Whatever

The Power Of Facial Hair

My Red Sox Beard

I have been wearing a beard since 1978, before then I only sported a mustache because that is all the facial hair I could have as a Naval Air Crewman. Beards prevented full sealing of the oxygen mask.

Nearly every guy on this year’s FRS team is sporting a beard and they come in a large variety styles and lengths. It started with a couple of the off season’s free agent signees in Spring Training and over the season has spread through the clubhouse like a zombie virus.

I’ve always kept my beard trimmed, but I want to help the guys in their quest to go from worst to first and hopefully beyond this year, so until the Red Sox season ends, be it being swept in the division series or winning the World Series in seven games, I won’t trim my beard (sideburns and mustache excluded.)

Lucky for Donna my beard isn’t very thick and doesn’t grow very fast, so I won’t end up looking like a member of the Duck Dynasty or ZZ Top.

Here’s A recent NY Times story on the bearded Bosox: Bonding With Beards, the Red Sox Repair Their Clubhouse Chemistry and the team also features many winners in Grantland’s Base-Beards (The 2013 MLB Beard Awards)

Started down, went up, went down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 1256

Caw, Caw

A whole bunch of years back, after I related the story of the bird that committed suicide by throwing itself into the grill of the Miata, my good buddy Mark asked if I’d ever seen a dead crow on the side of the road. When I said I hadn’t, he asked, “Do you want to know why?”

Now Mark is an avid outdoors man and the go-to-guy for any wildlife related questions (he was the one to identify the dead bird in the grill), so I knew if anyone knew why I hadn’t ever seen a dead crow on the side of the road it would be him.

“Because,” he said, “crows always travel in groups and there is always one crow designated as a lookout and when it sees a car coming it sounds off: caw, caw.” Now, I knew that crows are social birds and very smart, smart enough that they use tools, so it sounded reasonable.

Mark is also our go-to-guy for quick witted retorts and pranks, so when a couple years later I did actually see a crow as road kill, I got to thinking about his explanation…

Mark didn’t say, “caw, caw.” He said, “cahr, cahr.”

I’d been had.

Started down, went up, went down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 1254

Track 01 – These Are Days

Just love Natalie Merchant. I had almost every CD that 10,000 Maniacs put out and her first two solo albums. She has released a few more CDs since then, but I’ve stopped buying physical and downloadable music, so the only exposure to her music I get now is when I catch a tune on RadioParadise. The latest one is something called Nursery Rhyme of Innocence and Experience which not only has Natalie singing, but the cello opening reminds me of the theme music for the TV show Firefly.

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FMarUuty_yo

Track 05 – Don’t Speak

Back in the day I used to participate in CD swaps. You would mail CD mixes, usually with a theme, to an individual who would then mail you back one of theirs. It was a good way to get introduced to different music. I’ve kept some of mine that I mailed out and even a few I was given.

While looking for some empty CD disc cases to put another copy of Orphan Black DVDs* into I stumbled onto one of mine labeled “Quintessential Burn.” Unlike the rest of my burned CDs it had no label on the disc or the case it resided in. I could listen to every song and create a playlist for the disc, but I always used CD Text when doing these burns, so why couldn’t I read it right off the CD. Winamp doesn’t support CD Text, Windows Media Player doesn’t either natively, but at least there is a plugin for doing it.

Anyway, if I can find ’em, I’ll see about posting a video of each tune that I considered of or pertaining to the most perfect embodiment of a CD mix in December 2004. First up is track number 5, No Doubt’s “Don’t Speak.”

Tuesday Update

Shiny

The team car of the Purple Whales from the End Zone Entourage Fantasy Football League got its annual preseason wash and wax on Sunday afternoon. The NFL season starts in 3 weeks and then there won’t be any time on Sunday afternoons for that sort of thing.

I haven’t read the Jack Reacher novel Killing Floor before because I would have definitely remembered it. It is set in the fictional town of Margrave, Georgia which is described as about an hour south of Atlanta, but at one point our hero travels to Augusta to search for a missing character that figures big in the plot. The author has obliviously never been to Augusta and did minimal research, because from his description I wouldn’t have recognized the town. This I would have remembered…

My suspicions were correct on the purpose of the clear lucite sign holders. This morning my bathroom appropriate magazine ads were gone and were replaced with those same First Responders recruitment posters. The plant nurse will be holding informational meeting on joining the few the proud towards the end of next week. If those flyers are still up at the beginning of next month I think I’ll replace them with some U.S. Armed Force posters.

Jack Reacher

KillingFloorWe were in the book store on Saturday looking for some summer reading and I was so desperate to find something I would enjoy that I picked up a Jack Reacher novel, Killing Floor.

I have read all the Jack Reacher books and chew through them like I used to with Robert B Paker’s Spenser novels. Because I was sure I has already read this book I kept waiting for the moment when I would go go, “Oh yeah.” But I’m now more than half way through and that moment hasn’t come. Did I miss this book in the series or is it because it was written in 1997 that I’ve completely forgotten it? I’m thinking I just missed it, but the light of recognition may still go off in the next couple hundred pages.

This is a reprint of the very first Jack Reacher book and it has a new introduction by the author Lee Child that tells how he came to write and why he chose the genre, an anti-hero and how he came to name his protagonist. It also has a new round yellow circle on the front cover that reads “See Jack Reacher now in his first major motion picture.”

The introduction adds nothing new if you have visited the Lee Child’s web site, so what I really wanted was what he was thinking about with the much smaller Tom Cruise playing his 6’5″, 250 pound creation. I have heard that he publicly said he was happy with Cruise in the role. I recently had an opportunity to watch the movie and passed on it just because I knew I couldn’t be so charitable.

I’m Insulted

Early this week they put clear lucite sign holders on every single table in the cafeteria. Inside each one is a flyer calling for volunteers to sign up to be a First Responder. Every one in Maintenance is already trained to do this, but they are looking for a few more good (wo)men. They also put one on each of the six tables in what management refers to as the break area out front or what everyone else calls the smoking area.

For the last couple of days they have been putting up wall mount versions in every restroom. There is one on the wall just above every urinal and one on the inside of each stall door. I figured they were going to fill them with more of the please be a First Responder sheets, but they remained empty. Until this morning.

The ones in the Men’s Room out in the Turned Parts Department, near where my cubical is, had advertisements in them this AM. One of the urinals had a Viagra ad over it, while the other had one for Vesicare and each stall had an Ex-Lax ad, one vintage and very modern.

Once word got out about them, people were going in just to look, conversations ensued as to whether they were for real or was someone just having fun. Seriously, how could it have been anything but a joke. I know sales are slow right now, but would the Valve Store really try and make up some of that money by selling ads on restroom walls?

I’m insulted that no one asked me if I had anything to do with it…