Postpourri - Blogger Play, Licked Manikins, Cops and Cow Clocks

If you don't pay attention to the informational messages Blogger gives you when you create a post, or you don't use Blogger, Blogger Play is as much fun as they claim. It was fun to watch what people looked for on search engines, and it's fun to watch what they upload for pictures. Although I have to stress, the pictures are often nfsw. It reminds me a lot of when I used to run an application to make sure we weren't getting uploaded student porn on the website I worked for until last year (millions of hits, so lots of uploads) and occasionally got images like a boyfriend doing a top down strip tease, or female students licking manikin breasts. Be still your horny hearts. You don't ever get to see it - there are privacy rules.

Technology is not living up to my expectations. I put my headphones on the other day, and truly expected the music to just start and play something I wanted to hear. I was just sitting there, waiting for it.

Pooteewheet and Eryn caught a rabbit. They took the dog outside in the morning and scared the beasty, which promptly leapt at the wire fence, stranding itself halfway through, about six inches above the ground. Too far to get any leverage. My wife made me come outside and guard it from cats and foxes and polar bears displaced by global warming until she could get gloves on and push it free. It was fine, although deserving of a Darwin award. Kyle tells me this is not an uncommon event, and the rabbit should feel fortunate not to have bounced off the fence and directly into the jaws of a physics-savvy greyhound.

The new issue of the Twin Cities Imbiber is online, featuring Big Sky Brewery and cooking with coffee.

If you search for a ride on the Minnesota Zephyr on Google, you will discover the train is powered by AtomicForce. I saw "Atomic Train" on SciFi and it sucked, so I'm looking for a good B&B instead.

Robert Jordan passed away. If you're not familiar with him, he was the author of the Wheel of Time series that has been slowly accumulating more and more time between books with every release - almost ironic. I quit reading around book 4 or 5 because I couldn't remember what the hell had happened in the previous book by the time the next one came out. I said to a friend, and this is almost verbatim, "He's going to die before he finishes these. I'm not going to read them anymore. I'm not going to read any unfinished series ever again. Robert Jordan has ruined them for me." And since then, I have never read a series, on purpose, that isn't complete with the exception of Harry Potter - and I read the first one by accident. Said friend bought me a f-ing dragon book by Terry Goodkind, and I think he meant it in good faith, but based on the earlier conversation, I was almost certain he was being an a-hole. It sits on the shelf, unread. To give you a timeline perspective, The Wheel of Time is unfinished, and I sent Dan'l the first one, used, paperback, from the Uptown book store, to his ship, the U.S.S. Tarawa, during Gulf I, in 1991, 16 years ago.

She Says thought the man who died after internet gaming for three (3) days might in some ways resemble me, given I have talked about "gaming weekends" in the past. I pointed out that while my gaming weekends may have actually lasted three days, and involved 16 gallon kegs of beer for only three people, we did on occasion venture up from the gameboard to drink said beer and to eat a buffalo burger near the Res.

Speaking of which, Pooteewheet and I went to Superbad (a spoiler below). I'd recommend it. It's a teen sex comedy, and slightly offensive in the beginning, but the pace just builds and builds and it gets funnier and funnier. I loved it. Near the part of the movie where the action gets the fastest, the kids are stopped by two cops and about to be framed, there's dialog for a while, things get tense and more tense, and then one of them just runs like a bat out of hell. This scene is so much funnier if you've sat on a porch in Mobridge, SD, drunk, watching a pair of cops pull over a car full of Native Americans. Much to the cops' annoyance, there's snow falling, the Res residents are twitchy, and the drunk idiots on the porch closest to them are playing a Mexican Hat Dance Mooing cow alarm clock over and over and over and over. In a moment of distraction - maybe it's the snow, maybe it's the cow clock - the Native Americans make a break for it, sprinting off at a speed the cops can't hope to match given the icy road. End result - within ten seconds there's not a Native American in sight, there's an abandoned car from the Res, there are two very grumpy looking cops, and there are two drunk idiots on the porch playing a moo clock and laughing so hard it's probably an arrestable offense. I applaud them for their restraint in not hauling us in, though I suspect it had more to do with not wanting our testimony on record.