Farewell 2011, Hello 2012! Now what do YOU have in store?

For me, 2011 brought the worst and the best that life has to offer.  To describe 2011 as a year of transition is to take understatement to an entirely new level.
The month of August begins to take on new meaning other than simply "beach week".  In 2010, August highlighted the final chapter of one story.  August 2011 brought an emergency visit to the cardiac cath lab, and an entirely separate healing of the heart - a most unexpected and welcome one - the opening chapter to another story, the one I hope ends with "and they lived happily ever after."
To all who have touched my life in ways large and small, I offer my thanks. I hope that you will look kindly on whatever small impact I may have had on your lives as well.
This young lad now on his 60th circuit around the Sun has been blessed (or "blessed") with a life that is never boring. I expect that will continue in 2012. As somebody once said, God does answer our prayers; He does not take requests.  The answers are often not what we expect. ANd they are most often not easy. But they are there for us.
Happy New Year to all my friends, family, associates, collegues, and random online game teammates.
May your 2012 be the best year ever.

(About the photo: Taken I think in 1955 around Christmas.  I was then and am now "the thinker", Tom was and is "the doer", and Rick learned to live life on his terms.  This is part of a huge cache of old photos I am scanning and preserving.)

Well, hello there.

Turns out that sentence has become music to my ears.
More on that at some future time.
Which leads me to the point of this post.  I'm giving the blog another go.
First, there's some tidying up to be done with the blog interface, as well as with my little addled brain.

Thanks to this blog for the inspiration.

One take

That's the claim.
This is awesome on so many levels.

We interupt the silence for an urgent plea

The situation in Haiti is, well, nearly beyond words.
Two living saints from Pittsburgh are doing what they can to save the lives of a group of orphans and they need our help.

Ginny Montanez of That's Church is leading the effort to seek help for the BRESMA orphanage. Go visit and find out how you can help.

Sarah Palin

A thick layer of dust enshrouds this blog.
It's not that there's nothing to say. In fact quite the opposite. But others are saying it so much better than I.

Here's a new blog offering up one perspective on the Alaska governor's decision to step aside.

The MSM and the Beltway insiders are incapable of comprehending how somebody might wish to effect change without the trappings of insider power.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

Credit where credit is due

Finally, I have an opportunity to say something nice about Obama.
Not the President.
First Lady Michelle Obama offered some good advice to students in one of D.C.'s under performing schools. The details here.

(Huge h/t to Betsy Newmark)
(Photo from the White House collection)

My new favorite blog

Barack Obama's Teleprompter's Blog

Reflections from the hard drive of the machine that enables the voice of the Leader of the Free World

And somehow, some will be offended.
Too bad.


(h/t Gina Cobb)

Is it really a jar of mayo?

There are so many urgent matters taking our time these days. A nasty recession (but not the worst since the Depression - but keep talking it down,) the rise of socialism, the man made global warming myth, I could go on.
However, today there are bigger fish to fry. And after frying, slathering them in tartar sauce. But tartar sauce made with mayonnaise or with a revolting substitute.
Like me, Christopher Taylor at Word Around the Net is a purist when it comes to condiments.

Miracle Whip is one of those nasty fifties products that was marketed with dozens of recipes that James Lileks loves to mock. It is the same sort of bastard demon child of real food as Sandwich Spread and Spam.

Some people, dump this industrial waste into recipes such as cole slaw to get that nasty sweet assault on your senses.

His full article may be enjoyed by clicking here. Come back when you're finished, if you don't mind.

I'll wait.




Oh, you're back. Thanks. Let me pick up where Mr. Taylor left off.
Miracle Whip is an abomination.
Because several misguided members of our extended family suffer from the delusion that this pitiful substitute condiment tastes good, my dear wife makes two types of potato salad for family gatherings. One version is made with pure, delicious mayonnaise (Hellmann's of course) - while the other is slathered in that toxic waste called Miracle Whip. Invariably, the bowl of good potato salad is emptied first.
Similar family feuds also erupt over butter and substitute spreads (yes, I'm looking at you, yellow container. And I can and do believe it's not butter!)
For so many things in our society, the pale imitation has been marketed so well, that it is often preferred over the real deal.
Come to think of it, that might explain why we have the president we do.

Windy and living right

Lincoln Day 2009 brought a rather intense wind storm to western Pennsylvania -much of the eastern U.S., really - causing power outages and other mayhem.



We had some odds and ends blown around our porch and the wind got under the the grill cover, all too briefly turning it into a light than air craft. It landed face down in the muddy back yard.
The more interesting development was noticing a neighbor's trampoline parked in the spot where my car usually spends the night.



For no particular reason, the night before, I had parked the car a little further back in the parking area than usual. The result was a near miss instead of lengthy conversations with the neighbor and insurance adjusters.



I count myself fortunate.

We're here to help

This old yarn has been around awhile. I needed a good chuckle; this delivered:

A cowboy named Bud was overseeing his herd in a remote mountainous pasture in California when suddenly a brand-new BMW advanced out of a dust cloud towards him.

The driver, a distinguished looking man in a Brioni suit, Gucci shoes, RayBan sunglasses and YSL tie, leans out the window and asks the cowboy, “If I tell you exactly how many cows and calves you have in your herd, Will you give me a calf?”

Bud looks at the man, obviously a yuppie, then looks at his peacefully grazing herd and calmly answers, “Sure, Why not?”

The yuppie parks his car, whips out his Dell notebook computer, connects it to his Cingular RAZR V3 cell phone, and surfs to a NASA page on the Internet, where he calls up a GPS satellite to get an exact fix on his location which he then feeds to another NASA satellite that scans the area in an ultra-high-resolution photo.

The young man then opens the digital photo in Adobe Photoshop and exports it to an image processing facility in Hamburg , Germany .

Within seconds, he receives an email on his Palm Pilot that the image has been processed and the data stored. He then accesses an MS-SQL database through an ODBC connected Excel spreadsheet with email on his Blackberry and, after a few minutes, receives a response.

Finally, he prints out a full-color, 150-page report on his hi-tech, miniaturized HP LaserJet printer and finally turns to the cowboy and says, “You have exactly 1,586 cows and calves.”

“That’s right. Well, I guess you can take one of my calves,” says Bud.

He watches the young man select one of the animals and looks on amused as the young man stuffs it into the trunk of his car.

Then the Bud says to the young man, “Hey, if I can tell you exactly what your business is, will you give me back my calf?”

The young man thinks about it for a second and then says, “Okay, why not?”

“You’re a Congressman for the U.S. Government”, says Bud.

“Wow! That’s correct,” says the yuppie, “but how did you guess that?”

“No guessing required.” answered the cowboy. “You showed up here even though nobody called you; you want to get paid for an answer I already knew, to a question I never asked. You tried to show me how much smarter than me you are; and you don’t know a thing about cows…this is a herd of sheep. .

Now give me back my dog.

(h/t Duncan at And Rightly So!)