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Saturday: December 17, 2011
InstaPundit links to a post on Vuurwapen Blog entitled ‘How To Tell Your Date You’re Carrying A Gun’. It’s full of double entendres, but neither the author nor any of the 18 comments (as of this writing) makes the obvious Mae West joke: “Don’t think I’m not glad to see you, but yes, that is a gun in my pocket”.
Sunday: December 11, 2011
Last Sunday, I inadvertently washed a SanDisc Cruzer USB drive with a load of laundry and plenty of soap. To my great surprise, it still worked after I found it rattling around in the bottom of the washing machine. I of course immediately copied everything on it to my PC, thinking that it would surely be susceptible to long-term damage, since the insides are not hermetically sealed and therefore (I thought) would be prone to rust or mildew when wet. However, it still works almost a week later. One more thing to like about modern technology: it’s a lot less fragile than a floppy disc.
Wednesday: July 27, 2011
It’s less threatening from this view, but from ground level the James Madison University Recreation Center looks strangely like Kim Jong Il’s palace in Team America: World Police. Especially after dark, of course.
Thursday: July 21, 2011
Yesterday, Dustbury and Ann Althouse blogged the death of Alex Steinwess, who invented the album cover in 1939. Before that, “[t]he covers were brown, tan or green paper. They were not attractive, and lacked sales appeal.” (So Steinwess, quoted by Dustbury.)
Some countries were quicker to improve the esthetics of their album covers than others. These two were published as late as 1958 and 1961 respectively:
Of course, German publishers may have been slow to add unnecessary frills after the destruction of World War II. Or perhaps buyers of Heinrich Schütz records expected something in a plain brown (or tan) wrapper. The music on both records is quite austere stylistically.
Wednesday: July 20, 2011
As of . . . almost, almost, . . . NOW! – noon Eastern Time on July 20th, we are five-eighths of the way through Obama’s first and (almost certainly) only term. If we can make it through the next year and a half without any permanent damage, we can . . . relax? No, get down to the huge task of fixing what needs to be fixed.
Wednesday: February 2, 2011
This was the official National Weather Service report for my house an hour or so ago:
The expected high for the day (upper left) is 48o, while the current temperature (bottom center) is 63o. I’ve complained about this sort of thing before (here and here), but I don’t believe I’ve seen a 15o discrepancy before.
Hmmm. Now that I’ve read my previous complaints, I see that they include a 14-degree discrepancy, so I should probably delete this post. However, I don’t have anything else to do today – home sick with strep throat – and I can’t resist letting victims of the massive blizzard know that here in the Shenandoah Valley it’s a beautiful spring day.
Maybe they should start reporting temperatures in Celsius, to keep the errors down to single digits. Or maybe they should just add two lines to their computer program, resetting the expected high to be greater than or equal to the current temperature, and mutandis mutandis with the lows.
Monday: January 31, 2011
This was left as a comment – unapproved, of course. I have also redirected the link:
It’s so hard to get backlinks these days, honestly i need a backlink by comments on your blog / forums or guestbook to make my website appear in search engine. I am getting desperate Now! I know you’ll laugh while reading this comment !!! Here is my website download youtube videos I know my comments do not relate to the topic, but PLEASE HELP ME!! APPROVING MY COMMENT!
I suppose the only one more pathetic than this spammer would be a blogger who fell for the plea and approved the comment out of pity.
Wednesday: January 19, 2011
. . . thinks a salmon-colored couch is nice, but a couch made entirely out of salmon would be nicer:
Sunday: September 5, 2010
Staunton, Virginia has a one-unit hotel, The Storefront, “a very small hotel”. Is this sort of thing found in other cities as well? It’s certainly a clever idea. Guests receive a certificate good for breakfast at either of two eateries less than a block away. Presumably the owner or a representative comes by once a day to change the bedclothes and restock the refrigerator. If I didn’t already live in Staunton, I would certainly try it out.
Friday: July 30, 2010
What blogs on four buttocks in the morning, as many as ten buttocks in the afternoon, and two buttocks in the evening? Alas, no buttocks are left, and 2Blowhards is shutting down. It (they?) will be missed.
Tuesday: March 23, 2010
Nothing to do with politics. Today is Akira Kurosawa’s 100th birthday. I wonder how many culture bloggers will mention it. No one seems to have noticed Hugo Wolf’s 150th, which was 10 days ago.
Sunday: January 24, 2010
Am I obsessed with puns? I couldn’t help noticing that the last four postcards in today’s edition of Post Secret confess to peeing in the shower, and the very next paragraph asks for readers’ “support in our effort to create the first peer-to-peer online crisis center” (emphasis added). I will gladly grants that this is a problem, and a rather disgusting one, especially if you share a bathroom with anyone else, but ‘crisis’ seems a bit strong.
Tuesday: December 22, 2009
If you’re looking for a snow shovel three days into a blizzard: Home Depot. Martin’s (our local high-end grocery chain) sold out on Friday, when the blizzard was just getting started. By Monday, Walmart had been out of snow shovels for quite some time. They suggested I try Home Depot, which had large quantities of four different models, all very reasonably priced: the cheapest was $12.95, the most expensive $22.95. I bought the $19.95 model, since it had a metal blade and the other three were all plastic. I probably should have thought about buying a snow shovel earlier, but I rent, so clearing the sidewalk is the landlord’s problem. Of course, getting my car out from under two feet of snow was my problem. I did most of that myself, with just a window scraper, but paid a couple of guys $10 to finish the job. I would show you a picture of the snow shovel I bought, but searching for ‘snow shovel’ on the Home Depot site brings up only snow blowers and snow blower accessories.
Monday: December 21, 2009
Perhaps I’m just addicted to bad jokes and cultural allusions, but if I were Terry Teachout, I would have titled his latest post “Top of the world, ma!”.
Saturday: December 19, 2009
The view from my front window late this morning:
Renting means not having to shovel the steps, like the home-owner across the street.
The view from my back window:
Saturday: November 7, 2009
Thanks to the local Farmers’ Market, I have discovered that kohlrabi looks a lot better than it tastes, while sunchoke (Jerusalem artichoke) tastes a lot better than it looks. Too bad the market and the grocery stores are all out of sunchokes.
Thursday: November 5, 2009
My mother laughed when I first told her that one of my favorite dishes is chicken hearts in wine sauce. She thinks chicken hearts are far too low-class to be mixed with something so hoity-toity as wine. Of course the wine I put on the chicken hearts is the cheapest white wine I can find — usually the kind that comes in a four-pack of small bottles. Someone with more spare time and bad taste than I could compose a whole cookbook of similar ‘bipolar’ recipes: lobsters with Velveeta, ramen noodles with caviar, and so on.
A few days ago, I inadvertently discovered that one ‘bipolar’ combination of foods is surprisingly tasty: Toulouse-Lautrec’s favorite drink, the Tremblement de Terre, goes surprisingly well with a bag of pork rinds.
Monday: November 2, 2009
Harold March was the sort of man who knows everything about politics; and nothing about politicians. He also knew a good deal about art, letters, philosophy and general culture; about almost everything, indeed, except the world he was living in.
(G. K. Chesterton, The Man Who Knew Too Much, I. “The Face in the Target”)
Saturday: August 15, 2009
Monday: July 13, 2009
Driving through Berryville, Virginia a couple of hours later I had to slow down for a police car on the shoulder with all its lights flashing. There was no other car on the shoulder, and the policeman was having an intense conversation with a shirtless bald guy on a ride-on lawnmower 20 or 30 feet off the road. I wonder if he’d been driving it recklessly in traffic. If he’d been keeping it off the road, it’s hard to think what he could have done to attract the attention of a policeman — assuming the grass he was cutting was his own. Or would drunk driving on your own property be illegal if it was sufficiently blatant? There were some very curly fresh-cut tracks in the grass.
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