Does that make me white trash?

Yesterday, I was sitting in my favorite spot, flipping through the channels when I happened upon the Home Shopping Network. The article du moment was something from Hoover called a Floor Mate. Now, I'm typically pretty skeptical of the demonstrations on infomercials, but this thing looked like it was doing one heck of a job on exactly the same sorts of hard floors that we have in our house.

You'd think that having a lot of ceramic tile and hardwood laminate would make the place easier to clean, but in fact the opposite is true. Whereas you only have to go over the carpeting once with the vacuum and maybe do the baseboards with the attachments now and again, cleaning the tile means sweeping with a broom, using the Swiffer to get all the cat hair and cat-hair-induced dust bunnies, damp mopping with Spic 'n' Span, and then damp mopping again with clear water. Since the house has about half tile floors, we're talking 3 hours or so and a lot of wear and tear on my back.

So like I was saying, I saw this thing going for a bargain price, but blew it off. If it was any good, why would Hoover be selling it for cheap on HSN of all places. I mean, the only people who shop on HSN are morbidly mu-mu wearing hillbillies embedded in their potato chip littered couches. Right? Guess not... 'cause I bought one of the things after a bit of prompting from Sweetie.

But the rhinestone-encrusted denim jackets and faux mother-of-pearl sandals will have to stay with the mu-mus. I'm done.

A few quick jokes

A man staggers into an emergency room with two black eyes and a golf club wrapped tightly around his throat. Naturally, the doctor asks him what happened.

"Well, it was like this," said the man. "I was having a quiet round of golf with my wife when she sliced her ball into a pasture of cows. We went to look for it and while I was rooting around, I noticed one of the cows had something white at its rear end. I walked over and lifted up the tail and sure enough, there was my wife's golf ball...stuck right in the middle of the cow's butt.

"That's when I made my mistake."

"What did you do?" asked the doctor.

"Well, I lifted the tail and yelled to my wife, 'Hey, this looks like yours!'"

---

A man went into a pharmacy and asked to talk to a male pharmacist. The woman he was talking to said that she was the pharmacist and that she and her sister owned the store, so there were no males employed there. She then asked if she could help the gentleman. The man said that it was something that he would be much more comfortable discussing with a male pharmacist.

The female pharmacist assured him that she was completely professional and whatever it was that he needed to discuss, he could be confident that she would treat him with the highest level of professionalism.

The man agreed and began by saying, "This is tough for me to discuss, but I have a permanent erection. It causes me a lot of problems and severe embarrassment. So I was wondering what you could give me for it."

The pharmacist said, "Just a minute, I'll go talk to my sister."

When she returned, she said, "We discussed it at length and the absolute best we can do is, 1/3 ownership of the shop, a company car and $3,000 a month living expenses."

---

A blind man walks into a bar and starts swinging his seeing eye dog around in circles above his head.

The bartender says, "hey what are you doin'?"

The blind man says, "Just having a look around."

It's just a jump to the left

After all the yard work (and an nice cool shower), Sweetie and I headed out to have a nice, relaxing dinner. As we were eating, "Let's Do The Time Warp" came on the music system. The two of us were quietly singing along and laughing at each other when we realized that we had an audience. The young guy who was our waiter was kind of smiling at our antics, and when we told him what we were doing it came out that he'd never seen The Rocky Horror Picture Show. He seemed amazed to learn that big-name actors like Tim Curry, Susan Sarandon, and Barry Bostwick were in the movie and, since he professed to be a movie buff, we made him promise that he'd rent it and watch it--if only so that he'd recognize the inevitable references that come up in other TV shows and movies.

It set me to thinking, though. Rocky Horror came out in 1975, and although I correctly assumed our waiter hadn't been born yet, it wasn't until later that it dawned on me just how long ago that was. 30 years! Our waiter was maybe 21 and was probably born right about the time I was graduating from college. Now, you might think that you know where this is headed. You might think that this realization made me feel old--and it did, sort of; but mostly what it did was make me feel a little bit sorry for our waiter because of all the things I've lived through that, for better or worse, he never had the opportunity to live through.

I mean, I was a kid in the '60s. That means that I can still remember how subtly different the blue of the sky was before it became nearly impossible to find a place where the air wasn't polluted. It means I can remember a time when cashiers didn't break down in tears at the thought of having to ring up something that didn't have its own labeled button. Bar codes? Just a glimmer in Isaac Asimov's eye (introduced by the grocery industry in 1973, by the way). Scratchy vinyl records on Mom's musty-smelling monaural record player. Steel-wheeled roller skates that you clamped on to your tennis shoes with a key. Saturday morning cartoons that were on from 6am until at least noon--and not the crappy 30-minute ads for action figures or video games like the kids have now. Video games? Hell, we didn't even have Pong until I was in high school. Better than that, the bookmobile would come to our neighborhood during the summer, and I'd load up on Hardy Boys mysteries and novels about dirt track racing.

I used to think I'd miss being young, and while there's a bit of regret when I see some lucious young thing strutting around in her Daisy Dukes, I realize now that I'm mostly just grateful for all the cool stuff I experienced. Stuff that is gone forever and which future generations will miss out on (even though they probably don't think of it as missing out).

Ride report: Red Hot Chili Pepper Ride (Dallas, TX)

Monday again, after a busy weekend. Spent all of Saturday morning down in the Joe Pool lake area serving as a volunteer ride marshal for the Red Hot Chili Pepper ride, the request of one of our fellow GDB members. The organizers of the ride have come under fire in past years for poorly-marked routes, insufficient intersection control, and the like; they were hoping that getting a few experienced riders out on the course to encourage safety might help.

How well we succeeded is debatable. Suzanne and I partnered up to ride the 40-mile course, and from the moment we turned on to the first major boulevard we could see that our fellow travelers were unimpressed with our advisory role. It was a downhill of half a dozen blocks with traffic lights at all the intersections and no police to stop cross traffic. Despite all our best efforts most riders blew right through multiple red lights, ignoring our cries to stop and nearly ramming us when we did. It was pretty scary and I'm still astounded that no one was killed.

The rest of the ride was pretty uneventful. Suzanne and I occasionally pulled alongside a rider to remind him or her that the rally's rules prohibited wearing headphones, and the rider invariably ignored us. Probably the only useful thing that the organizers got from us was the four pages of comments that Suzanne compiled as we had a bite to eat after the rally. The ride has a lot of potential, but it's developing a bad reputation that will have most riders crossing it off their schedule if they don't figure it out soon.

Came home, showered, caught a nap, and then headed over toward Ft. Worth for dinner and to take in a play with some friends from church. Then yesterday (Sunday) morning it was sweeping, dusting, mopping, and vacuuming in the morning; mowing, trimming, and weed eradicating in egg frying temperatures during the afternoon.

Book: Lance Armstrong's War

Lance Armstrong's War : One Man's Battle Against Fate, Fame, Love, Death, Scandal, and a Few Other Rivals on the Road to the Tour de France by Daniel Coyle.

As I get older, it seems like I don't have the ability to get sucked into a book the way I used to when I was a kid. With this book, it wasn't a problem. Sweetie surprised me with it early last week, and when this weekend turned out kind of slow and lazy, I just kept turning the pages.

Like a lot of American cyclists and cancer survivors, I've followed Lance Armstrong's career over the past few years, but I became particularly interested once I started paying attention to the Tour de France and the finer points of how professional cycling works. This book builds on that interest quite nicely, because it is as much about the pro cycling culture and the character of Armstrong's competitors as it is about Lance himself.

The author successfully walks the line between too much detail and not enough, so he is informative without bogging down. He paints a portrait of Lance as a complicated individual: driven, focused, and often not very pleasant to get close to. Hardcore Lance fans might not care to read what Coyle has to say, but I found it fascinating to get a glimpse behind the image we see on Letterman, during OLN interviews, etc.

Airborne annoyance

What is it with some people and sneezing?

I mean, sure, I understand that it's right dead in the middle of summer allergy season, so you're bound to have people sniffling, snorting, coughing, and generally sounding like the tuberculosis ward from hell. But come on. Is it strictly necessary to share your atomized mucous with everyone?

Mom taught me to cover my mouth and nose when I sneeze or cough. Later, a girlfriend taught me that all this does is to get your hands all germy. She trained me to sneeze or cough into my sleeve, but you know... that's for bonus points. What I don't get is folks like the guy in another set of cubicles, half a floor way, around a corner who--when he sneezes, it's "ht-CHUHHH!" Kind of the bronchial spasm equivalent of yelling "OO-RAH!" or doing a victory dance in the end zone.

What's to be so proud of that you've got to share it with the entire floor? You know... I'm just sayin'.

AND WHILE I'M AT IT...

Can't someone invent a container of yogurt that doesn't gleek all over the front of my shirt when I peel off the foil cover? Yeesh.

Random rhymes

Someone on one of my cycling forums was posting some Tour de France related limericks, and I just couldn't help trying my hand at a few rhymes of my own.

First, one about The Look:

Our hero Lance was looking weak
Herr Ullrich thought him not a factor
And yet he claimed the mountain's peak
That wily Armstrong--what an actor!

...and then a reference to Bob Roll's Kinetic ads that played during OLN's 2005 TdF coverage:

Our buddy Bob is on a roll
He takes to training in the nude
And though I fear this takes its toll
Don't get me wrong--I'm not a prude

It's just... I worry for the boy
In life there's peril and there's pain
Ride it, your kinetic toy
But Robert, please... do mind the chain

This last one--the only actual limerick of the bunch--has to do with the unfortunate photo of Pieter Weening that Yahoo! Sports ran for, like, 5 days after his stage win.

Poor Pieter Weening was caught
By an unlucky camera shot
While, to his chagrin,
He had stuck to his chin
A great gooey gobbet of... um. Never mind.