Category: odd

i just arrived in mobile to drop my kids off with my in-laws for mardi gras weekend. this way the boys get to participate within some parades in mobile (a much more family friendly atmosphere than new orleans) and pamela and i get a weekend alone. about twenty minutes ago my dad just finished telling me the latest news of saraland, alabama. i don’t won’t to steal my dad’s thunder but i have to tell you this story. my dad will blog about this later, probably tomorrow and do a better job of it with pictures and such.

presently the state of alabama is working on expanding highway 158 from two lanes to four (a much needed improvement by the area of the university of mobile). as a part of the project they were using an excavator to clean out a swampy area beside the road. it’s really rained alot around here and apparently no one consider the possibility of the land being too damp for the weight of the excavator. thus when it went down to the swampy area one side began to sink and the whole machine tilted over on it’s side. this would usually be bad but not a case for panic because you could always come back when the land was drier and pull the machine back up. the problem here was that ground was VERY wet and the excavator began to submerge into the soil. pulling the excavator right side up is one thing but pulling it completely out of the ground is something completely different.

not wanting to lose the $200,000 machine the city sent another excavator down near the first in an attempt to pull it upright and away form danger. this would have been a brilliant idea if it were not for the fact that the second excavator began to sink submerge too. it sank straight down, tracks first, fast and deep. in the past three days the first excavator has sunk to the point that all you can see of it is the track on the high side and the second one has sunk straight down to the point that only the excavating arm is visible. thus the city now has two $200,000 machine underground.

the city has been quoted the price of $65,000 a piece to have an outside contractor with a super-sized crane come in and lift the machines out of the ground. that wouldn’t even include the cost of the rebuilding the engines which have now be engulfed and no doubt in-filled with mud. someone else has come in and said they would pay $20,000 to the city for each vehicle and then remove them. it will be interesting to see what the city thinks is cheaper.

my dad’s blog will surely have a better story concerning this and pictures of the events.

here is some interesting conceptual art dealing with the growing fear of “rent wear” which is where a company reaches into your home, through the use of technology, and bills you based on the household goods you use. it’s not happening yet but it is a fear that some worry about based on where we are right now with internet usage within our homes. the artist behind “license to sit” is cyborg researcher steve mann and here’s how he describes the piece:

the internet chair has magnetic stripe card reader and spikes that retract when a seating license is downloaded from a license server in response to input from the card reader incoroprated into the chair. the license server is in the 19 inch relay rack behind the internet chair. the license to sit last five seconds and then a buzzer goes off warning the person seated to get up. after the buzzer the spikes re-deploy.

interesting world huh?

link

it’s thursday night and the the aprentice 3 is on so pamela and i are watching it. i love the show but i think donald trump is probably a jerk (i mean he wants people to refer to him as “the donald”. what type of joke is that). tonight he was asked by one of the contestants on the “net worth” team about an urban legend concerning trump paying off the mortgage of a good samaritan’s house to thank him for helping trump while his limo was stranded. trump was asked to his face if this was true and trump said it was with out giving any details.

for years similar legends have gone around concerning several celebrities. it’s a good story but snopes has debunk the story again and again. snopes has listed an article concern this story about trump since july 30, 2001. a full three and a half years before trump’s words tonight. according to snopes the legend is false. i guess the event could have happened since 2001, thus moving it from legend to fact, but i personally figure trump is trying to get some free good publicity.

you’re not going to believe this!

this article tells the story of patrick lawler a construction worker who went to his dentist complaining of a toothache that has lasted for four days. when the dentist looked into mr. lawler’s mouth he discovered that he had a 4 inch nail embedded in the roof of his mouth. lawler had been working with a nail gun, shooting a nail through a piece of wood. what lawler didn’t know was that while nailing the piece of wood he actually sent out two nails. the spare nail somehow bounced into the palate of his mouth embedding itself into his skull and going 1 1/2 inches into his brain.

he walked around with this nail in his head for six days thinking he had a bad tooth ache. he actually ate ice cream to help lower the swelling of this supposed “tooth ache”. he ended up having to go through a four hour surgery to remove the nail and now seems to be doing well.

my word!

awhile back i feel in love with albert’s famous salsa. it’s a salsa that drives me absolutely wild. i can eat the entire quarter jar of salsa in one sitting with a bag of chips. since, i love the product and my mom always taught me that you should tell someone when they do something well, i decided to email jananna foods (the company that makes albert’s famous salsa) and tell them how fine they salsa is. i also figured that the executives at jananna foods would be so impressed by my effort that something good would happen. maybe they would pick me to be their next product salesman. you could see my face on advertisements talking about how albert’s famous salsa was the energy behind everything good that happens in my life. because of albert’s famous salsa my teeth are straighter, my kids get along with me better, and my wife now thinks i’m better looking.

i figured that even if they didn’t offer me a job as their male spokes model i would at least get a few free coupons or something for the effort of tracking down this small regional company and complimenting them on their salsa. that’s the way it’s supposed to happen. you compliment their product and they respond by giving you free stuff and asking you to recommend them to their friends. any free stuff would do – a free hat, a cool salsa t-shirt, or just a case of free salsa. so i’ve been checking my email regularly looking for their response to my email asking for my address so they can ship my free stuff to me.

i received the followinng email today:

Thank you so much for taking the time out to commend our product.

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cartoon by jim siergey

i voted for bush and given a choice between him and kerry i would still probably vote for him (never know though). i just thought this cartoon was funny.

this story is completely funny to me

A group of 40 people dressed in Santa Claus outfits, many of them drunk, went on a rampage through Auckland, New Zealand’s largest city, robbing stores, assaulting security guards and urinating from highway overpasses, police said yesterday.
Lacking Xmas spirit

The rampage, dubbed “Santarchy” by local newspapers, began early Saturday afternoon when the men, wearing Santa costumes, threw beer bottles and urinated on cars from an overpass, Noreen Hegarty, Auckland Central Police spokesperson, said.

She said the men then rushed through a central city park, overturning garbage containers, throwing bottles at passing cars and spraying graffiti on office buildings.

Alex Dyer, a spokesman for the group, said Santarchy was a worldwide movement designed to protest against the commercialization of Christmas.

so let me get this straight. in order to protest the commercialization of CHRISTmas we need to go around and urinate on cars as they go under an overpass?

my dog is jewish. i haven’t seen her wearing a prayer shawl, blowing a shofar, or reciting the shema but i know that she must be jewish. it’s the only explanation that i can come up with for what happened today.

today was montana’s introduction to parkview baptist church. my family and i go to church at parkview, i work there, and the boys attend school there so it only made sense that we would introduce montana to the people who would see a good bit of her. montana is going to go with us to pick up the boys from school, she’ll travel around with me when i do errands, and sometimes she’ll just come hang out with me at my study. after all, a dog is an easy way to meet new people and meeting new people is usually about half the battle for me in ministry. thus montana is going to be involved with the church and therefore i wanted her to get used to the place and more important the people who actually make up the church.

so i made the rounds around the church office with montana in tow. everyone in the office loved her and she gladly returned their love. after all montana is a friendly dog. after finishing our visits around the church office i decided to take her over to the maintence building and introduce her to our maintence crew, larry, kirk and david. their all nice guys and montana instantly picked up on that fact. she got along fine with them and they enjoyed meeting her. after we finished horsing around in the maintence building montana and i left to go back to my study and start to do a little more work before heading home for lunch. this is when the problem developed.

at the end of the maintence building is a creche (nativity scene). it’s one of the old, cheap, plastic variety that lights up when a light bulb within each figure is turned on. i placed a picture of the nativity scene at the top of this post so you could see it. when montana saw the creche she stopped dead in her tracks. i know she stopped because i did not and she jerked me backwards. she stared at the nativity scene, began to growl and then barked several times. she did this same cycle of growling and barking several times. in fact, she barked so loud that kirk and david heard her and came running out to us.

“what happened” kirk said.

“i’m not sure. she just stopped and started doing this and she keeps looking at the nativity scene.”

david suggested that i walk her closer to the nativity scene to see what would happened. this seemed like a good idea to me so i tried dragging her over to the creche. 45 pounds doesn’t really seem like allot of weight, yet when that forty five pounds is a dog that doesn’t want to be anywhere near the plastic JESUS it becomes an entirely different story. all my dragging accomplished was getting montana to perform a semi circle around the nativity scene without ever getting any closer to it. all she did was growl and bark while making sure that i wasn’t able to get her any closer to the glowing plastic diety.

when i finally gave up montana turned into her normal friendly self.

this is why i say montana must be jewish. of course, she could be muslim, buddhist, or whatever else a dog can be. : ) all i know for sure is that she doesn’t like gods made out of plastic that glow in the dark. then again i’m not sure i really like those gods either.

SIDE NOT – this was my 200th post which is an occassion of great joy and celebration. please pause for a moment of silence in honor of the great moment. after the moment of silense please go get yourself a snack and eat it and dance a little jig in honor of the occassion. thanks for celebrating with me.

i’ve eaten at a few really nice restaurants in my life, restaurants that put a healthy fear of the check within my mind. i don’t eat at this resturants often but i’m not a complete stranger to them. yet today i encountered the most expensive meal i’ve ever had and it was at a restaurant i thought was supposed to be cheap.

my family and i ordered lunch from arby’s today. we had just picked up montanta and wanted to grab something to take home with us. i ordered for the family and then went through the drive through. when we made it to the pickup/pay window i gave the cashier my debit/credit card to pay for the meal. she left to go “swipe” the card. after seven minutes she came back and said “sir, i’m having a problem with your card.” typically, these are words that would strike fear in me – fear of overdrafts, fear of nsf fees, fear of bad looks sent towards me from my bankers. but not this time. i had just balanced our checkbook and i knew we had more than enough money in our account. so i figured it was a problem with the magnetic stripe on my card. we gave the cashier pam’s card and asked her to try it. after another 7 minutes she came back and said “i’m sorry but it’s still not taking the card.”

this was frustrating. i reached into my ” just in case” money, paid the bill, and figured i would look at the union planters website when i got home to see what was going on with my card. of course, when i finally received my order it was messed up but by then i was too tired of waiting to stay there any longer.

when i got home i discovered something other than just that my typically good arby’s food really stunk this time. what i discovered was that the cashier had “swiped” our cards for authorization 38 times. these “swipes” did not actually charge our card but they did but an “authorization hold” on the cost of the meal for each time the card was “swiped”. the way this works is that when you use a credit card or debit card it first checks to see if you have the money in your account. if you do then it puts a “hold” on the money telling your account to keep this money in reserve for when the credit card actually charges your account. the money isn’t actually moved from the buyer to the seller until the transaction is finalized.

well apparently our cashier had no idea how to operate the credit card machine and out of her ignorance placed 38 authorization holds on our account without ever actually finalizing the sell. apparently arby’s doesn’t require extreme intelligence from their cashier and it took our cashier a little while before she realized that she didn’t know what she was doing. since she was a bit of a slow learner it wasn’t until the 38th time of “swiping” my card that she finally decided she should give up. in college i trained rats for a psychology class and my rat didn’t take 38 times to learn anything. i guess arby’s can’t afford to hire rats and has therefore obtained employee with less intelligence.

since the meal was $19.22 and it took 38 “swipes’ before our cashier learned that she wasn’t going to be able to work the machine we have a grand total of $730.36 that is now reserved for in our account.

now this would not be good on our regular credit card account but it is definitely not good in our checking account. the bank told me that the $730.36 will stay “held” waiting for arby’s to finalize the transactions for four days unless arby’s withdraws their “authorization holds.” during those four days the $730.36 can not be used for any other payments. personally, my checking account doesn’t normally have a spare $730.36 lying around in it. after all, if i normally had an extra $730.36 just sitting around then i probably wouldn’t be at arby’s in the first place.

so i’ve decided to start the process of having these “holds” removed rather than waiting four days for them to naturally disappear.

i called my bank and they told me they would need a letter from arby’s on company stationary saying that the “holds” are released. i went to arby’s and they said “no problem” but unfortunately they don’t have company stationary at any of the franchises. this makes sense because fast food franchises rarely, if ever, need to send out “official correspondence.” an arby’s franchise is too busy making sandwiches to correspond with people. so the manager “faked” company stationary as best we could and faxed it over to union planters. after looking at the letter she made i’m fairly sure i know why the manager went into the fast food industry rather than graphic design.

i won’t find out if this has worked until tomorrow.

for now all i can say is that arby’s has gotten allot more expensive than it used to be.