Superior

Today there was a grand opening for a new store in the neighborhood. This is on the location that there used to be a store, until sometime last year. It will be nice having a store there again, it is much more convenient than the one we've been going to.

I like all the neon on the old art-deco front facade, and the inside is nice, too.

The place was packed this morning when my wife went there. It was packed when I was heading home and decided to stop in to take a look and some pictures!!!

They're either going to need more parking spaces or less popularity.

I think a lot of people in the neighborhood are tired of the lousy service at Food 4 Less and are thrilled that there is now an alternative. The prices seem not a lot better, but they have some sale items for less.

Ummm, do my eyes deceive me, or do they already have a couple of the letters in "enter" burned out???

I walked around taking pictures for a while, until a plainclothes store security with a lip piercing came up and told me that I had to put my camera away. "This is SO going on my blog!!!"



I guess the chickens aren't the only ones watching!!!

MoonRaiser

This is a transcription of a bit done by Mark and Brian a few years back. It is featured on their charity C.D., Little Drummer Boys. They just re-played it the other day and brought it to memory. Very Christmas-y and funny!!! One of my favorites:

Mark: Well, many of you probably remember the Rudolph situation where he discovered the land of the misfit toys in the Rudolph Christmas special, he discovers the land of the misfit toys. And, last year we spoke with King MoonRaiser, the king of the island of misfit toys, who was hoping for some of our listeners to adopt some of the misfit toys and ease overcrowding on the island, 'cause it's really kinda getting a little bit space challenged. Well, we thought we'd see how that went. So, with us once again with us is King MoonRaiser. Good morning, King MoonRaiser.

(Floof floof, floof floof)

Mark: He's flying in...

(floof floof)

King MoonRaiser: I am King MoonRaiser, king of the island of misfit toys.

Mark: Good Morning

King MoonRaiser: Good morning, I'm a flying lion.

Mark: Yes, you are. Now, what is the situation on the island of misfit toys?

King MoonRaiser: Worse than ever, I'm afraid, not that you'd care

Mark: Of course we care

King MoonRaiser: Not only did none of your listeners not adopt any of our reject toys, but during the past year even more loser toys have flocked to my island looking for a free ride.

Mark: Well, would you like to run down some of the toys, just in case our listeners might be interested in adopting one of them?

King MoonRaiser: Yes, it would help a bit.

Mark: OK

King MoonRaiser: Here is a list of just a few of the toys I would really love to get rid of:
Barbie's Malibu Outhouse. Misfit toy.
Nicotine Patch Kids.
Tic Tac Camel-Toe.
Baby Got Backgammon. Misfit toy.
Honkey Kong. Misfit toy.
Tickle Me L. Ron Hubbard. Misfit toy.
Crucifixionary.

Mark: Fly around some, King.

(Floof floof)

King MoonRaiser: I'm a flying lion, I'm the King of the misfit toys.

Mark: Right.

King MoonRaiser: Crucifixionary.
Mr. Potato Crotch.
Mouse Crap. Misfit toy.

Mark: Guess it would be

King MoonRaiser: My First Crystal Meth Lab. Misfit toy.
John Candy Land.
Michelob Lite Brite.
G. I. Joe Momma.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Gallaghers.
Hasbro's Do It Yourself Circumcision Kit. Misfit toy.
And, finally, Poop Chutes and Ladders.

(Floof floof)

King MoonRaiser: Flying, around flying...

Mark: Allright, yeah, well, listen...

King MoonRaiser: These are just some of the toys I want to shove out the screen door and don't let it hit you in the ass. Get off my island, you misfit toys! Please someone, come and rescue them.

Mark: Well, we understand it is an overcrowded situation there. We'll do our best to see that listeners come and adopt some of those misfit toys.

King MoonRaiser: I'll be flying out now to go back to my island.

(Floof floof, floof floof)

Mark: See ya, King MoonRaiser!

(Floof floof, floof floof)

Mark: Bye bye!

(Floof floof, floof floof)

Mark: Say good bye to King MoonRaiser, everybody.

(Floof floof, floof floof)

Mark: King of the island of misfit toys.

(Floof floof, floof floof)

King MoonRaiser: Is that your car down there?

Mark: No, why, what are you going to do?

(Grunt)
(Floof floof, floof floof, floof floof, floof floof)

Mick's Brain

My firstborn came up with this week's phrase for Magnet Mix-Up, all on his own. Lots of bonus points for taking a lot of liberties with the letters, notably the U turned to a C, the 8 as a B, the V inverted for an A, and the Z and I combined for another M!!!

Busy, Busy, Busy...

It's been that way for the last several days!!! Busy, but good. Wednesday they had lunch at my work for my department. Great food, good times.

Thursday I took my personal day from work, as I had an appointment with the Division of Labor Standards Enforcement, regarding the way they had held up my final checks (read all about it here). Not surprisingly, those scum bags had not given them the whole story. I filled in the blanks for them, and ended up getting paid. Call it severance or a little bit of an early Christmas bonus. Of course, I don't have it in hand yet, but if it doesn't come through I have a feeling that the Division of Labor Standards Enforcement will not let them slide. For exactly that reason, they want the check mailed to them, then they send it on to me. Said they would mail the check today, but I've heard that song and dance for the last year or so that I was there!!!

Yesterday we left the boys with some friends and went to do a little shopping. I'm surprised at how much we spent!!! That evening we left them at my parent's house for the night, and we went to my company's Christmas party. That's where the picture is from. It was great, open bar, good eats, elegant surroundings. I only saw probably less than a dozen of the crew that I work with there, but it was still cool. They had a band there that was quite woofy. I could go on...

Today was my niece's birthday party. It was at a place called John's Incredible Pizza. I had never heard of the place, and it's a ways out, but it was GOOD!!! Buffet style, with a great variety of different pizzas and salad bar and pasta and fries and dessert bar, as well as rides and games. Beats the hell out of Chuck E. Cheese's!!! They had this one kind of pizza, spicy peanut butter pizza, sounds bad, tastes good. I could go on, once again, but the hour draws late...

110

I wasn't going to post anything today, because I didn't have much to post about. But then, I found this video on someone else's blog, and it was too cool not to steal and post here!!! Google was being a bitch about making with the code, so I just stole it from the one I found it at. Hope it works, I'll be taking it down if it doesn't.
*Note: It didn't work, so I found the same vid on YouTube. It's missing the downtown stretch, but it has the rest, as well as a usable code!!! Only thing, their vids seem to make my posts move way down on the page for some reason...



This is the first freeway ever built in California, and the second in the nation. It was constructed in 1940, with a speed limit of 45 MPH. The original portion features many twist and turns, "to keep drivers from getting sleepy".

Viewing this video, you can see a lot of what I used to deal with four days a week on my way home from my previous job. This is a fairly clear time of day, it gets completely stopped in the afternoon. Going through the downtown skyscrapers is always cool. Heading up to the tunnels, you'll notice the left lane is all backed up. It's usually like that, it exits to the 5. The next lane over backs up, too, because there are a bunch of idiots waiting until the last minute to get over. Max would sympathize. Just past there it gets into the twisty section. You may notice a tall railroad trestle, that was abandoned for many years, but now is in service for the Gold Line. My home is off this portion. It's fun, the exits are hard 90 degree turns, posted at 5 MPH with very short ramps. High rolling vehicles best heed the 5 MPH. The entrances are fun, too. They have a stop sign, and you have a very short area to get up to speed. Don't pull out in front of me from one of those unless you've got the motor to back it up, you will get a federal bumper up your ass!!! But, if this section is reasonably clear, FUN!!! Test you vehicle's cornering capability!!!

The Rock Pile

The last of the shots from last weekend's trip. This was pretty cool and needed to be shared, I thought.

Coming onto a military base out in the Mojave, there is a large rock pile that has been painted by the various units that have trained there.

A lot of really cool artwork!!!

These shots are only a small portion of what was there.









Check out Sergeant Major Dale!!!

No TV...

Welcome to the third installment of Magnet Mix-Up!!! In response to my last posting, Eyeball came up with "no tv 4 ned". I rather liked it, except I'm a bit N challenged so I had to change to names. I responded to Eyeball:

"The other night I was trying to listen to some music on my comp and wifey comes in and turns on some inane show on. I was wishing I was Ned."

Inscription Canyon

Miles and miles of gently rolling hills and sand dunes in the Mojave Desert give way to some ancient lava fields.

A bit out of the way, something like 10 miles of poor condition dirt road give way to 5 miles of really bad dirt road. Here are some of the most easily accessible Indian petroglyphs to be seen.



Hard to tell exactly what some of these are suspected to be. Is this an Indian pizza???



And yet other inscriptions are more recently added graffiti. I'm not sure the Indians were up on the theory of relativity. Or have we crossed over into the twilight zone???


All images are © ancient Indians???

Love Train Tribute

Another thing we did was visit a railroad museum. Well, we tried to visit it anyway. It wasn't open when we got there, and we had a couple of other stops on the agenda for the day so we couldn't wait around for it.




However, they have several engines and cars outside of the place, and the boys enjoyed climbing all over them, and I enjoyed taking several pictures!!!




I like the way the shot through the windows came out, not only can you see my boy, but you can see my reflection.





Next stop: Inscription Canyon!!!

BUNNY!!!

The place where we stayed was teeming with jack rabbits at night!!!

They were not easy to photograph with my digital camera.

This is the best I could manage.

They were very cool to see, though!!!

65 on 66

For the long weekend we went to Barstow. The original plan was to take the Maverick, but it was having charging system problems, so we took the Falcon instead.


It was a great trip, and the Falcon ran flawlessly, with the exception of a little vapor lock when it was warm.



On the way back, we drove old Route 66 from Barstow to San Bernardino to avoid some of the traffic on the way back.


I've got at least two, maybe three more posts to come from the trip.


Stay tuned!!!

B.S. For Dinner

The other night I had a couple of turkey pot pies for dinner. It so happened that I had two different brands in the freezer, a Banquet and a Swanson. Since I've not posted in a while and it is Thanksgiving, I thought it was a pretty decent tie-in. Turkey is OK by itself or with some gravy, but given the choice I would usually go with the ham over turkey. Turkey pot pie, though... it doesn't get much better than that!!! I would mark one pie with a "B" and the other with an "S" and do a comparison. The instructions always say to cut a slit in the top, but with the frozen crust this usually doesn't work very well. I usually just poke holes with a fork, and this time I did so in these letter shapes.

My feeling going in was that the Banquet is the superior pie. I don't know why, perhaps it is because I'm more used to seeing that brand, since my youth. The color scheme of red seems more appealing to me than the blue of the Swanson. Saving my perceived best for last, I plopped out the Swanson pie first. I was ravenous, so it was really good to me. Next came the Banquet pie. It did not come out of the (paper) pie tin cleanly, leaving part of the crust stuck to it. Doesn't matter a whole lot, I cut the thing into bite size pieces first thing anyway, but I had to work at the crust to get the remains off the edge. Perhaps this was because it had a chance to cool off more, and adhered to the tin during the process. It tasted... well, about the same, maybe not quite as good. Maybe that was because I had some in my belly already and wasn't as famished, or perhaps because the crust had wronged me. Either way, I can declare neither one a decisive winner. My preference will continue to be whichever one has a better price!!!

After the Thanksgiving holiday, I'm thinking chili. Last weekend the wife and I went out to Claim Jumper for dinner, and we both had dishes featuring their chili, which is quite good. That got me to thinking that I've not made my chili in a while, I should try making some something like theirs, with big chunks of steak. Not gonna happen this weekend, it's Thanksgiving, and after that I'll we'll be out of town for a few days. Possibly the weekend after... and hey!!! I'll probably have some leftover turkey!!! Never tried turkey chili before, and everyone will probably like that better than turkey straight. Could be some ham left over, too, another thing I've never tried in chili. I've got two crock pots, one for the each of ya!!!

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!!! Hope your leftovers have a happy ending, too!!!

What About Them???

More fun with refrigerator magnets!!! The set is not complete, so I end up putting together whatever I can come up with. That's what happened with the last one. I've decided that perhaps I'll make this a regular recurring feature, whatever funny thing I can come up with. The letters I have are D, E, H, I (X2, or could be used as a 1), K, L, M (or could be used as a W, upside down), N, O, Q, R, S (X2), T, U (X2), V, Y (X2), Z, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 (or could be used as a 9) and 8. I encourage you to make suggestions of what I could post in the future!!!

South Park Girls

(Click on the pic for a better view)

Pank: Hey, do you see that???
Lilly: Yea, how did she get those???
Gonk: They can't be real.
Eyeball's Girl: Oh, they're real all right, they are what are going to get me the BIG ROCK!!!
Granny: but we've all got big boobs in real life!!! How come she's the only one who got boobs here???

Feel free to create your own dialogue!!!

What's Lilly Been Up To???

Fire off the Freeway

I shot this over the weekend. I'm fairly talented at driving and filming, huh??? I've seen this place catch on fire before!!!

A Sleazy Proposition

Tomorrow is voting day. Be sure to get out and vote!!! My main hard and fast rule for all the propositions is not to vote for any of the bond issues. Almost every one of these ends up costing in my property taxes. A lot of renters don't see it, but if you are one, know that any property tax increase will be passed along to you. So many of the ads about the propositions are SO transparent that it is amazing that anyone pays attention. The big one here is 87, an oil extraction tax to pay for alternative energy research, with provisions to keep the costs from being passed along to consumers at the pump. We'll just see if that actually pans out that way. The other top three oil producing states have an extraction tax. The ads against it, though... "it's a bad idea, it'll never work, it will end up costing you more at the pump!!!" And you'll never guess who's paying for it. Citizens against higher taxes, AKA big oil!!! Wow, didn't see that coming!!! They have spent over $100,000,000.00 on it. Unfortunately, Slick Willie has been stumping in favor of it, and I've heard several people who were also in favor who are re-thinking because of that.

Next up is proposition 86. A cigarette tax of $2.60 per pack. The proceeds will go to various health programs, and a hit like that alone, I would think, would be a big nudge in the right direction to people who are thinking about or trying to quit. Naturally, it's opposed by (you'll never guess) big tobacco!!!

Another one out there that hasn't gotten quite as much coverage is 85, requiring parental notification before performing abortions for minors and a 48 hour waiting period. Ready for the amazing, unpredictable opposition??? Planned parenthood!!!

I've already made my view on bond measures, but I feel this one deserves a special condemnation. Proposition 84 is a "clean water" bill with a 5.4 billion dollar price tag. I'm as for clean water as anyone, but the trouble with this bill... It's been done before!!! Five times already, if I'm not mistaken. Every time, the funds get treated as government's piggy bank.

The one that I do like is proposition 1A. This is the one we need more like it. Instead of raising taxes or issuing bonds, it keeps politicians and government from raiding taxes that we've already allocated and sees to it that they go where they're supposed to go.

Perhaps I'll do an update on what makes it!!!

Flaming Eyeball Productions Presents:

We'll just see if this works!!! First time I've tried this, but with a little help from You Tube...

Two of the three videos I recorded of the pumpkin destruction!!!

For some reason, the third one isn't showing up yet. I'm not that familiar with the workings of You Tube yet, but I think I have found an outlet for my video creativity!!!

A November Tradition

At the beginning of every November, we have a tradition at our house. We throw our old jack-O-lanterns to the street, usually from the front porch!!! Always there is some kind of recording of the event, whether it be video or still pictures. This year we did both, but I was doing most of the video so I was relying on others to take the stills.
As a result, most of the stills weren't that good, but these two came out good. Pumpkin in mid-flight, and the lid of a pumpkin on it's edge. The videos came out quite nice, hopefully I'll post some soon.