Turtle Tchotchke Tuesday

A boot brush. But it doesn't get muddied. It just hangs around the garage. Mom gave this to us.

Satan's Sixes Sunday

In the early days of the Intertubes, before there were web forums for very specific interests, before spammers filled your inbox, there was Usenet. Usenet is a distributed, hierarchical, threaded discussion system.

One of the hierarchies that I followed was:

• rec.* – recreation and entertainment
• rec.humor – a free-for-all group to post jokes and funny stories
• rec.humor.funny – a moderated group where funny (as defined by the moderator) posts (usually originally from rec.humor) are posted. This group saved you from having to hack through the non-funny stuff in rec.humor.
• rec.humor.funny.reruns – a moderated group where a daily post was made from items in the rec.humor.funny archive.

In the early days any post that had even the faintest trace of commercialism would be flamed and repeated posters of these commercial posts were banned. Spam was born. The anti-Spam forces lost the war in groups such as rec.humor. It was impossible to find humor among all the get-rich-quick messages so I just quit reading that group.

I depended on the moderated groups for my humor.

One day this message showed up in rec.humor.funny.reruns:

(Here's a link to the post in the repository of rec.humor.funny.)

One of the numbers of the beast, "Route 666 - Highway of the Beast," has been discussed before.

I thought I had an illustration for "668 - Next-door neighbor of the Beast." Ronald Reagan, well, Nancy, didn't want to be the Beast, they wanted just to be the next-door neighbors. So they changed the address of the house they bought after Reagan's terms were over. I thought I had a clipping of the story. Shoot!

Speaking of rec.humor, I posted some jokes there. On the morning of October 1, 1987, the Whittier Narrows earthquake struck the Los Angeles area. Before we knew how bad it was I posted something like the following:

Subject: Old joke, new application

Body: I've heard the earthquake in East LA did 50 million dollars of improvements.

(The old joke I heard involved some disaster in Española.)

A day later the slightly reworded joke was posted again on rec.humor with the subject "L. A. Earthquake." A few days later it made its appearance on rec.humor.funny with its new title (the link is to Google Groups' record of it on rec.humor.funny.reruns...I can't find it in the official archive). I made the big time but without attribution. 

Big Brother, Part 2

Earlier this year I posted a picture to Facebook where I said "Big Brother is Watching My Neighborhood Today." It was a picture of a Google Street View car parked in the lot where I had gone for groceries.


For the comfort and convenience of my non-Facebook friends, here's the picture:

Big Brother is Watching

For some reason, I looked at their Street View of that parking lot today.

Well, lookie there!, there's my car (the white Prius)! You can see the little Apple sticker on the rear window.

View Larger Map

And here it is from the front as the Street View Car is leaving the lot.

View Larger Map

I did a crappy job of parking.

I'm famous!

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More Travels with Karen

Last time, we saw Karen and Jack on a trip to see three of his sisters. They continue their trip in this installment. They visit Herbie and see sights in the Los Angeles area.

I have a poor memory. I was living in the L. A. area at the time but I have no memory of this visit. Maybe Karen can tell me if they saw me. Somehow I think not. I'm not in any of the pictures.

They saw:

• Disneyland
• Marineland of the Pacfic
• Knott's Berry Farm

We have the family Christmas again. It doesn't seem to be quite the extravaganza of earlier years. Mom got something very romantic! Jack really embraced the CB radio craze. He gave each of us our own radio. Poss was this year's lucky recipient. Mine came years later and never worked, not that I cared.

We see another of Jack's Red Periods. It starts in Kiowa.

Karen and Jack take Mom and hit the road again. They see Lake Powell with a stop at the Four Corners Monument.

Lake Powell was my introduction to environmentalism. My sophomore year Social Studies class had a semester where we studied environmental issues. It started with Mrs. Bolsterli showing us two movies. The first was a beautifully produced Sierra Club movie that showed us the beauty and grandeur of Glen Canyon before it was flooded. Then, without comment, we saw a movie made by the Bureau of Reclamation that showed us the glories of hard-working men, heavy equipment and concrete. They built a dam that controlled the river and formed a lake that gave us a beautiful recreation area, irrigation and flood control. Discuss (or was it "disgusting!"?). I've never been there.

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Turtle Tchotchke Tuesday

Over the years we've gotten a lot of turtles that are no longer on display. These are languishing in the garage in a box marked "Turtles."

Some of them are kind of nice.

Satan's Sixes Sunday

Last week I told you about our drive down the Devil's Highway. Unfortunately, my car didn't carry the mark of the beast. Each time I buy a new car I wait on pins and needles for my license plate to arrive hoping that its numbers will be "666." It hasn't happened yet. I need to buy more cars.

Long ago, I went to California's DMV web site to see about a special license plate. I once saw a little pickup truck on the freeway with the California license plate that was simply "666." So they apparently didn't have trouble issuing plates with that number. At the time the license plates being issued were still starting with the number 2 or 3. The plate I was thinking would be cool would look like a normal plate:

They couldn't issue it because it was a plate configured as one in the normal sequence. I wonder if the person who eventually got it kept it. I would have died and gone to heaven hell. I'm not really a fan of personalized license plates. They're usually:

• Way too clever
• Way too phonetic: "CME2P" on a urologist's car
• Way to "what's the point?": "JAG XK 37" on a Jaguar XK..."37" because he was the 38th person to come up with that clever idea
• Way too possessive: "RD CR 4ME"
• Way too cryptic: "TEOATIB" This was a friend's plate. I finally found out what it meant. It turns out that Jerry helped come up with it. It's the initials of "The Essence Of All That Is Butch." To add to the crypticness: he isn't butch.
• Way too combining of the above
• And on and on

Wait, where was I?

Oh, yes, 666 license plates.

I haven't been assigned any yet. And at the rate I buy cars I have about a 50-50 chance of scoring one in the next 5000 years.

But Peggy has come to my rescue. Along with the highway sign, she gave me a used license plate. It hangs in the garage next to my highway sign.

It's not as cool as having a plate randomly sent to me by the DMV but it's cool nonetheless. Thanks, Peggy!

Since we're on the subject of licenses with "666" in them...

Twenty-some years ago Peggy's main squeeze was working at the Santa Fe animal shelter. This is where you went to get your pets' licenses. Since I was such a good boy she lifted this one and gave it to me.

If I had a dog I'd name it Cerberus. I have his license ready. And it's expired. He'd be living a life of crime!

Travels with Karen

Picture time again!

Karen became quite the traveler in the mid-1970s. She had been to Emporia and now finishes the trip to Washington, DC, that she started in the last batch of pictures.

In this batch of pictures that takes us from April, 1975, to Summer, 1976, we'll see:

• More of Karen's trip to Gettysburg and DC
• A deep snow
• Bobbie's graduation from college
• Christmas, 1975. I can't make out any of the presents I got. I suggested last time that one of the reasons we had no Christmas orgies in 1973 and 1974 might be because we were getting too old for that sort of stuff. I was wrong. It was just the Ewwww-dena factor. She's gone and Christmas is back to normal. It looks like Sandy Klaus gave mom her first microwave oven this year.
• Karen and Jack visited two of his sisters. I've never met Tuck. She and Jack seemed not to exist to each other (see "Sister's Selfish Coat") until their mother died. It looks like Tuck's family loves plaid. If it weren't for Karen, Jack and Tuck's normal clothes I think we would have an "Awkward Family Photos" candidate here.
• They then traveled to Wyoming...
• to see Nene.
• Karen and Jack took another trip in the Summer of 1976 to see his uncle Floyd and Margaret. If Jack had been wearing this outfit back there with Tuck, that would have made the photo truly awkward.
• They went south to see another of Jack's sisters, Herbie.

Karen sure did get around.

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