’s just for a simple little blog post.

Gee, I wonder if my IP address was sent to the FBI? I’ll let you know if I get a visit…

Rob Brezney’s Horoscopes appear in the Jackson Hole Weekly, which I read, weekly…

My horoscope for last week went down like this:

If you don’t run your own life, someone else will, said psychologist John Atkinson.

Make that your motto in the coming weeks, Leo. Write it on a big piece of cardboard and hold it up in front of your eyes as you wake up each morning. Use it as a prod that motivates you to shed any laziness you might have about living the life you really want.

Periodically ask yourself these three questions: Are you dependent on the approval, permission, or recognition of others? Have you set up a person, ideology, or image of success that’s more authoritative than your own intuition? Is there any area of your life where you have ceded control to an external source?

Some other great quotes while we’re on the topic:

• Whether you think you can or think you can’t, you are right. — Henry Ford
• What’s going on in the inside shows up on the outside. — Earl Nightingale
• I never did a day’s work in my life. It was all fun. — Thomas Edison
• I always turn every disaster into an opportunity. — John Rockefeller
• You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take. — Micheal Jordan
• Anyone can do nothing. — Ruben Gonzalez

B.T.W. The photo above is Brezney’s symbol for Leo, not mine. But, there is some symbolism in that image that captures my current physical state of being. :-)

Here’s the Top 42 shots from the cardboard derby yesterday up at Grand Targhee. This is the 12th annual derby for Targhee and just as good as always! Here’s the SlideShow.

Hay, it’s Friday! My brain has just been popping today with ideas and Pinterest pins so I decided to clump them all together into one post.

I put some great current links up on my Interesting Links board, I found an amazing video of a freeway shutting completely down in Israel honoring the 6 million Jews who died in the Holocaust, and the Cardboard Derby at Grand Targhee is tomorrow.

I also shot a short little video cruising through Huntsman’s Springs and spotted a cool green truck at Driggs Tire.

Whew… So, lets go:

Here’s the Huntsman Springs drive-by:

Here’s the old green truck:

Here’s the freeway shutdown:

We’re heading to the Cardboard Derby tomorrow…

I discovered a great new weather map from Weather Underground! Enter your location (city, state or zip code) and you get your current weather. Here’s ours.

I spotted something on this new Google map that I had never noticed before. If you travel between Driggs and Jackson by plane, which a lot of people do, you would fly right over Mt. Hunt. I never knew this particular mountain existed before seeing it here.

The significance? Hunt is my sister and her kids surname, and they fly out of Jackson!

…otherwise known as Costochondritis, has been diagnosed as the reason for the chest pains that have had me wondering about my mortality lately.

Actually, I made the diagnosis, with a little research… I’ve had a gut feeling that my heart was fine, but why was my chest hurting? Here’s what I found:

Costochondritis (kos-toe-KHON-dri-tis) is an inflammation of the cartilage that connects a rib to the breastbone (sternum). It causes sharp pain in the costosternal joint — where your ribs and breastbone are joined by rubbery cartilage. Pain caused by costochondritis may mimic that of a heart attack or other heart conditions.

The prescribed treatment was Ibuprofen, so I took some today. The pain dropped by half within the hour. The articles I read mentioned it usually occurs on the left side of your chest. Yep! And a possible cause was repeated minor trauma to the chest wall.

Then I got it: seatbelt shoulder straps! I drive for a living and I have them on all the time, on bumpy roads, and they cross exactly over the location of pain. Damn!

Since I don’t have health insurance, I just saved myself a bunch of money :-)

I swear, this Blog has a mind of it’s own! I left it alone longer then usual yesterday and it activated the My Masters Dead routine that I had developed a while back. I better adjust the timing function to trigger after two days, not a few hours… ;-)

On a very serious note, I’m really disgusted with the mainstream media, particularly NBC! Regarding the Trayvon Martin insanity, on March 27th the Today Show broadcast a seriously edited clip of the 911 call that just contained: “This guy looks like he’s up to no good – he looks black“, thus implying that a racist stereotype was being made by George Zimmerman, and furthering the hate-mongering going on now.

A transcript of the complete 911 call shows that Zimmerman said, “This guy looks like he’s up to no good. Or he’s on drugs or something. It’s raining and he’s just walking around, looking about.”

The 911 officer responded saying, “OK, and this guy — is he black, white or Hispanic?”

“He looks black,” Zimmerman said.

This kind of media crap makes me furious!!!

I really wish the United States had the courage to re-introduce serious deterrence. Negotiation is fine but not when it comes to nukes. The reason I turned out to be such a dammed rebel was the Cold War. When you live under the threat of dying by Russian nuclear bombs, you just don’t care.

Thanks to Ronald Reagan’s nerve, we won that war. We could defuse our current threats, Iran and North Korea, the same way. With deterrence!

First, assemble anti-ballistic weapons in Israel and South Korea capable of shooting down any rocket launched from an offending country. This technology could even be satellite based.

Then, issue a directive to Iran and North Korea that if they do launch a nuke, their countries will be immediately destroyed by the U.S. nuclear arsenal.

Their entire country turned to glass! Everyone burned to death! Goodbye…

This would cause great upheaval among the people and the current regimes would be overthrown. Then we can go in and dismantle the nukes.

Is it too late to vote me in as president?

Neil Young – “BBC In Concert” – February 23, 1971.

Shortly after he performed this, I graduated from college and started my computer consulting career in the Bay Area.

I love Neil Young.