Feb 102015
 
St Patrick's

St Patrick's (Photo credit: bigdmia)

Well it is that time of year again. St. Patricks Day is upon us and there will be legions of people who think the holiday is about green beer and getting drunk.  If you know much of anything about it, that is not the reason for the holiday at all and frankly, I resent the stereotype that the Irish are a bunch of drunks. I am not.

English: Marc Gunn performing at the New Deal ...

Image via Wikipedia

Listen to this tune by my friend Marc Gunn, Celtic music afficianado extrodinaire: St. Patrick Never Drank.  You can read more of his great stuff and listen to his killer Celtic podcasts over at MarcGunn.com  My favorite is the Pub Songs Podcast but the Irish and Celtic Music one is a very close second.

So, dear Cantankerous Readers, what are your plans for St. Patricks Day?  Are you going to go get blasted on green beer?  Raise a pint of Guiness? A few shots of Jamesons?  I want to know.

For my family this year it will be a bit different.  We are headed uptown to see my daughter and her school band perform in the St. Patrick’s Day parade.  That should be a ton of fun.  After that, my other daughter is going to be in a fashion show to celebrate the opening of a new mall here in Salt Lake.  They were looking for Make-A-Wish kids and she is too cute to be ignored!  See some stuff about her at ameliasmakeawish.com.(see how I worked that link in there?  I am that good.)

After all of those festivities, we will be home to see if the Leprechauns have invaded again.  They seem too every year and the kids love a scavenger hunt for gold (read chocolate) coins.

After that I don’t know what will happen, but it will all be without beer.  Probably lots of celtic music, most of it from Marc’s podcasts and albums.  If you need some tunes go here and get a load of 17 songs for this year.  Thanks again Marc.

I really do what to know how you all plan to celebrate….the comments are open and waiting for you…Don’t let me down, I have your IP address.  That would be a great T-shirt…….

happy St. Patrick’s Day

-Justin

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Feb 102015
 

Well folks, my best laid plans kind of fell apart on Friday.  It was my daughters 6th birthday and we were running, making cakes and partying all day.  the cantankerousness was forgotten.  Sorry about that.  But, here is a dose of the funny Bone Ticklers for a Monday(which happens to be my anniversary as well.  Go figure.)

Anyway:

England v Argentina … we bring on the sub

You have to love the Brits.  Argentina: We are going to revolt!  England: Fine we will wipe you off of the map.

U.K. rowers cancel trans-Atlantic plan

I wonder how much alcohol was involved in this hare brained scheme.  I am all for endurance challenges but rowing across the Atlantic doesn’t sound like a very wise thing to do.

One way or the other, the squirrel always rules

Tim Bedore of Vague but True fame has it right with his animal conspiracy.  The Animals are out to get us, and the squirrels are the first wave.

DEA wants to scan all license plates on Utah’s ‘drug corridor’

This one is for Bob.  His conspiracy theories and Government Overlording is evident here.

Dying Chevron Executive Excited To One Day Become Oil

this just made me laugh.

 

OK guys thanks for reading again.  There will be another one for Friday!

also thanks to theonion.com and Fark.com for some funny stuff!

-Justin

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Feb 102015
 
Main Street at the Magic Kingdom, Walt Disney ...

Main Street at the Magic Kingdom, Walt Disney World Resort, Lake Buena Vista, Florida, USA. The photo is taken presumably from the roof of the Walt Disney World Railroad, and the US Flag is in the foreground. In the background is the regal Cinderella Castle. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Is it just me or was Friday just yesterday.  Must be me becasue Friday was last week!  And then March is gone as well.

Oh Well.  These days it seems like time is fleeting and going faster than is really necessary, but it is still going!  We are trying to figure out what we will be doing when we get to Florida for Amelia’s Wish and there is an amazing amount of crap to do in Disney World.  It seems like we should be able to sit down and have the whole thing planned in an hour or two but we are going on a week or more and still don’t have everything nailed down.

When it does get nailed down, it will change though.  That is the only thing I am certain of.  Maybe I need to get Ralph to help out.  He has been halfway around the world.  I have a 6 hour trip.  With 4 kids.  Maybe I can get “Uncle Ralph” to come and we can pick up “Uncle Bob” on the way through.

That would be wild.  3 coots in the Magic Kingdom.  Sounds like a novel where at least one gets arrested.  Maybe I should write that as a series of shorts while we are gone.  I am going to be making videos and writing about the trip anyway over at Ameliasmakeawish.com.  I am rambling and have now forgotten the original point of this post.

Maybe the sands of time that I started with should be compared with the brain cells that seem to be deserting me at much the same rate. I could blame it on sleep deprivation or getting older, but I don’t know the cause.

How fast is your hourglass being emptied?  And what should be the more pressing question, are you going to be able to turn it over?  If you remember, Dorthy tried in vain to turn over the hourglass that the witch set for her….is that where we are here?

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Feb 102015
 

Se la vie

Life has a way of slapping you in the face just when you think everything is under control. During our stay in France, for the first time in our foreign travels there wasn’t a Starbucks. Whenever we saw a Starbucks, we asked ourselves why anyone would want to visit Starbucks when there so many good places to get coffee in Buenos Aires or Rome. In France, while there were many places to get coffee, if you wanted a croissant to go with it, it wasn’t so simple.

You needed to visit a boulangerie (bakery) and then take your croissant to the coffee shop. Since everyone (meaning the French) understands that there is no explanation provided to anyone else. You have to figure it out yourself. Somehow it never worked out so smoothly when we tried it. Once in while you would find a lunch type cafe where you could get coffee along with your sandwich or pastry but these were not the norm. Now that I reflect on our French experience it is clear why it wasn’t until we visit France that we missed the Amercan ambience of Starbucks. Continue reading »

Dec 232014
 

I don’t know about you but I’m fed up with Search Engine Optimization, Page Rank and kowtowing to the great god Google. What do they want from me? What do they want from the world and can anything stop them?

Google says their mission is ‘to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.’ Did you ever hear anything more like big brother in your life? Even Obama hasn’t suggested doing this as he eliminates the private sector economy. And these clever people at Google have figured out how to make us pay for it without thinking unlike those clumsy and ineffective taxes the government uses to get our money.

But back to the SEO. Have you read the helpful instructions you can find everywhere on the web about how to make Google happy?  Even if you read them, do you have a clue about what Google really wants? You hear all the time that if you create high quality content, the web is a piece of cake but when you begin to study SEO you learn that it is bull crap because Google can’t read and wouldn’t know good writing from from the typing of 10,000 monkeys. If you write good copy but fail to appease the god Google, nobody will ever find you, read you and appreciate your effort. Why bother?

To make Google happy, don’t waste your time refining your prose because writing is old fashioned and irrelevant. Nobody cares because thanks to Google, nobody will know that it even exists. If you want to be successful you have to pack your collection of words (why even call it writing?) with a  word or phrase that somebody might search for. Salt enough of those keywords throughout your word aggregation and Google will send you readers. No muss, no fuss and best of all, no tedious writing effort. Anything will do.

Google has spawned a whole new industry of products and services to help witless people with more money than they can spend to propagate their word aggregations around the web to provide ‘credibility’ (in the form of back links) to your aggregations. Put those mutated word aggregations in enough places and rearrange their words in enough ways and Google will reward you with a higher page rank. Just like the annoying TV ads that finally get etched into your brain and make you mindlessly grab the products when you shop, if you saturate the web with your word aggregations, you overwhelm the competition and achieve value to Google.  After all nothing else matters any more.  And all it took was a few hundred dollars and some software.

So today I say to Google, ‘Do no harm’. If Google can’t read and won’t even try to learn, then stop pretending that Google knows how to find value and content. Call a spade a spade. Google isn’t about writing or content – unless you value keywords. I can’t get too excited about them but then, I’m a Coot. They are probably all that Tweet- addled Gens X and Y can handle. Google doesn’t care a rat’s ass for writing. What Google loves is picture frames for keywords.