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Who knew that this series would be the inspiration for the costuming on so many of Las Vegas’ shows?

]]> http://www.whiteeyebrows.com/he-man/feed/ 0 http://www.whiteeyebrows.com/a-proposal/ http://www.whiteeyebrows.com/a-proposal/#comments Wed, 07 Apr 2010 00:36:15 +0000 WhiteEyebrows http://www.whiteeyebrows.com/?p=2917 I’d like to propose a change in our country’s social security system.

The way I see it, generationally speaking, families are having fewer and fewer children with each passing generation. My grandparents had 11 kids. My parents had 5. I …

…Renewed in spirit, and with fresh new opinions to opine…

…Unashamed of even the most poorly-researched commentary…

…and unafraid of being lampooned, harassed, technologically abused, and left for dead.

Here’s a quick smattering of topics to get us up to speed:

Politics:

Congress now has a “jobs agenda” instead of a “jobs bill.”  Switching from an actual bill to an agenda seems to mean it will be even less likely that anything actually gets done in congress.  Is there a negative approval rating?  That’s seems to be what they are heading for.  People were harassing Obama that he got very little of his ambitious agenda done in his first year, but I would definitely say Congress gets the prize for completely wasting its time working on mondo-legislation that will be forever gridlocked.  My solution?  Congress needs to focus on incremental, consensus change.  Get what you can get, because it will be better than getting nothing at all.

Religion:

Lately I’ve been reading a biography of Brigham Young.  So far, I’m at 1848, right after he’s entered the Salt Lake Valley for the 2nd time.  Here are few things I didn’t know I never wanted to didn’t realize:

• Brigham came from a very poor family
• He was one of the most ardent protectors of Joseph Smith, oftentimes threatening and exposing apostate church members who were seeking to harm him.
• He served only one mission to England, which was less than 18 months, and still baptized and gathered over 8000 converts.  The message was not well received in London, but was best received in the British countryside among the working class.
• Brigham left Winter Quarters shooting directly for the Great Basin, in spite of others who made strong cases for California or Oregon.  It wasn’t quite the ‘wandering children of Israel with miraculous discovery of the Salt Lake Valley’ portrait that has oft been painted.
• After Brigham got to the Valley, he basically turned back around and went directly back to Winter Quarters.  I wasn’t sure I knew that.  He left most of the men of the initial 1847 company there to start planting winter crops, and his thoughts then turned exclusively on initiating the massive migration the following spring.
• I’m surprised how poor of a writer he was.  All of the direct quotes from his diary are extremely poor in grammar and spelling, while things like “Journal of Discourses” are just replete with flowery language.  He must have been a much better orator than he was writer, and he certainly had some help committing it to paper later.

American Idol:

I’m not going to be able to watch the Top 12 Boys and Girls until Thursday… so stay tuned for a massive blog on Thursday.

It is, after all, donut day!

Fast forward to 1950. The post-war baby boom is in full swing, and people are looking for jobs and the American dream. Again, California booms with population growth. California becomes the new ideal: driving along the coastal highway, or perhaps even a brand new shiny interstate highway – with speed limits in the 50mph range – in your beautiful new Ford, Mercury, Pontiac, or Buick convertible.

Fast forward to the late 1990′s. Internet entrepreneurs start gathering in critical mass in the Bay area. The internet is taking off like crazy and start-up fever is taking hold of the population, creating a new breed of billionaires: internet entrepreneurs. The explosion of the web creates instant and huge demand for programmers, marketeers, and support and operations specialists. An entirely new industry is booming (something we hadn’t seen for almost a century), and California was at the center of that boom.

A decade later, it seems like the perennial story for California continues to be that it’s burning down. In fact, with each burning summer I wonder if there is any part of California that has yet to be burned at least once?

Throw in the earthquakes, landslides, and possible pacific tsunami, and what kind of place is California, really?

Just as my sister-in-law once stated: you pay for every ray of sunshine you get here.

First of all… since when did any country advertise for immigrants?

“Start a new life” seems to appeal to particular brand of people that I’m not sure you want to attract.  This would indicate that they probably did something to screw up their current life.  Do you want a population of screw ups invading your country?

I don’t understand.

Wait!  Maybe this recession is taking such a drastic toll on tax revenues that cities, states and countries are going to have to start advertising, like corporations, for people to come and live (and pay taxes) in their territories.

So with that in mind, I’d like to create my own advertisment for Wylie TX (where I live)

When I say “Wylie” you might think of a few things…

Maybe you’re thinking…

“Wyle E Coyote”

Or maybe, if you’re from Dallas and know a little about Wylie, you think…

“Rednecks”

Well, Wylie isn’t either of those things.

Wylie is where farmland meets suburban development.  Wylie is where Lake Lavon meets Wal-Mart, and Wylie is where FM544 (Plano Parkway) meets Highway 78.

Move to Wylie.  We need more tax $ so they’ll stop trying to pass the stupid school bond.

So.. here’s the fun part.  In the comments, please create an advertisement for your city, state or country.  Ready…. GO!

The sad reality is that I woke up 2 hours before my wife to start re-wiring our house.

You see, I like to add stuff to my computer network, and I’m starting to run out of plugs around the house, especially in the office.   I have been waiting to add more connections though, because I am at maximum capacity of cords I can shove down into the existing network box in the master closet (you have to run each cord directly back into a single location in the house).  So I’ve been putting off adding anything else until I could resolve how I was going to get more wires down the wall in the closet.

Exhibit A: The Closet! (Don't forget to notice the fax machine!)

My solution?  Move all my network gear to the other side of the closet (which is easier to access from the attic), drill new holes into the attic for the wiring, and open up the wall and install a large low-voltage panel to handle about twice the network drops I have right now.

Sound simple, right?

I thought I had it all thought through, so I began by exploring the wall.  I started with my stud-finder, but quickly thought it was giving me false readings.  There was no way I had a 6″ stud in the wall with a stud only 6″ away from it.

So I started cutting into the wall.

That's a pair of pants hanging by the cut so you can get an idea of the scale.

Sadly, I found a water pipe in that wall, directly behind where I was going to install the new box.  And yes, 6 inches away from that was the world’s largest stud (besides myself, of course) – three 2×4′s nailed together.  All these things are completely blocking the area where I wanted to install the box.

No problem.  I worked through the issue, and mentally repositioned where the box should go.

Then I headed up into the attic.

(I would have a photo of the attic here… but I was not getting back up there just for a photo op… just picture me rolling around in 18″ of blown-in insulation.)

Now, if you’ve never done attic work, let me beg you to never start.  Being in the attic is bad enough, laying prostrate across beams and trying hard not to step on any drywall so as to come directly through the ceiling.  Add to that the difficulty of being a large man in a small attic, and it gets worse.

I get up in the attic and find (under the 2 feet of insulation) that because of stupid plant shelves, there is no direct route down into the wall where I want to reroute all the cords.

So after two and half hours of exploratory drilling, frustration, and making holes in the walls, ceilng, and attic, I had to just give up on that project until I can recieve some further inspiration as to how I’m supposed to proceed.

Then… I went out into the yard to help my wife…

Now, perhaps you can see why my Saturday felt so fruitless when I gazed at that single stick of a tree poking out of the ground.

Warning: My yard in the photo appears greener than it really is!

Yes, friends, my neighbors received the coveted “Yard of the Month” sign.

First, I congratulate them.  They absolutely deserve it.  Ever since they moved in, they’ve had beautiful perennials and annuals planted in the front yard, and have always had the greenest, most weed-free grass on the block.  They really do a great job.

However, I de-congratulate myself.  Why?  Because now I get to be the neighbor that everyone immediately compares the “Yard of the Month” to.  My grass has weeds that grow at about 3x the speed of the grass.  Besides my regular weeds this year, I’ve also started growing dandelions for the first time.  This is extra dangerous, because those things spread like MAD!  But for some reason, they magically end at the neighbor’s property line.

Furthermore, I de-congratulate myself because as soon as my wife saw the neighbor’s accomplishment, she immediately stated “We’re getting  yard of the month!”

Great…

Don’t get me wrong, I really like the idea of a nice yard.  I’m willing to work for this goal, especially while my wife is still willing to help me out in the yard.  But I can already see forward to the day when her first priority on a Saturday morning is not going to be bouncing out of bed to mow, weed and trim, thus leaving the impossible task solely to me — the “yard man.”

In the meantime, I’m game.  Let’s go for it.  If we’re ever going to get “Yard of the Month,” it’s going to be now.  So in that spirit, we rolled up our sleeves and started with the routine mowing and edging.  We kicked it up a notch by pulling a few of those pesky weeds and fertilizing (based on recommendations from our neighbor).  We then extended ourselves past any typical work by planting some tree starts we had gotten from the wifey’s work into pots.  This led to us doing a full ‘audit’ of the pots on the back porch, so we cleaned out the nasty, rotting, dead vegetation and pots that were just growing weeds. (How a weed jumps up from the grass into a pot is still a mystery to me.)

There was a tree in one of the pots that seemed to be doing really well, so we decided to plant it in the ground.  This decision, of course, led to a trip to Lowes after we realized that we were not going to have any good soil to plant the tree in.  One bag of soil and $120 in extra supplies later, we returned home armed to give this tree every chance of survival and attractiveness possible.  We bought ground fabric, special tree planting soil, and steel frame to put around the tree to keep the grass from growing in.

I had been wanting to install these steel tree ring/barriers in the front as well, so we bought enough for us to (very optimistically) also do the front yard as well. (Didn’t happen)

A few hours, muttered cuss words, blisters, and a pile of exhaustion later, we had a small stick protruding from the ground with a beautiful steel ring around it and a pile of mulch.

We enjoyed a small moment of victory which was quickly overshadowed by the sad realization that for all that work, we had only a small stick in the ground to show for all the effort.

…And it probably will just die anyway.

But that is only half of the story… tune in tomorrow for the story BEFORE this story as I recount the futile weekend project that preceded this yard project!

What is a plosive?  If you’re not an English major or a vocalist, you may not know.  Plosive are consonants that make an exploding sound when you say them.  They rely on a certain amount of built up pressure behind your lips.  P,D,B,K, and T are the major ones.

Notice, all the best/nastiest words start with P

• Pee
• Poo
• Prostate
• Paula (P)Abdul
• and many others (c’mon… my mom reads this blog)

So the “Pig Flu” does seem to enhance the nastiness of the disease.  Bravo, Rhia.

Tonight is the top 5 of American Idol, which I am now renaming Pamerican Pidol, in honor of the Pig Flu, and also to honor it as one of the best/nastiest words in our English language.

American Idol has a great vowel-filled, roll-off-the-tongue feel to it.  Throw in a few P’s and we instantly have a show that fewer Americans will like and talk about.

Henceforth American Idol will no longer be known as A.I., but as P.P.

When I was in choir during college, our choir president, Jeff, was in charge of consonants.  Even today, when I listen back to our recordings, I can hear Jeff hacking away at those beautiful consonants – especially the plosives.

This blog was brought to you in part by the Foundation for WhiteEyebrows’ Stream of Consciousness.