utenzi

I recently received light criticism due to my mentioning liking pina coladas . Apparently that's a "girls drink". Okay, okay. There's no "apparently" about it. It is a girl's drink. But why is that? I love the taste of coconut and sweet things in general--and these are often characteristics of so-called girl's drinks. I guess my ego can handle the occasional scathing remark about the mixed drinks I inbibe but I wonder why there's assigned gender preferences in alcohol drinking? It doesn't matter much to me as long as I don't have to drink beer (nasty taste!), bourbon (even worse!) or rye. And don't get me started on Scotch! That stuff makes castor oil taste good by comparison. Oddly enough all those nasty tasting things are considered manly drinks. That makes me wonder if men in general have poorly integrated taste buds. LOL Or maybe we're not too bright as a gender. There's certainly a lot of evidence that we ...

Descartes walks into a café and sits down ready to order. A waiter comes up to him and asks, "Do you need a menu?" Descartes replies, "I think not," and he disappears! * * * * * * * Overheard in 18th century England: "Did you hear that George Berkeley died? His girlfriend stopped seeing him." * * * * * * * What did the Buddhist say to the hot dog vender? "Make me one with everything." * * * * * * * What does an agnostic, dyslexic, insomniac do? Stays up late at night, pondering the existence of Dog. * * * * * * * An engineer, theoretical physicist, experimental physicist, and philosopher were hiking through the hills of Scotland. On top of one hill, they see a black sheep off in the distance. Engineer: "What do you know, the sheep in Scotland are black." Experimental physicist: "Well, some of the sheep in Scotland are black." Theoretical physicst: "Well, at least one sheep in Scotland is black." Philosopher: "We...

This weekend I have a number of chores I hope to get out of the way. I'm hoping that by actually putting them in print --so to speak-- there's a stronger chance that I'll actually do them. LOL Here goes: 1. Paint my exterior storage building and clear the vines off of it (it'll need to be sunny enough first to dry up the rain tho) 2. Mow my front yard. Also requires some clear weather to allow grass to dry. 3. Build a storage "thingy" for my bedroom. I've got a bunch of pine boards and a 4x8 sheet of MDF as well as some trim to make it pretty. But since I don't have any place to do it inside--I need good weather for this too. I see a theme developing here! 4. Go to nearby business to pick up a cubic yard of decorative stone for one of my shrubbery areas on my side lawn. It'll weigh about 2,000 pounds! I might wimp out and only get a half cu. yard. 2,000 pounds sounds like a lot of work! 5. Get gasoline for the lawn mowers. 6. ...

Todays complaint is about hybrid cars. I'm not sure if they're called that in other countries so what I'm referring to are cars that use a battery to store energy accumulated during activities like braking to help propel the vehicle. Don't get me wrong here. I think hybrid technology is wonderful. It should be in every vehicle--and should have been in them for a long time now. My gripe is that these cars are being marketed as being 'green' and environmentally sound. Personally I find that since they're totally dependent on gasoline for energy generation (the electric aspect is just recovered energy from the gasoline engine that would have otherwise been wasted) that calling hybrid cars environmentally friendly is a false claim. Solar cars, hydrogen cell cars, methane even--these don't cause the pollution that gasoline based internal combustion engines do. They are 'green' not hybrid cars. I certainly am glad that some car models are finall...

I admit it. I've read "The Da Vinci Code." I read it 2 years ago not long after it came out. It reminded me of "The Celestine Prophesy" in that they're both very poorly written and preachy with long drawn out and silly "plots". Yet at the same time they're fairly easy to read. Here's a dissenting opinion on that. While I'm not quite that critical I did notice most of the objections mentioned in that article. And that's just the first few pages they're commenting on. LOL It's not very well written. Of course it's interesting that millions of dollars can be made by writing poorly. Inspiring, almost. Hell, I can write quite poorly. I'm currently reading a book titled " Salt: A World History ". I was hoping for something along the lines of Diamond's "Guns, Germs and Steel" but it's not nearly as interesting. It's also very disjointed so far but I'm only half way through i...

This is kinda cute. It gives the Archimedes "Eureka" moment a new twist:

I've finally joined the 20th century and gotten myself a cellular phone . It's my new toy and a lot of fun. I'd oddly enough never used one before my purchase 2 weeks ago. I didn't even know how to answer the damn thing at first. I finally set up my voicemail box just this past Friday. Of course, looking at the calendar, I notice that it's now the 21st century so I'm running 100 years behind . Story of my life! But at least I'm starting to catch up. The next thing is likely to be creating a wireless home network. In a way it's kinda silly to have a network since just I live there and I'm not likely to be on more than one computer at a time but the real reason is so I can run my ReplayTV units off of the Internet (for autodownloading of television schedules). Right now they use phone lines but I'm going to kill my landline based phone since the cell phone is all I need. But is the wireless network 20th century or 21st? Damn. How will ...

For some odd reason instead of being asleep in the wee hours of the morning I was thinking about how we often label as opposites what are really lesser and greater quantities of the same thing. The best examples I could think of were temperature and light. In temperature we refer to hotter and colder but the quality 'cold' really doesn't exist outside of ourselves. It's purely a subjective relationship. Heat is a measure of how much kinetic activity there is in something. It can vary quite a bit. From zero (absolute zero) activity to the top end in plasma where all normal characteristics of a substance are lost. What we refer to as 'cold' is just a range on that continium. Similarly black isn't a color. It's just the absense of light. Light can appear in colors depending on how it's being filtered. White is merely all the colors combined. But pure black only exists in the absense of any light. I guess it's mostly semantics...

It's drizzling rain today and the temperature is topping out around 60f. This is nasty for this time of year here. Sunny and in the high 70s is more the rule. What a lousy Spring so far! And all this rain has my lawn growing way too fast. I have an acre lot and it takes me forever to mow it with my push mower--I have a riding mower but usually don't use it since mowing my lawn is my main form of exercize and I'd best keep at it. I'm sure glad I'm not a farmer! This stuff is way too much work. I spent the past week in South Carolina at my parent's house. I did some hauling of large items in my truck: plywood; landscape timbers; mulching material; etc. I also spent some time on the water kayaking but not as much as usual. Same story there--lousy rainy weather. It's kinda silly to avoid kayaking in the rain since you're getting wet anyway--but silly or not I don't like to paddle if it's raining harder than a sprinkle.