They say that imi­ta­tion is the sin­cer­est form of flat­tery, so the folks over at Girls Gone Wild HQ must be pretty happy. I stum­bled onto an infomer­cial for a GGW knock-off this morn­ing called Wild Party Girls. Instead of $9.95 for a video, really usu­ally 2 because they throw in a “free” one, these guys are giv­ing you two DVDs for Free!* (*$5.95 ship­ping and handling)

Not only are the DVDs free, but they are going to toss in a free hat. It is one of those foam trucker hats that have become, for some inex­plic­a­ble rea­son, fash­ion­able again. The hat is bright red with a white front panel. On that white front panel, in match­ing bright red let­ter­ing, are the words “Wild Party Girls.”

It might as well just say “I’m A Loser” on it. This thing screams, “Hey look at me, I’m a schlub! My idea of excite­ment is to watch girls expose their breasts.” The only pur­chasers of these things that can’t be con­sid­ered per­verts are, the peo­ple who aren’t sup­posed to buy them in the first place, boys 17 and under.

Does the buyer of these type of videos think that if he wears that hat around, nubile young women will just lift their shirts and flash him, hop­ing to get a star­ring role in the next series of DVDs?

This hap­pened yes­ter­day morn­ing and then when blog­ging time rolled around in the evening I had for­got all about it (why I remem­bered tonight is a mystery.)

Donna was in the kitchen when a UPS truck pulled into our dri­ve­way. Sar­cas­ti­cally she said, “Go ahead Mr. UPS Truck, feel free to use our dri­ve­way to turn around.” When­ever they deliv­ery stuff to us they just park in the street and traipse across the front lawn. She then said to me, “Go to the door he is brin­ing some­thing to us. Are we expect­ing any­thing?” As I headed to the door I replied, “Who knows?” At any given time there is a pretty good chance we expect­ing some­thing and it turns out we are, just not what he had for us this morning.

As I opened the door he handed me a large enve­lope and promptly spun around back to his truck. As I walked back towards the kitchen Donna asked, “Well, what is it?” “An enve­lope and it is from Citi­Mort­gage,” I answered. Our mort­gage had changed hands to Citi sev­eral months back so we both won­dered what this might be about, they were sell­ing our note again, they decided to call in the note, we were late on a pay­ment, what?

Well inside that UPS deliv­ered enve­lope was a come-on to refi­nance our mort­gage with them! They were offer­ing 6.05 vs. our cur­rent 6.5%. As an incen­tive they were also offer­ing $500 off our clos­ing costs. They were promis­ing about a hun­dred buck a month sav­ing, before fig­ur­ing in the clos­ing costs remain­ing after they chipped in their por­tion. Thanks, but no thanks. Gotta give it to them, sure was impres­sive to have it UPS delivered.

About 2 weeks ago I got a really sharp pain when eat­ing some pop corn. The next day I called the den­tist to set up an appoint­ment to have him look at it. The appoint­ment was for the next week, but before it came around I got a hack­ing cough that would have made den­tal work nigh impos­si­ble, so I put it off for another week. Besides it only hurt a lit­tle if I chewed on that side.

The appoint­ment was for this com­ing Thurs­day. Appar­ently the big pain was me crack­ing a tooth, as yes­ter­day while munch­ing on some peanut M&M’s (the Jedi mix) I com­pleted the destruc­tion and cracked off about 1/4 of ol’ #3. I thought that bite was kind of crunchy.

Although once the tooth is broke the pain goes away and I told them I could wait until my orig­i­nal Thurs­day appoint­ment, they had a can­cel­la­tion this after­noon, so in I went. The tem­po­rary is in place and I had to swear on a stack of bibles that there would not be a repeat of last August before they would let me out the door.

If you look to the right, just under Sturgeon’s Law, you will see a new addi­tion — a list of Radio Par­adise’s Recently Played Songs. Some help­ful soul over on the RP forums cre­ated a file that scrapes the recently played page and turns it into a feed. Now all that was needed was a way to dis­play that info on my page.

First I tried the RSS­Feed plu­gin. After a bit wrestling I got it to work, with one buga­boo, the only time it updated (read the feed) was when I rebuilt the index page. Not refreshed, rebuilt, as in post­ing an entry. This meant if you checked my blog in the after­noon, the songs listed as recently played would have been heard about 20 hours before. I guess if you are a rock, that is real recent, but in human terms that is like so yes­ter­day. And in Inter­net terms, with recent mean­ing mil­lisec­onds, that is unacceptable.

The sec­ond attempt is using another plu­gin, GETXML that looked promis­ing. It took a lit­tle more mon­key­ing that the pre­vi­ous plu­gin to get going, but I per­se­vered. Unfor­tu­nately it exhibits the same behav­ior as RSSFeed.

Some Mov­able Type forum search­ing turned up another plu­gin that might help either of the first by forc­ing a rebuild of the index file at pre­de­ter­mined inter­vals. That would keep the file list updated and recent. But I can’t seem to find it listed in the Plu­g­ins Direc­tory and quite frankly, I’m get­ting tired of mess­ing with this thing that prob­a­bly has no redeem­ing value to any­one.*
Con­tinue read­ing Recent Is A Rel­a­tive Term