Tues­day the 30th I emailed the OR DOJ about the mixup:

Just passed by the TV, my wife had on CNN and I noticed a scroll that said, “Sen­a­tor Strom Thur­mond Endorses Cloning.” I’m not a fol­lower of pol­i­tics, news or much of any­thing, so I’m sure there is lot more to the story, but all I could think was, “Of course he endorses it, he’s like 100 and on the way out and he never did get to be president!”

Made a lit­tle trip to Augusta this evening. Din­ner out at Damon’s, our favorite place for ribs. While dri­ving on the by-pass on the south­ern side of Aiken, I got behind a Sub­ur­ban that seemed to be a lit­tle late on the brakes and a lit­tle late on the start from a light, plus he did a lit­tle lane drift­ing as well. When I stopped behind him at the next light I noticed the dri­vers arm explor­ing the over­head con­sole area, a light went on, then off again, and of course we were a lit­tle slow leav­ing that light because we were busy futz­ing with some­thing else. It was then that I noticed the paper dealer plate on the back. It was start­ing to sprin­kle and the sun was going down, I hope he/she knew where the wiper and light switches are. For­tu­nately they turned right when I turned left so I wasn’t behind them when they started look­ing for the switches.

I’m not sure it is all together act­ing cor­rectly. When you have the cam­era on to take pic­tures it goes to “sleep” after two min­utes. The lens retracts and to take a pic­ture you have to turn it back on. There is a sleep mode set­ting, but it has no effect on when this hap­pens. I read the man­ual it seems the sleep thing just shuts off the LCD dis­play after 30 seconds.…hmm I won­der if I use the LCD would it go to sleep and not have to be turned back on. I’ll experiment.

I’m back. With the Sleep mode on the LCD goes blank at 30 sec­onds and then after 2 min­utes the lens retracts and off the cam­era goes, no won­der they are so proud of their power con­sump­tion on the web page, it’s built in. I think I need to start sav­ing my scheck­les for a dif­fer­ent one.

Look­ing for songs for my May CD Mix. I started look­ing for songs with the word din­ner in it. Searched far and wide into the nooks and cran­nies of the inter­net using Bear­share. There was one song I was inter­ested in that seemed elu­sive. It was a Suzanne Vega song enti­tled “Tom’s Din­ner.” I finally snagged not one, but two ver­sions. When I played it, much to my sur­prise I rec­og­nized it, cool, I even liked it. But tragedy struck when I paid atten­tion to the words.…it was Tom’s Diner, the restau­rant type, not the meal, sheesh.

I can’t remem­ber why I rented it, must have been a fawn­ing review on some site or some­thing, but Rock Star has been sit­ting on my cof­fee table for about a month. This is a bad sign, since it has been lay­ing there ready to be watched, The Harder They Come, Apoc­a­lypse Now, Heist, Blaz­ing Sad­dlesand The Cen­ter of the World have been watched and returned to Net­flix. See­ing as it was the only one in the house at the moment, I decided to watch it. I watched the lit­tle 10 minute behind the scenes thing while I waited on Donna to join me. I almost didn’t watch the movie — Wednesday’s Law & Order was cued up in the VCR — but I said I’ll give it 15 min­utes. Mark Wahlberg with long hair seemed to old for the part, and in spite of my eager­ness to bail, we watched the whole movie. Hints of Spinal Tap, com­bined with a heap­ing dose of irony and lots of 80’s metal music over­came the tired ass plot line. In the end I enjoyed the 103 min­utes spent with it.

I feel so cheap, so used. Manip­u­lated by the Hol­ly­wood machine. I should have been watch­ing IFC Fri­days on Bravo, but instead I watched a lamo movie and liked it.

Deja Vu all over again. Got a sec­ond copy of THTC from Net­flix today and sat down to watch it. Started at chap­ter 17, a lit­tle before it crashed last time. Got to 18 and it hap­pened again, same spot, one hour and 14 min­utes in and the pic­ture just froze. Couldn’t fast for­ward, noth­ing. Tried going to the main menu and pick­ing the next chap­ter, nope. After a few other attempts I took the movie to the PC and played it there, and it stopped at the same spot as the Tosi­hba in the liv­ing room.

This time I wrote a blurb to the cus­tomer ser­vice folks, instead of just click­ing on the unplayable link. We’ll see what hap­pens. While I was there I noticed that they still list a movie I sent back 1–1/2 to 2 weeks ago. Hope another one hasn’t got lost in the mail, they’ll think I’m keep­ing them.

Just on the infin­i­tes­i­mal chance that some­one who is read­ing this, is con­sid­er­ing hav­ing some screen print­ing done and is think­ing of hav­ing The T-Shirt Shoppe in Aiken, South Car­olina do the work, DON’T.
Two rea­sons:
1) He will put a lit­tle change, barely notice­able twist on your design. The only per­son who will see it will be the designer of the shirt. I can’t be sure of this, but know­ing this type of indi­vid­ual, it is prob­a­bly so that if for what ever rea­son this design takes off and sells mil­lions, he can come back and demand a cut of the prof­its, because, he’ll claim it wouldn’t have sold as well if his twist was not there.
2) He will con­vince you to pay up front by offer­ing a “dis­count” and once he has the money he will only print the shirts under pres­sure. Gen­tle reminders don’t work, you have to go and demand your shirts on such & such day. Then when you go to pick them up, he will invari­ably be print­ing right then and you’ll end up watch­ing him print the last of your shirts.

I know this because I was a first hand expe­ri­ence of #1 twice and #2 once and now the Pres­i­dent of the Master’s Miata Club can say he has expe­ri­enced #2.

This is a rant on them as well as myself. I tooted my own horn yes­ter­day about how I learned my The T-Shirt Shoppe les­son, well I hope I have learned my WebSticker.com les­son. I went to them to pro­duce the Barn­door Fan Club sticker a few month’s back for the price. Their quote was 15% less than my ol’ faith­ful in town. I went with it. It took like a week and a half of emails cor­rect­ing proofs until I thought we had it right. When I got the stick­ers the logo was smaller than the proof and it was slightly off cen­ter. I called and com­plained and it turns out the designer for­got to men­tion that an 1/8″ of unprint­able are was required all around. The off cen­ter was slight and I was told “it was within accept­able indus­try stan­dards.” They knocked a 1/3 off the price, so I kept them. It took over 2 weeks of email to get the right proof this time and I even sent them the Adobe Illus­tra­tor file of the logo! We’ll see what hap­pens when I get them.

6 month den­tist clean­ing and check-up today. I’ve got another cav­ity on #5. Had one last time on the same tooth. Delores the hygien­ist said that I have a line of decal­ci­fi­ca­tion and as that hap­pens the enamel gets soft and cav­i­ties form. Oh goodie. The den­tist came in and started pok­ing around, while he had his hands in my my mouth he was giv­ing the hygien­ist com­ment to write in my file. He was using words like buckle and mar­gin, was he talk­ing about teeth?

I hap­pened to catch just a part of this movie on one of the cable chan­nels a month or so ago and my wife and I decided to rent it. George Clooney for her, Nicole Kid­man for me. That’s right, The Peace­maker and as it turns out we saw the best 10 min­utes on TV. (The part where our main char­ac­ters are intro­duced to each other.) I stopped believ­ing when they start pass­ing around pic­tures of the train wreck taken from a satel­lite. If we have pic­tures being taken of every square inch of the coun­try of Rus­sia to be able to pick out this par­tic­u­lar bit of train track, why don’t we have pic­tures of the rob­bery train and work back from there to track the truck with the nukes? George and Nicole out­run, not just one, but two explo­sions. We are treated to the usual red LED count­down clock as they try to dis­arm the bomb. The only action movie clich? we missed was the Fruit Cart. Then again, that might have been in there while they were tear­ing up down­town Vienna and I had glazed over and missed it. Oh, and I fell sorry for the cit­i­zens of Vienna as it appears they have no police force at all.

The only movie left on the cof­fee table to watch now is Pur­ple Noon. 1960 French film based on The Tal­ented Mr. Rip­ley books. I actu­ally liked the Matt Damon — Jude Law flick based on these char­ac­ters, so we’ll see.

Had the nurse at work take my pres­sure this morn­ing. Down a bit, but not enough, so I called the Doctor’s office and they said take 2 a day of the med­i­cine they gave me. Tomor­row I get a CAT Scan of my abdomen to see what they can see. I want to take the test so we can find out what is wrong, but then again I don’t want to know, you know.

Nearly nor­mal today, I guess the BP med­i­cine is doing it’s job. I even had some moments where I felt quasi-normal this after­noon. The PA called this evening with the results of my CAT scan. There were no traces of kit­ties — she said there were no abnor­mal­i­ties! OK, so why did my BP go sky high? Blood work fine, which elim­i­nated liver or kid­ney prob­lems. CAT fine, no tumors or weird inter­nal things. I have a stress/echo test sched­uled for the 18th (soon­est I could get in) to see if my ticker is mal­func­tion­ing. If that is clean, that only leaves like one thing, my head. No new stress induc­ers have been applied. So is it 46.5 years of aggra­va­tions have build­ing up to a melt­down? I would have thought that rant­ing here would be tak­ing care of that. Or male menopause? Or a gene that mutated?