Bill's Notes

But I did get an awesome grill. Fits perfectly on the side deck. Cooked the first hot dog and it was great. Ball Park Grillers were a fine choice. One down, nine dogs to go.

Going to get a grill and deck furniture this morning. You can't have a deck this big (heh) and not have a grill. Hopeful I can get it set up tonight.

Have a good one.

Left my cell phone home this morning.

I feel naked. And vulnerable. Gee, this would be a good time to open up and express my deepest, innermost thoughts. Which are:

Of course the Phillies are in last place. They didn't DO anything in the off-season. The pitching sucks is less than stellar and they are in a band-box stadium where pitching is important.

Good thing I'm not really a Phillies fan. (I'm a fallen-from-grace Reds fan. Really I root for anyone but the Yankees.)

I'm glad I shared that with you all. It was difficult, but now that it's done, I feel unburdened and free.

Have a good weekend.

BTW, here is real, non-Vogon poetry and apropos of my mood lately.

It is an easy thing to talk of patience to the afflicted
To speak the laws of prudence to the homeless wanderer
To listen to the hungry raven's cry in wintry season
When the red blood is fill'd with wine and with the marrow of lambs

It is an easy thing to laugh at wrathful elements
To hear the dog howl at the wintry door, the ox in the slaughter house moan;
To see a god on every wind and a blessing on every blast
To hear sounds of love in the thunder storm that destroys our enemies' house;
To rejoice in the blight that covers his field
And the sickness that cuts off his children

While our olive and vine sing and laugh round our door
And our children bring fruits and flowers

Then the groan and the dolor are quite forgotten
And the slave grinding at the mill
And the captive in chains and the poor in the prison

And the soldier in the field
When the shatter'd bone hath laid him groaning among the happier dead
It is an easy thing to rejoice in the tents of prosperity:
Thus could I sing and thus rejoice: but it is not so with me.

--William Blake

As a professional writer, I'm asked to write all kinds of stuff. One thing I'd been asked in my new job is to write limericks.

Now, I am a terrible poet and didn't even want to try. However, my boss insisted. So I've given it a shot. And while I failed dismally ... true to my word ... today I got a surprise when my boss referred to my efforts as "Vogon Poetry."

I knew it was bad. I didn't think it was that bad. Apparently, it is. In the interests of conservation of matter, er, copy, I'm now offering my limericks for sale for assassination and torture purposes.

Lethal limericks: Send $50 and I'll ship 'em to you to use on your enemies.

UPDATE: Didn't sell 'em. But I'm gonna print 'em here, so be forewarned. Vogon poetry can be lethal.


l
An unmindful worker named Jake
Forgot a safety harness to take
He fell off the roof
And chipped a front tooth,
Which now reminds him of his mistake.

ll
Speedy Pat was always on the go
Running here and there, to and fro
He slipped on his duff
While rushing some stuff
And now he goes a little slow.

lll
A confident worker named Frank
Worked alone in a confined-space tank
Until he ran out of air
And was pulled out by his hair
By a coworker whom he’s now pleased to thank.

Alton Brown is right. You gotta put a lot more coffee in the coffee maker than the package suggests to make coffee right. Now I'm putting in 4 even tablespoons for 4 cups of water and it comes out as good as Folgers gets.

YMMV.

With God's grace and for His glory I'm hopeful that I'm coming out of this funk and making progress on other personal issues. Just wanted to pass on a note that God is loving and has done so much for me that it's astonishing. It's like he's ... God! That is, I testify to God's goodness, love, holiness, light and power here today on the blog. Praise God.

Bought a Time magazine last night so I had something to read during dinner. Among the things I learned:

Cheap oil is no more, forever, because of increased demand in the market from India and China and because the oil that is cheap to extract is already gone forever and only the expensive oil deep down in the earth's crust is now extractable. The price of gas could rise to $5 a gallon in the next few years. And yeah, the Time reporter was loving it.

Um ... couldn't increased demand create strong incentives to find more oil? Couldn't extraction methods become cheaper and more efficient? Couldn't political improvements among OPEC nations and floating the price of oil change the price?

No, what am I thinking? Only one variable in an economy changes at a time and all other things are fixed, forever.

Tut-tut.

Sophomoric humor alert: In response to my post below on Islam and other bloggers similar reactions, Dean asks about our mcguppers.

In the spirit of the inquiry, I dig back into my adolescent brain for an appropriate response and quote the great Angus Young:

I'm ever upper class high society
God's gift to ballroom notoriety
I always fill my ballroom
The event is never small
The social pages say I've got
The biggest balls of all

Some balls are held for charity
And some for fancy dress
But when they're held for pleasure
They're the balls that I like best
My balls are always bouncing
To the left and to the right
It's my belief that my big balls
Should be held every night

Update: Great minds think alike.

If you're having trouble commenting, shoot me an email at industrialblog at hotmail dot com and I'll post it. I've heard some folks are having trouble.

Two straight women in the personals have asked me for a picture, and then blown me off upon seeing it. I don't think this is a bad picture:



What don't I know? Am I hideous and don't know it? Is this a problem with an 'n' of two and they're both looking for something else?

Go ahead, be honest.

I thought I just looked a little generic, but I didn't think I was scaring 'em off.

Dean Esmay has gone totally insane and his methods are unsound:

I call bullshit on you people. Bullshit, and chickenshit.

Here I've given you links to a practicing muslim who is both a koranic scholar and a blogger. A blogger who has comments. A muslim scholar who directly addresses the many Koranic verses that (mostly Christian) critics of Islam like to pull out of context as "proof" of how violent intolerant Islam is, and explains how they're being taken out of context.

And instead of discussing the matter with him, you choose to argue with me?

BWOK BWOOOK BWOK BWOK! Chickens*** Christians, afraid to talk to debate any actual muslims! BWOK BWOK BWOK BWOK BWOK!

I tried to leave a comment but I had trouble registering. Each comment was given a "bad password hash" error. It may show up, it may not.

Here's what I wanted to say:

LOL! Stay away from the brown acid, Dean.

I'm kidding of course. I love Dean. He's a great guy. But he loves this equivalency thing, forgetting that the difference between Christianity and Islam is Christianity is true while Islam is false.

UPDATE II: Chris says it better in the comments.

What I find funny about the whole thing is that moderate muslims trying to convince christians that 'jihad' means 'inner struggle' are wasting their time. We don't believe that Muhamed is God's final prophet, so it's not terribly relevant to us whether he suggested we struggle against our tendency to disobey God or whether we struggle against the infidel.

Ever since Proust it's been cliche that the sense of smell triggers memory. (Gilbert Sorrentino in Mulligan Stew was funny with his, "What if Marcel smelled a Yankee Doodle?" but that's neither here nor there.) But what the hell this weekend reminded me of Manila? Got a really powerful memory for a few moments there, and fortunately, it was a pleasant memory.

Many people have remarked that the Philippines has a specific smell, sort of bittersweet. A little like a combination of a sweet wood, an outhouse and fish. I got that smell yesterday. It might have been the burning brushpile, though who knows.

You can get decent pizza up in Dutchie-land, i.e., the Poconos?

But you can. Frank's is pretty good, even if they ain't the friendliest folks up there.

... of a cover story. Fortunately, the story got better and finally works. Felt like I was foul-tipping one pitch after another and finally caught a single through the middle.

Or something like that.

... be awake and posting on my blog before 7 am Sunday. Went to bed early last night. That means I got up early.

Random stuff: Bought a hatchet yesterday and despite the rain went out in my woods and started to clear. A hatchet helps with the small limbs, though I ended up hacking away just for the heck of it on some big limbs. Also broke out the chainsaw. Felled another tree, a pretty big one that had broken at the trunk about 12 feet up. The broken part was still attached and it looked like hell. But I was able to cut the thing up. Need a sharper loop on my saw... I think I burned the trunk down from friction :) Slowly making progress on the property and so far my back is holding up.

Meanwhile, here's what a 19-year-old receptionist at work said to me Thursday when she saw me wearing a "Seton Hall University" sweatshirt. "Seton Hall? Is that where your kids go to school?" Tres amuson. She started to backpedal ("I mean, where you went to college"), but shit, no one ever correctly guessed that I could have college-age kids before. (By the way, she's 19 but has a one or two year old kid.) Maybe I should retire the sweatshirt. Is it wrong for a 41-year-old man to wear an alma mater sweatshirt if he's not at a basketball game or retired? I tend to wear whatever I want. Friends of mine have heard this story and are giving me a hard time now ...

So that bride in Georgia ran away to New Mexico, lied to her family about being kidnapped, made the national news, and blew off 600 of her family and friends, not to mention threw away the money laid out for the wedding. And now the wedding is "postponed." Postponed?

Despite my last post, I am not posting on politics. It was a funny quiz, that's all.