A Real Nice Beer

Crooked Tree IPA by the Dark Horse Brewing Co. of Marshall, Michigan.

Mari-Rose bought me some a week or two ago. Yummy!

Kitty

On my way to work there's this little black and white cat I sometimes see at the edge of town. It seems to be a loose cat - I generally see it around a bar and a car customization shop.

A couple of weeks ago on that stretch of road I saw a smashed animal with black and white fur. It wasn't a skunk; it didn't smell. So I thought kitty had bought the farm.

But this morning I was happy to learn that kitty is safe and sound. I saw her again, walking in the weeds outside the bar.

Just a nice little thing that happened today.

Curious About the News

Here's one thing I've been curious about. You know that news story about Sen. Larry Craig, who was busted in the bathroom for allegedly soliciting another guy?

His excuse was that he has a "wide stance" while using the bathroom, which is why his foot tapped the foot of the other guy in the next stall (an undercover cop, as it turned out).

But something about that excuse has never made a bit of sense to me, and I haven't heard anybody else bring it up: When you're sitting on the pot, you've got your pants and underwear around your ankles. That limits how far you can move your feet, doesn't it? It means your stance can't really be too wide, doesn't it?

Anyway that's my curious thought for the day.

Okay, now I have to go to the bathroom...

Oooooh, This Is a Bad Idea

Homeowners Using Credit Cards to Make Mortgage Payments

Yikes!

John Raises Eyebrow; Says, "Fascinating..."

I read a fascinating, if very long, three part article, that asked and finally answered what seems an exceedingly simple question:

Two photographs were taken on the same day in 1855, during the Crimean War. The two photos are nearly identical, except one of them might have been staged for effect. Was the photo staged for effect?

It's remarkable how much effort it took to learn the answer.

The question isn't interesting. The quest is.

Here's What I Don't Get

I followed one of those links to a dumb, salacious news story today and I learned this:

The so-called "Preppie Killer," who served 15 years in prison for strangling a woman in Central Park, was arrested Monday on charges of selling drugs and resisting arrest.

Robert Chambers was released from prison on Valentine's Day 2003 after serving 15 years for the 1986 strangling of 18-year-old Jennifer Levin during a tryst in Central Park.

The undercover sting began after police received complaints alleging drug sales at Chambers' residence, where he lived with his girlfriend...

His girlfriend? He lived with his girlfriend?

Can somebody explain to me how a guy kills a woman "during a tryst" and then after he gets out of prison, finds a girlfriend to live with him?

Wouldn't you think that doing 15 years for murdering a woman would sort of take you out of the dating pool?

A Good Quote

From today's Writer's Almanac:

"[Writing a novel is] like creeping along on your belly with shells exploding around you. It's only occasionally that there's a ceasefire and you can get up and run."

Look What the Girls Caught

The girls went down to the creek yesterday afternoon with a babysitter, and look what they found.

Pretty impressive. It was about 2-3 inches long. Not huge, but bigger than any crawdad I'd ever caught as a kid.

This is a picture of it crawling back into the water after we let it go.

Cool Art

I didn't know you could do this to a book.

Kind of shame to lose all those words, though.

How to Be a Complete Jerk

From today's Writer's Almanac:

It's the birthday of the memoirist and novelist Bernard Cooper, born in Los Angeles (1951). His most recent book, The Bill from My Father (2006) is about a bill he received in the mail from his father itemizing every expense he had incurred on his father's bank account since the day he was born. The bill totaled 2 million dollars.

The thing that's hard to believe is that the dad would take the time to compile this list. It had to take hours and hours and hours and hours. And for what?

What a jerk.

A Total Scrum

The baseball season in the National League is coming down to the wire. With only 3 games left, everything is still up in the air. The wildest possibility is a five-team tie that would have to be resolved to determine the winners of the NL East, the NL West, and the Wild Card.

ESPN breaks down how silly this could get:

Among the fun possibilities if five teams in the East and West finish the season with the same record:

The San Diego Padres theoretically could play in Milwaukee on Sunday, in Arizona on Monday, in San Diego on Tuesday, in Philadelphia on Wednesday, back in San Diego on Thursday and then in New York on Friday.

Wow.

A Hard Word to Type

"Ethiopia"

Go ahead ... try it.

Lawn Mower

One of my favorite newspaper writers is Joel Achenbach of the Washington Post. I'm not exactly sure what his beat is - it's sort of science, sort of society, sort of whatever comes to his mind. He's sort of like a thinking man's Dave Barry. Anyway, today he wrote a good blog post about his lawn mower:

Being the recipient of an ego-boosting compliment was not something I anticipated when I took my mower to the hardware store to get the blade sharpened.

The mower didn't mean much to me, other than as an object of mild resentment. I used to have a gas mower that, while nasty and loud, left no doubt of its agenda. It was violent. It was a satisfying machine for whacking the fescue. But it had to be put to sleep earlier this year. That left me with my relatively new backup mower, an electric number given to me by a friend. It is a mild, modest device. As I've noted here before, it's like something a lady would use to shave her legs.

And it was literally dull in every way. Hence the trip to the hardware store.

So I'm waiting around. I can hear the blade being sharpened in the back of the shop. A grating sound, a high frequency industrial whine. Then the guy comes out of the back of the shop, and he's pushing my mower, and he tells me there was a lot of grass jammed underneath, and that the blade had certainly been dull, and then -- out of the blue -- he says, "That's a nice mower."

"Really?" I said.

"Yeah," he said. "That's a nice mower. They don't make those anymore."

And then another guy agrees with him. A nice mower, and you can't find that model anymore.

I'm like: Yo.

I got me a hot mower!

This is like a new identity. I'd needed one. Now I'll be that guy: The dude with the mower.

Mr. Mower Man.

With this new identity comes the responsibility to share the magic. I'm going to have to spend more time letting the people out there, the citizenry, check out my mower. I'll have to take it for a stroll down the sidewalk, maybe through the business district. Strut my stuff. People might wonder why this man is pushing a mower through a pedestrian mall, or the food court at Tyson's, or whatever, but mostly what they will ask themselves is, "How can I get a mower like him?"

Haven't we all felt like that?

Nasty Stuff

"The Most Badass Whiffle Ball Pitching You'll Ever See"

Cool.

Musical Bottom-Feeding

Today I came across this page, reviewing the best finds that a fellow musical bottom-feeder has come across. That album by The Tractors sounds really good...

Only You Can Decide the Fate of This Baseball

The guy who bought the baseball that Barry Bonds hit to break Hank Aaron's record has set up a website where we, the people, get to vote what he will do with the ball. The three options are:

1. Give it to the Baseball Hall of Fame
2. Brand it with an asterisk, then give it to the Hall of Fame
3. Put it on a rocket and shoot it into space

I think the "asterisk" option will win. Shooting it into space seems too...final. And handing it over to the Hall of Fame seems too...ordinary.

Besides, burning an asterisk into the ball would just have to irritate Barry Bonds. That makes it a good option right there.

UPDATE: This is already irritating Barry Bonds!

Bonds said Ecko could have found a better way to spend three-quarters of a million dollars.

"He's stupid. He's an idiot," Bonds said. "He spent $750,000 on the ball and that's what he's doing with it? What he's doing is stupid."

Ecko did not directly respond to Bonds' comments Wednesday, but said in a statement he would make Bonds a custom T-shirt that says, "Marc Ecko paid $752,467 for my ball, and all I got was this 'stupid' T-shirt."'

I think Ecko is very smart. Apparently he's a fashion designer by trade, and in that business your name is your brand. This guy has bought tons of brand recognition by doing this.

We Have An Excuse!

We just can't help it!

Whether we’re looking for someone to date or sizing up a potential rival, our eyes irresistibly lock on to good-looking people, a new study finds.

Participants, all heterosexual men and women, fixated on highly attractive people within the first half-second of seeing them. Single folks ogled the opposite sex, of course. But those in committed relationships more often eyed beautiful people of the same sex.

Jon Maner (University of Florida) based his research on the idea that evolution has primed our brains to subconsciously latch on to signs of physical attractiveness in others, both to find a mate and to guard him or her from potential competitors.

Maner's experiments, which flashed pictures of attractive men and women and average-looking men and women in front of participants and measured the time it took to shift their attention away from the image, surprisingly showed little difference between the sexes.

"Women paid just as much attention to men as men did to women," Maner said.

Hmm ... in my experience I'm equally ignored by men and women. Apparently that means something. :)

Song Title of the Day

"Sick Hipster Nursed by Suicide Girl," by Film School.

Meteorites Make You Sick

Weird story:

Villagers in southern Peru were struck by a mysterious illness after a meteorite made a fiery crash to Earth in their area, regional authorities said Monday.

Around midday Saturday, villagers were startled by an explosion and a fireball that many were convinced was an airplane crashing near their remote village, located in the high Andes department of Puno in the Desaguadero region, near the border with Bolivia.

Residents complained of headaches and vomiting brought on by a "strange odor," local health department official Jorge Lopez told Peruvian radio RPP.

Seven policemen who went to check on the reports also became ill and had to be given oxygen before being hospitalized, Lopez said.

Things I Didn't Know About Ken Kesey

From today's Writer's Almanac:

In 1969, he moved to his family's farm in Oregon and spent much of the rest of his life raising cattle and sheep and growing blueberries. He joined the local school board and coached wrestling and taught a creative writing class.

His last novel was Last Go Round (1994), an old-fashioned Western based on the pulp fiction he'd loved reading when he was a kid. He died in 2001.

Ken Kesey said, "The trouble with super heroes is what to do between phone booths."

That would be pretty cool, having Ken Kesey on your school board.