My pyrate name is Iron tom rackham

A pirate's life isn't easy; it takes a tough person. That's okay with you, though, since you a tough person. You have the good fortune of having a good name, since Rackham (pronounced RACKem, not rack-ham) is one of the coolest sounding surnames for a pirate. Arr!

Get your own pirate name from piratequiz.com.

Froggy

I've got a frog in my front courtyard. He's very loud because I can hear him over the TV way in the back. I guess he's looking for Mrs. Frog. He's out there ribbiting away every night and today because it was foggy (rhymes with froggy), he was making his music, so I recorded it.

Click here for Froggy of Dreamland.

This is my 100th post.

Someone asked me if having a frog making noise was annoying. I said no and then Froggy vanished for about a week and I missed him.

Tonight he came back, so I went outside in the faint hope of getting a photo of him, when I know he's hiding behind the fountain.

BUT!!!! I made a noise and he answered and then I had a conversation with Froggy which I guarantee will make you laugh.

Click here for "My Conversation with Froggy".

Triskaidekaphobia

This is my 99th post and it's been a pretty good Friday the 13th for me... Much better than usual. I got in the 2 Cents again because I like to send in a funny answer and most everyone else is serious...

Mitt Romney - Great White Varmint Hunter

...The former Massachusetts governor, Mitt Romney has called himself a lifelong hunter, yet his campaign acknowledged that he has been on just two hunting trips -- one when he was 15 and the other just last year.

Campaigning in Indianapolis on Thursday, Romney said he has hunted small game since his youth.
"I'm not a big-game hunter. I've made that very clear," he said. "I've always been a rodent and rabbit hunter. Small varmints, if you will...
Yosemite Sam has a couple of comments about Mitt and his Varmint Hunting - Comment 1 - Comment 2.
Another intelligent cartoon based political statement made by Mitt.



My Political Prediction for Mitt -

Mitt is still toast - his latest goofballism - On Monday afternoon (5/21/07), McCain made fun of Romney's evolving positions on other issues when asked about the immigration controversy during a conference call with bloggers.

"In the case of Gov. Romney, you know, maybe I should wait a couple of weeks and see if it changes, because it's changed in less than a year from his position before," McCain said. "And maybe his solution will be to get out his small-varmint gun and drive those Guatemalans off his lawn. I don't know."

The jab squeezed in references to two past controversies: Romney's backtrack on an April comment that he'd "been a hunter pretty much all my life" -- he later said he had shot "varmints, if you will," such as rabbits, as a child; and a 2006 report in The Boston Globe that a landscaping firm Romney hired to maintain his home for years had hired illegal immigrants.

Giant Rat of Sumatra

I hate rats and I hate rat cousins. Earlier this week, I smelled something bad and then flies started showing up. Luckily, I have my Orkin Man's cel phone number, so I called him up and he came over in about an hour. There was a big dead rat in the crawl space behind my comfy chair, so when he opened up the vent, the smell became really bad. The dirty, stinking rat was way under the floor, so he took a long pole, duct taped a glue trap to it and snagged the rat. He asked me if I wanted to see it and I decided to go check some email. He said that if I had waited another day or so, the stink would have lingered a lot longer. The moral of this story is: Don't poison a rat, but if someone else does, be sure to have the Orkin Man's cel phone number.

P.S. This year, 2007, hasn't been a very good year for me so far. Lots of things have broken, lots of frustrations, lots of problems and then a Dead Rat. I've decided that the Dead Rat is it. No more bad things will happen to me for the rest of the year, cuz it's got a lot of making up to do... So that's it!

2007 NCAA Final Four

Last year, I predicted the outcome of the final 4 in the March Madness, NCAA Basketball Tournament by using the Mascot theory. This year, I have a monetary interest, so luckily for me, I can manipulate the outcome and still make logical Mascot vs. Mascot sense, such as it is...

We have the UCLA Bruins vs. the Florida Gators again, just like the championship game in 2006. Last year I said that Gators would eat a LSU Tiger, but that's only if they get them into the water and I had a Tiger eat a baby Bruin. This year, we've got a real life king size Grizzly Bear, which can put a big time chomping on any Florida Gator (I saw a demo on the Discovery Channel and a bear can bite right through the head of an alligator).

Then we have the Ohio St. Buckeyes vs. the Georgetown Hoyas. A Buckeye is a giant tree and I don't care what the Georgetown website says, according to Wikipedia, a Hoya is a small flowering plant, so obviously, a giant tree defeats all small flowers. That's an easy pick.

So in the final game, we have Bruins vs. Buckeyes and as you can see from this photo, the giant tree will fall and crush any bear... So GO BUCKEYES!!

UFOs, Alien Kidnapping & the Hindenberg

News Item: France became the first country to open its files on UFOs Thursday when the national space agency unveiled a website documenting more than 1,600 sightings spanning five decades. The online archives, which will be updated as new cases are reported, catalogues in minute detail cases ranging from the easily dismissed to a handful that continue to perplex even hard-nosed scientists. "It is a world first," said Jacques Patenet, the aeronautical engineer who heads the office for the study of "non-identified aerospatial phenomena." French UFO Website

I'm not sure if I really was kidnapped by aliens, but the story below is true.

When I was 13 years old, I would take the same bus every day to school. I had to walk about 10 minutes to the corner to the bus stop (AC Transit) that came around 7:15am. one day, I left at the usual time and I got to the bus stop and waited and waited and waited and finally a bus came and it was the 10:30am bus. I've never worn a watch, so I had no idea what time it was, but somehow about 3 hours went missing from my consciousness, so I've always just figured I was kidnapped by aliens and they couldn't deal with me, so they just put me back.

Or maybe that's why I am the way I am?

I once thought I saw a UFO, but I figured out it was someone from the other side of the street that shot off a Roman Candle right over the top of our house.

I did try to create a UFO on Halloween, but it's probably lucky my plan failed. For some reason, when I was a kid, the Chemistry sets you could buy had lots of dangerous chemicals (life was so much more fun back in the good olde days, eh?) and I figured out how to make Hydrogen gas and in my wierd mind, I thought I would take a couple of dry cleaning plastic bags doubled up for strength, fill them up with hydrogen gas that I was going to make in the garage, put a gondola full of lighter fluid underneath, make a slow burning fuse, which I was able to make with my chemistry set and float it up over the town on Halloween night and when it blew up in a Hindenberg Jr. like explosion, I would see the story in the paper the next day. What an excellent idea, eh? Make hydrogen gas in the garage with a car full of gasoline..

Well, lucky for me and the rest of my family, I failed miserably. and I was truely miserable afterwards. as I was putting a glass funnel into the rubber stopper which I was going to use to mix the chemicals, the glass tube broke (I didn't know you were supposed to use Glycerin to make the glass slide through the hole) and I jammed about 2 inches of the tube into my right hand right between the thumb and index finger in the nice fleshy part and then it broke off making a nice tube where all the blood could nicely squirt out easily and quite a lot of it did flow.

My Dad was watching football and as calmly as I could (this part is fuzzy in my mind because it's so long ago, so maybe it was a panicky scream?) said I needed some help. We went down to the hospital, I had to wait for what seemed like a really long time with a bloody towel wrapped around my hand, the doctor shot me up with some anesthetic and in about 2 seconds stuck a jagged glass tube held in tweezers in front of my face and said: "Is this it?" Those doctors are such jokers!! Since is was scientific glass, it has lead in it, so it will show up in an X-Ray and there was one small piece left in my hand and it floated around for about 10 years, sometimes coming near the surface and causing pain when I shifted gears while driving. Thankfully, it's stuck somewhere deep inside and it just leaves me alone.

The moral of this story is: If you ever get the idea to recreate the Hindenberg disaster, just watch the film of it bursting into flames and think about the "Humanity".

Hindenberg Video

My Golf Towel Collection

I've been collecting golf towels for a long time. I liked them because they were colorful, had cool logos, said something about the location and scenery and are usually about $10-15. Over the years, a lot of family & friends have helped me add to my collection, although I think I picked up the most remote towel myself from the Alice Springs Golf Club in the Outback of the Northern Territories in Australia.

Jesse Isotalo was in Sao Paulo Brazil and had hired a taxi all day for $50 (Sao Paulo is about 600 square miles) and drove to every sporting good store he could find (it was winter and all the golf courses were closed) and all they had was soccer & NFL stuff. He finally went to an embroidery shop and had them make up a fake Sao Paulo Golf Club towel.

My brother, Larry, was living in France, where they don't play much golf. He took a train, a bus and then walked 5 miles to a private club - Golf de Saint-Cloud. They almost didn't let him in because in their French mentallity, they didn't understand why anybody would come all that way just to get a golf towel.

Click here for the complete collection

I've got Golf Towels from: Australia, Bahrain, Brazil, France, Hong Kong, Japan, New Zealand, South Africa, South Korea & US - California, Florida, Hawaii, Illinois, Montana, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Tennessee & Utah.

Four Things About Me You Might Not Know

Four Jobs I've had in my life:
Worked on an Army Fort fixing computers
Tour Guide on Amtrak
Hardware & Software Technical Support
Event Planner

Four movies I would watch over and over:
Maltese Falcon
Ferris Beuller's Day Off
Jurrasic Park
Used Cars

Four Places I have lived:
El Cerrito CA
Salinas CA
Hayward CA
Castro Valley CA

Four TV shows I watch:
Lost
24
Heroes
The Office

Four Places I have been on vacation:
Alice Springs & Great Barrier Reef Australia
Yellowstone Park
Grand Canyon
Hawaii

Four of my favorite foods:
Salmon
Filet Mignon
Seafood Salad
Chocolate Ice Cream

Four places I would rather be right now:
Watching the sunset in Lahaina, Hawaii
Watching a movie
Point Lobos State Park
In my comfy chair

Here's what you're supposed to do... and please do not spoil the fun. Hit forward, delete my answers and type in your answers. Then, send this to a whole bunch of people you know INCLUDING the person who sent it to you. The theory is that you will learn a lot of little known facts about those who know you. Remember to send it back to the person who sent it to you.

Raiders of the Lost Ark Mystery

Who is this guy in the yellow box?







This has driven my crazy ever since I saw the "Raiders of the Lost Ark" in 1981, so it's been haunting me for 26 years.

Does anybody out there know Steven Spielberg or Harrison Ford or George Lucas and can ask them for me?

It's in the final few minutes of the movie, when they tell Indy that they have "top experts" investigating the Ark. Maybe it's someone's uncle or father, but why is he just standing in the background not saying anything? Please make a comment if you know.

Q: How Cold Was It This Weekend? (13-Jan-07)

How Cold Was It Jokes

A: It was so cold in Castro Valley that running water in my front courtyard fountain froze.

Here is my photo album link. There are 10 photos in the album.

2008 Presidential Politics

As previously predicted by me, I'm even more sure that neither McCain or Clinton will be the next President. Here are 2 links if you'd like to keep up with the complete roster of candidates from Time Magazine. They call it the Presidential Racing Form...

Democrats

Republicans

They show money, trips to early primary states, book rankings on Amazon.com, etc.

Other links for political theatre viewing are CNN & MSNBC.

Random Stuff to wind down 2006

I'm doing a cull without mercy clean up of my office which hasn't been done since I put in the furniture, so it was due.

I found an envelope with another bunch of collected quotes and new articles from various sources and some that I created, so I'm just going to share them.

The Hormel company, manufacturers of Spam, celebrated the 50th anniversary of the luncheon meat by designating the town's July 4th celebrations as "Spam Days". Among the festivities were a "Spam-o-rama" cookoff and a "Salute to Spam" air show. A bitter strike against Hormel ended in September and not everyone has made up.

"Hormel has co-opted the Fourth of July holiday and turned it into a glorifcation of pig meat in a can," said Jim Guyette, former leader of the union. T-shirts reading "Scab City, USA" and "Cram the Spam" were seen alongside company-issue Spamwear.

One of my all time favorite TV shows - "You're travelling through another dimension. A dimension, not only of sight and sound, but of mind. A journey into a wonderous land whose boundaries are that of imagination. Next stop - the Twilight Zone!" - Rod Serling

Laissez les bon temps rouler! - pronounced: "Lay-say lay bon tom rule-ay!"

San Francisco Chronicle - Friday, December 6, 1991
Hayward Tom responded to our call for infomation on various football handicapping systems. He said he uses the Visi-Calc program for an Apple II PC to enter weekly data and compute his picks. At the 11 week mark, he was humming along nicely at 64.8%, he said.

Tom added: "Good luck and I'm glad to see that Larry Stumes is over 50%. I used to use the "Stumes Factor" to pick my games. If he picked the opposite way than I did, I was sure to win.

Tom was referring to back to an infamous off-year that Chronicle racing handicapper Stumes had when he was doing the football predicting.

1. If you don't let anybody in, no one can hurt you.
2. The more complex the mind, the greater the need for simplicity of play - Capt. Kirk
3. 25 G's is a lot of cabbage. Where are we going to glom onto it? Pony up the dough
4. Special words from 2001 - Nabonga, Sock the Weasel, Uncle Gruesome, Nothing but trouble, Side Effects and Wake the Banshee
5. Pardon my side effects
6. A bad Psychic is better than a good Astrologer
7. A little kid & his mom are heading into a grocery store and he says: "No basket for me" and she points and says: "BASKET!!" and he starts crying and gets into the basket. (true story)
8. Turning negative thoughts into positive actions
9. There's more spin control around Dan Quayle than Minnesota Fats ever needed
10. Question to TLC in 1990 - Have you always been this way? TLC: "The older I get, the funnier I get."
11. Tickle my fancy and I'll follow you anywhere
12. Crossfire 17-Aug-88 - Senator Alan Simpson: "You're looking for something that isn't there. You're looking into George Bush's head."
13. Imagination is more important than knowledge - Albert Einstein
14. A riddle from a Sherlock Holmes movie - Sherlock Holmes Faces Death (1943) - Who's was it? His who is gone. Who shall have it? He who shall come. What shall be the month? The last from the first.
15. Character name for some future story - Martin Stumbles, Esq.
16. Chinese/Russian Detective - Won Wong Steppe
17. Those people want me, but they can't touch me because the old man love my ass
18. An old alias - Joe Cose. Jocose \jo-kos\ adj 1: given to jokes and jesting 2: characterized by joking

2 Cents Question: Can the US regain its standing in the world?

I'm not sure what will happen in the next 2 years, but I expect the worst and hope for the best.

I'm not sure I'm going to vote in the 2008 Presidential election because anybody who wants to be President with the current situation might not be the smartest cookie. As Mr. T would say: "I pity the fool who wants to be the next President!"

A Milestone, I hope...

On 2-Dec-06 my worst nightmare happened. I am hurt, bruised, sprained, but OK. I can't go into details, but just for me, I'm putting a reminder in my blog. I want to mark this date to remind me. I'm feeling a lot happier even though it's painful.

That's it for now.