Scott Cramer wrote this.

My daughter has gorgeous long eyelashes which my wife always points out to people came from me. After she says that, I like to chime in seriously with, “Yes, they come in great when I go out in drag.”

I’m a riot at social functions.

As a special tribute to the Fourth of July, in the wee hours of the morning, I blew up my website! This leads me to the time proven addage that you get what you pay for. I pay $99 per year to host my site. They give me all kinds of bells and whistles and gee-whiz-bang utilities that I should be able to use. When they work. Their support team are the first I’ve seen in the technical field that work bankers hours. The clock strikes 5 and they are history. I imagine a whole bank of hosting servers with giant clock screen savers up on the monitors and fancy scripted programs eating up CPU cycles to set off alarms at 5:00:00 to get everyone out of the building, automatically shut off the lights and, just for fun, shut down random sites and application servers. As everyone drives home snickering, I’m sitting at home patting myself on the back for finding such a wonderful deal on my web hosting.

The Fourth of July needs a cute cuddly mascot. Christmas has Santa Claus, Easter has that whole bunny thing going, and St. Patrick’s day has those impish little leprechauns. Okay, I know – what about Uncle Sam? I’m as patriotic as the next guy but I always imagine Pa Kettle in a bad Elton John costume. It worked great in the 1940’s but now it just brings to mind old “Buy Bonds!” war posters. Maybe we could compromise and give Uncle Sam a mischievous sidekick – like a pyromaniac pet chimpanzee named Dubya. Hilarity would ensue every Fourth of July holiday as little Dubya blew up federally protected parks and planted firecrackers under the sacred Constitution. Heck, why settle for just the Fourth of July? We could keep little Dubya around all year! Maybe we could even keep him four years! C’mon, who doesn’t love a cute, innocent little monkey?

My daughter cut her first tooth recently. What was a cute, “Oh, look she’s biting my nose!” is now more like, “AHHHH! Somebody please detach this baby from my face!” It’s amazing how much that miniscule amount of enamel affects people. Everywhere we went over the last six monthes or so people were looking at her gums or telling us stories of their child’s first tooth. Heck, people were even calling us at the house for dental updates. I even programmed the answering machine for “If you are calling about Maddie’s first tooth, it has not yet arrived. If you are calling for anything else, please leave a message.” We got a lot of calls, but no messages. It’s amazing. When the tooth first became visible via the naked eye – we tried magnifying glasses but they kept getting steamed up – I think my wife called more people than when Maddie was first born, if that’s possible. The oddest thing was that people were asking me if I’d gotten any pictures of it yet. A $400 digital camera two inches from a baby’s mouth? I think not. I must admit, though, it’s a lot of fun to watch Maddie learn how to use her one tooth. When she realizes she can bite down on food with it she gets this look like, “Hey, these things are great! Everybody should have some!” While mommy isn’t looking I’m teaching her to progressively bite the limbs, ears, and heads off Teddy Grahams. Shh, don’t tell.

Half my readers complained that I had a short posting yesterday.

I think there are only about two people reading these things so it’s only one person.

I don’t know whether that makes me feel better, or worse.

The doctor told me I have eye strain.

I came home and researched it on the Internet for about 10 hours. I still can’t figure it out.

The Learning Channel (TLC) on cable airs a show called Junkyard Wars. Teams race against each other to build fantastic machines out of anything they can find in an old scrap heap and then accomplish some task – like chucking pumpkins at a castle or building dragsters. This British created show is a big hit – and really fun to watch. I’ve got TiVo working overtime to catch all the episodes that I missed. Of course, this means no more auto-recorded classic Dating Game episodes or PBS specials on quilting. All true.

In the spirit of the 60’s space race, I say we take the Junkyard Wars concept, increase the buget about a thousand-fold and start sending these boys into space! A couple scrappy inventors, some duct tape, and a Mars landing flag. That’s what it’s all about.

Just don’t tell OSHA.

A woman where I work wants to play the “Imperial March” when she walks down the aisle to her betrothed. This was the omnious tune that played whenever the villainous Darth Vader walked into a room in the Star Wars movies. Sidenote – I hate to have to preface facts like that, but as sobering as it is to many of us hovering around thirty (or more), the original movie hailed in the latter days of disco. Today’s movie moguls would have had Britney Spears playing Princess Leia and “Oops, I did it again…” as a sexy dance routine in front of Jabba the Hutt. Nightmares aside, I can just see this woman marching down the aisle, theme song playing, crushing rose petals in step with every measured beat. Her speech, a Vader-ish rasp from behind her veiled face. As the minister asks if there is anyone who knows a reason why this couple should not be joined, a voice in the audience is cut short in a strangulated cough as she casts a quick glance and gestures with one delicate lace-gloved hand. I can only imagine what’s in store for the Groom. “May the force be with you.”

My wife and I bought a toy for our one-year-old daughter tonight. It’s a little stuffed dog that plays a recorded sound whenever you shake it or move it – or look at it cross-eyed, for that matter. As we wheeled it through the store to the checkout lane, it was screaming “Hehehe!”, “Uh-oh!” and “Yahoo!”. Depending on whether you ask Erin or me, that last one could be “Gadzooks!”. We have a pretty strong debate going on the subject – second only to whether one of Maddie’s stuffed toys is really supposed to be an elephant or just a block with feet. I’m sure about the “Yahoo!” argument but with Erin’s background in biology I’m pretty certain I’ll have to concede my theory that children’s blocks de-evolved from fuzzy cubes with feet. You win some, you lose some. In any case, we walked Maddie and the toy to the car to the tune of “Woof woof!” and some kind of panting sound. For the first time, we were the circus sideshow in the Wal-Mart parking lot (you know what I’m talking about). All the way through town the cute little toy was yelling “Wee!” and “Wow!” every time I hit a bump or turned quick. High pitched yelling from my passengers is nothing new, but this was in a much cheerier voice. As a matter of fact, I’m thinking about keeping the toy and hiding it under our mattress.

Time is inversely proportional to the desire for it’s passage.

Biting Insect Repelling Wrist Band – $2.49
Sunscreen with Insect Repellent – $7.99 (Can’t be too careful!)
Anti-Itch Concentrated Lotion – $5.99 (%$#^@& immune mosquitos!)
Bactine Antiseptic Squeeze Bottle – $3.99 (thorn bushes)
Band-Aid Bandages – $2.79 (lots of thorn bushes)
Maximum Strength Anti-Itch Cream – $6.49 (“Leaves of Three, Let Them Be!” – sigh)

Picking Wild Raspberries – Free

My wife claims she warned me in a calm monotone voice.

“Get up. Now. There is a spider in the bed.”

I heard something entirely different.

“GET UP NOW! A LARGE HAIRY ALIEN SPIDER IS CRAWLING UP YOUR LEG!”

My wife lies. Especially the part where I screamed like a little girl.

I saw three young girls walking through my neighborhood while I was driving home. The first one was wearing shiny tight red vinyl pants that covered all the way from her ankles up to her anorexic hips where the material puckered a bit with no flesh to which it could adhere. She had on a short sleeved grungy white t-shirt covered in part by long stringy blonde hair, and was trailing a cigarette from a hand held low at her side (if I was her, I would worry about melting the pants). She was obviously the Alpha-skank. The second girl in line was wearing (or not wearing) very short cut jeans. She had a long sleeved black lace top that, when I looked in the rearview mirror after passing, I could see was totally backless apart from one cloth tie hanging loosely from one side to the other – a distance no more than a foot and a half on her frame. She strutted in line with the others, even managing to glare at me in perfect synch when I dared glance out my window as I passed them on the street. She’d have her own skank-posse soon enough. If I were Alpha-skank, I’d worry about walking on the road-side edge of busy streets. One push and her shiny red vinyl ass is converted into a trendy red vinyl car bra. The third girl was wearing a conservative pair of jean shorts and a loose fitting shirt that didn’t announce the exact stage of her teenage development. I like to think of her as Jane Goodall doing a high school sociology project, having just recently been accepted by a pride of wild skanks.

This is the ICQ message I received a few moments ago when I sat down at the computer.

kenr: btw, i’ve discovered a _great_ new browser!
Netscape 3.01 with Java and Javascript turned off… 🙂

The effects of code glut and superfluous (I just love to use that word) features are creating a new electronic class of users. Call them The Digital Amish or The Electric Luddites – or just call them fed up. They are using tools like the old Netscape browsers – the ones that worked, not the zombie kludge versions we have around today – and older stripped down versions of word processors, spreadsheets, and even operating systems and hardware. Sure, for some of them it’s just nostalgia, but for many it’s an overwhelming sickness of programs that take up hundreds of meg of storage, limited license usage and yearly updates, and features so smart that you have to fight just to make your documents look the way that you want them to look!

A fork is not a blender or a microwave oven. Why? Because it doesn’t need to be. It does what it does – and it does it well. The closest we ever came to FORK 2.0 was the Spork, and we learned our lesson.

Where did customer service go?

I wrote the hosting company for my website’s domain when I was having a technical problem with the code for a page. I had already spent a number of hours figuring out the problem and the hosting company’s tech support page was of no use – unless you like chanting “zero results found” as a mantra. It turns out the hosting company had installed SSI but not XSSI. For those of you with productive lives who use real words, it’s like having a dog that only obeys two commands. Come. Stay. No rolling over. No sitting up. No fetch. It’s a dog, but it’s a boring dog.

Tech support closed their phone hours at 5pm. I waited until the next day and gave them a call. After 25 minutes worth of bad on-hold music I got through to a suspiciously happy tech support person. I rattled off what I was trying to do and gave him my theory that his company was not running the software I needed. Naturally, I asked how I could get this software installed. He said I needed to write to the requests department. Could I talk to them? Nope. They don’t use the phones. They’re either deaf or Amish, I surmised. I was hoping for Amish – they might at least have a work ethic.

I went back to the company website and looked for the online request form. No form. They did have a tech support request form though. Sigh. I filled out the tech support request form and received an e-mail that someone would be addressing my problem within the next 48 hours. Several days later I received a reply from tech support that I needed to send my request for additional software to the requests department. Tech support, however, was unable to forward my e-mail. Irony. They did, however, provide me with the e-mail address for the requests department. Finally.

I forwarded the tech support non-answer to the requests department and received an e-mail that someone would be addressing my problem within the next 48 hours. Several days later I received a reply from the requests department saying that if I could tell them exactly how to install the needed software on their computer system that they would consider doing the installation for me.

I felt horrible for putting them through so much effort.

Pasty white guys should not wear pasty white shorts. Pasty white guys in nothing but pasty white shorts should not stand on their porch with one leg hiked up on the railing. From a half block away at thirty miles per hour pasty white shorts guy looks a lot like pasty white naked guy. Pasty white naked guy facing the street with his leg hiked up in the air. Pasty white “oh my god, I don’t want to see this” guy rapidly looming larger in the windshield.

I don’t know what’s scarier, pasty white “thought he was naked” guy, or the fact that when I got close enough I saw he was actually pasty white guy in pasty white shorts – because I looked.

I started with English:
A pretty woman on the beach sold me a large green cucumber which I made into a lovely salad.

Went to French:
Une jolie femme sur la plage m’a vendu un grand concombre vert de que j’ai fait une belle salade.

From French to German:
Eine h?bsche Frau auf dem Strand hat mir eine gro?e gr?ne Gurke verkauft, aus der ich einen sch?nen Salat gemacht habe.

Back to English:
A pretty woman on the beach has sold a big green cucumber, for which I have made a beautiful salad, to me.

Language translators have gotten a lot better. However, I’ll be even more impressed when they start questioning why I’m buying large vegetables from seaside maidens.

Dear TiVo,

I do not want to watch old episodes of “Gomer Pyle”. I do not have any interest in “Bonanza” or “The Brady Bunch”. Yes, I like “Charmed” and I realize Shannon Doherty was also in “Little House on the Prairie” – but TiVo, she was 12 years old! It’s just not the same! I know that I asked you to tape “Dexter’s Lab”, but please, TiVo, I beg of you, no more “Sheep in the Big City”! I swear, I’ll even stop asking you to record “Weakest Link” if you can help me out on that one!

Sincerely,
Your Owner

p.s., Good call on the Science Channel’s “Physics of Baywatch”, I’ll give you that one…

Today is Father’s Day. I shall sit around unshaven and in my underwear until afternoon.

Just like most other days.