3AM EXCLUSIVE! Weekend project a complete waste of time!

The main project for last weekend (aside from the usual mowing the yard, filling the bird feeders, burying dead hookers in my basement, etc.) was repairing a drainage pipe in the front of our house.

The drainage pipe in question had become clogged (probably as a result of some roofing work we'd had done) leading to a backed-up downspout which caused a nice-looking, but foundation-eroding fountain in front of our house during last week's rains.

You probably couldn't tell from the picture, but the soil around the downspout was extremely eroded because of the backup-induced fountain. So I determined that I had to dig out the end of the drainage pipe where the water is supposed to come out.

I did some excavation (that means "digging" for those of you from Arizona) and found the culprit. The end of the pipe had become collapsed, leading to a severe blockage (much like Jason Whitlock's coronary artery).So I trimmed off the broken pipe with my kick-ass reciprocating saw and cleared the soil from around the end.
I also dug a trench from the recently trimmed pipe (sounds kinda dirty, doesn't it DLC?) out into the lower elevation of my yard.

Here's what the excavation looked like at that point.


Now it's time to prepare the new drainage pipe.

First, you're supposed to put this kind of cloth sock on the pipe to keep sand an dirt from getting in through the small holes that let water out of the pipe. It's kind of like putting sausage into a casing. (Yeah, I know what some of you are thinking, and it's like that too.)

Once the pipe sock was on, I attached it to the existing drainage pipe with a hose clamp and trimmed off the excess. I then cut a hole at the end of the new pipe to put a neat little grate on.

All that was left to do was bury my pipe (heh) and then replace the sod I had saved just for this purpose. And voila, the new drain.

Unfortunately, there's still a blockage in the drain. I put the garden hose in my gutter Sunday just to test it and discovered I was still getting serious backup. So all that work, and I still haven't solved the problem.

So my next step is to rent one of those rotor rooter things at Home Depot and try to drill this sucker out. It will probably have to wait until next weekend, though.

I just hope it doesn't rain before then.

tagged: home, project, DIY, drainage, pipe, gutter, erosion, home improvement

Not in Kansas anymore

If you've not been reading A California Girl in Kansas, then for one thing shame on you. For another thing, you're pretty much out of luck now.

Shea, the talented and effervescent author, published her "Goodbye to Kansas" letter today. Brought tears to my eyes. Well, not really, but it is an honest and heartfelt review of her three-year odyssey in the Sunflower State.

Most importantly, Kansas taught me a lesson that I will never, ever forget - grow where you’re planted. Make the most out of every situation. Never give up. Always believe that you can make every day fabulous and fun. Give everyone you meet a fair shake. At the end of the day, or at the end of three and a half years, you’ll find that the one place you never thought you’d live is the one place you can’t really imagine living without.

Great thoughts from someone who I'm pretty sure will be (even more) famous some day.

Take it easy on the Caribbean, Shea. You're not in Kansas anymore.

tagged: Kansas, blog, Caribbean, farewell

Prohibition is good for business

Okay, we've got our next big business idea ready to go.

Those of you who read about the big local blogger meetup last night probably think it was just an occasion for drinking booze and eating boob (cake).

And while the boob cake was tasty (so delicious and moist), and the Boulevard Wheat never tasted better, I did have the ulterior motive of discussing our next business venture with XO and Keith (thus also allowing me to write the evening's outlays off as a tax deductible business expense, but I digress).

The core of our new business idea is the realization that when Kansas City voters approved a ban on smoking in public venues, we all saw that as a super-restrictive overstep of government authority.

"What about our personal rights? What about the freakin' constitution," we all said.

What we failed to realize, until recently, is that just as in the days of alcohol prohibition, tobacco prohibition has left a hole in the market place that is burning to be filled.

So here's our idea: We rent a space, probably a bar that has had to close because smokers can't smoke there anymore. We reopen it as a "private club" and sell memberships for , I don't know, $40 bucks a year?

We cut a deal with big tobacco, maybe Phillip Morris or RJ Reynolds, to supply the cancer sticks at a cut rate.

We then sell them above retail at our club, and since we won't allow tobacco products to be brought into the club (city ordinance, probably), we have 100% market share.

We haven't landed on a name for the place yet, but my nomination is "Smokin' Hotties." I figure we can have bikini-clad waitresses with cigarette lighters in their bikini tops (you know, flip a switch and a flame comes out of the nipular area).

But let me know if you have a better name. If we use a name you submitted, I can probably get you a free membership.

tagged: Kansas City, smoking ban, business, cigarette, Phillip Morris, RJ Reynolds, prohibition

Friday Blogthing: It's pronounced just as it's spelled

Speaking of office space...

I am Samir Nayeenanajar from Office Space. Take the test and find out who you were.

tagged: Friday, blogthing, Office Space, samir, pop culture, movie, blog, meme

Cleared for takeoff

The corporate travel group at work sent out an email recently to apprise me of a great corporate perk.

We all had the chance to sign up for a service that will allow us to bypass security lines at most major airports around the country.

If you've flown recently, you've probably seen the booths for this company, Clear, popping up at airports near you. I've seen them in San Francisco, Atlanta and New York.

I only travel two or three times a year, but after my most recent experience at the Atlanta airport my interest in such a service was piqued. Who needs, thought I, a four hour security ordeal?

So I nibble on the bait sent out in the email and go to the Clear website for more info. The price, $130 bucks, is a bit steep, especially for a infrequent traveler like myself. My company wouldn't pick up the expense, but I might be able to justify it anyway based on some vacation travel we're planning for later in the year.

So I read on, and here's where they lose me.

Part of the "enrollment" process is that you have to give at least two pieces of approved government-issued identification to some stranger at one of their airport kiosks. Also, you have to voluntarily allow them to capture images of your irises and fingerprints, as well as a photograph.

So you're basically paying $130 to add your ID (finger prints and retinal scan) to a database that you can be damn sure will get into government hands -- maybe added to a list of some kind?

Now my knowledge of history isn't as good as, say, a San Francisco free-Tibet hippie freak, but I'm pretty sure that this kind of list would be similar to the kinds of list that people with names like Hitler and Stalin used.

And even if I'm wrong on that count, I KNOW that this kind of thing has been a significant concept in all kinds of post-apocalyptic dystopian literature and movies.

Look, I'm too paranoid to even use my real name on an inconsequential blog read by a bunch of losers (no, not you, you're the cool one). I'm still trying to figure out how to stop the NSA from tracking my Google searches. I need to focus on making sure my own government isn't using the British traffic cameras to spy on me.

There's no way a tinfoil hat-wearing, government-not-trusting, X-Files-believing suspicious sunuvabich like me is going to freely turn over my freaking retinal scan to the gubmint!

Don't even waste my time.

Now, I gotta go renew my Hen House shopper rewards card.

tagged: clear, privacy, travel, retina scan, San Francisco, New York, Atlanta

Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor?!

A picture taken at the Pro-Tibet rally in San Francisco and posted without further comment (really, is any needed?)

Dunce hat tip to John B. at Blog Meridian

tagged: protest, Tibet, history, China, Nazi

High on the hog

I know we're all struggling to come to grips with the mounting global food shortages.

Who would have thought that such a thing could happen in the good old U.S. of A. Oh, sure, it hasn't come to the point of food riots yet (at least not in the good old U.S. of A.), but why wait until that happens before we start talking about a solution.

Luckily, it's Canada to the rescue. They have a very clever plan for helping out with the global food shortage: Throwing away food.

The Canadian government announced that it would pay pork producers as much as $50 million to kill 150,000 pigs by fall. It's an effort to reduce supply in order to raise the price of pork and help struggling hog farmers.

The brilliant plan is the brainchild of high-ranking Canadian Bacon Minister Jules Winnfield who, despite his official position, is not a fan of pork products anyway.

"Pigs are filthy animals. I don't eat filthy animals.

Maybe bacon and pork chops taste good. But hey, sewer rat may taste like pumpkin pie, but I'd never know 'cause I wouldn't eat the filthy motherfucker. Pigs sleep and root in shit. That's a filthy animal. I ain't eat nothin' that ain't got enough sense to disregard its own feces."

tagged: Canada, global food shortage, Jules Winnfield, bacon, pigs, Pulp Fiction, pork

YouTube Tuesday: Wii, Eye and You(tube)

The health benefits of owning and using the Nintendo Wii have been well documented, but I think the physical risk has been somewhat ignored.



tagged: movie, YouTube, video, Wii, Nintendo, eye, injury, humor

I must've put a decimal point in the wrong place or something

You don't have to be a rocket scientist.

In fact, sometimes it's better if you're not.

Sometimes, like when it comes to predicting catastrophic asteroid impacts, it's better if you're -- oh, I don't know -- a 13-YEAR-OLD GERMAN KID!!!

That's right. The national brain trust at NASA just had their pocket protectors handed to them by a pimply faced German teenager, who discovered that there's actually a pretty damn good chance of a significant portion of North America and Europe being destroyed within the next 40 years.

Nico Marquardt used telescopic findings from the Institute of Astrophysics in Potsdam (AIP) to calculate that there was a 1 in 450 chance that the Apophis asteroid will collide with Earth...

NASA had previously estimated the chances at only 1 in 45,000 but told its sister organisation, the European Space Agency (ESA), that the young whizzkid had got it right.

1 in 450?!?!!! That's better odds than Larry Moore saying something non-goobery within the next 40 years.

And we're not talking about some pea-sized piece of space granite, here.

Both NASA and Marquardt agree that if the asteroid does collide with earth, it will create a ball of iron and iridium 320 metres (1049 feet) wide and weighing 200 billion tonnes, which will crash into the Atlantic Ocean.

The shockwaves from that would create huge tsunami waves, destroying both coastlines and inland areas, whilst creating a thick cloud of dust that would darken the skies indefinitely.

So nice going NASA. I don't suppose you have any ideas on what to do to avoid the mass calamity.

If you do, let's run them by the German grade school students for verification, mmmkay? You NASA guys can just keep looking for Klingons near Uranus.

tagged: NASA, asteroid, impact, Apophis, German, Klingons, Uranus, Michael Bolton, Nico Marquardt

Weekend review

While you were busy adding earthquake reinforcements to your house, I was having the best weekend ever.

Srsly, I got a lot accomplished and was left Sunday night with a pleasant healthy exhaustion. Felt good.

Here's a partial list of what I did (not in chronological order):

• Mowed the lawn -- added fertilizer and weed pre-emergent


• Attended a training seminar to qualify as a volunteer to work with children and disabled adults (more on this later)


• Dragged out and assembled our patio furniture


• Made awesome beef arm roast for Sunday dinner


• Assembled backyard badminton court


• Repaired two bicycles


• Cleaned garage


• Three loads of laundry


• Fixed broken garage door hinge


• Cleaned street gutter in front of house


• Refilled bird feeders and humming bird feeders

Yeah. I'd say it was a good weekend.

tagged: weekend, review, spring, mow

Friday Feast: The Meesha Special

Everyone is dedicating today's Friday Feast to Meesha, who just can't get enough. As a special treat, today's entrée features pickles.

Appetizer
Name a color you find soothing.
C2 M9 Y33 K0

Soup
Using 20 or less words, describe your first driving experience.
I swear officer, the light was green.

Salad
What material is your favorite item of clothing made out of?
Latex

Main Course
Who is a great singer or musician who, if they were to come to your town for a concert, you would spend the night outside waiting for tickets to see?
ScrantonicityDessert
What is the most frequent letter of the alphabet in your whole name (first, middle, maiden, last, etc.)?
X (three of them).


tagged: meme, Friday Feast, Scrantonicity, latex, pickle

Opracritical

I try to keep an open mind. I try to be aware and respectful of differences of opinion. And I try to be open to changing my opinion when justified.

It was with this in mind that I decided to sit through Oprah's show yesterday evening.

What I saw in the first two minutes confirmed that I wouldn't need to change my opinion re: Oprah being a big hypocritical phony.

In her increasingly desperate attempts to avoid being overtaken by Ellen Degenerate as the queen of the talk show (a dubious title indeed), she joined the green herd with an unoriginal guilt trip aimed at a wasteful America.

Here's what she had to say to start her show:

I hate waste.

It's a little known fact about me, but I save toast. I really do because I think it will be crisper tomorrow.

Really I can't stand it [waste]. I guess it's the way I was raised, and I wasn't even raised during the depression.

But I have this whole thing that I can't stand waste. I think we waste so much in this country.

So this show is to get you think about how much you waste and ways that you can be more conservative as a consumer.

So let me get this straight, Opes. You, one of the richest women people in the world, want us to stop wasting?

You, who recently bought a $50-million estate, want us to not be so wasteful?


The woman who has at least SEVEN palatial estates wants us to be less wasteful?

Winfrey currently lives on "The Promised Land", her 42 acre (170,000 m²) ocean and mountain view estate in Montecito, California, outside of Santa Barbara. Winfrey also owns a house in Lavallette, New Jersey, an apartment in Chicago, an estate on Fisher Island off the coast of Miami, a ski house in Telluride, Colorado, and property on the island of Maui, Hawaii. Winfrey's show is based in Chicago, so she spends time there, specifically in the neighborhood of Streeterville, but otherwise resides in California. Her Hawaii property was featured on the cover of O at Home and on her TV show. Winfrey also owns a home in the exclusive town of Avalon, New Jersey"

Oprah, who charges a minimum of $50,000 to advertise on her website let alone her television show/network/magazine, thinks we peons waste too much.

The woman who quite possibly could be the ROOT OF ALL EVIL! -- believes we are living it up too well.

Right.

Look, I understand that Americans waste a lot of food/oil/energy/time, but Miss Oprah is hardly in a position to tell anyone to cut back.

So why don't you just go ahead and piss off, Oprah.

tagged: Oprah, estate, evil, money, waste, hypocrite

Friday Blogthing: Orange

Maybe this means I can run for president of Ukraine, though I'm not too keen to be mentioned in the same company as David Blaine.

Your Aura is Orange

You're a bit of a loner, but you're never lonely. You know how to entertain yourself. Whether you're trying an extreme sport or a new weird food, you always live on the edge. The purpose of your life: testing limits - both physical and mental... and then telling people about it. Famous oranges include: Timothy Leary, David Blaine, Tony Hawk, Carey Hart Careers for you to try: Snowboarder, Circus Performer, Undercover Agent

What Color Is Your Aura?

tagged: Friday, blogthing, orange, aura, David Blaine, Ukraine, blog, meme

Coppers and robbers

Northlanders should take this as a hint.

Hell, AT&T should, too.

For the second time in the last few weeks, someone swiped a length of telephone line, presumably to sell the copper wire therein.

This is the second phone outage caused by copper thieves in recent weeks. On March 29, thieves stole several hundred feet of cable from 43rd Street and Pittman Road in Kansas City. ...

Meanwhile, the demand for copper is on the rise and the price could rise to $5 a pound in six months. Currently, copper costs $3.85 a pound.

This is a sign to AT&T -- and all of you Luddites for that matter -- who are still living in the 1960s (the decade in which the aforementioned telephone lines were installed).

The message is this: Get with the freakin' times, man!

This the 21st century! It's almost 2010, fer cryin' out loud. And we may not have flying cars (yet), but we've had wireless telephone technology for the last 20 years.

Buy a cell phone.

There are great deals out there. The networks are solid and with copper wire pushing $4 a pound (that's like five times more expensive than air) it just seems more efficient to go wireless.

I'm telling you, in this day and age, there's no reason to be connected by a wire to anything.

Just make sure you have an extra battery.

tagged: copper, wire, thieves, cell phone, ATT, telephone, outage

Posted On, Vol. 1

I just made up an old tradition at 3AM where I go through my comments on other blogs for the previous week and post them here.

Not only does it give me a chance to link to the blogs I read most, it allows me to be lazy and post something that I've already written.

Here's the round up for the past week:

• Posted on The Kansas Citian:
  James thinks the US is posturing for war with Iraq. I'm just excited about a new expletive:

  I think "Qud" is now my favorite invective: "Get the hell off my lawn, ya' damn Quds!!!" or "That slutty Qud goes home with a different guy every night." or "Ew! Somebody Quded all over my pizza!"

• Posted on The Random Ramblings of a Midtown Miscreant
  MM took some cheap shots at the town of Lone Jack, Mo. I had to defend it's virtues:

  Even though I'm married, I occasionally take a trip to Lone Jack. But thankfully, having a spouse drastically offsets the need of going to Lone Jack.
  
  Lone Jack can be fun every once in a while, but the alternative is much better.

• Posted on Frighteningly Uncommon Sense:
  Faith ranted against women who put on makeup while driving. I commented that my hands are already full without adding eyeliner into the mix:

  If I were a chick, I don't see how i could put on makeup while driving, what with my hands being full of coffee, bagel and cellphone already.
  
  Plus me being a chick and not a very good driver in the first place.

• Posted on I, Shane:
  Shane is campaigning for Barack Obama again. I'm still skeptical (natch):

  I’m almost there with you on this one, Shane. I certainly would vote for BO before Hillary. And I’m beginning to consider that he might be a better candidate that McCain.
  
  But I don’t have high hopes for his presidency. He says he’s the candidate of change, but I haven’t seen him propose any real reform.
  
  If I had to vote today, I’d probably still waste my vote on Ron Paul.

Well, that's it for this week. Go check out the posts I've linked to get the full force of my cleverness in its original context, and to experience some pretty damn good blogging from these local writers.

tagged: Iran, war, Quds, make up, driving, Barack Obama, Ron Paul