A couple of random thoughts......

Would it have been the same if Johnny Thunders died in, say, Toledo, Ohio as opposed to New Orleans?



























....and (bad) Bucky's screws up (NOT to be confused with good Bucky.....although they both are frequently sighted):

This was too funny. I despise coffee and yet a couple days ago even I got one of these in my E-mail from one of My People (thanx for the offer, Glammy Pammy)! It looked just like this, and had a .pdf attachment of a coupon for some typically overpriced Starbucks laxative-like beverage:



Starting today until September 30th, please join us in "surprising and delighting" our family and friends, while introducing you to our iced beverages. Attached is an invitation for a complimentary iced Grande beverage. Please forward this invitation to everyone in your email address book.

Thanks so much!
Kimberly Beasley
Starbucks Coffee Company
Southeast Regional Coordinator
(404) 636-5200 ext 2200





What the HELL were they trying to do? Why not physically hand out something that can't easily be duplicated, like gift cards or something.....??? Does this Kimberly person really exist? If she does exist and DOES ACTUALLY work for Starbucks, I'm sure that she didn't state "Please forward this invitation to everybody in your E-mail address book."


MAYBE SHE DID, though......Was this bird about to git the axe from the higher corporate levels of Bucky's and decided to go out with a bang?? Mistake or intentional, does she still work for Starbucks?? Is she cute?

....and WHY is surprising and delighting in quotes and different colour font?? That really makes me nervous! Shit, any invite to a place like Starbucks where I am to be "surprised and delighted" really puts me on edge.......

....according to snopes.com, she DOES exist, DOES work for Starbucks, and they made no mention as to whether she's cute or not, nor about the dastardly implication behind the quotation marks surrounding the words surprising and delighting.......


So, if I were Kimberly Beasley, I thought, what would I order at my local Starbucks (shit, there's NEVER one near you, is there?? Why don't they just build more of them)?? So I though about a few answers that Kim might order up, and I plugged them into the Starbucks Oracle:

Minutes of fun, really.....go ahead, have a go......I mean, I've been to Starbucks about four times in my life (two of those being threatened by my buddy Hillbilly Jay that if I didn't stop there to feed his Starbuck's addiction, he'd forcibly commandeer the car and drive us there) and all I remember is that they got gay names for the drinks ("Venti"??? "Grande"?? The fuck's up with THAT idiocy??). So on the Starbucks Oracle, you can even put in "Grandi Venti" like I did ('cause I don't know ANY of the names of those stoooopid-ass coffees) and STILL get an answer!!!

Isn't technology wonderful??

I'm taking off forra while......and I don't think where I'm going has legitimate Internet access.....so I'lll post (with lost more pics on the pic page) Wednesday the 6th!!!

Have a good holiday....


-E-

Some people have to learn to laff.....

...this was at my old supermarket where I used to buy my groceries and where a large number of people I know and used to know either had worked or still work there......

....WHY does it not surprise me there in Denver that people were pissed off at being upsold smokeys?? I mean, if you do that here in Portlandia, the customer would just literally blurt out laffing at you and tell you to have a nice day!! Even in Western New York, the customer would laff....

Man, some people have got to lighten up and light up......

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Speaking of lightening up, have a peek at this chart.....find your city on there.

Just fascinating.....especially in terms of how little spatial geography has to do with these results! There is just as much a chance that two cities within a relatively close proximity have a similar "anger ranking" as there is that two close together cities have a large disparity in scores!

Numbers 4 and 6 (Baltimore, MD and Wilmington DE....maybe an hours drive) as well as #99 and #100 (Bangor, Maine and Manchester, NH......like, three hours away) are very similar in scores.......

.....but what about the fact that someone is twice as likely to go postal in The Emerald City (#43 Seattle, WA) as they are only 2 and 1/2 hours down I-5 in The Rose City (#96, Portland, OR)?? Or far more likely to absolutely lose it in The Queen City (#37 Buffalo, NY) as they would in The-Something-Or-Other City (#86 Rochester, NY).....and THAT'S just 75 miles down I-90?????

Wow.....not all relationships are geographic......

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....two of the most evil words when combined just walked into my office today:

Seattle

Developer

-E-

Random Monday Night Ramblings.....


Was watching the Little League world series this weekend as the kids from Beaverton lost the U.S. Championship match to a class-act team from Georgia! What really hurt most, though, was looking at the JUGS guns reading the pitch speeds of these kids.

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The Japanese flamethrower was hurling at 71 miles an hour!!
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Me?? I was timed at the Ontario Science Centre about two years ago........I clocked in at a high speed of 62! Nice, I can get out-thrown by a 12-year-old!!!



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The Bills aren't winning ANY pre-season games! Whenever Marv Levy is around and the Bills lose all four pre season matches.....they usually go on to the playoffs after the regular season.

Doesn't really matter, as I learned that I STILL can't pick Sports Action (Legal pro football betting run by the State Government of Oregon) if my life depended on it!

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If you are an experienced pilot, shouldn't you be able to tell VISUALLY that something's kinda off in that this runway seems a fair amount shorter than all the other ones that I've taken off from?????

Me? I've always hated flying and I don't fly well AT ALL (clutch the seat, grit teeth, breath rapidly......just the guy you really don't want to sit next to).....especially on my most recent flight from Denver to Portland recently as a rather large thunderstorm cell was coming in over the Rocky Mountains from the NorthWest......plane barely got out, and, as it was blowing through the front edges of this storm, it seemed like it wasn't having much fun trying to stay airborne.......


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I love this...the forecast from www.weather.gov for Mist, Ora-gaaaan:

For: Mist .

August 28, 2006 22:37:47 PDT

Tonight: Mostly cloudy. Areas of drizzle. Probability of measurable precipitation 30 percent. Northwest wind 12 mph. Low 54.

Tuesday: Mostly cloudy. Ocasional rain then chance of rain showers. Probability of measurable precipitation 40 percent. Northwest wind 13 mph. High 63.

Tuesday Night: Mostly cloudy. Chance of rain showers. Probability of measurable precipitation 30 percent. Northwest wind 13 mph. Low 49.

Wednesday: Mostly cloudy. Scattered rain showers. Probability of measurable precipitation 40 percent. Northwest wind 8 mph. High 64.

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More pics on the graduation party site in a day or two......

-E-

Usually, I'm NOT......

....a big fan of organised religion.

But they've made me a convert, so, for the public good, I give you:

WHY YOU SHOULD CONVERT TO FLYING SPAGHETTI MONSTERISM

• Flimsy moral standards.
• Every friday is a relgious holiday. If your work/school objects to that, demand your religious beliefs are respected and threaten to call the ACLU.
• Our heaven is WAY better. We've got a Stripper Factory AND a Beer Volcano.

...taken from http://www.venganza.org/

.......and it's a fucking .org website! Which makes us a not-for-prophet religon! How many other faiths can one say that about without laffing out loud?? Plus, come on!! We're endorsed by The New York Dolls!!!!

Ya know, sometimes......


....you've reeeaaaallllly got to compare statistical evidence against empirical evidence.

If you travel a fair bit and you drink a fair bit.....watch THIS

....and I'll rest my case!

No, I'm not saying that I'm right at all....but this flies in the face of what I have personally seen and what others have told me through the course of their travels.....but hey: If Mr. Forbes said so!!!

....maybe next year's winner, according to Forbes, will be Salt Lake??

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.....was reading a trade journal at work about transportation planning, and did a bit of research. Apparently, Denver has finished T-REX.

This sucks, because NOW, they're working on voter-approved Fastracks, and between the fact that they already had an ass-kicking public transit system (that is only going to get better) that services ALL of the metropolitan area well and not just the central urban core (*AHEM*....are you listening, Tri-Met?) and two brilliantly-written daily newspapers, it brings a slight longing for the Mile-High City to me.....

However, given the step-on-everybody-else-to-get-what's-yours materialistic sort of culture that is (and has been for a while now) pervasive in a large majority of the citizenry there, plus the fact that there's no large body of water or urban-area rainforests for a great distance, the aforementioned longing is quickly tempered.....


-E-

So Byron, no deal...no deal.....

.......now, you're gonna git ten million from WHERE again??

.....how about asking City of Buffalo Residents for that amount out of a property tax increase??

Yeah.....that'll go over reeeaaaal well.....especially under a state-mandated fiscal control board!

Well, the Fort Erie Racetrack And Slots is breathing a huge sigh of relief now!! They git to keep those Western New York dollars.....for now, anyways.....and not have to kick ANY of it back to The City of Buffalo.

And, another side of things......

The Bore-a-gonian is probably the largest pile of rubbish there is! Why an area as intellectual as PDX puts up with such an insult as their only daily newspaper is beyond me! By comparison, it makes the Buffalo News become tolerable, and it will never be one-tenth as well-written as any of the Denver daily papers (Rocky Mountain News and Denver Post.....The Denver Daily News rips it's stories straight off the AP wire and has no columnists)...but The Bore-a-gonian has one columnist who knows how to write!! No, it's not that mean, bitter old man who keeps writing defamatory and misleading shit about my workplace......











Rather it's a guy who actually writes well.

Now, I know I'm living vicariously through the lads from Beaverton (The Murrayhill Little League team), but a columnist named John Canzano wrote why there's reason to really take another look at things......

Shortly thereafter, numerous people who just totally missed the point of this piece were writing in, saying things like "You don't know how much any game means to the kids when you see them going all out, even if it's only for the neighbourhood championship" and saying things about how Canzano just tarred Little League with a broad brush and there are quote: ".....a few spectacular incidents that Canzano talks about.....but this is not all of the world of kids sports" and just responses like that!

Great article....kind of tempers one's rah-rah-ness.....

-E-

• I put three pages in the picture page because I was at The Ocean this weekend, reconnecting with Zen. Thought about bringing the laptop, then remembered My People's law, Oregon Revised Statute #999.99.999.9 subsection (a), which clearly states: "No person, whilst at the coast on the beach, reconnecting with Zen, shall have their laptop computer closer than 70 miles to their person"

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• I haven't had a chance to see Snakes on a Plane this weekend (due to Zen Reconnection), but that movie and Admitted are both going to be seen by me this coming week. Come on, ANY flick where Samuel L. Jackson shouts "Get these motherfucking snakes off of this motherfucking plane" has got to be worth the $8.50 for that line alone!!!!

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• ???? My Colorado Rockies STILL have a very do-able shot at sneaking into the post-season??? And it's now late August?? Thank God the National League is such total rubbish this year! Denver: Fucking SUPPORT these guys....go to Coors....just cheer them on wildly!!

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• My Pub Quiz performance Thursday Evening was not terribly impressive. For the first time, we finished in the lower fiddy percent of the teams participating!! Very Flowers for Algernon-like.....

.....BUT, we walked out holding our heads high, as we were thee only team to correctly answer the question: "WHO did Wayne Gretzky first play Professional Hockey for?"

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• FUNNY shit. I mean, at first I was infuriated at the meth lab that was busted next door and really ticked at my housemates cavalier, "oh well" attitude towards that whole thing!

My one housemate does a little research, and sends me this link. Turns out that they busted not only the lab, but the people running it as well. LOOK at these fucking tweakers.....man, talk about strung out!!! I never saw ANY of them before in the neighbourhood!

THEN, my housemate gets stopped by the Sheriff walking home (long story, that happens all the time here) and after showing ID and stuff, he starts talking to the deputies. Well get this!!! That mid-90's Jeep SUV eight houses down the block that was put under a military flame-thrower and fried LITERALLY to it's metal (NO rubber on tires, NO interior remaining, NOTHING left save for the metal frame) in the middle of the night a few weeks ago????? Turns out that the meth-heads busted for running the lab next door were to blame for THAT as well, according to the deputy!!

Screw this.......I think I've had enough........

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-E-

WE are BASEBALL West.....

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• Today's topic: Noodly Appendages

This was brought to you by an astute reader of the 18,472,054th from Atlanta, Georgia......

I mean, I checked this on Amazon.com and lo and behold.....there it was....all 20 pages of it. WHO comes up with this stuff? It initially strikes me as being from Europe......

Although now it's no longer paired with The Child's Story Bible, but rather with this.....which IS going to be my next book purchase! The web site almost had me pissing myself laffing! You have GOT to watch the New York Dolls video on the site....unless you are easily offended at people poking fun at organised religion.....

....now The Flying Spaghetti Monster, on the other hand, wasn't from Europe.

He's an Oregonian....

....'nother new pic on the Grad Party page today!

-E-

And they're wigging over a Mega-Lo-Mart here in Cedar Mill.....

.....Christ on a bike!!!

So, the next-door neighbour's got some trash and garbage accumulating on the side of their house. A) - Bleech! B) - Rats an' shit! So I tell one of my housemates before I leave town Friday that I'll speak to my buddy in Code Enforcement on Monday and see what can be done.....

Well, my housemate takes a casual stroll over there and peeks around and then E-Mails me at work today with this pic he saw taped to the garage door!

So my co-worker in Beaverton Code Enforcement tells me to call this guy in Washington County's Code Enforcement (since technically, Cedar Mill is in unincorporated Washington County and not within the City of Beaverton.......YET, anyways). I speak with the gentleman, and he tells me that we have to contact the STATE Department of Health because it's a HazMat situation......but yet, the people causing the trash accumulation are in the OTHER half of the duplex and THEY ARE STILL RESIDING THERE.....

This used to be a really nice street......shoulda THOUGHT something was kinda off a few weeks ago when this mid/early 90's Jeep Wagoneer down the street one morning was sitting in a driveway looking like it LITERALLY was put under 45 minutes of a military flame-thrower......

.....and now? Replaced with what appears to be a nice 2004 model Wagoneer......

....nice....

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Posted another pic of the graduation party on the fotograff site ( http://ernie-pics.blogspot.com/ )


-E-

Third times a charm, I guess....

TSA Nazis, after the THIRD (*ahem*, "random") HAND-INSPECTION, FINALLY found the evil, diabolical hidden 2 -ounce bottle of mouthwash in my laptop case!

Went to this thing My People hold called "Wednesday Concerts At The Zoo" or something like that! Well....it ain't no "Thursday at the Square", THAT'S for sure.....but still, instead of $3 pints of Lab Ratt's Blue, you can just buy an entire bottle of really nice vino, for, like, $20....with the profits going to pay for zoo animal feed, or something nice 'n lefty like that.....

....anyways, I had met a person who works for Intel in Hillsboro, Oregon that my buddy Lori introduced me to. Cool....really great person.......had to give this person shit about how bad the Intel Celery processor is (I've had two computers with the Intel Celery processor......it does for processors what The Yugo did for cars)!

Then, what this person said stunned me!

"Oh yeah....I know they're shit! Basically, they are the exact same chip as an Intel Pentium.....but they intentionally blow out two critical fuses during manufacturing.....so it's capacities are severely lessened and thus, it becomes a Celery processor from what WAS a Pentium processor!"

Errmmm.......right!

No wonders I'm a die-hard AMD fan (and have been since my first Intel Celery chip)! I mean, when my desktop has an 800 MhZ AMD Duron in it, and my laptop has a 2200 Mhz Intel Celery processor in it....and the AMD processor ROUTINELY flies along much quicker than the Celery......then something's wrong!!!

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....Finally found some time to post some pics of PNC Park in Pittsburgh, and of my graduation party. I am forever in the debt of Buffalo Beast fotograffer Lukia Costello for some simply ass-kicking pics.....she somehow made ME look remotely decent.

Add comments to the pics if you feel so inclined.....better yet, make a caption!!!

They're at http://ernie-pics.blogspot.com ....and I'll probably post, like, one pic each day! Click on the image to expand it!

I hope you get a laff outta them!

-Ernie-

Great.....just great.....

...ever wonder if by keeping us afraid and intimidated, they gain greater control over us and easier acquiescence by us?

No, it's not Al-Quida I'm referring to....

I mean, HOW intimidating is THIS?? "New airport security will include the following: Mothers can bring baby formula on board flights, but only after drinking it in front of security officials first."

Ooooh-Kay.....what about breastfeeding?? I can hear the jokes rolling now......

And I love Dubya's quote: ".....a stark reminder that this nation is at war with Islamic fascists."

OK...cool....nice. So why is that statement qualified with the term "Islamic" fascists??? How come in Word War II, we never heard the term "Christian Fascists" to describe Germans and Italians????

Oooops....that’s right. Almost forgot: The Christian Fascists were white.....yeah.....ahh.......NOW I get it.....


Like I say....just great! I have to fly out Friday Night......I don't need this shit!!!

-E-

Golly......this'd be a great song if.....

......the composer knew how to spell!


Now, this is amazing! Look at this pic they show in this video!!!! Fucking Hell.....LOOK AT THE PIC!! The person who they purport in the fotograff to be Bucky is POSING!! POSING! Yeah.....that's either last year's clan reunion or made by Adobe......

Of course, quote: "New York State Troopers refuse to comment on exactly how they obtained the picture....."

Called "fotoshop", guys!!

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Goddamm Senecas never stay in one place too long!!

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Gotta love CafePress

Did he really say that......??

YO, Buffalo!!!

Tony just called you retarded (bottom of third paragraff)!
























YO! Who ya callin' retarded?? Me? Huh?? I'll slap ya again if ya do!

What a difference a year makes.....

...well, OK. So thanxgiving ain't for another four months.....

....still, over the past year I have a lot to be thankful for.

Today, it's been one year now since I had finally made it home to Portlandia and to Cedar Mill.

In that last year, I was able to do things that I either wasn't allowed to do or just couldn't do from 2003-2005......

• I was actually able to graduate from University
• I was able to get my old job back with The Government and get paid more than seven-fiddy an hour
• I was able to find another job and finally resume my career
• I was able to surround myself with, friend and stranger, people who CARE!
• I was able to possess a sense of dignity once again
• I was able to see the ocean again
• I was able to rediscover once again just HOW badly my golf game sucks!!!
• I was able to learn to live and laugh again

I'm home.....

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On a lighter note.....my brother's a bartender.....wonder if he even thought of trying this (courtesy of a reader in Washington State).

Thanx, all.....

-Ernie-

Random Wednesday Night ramblings.....

• FINALLY got around to seeing the flick Paradise Now.......I had been told how great it was by someone I used to know....veeerrry dragging, slow, and dull and predictable. Don't waste your time.....

• Right. So, we've all heard of Snakes On A Plane......but monkeys on a train??

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I mean, is this common in India?? Throngs of morning commuters waiting on a tube platform....and there are these monkeys wearing monkey suits. bitching about another job they can't stand commuting to every morning?? I mean, they seem to act like it's no huge thing and a common everyday occurance! Shit, these monkeys are learning to use public transit instead of being single-occupant car drivers..........now WHO'S the more evolved life form??

I mean, seriously, though......didn't ANYONE think that it was a bit strange that this monkey is sitting on the tube platform waiting for the goddamm train to arrive???? HOW'D these monkey's know what train to get on?? What stop to disembark at?? How would they fare on The Northern Line? On the MAX??

-E-