Well, I’m home again, after 1500 miles of driving from NYC to Texas and 2000 miles of flying , I am dead dog tired. First thing on the agenda was taking a nap! We had a great time though! This was my third trip flying up to New York to visit Lisa since we met thru our blogs nearly two years ago and every trip has been a helluva lot of fun. We found this small, but great restaurant that served Argentine cuisine in Manhattan and stuffed ourselves on delicious chorizo sausage and an amazing sampler of empanadas. Damn the food was so good, we will definitely be going back to that one!

We went downtown to meet a friend of Lisa’s at Harry’s Bar at the Helmsley Hotel and ended up passing thru Grand Central Station. Although I’ve been there before, years ago, it’s always awe inspiring to see it again. The inside of the terminal is so huge and cavernous with gigantic chandeliers and beautifully done marble work that you can’t help but feel overwhelmed by the scale of the place.

On the drive down, the high points were the beautiful mountain scenery in Virginia and Tennessee and a too short lunch stop in Nashville where we lucked out on finding a cool restaurant called Big River Brewing in the heart of the old town. It was directly across the street from the Hard Rock Cafe along the river front and the food was delicious!

Continuing on, just after crossing the Mississippi River into Arkansas, we were amazed at the number of 18 wheelers on the road. It seemed like there were 10 big rigs for every car we saw, causing me to remark that it seemed like everyone in Arkansas must drive one of these things. This got us to talking about about the ways of truckers and the type of life they lead on the road, away from home and I ended up telling Lisa a secret about one of the favorite pastimes of these guys when they’re driving.

Looking at the photo above, you can see that the driver has quite a vantage point for a nice view of the passenger’s seat in every car that passes them on their left on the highway. The next time you’re in the passenger seat on the interstate, look up at the driver as you pass a truck, you’ll notice that the driver will almost always be looking down at you as you pass. What they’re hoping for is a good view up the skirts of any female passengers. Of course, the best ones are pantiless and sitting somewhat carelessly thinking that no one can see anything. At the very least you might get a nice view of some very shapely legs or cleavage. I know this from personal experience, I drove a big truck for a short while some years ago and I can tell you that the view is much, much better than you might imagine.

Occasionally you run across a female passenger that knows this and takes full advantage of it by deliberately flashing the truck driver as they speed by. Hey, it can get monotonous driving for long hours and thousands of miles like those guys do, sometimes it’s the only entertainment they get!

Further on, we stopped and met Tish which was really cool! She is funny and witty and treated us to a great meal at a local, yet famous cafeteria called Bryce’s. Unfortunately we didn’t get to visit long, we still had quite a ways to go to get to Texas and I had an early morning flight back to New Orleans.

I did get to turn Lisa on to Waffle House food and waffles and Ally da Pup was a lot of fun to have along. Ally is very afraid of car travel though, poor thing had to be tranquilized most of the drive time but she seemed to enjoy the numerous rest stops and motel stays. We did our best to keep her occupied.

Anyway, I had a great time and now I need to get lots more sleep. I’m sure we’ll have more later, hope you guys stayed out of trouble! Have a great weekend!

I’ll see you guys next week! Saturday morning I’ll be flying up to New York City to meet with Lisa and from there we’re going to drive halfway across the USA for a little vacation time. Sounds like fun, no? Even Ally da Pup will be coming along for the ride. I’ll be bringing my laptop and taking pictures too, maybe I’ll have some photos worth posting! How cool is that?

There’s a lot of things I want to see, stuff like the world’s largest ball of twine, Larry’s Snake Farm, Dinosaurland, the Spam Museum and hundreds of other crappy roadside tourist traps LOL Unfortunately, Lisa isn’t too keen on seeing those places so we’ll have to compromise between her shoe stores and my tourist traps. Music choices are another thing we can’t agree on so I’m loading up my cell phone with as much of my heavy metal collection as possible and bringing along my headphones.

We’ll try to keep you posted depending on internet connections! Meanwhile, try not to get into to much trouble while we’re away and have a great weekend!

That was the joke question asked in a commercial break during the broadcast of Last Comic Standing the other night on NBC. If you wanted to hear the punchline all you had to do was send a text message to NBC on your cell phone to get it. The cost for this amazing and convenient service? Only 99 cents! Have you ever heard anything so utterly lame? Actually holding the punchline of an elementary school level joke for ransom over the airwaves. It irritated me so much that I changed the channel and watched something else instead. Hey, NBC, here’s an idea for you that would be far more entertaining. Why don’t you air a clip of the genius that conceived this brilliant marketing idea actually being fired on national tv. Now that would be funny!

In case you’re wondering, and I won’t charge you a buck for the punchline… What’s orange and sounds like a parrot? A carrot. Yeah, I told you it was LAME. And, no, I didn’t pay for it, I got the punchline by doing a web search.

Remember a while back I wrote a post about Stumble Upon? I still like to use it to surf for fun websites sometimes, but unfortunately it’s been sold out to eBay. And eBay is selling spots in the page rotations. Guess what that means kiddies? They sold your eyeballs to the highest bidders, meaning more and more of the webpages they send you to actually paid for the priveledge of having you surf in. Instead of being sites that Joe User submitted as being cool or interesting, you get to see who paid the most money for your attention.

I think this may actually be good in a backhanded way because you get to vote thumbs up or down on every site. If I get even the slightest suspicion that the site submission was paid for, it gets an automatic thumbs down. Hell yeah, just like that! And if the site has pop up ads of any kind on it or if it’s running a script that resizes or takes control over my browser window in any way, it gets an automatic thumbs down too, I don’t care how awesome the website is. If it has pop ups, it sucks!

Check out this billboard photo, notice anything odd about the two ads?

That’s right, it’s the same woman in both ads! LOL

Well, that’s all I got, have a great weekend kids!

I took my car in for some repair work on my A/C system the other day and I went to a place I found in the phone book. Yeah, it’s hotter than Hades here in N.O. and a working air conditioner is always on the top of my list. As an ex-mechanic I’m very picky about who I will trust. I can always tell when someone is bullshitting me or trying to jack me for unneccessary work. The shop was nice and clean and the owner seemed intelligent and straightforward.

Turned out he was someone I knew from high school or at least he remembered me, I couldn’t recall him or his name. I decided to trust him and leave it there for the day for the repair work. As I was leaving though, I started noticing that the walls in the office and waiting area was covered with religious quotes and icons and various other religious paraphenalia. I thought it was just a bit overdone, being proud of your religion is one thing and that’s fine, but this was going way overboard.

Later that day, I went back to pick it up and that’s when it hit me. Well actually he hit me, he clobbered me with Jesus. He asked me point blank if I had the Lord in my heart and if I had found Jesus. Seriously, I am not kidding. And he went on and on telling me all about the goodness of the Lord and asking if I’ve confessed my sins and made my peace, etc, etc, ad nauseum. Then he invited me to his “church”, which turns out to be one that I recognized as a borderline “cult”. You know, one of those independent churches that don’t have an actual denomination. The whole time he was talking, he stared intently into my eyes, like he was trying to mesmerize me or something. I definitely felt like I was being recruited into a future of selling Bibles door to door or wearing Hare Krishna robes at the airport, begging for donations LOL Charles Manson probably recruited his followers the same way!

I wasn’t having any of it though, I lied like a dog, I told him that I had indeed found Jesus and God was in my heart and that I was in regular attendance at a nearby church, etc, etc. just to get him to shut the fuck up. I felt like I was having to chew my frikkin’ leg off to escape his insidious Spanish Inquisition line of questioning. I’m so going to hell…

I’m not against religion in any way shape or form, and I respect your right to worship or not worship, just please, keep it to yourself. Whatever chance he had of ever seeing me at his shop again for future auto repairs was just blown all to hell, so to speak. I never want to encounter that creepy freak again. LOL

I was telling Lisa this story, her response is now my new prayer. “God save me from those who want to save me”. hehe

Hope you guys are having a great weekend!

Have I ever mentioned how much I loathe cutting grass or doing yard work? I’ve always been that way. When I was a kid I was very allergic to fresh mown grass and it made me extremely miserable with swollen eyes, runny nose, burning, itchy skin and short of breath for hours. Did I ever get a break from cutting it? Hell no, my old man probably thought it built character or someshit and I was forced to cut it anyway. It wasn’t like I needed the exercise, I was always very active. And it didn’t matter that I felt like I was freakin’ dying because I could barely breathe, I had to cut it anyway. For some reason, the allergies have slowly diminished as I got older and older, but I hate it now more than ever. I remember dreaming of the day when I would become an adult and would never have to do yard work again.

That never happened! I became an adult, yes (sort of), but did I ever get a break from cutting it? Well, only when I lived in apartments, then some other schmuck had to cut it for me. Yay! And now I find it’s come full circle, my old man is too old and feeble to cut his own lawn so now I’ve had to take over the miserable ritual. Woe is me. If I had a time machine, I would go back and kill the bastard that came up with the idea that lawns needed trimming. I like to think it’s just a sick fad, why can’t it be fashionable to have a small jungle growing around your home? Think of how much more fun that would be!

When you think about the ecological impact, tall, natural grass makes much more sense. We pour fertilizer and insecticides all over it to nourish and protect it then we have to buy fuel and machines to maintain it. We waste fresh drinking water on it to keep it from dying! The poisons end up in our water supplies and the burnt fuel pollutes the air. Then just think of the impact the manufacturing of the billions of dollars worth of lawn equipment we buy every year has on the planets resources. Throw in thousands of serious injuries and medical emergencies that occur while cutting grass and it’s easy to see why it’s a really bad, bad idea. I believe that keeping a well manicured lawn is one of the most wasteful things that a homeowner can do. If you like cutting grass, then I think you’re one sick fuck.

Notice that I have nothing against veggie gardens or growing flowers, just don’t ask me to help you tend one, LOL And of course growing food crops or garden vegetables is a necessity, to me that’s not a waste of time, energy or resources. It’s a positive impact.

You’re probably wondering what brings up this rant. I was cutting grass at my folks house the other day and ended up with a HUGE gash in my arm from brushing past a freshly trimmed bush in the front yard. It sliced me open like a knife and I was barely able to stop the bleeding, two days later it still hurts like hell. It’s going to leave a massive, ugly scar and I’m PISSED. Now, I look like I was just in a bar brawl and right in the middle of job hunting. Just what I needed!

So, happy frikkin’ birthday to me, which just happens to be tomorrow by the way. So I ask you, in honor of my birthday and for the sake of our planet, I want you all to boycott cutting grass for one day. That’s not hard is it? Please, give the poor grass a break, let it grow dammit! The grass just wants to be free, grass has rights too!! LOL

What does the photo below have to do with this post? Not a thing!