My cousin Adam Good got married this weekend and Celeste and I hauled the kids up to Laurel Ridge for the festivities. At the reception Celeste talked me into dancing (a rare event) and below is video proof. Enjoy. (Hat tip to Jeff Martin for tipping me to the video, uh, service).
Last week while I was in Northern Virginia on business I was invited to go with some friends to the Shenandoah Brewing Company in Alexandria to brew some beer. Since brewing beer entails a lot of waiting and sampling the various products brewed at the facility we decided it would be prudent to take a cab there. Anyone from that area can tell you that taking a cab is not as straight forward as it is in other parts of the contiguous United States.
First, you have to wait for the call from the cab driver saying, in barely intelligible English, that he can’t find your location. After giving directions in the same dialect you use when conversing with tech support for your computer, or phone, or DVD player, or MP3 player, or…you get the idea, you’re picked up 1/2 hour past the scheduled time. At that point you give the address of your destination, sit back and enjoy the ride while you wait for him to tell you you’re there when obviously you’re not because you’ve stopped in front of the one remaining vacant lot in the surrounding 300 square miles. Eventually you realize you’re only about a mile from your intended destination so you begin to bark out directions, which should be fairly easy except that every time you say "turn left" the guy turns right. Literally you scream, "No the OTHER left" and he gets all flustered and starts making these guttural click-click noises that mean something on the other side of the world. Here they just mean you know the guys cussing you out but you don’t how, and since you just want to get where you’re going you start talking to him like he’s your four year old kid that you’ve just made cry. "It’s okay Mr. Cab Driver, just take it easy and turn left up there in front of that really bright red sign…the one on your left…NO, THE OTHER LEFT. No, not the green sign, the REEEEED sign. Ah, there you go." Thankfully he manages to avoid hitting the one person in Northern Virginia who walks from one place to another and deposits you at your destination a mere 45 minutes late.
That’s exactly how our trip went last week. We were mildly concerned about getting home because after brewing beer all night we weren’t so sure we’d know right from left and were pretty sure we wouldn’t be speaking intelligible English. Luckily another member of the group showed up late, stayed sober, and gave everyone a ride home. Poor guy had to put up with us demanding a McDonald’s Drive-Thru and then being boxed in when a police cruiser in pursuit of a suspect screeched to a halt at the end of the drive-thru and continued the pursuit by foot.
Having a front row seat to a live episode of COPS! reminded me why I don’t go out any more. Well, that and the rather nasty headache I had the next day. It ends up the stuff we were drinking had something like an 8% alcohol content, which means we were having a kind of 2-for-1 special on regular beer. Add that to the fact that I’m no spring chicken and you have the recipe for a not-so-fresh feeling the next morning.
Despite my day-after discomfort I highly recommend the experience at Shenandoah Brewing. After all, nothing says you HAVE to sample so much of the stuff and it is a really interesting process to watch and participate in. If you have the choice use a designated driver since I’m not entirely confident you’ll get home if you take a cab.
From Boing Boing comes the tale of a guy who allegedly steals some computers and inadvertently posts pictures of himself on flickr for the world to see. From the post:
"Last week a number of computers were stolen from our office in
Vancouver, BC. One of those computers was a shared iMac with
Flickrbooth, an app that automatically uploads photo booth shots to our
flickr account, installed on it.
Just this morning a friend called to tell us that there are photos of
whoever has the computer now in our flickr stream! Obviously the guy
didn’t know he was uploading images of himself and his awesome tattoos."Here’s a link to the shots on the company’s flickr account. Do you know who this guy is? The theft victims and the Vancouver police would love to hear about it. Looks like the SomethingAwful forums are all over the case, too.
Update: A gem in the comments thread:
"There should be a word for this, thinking you’re getting away with
something on the sly while the world laughs at you, anticipating your
inevitable demise — schadendouche?" [beatnik]
To help us understand this exquisite new term (schadendouche) let’s explore its roots.
First we have schadenfreude: a German word meaning ‘pleasure taken from someone else’s misfortune’.
Then we have douche: Douche bag, or simply douche, are considered pejorative terms in Australia, the United States, Canada and New Zealand. The slang usage of the term dates back to the 1960s.[4]
The term may be used in a phrase such as "that guy is such a douche
bag!"
Yes, I think we have a winner and I also imagine that we’ve all had our moments of schadendouche-ism…or would it be schadendouche-ity?
I read this item about a bank robbery in Clemmons this morning because I was just by that bank yesterday. In fact I go by that bank all the time so the story was bound to grab my attention. What kept my attention was this paragraph from the story:
The culprit took an undisclosed amount of money. He was described as a
black man, about 5 feet, 6 inches to 5 feet, 9 inches tall. He was
wearing a blue bathrobe, and his face was covered, authorities said.
Talk about the ultimate in business casual! In days past you could count on thieves to at least wear coveralls, some even with their name tag still stitched on the chest, but today’s Felonious Monks don’t even bother to get dressed. Truly our world is going to hell in a handbasket.
I came across the ad you see to the left on BuzzMachine. To me this is further evidence that I should have gone into advertising. Also, I’m wondering if there’s an endorsement opportunity here for The Turd Man of Alcatraz?
Found via Boyd, this is hilarious to anyone old enough to have seen The Karate Kid back in the day.
Wax on! Wax off!
Some high school seniors in HIlliard, Ohio pulled off a new rendition of an old trick at their school’s football game. In a nutshell they tricked fans of their rival school’s team into holding up black and white plackards in three sections of the stadium that spelled "We Suck" instead of the promised "Go Darby" (see video below). A similar trick was pulled on a much larger scale, and stage, at the 1961 Rose Bowl and in 2004 at the Yale-Harvard game.
The kids who planned this little senior prank said they expected punishment, but they got more than they bargained for. Three days of in school suspension and a ban from all school activities for the remainder of the fall semester. I buy the three days of ISS but banning them for the rest of the fall? This is one of those pranks that should be held up as the right way to carry on a long-standing tradition of senior prankage. No one got hurt, no animals were treated cruelly or unusually, and they didn’t damage any property so why the extreme punishment measures?
By comparison let me share some high school pranks from my day:
Property damage and animal cruelty were features of these pranks. By comparison the kids in Ohio pulled off a prank that was benign and actually required a lot of thinking. I expect they’ll go on to achieve greater things than any of their school’s butt-puckered administrators have.
Some poor kid in Oklahoma is also named Jon Lowder. I know this because he’s a pitcher and appeared in relief in a game covered by the paper in Ada, OK. I hope that when he’s applying for a job or college admission that the folks who Google his name for the background check is not the same person who calls himself the Turd Man of Alcatraz.
What happens when you morph two 41 year old folks who’ve been married for 15 years? The picture to the left is the morphed pictures of my wife, Celeste, and me, Jon. The result is CelJon. Here’s the link to the web page that shows the original pictures and the result. I’m pretty sure our kids are grateful that this isn’t how genetics work.
Want to do your own morph? It’s free at www.morphthing.com.
Believe it or not one of the most popular posts on this blog, out of over 1,000 posts I’ve made, is this one I did on Ernest Angley back in April, 2006. It gets a lot of traffic from people who search the term "Ernest Angley" on Google (six people just this morning) and as you can see from the comments on my post he still has his share of supporters.
Today the folks at Boing Boing pointed to a blog called Televangelists with Toupees and that site ranked good ol’ Ernest’s mop as the number one televangelist toupee. The site claims that Ernest once offered locks of his dead wife’s hair in exchange for a donation and it also has a Youtube video of one of Ernest’s 80s era promos, but I wanted to find a video that would give you an idea of what made him the finest in unintentional late night comedy in the days before cable. Here it is:
Befuddled 