Don’t Blame It On The Sunlight
Posted by Mitch on Feb 28, 2008
It’s snowing once again, and at the present moment it’s snowing while the sun is shining. This is a big time phenomenon in central New York, multiple days of snow, and sharing snow with the sun. What do we blame it on? Well, today, I’m blaming it on the boogie:
X10 Home Security
Posted by Mitch on Feb 20, 2008
X10 Home Security is like no other company I’ve ever seen; I must be too trusting. X10 sells home security systems and other types of items, including wireless products that you can hook to your computer and watch and listen to on your TV; are you kidding me? I didn’t even know anything like that existed, so you know I had to take a look into it, and then I had to work on marketing it.
If you’d like to check it out, please click on the highlighted X10 link and look at some of the items I’ve highlighted. And, of course, take a look at what’s below:
Congress, Get Back To Real Work
Posted by Mitch on Feb 17, 2008
The congressional hearings on Roger Clemens and steroids was in full bloom last week as he and his accuser sat at the same table and endured heavy grilling from different congressional leaders.
I’m not here to take sides on this one, though I do have an opinion on it. I’m here to give an opinion on two other things. The first is that I don’t believe this is an issue that Congress should be dealing with. I mean, we’re in an election year. We have problems with the economy, we’re still in Iraq, we’re starting to see signs of global warming that may be our fault, they’re predicting gas could reach $5 a gallon by summer, houses are being foreclosed upon at record rates, they just recalled even more food products after having recalls of toys and the like all throughout last year, and unemployment is rising. Don’t these guys have better things to do that bring in Roger Clemens and others on something that has absolutely nothing to do with them, stuff that supposedly happened many, many years ago?
Two, this thing about steroids and other drugs in baseball. There are now rules for using steroids in baseball, but there weren’t in the past. Why is this suddenly a big issue? There are many sports pundits who are saying that the games and records are tainted because these athletes have been using steroids and thus the playing field wasn’t level. Please; stupidest argument I’ve ever heard. We know as a fact that football players have been using steroids since the late 60’s, and no one is saying those games shouldn’t matter. Baseball players have long used other drugs and stimulants because of the number of games they play, and no one has ever said that tainted the game. Doc Ellis of the Pittsburgh Pirates wrote in his book about being stoned on cocaine back in the early 70’s when he was pitching, and the Pirates won a World Series; anyone talking about taking that championship back?
Once something is made illegal, that’s when the story changes, because now there are rules on the books. I can fully understand that, and agree with it. But the way Congress is running these witch hunts on things that happened in the past needs to come to an end. Congress needs to get back to the business of taking care of the country, sports leagues need to get back to enforcing the rules they have at the time they set them, and the rest of us need to be allowed to just get back to watching sports and enjoying them for what they are.
And now I’m off this soapbox.
Lighting Can Be Neat,… And Expensive
Posted by Mitch on Feb 16, 2008
My wife and I go out to dinner every Friday night unless one of us has a previous commitment, which is rare. We usually end up somewhere familiar afterwards, or out of the norm, but it doesn’t ever seem to matter because we seem to have a lot of fun no matter where we end up.
Last night, we ended up a a furniture store, of all things, and it was my idea. There’s a new one in town called American Signature, and since we know we’re going to need something new in the living room at some point, it just struck me that we should take a look, since we were pretty much down the street from the place.
It turned out to be a very good time, though for the oddest of reasons. We usually have fairly similar taste, but it seems that goes away when we start talking about furniture. Every piece I liked she thought looked either too old style or, in her words, like RV furniture. I mean, what’s wrong with recliners and cup holders in furniture? Everything she liked was too low or too hard to get out of once I felt like getting up; I’m not a small guy. We did agree that we didn’t like piping on furniture, so that was a start. We didn’t even disagree on colors, which is also something different.
So, we disagree on furniture, but we don’t disagree on lighting fixtures for some reason. We saw a lot of very nice pieces of all types that we thought would be nice, but of course that’s not our priority at the moment. Some are the coolest things, but I’m someone who just can’t pull the trigger on expensive lighting, at least for myself. We’re going to a party later today, and we bought a neat lamp for my friend’s house, as he’s been doing some redecorating and we think it’ll work nice in his house.
Anyway, the lamp below isn’t the one we bought, but it’s pretty neat, if you can afford it; if not, click on it anyway, as they’ve got lots of other pretty good stuff:
These Businesses Don’t Care About Us
Posted by Mitch on Feb 11, 2008
Last night, near 10PM, the phone started ringing, and it looked like some company was trying to reach us. My wife picked up the line, and no one was there.
It seemed odd, occurring on a Sunday night, so I did something that’s common to me; I looked up the company and phone number online. I do this at times to find out what kind of company might be calling the house. In this case, it turns out that the company was someone called ITL, and they’re a telemarketing company; their website is www.itltd.net, but I’m not setting it up as a link because they don’t deserve more press than this. However, they don’t always sell products for companies. One of the things they do, based on what I learned, is just call numbers to see if they’re active, so they can then sell lists of phone numbers to other companies.
Frankly, I’d never heard of such a thing, but I guess it’s more common than I’d thought. After all, there’s a lot of spam email we receive that’s only true purpose is to see if the email address they’ve sent something to is legitimate, so they can sell your email address to someone else on the back end.
What’s more normal, however, is this type of call that I received earlier today. I saw the phone number on Caller ID and a person’s name, so I thought it might be a legitimate business call, as it was long distance. I picked up, and nothing. So I checked it out online, and learned that someone else had tracked it back to a company that offers scam credit cards to people. They get phone numbers under these fake names, bomb the phones with their software, and push these things. Most of the time they don’t call a second time, but every once in awhile they do. What happens is it calls anywhere from 4-10 numbers at a time, and the first person that answers is the one that gets the pitch; everyone else gets nothing.
By the way, I’m no the no-call list, which is probably why I’m a victim of these hit and run tactics. It’s hard for anyone to track these people down, but there is something you can do. When I look up these phone numbers, I invariably come across a list that someone is making of these phone numbers, saying who called, what the number is, and, if possible, what the person on the line might have said. Then these folks report it and, hopefully, the authorities try to track these people down.
I guess everyone needs a business, but these people should be shut down; oh well,…
My Favorite Commercial From This Year’s Super Bowl
Posted by Mitch on Feb 8, 2008
There’s nothing closet about it; I’m a major league Michael Jackson fan. For those of you who weren’t around to know just how much he meant to the music industry in the 80’s, and for those of you who do, and, mainly, for me so I can find it whenever I want to, well, here we go:
Ask And It Is Given
by Esther & Jerry Hicks
Bobo Brazil, WWE Hall Of Famer
Posted by Mitch on Feb 7, 2008
It’s Black History Month, and it may seem odd to talk about someone who was a professional wrestler. However, I’ve always loved wrestling, and when I was a kid, one of my favorites was a guy named Bobo Brazil, probably because he was one of the few black wrestlers of the day, and a good guy to boot.
With all the problems there used to be between the races, along with segregation, and the stories of trailblazers like Jackie Robinson who broke color barriers in professional sports, I have to admit that I never thought of wrestling as one of those sports where a black man would have problems breaking the color barrier, and how, oddly enough, someone like Bobo Brazil could actually make promoters break the color barrier.
First things first; for some odd reason, we can’t even get confirmation on what his real name was. Wikipedia lists it as Houston Harris, but they haven’t been able to confirm it, nor his actual date of birth. What is known is that he started wrestling in the 1950’s against all black competition, traveling with other wrestlers, sometimes in places with segregated audiences, which was standard for the time. What eventually happened, though, is that the fans clamored for Bobo to be put into matches with white wrestlers, and seeing the tides of change, it happened. And, because he crossed lines, and the fans loved it, other wrestlers were finally able to compete against anyone, and it made things better for everyone.
To read more about Bobo Brazil, check out this page from the WWE Website; not sure how long it’ll be up. And while you’re there, since I have no real idea how many people might be wrestling fans, check out some of the other black wrestlers from the past that are being highlighted this month. It makes for good reading, whether you are a fan or not.
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