I get spam.

Am Juliet,a tall good looking young girl,so lovely
and caring with good understanding.fair in complexion,care with good
sharing,honesty.I saw your ad at www.jihadwatch.org which interested me much
and i decided to contact you.I really want to have a good friendship with you
even if you have married we can be friend ok ,i have a reason of
selecting you as my friend,pls if you wish to know more.Pls contact me
through this my id We need to talk and
know ourself more and equally share pictures to each other.hope to hear
from you.

Bye with a warmly
huggs.
Juliet

Who among us doesn't need/wouldn't like a warmly huggs? Still, I think I'll pass.

Was going through the spam folder on my hotmail account, to make sure I wasn't missing anything.

Hotmail does a pretty good job these days, segregating this stuff.

Besides the usual lotteries I have won, and the rich childless widow who has cancer but is most disturbed by her stroke sickness, people who have died without wills whose attorneys have selected me to inherit from ("Being a well traveled man, he met sometime in the past or implicating him were nominated by one of his numerous friends abroad who wished you are not too sure again."), and phishing attempts from several different credit cards I don't have, I saw a new one. Subject line: "To see her pretty plaything once more". Body: "When it had got to the top.". And then a link.

No, wild horses could not make me click on that link.

Two signs that I have seen in labs where I have worked:

Fast
Cheap
Accurate
... Pick Any Two


and


Lab Rates
Answers: $1
Answers Related to Question: $2
Answers which Require Thought: $3
Correct Answers: $4
Dumb Looks are Still Free

This last reminds me of when the engineers back at the environmental consulting business I used to work at would yell at me: "I need a number!" "Six!" I would answer immediately. "...Oh, did you want me to run your sample? That will take a while."

Too grim lately.

Today the boss happened to mention that he knows a woman who married into a lot of money, so that she is now the idle rich; she went off to California or somewhere to have some "work" done, and looks about 20 years younger.

I said that I don't understand the point of trying to turn back the clock by having "work" done, or even wanting to. "I am 48 years old," I said. "I lived every one of those years. I have no desire to delete any of them or to pretend that they didn't happen."

Kristina said, "When I die, I want to look like hell!"

We all cracked up.

This is funny as heck.

Laws Concerning Food and Drink;
Household Principles;
Lamentations of the Father"

An excerpt:

On Screaming

Do not scream; for it is as if you scream all the time. If you are given a plate on which two foods you do not wish to touch each other are touching each other, your voice rises up even to the ceiling, while you point to the offense with the finger of your right hand; but I say to you, scream not, only remonstrate gently with the server, that the server may correct the fault. Likewise if you receive a portion of fish from which every piece of herbal seasoning has not been scraped off, and the herbal seasoning is loathsome to you, and steeped in vileness, again I say, refrain from screaming. Though the vileness overwhelm you, and cause you a faint unto death, make not that sound from within your throat, neither cover your face, nor press your fingers to your nose. For even now I have made the fish as it should be; behold, I eat of it myself, yet do not die.

This writer knows about little children.

F has a little Acer travelmate tablet PC that we bought for her when she went off to college. We had planned to get her a reasonably modest laptop, and then her nice academic scholarships were such that we were able to spend a bit more money and get what she wanted.

And she loves her little computer, but occasionally it gives her fits. It started dropping out letters, and the tablet function stopped working, and we arranged to send it in for repair; but then in the meantime it occurred to me to ask if she'd updated all her virus things and run checkdisk.

Here's an excerpt from her email:

I just completed the checkdisk thing... last night I had to wrestle with all the other things I run, trying to get them updated. Spybot insisted on downloading and installing the new edition of it, and I couldn't make it not, so I was like whatever (there's some grammar for you) and let it and waited three years for it to install itself, but then it was like REBOOT and I was like NO and then I was like FINE WHATEVER and I rebooted and it was like HEY I HAVE TO INSTALL MYSELF NOW and I was like NO YOU DON'T GO AWAY. So I ran the old version of spybot and I guess it worked fine. It took deep into the night, but it didn't find any problems. Ask Daddy should I reinstall the new Spybot or just keep using the old one? Also, ask him what is ad-watch? It appeared on my desktop along with the new adaware.

anyhow, I'm writing this email to test that the typing works, which it appears to do. I have not tested writing on the screen.

oh- the new spybot calls itself spybotsd152. ask daddy what that is as well. I am confused.

Poor F. Here is what we had in my day:

I heard a new one today.

"Never seen nothin' like it. I been through two hog callin's and a county fair, and I ain't NEVER seen nothin' like it."

: )

My mother laid this one on me about what the preacher said this AM:

He was telling a tale to illustrate something and this had to do with a young female teacher who was putting her skills as a reading teacher to the test. There was this young student who was being slow to learn. The teacher was wanting to get across how to relate what we know to sounding out words. They were studying about Thanksgiving and ran across the word "thank." The kid was not putting it together. Gently, the teacher was "hinting" by suggesting "thank." "Thank." "Thank." The frustrated kid came back with "I AM thanking!"

Reminds me of the state trooper who pulled over the Tennessee boy and said, "Got any ID?" The boy said, "'Bout what?"

Maybe there's two people who haven't seen this yet ...
it's so funny I can't resist putting it here.

Love how the bird screams along with the vocals.

Tsiporah is making a concerted effort to eat right. Today her routine was off, so she had to eat her fallback breakfast: vanilla yogurt with blueberries and sprinkled granola. Doesn't that sound delicious? I am partial to blueberries and cottage cheese, myself, and could eat that till it comes out my ears.

Her rushed morning, and the age of her son (8), remind me of a time when F was about that age and our morning routine was off. F didn't have time to eat breakfast, so I made her a peanut butter foldover and shoved it at her as we walked out the door - "Get on the outside of that!" (I used to say that when I needed her to go on and eat, but one day she looked at her food in bewilderment and said, "I'm already on the outside of it!") Halfway to school, with a mouthful of sandwich, F sneezed explosively. I had to pull over to the side of the road, retrieve a roll of paper towels from the trunk, and wipe chewed peanut butter sandwich and snot off her jumper, her seatbelt, the dashboard, car door, and book bag. Both of us laughing our heads off the whole time, and me thinking, that's what you get for being in a hurry. I've gotten to where I try very hard not to be late anywhere, but if it's unavoidable I'd rather be late than get in a hurry and make myself even later.

Here is a funny story:

Police seize rabbits -- again.

In October, Hillsboro police seized 158 live rabbits from Sakewitz's home and found nearly 100 dead ones in three freezers. She was charged with 92 counts of first-degree animal neglect and 165 counts of second-degree animal neglect.

(Well, the dead bunny part isn't really funny.)

Two days before the bunnies disappeared, Sakewitz repeatedly asked Rouches if police would return 75 of her favorites.

"She was very respectful but had a desperation, that 'I need my rabbits,' " said Rouches, who told Sakewitz she had to wait for the court to rule on the case.

The police actually were caring for 200 rabbits, not 158, due to the brief period of unexpected mating they had before the sexes were separated. (Unexpected???)

Over the weekend a worried motel clerk in Chehalis called police, Hillsboro police Cmdr. Chris Skinner said. Sakewitz, he said, had rented a moving truck, stolen the rabbits and driven to a horse farm near Chehalis along Interstate 5.

Skinner said Sakewitz checked into a motel and asked the clerk for a ride. During the drive, Sakewitz spoke so obsessively of rabbits that the clerk became concerned.

The police regained the rabbits, but:

As for the rabbits, police started with 158 but there's no telling how many they'll end up with -- especially after Sakewitz mingled the animals again.

"You see where I am going with this?" Skinner said.

R and I are very strongly reminded of the hilarious short story Pigs is Pigs.

This is very strange to me.

Virginia killer's sanity questioned as execution looms

I don't mean to be disrespectful of a fellow human, really. But I am reminded of a funny story that a Hewlett Packard service rep told me, back before HP sold off its lab equipment business to Agilent. It seems that an HP service rep got a call from a customer who wanted a 250 foot power cord for his instrument and couldn't find a part number in the catalog. The rep called the parts department to get a part number. The parts dept. said they didn't stock a 250-ft power cord but they could get him the stuff to put one together. As an afterthought, they asked why the customer wanted a 250-ft power cord anyway. I don't know, the rep said, I'll ask him. The rep called the customer back and explained that he would have to put one together for him. OK, the customer said. Then the rep asked why he wanted a 250-ft power cord anyway. "Because I'm on the 5th floor of this university building," the customer said, "and I'm about to push this s. o. b. out the window; and I want it to still be running when it hits the ground!"

This, you understand, by way of putting in a service call.

Maybe you have to have to really struggled and fought and gone through the valley of the shadow of death with an instrument to appreciate the humor of that story, but trust me, it's really funny.

But the idea of the impossibility of executing an insane person is kind of weird. I am down with not executing an insane person, really, but to insist on sanity before execution is like wanting that mass spec to hit the ground "conscious". Don't you think?

Children's moment at church this morning: The minister had two branches, a dead one he'd picked up off the ground, and a still-green one that he had stripped off a tree this morning (and therefore will soon be dead, but we won't mention that.) He asked the kids to tell him the difference between the two branches, and they obliged. "One is dead, and one is ... not dead." Then he asked them how church members could be like those two branches. Answer: Because some are old and some are really, really young.

I am so TIRED. We ended up taking F back to school yesterday, after all morning at church and early afternoon at the in-laws', and didn't get home until around 11:00 PM. I am no spring chicken. I'm not sure I ever was, to tell the truth.

I have a lot of stuff I want to talk about but I can't seem to keep my eyes open. So I'll just post this story my mom sent and call it a day.

...

One Sunday morning, the pastor noticed little Alex standing in the foyer of the church staring up at a large plaque. It was covered with names with small American flags mounted on either side of it.

The seven year old had been staring at the plaque for some time, so the pastor walked up, stood beside the little boy, and said quietly, "Good morning Alex." "Good morning Pastor," he replied, still focused on the plaque.

"Pastor, what is this?" he asked. The pastor said, "Well, son, it's a memorial to all the young men and women who died in the service."

Soberly, they just stood together, staring at the large plaque. Finally, little Alex's voice, barely audible and trembling with fear, asked, "Which service, the 9:45 or the 11:15?"

A person died and went to hell.

The demon who took charge of him told him that there were many rooms in hell, and that he could choose which one he wanted to spend eternity in. But once he passed a room, he could not go back.

The first room had a concrete floor. People were inside, standing on their heads.

"I'll pass this one up," he said.

The second room had a dirt floor, ditto.

"Nope", he said.

The third room was ankle-deep in mud. But the people inside were standing around laughing and talking and sipping coffee.

"This is the room for me!" the person said.

Right then another demon came into the room and said, "All right, coffee break's over! Back on your heads!"

I'm telling this because every now and then you hear somebody say "coffee break's over, back on your heads", and it occurs to me that eventually this will become a saying that no one knows the reason for. And that will be a shame.

We have a new person in our group, V.

On Friday I happened to have a conversation with another coworker about something and in the course of it used the expression "treated like the red-headed stepchild". Then I stopped myself, hand over my mouth, because - V is a redhead. Brilliant, flaming red hair. You can't miss it. She didn't hear me, fortunately. But here is another insensitive saying that has now been brought to my attention and must be struck off my list of expressions.

(I'm kidding. I doubt she'd care.)

Sometimes I hear one of my sayings from somebody I'm not used to hearing it from. My boss talked about something taking "ten forevers", which is one of mine and I don't know where I got it, and today R said we'd walked "all over hell's half-acre", ditto. At my previous place of employment I used to work with a woman who used a lot of black English, and was very expressive with it. Sometimes I would repeat what she said back to her, word for word. It always sounded so funny in my thin little white voice that we both would die laughing. I remember that once I had to call in because I'd hurt my back. My friend told me that she tried to impress upon our boss that it would be bad if I had to miss a lot of work, because we were understaffed as it was. She said that she told her, "If Laura back is threw out, we in deep sh-t." It sounded very natural in her voice, and when I repeated it - well, we laughed our heads off. Funny how that works.

Well, we knew this already:

Why Men Don't Listen to Women

Bottom line: Men have to work harder deciphering what women are saying because they use the auditory part of the brain that processes music, not human voices. Men's brains are not designed to listen to women's voices. It's not the pitch of the woman's voice, but rather the vibration and number of sound waves that cause the problem, notes Discovery News.

[May I point out that pitch is directly related to frequency, which is number of waves per given time interval. Duh.]

But guys have no trouble at all hearing each other because men use a much simpler brain mechanism at the back of the brain to decipher another man's voice and recognize it as speech.


On a related note, check this out:
How to tell the sex of a bird

R and I attended another American Chemical Society meeting and talk tonight. This talk was about polymers made from lignin which is extracted from wood pulp. Our speaker said that this is very green, because wood is renewable, and that it will reduce our dependency on petrochemicals. However, he talked a lot about styrene. During the Q&A I asked if their styrene was derived from petroleum or if they were recycling it. He said that they are using petrochemically-derived styrene but that you can produce acetylene (C2H2) from lignin and make other chemicals; specifically, you can hit it with benzene and make styrene. Hello, benzene is a petrochemical too. I suppose the other chemicals he was talking about - little bitty hydrocarbons like methane and propene and so forth - could be produced in fermentation vats, but I'm not seeing benzene being produced that way.

Oh well. It was an interesting talk. He showed us a diagram of an extrusion device consisting of a screw being turned by some sort of motor. The stuff being extruded is introduced between the threads at the motor end of the screw and is forced along its length as the screw turns, until it is pushed through a dye at the end to form whatever shape you want. You can start with deep threads and make them progressively shallower if you want to compress your material before you extrude it.

This reminded both me and R of a time when F was quite small. She had some blocks with holes in them that you could drop marbles through, and messing around as kids will, she forced play-dough through one of the blocks. "Look, Mommy, I'm making a worm!" she said. I admired her worm, and then I told her that that process was called "extrusion" and she could say that she was "extruding" a worm. Then I suggested that she go and tell her daddy that she was extruding a worm. Which she did. R's shock and horror overtook him before he asked could himself how a very small child would know that word and he shouted, "From where?" We've laughed about that ever since, but I'm secretly glad that R is not as mischievous as I am. I don't think I would like it if he was.

Somebody at church this morning had an e-mail that he had been sent entitled "You Know Your Church Is a Redneck Church If...."

I about died laughing when I read it.

I went looking for this on the net and found different versions. I'm going to divide this between "Redneck" and "Country" because the two are not synonymous.

***

You Know Your Church Is a Redneck Church If...

The finance committee refuses to provide funds for the purchase of a chandelier because none of the members knows how to play one.

When the pastor says, "I’d like to ask Bubba to help take up the offering", five guys and two women stand up.

Opening day of Deer season is recognized as an official church holiday.

A member of the church requests to be buried in his 4-wheel-drive truck because "It ain’t never been in a hole it couldn’t get out of."

The choir is known as the "OK Chorale".

In a congregation of 500 members, there are only seven last names in the church directory.

High notes on the organ set the dogs on the floor to howling.

People think rapture is what you get when you lift something too heavy.

The baptismal pool is a #2 galvanized washtub.

The choir robes were donated by (and embroidered with the logo from) Billy Bob’s Barbecue.

The collection plates are really hub caps from a ‘56 Chevy.

The minister and his wife drive matching pickup trucks.

The communion wine is Boone’s Farm Tickled Pink.

***

You know your church is a country church if...

The doors are never locked.

The Call to Worship is "Y'all come on in!"

People grumble about Noah letting coyotes on the Ark.

The restroom is outside.

Never in its entire 100-year history has one of its pastors had to buy any meat or vegetables.

When it rains, everybody's smiling.

Prayers regarding the weather are a standard part of every worship service.

The church directory doesn't have last names.

The pastor wears boots.

Four generations of one family sit together in worship every Sunday.

The only time people lock their cars in the parking lot is during the summer and then only so their neighbors can't leave them a bag of squash. [I love this one and it's TRUE - I have had to fend off zucchini, and my church is in the city! But I don't fend off the tomatoes!]

There is no such thing as a "secret" sin.

There is a special fund-raiser for a new septic tank.

Finding and returning lost sheep is not just a parable.

You miss worship one Sunday morning and by 2 o'clock that afternoon you have had a dozen phone calls inquiring about your health.

People wonder when Jesus fed the 5,000 whether the two fish were bass or catfish.

It's not heaven, but you can see heaven from there.

The final words of the benediction are, "Y'all come on back now, ya hear!"

Another engineer story.

An engineer died and went up to heaven. But St. Peter turned him away at the pearly gates. He shrugged and went trudging down to hell.

St. Peter liked to call Satan up on the telephone every now and then, just to check up on things, and a few days after that engineer was turned away, he called - "What's up?"

"Oh, things aren't too bad, I guess," Satan said. "We've got an engineer down here now, and he's fixed the flush toilets. It's kind of nice."

Peter hung up a bit perplexed. A few days later he called again.

"That engineer you sent down here got the air conditioner working! It's cooling off already!" Satan said.

Well, that didn't set too well with St. Peter, so after a few days he called Satan again. This time he heard laughing and loud music in the background.

"Our new engineer fixed the refrigerators! We have ice for our drinks! Sorry I can't hear very well - we're having a party!" Satan shouted.

This upset St. Peter, and he told Satan that the engineer didn't belong there after all and he had to send him up to heaven right away.

"I don't think so!" Satan yelled. "We like having him here!"

"I'm telling you, a mistake was made! You have to send him up right now!"

"No!" Satan said.

"Send him up right away or I'll see you in court!" St. Peter shouted.

Satan burst out laughing. "Yeah, right! And where are YOU going to get a lawyer!"