Rants

Back earlier this year I signed up for a CD Mix of the Month Club . Cool idea. This guy in Texas creates a mix CD and mails it to you once you have mailed him one. As a bonus, if you mailed 2 CDs he would sent you his and one from somebody else who sent two. All it cost me was some time, a couple of blank CDRs and $2 to mail them off. Well poor Josh on the other end had a few more bucks wrapped up into this as he was mailing out a couple dozen, then 50, then 100 and now the last 2 months nearly 400 CDs. Yikes, that’s a lot of postage! Well today, I got in my email, a note from Josh that if you want to continue to play along in the CD MotM Club you will have to kick in 3 or 4 dollars. I think this may be the end of my ride. I just have this thing for somebody offering me something for free and then latter charging for it. Its a principle thing. You have to stop agreeing to give it away, once you have reached the point where you are no longer comfortable with the total monetary outgo. If you don’t mind spending $100 a month and it costs $1 per, don’t sign up 200 people and then go gee, I’d better charge money to make up the shortfall. Stop at 100.

I just finished listening to Beth Orton’s CD, Central Reservation. There are 12 songs and I’m not to sure they weren’t all the same tune, I don’t think she changed pitch the entire 58:50. I wonder what happened? Her first CD, Trailer Park, was so darn good. She has a new CD out now called, Daybreaker, that I probably won’t buy now because of this listening experience….though I might download from the net and give it a listen, if I remember to.

Are these worth the price/hassle? I’m not to sure. We bought a small gas blower for like $75 a few weeks ago and really got out and tried on the ol’ driveway this evening. My picked up her rake and did the front yard and I did our 2-car wide driveway. She had about 2 as much square footage to do and still managed to finish slightly ahead of me. She got a nice little workout and I got a numb hand from the vibration, somehow I’m not to sure about this contraption.

Maybe it went so slow because I’m a novice. Wonder if there is a web page of leaf blowing tips? Nope!

This is the time of year that even if it isn’t raining outside you may want to carry an umbrella with you when you go get the newspaper in the morning. The noise is also very interesting. Bang, bounce, bounce, BANG (as it hits the aluminum gutter) then silence for a minute or two and repeat. Later this month a hard hat will be required as the hickory nuts start falling.

There is three hours of my life I won’t get back. Not only that, it seemed like four. I love science fiction/fantasy stuff. But what I consider my biggest failures in the realm is my inability to read the Tolkien trilogy. I have made 3 or 4 attempts at reading them, but fail miserably each time. I always get bogged down with all the names and strange words for things. I figured the movie would be just the thing, visuals for me to hang my synapses on. Wrong. I never did get anybody’s name straight and the two humans were so similar looking I thought for a minute they were the same person. They did a remarkable job making the normal sized actors playing hobbits look small, but I never could fully buy in. I spent most of the time figuring in my head how they did instead of paying attention. And what was it with the subtitles in sections? The whole time they were speaking English and then just for a bit lapsed. And there is this one scene as they all race down a lot of steps in a narrow, high up staircase. Naturally a section is destroyed making our characters jump over the gap. As the gap widens it is obvious that the smaller characters can’t make the leap themselves, so the human tosses the hobbits over. Then he looks at the troll and the troll says, “No one tosses a dwarf.” Tolkien wrote that? To me, it seemed like an out of place bad joke.