YouTube Tuesday: A holiday favorite

As we find ourselves falling deeper and deeper into debt the holiday spirit, here's a Christmas classic that is sure to tug at the heart srings of some of you.

tagged: ding, fries, are done, Christmas, carol

Indicator

Hey people in case you haven't noticed, the economy is bad.

It's so bad that the KU basketball program has decided to lay off three refs this year. I mean it's rough. A buck is so hard to come by that Walt Bodine has taken a job moonlighting as The Crypt Keeper just to make ends meet.

But over the weekend I saw a true sign of economic meltdown while on a quest for super cheap headphones for my six-year-old daughter to destroy use.

What was this sign? I'm glad you asked. Allow me to illustrate via camera phone:



That's right, Big Lots is having a FREAKIN' LIQUIDATION SALE!!!

Now, I don't know if you've ever shopped at a Big Lots. This is the bottom feeder of the U.S. retail distribution system. So if the American consumer-driven economy were an ocean, all of the chum deemed inedible by big fish like Crate & Barrel, Restoration Hardware or FAO Schwartz, would filter down to smaller fish like Target, K-Mart and Walmart.

The dregs unworthy of even these "value" retailers sinks to the bottom of the sea, where Big Lots picks it ups, dusts if off and puts it on the shelf and ludicrously low prices. This place is one step up from the weekly Lee's Summit swap meet.

You always hear that when the economy starts to sag (much like Larry Moore's chins), consumers flock to the value (cheap) retailers. Yet, here in good ol' OP, the throngs of shoppers seeking disposable grass trimmers aren't enough to keep the doors open.

Still, I could be misreading this. It could be that the store is closing due to the long-rumored "renovation" of the strip mall at 95th and Nall. I hope that's the case and that in a few months we'll have a newer, brighter Big Lots to get cheap junk from.

If the economy keeps going the way it is, we'll need it.

PS -- I got the headphones. Four bucks.

tagged: Big Lots, economy, liquidation, Walt Bodine, KU, Bush, environmentalist

Friday Blogthing: Wise guy

Your Mafia Name Is Dante "Fatty" Fischetti

Leave the gun. Take the cannoli.

What's Your Mafia Name?

tagged: Friday, blogthing, mafia, mob, name, cannoli, quiz, blog, meme

Top Ten Thursday

I'm trying out a new gimmick here.

It's been a while since I tried any new gimmicks, so today I'm launching a new gimmick. Just tossing this out there. Throwing it against the wall to see if it sticks.

I know it's not original. Lots of people do lists of all kinds of crap. But I figure, meh, it's something to do. Besides, I once read in a Top Ten List of blogging hints that readers and search engines like Top Ten Lists.

Anyway, it's pretty self explanatory. Each Thursday I publish a Top Ten list on a given subject. Sound good? Good.

To kick it off today, here's my:

Top Ten List of Upcoming Top Ten Thursday
Top Ten List Topics
10) Top Ten Favorite Movies (Obviously, this will be broken into various movie genre categories (Westerns, Drama, Comedy, etc.))

9) Top Ten Favorite Movie Villains

8) Top Ten Favorite Breakfast Cereals

7) Top Ten Favorite Religions

6) Top Ten Ways to Break Bad News

5) Top X Favorite Roman Numerals

4) Top Ten Songs About Coffee

3) Top Ten Favorite U.S. Cities

2) Top Ten Favorite Stationery Items

1) Top Ten Favorite Middle Names

Well, there you have it. Obviously, the use of lists like this isn't to categorically rank arbitrary topics, but rather to generate debate.

Maybe you disagree that Middle Names should be ranked above Breakfast Cereals. Perhaps you think I left some important category off the list all together.

If so, then by all means leave a comment with your opinion.

tagged: Top Ten, list, Religions, breakfast cereal

A sort of Hjemkomst

One of my personal philosophies about travel is that you should do your best to seek out the historical and cultural flavor of where ever it is you find you've traveled to.

I think every place has something to discover. Sure, it might be an easier search in, say, Florence, Italy, than in Liberal, Kansas. But the there is there for the curious and persistent to discover.

It was this kind of thinking that had us spend a little extra time in Fargo during our Grizwaldesque Thanksgiving road trip to North Dakota.

Actually, the Heritage Hjemkomst Interpretive Center is in Moorehead, Minn. It hosts various local art and history exhibits, but the anchor tenant (pun intended) is the Viking replica ship, Hjemkomst.

The ship was the dream of Moorehead resident Robert Asp, who wanted to build a Viking ship and sail it to his ancestral home in Norway. For those of you who don't spreken Norwegian, Hjemkomst translates to "homecoming" and is pronounced (near as my non-Norwegian ear can tell) "yom-komst."

The hull of the Hjemkomst is 76 feet long and 17 feet wide. It took Asp eight years, 100 oak trees and 7,000 rivets to build.

In 1980, while I was busy trying to figure out a Rubik's Cube, Asp sailed the completed Hjemkomst on Lake Superior. Unfortunately he died of leukemia before he could attempt the voyage to Norway.

Two years after his death, four of Asp's children were part of a 12-person crew to finally attempt crossing the north Atlantic in the Hjemkomst. The 6,100 mile voyage was treacherous as the Viking ship was buffeted in a severe nor'easter.

A rogue wave hit the ship so hart that one of the hull timbers split. The crew faced sinking in the cold waters before plugging the breach with burlap sacks.

Hull breach caused by rogue wave in the North Atlantic.

The crew's quarters on the deck consisted of sleeping bags on wooden planks, just like the original Vikings used circa 890 AD (the planks, not the sleeping bags).

After more than two months at sea, the Hjemkomst pulled into the harbor at Bergen, Norway to the celebratory greetings of their cousins.

The museum plays a 30-minute documentary about the project before the tour. Admission is only $7 bucks a person for adults. The admission attendant let our 6-year-old daughter in for free. The ship exhibit allows you to get up close and touch the ship, see the water marks and get an idea of what life aboard the ship must have been like for the Americans in 1982 and for the Vikings in the ninth century.

tagged: travel, North Dakota, Fargo, Moorhead, Hjemkomst, Norwegian, vikings, ship

YouTube Tuesday: Feminists just need to find a man

I was listening to Nellie McKay during my lunch break on my ancient iPod (good luck finding her on any radio station around here). I've always appreciated her sense of humor and social satire... not to mention her phenomenal musical talent.



tagged: Nellie McKay, music, satire, feminism, video, You Tube, humor, Sarah Palin

Borealis

Here are a few of the things I learned on during our Grizwaldesque Thanksgiving road trip to North Dakota:

• Fargo is aptly named. The only thing it's close to is West Fargo (and Moorhead which, it turns out, is not aptly named).
  
  
• Stay away from the biscuits and gravy at the Fargo Holiday Inn. "Stick to your ribs" must have a unique colloquial meaning in North Dakota.
  
  
• The people of North Dakota are super nice, but they misspell and mispronounce "barbecue."
  
  
• You can make it from Fargo to Sioux Falls on a single tank of gas... just barely.
  
  
• It's only a matter of time before there's a Space Aliens Bar and Grill at either The Legends or the P&L District. But they damn well better spell "barbecue" correctly.
  
  
• I spent hours along a lonely highway looking for that bag of money, but I didn't find it so it must still be there somewhere.

tagged: Fargo, North Dakota, travel, barbecue, Morehead

YouTube Tuesday: Scavenger

Hey let's face it guys, times are tough.

People are losing their jobs, NFL teams are going 1-20, auto company CEOs are forced to drive rather than fly private jets, I mean it's rough out there.

And desperate times call for resourcefulness. So here's a video tip on how to take advantage of one of Kansas City's most abundant and overlooked resources.



tagged: Kansas City, recession, financial, economy, video, You Tube, scavenge, homicide

Obama calling

Okay, I get why these guys were fired.

A company can't have employees snooping around in the private files of their clients, especially high-profile, politically influential clients like, oh I don't know, the PRESIDENT ELECT OF THE UNITED STATES!!!

But still, as Johnny Sacramoni would say, it seems "funny, ironic, whatever" that these guys got fired for doing something with Obama's records that Obama himself voted in favor of allowing the telecom companies to do.

For those of you with a short memory, here's what happened just a few short months ago:

Sen. Barack Obama explained his support for a compromise on FISA legislation, saying that concerns over American security trumped, at this point in time, objections over immunity for telecommunications that participated in the previously illegal program.

The old Potomac Two-Step continues...

tagged: Obama, telephone, FISA, politics, Johnny Sacramoni

Friday Blogthing: Typealyzer

I ganked this from May at May's Machete. This kind of thing is very useful for those of us who like to separate everybody into nice neat little psychological categories.

The analysis indicates that the author of http://3oclockam.blogspot.com/ is of the type:

ESTP - The Doers

The active and play-ful type. They are especially attuned to people and things around them and often full of energy, talking, joking and engaging in physical out-door activities.

The Doers are happiest with action-filled work which craves their full attention and focus. They might be very impulsive and more keen on starting something new than following it through. They might have a problem with sitting still or remaining inactive for any period of time.

Analysis

This shows what parts of the brain were dominant during writing.

tagged: Friday, blogthing, personality, type, Typealyzer, doer, quiz, blog, meme

Go Elf Yourself!

Just in time for the holidays, OfficeMax is teaming up with those knuckleheads at JibJab to sponsor the ElfYourself viral campaign.

And it's obviously working, since they got me to post this ridonkulous video ecard.

Still, with cameos from such local bloggy luminaries as Shane, Chimpotle, Xavier Onassis and The D, I think the entertainment value is worth the two minutes it takes to watch. However, it's definitely NOT as cool as last year's Handbell Hero viral staring Pensive Girl.

Send your own ElfYourself eCards

tagged: Holidays, Christmas, JibJab, OfficeMax, viral, marketing, video

As seen in Kansas: Atomic Cannon

If you drive far enough west of Kansas City on 1-70, you eventually come to a bend where the highway cuts south with Fort Riley on the west side and a steep Flint Hills bluff to the east side.

If you're paying attention to the scenery instead of the traffic, you may notice at the top of the bluff just as the highway makes a westward turn, a rather large looking cannon.

And, if you've got some extra time, if you're feeling adventurous, if you need to stretch your legs and if the weather is nice, you can pull off the highway into Freedom Park and find out just what the dealio is with that rather large looking cannon anyway.

When you park, you'll see a park shelter with some historical information and a plaque describing one of the few US Army atomic cannons still in existence. You'll also see the beginning of a switch back trail that leads up to the top of the bluff for a close-up view of this nuclear titan.

As you make your way up the switch backs (which are currently riddled with washouts so watch your step), you'll see an artillery piece rise up out of the prairie grass in front of you.

This isn't the Atomic Cannon. It's a rather run of the mill (though still impressive) M1 155 mm Howitzer. There's another one up the hill, aimed roughly in the direction of south Junction City. The WWII-era gun was used widely by the U.S. through the Vietnam war and is still in use by some countries.

Anyhoo, follow the trail a few hundred yards to the top of the bluff, brace yourself against the ubiquitous Kansas gale and catch your breath.

You have arrived.

The M65 Atomic Cannon, affectionately called "Atomic Annie" by the grunts back in the day, stands guard against the Flint Hills prairie chickens and hawks.

Standing next to the impressive weapon you get a sense of scale that you simply can't appreciate when you drive by at 80 mph on I-70 a couple hundred feet below.

The engineers behind this beast had some serious damage in mind when they came up with the idea of building a cannon that could fire a nuclear-tipped shell over 20 miles.

Yes, 20 miles. In it's current position, that puts the recently tornado ravaged hamlet of Chapman, Kan, well within range. Or, you could point the barrel in the opposite direction and lob a radio active round right into downtown Manhattan, though I don't know why anyone would want to do that.

The M65 was conceived and built to defend Europe from those evil Soviet devils back in a time when people used the word "atomic" rather than "nuclear" (or "nookyoular" for that matter).

It was the army's largest artillery gun, and the one at Ft. Riley is the largest of the twenty M65's made during the cold war. Only eight are still around. The one at Ft. Riley is on permanent loan from The Smithsonian.

Here are a few other fun facts about Atomic Annie:

• At 47 tons, the gun was transported at a top speed of 35 mph by two tractors which brought the total weight to 83 tons. The army considered it "highly mobile" in comparison to the strategic atomic weapons of the day.
• The drivers of the vehicles communicated with each other by means of a built-in telephone system.
• The 11-inch projectile fired by the gun weighed in at 550 pounds.
• The atomic cannon first went into service in 1952, and was deactivated in 1963.

tagged: gun, artillary, cold war, Atomic Cannon, Soviet, nuclear, Fort Riley, Kansas, Howitzer, Army, Military

Small change

This just in from The Guardian, Clinton to accept offer of secretary of state job:

Hillary Clinton plans to accept the job of secretary of state offered by Barack Obama, who is reaching out to former rivals to build a broad coalition administration, the Guardian has learned.
...
Clinton, who still harbours hopes of a future presidential run, had to weigh up whether she would be better placed by staying in the Senate, which offers a platform for life, or making the more uncertain career move to the state department.

Obviously this won't happen until it happens, but let's just to make sure we're all on the same page here: Obama's definition of "change" is hiring a bunch of Clinton-era retreads (or, actual Clintons themselves).

tagged: politics, Clinton, Change, Obama, Secretary fo State

YouTube Tuesday: Peter Schiff and his Magical Time Machine

I was mildly blown away when I saw this clip posted by Nick Sloan.



Schiff is almost as prescient as El Borak. Almost.

tagged: Peter Schiff, recession, financial, economy, video, You Tube

It's gotta be the shoes

This has been a really strange day.

It started this morning when I left the house without my wallet. So after dropping the kid off at school, I went a few blocks out of the way to stop by my house to pick it up so I'd have cash for hookers and blow this afternoon.

So then, 10 minutes later I parked in the garage at work and was making my way to the door of my building when I realized I'd forgotten my work ID/key card. So back in the car, 10 minute drive back home, up to my bedroom to get my key card, back in the car, another 10 minutes to the garage, park (I get the same parking place I had the first time), and finally up to my desk.

So I'm starting work late, my computer's acting all up and stuff and it just feels like thing the world in general is out of sync with me and I can't figure out why.

Then it hits me. I bought some new shoes Saturday.

I've been in need of new shoes for a while, and I'm kind of a picky shoe buyer, embracing as I do the importance of comfortable kicks. As Cliff Claven rightly pointed out, all great civilizations had, at their base, comfortable footwear.

Anyway, it takes me a lot of shopping before I can settle on a pair of shoes fit for my soles. But Saturday I stumble into a suitably comfy pair of shoes from Johnston & Murphy.

So today I'm wearing my new Sandro Moscolonis and, while they are indeed cozy (they were "hand made in Brazil" so of course they're comfortable), they just don't feel like my shoes yet.

So that's what I attribute the mild imbalance too. You gotta feel good from the feet up or your day will just seem a little off kilter.

tagged: shoes, Johnston & Murphy, Sandro Moscoloni, shopping