With that said I promise the site won’t become a shock site or be built to offend. I collect gifs and jpegs in the gallery and the front page will probably consist of links or youtube videos that I find particularly interesting or hilarious. Sometimes I’ll post something that’s just plain awesome. Anyway have fun, and due to the nature of the site I probably wouldn’t surf it at work. The last thing you need is some crazy guy with asperger’s syndrome spouting racial invective at full volume in your office. 95% of the content on lollibrary.com so far is perfectly safe, but that 5% if played at full volume in an office setting might not be the best career move.

While waiting I came across this awesome article about Darth Vader’s Ariel Atom.

http://www.urbanracer.com/articles/anmviewer.asp?a=3741&z=45

Meshuggah – Bleed (Yes that’s a real drummer. And only 1 drummer.)
Download audio file (03%20-%20Meshuggah%20-%20Bleed.mp3)

Priscilla Ahn – Dream (It’s been featured in quite a few soundtracks so I lose cred for that. But being the father of 2 daughters, the sentimentality captures me.)
Download audio file (01%20-%20Dream.mp3)

Andrew Bird – Effigy
Download audio file (04%20-%20Effigy.mp3)

Azam Ali & Tyler Bates – The Spill (Tyler Bates does the equivalent of modern synth guitar Top Gun soundtracks for Zack Snyder (director of 300 and Watchmen). Sure it’s cheese, but it’s catchy and I’ve listened to this track way too many times to worry about it.)
Download audio file (Azam%20Ali%20and%20Tyler%20Bates%20-%20The%20Spill.mp3)

7l & Esoteric + Mr. Lif – Operating Correctly
Download audio file (06%20-%20Operating%20Correctly%20%28Feat.%20Mr.%20Lif%29.mp3)

That’s it for now. I’ll start highlighting new tracks as they come out. I can’t keep looking back to 2008 only. So things I find, I’ll post. There’s some other stuff I’d like to post but this little audio player starts having issues the more instances of it you post. Sorry Sera Cahoone and Fleet Foxes, you’ve gotten a lot of play time but everyone knows you’re awesome anyway.

Yes, it’s a toy. Yes, you can buy it for your children so they can learn about the security checkpoint. Yes, there are a ton of hilarious Amazon reviews for this toy.

I poured over my last.fm rss feed to locate what new material had crept in in 2008. I’ve found 50-60 new releases to evaluate for the best songs. This is going to take a little while.

Here’s the artist breakdown.

Agalloch, Amon Amarth, Amon Tobin, Andrew Bird, Animal Collective, Autechre, Azam Ali, Behold… The Arctopus, Between the Buried and Me, Blockhead, Buckehead, Candiria, Conor Oberst, Cunninlynguists, Deerhoof, Devildriver, DJ Zinc, Dream Theater (Greatest Hits), Estradasphere, Faun Fables, Final Fantasy, The Flaming Lips, Fleet Foxes, Fleur, Gnarls Barkley, God of Shamisen, Gojira, In Flames, Isis, Kamelot, Kronos Quartet, Laura Marling, Loreena McKennit, Lustmord, Meshuggah, Minus the Bear, Mr. Lif (Collaborations), Nine Inch Nails, Niyaz, Okkervil River, Opeth, Orishas, Ozomatli, Portishead, Psycroptic, Puscifer (Remixes), Reverend Peyton’s Big Damn Band, Roots Manuva, Secret Chiefs 3, Sera Cahoone, Sigur Ros, Sleepytime Gorilla Museum (2007 ahem), Soilwork, Solefald, Sonata Arctica, Strapping Young Lad (Greatest Hits), Textures, Tin Hat Trio, Toadies, Tom Morello, Venetian Snares.

Right now my iPod is loaded with the new albums from the above artists. I’m listening linearly instead of using shuffle and rating them as I go. Once I’ve got a song from each of the above albums I’ll make a new playlist and rate them based on my favorites. I’ll be truthful to my tastes. Normally I try and limit exposure to my musical tastes, but limiting the list based on how palatable the music is to anyone else wouldn’t create a list that’s mine.

I’m posting the entire article here as well. It’s absolutely hilarious, and contains more wordplay than a rap battle.

We Blew It
A look back in remorse on the conservative opportunity that was squandered.
by P.J. O’Rourke
11/17/2008, Volume 014, Issue 09

Let us bend over and kiss our ass goodbye. Our 28-year conservative opportunity to fix the moral and practical boundaries of government is gone–gone with the bear market and the Bear Stearns and the bear that’s headed off to do you-know-what in the woods on our philosophy.

An entire generation has been born, grown up, and had families of its own since Ronald Reagan was elected. And where is the world we promised these children of the Conservative Age? Where is this land of freedom and responsibility, knowledge, opportunity, accomplishment, honor, truth, trust, and one boring hour each week spent in itchy clothes at church, synagogue, or mosque? It lies in ruins at our feet, as well it might, since we ourselves kicked the shining city upon a hill into dust and rubble. The progeny of the Reagan Revolution will live instead in the universe that revolves around Hyde Park.

Mind you, they won’t live in Hyde Park. Those leafy precincts will be reserved for the micromanagers and macro-apparatchiks of liberalism–for Secretary of the Department of Peace Bill Ayers and Secretary of the Department of Fairness Bernardine Dohrn. The formerly independent citizens of our previously self-governed nation will live, as I said, around Hyde Park. They will make what homes they can in the physical, ethical, and intellectual slums of the South Side of Chicago.

The South Side of Chicago is what everyplace in America will be once the Democratic administration and filibuster-resistant Democratic Congress have tackled global warming, sustainability, green alternatives to coal and oil, subprime mortgage foreclosures, consumer protection, business oversight, financial regulation, health care reform, taxes on the “rich,” and urban sprawl. The Democrats will have plenty of time to do all this because conservatism, if it is ever reborn, will not come again in the lifetime of anyone old enough to be rounded up by ACORN and shipped to the polling booths.

None of this is the fault of the left. After the events of the 20th century–national socialism, international socialism, inter-species socialism from Earth First–anyone who is still on the left is obviously insane and not responsible for his or her actions. No, we on the right did it. The financial crisis that is hoisting us on our own petard is only the latest (if the last) of the petard hoistings that have issued from the hindquarters of our movement. We’ve had nearly three decades to educate the electorate about freedom, responsibility, and the evils of collectivism, and we responded by creating a big-city-public-school-system of a learning environment.

Liberalism had been running wild in the nation since the Great Depression. At the end of the Carter administration we had it cornered in one of its dreadful low-income housing projects or smelly public parks or some such place, and we held the Taser gun in our hand, pointed it at the beast’s swollen gut, and didn’t pull the trigger. Liberalism wasn’t zapped and rolled away on a gurney and confined somewhere until it expired from natural causes such as natural law or natural rights.

In our preaching and our practice we neglected to convey the organic and universal nature of freedom. Thus we ensured our loss before we even began our winning streak. Barry Goldwater was an admirable and principled man. He took an admirably principled stand on states’ rights. But he was dead wrong. Separate isn’t equal. Ask a kid whose parents are divorced.

Since then modern conservatism has been plagued by the wrong friends and the wrong foes. The “Southern Strategy” was bequeathed to the Republican party by Richard Nixon–not a bad friend of conservatism but no friend at all. The Southern Strategy wasn’t needed. Southern whites were on–begging the pardon of the Scopes trial jury–an evolutionary course toward becoming Republican. There’s a joke in Arkansas about a candidate hustling votes in the country. The candidate asks a farmer how many children he has.

“I’ve got six sons,” the farmer says.

“Are they all good little Democrats?” the candidate asks.

“Well,” the farmer says, “five of ‘em are. But my oldest boy, he got to readin’  .  .  .  ”

There was no need to piss off the entire black population of America to get Dixie’s electoral votes. And despising cracker trash who have a laundry hamper full of bedsheets with eye-holes cut in them does not make a man a liberal.

Blacks used to poll Republican. They did so right up until Mrs. Roosevelt made some sympathetic noises in 1932. And her husband didn’t even deliver on Eleanor’s promises.

It’s not hard to move a voting bloc. And it should be especially easy to move voters to the right. Sensible adults are conservative in most aspects of their private lives. If this weren’t so, imagine driving on I-95: The majority of drivers are drunk, stoned, making out, or watching TV, while the rest are trying to calculate the size of their carbon footprints on the backs of Whole Foods receipts while negotiating lane changes.

People are even more conservative if they have children. Nobody with kids is a liberal, except maybe one pothead in Marin County. Everybody wants his or her children to respect freedom, exercise responsibility, be honest, get educated, have opportunities, and own a bunch of guns. (The last is optional and includes, but is not limited to, me, my friends in New Hampshire, and Sarah Palin.)

Reagan managed to reach out to blue collar whites. But there his reach stopped, leaving many people on our side, but barely knowing it. There are enough yarmulkes among the neocons to show that Jews are not immune to conservatism. Few practicing Catholics vote Democratic anymore except in Massachusetts where they put something in the communion wafers. When it comes to a full-on, hemp-wearing, kelp-eating, mandala-tatted, fool-coifed liberal with socks in sandals, I have never met a Muslim like that or a Chinese and very few Hispanics. No U.S. immigrants from the Indian subcontinent fill that bill (the odd charlatan yogi excepted), nor do immigrants from Africa, Eastern Europe, or East Asia. And Japanese tourists may go so far as socks in sandals, but their liberal nonsense stops at the ankles.

We have all of this going for us, worldwide. And yet we chose to deliver our sermons only to the faithful or the already converted. Of course the trailer park Protestants yell “Amen.” If you were handling rattlesnakes and keeping dinosaurs for pets, would you vote for the party that gets money from PETA?

In how many ways did we fail conservatism? And who can count that high? Take just one example of our unconserved tendency to poke our noses into other people’s business: abortion. Democracy–be it howsoever conservative–is a manifestation of the will of the people. We may argue with the people as a man may argue with his wife, but in the end we must submit to the fact of being married. Get a pro-life friend drunk to the truth-telling stage and ask him what happens if his 14-year-old gets knocked up. What if it’s rape? Some people truly have the courage of their convictions. I don’t know if I’m one of them. I might kill the baby. I will kill the boy.

The real message of the conservative pro-life position is that we’re in favor of living. We consider people–with a few obvious exceptions–to be assets. Liberals consider people to be nuisances. People are always needing more government resources to feed, house, and clothe them and to pick up the trash around their FEMA trailers and to make sure their self-esteem is high enough to join community organizers lobbying for more government resources.

If the citizenry insists that abortion remain legal–and, in a passive and conflicted way, the citizenry seems to be doing so–then give the issue a rest. Meanwhile we can, with the public’s blessing, refuse to spend taxpayers’ money on killing, circumscribe the timing and method of taking a human life, make sure parental consent is obtained when underage girls are involved, and tar and feather teenage boys and run them out of town on a rail. The law cannot be made identical with morality. Scan the list of the Ten Commandments and see how many could be enforced even by Rudy Giuliani.

Our impeachment of President Clinton was another example of placing the wrong political emphasis on personal matters. We impeached Clinton for lying to the government. To our surprise the electorate gave us cold comfort. Lying to the government: It’s called April 15th. And we accused Clinton of lying about sex, which all men spend their lives doing, starting at 15 bragging about things we haven’t done yet, then on to fibbing about things we are doing, and winding up with prevarications about things we no longer can do.

When the Monica Lewinsky news broke, my wife set me straight about the issue. “Here,” she said, “is the most powerful man in the world. And everyone hates his wife. What’s the matter with Sharon Stone? Instead, he’s hitting on an emotionally disturbed intern barely out of her teens.” But our horn rims were so fogged with detestation of Clinton that we couldn’t see how really detestable he was. If we had stayed our hand in the House of Representatives and treated the brute with shunning or calls for interventions to make him seek help, we might have chased him out of the White House. (Although this probably would have required a U.S. news media from a parallel universe.)

Such things as letting the abortion debate be turned against us and using the gravity of the impeachment process on something that required the fly-swat of pest control were strategic errors. Would that blame could be put on our strategies instead of ourselves. We have lived up to no principle of conservatism.

Government is bigger than ever. We have fattened the stalled ox and hatred therewith rather than dined on herbs where love (and the voter) is. Instead of flattening the Department of Education with a wrecking ball we let it stand as a pulpit for Bill Bennett. When–to switch metaphors yet again–such a white elephant is not discarded someone will eventually try to ride in the howdah on its back. One of our supposed own did. No Child Left Behind? What if they deserve to be left behind? What if they deserve a smack on the behind? A nationwide program to test whether kids are what? Stupid? You’ve got kids. Kids are stupid.

We railed at welfare and counted it a great victory when Bill Clinton confused a few poor people by making the rules more complicated. But the “French-bread lines” for the rich, the “terrapin soup kitchens,” continue their charity without stint.

The sludge and dreck of political muck-funds flowing to prosperous businesses and individuals have gotten deeper and more slippery and stink worse than ever with conservatives minding the sewage works of legislation.

Agriculture is a business that has been up to its bib overalls in politics since the first Thanksgiving dinner kickback to the Indians for subsidizing Pilgrim maize production with fish head fertilizer grants. But never, since the Mayflower knocked the rock in Plymouth, has anything as putrid as the Farm, Nutrition and Bioenergy Act of 2008 been spread upon the land. Just the name says it. There are no farms left. Not like the one grampa grew up on.

A “farm” today means 100,000 chickens in a space the size of a Motel 6 shower stall. If we cared anything about “nutrition” we would–to judge by the mountainous, jiggling flab of Americans–stop growing all food immediately. And “bioenergy” is a fraud of John Edwards-marital-fidelity proportions. Taxpayer money composted to produce a fuel made of alcohol that is more expensive than oil, more polluting than oil, and almost as bad as oil with vermouth and an olive. But this bill passed with bipartisan majorities in both houses of Congress and was happily signed into law by President Bush. Now it’s going to cost us at least $285 billion. That’s about five times the gross domestic product of prewar Iraq. For what we will spend on the Farm, Nutrition and Bioenergy Act of 2008 we could have avoided the war in Iraq and simply bought a controlling interest in Saddam Hussein’s country.

Yes, we got a few tax breaks during the regimes of Reagan and W. But the government is still taking a third of our salary. Is the government doing a third of our job? Is the government doing a third of our dishes? Our laundry? Our vacuuming? When we go to Hooters is the government tending bar making sure that one out of three margaritas is on the house? If our spouse is feeling romantic and we’re tired, does the government come over to our house and take care of foreplay? (Actually, during the Clinton administration  .  .  .  )

Anyway, a low tax rate is not–never mind the rhetoric of every conservative politician–a bedrock principle of conservatism. The principle is fiscal responsibility.

Conservatives should never say to voters, “We can lower your taxes.” Conservatives should say to voters, “You can raise spending. You, the electorate, can, if you choose, have an infinite number of elaborate and expensive government programs. But we, the government, will have to pay for those programs. We have three ways to pay.

“We can inflate the currency, destroying your ability to plan for the future, wrecking the nation’s culture of thrift and common sense, and giving free rein to scallywags to borrow money for worthless scams and pay it back 10 cents on the dollar.

“We can raise taxes. If the taxes are levied across the board, money will be taken from everyone’s pocket, the economy will stagnate, and the poorest and least advantaged will be harmed the most. If the taxes are levied only on the wealthy, money will be taken from wealthy people’s pockets, hampering their capacity to make loans and investments, the economy will stagnate, and the poorest and the least advantaged will be harmed the most.

“And we can borrow, building up a massive national debt. This will cause all of the above things to happen plus it will fund Red Chinese nuclear submarines that will be popping up in San Francisco Bay to get some decent Szechwan take-out.”

Yes, this would make for longer and less pithy stump speeches. But we’d be showing ourselves to be men and women of principle. It might cost us, short-term. We might get knocked down for not whoring after bioenergy votes in the Iowa caucuses. But at least we wouldn’t land on our scruples. And we could get up again with dignity intact, dust ourselves off, and take another punch at the liberal bully-boys who want to snatch the citizenry’s freedom and tuck that freedom, like a trophy feather, into the hatbands of their greasy political bowlers.

But are we men and women of principle? And I don’t mean in the matter of tricky and private concerns like gay marriage. Civil marriage is an issue of contract law. A constitutional amendment against gay marriage? I don’t get it. How about a constitutional amendment against first marriages? Now we’re talking. No, I speak, once again, of the geological foundations of conservatism.

Where was the meum and the tuum in our shakedown of Washington lobbyists? It took a Democratic majority in the House of Representatives 40 years–from 1954 to 1994–to get that corrupt and arrogant. And we managed it in just 12. (Who says Republicans don’t have much on the ball?)

Our attitude toward immigration has been repulsive. Are we not pro-life? Are not immigrants alive? Unfortunately, no, a lot of them aren’t after attempting to cross our borders. Conservative immigration policies are as stupid as conservative attitudes are gross. Fence the border and give a huge boost to the Mexican ladder industry. Put the National Guard on the Rio Grande and know that U.S. troops are standing between you and yard care. George W. Bush, at his most beneficent, said if illegal immigrants wanted citizenship they would have to do three things: Pay taxes, learn English, and work in a meaningful job. Bush doesn’t meet two out of three of those qualifications. And where would you rather eat? At a Vietnamese restaurant? Or in the Ayn Rand Café? Hey, waiter, are the burgers any good? Atlas shrugged. (We would, however, be able to have a smoke at the latter establishment.)

To go from slime to the sublime, there are the lofty issues about which we never bothered to form enough principles to go out and break them. What is the coherent modern conservative foreign policy?

We may think of this as a post 9/11 problem, but it’s been with us all along. What was Reagan thinking, landing Marines in Lebanon to prop up the government of a country that didn’t have one? In 1984, I visited the site where the Marines were murdered. It was a beachfront bivouac overlooked on three sides by hills full of hostile Shiite militia. You’d urge your daughter to date Rosie O’Donnell before you’d put troops ashore in such a place.

Since the early 1980s I’ve been present at the conception (to use the polite term) of many of our foreign policy initiatives. Iran-contra was about as smart as using the U.S. Postal Service to get weapons to anti-Communists. And I notice Danny Ortega is back in power anyway. I had a look into the eyes of the future rulers of Afghanistan at a sura in Peshawar as the Soviets were withdrawing from Kabul. I would rather have had a beer with Leonid Brezhnev.

Fall of the Berlin wall? Being there was fun. Nations that flaked off of the Soviet Union in southeastern Europe, Central Asia, and the Caucasus? Being there was not so fun.

The aftermath of the Gulf war still makes me sick. Fine to save the fat, greedy Kuwaitis and the arrogant, grasping house of Saud, but to hell with the Shiites and Kurds of Iraq until they get some oil.

Then, half a generation later, when we returned with our armies, we expected to be greeted as liberators. And, damn it, we were. I was in Baghdad in April 2003. People were glad to see us, until they noticed that we’d forgotten to bring along any personnel or provisions to feed or doctor the survivors of shock and awe or to get their electricity and water running again. After that they got huffy and began stuffing dynamite down their pants before consulting with the occupying forces.

Is there a moral dimension to foreign policy in our political philosophy? Or do we just exist to help the world’s rich people make and keep their money? (And a fine job we’ve been doing of that lately.)

If we do have morals, where were they while Bosnians were slaughtered? And where were we while Clinton dithered over the massacres in Kosovo and decided, at last, to send the Serbs a message: Mess with the United States and we’ll wait six months, then bomb the country next to you. Of Rwanda, I cannot bear to think, let alone jest.

And now, to glue and screw the lid on our coffin, comes this financial crisis. For almost three decades we’ve been trying to teach average Americans to act like “stakeholders” in their economy. They learned. They’re crying and whining for government bailouts just like the billionaire stakeholders in banks and investment houses. Aid, I can assure you, will be forthcoming from President Obama.

Then average Americans will learn the wisdom of Ronald Reagan’s statement: “The ten most dangerous words in the English language are, ‘I’m from the federal government, and I’m here to help.’ ” Ask a Katrina survivor.

The left has no idea what’s going on in the financial crisis. And I honor their confusion. Jim Jerk down the road from me, with all the cars up on blocks in his front yard, falls behind in his mortgage payments, and the economy of Iceland implodes. I’m missing a few pieces of this puzzle myself.

Under constant political pressure, which went almost unresisted by conservatives, a lot of lousy mortgages that would never be repaid were handed out to Jim Jerk and his drinking buddies and all the ex-wives and single mothers with whom Jim and his pals have littered the nation.

Wall Street looked at the worthless paper and thought, “How can we make a buck off this?” The answer was to wrap it in a bow. Take a wide enough variety of lousy mortgages–some from the East, some from the West, some from the cities, some from the suburbs, some from shacks, some from McMansions–bundle them together and put pressure on the bond rating agencies to do fancy risk management math, and you get a “collateralized debt obligation” with a triple-A rating. Good as cash. Until it wasn’t.

Or, put another way, Wall Street was pulling the “room full of horse s–” trick. Brokerages were saying, “We’re going to sell you a room full of horse s–. And with that much horse s–, you just know there’s a pony in there somewhere.”

Anyway, it’s no use blaming Wall Street. Blaming Wall Street for being greedy is like scolding defensive linemen for being big and aggressive. The people on Wall Street never claimed to be public servants. They took no oath of office. They’re in it for the money. We pay them to be in it for the money. We don’t want our retirement accounts to get a 2 percent return. (Although that sounds pretty good at the moment.)

What will destroy our country and us is not the financial crisis but the fact that liberals think the free market is some kind of sect or cult, which conservatives have asked Americans to take on faith. That’s not what the free market is. The free market is just a measurement, a device to tell us what people are willing to pay for any given thing at any given moment. The free market is a bathroom scale. You may hate what you see when you step on the scale. “Jeeze, 230 pounds!” But you can’t pass a law making yourself weigh 185. Liberals think you can. And voters–all the voters, right up to the tippy-top corner office of Goldman Sachs–think so too.

We, the conservatives, who do understand the free market, had the responsibility to–as it were–foreclose upon this mess. The market is a measurement, but that measuring does not work to the advantage of a nation or its citizens unless the assessments of volume, circumference, and weight are conducted with transparency and under the rule of law. We’ve had the rule of law largely in our hands since 1980. Where is the transparency? It’s one more job we botched.

Although I must say we’re doing good work on our final task–attaching the garden hose to our car’s exhaust pipe and running it in through a vent window. Barack and Michelle will be by in a moment with some subsidized ethanol to top up our gas tank. And then we can turn the key.

P.J. O’Rourke is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD.

Most of the server from the Dark Age of Camelot days actually banded back together to play. The game is really fun and far less time consuming and difficult to just jump in and play as DAoC or even WoW. You can level exclusively through PVP, and it actually works and is probably the fastest way to level.

Anyway, due to the fact that I can have a better experience playing for 15 minutes in Warhammer than playing for 2 hours in DAoC, I went ahead and picked up the game, on the pretense that I would temper my obsession to a reasonable degree.

If you want to try it out, I’m on the Iron Rock Server – Destruction side. My character’s name is Yoritomo.

Dig a little deeper and I find BJ Atchley of Connecticut who plays the Alto Saxophone. Too bad I haven’t picked mine up in 5 years or so.

So my apologies go out to BJ Atchley of CT from whom I will likely steal the first page of google for some time to come.

• Nikon sb-600 flash
• Impact Light Stand
• Light Bracket
• Optical White Umbrella
• Radio flash trigger
• Gaffers Tape
• Clamp

That’s pretty much a single light support system for an off camera lighting setup. I’ll eventually want 4 total of all of the above, except I’ll only need receivers for each additional light. Also after I have at least one flash like the sb-600 that works in ttl mode on my camera I can get the cheaper vivitar 285hv. The vivitars would eventually get replaced by other nikon flashes like the sb-600 or sb-800 though. Oh and I suppose I’ll need a backdrop so I can do some portraiture on the go.

Also you have to throw in a color gel swatchbook with every order. But you also need enough of the basics for color correction as seen here. Also some ball bungies would be nice.

A nice off camera TTL cord would be nice but they’re horribly overpriced. A new camera body can fire them in TTL mode off camera anyway.

Tripod stuff:

• Silk 700 Tripod Legs
• Bogen 488RC2 Ball Head

I suppose I’d need a bag for all or some of this stuff, but a generic canvas bag would do for the lights. A new camera bag is a few lenses off before I’ll need an upgrade. Speaking of lenses I’ve changed my list up a bit. I keep reading too many things about Tamrons having focusing issues so for now my order of lenses will be.

• Sigma 18-50 2.8 HSM
• Tamron 28-75 2.8, Has to be the one with the built in motor.
• Sigma 10-20mm HSM
• Nikon 70-300mm AF-S VR
• Sigma 30mm 1.4 HSM
• Nikon 60mm Micro-Nikkor
• Heck even the Bigma (Sigma 50-500mm HSM) would be great

Any other lenses need a body upgrade for my lowly d40. By the time I’m up for it I’m sure the Nikon d300 will be at a more realistic price.

I know this is insanely boring stuff, but I’m doing it more, to keep track of my upgrade list. It’ll take me years and years to really acquire all this stuff, but if my daughter’s keep getting more beautiful, I’ll have to keep taking more pictures.

Watch the Youtube video after the jump

On Tuesday evening I mowed our lawn for the first time after the seasonal break due to winter. Naturally the first things that begin to grow are weeds. The grass is still browned and dry and will need a few weeks of weed and feed, coercion, and watering to change to a normal green color. We had a lawn service maintaining our lawn for the majority of last year but decided the $100 monthly fee could be better spent on pretty much anything, so we canceled in the off season. In my new excitement to maintain my own lawn I decided I needed/wanted a gas-powered edger/weed eater. Faced with a non-stop 8 months of lawn care, I thought it would be okay to spend $100 or so on a nice gas-powered one so I don’t have to keep replacing spools and messing with the cord on our electric whacker. My inspiration was a 2-stroke weed eater my parents had given us that after 10 years of use didn’t seem to work. I couldn’t get it to work either. Lowe’s and back again, I opened and began using my foliage flagellator after scalping and bagging the grass with the lawn-mower.

I didn’t wear a mask.

I didn’t wear a mask.

I’m a moron.

My wife told me to wear one and I believed her to be too fastidious in her fear for my frail resistance to pollen and life in general. Usually I can take a benadryl afterwards and be dandy by the time it wears off. It wore off at about 4:00am. At which point I could only breathe in short gasps, and had a layer of phlegm blocking my airway. Chest wracking coughs weren’t possible because I couldn’t draw in the air or spare the breath. After about 15 minutes of deterioration and struggle with breathing I decided this situation needed drastic measures. Either I drink a bunch of benadryl or I go to the hospital. I decided to slam some children’s benadryl like I was a parachuting snowboarder playing halo drinking mountain dew. I drank about 80-100 ml of it. It took about 5-10 minutes to kick in and did it ever kick in. I was able to breathe. I don’t remember falling back asleep, I just remembered looking at the clock every minute or so but each time I looked an hour had passed. I turned my alarm off but don’t remember it sounding.

At 9:00am I get a call from my boss on my cell. “Are you in today or not?” he asks. “Outh,” I reply in my best non-slurring voice. I then explain what had happened while wobbling on my feet, at least this is what my brain remembers. “Well, the meeting on the zone project database is today.” “Uh, oh,” I had missed the first meeting in Austin due to an extremely sick rest of the family, and really didn’t want to miss this one. I had remembered the meeting and even set my alarm for the appropriate time to show up with plenty of time to spare. You know, the alarm I had turned off in an anti-histamine stupor. In the middle of a benadryl bender I had completely forgotten. My boss and another associate from the Austin office had flown in to Dallas just to make this meeting. I didn’t want to skip out a second time when the company had paid airfare for some others to be in my home office. I thought for a heartbeat, I’ll just shower then drive there. Um, yeah. Heather drove me to work. I could hardly walk straight. I sat in the meeting and actually contributed, even though it was against my own better judgment, cause I honestly can’t keep my mouth shut in design/planning meetings.

The meeting went well and I managed to not look like too big of an idiot. The benadryl started to wear off at about 12:30 and was completely gone about 3 hours later… although I have a rash on my neck now. There’s something in my yard that hates me and I return the sentiment. Next time I wear a mask.

Like everyone in Britain I have long been a huge fan of the television show Top Gear, although we get it only sporadically here in America. You can find it on BBC America and occasionally it pops up at odd times on other cable channels. There have been rumours circulating that the show would eventually come to America. I hoped it would come with Jeremy Clarkson and the gang, but NBC seems to have bought the show and I got a call one day asking if I would be interested in being a part of it.

I do my show full time, and these programmes take a great amount of time to make, so right away I had my concerns about fitting it in. The general rule of television is that it takes an hour for every minute that you see on screen. My other fear is that the show will not be made by car people.

So someone calls me from the network and is clearly not a car person. He says: “You like cars, right?” I say yes. “Like, all kinds of cars?” Well, yes. I like all kinds of cars. Why? “Well, the network has bought the TV show . . . um . . . High Gear? Top Gear? Top Gear! Top Gear, yes. We know you like to build cars.”

I ask: what’s the plan for the show? “Well, like, one week you build a car that flies and the next week you make a car that goes under water.” So I said: you know you can’t build these things in a week.

In my mind I can just see Jeremy lambasting Americans for what they did to his show. So I think: I’ve got to run away from this as quickly as I can. So I tell him that, as much as I like the show, I try not to make my hobby my job.

I like the show just the way it is. Jeremy and the guys are extremely talented, so maybe it would be an idea to do an American show similar to Top Gear but not with the same name, because I think it would be impossible to recreate or live up to the standards of the British show.

Another problem for Top Gear in America is the biting humour and criticisms of the cars. My great fear in America is that, for instance, if Kia was our sponsor this week, we’d have to say the car was fantastic.

I said on The Tonight Show recently that the new Kia was available with a heated rear window, so if people needed to push it in winter they could keep their hands warm. Boy, the phones did not stop ringing. So imagine what Jeremy would have to put up with.

I don’t think you could be quite as freewheeling with your opinions as you can on the BBC, because sponsors pay for the programmes. Sponsors would be unlikely to embrace any criticism.

Americans don’t really see personalities like Jeremy on commercial television. They know that they have to be somewhat watered down. When Jeremy rips into some sponsor such as Ford or Chrysler, well, that’s the last time they sponsor that show. Then what you have is “the meeting” after the show, where they tell him to tone it down. That’s just not what they do at Top Gear.

Some British shows translate quite well here – The Office, for example. But with Top Gear I have such respect for the original show, I feel if they asked me to do it I would be a pale imitation of Jeremy.

It would have to be something completely different, coming from a different angle. But when you see something that’s sort of perfect as it is, it’s difficult. Are you outright stealing, trying to imitate? What are you doing? I would prefer to do a different show rather than try to copy something that works so well already.

Cars are my hobby. Television is my job. When you make your hobby your job it becomes a whole different thing. For me, my great release from any sort of pressure is to go to my garage.

I have a friend who was an attorney but always wanted to open a hot-dog stand. So he opened a hot-dog stand and it was doing okay. Then he opened one on the other side of town and that was doing okay but never really did well. Then he ran between the hot-dog stands and the law practice and he lost all three of them.

So I go to my garage and I shoot my web pieces (see www.jaylenosgarage.com) and we talk about the cars. I do it for free – there’s no money in it. We just passed 27m hits, so it’s quite popular, and that’s what I like to do. It’s great fun because it’s like sitting with a bunch of car friends. I don’t want it to be my job.

I’ve added the rss feed to the sidebar, and a link to the little dynamic site that google makes.

This has helped distract me from the weird political pastor/politician insanity that seems to be spreading. As long as we can roll religion, race, politics, and government largess into a single beautiful soundbyte, then we’re still in the US.