JeffSay…

I fell in love with a 1974 Chevrolet Caprice convertible last night. I stopped by a friend’s father’s ATV shop and there it was in the back. It’s for sale even. It’s about 67 feet long and 28 feet wide and like The B-52′s Chrysler, it seats about 20.

It’s similar to this one in almost all but color:

*swoon*

”As I have travelled around the country … I’ve heard the need for change,” Brown told reporters massed outside his new home at 10 Downing Street. “Let the work of change begin.”

Except for the fact that Blair chose to live in 11 Downing Street instead of #10 because it was larger (Mr. Blair having three children and #11 being larger than #10). Mr. Brown has lived in #10 since he assumed the Chancellorship ten years ago. Sure it’s his “new home” as Prime Minister, but I’m in a nit-picky mood.

Britain’s Brown to unveil government shakeup | Reuters AlertNet.org

Copies that Mary Cheney must sell for her publishers to break even on the $1 Million advance they gave her. To date, she’s sold 4,091.

This assumes that all of the books are sold at the list price of $25.00 and doesn’t factor in purchases made through sites like Amazon.com, which is selling the book at a $9.25 discount. This also doesn’t figure in publishing costs, just the advance.

Andrew Sullivan | The Daily Dish: Mary Cheney’s Book

Written very early this morning, there were errors in my understanding of Sullivan’s article. It was right the first time, but edited to be wrong. Now it’s being edited to be right again. ;)

Update: Nearly a year later and Mary’s book is so popular that you can get it on Amazon.com for $1.89 ($0.07 used)—and that’s for the hardcopy.

Petrelis Files | Amazon: Mary Cheney’s Book Sells for Seven Cents a Copy

Tornadoes, lightning, and hail–OH MY!

I was just looking through a copy of Esquire from this past September when I noticed something that perplexed me: the table of contents wasn’t until page 45. That just strikes me as weird. Also, the forty-four preceding pages weren’t numbered. Of course this is because they’re advertising pages, but it still intrigued/irked me.

Another thing that bothered me was how cluttered the cover was, so much so that it’s almost hard to read. I understand needing to give the potential buyer a clue as to what’s inside from just the cover, but this is a bit overboard.

I had a little run-in with my friend’s mailbox tonight. Upon leaving her house at shortly before 3:00 AM, I tripped and slammed into her mailbox. It’s an old mailbox on an old mailbox post. It’s been there forever and seems to have rotted away. When I tripped, not only did I scuff my shoes (bitch!), but I hit it with my shoulder and it promptly fell forward and landed on the ground. I proceeded to keep falling, though and landed on the ground scuffing my knee up pretty well.

It was a good night, though, overall. We went to see some friends and played Dirty Minds for a little while. Then we found a copy of Maxim which tickled us to no end since these friends are gay and had no real interest in the magazine but are for some reason subscribed for it—for two years.

Also of note is a blog entry about how mean Randy, Paula, and Simon are on this season’s American Idol. I’ve only watched about 30 minutes of the episodes so far and the performers from Seattle were especially bad, so much so that I didn’t even finish watching a full episode, but the comments from the judges seem to be even more…bitchy? than in previous years. They’re no longer humorous in their criticism, they’re just plain mean.

Someone I talked to over dinner at the diner last night said the judges’ behavior on this season’s ‘American Idol’ was like watching the varsity team make fun of how kids in the Special Olympics play sports. I totally agree, except I think the varsity team is probably nicer.

What will it take for ‘American Idol’ to stop the madness — some pimple-faced kid committing suicide because Randy, Paula and Simon got an entire TV nation to laugh at him/her? It would be good if we could show some outrage before it comes to that.

Worth Repeating: ‘Idol’ Judges: Real-Life ‘Mean Girls’

Tonight’s Special Guest Star was Tori Spelling. She kept popping up everywhere. She was in a movie that we saw at Blockbuster, then she popped up in Scream 2 in the movie within the movie and she was brought up again at dinner when the movie Trick because someone mentioned something burning in their eye….

No, this isn’t about Christmas presents, it’s about some gifts that our dear President Bush has received, namely a bicycle or three. Not just any bicycle, no, a $5000 bicycle.

I was reading the Washington Post site and noticed an article about President Bush’s bicycling in the “More on washingtonpost.com” section of an info box. The president rides a custom-painted, $5000 Cannondale mountain bike. That price tag got me to thinking about how many semesters of college that one bike could pay for. $5,000 will pay for 2.29 semesters of tuition at a local state university. But he doesn’t just have one bicycle.

According to the article, he has three with a total value of $13,200. That amount of money would pay for six semesters of tuition at the same local university. I find it kind of amazing that some kids can’t go to school because they can’t afford it while the President rides around with a year’s tuition under his backside.

Bush Transforms Into Avid Mountain Biker – washingtonpost.com

I went and voted today. Early voting started a few days ago and runs up until the election. I used a touch screen machine and had no problems. Even the 4,000 year old woman running it had no problems.

It stacked the candidates in the races so one was on top of the other and I would have liked it better if they had been in separate columns, but that would have made the ballot considerably longer and it was already pretty hefty at six “pages”. It was most painless.

I was a bit disappointed though, because none of the Democratic candidates were liberal enough for me, but I wasn’t willing to vote Green or independent because that would increase the chance that a Republican would win when the “third-party” candidates don’t really have a shot. Kind of sad, too, when you consider that the candidate that most matches my beliefs was the Green Party candidate.

The Republican candidates, though, were too, well, evil works for me. They’re pretty much the same bigoted person across the board. “Keep our guns!” Yes. That’s what we need, more guns. More guns that kids can take and accidentally (or purposefully) shoot their siblings or more guns that troubled kids can take to school and kill their classmates with.

“Stop Illegal Immigration!” Sure. You go work in the fields for low pay a few weeks and we’ll see how long it takes before you backtrack and go out and scout for illegals to work the farms.

And then there are the “Stop Homosexual Parenting” idiots and the supporters of the “Marriage Protection Amendment” bigots. Pretty much all of the Republican candidates in the field espouse the same narrow, bigoted beliefs in this realm.

Sad thing is that many of the Democrats do, too. DINOs the lot of them. But at least on most issues aside from GLBT civil rights they “score” better.

Okay.  Hamburger Helper has this new microwaveable singles thing and, well, I’ve always enjoyed some Hamburger Helper so I tried it out.  It includes everything you need, including the beef, apparently.

I’m not entirely sure how that works, since you normally have to refrigerate meat, but whatever.  The box says “just add water” and it’s as simple as that.  The thing that makes this worthy of mention is that when you open the pouch and pour the  noodles and the sauce into the bowl, there’s no meat to be seen.  It’s just some powder and some noodles.  That provoked the reaction of, “WTF?  Where’s the beef?!”  Yeah, I really did say that out loud.  Anyway, I decided that I’d go ahead and mix the stuff up anyway and as soon as I added the hot water, the meat appeared.  It started floating around at the top of the bowl.   This kind of disturbed me, but I went ahead and ate the stuff and it tasted sort of like real ground beef, but not quite.  It’s odd to say the least.

New Hamburger Helper® Microwave Singles: Great On-The-Go, Between Meal Option

Okay, odd way to title an entry, but I do. I like them. I know I can get the same information faster through the Internet, but there’s something about having the actual paper in my hand and sorting through it that appeals to me.

Take USATODAY for instance. I can get almost every story in the paper as soon as its published through its RSS feed and I can select which parts of the “paper” that I want to read thus eliminating sections that I won’t bother with like the Sports section*. I’m hardly ever interested in that part. But I can do the same thing with the actual paper, too. I can just pull that section out and toss it aside.

The same is true for magazines. I can get probably 90% of magazine content online at no cost. But for a lot of magazines, Macworld in particular, I just like having it in my hand.

RSS feeds are convenient, I can get what I want, faster than they can print it, but an actual newspaper or magazine is a different kind of convenient: I can reade it any time, anywhere.

*That’s the beauty of USATODAY’s RSS feeds. They have a separate feed for not only each section of the paper, but it’s broken down into a myriad of subcategories. The thing that really makes me love their feeds is that they don’t mix the sports headlines in with the real news. I don’t care much for it and it makes me happy that they leave it out. Other sites, like BBCNews have separate feeds, but they still mix in sports with all of the rest of them. It’s just annoying. If I want sports “news”, I’ll got to either a dedicated feed or to a site that specializes in sports “news”.