Archive for May, 2008

“Politics makes strange bedfellows” the old saying goes.  But what could be stranger than U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Gene Simmons with Kiss.

Rice was in the Stockholm, Sweden Thursday for an international conference on Iraq. Kiss was there for a sold-out concert on Friday. She was “thrilled” to meet the boys in the band and posed for this picture. After getting her Kiss Army T-shirt, hanging backstage and doing Jagger shots with the band she got back to business having dinner with the Swedish foreign minister.

Rice said her favorite Kiss tune is “Rock and Roll All Nite and Govern Every Day.” 

Here’s the full story from MSNBC.

Jeff Peckman has shown his video proof an Extraterrestrial being.  Is this an alien, or a really well made puppet. Here’s the story from The Denver Post.  Here’s my orignal post:

Should Denver have a city Extraterrestrial Affairs Commission? Jeff Peckman thinks so:

“It is important because if you’re driving down the highway and you saw a crash of a small spaceship and a car or a bus full of kids, you really wouldn’t know what to do.” Peckman said.

The Rocky Mountain News has the full story. Interesting how the newspaper notes: “Peckman, 54, who is single and lives with his parents”. OK. Does he have a tinfoil hat?

Great blog post with pictures of creative ideas for business cards.  The one on the left is for a lawn service company with grass seeds and on the right a divorce lawyer with a card that splits in two.  Here’s the full collection.

School is letting out for the summer vacation all around the US. Back in the late 90’s I wrote a series of articles on JokeWallpaper about my old summer jobs.  Here’s one of the more popular stories….this is a true story:
 

The next summer I finally landed an inside job, working as a busboy at a fancy restaurant: the Fogcutter. The restaurant was in Port Huron, Michigan on the shores of the second largest of the great lakes, Lake Huron. In the summer the tourists would flock to Port Huron to enjoy the lake. They often would swim at the public beach called Lakeside.

This was the summer that a new movie had everybody talking sharks. Steven Spielberg’s JAWS was the hit of the summer. The restaurant owner had decided to capitalize on the frenzy by offering a new menu item. The owner had made arrangements to get shark meat from Florida.

Everyday you could hear the reactions of the customers when they came across the listing on the menu “Fillet of Young Great White Shark $7.95.” They’d asked their waitress about it and occasionally ask me if I was nearby.

I would explain “Yes, it really is shark meat. A very mild tasting fillet broiled in butter and lemon, served with red potatoes and green beans.” I would continue “It really is very tasty and very fresh. It is caught here locally in Lake Huron, right off Lakeside Park.” The gasps often could be heard a couple of tables over.

If the customer balked at the idea of sharks in a fresh water lake I would tell them the story known only to the locals. The story of a couple of marine biologists whose experiments went terribly wrong. Their experiments mutated a Great White Shark that then thrived in fresh water and they accidentally released it into the great lakes.

After one customer commented to the owner about the “story telling busboy”, I found myself spending a lot of time at Lakeside soaking up the sun and looking for another job.

You can read the whole series on Summer jobs by clicking here.

Not one, but TWO stupid crooks. A surveillance camera caught two men breaking into an establishment by throwing boulders through glass. But the plan doesn’t work, and both would-be burglars end up getting knocked out by the boulders — one at a time.

Scott Dixon winner of the 2008 Indianapolis 500 is an enthusiastic user of ChaCha Mobile Answers.  This is a picture of Scott receiving the ChaCha $10,000 award for wining the race and having a ChaCha Egrip on his phone.  Pictured left to right, Brad Bostic, Scott, Bruce Eicher and Susan Marshall. The guy in the background picking up trash in the stands is not identified.

With gas prices flirting with $4.00 a gallon there’s lots of folks looking for fuel efficient cars like hybrids.  The Car Domain Blog found this hybrid listing on AutoTrader.com.  Here’s screen-capture copy if the original is gone.  The listing has way too much information for a car listing.  TMI overload:

“I got this car in Dec 2005 for my new wife 19 and she never got a drivers lic and divorced me in 2007. I never one time drove the car it was damaged and has a rebuilt title. It still needs work because we never complete fixed it. It needs airbags and seatbelts, ( about $500 used ) and the rear battery is not charging due to sitting. If you drive the car it might start charging or you can have a new battery placed in it. I have an extra battery a man sold me. I have an extra engine with 50,000 miles on it I will sell for $300 if u take the car $500 without the car I gave $900 for it. The car needs some paint on doghouse. It has very low mileage and would go 200,000 if fixed more. I got the car to take my cheater wife on trips, but her last trip was with another man so I just drive my new dodge truck & have no need for any car. You can drive the car without the battery working and it might then take charge if the engine forces the charge or the dealer has 144 Volt chargers to try charge it. It gets 61 MPG on the dash reader. It starts and runs good but I never drove it so you might want to tow it home. I am firm on the price. I am 60 years old and have a new wife 20 whos a nurse so she is away doing hospital work and we go no place. She is wife #6 not the one I got the car for. I am going to sell my farm an everything I do not need this car. I have $8000 invested in the car now and need $5000 as I still owe that on the car. No lien on title I got it on credit cards at 30 % interest is why I am selling to cut my interest down. Location is 17 miles west of Bloomington Indiana. Leave a message it will answer LIVE FISH OF INDIANA on the phone.”

Article from the Denver Post on a December party at the Governor’s Mansion thrown by the Colorado Governor’s 22 year old son.  Love the pic of the doin’ shots on a ski.  Only in Colorado, right.

I noticed that the article refers to the house as the “Governor’s Mansion”. 12 years back when I was in TV news our state’s Governor’s press office always chided the news media to not call it the “Governor’s Mansion” but call it the “Governor’s Residence”. They thought the “Mansion” made it sound like the Gov. was some millionaire or something. Of course, he was, but they didn’t want people to be reminded of it. He was a Democrat after all!

Back in 2005 Amazon launched a new service Amazon Mechanical Turk, called Mturk for short. It’s a service to use what’s called “crowd sourcing” to accomplish tasks.  The Wikipedia entry on Mturk describes the service in detail.

The same day Mturk launched at mturk.com I created a parody page at the mis-spelled domain mtruk.com.  Click here to see the Mtruk parody as it appeared in 2005.

The Ambani family built their own private home, a skyscraper, in Mumbai, India.  Full size indoor theater, a room where it can snow, and the first six floors are the garage.  Here’s the full story from Forbes.com. Here’s a second article with a little more detail.

Nothing good comes from being a drunk college student in a convenience store at 2:30AM, especially if there’s an on duty cop there. Plus, lobbing M&M’s at the cop… not a good idea. Here’s the story from the Des Moines Register. I liked this comment from one reader:

 
“Wait until we find out that the officer is allergic to chocolate. Then it becomes assault with a deadly weapon/attempted murder.”

Be sure to read the very last sentence of the story.

There is talk all across the US about the creation of a national ID card or the standardizing of all of the nation’s driver’s licenses. If they do standardize driver’s licenses the US should use the Indiana drivers license as the template. Here in my home state we’ve got the biggest damn driver’s license you’ve ever seen! It’s as big as a jumbo post card. It’s gotta be at least 5″ x 7″ !

Just take a look at this picture of a state cop holding a drivers license. This is a digital photo of a warning sticker that used to be posted on every gasoline pump in the state of Indiana. It warns drivers away from pumping gas and not paying. If you do, you may lose your driver’s license.

This is the real size of our driver’s licenses! Can you believe it? I can’t even fit it in my wallet!

Well….not really. This is a real, un-photoshopped picture. All I can guess is that the ad agency that made the sticker must have decided that the real driver’s license looked too small so they enlarged it. It’s a strange site every time I have to stop and fill up my car.

Here’s the full size version.