Val Kilmer: Then
and now:
Mitch Taylor:
Remeber Kent from Real Genius?
He most recently was in Michael Clayton and this is what he looks like now:
Whoa!
Archive
Normally on this date, I post some outlandish post that ends up being an April Fool’s Day thing.
Not so much, this year. See, right now I’m swinging between two extremes at work (possible promotion versus possible layoff because I cost too damn much), I’m relatively happy at home, and I really don’t want to jinx anything in terms of karma.
So, no big joke this year.
…
Yes, I’m serious.
Out.
Things may be up and down as we are updating to the latest version of wordpress. I must say I’m impressed with it and all the new features.
Update: I’ve grabbed a new theme since I have been having so many problems with K2.
I’m now using futurosity which I’ve managed to modify somewhat to suit my needs. I think it will at least do until I am able to do my own custom programing for wordpress and wetwired.
Update #2 I’ve used the hack suggested for the RC4 version of K2 and re-uploaded it and the refresh problem with the site seems to be resolved. This layout is more conducive to what we want wetwired to look like in the long run. 3-31-08
In case you missed it, Chillville was on 101x this morning in Austin. I always try to catch just a little bit of it when I’m in town. Today I found out about Gnarles Barkley’s new Album “The Odd Couple“. This was Full Monty’s Catch of the day. I have to agree after listening to the album that many more of the songs on this track are - bareable. It seemed like the last album that came out only had one or two good songs - especially Crazy - very radio friendly and even today if you played it, it would still get stuck in your head.
Today also was the very wet Cap 10K. And our very own figment did it in 1hr and 2minutes and liz did it in 56minutes. Congrats!
I just bought my tickets to see Salvage Vangaurd’s Intergalatic Nemesis for the 3rd time. This time it will be at the Paramount for one night only on May 9th. You can still pick up tickets but all the good stuff has been sold out -rather all the close up stuff has been sold out - I got in the A seating.
Ladies and gentlemen, I offer the following humble advice.
Take care of your teeth, for the one thing you don’t want is to have a cavity near the back of your mouth. Mark my words, to fix it your dentist will have your mouth wider than Ginger Lynn Allen’s during a John Holmes Memorial “fillin’ and drillin,” if you know what I mean.
My friggin’ jaw is killing me. Cavities taken care of, but yeesh!
Out.
Have you seen the news lately about 2 separate issues? One is that the airline industries either already have or are in the process of outsourcing their maintenance on airframe and power plant to other countries in Asia or South America. Issue two is the Air force outsourcing the contact for building refueling planes to Airbus - a European company.
Amidst a falling economy, both options are taking jobs outside of the United States. Does this not strike a cord with you? As far as outsourcing maintenance - you have uncertified people working on airplanes/jets. How many planes falling out of the sky will it take for that to stop? How long will it take till the airline industry goes belly up because the people who would be buying tickets have lost their jobs to outsourcing? Or will we go the way of other countries and have government intervention into airline industry.
What the hell is going on with this country?
Ben Saunders, long standing pole treker has been hold up in Eureka, Canada (Nunavut Territory) waiting on his plane to be fixed yet again. Ben is setting out tomorrow - barring any other unforseen plane problems - to break the world record solo and unsupported by foot to trek from Ward Hunt Island to the Geographic North Pole. He aims to put the record at 30 days - the current record is 36 days and 22 hours.
Wetwired has previously pledged $100 bucks sponsership for a mile for his South Pole trip which got delayed, but when he goes we’ll cough up the dough.
Last night the power went out in my subdivision. I decided to not call because any one of the 120 other homes was prob. calling in. Sure enough by about 9:50 a repair truck pulls up in my cul-du-sac with a repair man stepping out. I walked outside and greeted him and asked him what was going on - he said “Not a good evening with the underground stuff,” he then asked where the underground box was located - thinking it was in my backyard. It actually is directly behind my yard in the neighbors with a fence dividing it. So I told the repair guy to go around the block and I’d shine the flashlight for him to see which house it was.
He drove around and walked into the back yard, where I was leaning over the fence with my light - and he discovered two things. One the box had an ant hill on half the size of it, and two the other side of the box was covered in a giant bush in attempts to hide it. “Guess they won’t like it when I chain saw this ‘motha down” he said, obviously a bit disgruntled, and proceeded to walk back to his truck. Coming back he yanked the chainsaw Christmas Vacation style and proceeded to trim that bush down so he could get at it. After another hour he and his other repair men left, unable to resolve the issue with it - and they searched for more problems elsewhere in the subdivision. I gave up and went to bed and woke up to the sound of, no power still.
I manually raised my garage and pulled my car out and as I drove out of the subdivision there they were, 4 trucks all working hard trying to figure out what the deal was. Since I was a bit late I didn’t bother to ask what the deal was, figuring I’d call the customer service line once I got to work. There in lies my frustration. I should have stopped and talked to the “American/English is my first language Repair men,” where I could have gotten the poop on what was going on.
Now Austin (and surrounding areas) have several different choices for power, there is the Austin Energy Company, Perdernales Electric, Reliant, and several others. But we went with TXU because of the 2 year contract we got with a discount. So when I call customer service for TXU (Texas Utilities or Texas Electric and Gas) I expect to talk with a Texan, someone local. But NOOOOOOOOOOO… I’m talking to Bangalore, India. I’m talking to someone who can’t even get my address right after I’ve repeated it 3 times. It’s not hard. Then I realize that I’m talking to a company that has the highest customer dis-statisfaction rating. Apparently there are some others that have come across the same problem.
I then realized that TXU outsourced my safety and security to another country, and even though I had told these people I had a medical condition, I didn’t get any help, nor could they help me as they weren’t even on our part of the globe.
Moving on, after my useless customer service rep figured out where I was located she then transferred me to someone else because I was in the wrong queue. Mind you I called the 800 number, choose to speak to someone about an outage, yet I still some how ended up in the wrong place? The 2nd person I talked to was just as bad and asked me all the same questions the first person did, but let me know that by 11am power “should” be restored.
I await anxiously.
(3 votes, average: 5 out of 5)
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(republish from 2000, previously lost)
When most of my friends were still playing cowboys
and indians I announced to my father that I wanted a
job, and for better or for worse i began my working
life. What my father neglected to inform me of was
that working is like shaving and masturbation; once
you begin your tied to it for the rest of your life.
In the eleven years since, I have had more jobs than
I can count. I have worked as a ranch hand,
been in construction and demolition, sold every product and
service under the sun and even had a job where I was
paid to read comic books. However for the last year or
so I have been working as a bartender- by far the most
stressful and rewarding of all my professions.
Every day I see people at the best and worst moments
of their lives. I see them when their inhibitions are
lowered and their guard is down. This volatile
combination has lead to certain observations and
conclusions that I would like to share with others.
Your thoughts and comments would be appreciated, and I
will answer all e-mail.
My Cocktail
-3 ounces of extra dry gin
-ice
Pour gin over ice and serve in an old fassioned glass.
(2 votes, average: 3.5 out of 5)
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I went looking through my old emails and have references to some posts in 2000 and 2001 that I just can’t find - that’s the problem when you go from “do-it-yourself” to blogger to movable type and now to Wordpress. Who knows, maybe I’ll find something if I keep looking.
There is a great tool out there if you have a mac that is called Wordpress Dash http://www.paniris.com/wordpressdash/index.php?action=download&v=4 that allows you to remote post without logging into your site. Its a widget that runs on the macbook dashboard. I’m fairly certain there is one for windows too as Wordpress has a pretty good api and there are many other remote posting tools out there. I actually forgot about this one, I used it when I went to Rome and could find sketchy internet here and there. Along those lines, todays travel tip: when you travel internationall, bring a very small laptop if you’re bringing one. I brought my macbook and its small, now I wouldn’t mind something even smaller like the macbook air.
We’ve got 3 candidates with varying ideas and ideals but all equally the same. They are all career politicians. The Democrats all have great plans for us. Let’s give you more socialized programs and of course increase your taxes to pay for it, and forget about continuing the Bush tax cuts. They will also yank the troops out of Iraq so quickly they’ll plunge Iraq into a civil war, causing oil to stop flowing, thus driving the up the cost of gasoline even more. The Republicans are fully prepared to keep us in Iraq for 100 years to ensure the flow of oil, but at what cost? 9 billion a month? Not only that, while we’ve heard about tax cuts from them, continuing the bush tax cuts, we’ve not heard about any IRS revamping, or any new effective plan to fund the country or revitalize the economy. The Republicans have only one real agenda at this point, and that is to continue to fund the Military Industrial Complex. We’ve been warned about this previously but we did not take heed.
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
Traditionally a wartime economy is good for a country because money is put right back into it and jobs are created, but this is only when the war lasts a few years -you cannot sustain a war-time economy. This is why we had a low unemployment rate through 2003-2006 or even mid 2007 and jobs were steadily on the rise, but we’ve hit the peak. Companies are laying off people and trimming the fat to make their quarterly numbers. But fear not, 3 candidates continue to talk about how they plan to take office and create more jobs. Magically poof, from day one (another sound byte thrown about) jobs will suddenly appear.
Everyone wants to take credit for creating more jobs, but what jobs are we going to do ? Make cars? Wait no, Mexico, Japan, Korea, and China have that tied up. Clothes? No, China, Taiwan, Indonesia, Malaysia have that tied up. How about electronics and computers? Be serious, Dell computers outsourced all of its manufacturing 6 or more years ago, the only thing that is done here is putting the parts in a box. Wait, I know, we could all be customer service reps. No? You mean India, Panama are now the countries with the largest call centers in the world? Oh, it can’t be all bad. I’m sure we can find some sort of good paying job here in the States. I know, we can all go work at McDonalds, Burger King, Applebees, and various other restaurants. With competitive wages, benefit packages, and great health insurance where could we go wrong? I don’t know maybe the fact that we’ll be eating 15000 calorie burgers and be dropping like flys from massive heart attacks? But call my cynical.
Who do we blame for all of our jobs being outsourced to other countries, our manufacturing going over seas or offshore and our growing waistbands? Look in the mirror..
oooh sexy, ok now stop…
You (we) voted the people in office who provided the incentives for companies to find cheaper labor and increase profit by breaking the backs of underdeveloped mal-nourished people who have yet to unionize. But come on, it’s a free-market economy and these big companies are just trying to compete on the global market, can’t we give them a break?
By break I mean break the bank, as in our financial institutions that have loaned out massive amounts of money to people who knew they couldn’t afford to make the realistic payment on a house. They want us, the tax payers, to pay for a) the greedy banks who knew better, and b) the optimistic moron who threw caution to the wind. Lets blame everyone else but ourselves. Its time that both of these two entities learn to own up to their own responsibilities. What is the meaning of the price of Freedom? One meaning is simple: the price of Freedom is taking responsibility for your actions. Are we a country of people who are not responsible for ourselves? A country whose people allow their government to tell us what to do, where to work and where to live because they know what’s good for us?
Now before you right me off as a stereotyper of these loans lets address the legitimacy. Begin run-on sentence: I understand that yes, you could have worked at Ford, just gotten a 30 year mortgage ( 20% ARM and 80% fixed at 6%) and suddenly the ARM that you had so planned on refinancing just shot up to 22% interest rate and you’ve got to find some way of doing something about it before they foreclose on it but right before you started thinking about it you got laid off because you just couldn’t afford to buy one more car on the X-Plan and Ford didn’t make its quarterly numbers yet again on the massive 15 mile per gallon vehicles they continue to push out on the market, or maybe you just took out a 2nd mortgage on your home because you needed to send your kid to college and you were just trying to keep them from having to take on student loans that they would have to pay back soon as they had graduated and moved back in with you again because they couldn’t get a job with a degree they received, now they planned on working with you at the Ford plant so they could get their feet on the ground with their English degree and a minor in Russian Literature, but now both of you are out of a job and your stuck between a rock and a hard place.
That’s one hell of a wake up call, but here’s rub: its your responsibility, not mine, to keep up with your own finances. If you can’t take on more debt, don’t. If you were meaning to refinance that ARM but just didn’t get to it why not? Were you taken advantage of by the lending institution? Maybe. But look, if you didn’t do your due diligence and research types of loans or you were the type of person that did not quality for an A loan because you had previously not been fiscally responsible enough to have good credit, why should I have remorse or sorrow for you? Because you had to have your house now and not wait until you could save up I am to suffer? As Eisenhower said,
Another factor in maintaining balance involves the element of time. As we peer into society’s future, we – you and I, and our government – must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering for, for our own ease and convenience, the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without asking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow.
I do believe in a better tomorrow but we’re looking at a very insolvent today. I want you to find a new job and be able to take responsibility for your own actions. Because of that, here is my path to righting the United States.
1. We do not bail out the financial institutions that are flopping.
2. We stop allowing financial institutions to have overseas countries (China) underwrite our loans.
3. We do force financial institutions to refi the customers that they knowingly misled to a reasonable loan instead of allowing them to foreclose.
4. We infuse our education system and job re-training programs in this country. Those who have lost jobs need to be able to find these magical “poof” jobs. The only way to do that is to re-train them to do something else. This I’m willing to pay for, because having another working citizen paying taxes only increases my chances of actually being able to retire at 65 and being able to take my social security that I’ve been paying on since I was 16.
4b. By retraining our countrymen we allow them to stand tall and take responsibility and own up to their debt.
5. NATO: Guess what, no longer will the US be the primary financial backer, its time for everyone to step up.
6. Foreign Aid to countries who only subside on it: No more. The money is needed here in the United States to pay down our National Debt and buy back our Country from China.
7. Iraq? This is a multifaceted problem. Money, Terrorists, Oil, Freedom.
7a. Money: War Bonds. We’ve done it before, lets do it again, war bonds allow the country to borrow money from its own citizens and not other countries.
7b. Terrorists: Time and time again we’ve learned that logic does not work with brainwashed fanatics, you can’t talk it out of them. No tolerance policy, no more human rights issues, they are not going to provide it to you when they blow up your plane. Unfortunately to some people the only way to talk is with aggressive action.
7c. Oil: We have to get out of the middle east. In the 1960’s our President put forth a mission to put a man on the moon in 10 years. Its time to have another mission, freedom from Foreign Oil Dependency.
7d. Freedom to Iraq. We have to pull out once the government is stable. Pulling out before then will cause a civil war and the same freedoms that they had enjoyed will be gone.
8. Balanced Budget: seriously we have a bunch of morons who earmark everything throw money left and right because it’s the US government. Its time we run the gauntlet on the budget and start killing stupid programs. We need to help ourselves to be able to help the rest of the world.
9. Reinvest in public transportation nationwide. This goes hand in hand with item 7c. We are too dependent on cars to get from point A to point B. Go anywhere in Europe and you will find that this is not the case, hell they don’t even have fat people in the Netherlands they have great public transportation and they ride bikes.
10. Healthcare: Universal healthcare is not the answer it causes higher taxes and less interest in research and development because of the lack of incentives. We fix the run-away frivolous law suits, we stop the drug companies from spending millions on marketing their new drug to doctors thus driving the cost of the drug higher. I’m serious about this, on a typical day a drug rep will go to 5-10 offices bringing trays of food, free samples, pens, pencils, tickets to expensive events all to sway the specific doctor into pushing their drug they are representing.
Pharmaceutical marketing is an obvious place to start. Drug companies invest $7 billion yearly in marketing to physicians.
How does that grab you for waste? Why not stop marketing drugs like this and start charging less for drugs.
Is this plan the end all be all of resolving our problems? No. Is it a bit drastic in some cases? Yes. But think about this, what is the cost of doing nothing? What is the cost of continuing to run a rapidly increasing well-fare state? Its time that we as a country start thinking smart financially so that we may once again prosper and the dollar can regain its value. Obviously none of these 3 candidates we have are going to act fiscally responsible and we’ll once again be voting for the one that can do the least amount of damage. As long as people continue to question and not immediately accept we may be ok, but when we turn complacent and do nothing, we’ll continue to see our freedoms erode away. (And when I say erode away, I mean Jim Carey “errroooding”)
(5 votes, average: 3 out of 5)
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The pizza must be too spicy dad….
Tonight a father and son sat at my bar. The boy was only sixteen but I made an exception, it was late and there was almost no one else in the place. They placed their orders Bud light and root beer, and I went back to stocking the beer cooler. When my back was turned they commenced with the usual small talk, how’s school, how’s work, etc. Their pizza came and this must have been the fathers queue to launch into the more serious part of the conversation.
” Son, your mother and I are going to get a divorce”. I’ve heard a lot of things said at my bar, but this was a first. Out of respect, I did my best to look like I was ignoring the whole thing. ” It’s for the best. We don’t love each other and never really have, or at least not that I can remember. But hell, life goes on, right?” I took this opportunity to glance at the boy, and he was crying, not making a sound, just tears on his cheeks and a sick look on his face. The man flagged me down and I dutifully came over with more drinks.
The father looked over at his son and noticed that he didn’t look to well. “What’s wrong son?” ” I don’t know dad, they must have just put too many peppers on my pizza. ” They finished eating in silence and I brought them their bill. It was settled and just as I was about to leave, the father asked me “So that waitresses over there, the blond, is she single? ” I think that’s what really drove it home for the boy. It made it all real, his whole world as he knew it was just taken from him. The tears started again and the two walked out of my bar.
Nuclear Meltdown
3/4 oz. tequila
1/2 oz. cognac
1/2 oz. passion fruit syrup
Shack well with ice and strain into a shot glass.
(3 votes, average: 4.67 out of 5)
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I’m writing this at 2:45 AM. I’m supposed to be awake in a little over an hour.
I’ve had about 2 hours sleep tonight.
See, when I got to work yesterday at 2 PM I expected I would be going to work today at the same time. Then, a coworker who is also training a group at The Job let me know that he was being forced to work on a separate project, and since I was co-training with someone else he asked if there was any way I could take his class for the next two days.
Classes that start at 6AM. Meaning I have to be there at 5.
After not going to bed until around 4 for the past two weeks.
Oh, and my manager told him to come to us for this.
I got about an hour and a half at around 10 PM, and I’m going to try to get some more sleep after finishing this. This will be a long, long day.
Out.
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