We're the only ones who see your inner beauty.

I was going to post again on that thread, saying "why are we talking to each other here" but decided not to. I found it amusing too.

The radio keeps repeating a story on the New York Pit Bulls, a "professional" mixed martial arts team who are having their first - match? smackdown? bloodlettiing? - today.

Coming on the heels of the Michael Vick affair, their choice of a name for the team seems less than fortuitous.

On my way to work this morning, I saw a dachshund wearing a teeny sun visor.

my m-i-l thinks we should stop going to the korean groceries in minneapolis, since to get to them we have to cross bridges across the mississippi. as she just told me, many americans don't eat korean food and they are quite happy.

Tell her that you'll take the tunnel.

There are probably happy Americans who take bridges all the time as well. No accounting for what makes us happy.

We just had a huge march/demonstration this morning on Main by a gang recovery group called Victory Outreach. They were brandishing sticks formed into crosses and using bullhorns to scream about Jesus to the cafe customers on the front porch. It was like an aggressive Thousand Thug March all the way up to City Hall. Thank god they found Jesus cause it looked like they wanted to slit our throats.

Behavior recommended by our County Health Dept. during our current water emergency -

Where was He?

Behind the Couch.

There are clearly two options - you can wait until September, when everything freezes over, or you can take advantage of the fact that you're close to the source and drive around the Mississippi.

Or just have everything delivered to your door.

Or, like the early Korean settlers to the area, you could cross the river in a boat.

I went back to read the recipe. He has a blog! Anyway, the dish seems like it would taste better made with just plain rice stick noodles minus the corn, iceberg lettuce and a few other ingredients.

Money & Banking

At the end of the day on Friday, I found myself at Sunset and Vine and in need of some banking action. As it turns out, this was just the right location. I went first to a large, conventional B of A in hopes of making a deposit and cashing a check. Given the date and time, the bank was inundated with customers queued up at the teller windows. Oddly, I was saved by a voice advising that she would handle any customers who only wanted to make a deposit. So I ran over to her desk and she ran my ATM card through a reader, took my check for deposit and hand wrote me a receipt for it (OK, she wrote down the wrong hour for the deposit, but who am I to quibble?).
This, of course, did not solve the issue of the need for cash. Since I had another check written on Washington Mutual, I went across the street to its branch. What a different world! I had never been in this location (a former branch of Home Savings with some of the odd sculpture and murals intact). Generally, my experience with WaMu has been conventional, if unsatisfactorily slow, banking. First, just to enter, I had to go thru a two door interlock subject to red and green lights. I managed this. Inside was weird. There was no conventional row of teller windows behind bullet proof glass. Instead, tellers of sorts were at various free standing desks crammed around the floor. There were two long lines. One turned out to be for deposits only and those patrons had to wait till they were summoned by a deposits only teller to come forward. The other long and winding line of which I became a member was for everything else.
Adding to the oddity of the environment was the presence of a representative of virtually every demographic (Hollywood is the confluence of expatriate Russians, Armenians, Thais, et al.) with an emphasis on tattoos and piercings. I felt like I was in a sort of Noah's Ark of banking. In any event, when I was summoned to a teller's desk, my check was accepted with my fingerprint being taken and-- instead of the cash I desired--I was given a receipt with a 5 digit pin number on it (per the paperwork, this number was valid for one hour only). I then had to wait briefly for yet another teller to escort me to a "cash desk." Here, I was instructed to enter the pin number in a sort of horizontal ATM like machine and out came a variety of bills in every denomination from ones to a fifty--in total the amount of the check I had negotiated.
Mission accomplished, I again approached the interlock and escaped.

They have a wamu like that at 25th & Mission, except without the red light, green light game to get in/out. I guess it's supposed to be impossible to rob with the atm-like cash dispenser and when you make a cash deposit the teller slips it into some kind of lock box. The stations randomly placed all over the bank is rather strange at first.

in a town where nobody apparently bothers to lock their front door even when they're not at home, there's a man going from door to door trying to convince people to sign up for an alarm system.

It surely is. It's like musical chairs or something.

Hmmm. Right after you moved into town. Hmmm.

While reading the LA Times this morning I saw a big photo of my cousin in the business section accompanying an article about the company he co-founded. Then when reading the metro/california section, I saw a large photo of a family friend, accompanying an article about thieves targetting affluent areas (as the high walls and hedges that provide privacy also provide cover for burglars to break in and take valuables). The family friend is not a burglar (at least not that I know of!)

Wierd to see photographs of two people I know well so prominently featured in the local rag.

Dude, where's your photo? You're not some underachiever, are you?

The Weekly World News is going away and I for one will miss it. They featured articles like -

"DEAD ROCK STARS RETURN ON GHOST PLANE!"

"BLIND MAN REGAINS SIGHT AND DUMPS UGLY WIFE!"

and who could forget -

FLORIDA MAN SCREAMS FROM THE GRAVE, MY BRAIN IS MISSING!"

Sometimes they even printed the truth -

only the print version is going away.

Greatly exaggerated (dude).

Get back to work. What are you doing, googling yourself again?

well, you'll be able to recycle some of it:

I have to check that that fucker from Radio Stoke hasn't usurped my no. 1 position.

Don't worry, Dr. J, no one can beat your top quality overhead door holders and push-pull latches.

I miss Glyn.

Don't fret. The Dude abides.

i just accidentally discovered* that a department i was once a member of, and whose chair once wrote a sniffy letter reluctantly recommending that i be re-appointed (sniffing partly at my teaching record) doesn't have quite the teaching record that chair sniffily referenced in that letter. he'd noted in that letter that department x, unlike many departments in the college, had very high teaching standards, and that this was reflected in the fact that that the core faculty all received average evaluations of, say, a-, whereas i had received average evaluations of only b+. now i learn that the core faculty on average awards a's to 62% of their students, whereas i awarded a's to only 27% of my students. hmmm i wonder if that discrepancy might have had something to do with it, as every study on student evaluations suggests it does. as for the chair? he apparently awards a's to 66% of his students.

*via one of those sites that tracks instructor grades across campuses.

Sounds like some profs are still in the grade inflation phase. And you're not.

Oh come on, everybody knows that if you were a better instructor, the kids would get better grades.

I guess I had some piss poor instructors.

I actually had a student tell me that after she was the only one out of twenty five not to pass the hands-on camera test. That was right before she told me that if I were a better person, she'd do better in the class too.

Well, you could try being a better person for awhile and see how it works out.

Jumpin' Jack Flash is a Gas Gas Gas!

Andrew Weil skincare line.

Damn, and to think that I was planning on introducing a product called Plantidote too. Now I will have to come up with a new suitable name.

Who knew? Dr Weil's healthy kitchen cookware line.
Healthy pots and pans.

A PR and marketing person told me that blogging is "life caching".

I hope you reached for your pistol.

There is a huge boat parked on a street in my town, the type that we used to call a cabin cruiser. I've no idea if that term is still current.

The boat's name is the Nuckinfutts.

One wonders why the "t" had to be doubled. In any event, God bless New Jersey.

Not homicide - but homaricide.

Giant Lego Man Found in Dutch Sea

I need someone to explain this to me.

Why oh why is it that our children will not believe what WE tell them, but if someone ELSE in a position of authority tells them the SAME thing, they believe it? Here is our daughter, only adopted a year ago, who has only lived with us one year,refusing to believe us when we told her that 1. drinking lots of water is good for you, 2. that whole wheat bread is healthier than white and 3. that a good breakfast is the best way to start the day, when WE told her - when WE, when we were still virtual strangers! - told her this stuff over the last year - yet when her Color Guard teacher at the high school, also a virtual stranger, tells her the SAME STUFF, she BELIEVES it?

That is one of the oldest questions, Foodie52 and one that I'm sure your mother asked as well.

The cynical view:

Because children are with their parents virtually 24/7, know from experience that their parents lie to them all the time for peculiar reasons of their own & therefore have good reason to be skeptical of new untested statements.

Strangers, OTOH, generally have no ulterior motives in what they tell children &, assuming that the child perceives them to be of good character, may therefore have greater credibility.

The generous view:

The child, as noted above, had some reason to be skeptical when you told her, but when a disinterested stranger said the same thing, it set her to thinking that you may have been right after all. Though she won't admit that to you for another 30 years.