doodledee

This afternoon I went for a run. About halfway through my route, I rounded a corner and came face-to-face with three girls selling lemonade out on the boulevard. As soon as the one of them spotted me, they started yelling, .Hey! Free lemonade for runners!. Not being one to pass-up free lemonade, I yelled for them to have it ready to hand to me as I ran by. One of the girls jumped up, poured a glass, and went and stood with her arm out in the street. One perfect hand-off later, I was refreshing myself with a nice cold beverage.

Indeed it was so refreshing that I circled back around the block to see them again. As I had hoped, they saw me coming dashed out to the street with another glass. Man, that's good lemonade! Perhaps one more time? Why not, it's 100 degrees out, right?

So around I go again, heart thumping, head pounding, sweat pouring and all. As I round the corner, running for no other reason that to get some more of that damn lemonade, one of the girls yells, .You don't get any more free ones.. Curses, foiled again.

Oh, well. A morning picking strawberries, an afternoon making jam, and two free lemonades works out to be a pretty mint Sunday. So don't think I'm complainin'.

Tonight, Libby and I went to a live taping of Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me over in St. Paul. It was really fun. Al Franken was the special guest participant for this episode. That dude is incredibly quick. He makes me laugh hard. Hard like Uncle Buck hard.

Tune in the weekend of July 6th and relive the magic.

A couple of big church/state court rulings in the news over the last couple of days.

Yesterday, a federal appeals court in San Francisco ruled that the pledge of allegiance is unconstitutional because it contains the phrase 'under God'. Apparently, the phrase is considered an endorsement of religion and thereby a violation of the first amendment. I was surprised to learn that it was actually Congress who added the 'under God' phrase back in 1954. I was also surprised to learn that kids still recite the pledge at all. (This decision was put on hold sometime today.)

I dig the decision, even though a lot of politicians don't seem to. For one, the phrase could create confusion for children who come from agnostic households. It's also fairly easy to argue that by including the 'under God' bit we're forcing our kids commit to some sort of religious endorsement -- something that kids probably shouldn't have to do. Heck, I'm not sure if it's something that anybody should have to do.

Then today, the Supreme Court ruled that school vouchers are legal. The parallel issue here is that parents who send their children to religious based private schools use 95% of all vouchers. By providing vouchers to parents -- basically giving them tax dollars -- the government would seem to be endorsing a religious education. And in rolls that pesky first amendment again.

Strangely, on this one, I don't mind the ruling. The fact that so many parents use the vouchers to send their children to faith-based schools does not change the fact that it's still the parent's choice where to send their children. If they choose a religious school, so be it. If they want to bus their children to the new public school in Maple Grove, again, it's their choice to make.

Now I'm not saying that I'd use vouchers. People that turn their backs on public schools tend to piss me off. But the choices are there, so I guess it all seems fine to me. Then again, I'm easily fooled.

When it's nice outside, some of us at the office will take our lunches and go eat out behind the building on these old picnic tables that belong to some other business here in Strip Mall Hell. Figure a little sunlight is probably good for those of us who work in a dark cave most of the day. Today at lunch there was an enormous dumpster sitting out back next to our tables.

Being lazy, after we finished eating we got up to throw our trash into the dumpster rather than carry it back to our office. While looking in over the side, I spotted a ton of folders, a bunch of phone books, and wait... what's this?... a nerf crossbow? Since nobody but geeks would have a nerf crossbow at the office, I immediately dug further in. It quickly became apparent that this was no ordinary dumpster - this was some sort of magical geek dumpster.

Eventually, there were 4 of us frantically digging under thousands of file folders and tearing open boxes in pursuit of geek booty. An unopened keyboard? Jackpot! 50 or so unused CD jewel cases? Take .em away! And it just kept getting better. Software, hardware, you name it, it was there. We were like wild animals. It wasn't pretty.

One of us (me) even wanted to get in and jump around, but some other people (everyone else) weren't in favor of the idea.

Korea lost today. I guess this means that people can stop complaining that the whole thing was fixed. I was almost starting to believe it after watching that Spain game.

It's too hot lately. Cool down, please.

Garage sales are fun. We didn't really make any money, but the weather was nice and the cookout afterwards was great, so who cares. Sign me up for that deal every other year.

Last Sunday we played golf at Brookview in Golden Valley. It rained hard that morning, but by our 12:30 tee-time things were looking better. Strangely, when we went into the pro-shop to pay, the dude behind the counter told us that no rain checks would be given that day because there was a chance of rain later that afternoon. Say what? Isn't that the point of the rain check? If not, then what is? Dorks.

I found this map of the earth at night to be kind of neat. Some of the lights in Brazil are forest fires, I guess. Ouch.

I got a kick out of the reports from the Minnesota Republican Convention the other night. In what was clearly a very tight race, it took 18 hours and 12 full ballots to determine which candidate to endorse for governor. And what was the deciding factor? Well, they're Republicans, so it must be taxes, right? Nope. Well, everybody bitches about our do-nothing policies on transit, so that's gotta be it. Nope again. K-12 education? Nice try. At the end of the day, the candidates tried to gain votes by arguing that they "[were more] opposed to abortion and gay rights". Nice. Not surprisingly, these cornerstone issues weren't mentioned at press conferences the next morning. I can't wait for the Demos, no doubt it'll be just as fun.

And here's one of the reasons I love world cup soccer. To summarize, the guy who scored the winning goal for Korea over Italy happens to play for an Italian club team during the regular season. After he scored the goal that beat Italy, ending their world cup dreams, his Italian team immediately cut him. He will never be allowed to play soccer in Italy again. It sounds bad, but hey, at least he's not dead.

There was an interesting column in the paper today about how the Fairfax County (VA) Council has passed a law that makes it illegal to pave your entire front lawn. Apparently immigrants who move to the area for jobs can't afford to live in anything but high-density housing. Because a single house might have like 6 car owners, people pave their lawns to create extra parking places. Naturally, the people who don't have the need to pave their lawns are convinced that others doing so will hurt everyone's property value. God forbid they let them park on the street.

We had this exact situation while living in New Hope. Four guys sharing a house (often with some lady friends spending the night) resulted in up to 8 cars needing to park at our place. Since the city of New Hope has some stupid law that made it illegal to park on the street over night, we weren't sure what to do. Not to worry, we figured, the apartment building next door has parking for 100's of cars and the lot averages maybe 10% full. Bzzzz. After parking there a couple of times, we started getting nasty notes about towing our cars if we made it habit. Seeing as we had no vested interest in the property value of the house we were living in, we just parked our cars all over the front lawn. It looked bad, but hey, what choice did we have? God forbid they let us park on the street.

We're having a big garage sale on Saturday so I spent the night over at KC's helping set-up the garage. Ok, it's probably not really going to be that big of a sale, but it seems like everybody has a little something to sell, so in the end, we'll all make $5 and the accounting will be a total pain in the ass.

To prepare the garage, we hung the stereotypical black plastic on all the walls to prevent the yokels from getting confused and trying to buy stuff we're not looking to sell. We didn't get it all exactly perfect, though, so with luck, I'll make off with Keith's string-trimmer and I can just blame it on some shopper. Should be a real hoot.

It's strange that most of us are suddenly at the point in our lives where we seem to have crap we need to get rid of. I can remember not that long ago being able to fit most of my belongings into my Honda Civic hatchback. Or the time we moved 4 guys from one house to another in a single [albeit full] truckload. A few years later, you could maybe take a bag or two of stuff over to the Salvation Army, but you never had enough stuff for a garage sale -- most of your stuff was just fine. Then suddenly, almost without warning, sitting in a 20-year-old filthy chair isn't as charming as it once was.

I'm keeping my chair, though, you gotta have porch furniture.

There's a famous story among Bob Dylan fans about how the Hibbing High School student body booed Dylan during his performance at school's talent show in 1957/8. Apparently Dylan tried to play some crazy Jerry Lee Louis type song on the piano and people didn't like it, so they let him have it. Dylan took it pretty hard, I think. Some people claim that after his performance, Bob got so mad that he slammed his foot down, breaking a piano pedal in the process. Others point out that for years and years he never acknowledged his Hibbing roots or returned to the city.

So anyways, today Grossie and I played in a golf tournament down south in Hayfield, Minnesota. Most of the people in the tournament were old time IBMers from Rochester. I got to talking with one of them and it turns out he grew-up in Hibbing. He said he went to school with Dylan and yes, he booed him during the talent show. Surprisingly, he'd never had anyone ask him about the talent show before; he seemed surprised I knew the story. Then he said Dylan just sucked that day. And I believed him.

Tonight at dinner, the restaurant was pretty full and we ended up sitting in the smoking section. KC noticed a little blurb on the menu that said as of June 15th the whole place was going to be non-smoking. Seeing as they wouldn't really need it anymore, I stole the ashtray off our table. I put it in Jeannine's purse just in case they busted me on the way out. Later, after it wasn't as funny anymore, I decided to just leave it in her bag.
Go USA.

Last weekend, Grossie and I got tickets for the Grateful Dead Family Reunion concert over at Alpine Valley. It's going to be the first time all the [remaining] original boys have held a concert since Jerry died. The event was announced a couple of weeks back and tickets just went on sale last Saturday. I guess we were lucky to get in because tickets sold out in like 30 minutes.

By Monday, people were scalping them on Ebay for huge mark-ups and by Tuesday, Wisconsin had pulled the plug on the whole event. I guess somebody at Clear Channel forgot to handle getting all the permits before selling 70,000 tickets. Nice work, dumbasses. I really don't like having to cheer for Clear Channel, but in this case, I sorta have to. Me just wanna dance.

Sometimes for lunch we go to Cub foods and build a salad at their salad bar. It's all sold by the pound, so you have to watch what you take. Back in college, I remember hearing that my friends had to buy salad by the pound at UW-Madison, but at the U, it was all you could eat. At Cub, if I get carried away, I'll end up with like a $4.50 salad and I'll end up throwing away a bunch of crappy cherry tomatoes. Today, the checker told me that somebody had come through a few minutes before with a $13 salad. That's gotta be a lot of croutons.

Tonight, I built a new section of the site that documents the hunt for the best Juicy Lucy in town. We're calling it the Tour d'Loose Juice. Check it out, it's gonna be a hoot.

In my spare time, I've been writing a webapp that will manage blogs. It's in Java, which isn't too popular from a blogging perspective, because it's harder to set-up and all that. A friend at work pointed out this one site, moveabletype, that is a prebuilt perl app that is pretty slick. I think I'm gonna keep building my version, but I think I found my feature list. Weee.

It's crazy to see all the time people spend on their blog. Check this one out, for example. Looks nice, yea, but think of the time it would take. Insane.

(And yes, blogging about blogging is stupid, I know.)

This weekend kicks off the quest for the best Juicy Lucy in the metro area. Stay tuned for all the fun.

Ok, so not everything went according to plan. Two outta three ain't bad, though.

Here are some good reasons to stay home sick:

• You get to sleep for as long as you want.


• You get to eat soup and grilled cheese for every meal.


• You get to watch Dismissed on Mtv and not feel guilty.


• You get to fart around on your computer for the periods you can sit-up.

Pictures of Borly's new baby are now online. Cute..ness...over...load!

There was a big story in the news last week about how scientists found a bunch of buried ice on Mars. That's pretty mint. I can't wait for the bottled water crowd to start rejecting the 'crappy Earth water' and ordering-up Mars water at restaurants.

Consider this my official prediction that evidence of past life on Mars will be found. I'm guessing it'll look like a a trilobite, but I'd prefer if it was more like this hot martian that I saw on TV last weekend.