Month: October 2004

It occurs to me that one reason the placebo effect works so well is that it’s so easy to forget that we’re healing ourselves amazingly well all of the time.

I don’t want to say that I’m feeling overwhelmed by all the stuff I need to get done, but…

You know you’re in trouble when you find yourself prioritizing your life in terms of what you can least afford to neglect, and weighing consequences instead of rewards.

There are several major wildfires blazing in Northern California this week. Yesterday and today, there has been soot and ashes on the parked cars, it smells like a campfire, looks like a fog, and the sun has been bright orange. It’s very freaky looking, and breathing is not fun.

But here’s what I’d like to know. There’s so much smoke I can barely see across the street, so why aren’t the smoke alarms all going off?

Usually, if we’re cooking a pizza in the oven and a half a piece of sausage rolls off, I have to pull the battery in our smoke detector – shouldn’t it work just as well if the whole neighborhood were on fire? Another of life’s little mysteries, unsolved.

Critical Section used to be a daily read for me, but I was sure getting tired of checking when Ole took a four month hiatus from blogging. Asparagus Pee welcomes him back to the fold, and here’s a link to some interesting comments he just wrote up on Nevil Schute inspired thoughts on voting: Critical Section – In the Wet.

I love the suggestion that they should have test questions on the ballot propositions, and you’d have to pass the test for your vote to count.

This entry is just to make sure that Google will find a new website I’ve set up for a local school ballot initiative. It’s over at Measure V Blog, and it’s only of interest to people who live in the Auburn Union Elementary School District (AUESD). See how I got all those keywords in there?

This is the logo created for the committee by The Lady Janet and I like it a lot. I really like some of these new style sheets they’ve got over on Blogger these days too.

Tonight I tried white asparagus for the first time, and I won’t tell you what it looked like, but I will tell you that chlorophyl is not the smell ingredient. Everything came out just fine, in other words.

For a good laugh, here’s how they pack white asparagus.

Hats off to Brian Wilson for finally putting together the Smile package. I’ve listened to some of this, and honestly, it’s a little rough by Beach Boy standards, but I’ve decided that it’s good stuff, and I support Brian 100% in this, so doggoneit, I’m buying one and doing my Asparagus Pee best to help make it the best selling album of the year, and I encourage you to do the same.

I would love to hear what this would sound like if he’d had the support of the band back in the day, or even now. Thanks, Brian.

We were watching the debate this week between Bush and Kerry… in case you missed it, Kerry won.

Again.

There was a point in the debate where Kerry said, “I led the fight to put 100,000 cops on the streets of America.”

To this, The Lady Janet made the suggestion, “Wouldn’t they be better off in police cars?”

(And you wonder why I love this woman?)

Surprised today to find a new site at the top of a search on “Asparagus Pee.” Turns out there’s actually somebody trying to sell merchandise with this logo and a couple of others. Hey, more power to ’em, right? Get your Asparagus Pee T-shirts, coasters, and what not right here!

NOTE: Asparagus Pee, Gooblek & Other Neat Stuff is not affiliated with “The Pure Breed Revolution” and neither endorses nor discourages their efforts. Image at left used without permission, but I’m helping their Pagerank&#153 a whole bunch. And why didn’t I do this first?

So I’m eating my bag of generic store-brand BBQ chips tonight, and it’s an especially good extra-red-salty batch, but I turn the bag around, and I swear to god it said, “Try and enjoy our other delicious snacks,” like, “Come on, I dare ya.” (Click the pic for the big picture.) Guess it’s the perfect real-life example of Eats, Shoots & Leaves.

In other completely unrelated business, here’s a picture update of the wild turkeys that I see on my morning walk &#150 I wasn’t satisfied with my Fujicam pics, so I took a real camera and got it developed.

For my last exhibit, I just got home a couple of hours ago from a Candidates’ Night for the school board, and it was hard &#150 either I didn’t know there was going to be a quiz, or the dog ate my homework. Either way, here’s a quick jpeg showing my name on the local ballot with Dubya. I’m honored. No, really.