A Buncha words about a Buncha stuff...

...gotta feed the ol' blog-beast, after all...

Heloise ain't got nothin' on me: How about a household tip? I needed to clean the tape heads on my cassette deck the other day...(I remember how cool it was to have a cassette deck, and now they're considered antiques)...basically, you need virtually pure alcohol to clean 'em so your playback sounds nice and spiffy. And, I'd thot I had a bottle of extra-pure rubbing alcohol around here somewhere. That's what I'd thot. And of course, because I needed it right then, I couldn't find it. So, just for the heck of it, I got out my little plastic bottle of ear-drops...turns out they contain 95% alcohol, which is as pure as the rubbing alcohol I normally use. And it worked just fine on the tape heads! So what does the ear-drop company do; buy cases of rubbing alcohol and put it in their ear-drop bottles and sell 'em, turning a huge profit? A minuscule bottle of ear-drops that barely contains enough to fill a thimble sells for about the same price (if not more) than a fairly big bottle of Rubbing Alcohol. Ear-drops are almost pure alcohol. Use 'em enough and you might just turn into an ear-o-holic. "Can You Hear Me Now?" "Good!" "CAN YOU HEAR ME NOW"? "Owwww, man, you don't have to shout!"

Every neighborhood has at least one: I'm talking about a dog that just barks, barks, barks for no real reason. Well, the dog might have a reason, but sometimes I wonder if they can even think. Anyway, my neighbor's dog has an annoying high yelp which it utilizes to maximum volume whenever the owner lets it out of the house. "Owoooooo....growl....barkbarkbarkBarkBark BARK BARK BARKBARKBARK!!!" The dog starts out at maximum volume, since it starts out barking next door to me. Then the 'barking machine' runs insanely through the entire neighborhood, barking at everything...barkbarkbarkbarkbarkbark...until his barks grow fainter...alas, I know it'll return to the house next door, and it's barkbarkbarkBarkBarkBarkBARKBARKBARKBARK until the owner lets it in, and then, total silence. I like dogs; I think it's cool to watch them go crazy on the beach. But I'll never own one. Too much "doggone" noise. I view barking dogs the same way I view rowdy infants in a restaurant when I'm trying to have breakfast: Both should be ABOLISHED.

Every neighborhood also has one of these: There's always at least one resident in the neighborhood who doesn't believe in having a MUFFLER on his car. Across the street, a car starts up. Vrooooooooom......and instead of letting it idle for a couple minutes to let it warm up, he sits in the car punching the gas pedal...Vroom. Vroom. Vroom! Vroom! VROOM VROOM VROOM VROOOOOOOOOOM!!! It's at this point I begin tearing out the hair that hasn't fallen from my scalp yet, and then when I'm good and riled, he takes off, not gently...VROOOOOOOOM....then he gets a little further away; Vroooooooooooom....and he then enters the city limits, 2 miles north of me, vroooooooom, and then he pulls out onto the highway, 5 miles away from me, vrooooooooooooooom.....and then he returns home, and the afore-described "vroom" process happens again, only in reverse, as he gets back to the 'hood.

What my neighborhood doesn't have: An oversaturation of police personnel waiting to bust motorists for doing 2 miles an hour over the speed limit. It also doesn't have SNOW, which I've pretty much grown to despise over the years. The Snow was more fun when I was a little kid. Of course, everything was more fun when I was a kid. Except for getting beaten up by school bullies, that is. That, I coulda done without. I also have not seen an interstate highway in over a year now. That's just fine with me too. Any particular freeway on-ramp at any given time is just an accident waiting to happen as the roads fill up with uncaring drivers who'd rather mow you down than move over and let you onto the road.

A lateral move in the broadcast world: One of my favorite TV channels, "Court TV" was renamed "Tru TV" as of January 1st...although I haven't watched "Tru" in the daytime, this re-naming, I would suppose, means that somewhere on down the line, Court TV won't pony up for any more expensive gavel-to-gavel trial coverage. They'll just show re-runs of crime programs in the daytimes that originally debuted at least 5 years ago on Court TV's night schedule. Shows about homicides, shows about prison life...why DO I watch that stuff? I gotta be nuts.

Shaken, not stirred: I just picked up a VHS copy of a James Bond movie I haven't seen yet; it's 1985's "Licence to Kill" in which Timothy Dalton is Mr. 007. Dalton was okaaaay, I suppose, but it really doesn't matter...the script features minimal dialogue, and the film features a whole lotta cool action scenes...especially the last half-hour of the movie...the action has to be seened to believe; car crashes, motorcycle crashes, things blowing up, other things burning, and plenty of roundhouse right upper-cuts to the opponent's face. True culture. Next thing you know, I'll be watching NASCAR. Vroom, Vroom!!!!! And I'll turn it up to drown out the sound of my neighbor's car...
____________________

I thot maybe I'd been slacking 'till I checked and voila, I've got my two posts in for this week; that's enough to satisfy the Blog Monster's appetite...for now...