Wednesday, July 27, 2005

Clinton offered 40 goats and 20 cows for Chelsea

I heard about this on Tuesday and wanted to wait until I could come up with a good punchline to use in my blog. Nothing came to me and I just accept the fact that sometimes true life is funnier!

Can't wait to see what the current president is offered for the Bush twins!

Tuesday, July 26, 2005

Popular photography

With the popularity of photo sharing sites such as Flickr, you and I can now cover news events and post our own photographs. The recent London bombings were covered by citizen-journalists as was today's space shuttle launching.

Monday, July 25, 2005

Inventor of the TV dinner passes away

A truly great American has left us!

On a serious note, I'm old enough to remember when my mother would set up the trays in front of the TV in our rec room and we would eat Sunday dinner while watching the Ed Sullivan Show. That was actually a treat for us! I guess Mom felt "liberated" from setting up the dinner table and from washing dishes (we didn't have a dishwasher yet). Now it seems like eating at the dinner table is the exception rather than the rule.

Update (July 25, 10:39 AM): This from comedy writer Jim Barach: "Gerry Thomas, the man who invented the TV dinner has died. He had an open casket funeral. They just peeled back the foil cover."

Sunday, July 24, 2005

It's going to be 100 today!

I'm writing this around 9:45 Sunday morning. It's already 85 degrees outside and it's going to be at or near 100 degrees today! When I lived in Arizona, this was very common. However, 100 degrees in Chicago seems to be much hotter than in Arizona. It's the humidity plus the houses here are designed to repel cold...not necessarily the heat.

Tuesday, July 12, 2005

Drowning in LPs!

As I mentioned earlier, I spent the weekend in Columbus, Ohio. I brought an antique china hutch for my sister and returned with about a dozen boxes of my old record albums. It was kind of fun to see the albums again. They had been stored in my sister's house since she moved to Columbus in the early '90s.

I returned home Sunday and carried all of the boxes downstairs. I need to go to U-Haul soon to buy some more boxes to replace the ones that seem to be worn out. As I was going through the albums, I found the very first album that I bought. It was You Really Got Me by The Kinks. (The first single '45 that I bought, as I recall, was Tell Her No by The Zombies.) I also found an old Dave Clark Five album called Coast To Coast. When I first started collecting records, the British Invasion was in full throttle!

I also found Lynyrd Skynyrd's Street Survivors LP -- both the "flame" version and the "re-released" version. The "re-released" version came out after the plane crash that killed some of the band members and was minus the flame.

Of course, among these gems are a couple of Tom Jones albums and some disco music...but you can't be right all of the time!

I plan on selling my collection. I would like to find a buyer to buy the entire lot, but I will take several days and weeks to go through everything and then list the better albums on eBay and then hit the yard sale circuit!

Wednesday, July 6, 2005

Antiquing this weekend

I'm leaving Friday morning and driving to Columbus, Ohio to see my sister. I'm delivering some furniture from my mother's house and will bring back several boxes of my old LPs from my younger years. I have some original Beatles albums that I'm interested in selling and will be looking for collectors in the Chicago area. While I'm in Columbus, we're going to attend a large flea market in nearby Springfield.

Monday, July 4, 2005

Deep Impact

This is amazing. NASA can send a rocket on a 268 million-mile trip to collide with 4-mile wide comet, but I can't make a freakin' three-foot putt!

Saturday, July 2, 2005

Friday, July 1, 2005

Funny!

From comic Alex Kaseberg:
Tomorrow begins the Tour De France with Lance Armstrong going for seven in a row. Why do we Americans admire Lance Armstrong so much? Is it because of his miraculous comeback from cancer? That’s a factor. Lance’s amazing toughness and athletic ability? That’s part of it. Is it because, when Lance wins the Tour de France, it infuriates the French? Bingo.