A lovely day!

The Babe and I went out to the Emerald Lanes to see if her ball was done and to go bowling.  But when we got there, it turned out that there was a women's bowling tourney about to start so there was no bowling to be had.  However, Forrest did get her ball drilled and fitted--this took almost an hour as he had to do other things as well and it's not a trivial operation to get it drilled and adjusted.  I was worried that it wasn't going to be right, but he did a lovely job and it fit nicely.  We even got her initials in it.  :)  The Babe said that she'd done bowling league stuff from when she was 6 to after she graduated from high school and she'd never had a new ball.  She was pleased and I was very excited also. 

We went to another lane in town, Southtowne Lanes, to try it out.  It's not as good a lane as Emerald in our opinion but we did have a chance to see how her new ball felt.  (Perfect!)  I'm rather keen to figure out the weight I do best with so I can order a ball of my own.  (Yes, I'm going to go for that blue-and-gold "Scout" number.) 

We didn't want the fun to end, so we went out to see "Mrs. Henderson Presents" this evening.  Judi Dench is, as always, an amazing actress and I think that it's impossible for her not to look alive and beautiful and scrumptious.  (Yes, I'd probably run off with her if she asked, so it's just as well I don't know her. <G>)  Bob Hoskins is aging beautifully as well.  The two of them were amazing.  I'm interested in reading the two books that Vivian Van Damm and his daughter, Sheila, wrote about the theater and the happenings.  Both the Babe and I were very impressed at the quality of the casting: they had several dozen showgirls and they all looked like real, 1937 English women, with the chunky thighs and everything.  The costumes were delightfully authentic, too.  The whole film had that lovely "small" feeling that so many British films do and that most American films don't.  And it's really quite emotional to see the bombing of London and knowing that the war was going on for 6 years for Britain and that this was only the start of it. 

At one point, one of the characters flips off the German planes with the classic two-finger gesture Brits use.  It was only a few years ago that I finally made the connection between the gesture and Churchill's "V for Victory."  Yeah, it was a V, all right.  What a wonderful joke for flipping off the enemy.   <G>

A lovely day!

Sattidee at last!

I turned in the draft of the article I'd been working on this week (which had to go in two days early for a meeting--I am a tree; I can bend).  I've got another interview they'd like me to do for it, which sounds fun: someone in a PNW Department of Corrections who's going to talk about thin clients versus desktop computers, which will be interesting.  30 seconds to breathe and then I start the next article.  :)  Nice having work on the desk. 

Actually, we're going to go bowling today, too: the Babe's new bowling ball is likely to be done by now, which'd be really nice.  Might even do that right after breakfast and beat the Saturday rush. 

BC is sitting right next to me, periodically putting his head down and bumping my left hand while I'm typing.  It's very sweet and all, but it's annoying, too.  His fur's growing back on his side, too.  I noticed this morning that he's actually rather thickly furred now, but it's all dark undercoat, which is black, and the cinnamon-colored top layer hasn't regrown yet.  (So thaaaat's how he does that! <G>)

Breakfast is in the offing.  And bowling, of course. 

Sattidee at last!

Ship of fools, ISP of idiots

It is truly amazing to me how bad my ISP has gotten.  From being a pretty good place to be for the last 11 years, they've sunk into the depths that only the Texas cellphone marketing jagoff that's now running them could understand.  I just found out today that I've been losing email because they don't know how to run mail servers anymore, apparently. 

I am really looking forward to kissing them goodbye.  I'm just waiting for my last account to switch over to the new registrar and then I'm throwing the switch. 

Ship of fools, ISP of idiots

And the hits just keep coming!

Rick Davis has done a song entitled "Cheney's Got a Gun." 

Has it occurred to anyone that any shotgun wound involving ~200 pellets and had at least one that was in deep enough to get into the circulatory system and migrate to the heart is not a "minor" hunting accident as the Veep's propaganda minister would have us believe? Accidents happen, but this one is just plain funny. 

Some veins of ore are just too rich to play out quickly.  This is one of them. 

[Addendum: okay, it turns out that this isn't a song of Rick Davis's. He just linked to it. It is, in fact, a Bob & Tom Twisted Tune. Oh, well. What's interesting nevertheless is that someone put this song together, recorded it, and posted it within a couple days of the incident. Like I say, it's pastures o' plenty for the schnarky.]

And the hits just keep coming!

This is just too rich a vein not to mine

I'm looking forward to the monologue comments from Leno and Letterman. Some jokes just write themselves.

Here's another one that's just come in:

CHENEY SAYS SHOOTING OF FELLOW HUNTER WAS BASED ON FAULTY INTELLIGENCE
Believed Shooting Victim Was Zawahiri, Veep Says

Vice President Dick Cheney revealed today that he shot a fellow hunter while on a quail hunting trip over the weekend because he believed the man was the fugitive terror mastermind Ayman al-Zawahiri.

Mr. Cheney acknowledged that the man he sprayed with pellets on Saturday was not al-Zawahiri but rather Harry Whittington, a 78-year-old millionaire lawyer from Austin, blaming the mix-up on "faulty intelligence."

"I believed I had credible intelligence that al-Zawahiri had infiltrated my hunting party in disguise with the intent of spraying me with pellets," Mr. Cheney told reporters. "Only after I shot Harry in the face and he shouted 'Cheney, you bastard' did I realize that this intelligence was faulty."

Moments after Mr. Cheney's assault on Mr. Whittington, Mr. al-Zawahiri appeared in a new videotape broadcast on al-Jazeera to announce that he was uninjured in the vice president's attack because, in his words, "I was in Pakistan."

An aide to the vice president said he believed that the American people would believe Mr. Cheney's version of events, but added, "If he was going to shoot any of his cronies right now it's a shame it wasn't Jack Abramoff."

At the White House, President George W. Bush defended his vice president's shooting of a fellow hunter, saying that the attack sent "a strong message to terrorists everywhere."

"The message is, if Dick Cheney is willing to shoot an innocent American citizen at point-blank range, imagine what he'll do to you," Mr. Bush said.

This is just too rich a vein not to mine

"Cheney's got a gun!"

I just got a picture for "Nintendo Dick Hunt" this morning, about 16 hours after Cheney shot his friend while hunting. It's amazing how fast some things get on the web, eh?

(Addendum: sorry, I thought I'd posted this earlier this morning but it turned out not to be there for some reason. Sorry to everyone who looked for it in vain around 10:00am.)

"Cheney's got a gun!"

Hey, nice news!

I just got a phone call as I was finishing the previous entry about smoking that I've won a raffle! The prize is a basket of coffee and chocolate and things like that. They'll even swing by and deliver it this afternoon. Not bad at all!

Hey, nice news!

Random personal statistic du jour: smoking

Here's a personal statistic that I'm pleased about: today, February 12th, it's been 29 years since I quit smoking.

But I still miss smoking. I know it's bad and I'd have been dead years ago if I were a smoker; shoot, if I started now, with my diabetes, I'd be losing body parts withing 2 years, probably. Every junkie knows his drug, they say, and I sure know mine. I can tell you what it felt like the first time that day, my preferred brands, methods of administration, what it felt like after too much... everything. Tobacco's my drug and it always will be.

I have a dream at least once every summer or fall, when the weather's balmy. I'm at a party and someone unseen holds out a package of cigarettes and says "Oh, it's okay; they've taken all the bad stuff out now." And I reach down and take one and start to light it. I'm sure that it's something of a replay of when I lit someone's cigarette for them in 1982. We were camping and I figured I'd light it just to see what it felt like. I didn't inhale, knowing that that would've been sure to set off really bad cravings (and I would've coughed my head off, I'm sure), but the joke was on me: even having that little bit of smoke in my mouth and soaking in through the mucus membranes was enough to trigger some wicked-bad cravings for a week, so I haven't done that since then. And I now I'm stuck with this dream that comes up every so often that says "C'maaaaaaahn, you can do it. You won't get hooked because you're cool."

Nope.

Random personal statistic du jour: smoking