Tuesday, October 16:

The blog page has moved to this location. Go look at it! All of the archives and stuff should be there along with many new and exciting features.

Monday, October 15:

Despite my continuing efforts to fill my blog page with content that is interesting only to myself, people...well, one person...Lori Greenberg, feels strongly the need to comment upon my musings. She also likes making blog pages for people. And she's nice. To wit, she is creating a new blog page for me--one equipped with comment capacity. I am famaliar with the invention of the blog page with comment capacity but I never really thought that was such a tangy idea for me. But when Lori brought it up I realized that I am pretty bored here in the store and that the free cell playing is getting kind of out of control. Maybe it's a good thing. So I'm giving that whole movie a whirl, the comment thing. Yeah. That should be up and running soon.

Friday, October 12:

When I'm out and about with my tiny camera I like to take pictures of the interior of whatever ladies' room I happen to be in. It's not always especially interesting but at least I can be reasonably sure it's something Don has not seen before. Last Sunday we took a brief road trip to New Glarus and Mt. Horeb to check out their respective Oktoberfest celebrations. We stopped at The Grumpy Troll brew pub in Mt. Horeb where I got this picture of this outstanding boarder wallpaper featuring pictures of outhouses with little rhyming poems about outhouses in the background. Can you imagine how excited the person who found this must have been when they discovered this wallpaper? I mean...who would have guessed that anything like this existed? Unfortunately, they liked the wallpaper so much that they put it in the men's room too so that by the time I came running up to him with my camera Don had already seen the little outhouses. Bummer. I didn't have to pee while we were in New Glarus so I don't have any pictures from there.

Also in Mt. Horeb was a large craft fair. (Mt. Horeb, by the way, really hit my tourist trifecta because they had a brew pub, a craft fair and funnel cakes.) Anyway, the craft fair was where I found the pumpkin spider. With the requisite googly eyes, pipe cleaner legs and assembly that takes just minutes, it is a classic piece. Go pumpkin spider! I hope the guy who made it didn't think I was stealing his bits when I took the picture. I revere the pumpkin spider.

Wednesday, October 10:

The boys played out at Cafe Montmarte last night. I didn't get any decent pictures...of anything really...except for that nice bowl of lemons on the bar. They were the third of three bands to play so we all stayed up past our bedtimes and are feeling pretty loagy today. Shows are tiring. And I didn't even do anything--all I did was stay out of the way.

It's gotten a lot colder all of a sudden. With the introduction of medium and winter weight coats into my wardrobe I am finding an almost infinate number of pockets in which I can place and misplace things. Despite this, I have successfully located a piece of paper with a real word of the day on it.

Today's word is:

Acnestis- it is from a Greek word meaning spine or backbone (I can't type the word because it spelled with funny Greek letters). It means the part of the back between the shoulder blade and the loins which an animal cannot reach to scratch.

as if it weren't already.

Saturday, October 6:

I got my passport in the mail today. It came really fast--like 2 weeks. Way to go gov'ment! I had to get one because once a year Don's boss sends all the management and brewers to Mexico and I wanted to tag along this time and hopefully pick up another Copper Jesus. I had been concerned about getting a passport at all because earlier in the day on which I applied for it I had googled "Osama Bin Laden" to see if it was true that he had dyed his beard. Thought someone might be watching and marking things down on my permanent record. If they weren't watching then they sure are now because the new passports contain "special electronics". Of course it does. I don't think it's a MP3 player.

Don has an old school pre-war passport that differs from mine in several ways. First, it has no "special electronics" and also, it's very plain...probably like passports from any other country. The new ones are positively gaudy and they're all USA! USA! USA!. The first page alone (the one with my picture) has a flag, an eagle, wheat, the words "We the people" and the preamble to the constitution. In color! All of the other pages have inspirational pictures of America and quotes from the founding fathers. Brother. No hiding where you're from carrying one of these around. That seems kind of counter intuitive to me given the way the rest of the world feels about us.

I am still doing word of the day it's just that you aren't seeing it. I keep writing stuff down on scraps of paper and then either leaving them in my other pants or losing them inside my backpack. I had a good, dead one lined up but I can't do it without my notes. I guess I'd like you to adapt your expectations for word of the day to my half-assed way of doing things and only expect words once in a while.

Thursday, October 4:

I was at the grocery store the other day when I saw a display for a new product--Sunsweet "Ones", individually wrapped prunes (aka "Dried Plums"). I kind of thought I drempt the incident until I saw a commercial for them on TV. The impression left on me by this product's marketing is that individually wrapping the prunes makes the consumption of said prunes somehow easier or more convenient for the consumer. People, this simply isn't true! It is not more convenient to individually unwrap six or seven prunes when you could just eat them out of a bag. What are you thinking wanting a product like this? I know there's a stigma attached to prune eating and eating them out of a tiny cellophane wrapper might fool your co-workers into thinking you're having a breath mint or something but think of the environment! Prunes are not breath mints! If you're eating one it's probably because you have a condition remedied only by eating a whole bunch of them. Then you're throwing away all of those unnecessary little prune bags! Think about it! And don't buy individually wrapped prunes!

I'm all angried up.

Wednesday, October 3:

I was feeling poorly yesterday so I did not accompany Don to the beverage trade show. It was too bad because they were serving Woodford Reserve Kentucky Bourbon and bacon wrapped water chestnuts. Those are my two favorite foods but I've never had an opportunity to eat them at the same time. Oh well. There's always next year.

When Don got back from the show we watched several DVD's of "Hee Haw" that he got from the library. I commemorated the occasion in digital photographs so you could walk down memory lane with us. Don has fond memories of "Hee Haw" from his childhood. I remember watching it in the '70's but I don't remember feeling strongly about it one way or the other. It's kind of trippy to see it again. I forgot about the animated pigs that sometimes dance across the bottom of the screen. I remembered the part about the fence hitting people in the ass when they told a bad pun. That bit is still fresh as a daisy.

The DVD's we watched were from 1969. A lot of the music was hippie-sounding with the musicians playing tambourines and wearing swags of love beads. That was pretty strange. Another episode featured the newly married George Jones and Tammy Wynette. They sang independently of one another, George in a natural setting-- next to several jugs marked "XXX". Tammy Wynette looked positively despondent as she sang "Stand By Your Man"-- again much like she may have looked at home having just married George Jones.

At the end of the DVD an aging, though still twinkly, Roy Clark gave an interview wherein he answered a question that everyone has about "Hee Haw" and that was, What's up with Junior Samples' joke delivery? Is he mentally challenged or is he just acting? Roy answered that Junior's education only reached the third grade and as a result he had a difficult time reading jokes off of the cue cards. He could read them if he studied them carefully before hand. Sometimes the cast would put more difficult words on the cards to confuse him even further. And this was very funny. Initially I felt sorry for Junior Samples when Roy said this but then I thought, you know, illiteracy is funny as long as it makes the person at the butt of the joke a rich, rich man. We forget that sometimes in today's PC society.

"Hee Haw" produced new episodes until 1992, the same year Bill Clinton took office. Probably just a coincidence.

Monday, October 1:

Were it not for the fact that I have to archive my blog every month I think I would be completely unaware of the passage of time. I don't notice time passing until the end of the month when suddenly, a whole month is gone and the next one is starting. I don't know where I'm going with this, it's just something I've observed about myself. Window to my world, y'all.

Tomorrow evening I'm going to a beverage trade show at the Kohl Center. This won't effect you in any way unless you're expecting me to be at work bright and early on Wednesday. You wouldn't think that a sports arena and giant music venue like the Kohl Center would be a real safe place for a bunch of Dale Chihuly sculptures but that's where we keep them. Again, there's always something strange about public art in Madison and this time it's the location. Whenever Aerosmith or ACDC or Neil Diamond comes to town I think "I wonder how many other Dale Chihuly sculptures are listening to Aerosmith or ACDC or Neil Diamond right now?" And then I worry for them.

I'm going to get my own pictures of the Chihulys this time. I don't remember them looking as garish as they do in that web photo. Maybe they were, though. Every other time I've been there it was for a show and there was no way to smuggle in my giant, old camera. Hopefully there are no rules against having a camera around beer and wine distributors.

So last weekend Lost School was helping me out with my word project. Someone suggested that I use "dead" words (words that are not known to have been used in print in the last 400-500 years) from the OED in the hope that someone will use them in print so they won't be dead anymore. I'm not sure if that's how things work but I'll give it a go. There are problems associated with this, mainly that the sentences these words are used in are in middle english and are completely incomprehensible. So we'll have to wing it! If you are publishing a book soon please use the word:

Dravel v. Obs. To sleep unsoundly, have troubled sleep, to talk in one's sleep.

The last known usage was in 1553. Sometimes middle english is readable--it's just got some superfluous e's and hyphens. This time it was just gobbledygook so I'm not even going to repeat it. Dravel is from the Old Norse drafta, to talk indistinctly. Good luck!

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