Tales of a Desk Jockey

Joe the Plumber to unclog the toilets of the Middle East!

Wed, 07 Jan 2009 22:57:47 -0500

Ahh….it was coming. Too much fiber in those middle-easterners’ diets have led to stopped up toilets. It’s become such a massive problem that they have resorted to using rockets and artillery to try unclog these toilets.

But comes to the rescue is our dependable JOE THE PLUMBER!!!! Good solid union-member 100% American can always be counted on for solving problems in the middle east!

Yup, its true. Joe the Plumber of the McCain/Obama debate-fame has continued his 15 minutes of fame by going to the Middle East.

(CNN) – Joe Wurzelbacher: Plumber. Campaign celebrity. Foreign correspondent?

‘Joe the Plumber’ is headed overseas to try his hand at covering the conflict in Gaza, Wurzelbacher’s publicist Thomas Tabback confirmed to CNN Wednesday.

Wurzelbacher plans to spend 10 days in Israel reporting on the conflict for pjtv.com, a Web site run by conservative media outlet Pajamas Media.

The famous plumber will be focusing on the Israeli perspective on the situation. “It’s tragic, I mean it really is,” (well, DUH! The whole situation is tragic!!!!!) Wurzelbacher told CNN affiliate WNWO “I don’t say that in any little way. It’s very tragic, but at the same time what are the Israeli people supposed to do.”

Wurzelbacher told WNWO he’s not worried about the potential dangers of his new gig. “Being a Christian I’m pretty well protected by God I believe. That’s not saying he’s going to stop a mortar for me, but you gotta take the chance,” he told the CNN affiliate.

“Israeli officials are very excited to have him,” Tabback told CNN.

THE SHOE TERRORISTS!!!!!! (via florencio:jairoo:)

Wed, 07 Jan 2009 20:58:23 -0500

THE SHOE TERRORISTS!!!!!!

(via florencio:jairoo:)

Porn Industry Seeks Federal Bailout

Wed, 07 Jan 2009 16:59:11 -0500

Porn Industry Seeks Federal Bailout:

(via soupsoup:kaytee:delbertshoopman:irrationalblog)

Guess it was eventually going to happen, with everyone wanting to get on the bailout wagon…

Bored at work

Tue, 06 Jan 2009 10:45:00 -0500

It’s so slow for some reason, that I’m just sitting here and recalling what airports I have been to in my life (since in the next three weeks, I’ll be flying quite a bit, from Washington Dulles to Ft Lauderdale, and then back to Dulles from Miami, and then the next day, flying from Dulles to Frankfurt to Stuttgart and then back from Frankfurt).

So here goes….(in no particular order - thats for an even slower day!)

Domestic:
JFK New York
SFO San Francisco
SMF Sacramento
MSP Minneapolis
BOS Boston
MEM Memphis
VPS Fort Walton Beach, FL
DFW Dallas-Fort Worth
SAN San Diego
LAX Los Angeles
SBA Santa Barbara
ABQ Albuquerque
PHX Phoenix
STL St. Louis
EWR Newark
PHL Philadelphia
DCA Washington DC (National)
IAD Washington DC (Dulles)
HOU Houston
DEN Denver
SLC Salt Lake City
CHS Charleston, SC
FLO Florence, SC
CLT Charlotte, NC
ORD Chicago
YUL Montreal
YHZ Halifax

International:
FRA Frankfurt (used to live right across from the terminal in Gateway Gardens)
ZRH Zürich
STR Stuttgart
MUC München
LHR London Heathrow
MAN Manchester
DUS Düsseldorf
GLA Glasgow
BFS Belfast
BRU Brussels
HAM Hamburg
CGN Köln
BSL Basel-Mulhouse
GVA Geneva
STN London Stansted
FDH Friedrichshafen (originally was going to fly out of Berlin Tegel TXL back to MAN, but then switched to another ticket and flew from FDH to STN)
AMS Amsterdam
SNN Shannon, Ireland (for an emergency landing)

Flying around in a Cessna 172/T41 with my dad - taking off and landing with me at the controls (under the supervision of my dad!):
KMCC/MCC McClellan Air Force Base
KMHR/MHR Mather AFB
KSUU/SUU Travis AFB
EDU UC Davis, California
KLHM Lincoln, CA
Woodland, CA (code?)
Placerville, CA (code?)
Columbia, CA (code?)
Georgetown, CA (code?)

KDOV/DOV (Dover AFB) was the first airport I ever took off from, I think, when I was only a year old and my dad was flying around in the Aero Club plane. (Now my dad is not sure if it was Smyrna or Chandelle, DE)

Also flew in a helicopter in Apple Hill, CA, a motorized glider out of Hilzingen, Germany and an antique biplane out of Stahringen, Germany (the last two, had a great view of the Bodensee, the Swiss Alps and the German countryside…)

BBall in da Hoodz….How to keep rival gangs off your BBall...

Mon, 05 Jan 2009 22:24:37 -0500

BBall in da Hoodz….How to keep rival gangs off your BBall court….(via drylow)

(via jerule)

Mon, 05 Jan 2009 16:31:08 -0500

(via jerule)

Visiting the Everglades

Mon, 05 Jan 2009 15:57:23 -0500

I’ll be flying into Ft Lauderdale next Sunday and arrive around 2pm. Then checking in the hotel in Miami that night. I’d like to see the Everglades. What should I do?

1. Drive across to Naples on I-75 and then drive back on US 41? About 4 hours driving without stops (220 miles)

2. Drive south to Flamingo and stop at the various boardwalks and blacktop trails. About 5 hours nonstop (200miles)

3. Find a boat tour and do just that. Where? Which tour company to use?

Any recommendations would be greatly appreciated!

"Bureaucracy defends the status quo long past the time when the quo has lost its status."

Mon, 05 Jan 2009 09:43:14 -0500

“Bureaucracy defends the status quo long past the time when the quo has lost its status.”

- Laurence J. Peter (US educator and writer (1919 - 1988)

"Bureaucrats write memoranda both because they appear to be busy when they are writing and because..."

Mon, 05 Jan 2009 09:41:23 -0500

“Bureaucrats write memoranda both because they appear to be busy when they are writing and because the memos, once written, immediately become proof that they were busy.”

- Charles Peters

Wow…15 million characters of storage for only $2495 (plus...

Sun, 04 Jan 2009 11:58:02 -0500

Wow…15 million characters of storage for only $2495 (plus installation kit at only $495). Probably not big enough to hold one of my pictures from my new camera….

New Panasonic TZ-5 Camera!

Thu, 01 Jan 2009 22:35:44 -0500

Got a new camera for Christmas! My old Nikon CoolPix P1 is still great and has taken over 15,000 pictures in the past 2 3/4 years. But I wanted a camera that had better zoom but was still compact enough. Costco had a great deal on the Panasonic TZ-5 at only $240 plus tax prior to Christmas. I’ve been experimenting with it and so far love it. There’s been some complaints about “noise” in darker lighting such as indoors shot, but I’m used to this with my old camera and this is probably a trade-off to having a small compact camera.

The following shots were taken on the National Mall by 12th Ave NW looking east toward the US Capitol, a distance of about 1 mile (according to Googlemaps). I was blown away by the amount of zoom I had with full optical and up to 16.9x using slight digital zoom but still keep the quality of the image using 9.0 megapixels. I could pretty much use this camera for spying from a distance! Good ol’ Leica lenses - can always count on over-engineering by the Germans! xD

Still plan to use my old Nikon as it is a great camera, for parties or skiing as it is slightly smaller and more bombproof (no glass LCD screen (I have dropped it several times and it still functions well - will have to be extra-careful with this new camera!)

Wide-angle shot, no zoom

Thu, 01 Jan 2009 22:24:53 -0500

Wide-angle shot, no zoom

10x optical zoom

Thu, 01 Jan 2009 22:23:44 -0500

10x optical zoom

16.9x zoom (both optical and digital zoom)

Thu, 01 Jan 2009 22:20:32 -0500

16.9x zoom (both optical and digital zoom)

67.5X total zoom

Thu, 01 Jan 2009 22:19:30 -0500

67.5X total zoom

New Years Eve

Thu, 01 Jan 2009 17:17:32 -0500

cwags:

Spent last night going to dinner and hanging out with friends, playing wii and some games. No one got wasted, no one threw up, and no one is going to tell epic stories about it. Strangely, I’m not sad about that. I got to spend quality time talking and hanging out with good friends. I guess I’m getting old.

Hanging out at Cory’s place was fun! And it was nice to wake up the next day not hungover or super tired and sleeping for half the day on New Year’s Day…

Daniel Bozhkov, Darth Vader Tries to Clean the Black Sea With...

Wed, 31 Dec 2008 11:55:27 -0500

Daniel Bozhkov, Darth Vader Tries to Clean the Black Sea With Brita Filter, 2000, still from performance documentation.

Daniel Bozhkov, born 1959 in Aytos, Bulgaria, lives Nyack, New York. Bozhkov is a classically trained artist whose skills in Old Master techniques, like fresco painting, provide and unlikely foundation for his wide-ranging conceptual projects. Bozhkov attempts to capture the untranslatable experiences and ironies that confront immigrants moving from one linguistic space into another. He conveys the experience of the outsider through the language of mass culture, re-conceiving western capitalist conventions from an unfamiliar perspective, and in doing so unveils new and often uncomfortable insights.

Recent projects have ranged from the mocking performance of Darth Vader Tries to Clean the Black Sea with Brita Filter (2000), in which Bozhkov, as the Star Wars villain, attempts futile act of ecological remediation.

My Year in Cities

Tue, 30 Dec 2008 20:22:00 -0500

Hmm - for this year, it was my first year in who knows how many years I did not go out of the country (I believe the last year was 1988….), but here goes:

Washington, DC metro area (including Arlington and Alexandria, VA)

Canaan Valley, WV

Philadelphia, PA

Asheville, NC

Denver, CO

Houston, TX

New York City, NY (the Bronx)

Boston, MA

Salem, MA

Columbus, OH

Dover, DE

Total states visted/drove through this year (in chronological order):
VA, DC, MD, WV, DE, PA, TN, NC, CO, TX, NJ, NY, CT, MA, OH…(14 states and DC).

But 2009 will bring in January/February:

Ft Launderdale, FL

Miami, FL

Stuttgart, Germany,

Bodensee area, Germany/Switzerland

Basel, Switzerland

Ischgl/Mathon, Austria (for skiing!!!!)

Berlin, Germany

Wiesbaden/Mainz/Rheingau area, Germany

Frankfurt, Germany

Denver, CO

Winter Park, CO (for more skiing!!!!)

Canaan Valley, WV (for some shitty mid-Atlantic skiing….)

other places in plan for 2009: Philadelphia, Sacramento, and ….???

Top 10 Most Annoying Americanisms

Mon, 29 Dec 2008 22:57:41 -0500

Top 10 Most Annoying Americanisms:

1. “Happy Holidays !”
Translation: “Merry Christmas but I realise you might be Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, Bahai, something even more exotic, agnostic or Godless and I don’t want to offend you.”

2. “Have a nice day.”
Translation: “I would like you to have a pleasant time today” or “I hate you” - or anything in between.

3. “You’re welcome.”
Translation: Meaningless Pavlovian response to thank you.

4. “Do the math.”
Translation: “Work it out yourself, stupid.”

5. “Let’s visit with each other.”
Translation: “We should spend time together.”

6. “How are you today?”
Translation: “We mean nothing to each other, but let’s pretend.”

7. “Good luck with that.”
Translation: “You have no chance at all.”

8. “Oh my gosh!”
Translation: “I fear you may feel that taking the Lord’s name in vain is blasphemous.”

9. “Can I use your bathroom?”
Translation: “I would like to use your lavatory.”

10. “Not so much.”
Translation: “That’s completely wrong.” Used on me in classic fashion by a Clinton aide back in February.

On Polish Mountain

Mon, 29 Dec 2008 22:47:08 -0500

cwags:

I have heard it said that when you are really in a bad situation that you are “up shit creek” or “up shit creek without a paddle”. For me, this no longer applies. “Up shit creek” now equals “On Polish Mountain”. Now this is not a racial slur. Polish Mountain really exists in Maryland and is in the Green Ridge State Forest. How do I know this and why is it relevant, you might ask? Well, last night I accidentally visited Polish Mountain and came darn close to being a permanent resident. Let’s go back to last night….

I’m going to throw it out there because it will soon become apparent to all of you. I can be a dumbass. My wife can be a dumbass too. Two dumbasses in a car together can, in fact, spell trouble.

My wife and I had driven out to Ohio to visit relatives over the holiday. We left my brothers house at 2:00 pm eastern time. Things were going swimmingly until we got to around the Midway toll plaza on I-70. There, traffic stopped dead. Then it would go for a little while and stop dead again. Being veterans of Holiday travel, we had expected traffic but had never encountered stop and go so far out. Usually, it is bad where I-70 meets I-270 to go into Washington. This looked bad as we had ~150 to go and we were going under 10 mph hour. Do the math and we were looking at 15 hours if this kept up all the way. Being impatient, though rational, we decided to look for a better route. We found a way to cut down to I-68 through Cumberland. 68 was good but we wanted more. We knew 68 would eventually run back into 70 which was a mess. We could see by the GPS that 66 was tantalizingly close to us and would allow us to miss 70 and 270 all together. So we charted a course to I-66 with the trusty GPS…it never lets you down, right?

Well, the GPS decided to route us through the Green Ridge State Forest. We turned of off State Route 144 onto a paved road. Then it had us turn onto a well packed dirt road. We thought this odd but temporary and continued on. Then it had us turn onto Polly something or the other road. It looked like the previous road but a little narrower and it had a bit of gravel down. Here is where we both started having misgivings but decided to go on. Here is where we turned into dumbasses. About a quarter of a mile in, the dirt and gravel gave way to deep ruts. Now we are in a Toyota Corolla mind you, not a 4 wheel drive. However, the road was so narrow, we also had no room to reall turn around. So, we decided to go forward. We went down a sloping hill that had fairly deep ruts…deep enough that we scraped bottom a few times. We were committed at this point and didn’t really have any options so we pressed forward. Oddly enough, to our right we saw a small fenced in graveyard. Not sure who was buried there but it could well be other dumbasses that attempted what we were doing. At the bottom of the hill, we found a mud pit. I got out and quickly determined that going forward was a bad idea. To bad I didn’t have this cognitive ability about 10 minutes earlier. It was much wider there, so we tried to turn around. And failed…stuck in the mud.

As we often do, we decided to rely on technology and whipped out the cell phone…whoops…no service. Uh oh. So, doggedly, I pushed while the wife reved and we actually got the car turned around and pointed back up the hill…great success. But, the hill was kind of muddy too and those tire ruts that caused us to bottom out going down soon prevented us from making progress all the way up the hill. At a certain point, about halfway up, we were dead in the water and no amount of reving or pushing was going to move us. However, we discovered that we now had cell phone reception…great success.

We considered this an emergency so we called 911. They transferred us to the Maryland State Police. The Police were really not all that interested in our plight. They told us to call the park rangers. We called them. They told us they couldn’t do anything and to call a tow truck. We said we didn’t know any numbers and they said they’d call us back. Not wanting to wait, we alled a friend to a. let someone know in the event htat we didn’t make it out and b. to get us some numbers. We also called the cops back and asked them to call a tow for us because we were losing battery on the cell. The reluctantly agreed to look into..apparently having better things to do than rescue people.

We waited for someone to call. Let me set the scene…we were in a dark forest, in Maryland, near some wierd little graveyard where there was no apparent reason for there to be one, and had passed a wierd rock formation on which someone had written “Free”. I have seen “The Blair Witch Project” and now it was almost like I was living it. It was about this time in a horror movie when the psycho or the backwoods hillbilly would show up and dismember us.

Finally, our friend called with a number. That two guy told us there was nothing he could do. He tried to give us another number but he cut out and was gone. The cops called back and said someone was on their way. Thank God.

We waited about an hour before we saw lights coming through the woods. The guy came with a large flatbed two truck. Now, when we first got stucjk, I had had my doubs about how retrieveable the car was at that moment. We were on a muddy hill. The truck would have to back down to get us. I met the driver, named Daniel and hereafter referred to as the Saint, at the top of the hill. The Saint assesed the situation and quickly saw that he could potentially get stuck. So he helped us push the car off of what we were hung up on and told us to back down the hill and gun it up. We tried this several times and progressed three fourths up the hill before we could go no further. At this point, the Saint put his own livelhood in jeopardy and attempted a risky rescue. He turned around and began backing down. At one point, he tried to go forward. He couldn’t. Ladies and gentlemen, our tow truck and rescue was now stuck.

At this point, most people would have been a. pissed and b. given up trying to salvage us in favor of saving themselves. Not the Saint. He instead rigged a chain together out of several chains that just reached our car and managed to winch us up on the back. He was also hoping that the added weight would help him gain traction. It didn’t..we were still stuck. When he saw our situation initally before attempting recovery, he had called his boss and tol him to come out. However, his phone had died along the way. We gave him ours with the one precious bar remaining and he managed to get ahold of the guy, who was freaked out when they lost contact of the Saint Turns out, a few years back, some people had called needing a tow and ended up ambushing and shooting the driver. This is what they feared had happened again. When assured that the Saint had not been ambushed, the boss came out with a wrecker that had a winch. He winched the first tow truck with our car on it up the hill and we were now no longer all stuck on the mountain. The way things were going, I envisioned that tow truck getting stuck and calling another and so on until every tow truck in maryland was stuck on Polish Mountain.

In any case, we made it out, happy to take 70 which was traffic free at this point. Hell, it was 12:30 so it should have been. The trip that normally takes 5 1/2 hours took 10 1/2 because of our shortcut. It also lightened our bank account a bit as well. However, we learned some lessons about being in a hurry, blindly trusting technology, not being prepared with our car charger and a flashlight, and the general kindness of strangers.

The Saint later told us that when the cops called him, they asked if he had a four-wheel drive tow truck and he said no. They told him not to bother then but he told them that somebody had to go and help because no one has a four wheel drive tow truck. That, my friends, is a truely great deed. It’d have been easy for him, with three kinds at home and one on the way, at 7:00 on a Sunday night to blow off two strangers that had stupidly gotten themselves into a bad predicament. Moreover, he could have easily given up when he saw what was going on and where we were. But he kept trying to help.

It’s easy to forget sometimes, in the face of all the shitty things that we do to each other, that people are also capable of great acts of kindness. We often hear about the bad things and can easily become jaded. We don’t often hear about the guys making 15 dollars an hour and trying to support four kids and a wife that go the extra mile to help out someone in need. I didn’t want to let that happen this time. While what happened to us last night is certainly not news worthy, it is this kind of story that illustrates that which is good in people. It is this kind of story that exemplifies the Christmas spirit and that we need to keep going all year around. The world is a better place because of people like Daniel. To tell the truth, I have been a little jaded about people lately. And its kind of funny because it had passed through my mind that I needed a Christmas miracle to remind me of all that is good at this time. Perhaps, as much as it sucked at the time, this was it.

Sorry for the long post, but this story needed to be told.

Damn……what a story. Makes me happy that I always carry AAA maps in my car… This story reminds me of one that I read in a Stephen King novel: “You Know They Got a Hell of a Band” Glad you and Amy made it back okay!