I used to work at an auto repair shop in the Atlanta area that was right across the street from the main north/south rail line that went through the city and was also adjacent to the Naval Air Station on the northwest side. Now I know you’re thinking, so what, but i’m gonna tell ya so what. This has to be one of the noisiest freakin spots on earth and I am not kidding. How loud was it, well, The Who are on record for having THE worlds loudest concert on record and I have seen them and they sound like an old tinny handcranked Victrola compared to this shit. Why was it so loud? Well apparently Navy fighter pilots need a shitload of practice to touch down on aircraft carriers at sea safely and they have painted a sort of replica of an aircraft carrier deck on the runway and these guys make ‘touch & go’s” all farkin day long passing DIRECTLY over the shop just a few hundred feet in the air for practice. So close you think you could hit it with a rock, I tell ya. They SCREAM in and touchdown briefly on the “deck” then full throttle up and back up into a 1 mile wide or so circle SCREAMING through the air to come around and do it again, over and over and over….

Now the first time you see this happen is extremely thrilling, I mean it sends goosebumps all over ya at just the sight and sound. Totally amazing to see one of the entire worlds most powerful weapons of destruction passing so close. I mean this is the sound of freedom, baby and ya gotta love that! Right? Well sadly enough a few weeks of the “extremely thrilling sound of freedom” is enough to put you in the nuthouse. Now I know you’re shaking your head and labeling me some kind of wussy ass whiner at this point, but, I have more. How much more?

Well remember I said we were across the street from the main rail line? Yes well, it has trains running on it, going both north and south, sometimes at the same time, trains that are a mile long and then when you think that sucker is just about done passing so you can take a breath and hear yourself speak, along comes 4 MORE engines in the middle of the train to drag another mile of cars behind it. Yeah, well you can imagine how loud this must be when added to the “extremely thrilling sound of freedom” constantly happening while the trains are a merrily passing. Take some Dramamine cause you gonna get seasick from the vertigo, yah I know I am still a wussy assed whiner right? Wrong, cause I ain’t done yet. Oh, what do ya mean?

Well the road the shop was on is a very busy 2 lane blacktop with a wide crossing over the tracks to the very busy Naval Air Station directly across the street. One of those old ones with big loose boards that go bump bump rumble rumble every time a car passes over it and a shitload of cars and trucks cross every single day all day long. Now when ya add up the “extremely thrilling sound of freedom” to the sound of the trains passing and all the cars going over the tracks would be purty damn loud right? Well ya I would think so, wouldn’t you? But I am not quite done yet.

The city/county decided that we wasn’t getting quite enough noise in our diet so they decided to widen the road from a quaint little 2 lane blacktop to a very wide main thoroughfare with 4 lanes and tunnels and shit for cars to pass under the tracks and medians and turn lanes and all kinds of modern conveniences that are almost as cool as indoor plumbing. Needless to say these improvements would take up part of the shops parking lot directly in front of the building, we figured no big deal right? Wrong wrong wrong boys and girls.

The city/state people showed up with what I like to call “the loudest goddamn machine in the entire free world and beyond” and in fact I think they had that painted on the side of the thing. What did this machine do? It broke concrete into teeny tiny little bits of rubble, rubble that would have made Fred Flintstone proud, really. But the damn thing was so loud it made The Who look like a buncha sissies all by itself. And it went on and on and on for hours, nearly as long as this post is getting. Now add all this up and what do we get, well, let’s see we got the “extremely thrilling sound of freedom” and we got the trains a passing and the cars a crossing and “the loudest goddamn machine in the entire free world and beyond” to add to….

All the noises that are normal in a busy auto repair shop. Stuff like air tools and grinders and air compressors and a dynomometer and telephones ringing and welding machines and big sanders. Well, now, I think you might have an idea just how loud all this shit really was. We are talking major vertigo here folks, brain numbing, mind bending major league vertigo like you hopefully will never ever experience. I swear it was enough to make you want to go van Gogh on yourself. Why didn’t I wear earplugs? Huh? Did you say something? Dammit I can’t hear ya, speak up, for craps sake

Not even Christmas yet and N.O. is gearing up for one of the biggest parties in the world, Mardi Gras. The “Krewe du Vieux“ had their fund raiser on December 03. The invites stated “costumes encouraged, nudity qualifies”. Along with the “Krewe du Vieux Doo“, and the “Krewe of Drips and Discharges“. I am sorry I missed “Anne Rice” my fav vampire queen’s party at “Les Temps des Vampires“

Also, check out the “Baggage List“ at Bitchcakes blog, very funny!

And what I want to call the “Injury List“ at Kristins blog, like what if Chevy Chase had been a woman.

Laissez le bon temp roulez!

Browsing through the news today this thing caught my eye on the msn.com webpage “Adware Cannibilism” and my imagination being what it is immediately put itself into gear and showed me what it would look like if adware people picked up spears and stuck bones thru their noses and attacked each others corporate offices looking for fresh meat to throw into their huge black kettles they keep boiling in the lobby with a fire going 24/7 and a software witchdoctor doing a jig around the entire staff and singing “waah a wah tusi” and tossing shredded bits of magical “holy paper” to ward off evil rival hackers that devour other evil rival hackers evil programs. After clicking on the link I see “Adware cannibals feast on each other” further reinforcing previously described image. Apparently these assholes are suing each other for the “right” to load their malware/foulware/snoopware crap that secretly peeks at everything you do on the web to make more effective, targeted popup ads that nobody wants in the first damn place. Their programs are now designed to destroy previously installed programs that probably got their without you even knowing about it. My opinion is these people should be made to bend over and take a quikrete enema and hold it till it hardens, bringing a whole new meaning to the term “shittin bricks” which is what they been doing to us all along, shovin it right up our collective asses. What do you think? Drop your brick in the comments below. Woo that was fun =)

Not like usual days that suck just a little bit, gorgeous day outside, 70ish and sunny with a crisp feel in the air, gotta love that. Had to go out so I got my ass washed up and even shaved. For amusement I went to WalMart to gawk at the holiday crush and I was not disappointed. What fun! Even saw a few attractive women, but mostly the usual freak show, never fails to entertain me. Yah, I know, i’m easily entertained. I didn’t buy anything there just browsed a bit. Stumbled across the big screen HDTV display area, what a sad joke that was. Very nice TV’s but they were set up in a regular aisle and you couldn’t get back more than 4 ft or so. How the hell can you watch a huge 50+ inch screen while standing right on top of it, tsk tsk. Oh well, time to go now, decided to head for the local mall, yeah that’s the ticket, the mall!

Had to stop for gas, pulled in to an Exxon place with card machines built right in, love those, you don’t even need to go in, it prints you a receipt on the spot.

So I punch in all my settings and feed it my card, fill up and wait for a receipt. What? NO RECEIPT! The thing said go inside for receipt. DAMN I yelled so loud I think Beelzebub dropped his flaming feather pen while signing up a new soul to keep. I frikkin hate (<---use lots of inflection here) when that happens. Inside there was a woman cashier that looked like she had been vomited up from hell knows where with smoke stained teeth and skin and badly mangled hair that probably hadn’t seen a brush since she was queen of the New Jersey state fair in 1962 or something. Yah, major Wal Mart reject. Now I was really sorry I had to go in. I figured it couldn’t get any worse so…

Off to the mall I went. I stopped in at the food court area. I think every mall has one of those? Probably all called the Food Court too, heh. I was in the mood for some S&M (spanish&mexican) so I got in line at the Taco Bell. Taco Bell is dirt cheap and decent food I really enjoy eating there. I once thought about working there, but I probably couldn’t pass the taco bending exam. I tried doing it at home and broke every frikkin one! Anyway I noticed this nicely attractive woman several places in line behind me and decided I wanted to talk to her, I think she smiled at me, whoot! After I got my food I watched where she sat to see if she was attached and she was alone. Double whoot!! I noticed a trash bin near her table and after I was done I moved in to nonchalantly look for a ring. Damn! she had a ring on her left ring finger so I blew it off. Oh well.

I wandered off and was browsing in one of those specialty wacky gift stores for ideas for presents and stuff. I turned around and Bam! (sorry Emeril) there was the lady from Taco Bell right in my face. I said Hi and she said Hi back with a smile. Hmm I thought this was just too much of a coincidence to run in to her again in this huge mall pressed with hundreds of people. She had wandered off browsing and stuff and I decided to make a go. I thought for a few minutes and came up with a Farkin Brilliant Plan! I walked over to her and said Hi. (pretty brilliant huh). Exscuse me Miss but are you attached, I asked. She said yes, she was attached with a look that said too bad sailor, cause if I wasn’t I would be jumpin your bones right here! (sorry err sometimes my imagination just runs around all by itself) She actually said No I’m sorry with a nice smile. Double Damn!! I said to myself. I was horribly disappointed so I decided to spend some money to feel better. So I wandered off and ran into…

Frank Davis! He was signing books at the B. Dalton book store. He is the local guru of ragin cajun cooking and fishing and other ex french-canadien pastimes. Cajuns will eat anything, especially if it lives in a swamp, swims backwards or walks sideways. He has a lil’ TV show on the news. The book is titled Frank Davis Cooks Naturally N’Awlins. I bought a copy for a gift for someone and had him sign it with a dedication. Too cool, too cool. The day was suckin far less now and I stopped at a jewelry kiosk and bought myself a new ring. Big and gaudy silver with cryptic symbols pressed in and the center rotates around the body so you can play with it while wearing it. Ok now the suckiness was almost gone. I figured a new CD would really get me crankin’ so I picked up a copy of Lacuna Coil’s new burn. Never heard of them? They sound sort of like a gothic mix of Metallica and Type O Negative with a female vocalist. Really rocks, and the female lead singer has a really great haunting voice. I like haunting voices! I am listening to it right now, very moving. So I headed home from the mall and as I pulled into the driveway I thought about this woman that lives across the street. Single and attractive, shoulder length light brown hair and green eyes. I been meaning to talk to her but never seemed to see her much, very few opportunities. So…

I walked over and knocked on her front door, yah, just like that. She asked who I was cause we never met before so I introduced myself and said I just came over to err say Hi and stuff, yeah. She turned out to be pretty cool. We sat out on the veranda and talked, she drank iced tea and I drank nothing. (actually it was more like a front porch but I always wanted to slip the word veranda in a sentence somewhere, cool huh) She told me her husband died of cancer 16 months ago and she was sort of aimless and hanging with friends for fun, no dating yet. We chatted for a bit and got the usual formalities out of the way, and we made a date for lunch this wednesday!! Triple whoot!!! oh and a Bam! for good measure. (sorry again Emeril) Anyway, now, all the suckiness is totally gone and the day turned out pretty cool. Hope you guys had just as much fun.

Keep tha faith!

Many years ago I was employed in the deep sea diving business as an apprentice diver aka a tender, because you attended to your assigned diver and took care of his personal equipment. This included his diving helmet, wetsuit, gloves and harnesses and kept his knife sharp and tended his air hose/comm cable bundle while he was in the water. This was intended to prepare you to become a diver yourself. I never became a diver and I’ll tell you why further down. These guys looked upon scuba divers with disdain and called them scubydoo’s. The type of work being done here was underwater construction, repair and stuff like connecting huge pipelines together undersea with huge bolts as thick as your arm. They had to be physically strong and know how to work with real heavy duty equipment and put up with extreme temperature variations for long periods of time. In other words, girly men need not apply.

Practical jokes were part of the daily routine and it was pretty wild the way an entire crew of 20 or more diving personnel would stick together to perpetrate a prank on a newbie. One tender we called Diver Dave was really gungho about the entire diving scene, fresh out of dive school and annoying as hell to everyone because even though he was a nice guy he drove everyone nuts with constant chatter about diving. One day the plan was put in motion, we took an old diving air hose/comm cable assy and chopped the end off all the sections in a rough fashion and threw that end in the water and had a guy tend the hose right at shift change. When Diver Dive came on deck the dive superintendent told him to relieve the guy with the hose, the crew then pretended there was an actual diver in the water, even getting the rigging crew involved with radio commands to adjust the rigging the phantom diver was using. When the super announced the diver was coming up he signaled Diver Dive to pull up the hose slack and eventually he saw there was NO DIVER on the end and the hoses were cut. Needless to say Diver Dave nearly went in to convulsions thinking the diver had gotten injured or killed somehow before surfacing. He started shouting and ran around trying to drum up some help but after a few minutes he finally realized he had been had, big time, very funny and very cruel I know, but that was the nature of life at sea.

Real Diving

Why didn’t I become a diver? After a couple years I realized that these divers didn’t need to be real smart, they are basically underwater ditch diggers and I wanted more challenge, so I became a technician that designed, built and repaired diving equipment. I’m not taking anything away from these guys because they were real hardworking men with guts and courage to take on tasks that no one else would dream of doing, without them we wouldn’t have oil flowing from offshore to keep this country fueled.

I got nothing, really I don’t. I love how Mr. Hands says he has nothing then ends up turning it into something. All I got today is dumbass redneck style jokes. If you already heard all the redneck jokes don’t bother to read further.

911 operator: Hello what is your emergency?

redneck: Oh my god! me and my buddy was huntin’ and my shotgun went off and hit my friend and I think he is dead. What can I do?

911 operator: Well sir, first thing is to make sure that he is dead.

redneck: ok hangon ( moments later a shot rings out)

redneck: ok he’s dead. now whut?

police officer: Sir I pulled you over because you were speeding. Give me your license and registration.

redneck: Officer, you are wrong, I wasn’t speeding, I never speed.

rednecks wife: Don’t lie to the man, you always speed on this road!

redneck: Hush up you, let me handle this!

police officer: Sir I also noticed you weren’t wearing a seatbelt, I will have to write a ticket for that as well.

redneck: Officer, I was wearing my seatbelt, I just unhooked it to get my wallet out.

rednecks wife: There you go lieing to that police officer again. You’re going to burn in hell!

redneck: Shut up woman, or you’ll be sorry when we get home!

police officer: Exscuse me ma’am, does your husband always treat you like that?

rednecks wife: No sir, only when he’s been drinking.

And now for something completely different. (credit monty python) There is a website called Operation Truth that features blog posts from soldiers in Iraq at the front lines. They use them to stay in touch with family and friends, often Mom at home knows what’s going on over there before it comes on the news. Very interesting stuff to read about what’s going on in their head with their life on the line daily. Enjoy

Ever notice just how many scents we wear on a daily basis? I’ll work from the top down. First off we have the shampoo, I personally use that new Garnier Fructis stuff, you know the one with the commercials showing all the young people having fun tossing their hair around and stuff. I wanted some of that fun so I bought a bottle and if I had known it would make my head smell like a 2 day old fruit salad I wouldn’t have. (sort of like the herpes commercials, those people are always out cycling and boating and having a great time, almost makes you wish you had herpes too!) Moving down I use Clearisil pads on my face because I tend to have oily skin but these things have their own chemical scent, I don’t know how long it lasts but it definitely clashes with the eau de fruit salad.

Moving further down we come to the deodorant, I like Old Spice with a scent called Pure Sport, whatever the hell that means, all I know is it smells good and it amazingly does not clash with my Old Spice body soap also scented Pure Sport. I steered clear of the one called Red Alert or something like that, the idea that commies might attack my pits was just too much. Unfortunately I can’t find an Old Spice cologne with the same scent so I use one named Whitewater and again what the hell is whitewater supposed to smell like? I dunno but it smells pretty good, I get compliments on it and it doesn’t seem to clash too badly with the Pure Sport scents, but they all clash with the eau de fruit salad odor.

Are we done yet? Oh no, no we have to consider the odors from our detergents we use to wash our clothes and the dryer sheets or softners that have various odors, like “spring fresh scent” which can take on entirely different meanings depending on whether you live next door to either the city dump or a sewage treatment plant. And those odors always clash with all of the previous mentioned.

Now to the problems women face. I am pretty sure they have all the above mentioned clashes plus even more. Face make up has it’s own scent, maybe not perfumed but still has a scent. I have also noticed that lipgloss/lipstick can have it’s own odor as well. Mint or fruity scented facial scrubs can also add to the smorgasbord. If a woman likes to wear Obsession for example, can she buy a vaginal deodorant with the same scent? Not as far as I know. It’s also funny how they market underarm products, take Secret for example, is it called that because we like to pretend that women don’t get offensive pit odors like men?

Commercials for men’s underarm products are always bold and brash claiming their products can tame that dastardly pit odor! Anyway what better way to start or end your day with so many wonderful thoughts about odors, enjoy!

from fast food restaurant lines during the noon rush hour between 12 & 1. As a working man with only a half an hour for lunch they clog up the works horribly. You stand in line for up to 20 minutes or more because these retired people descend upon the local eateries at precisely 12, just before you arrive in a hurry to get lunch and back to work. If you are lucky you may have 10 minutes to wolf the food down and get back to work on time. I’ll defend their right to eat anywhere they please, but do the have to eat at 12 frikkin o’clock? Hell no, they have all day to eat at their leisure! Recently overheard conversation from the eldely couple just in front of me at a Wendy’s restaurant AFTER the cashier asks for their order. Picture this at a very leisurely pace:

“Ok, Harold what do you want to eat?” says the lady, now looking up at the menu board for the first time since they came in.

“Oh, I don’t know Martha. Let me take a look.” Now he looks at the menu.

“Well I think I had the chicken sandwich the other day, so I don’t want that, hmmm what do I want?” grrr like some one else here would know.

“Harold, why don’t you try the fish sandwich , that’s real good.”

“No, no, not the fish, I don’t feel like fish today.” squinting at the menu board.

“What about you? What do you want?”

“Me? I think I’ll just have a hamburger and a coke.” the cashier punches in the order.

“Ok sir what will you have?” asks the cashier.

“Oh just give me what she’s having that, will be good.”

“Wait, can I get that hamburger with cheese, please?” says Martha.

“Oh me too, I want cheese on mine too” says Harold. Then the cashier corrects their orders.

“That will be $7.37 please.” says the cashier.

Just then you get this terrible sinking feeling as the lady reaches in to her purse and pulls out the OH MY GOD! NOOOOOO!!, not the little bitty change purse, and then she dutifully and carefully counts out 37 pennies to the cashier.

By this time you are a nervous wreck and seething with anger because you now have only 5 minutes to eat and make it back to work on time!

I think most guys can agree that taking care of a good woman is essential and in fact can be a lot of fun. But to make this work well the woman has to keep the area clear of extraneous brush and shrubberyand keep it well manicured. If I really like the view the more likely I am to set up camp and really keep the fire stoked so to speak. Mowing it all off is not necessary unless you’re into having your woman look like a great big little girl and that comes with the risk of making you feel like some kind of pervert. Of course shaved can be fun at first but the regrowth can be bad news and quite hard on the face.

Women, what do you think? You spend a lot of time on hair, makeup and clothes, why not a few more minutes to do a little bit to keep the playground up. Maybe he will spend more time camping at the “Y”. You have nothing to lose for trying. Oh and guys if your lady hasn’t been saluting the flagpole lately maybe the area surrounding it needs some landscaping, this works both ways you know. Now excuse me while I go make myself look like a great big little boy, at her request.

Why? If they were, we would always be eating burnt toast, a wise man once said. Think about it, the number of conceivable problems and possible errors expands exponentially when you you consider all the possible combinations of hardware from all the different manufacturers such as CD/DVD drives, hardrives, motherboards, cables, processors and then throw in all the possible variables that come with all the different programs and operating systems that we like to install to make them do all the stuff we like, whether it is heavy duty number crunching for video editing or to play some silly little tetris game.

If you have ever gone to Microsoft and done a search to fix a compatibility problem of some type, the number of possible errors that can pop up can be staggering! Even a simple search on Google can return millions of results to fix even the smallest mindnumbing error. I know it’s the hotrodder in me that makes me keep my PC’s in tiptop shape because I am not happy unless they can really smoke the tires, so to speak. Just like any machine they need maintenence to keep them in good working order from time to time and I don’t know about you guys but I hate burnt toast.