Coming down out of the atmosphere for...
RANDOM RUMINATIONS...

I never thought I'd say this last year: I drove by the gas station where I usually put gas in the car (I used to say 'fill up' but with prices these days, ARE YOU KIDDING?), and I was almost overjoyed to see that gas had gone DOWN to only $3.28 a gallon. Okay, not almost overjoyed, but hopeful that gas will go down to $2.99 a gallon by this winter when all the tourists are gone and demand goes down. Okay, not hopeful, either...

Repeating myself in order to make a point: Everyone's making a big deal (and rightfully so) about the SGT. PEPPER album, the 40th anniversary of it thereof. And RIGHTFULLY so! (oh, I already said that.) (Can you tell I'm a Beatles fan?) (I wrote more about Sgt. Pepper a few days ago, so you might wanna check that post. Or not.) But there's another important (or not) date coming up: On August 16th of this year, Elvis will have been on that great big stage in the sky for the last 30 years. I have the single of "Hound Dog". It came out in 1956. It's a 51-year old piece of plastic!

Repeating myself.....part two: In another recent previous post, I went on and on and on (like I always do about everything else) about an old record by crooner JERRY VALE that I'd been searching for: "Two Purple Shadows"...well, I found it at www.gemm.com, and I got my copy a few days ago. As a kid, I had it on a 78. The new copy I have is on a 45. And, it's also on a '33' LP. Confusion ran rampant among record companies in the '50s..."we don't know which speed is gonna be the most popular, so we'd better press 'em in every format." "Shadows" came out in 1953, three years before "Hound Dog" and 1 year before Elvis' first record, "That's All Right." And I never thought I'd mention Elvis Presley and Jerry Vale together in the same post. Oh, by the way, my "new" copy of the Jerry Vale record is a 54-year-old 45.

Can it really be half a year? Coming up the middle of this month, it'll be my 6-month anniversary of my move down here to ye olde Oregon Coast. I can't believe I've been here this long already. Wow. 6 months. And it feels like it's been half a year. Hmm. And walking on the beach these days, is just as cool of a thing to do as it was when I first got here. Aaaah. Last nite, about 9pm, I checked the temperature here; it was 51 degrees. Contrast that with 75 degrees up in North Idaho, where I used to live. I lived up there long enough to know that if it's 75 degrees at 9pm, it had to be a gazillion degrees at mid-afternoon. I don't like it that hot. Never have.

Hotsie, Totsie, another Nazi: I'm watching Northwest Cable News right now, and they're reporting that up in Renton, Washington, Nazi pamphlets have been found in the restroom of a coffeehouse; evidently the leaflets were interspersed in-between the paper towels in the dispenser. What a sick bunch. I've always thought, why should the Aryan Nations Church ever have had constitutional protection when among its aims were to endanger the lives of minority citizens? Isn't that a form of "overthrow", on a person-by-person basis? And so these losers can march down Main Street at any given time, just by doing the proper paperwork. Sheesh.

I still don't know why they call him "Sweet" Lou: A leopard can't change its spots, and neither can Lou Piniella. And we would never want him to, right? He's manager of the Chicago Cubs this season (at least), and he'd left the dugout recently to intellectually dispute a call with the third base ump. Okay, not intellectually. Lou got in the ump's face and then kicked dirt all over the ump's new alligator shoes. And in the process, got himself suspended indefinitely. Ah, come on. In this age of mercenary ballplayers and parity for every team, we need Lou to add some SPICE to the game!

Just another thing that makes me feel old: Paul McCartney will be 65 this year. 65! To his credit, he's still promoting himself for all he's worth, which won't be quite as much after soon-to-be-ex-wife Heather Mills gets through with him. So, ha ha, Paul's trying to get a 'leg up' on the situation by releasing another album; it's called 'Memory Almost Full' and it'll be out sometime this month, I guess. Just the thing to replace some of the millions of pence-bob-quid-pounds-sterling (or whatever English money is called) that Heather's gonna end up siphoning offa his bank account. The new album reportedly will contain songs about Heather, as well as Paul's first wife, Linda...the lady who actually CARED about him.

Here's a situation that's for the birds: I have two pair (pairs?) of finch. And they work fast. I got 'em about a month ago, and already, eggs are hatching. ACK! One pair of finch are really into this "parent" thing; at least one of 'em is in the nest at all times. And from what I can tell, underneath the parent finch are 5 really ugly little baby finch, with mouths eternally open. And the other pair? 4 unhatched eggs in that nest, and unusually, the female hardly ever sits in the nest, except when she's sleeping. She can't be bothered to sit in the nest when there's so much to do during the day, such as eating, squawking, and drinking, and then squawking some more...the male spends more time in the nest than she does during the day. Hmmm...maybe she plans it that way. Truly a liberated female finch.

The MSNBC early-morning watch, ad nauseum: Don Imus has now been off the air close to 2 months. All over three little words, that rhyme, respectively, with "happy", "breaded", "foe". Joe Scarborough was on all of last week, and he brings an easygoing outlook to early mornings. So I thot Scarborough would be on this week, since he's been doing fairly well, and I've read that the powers that be at MSNBC like the job he's doing. So who's doing the early-morning former-Imus slot today (early Monday as I write this)? Tucker Carlson, the uptight humorless yuppie MSNBC broadcast dweeb, who used to wear a bowtie. Tucker has a surprising resemblance to Punksatawney Phil, the world-famous groundhog who would just as soon be left alone.

One last little bit of good news: If you look at the little "countdown clock" on the left side of this page, underneath the dancing George W. Bush, you'll see that there are now less than 600 days left in his administration. And he will be in charge right up 'till the end, whether he's impeached or not, because it would take a couple of years just to get the impeachment machinery going. He might have to do a lot of fancy dancing, should that happen, but even if he was up to his eyeballs in subpeonas, he couldn't be any less effective of a leader than he is now.
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This post is something of an experiment. And I may do this more often. You know, put my ignorance on display for all to see by boiling down complicated issues to a moronic conclusion. I find it easier to distort things if I'm brief. Sort of a "hit 'em quick and run" strategy. Did it work?