July 2010 Wrap Up Show

08.03.2010

As I just noticed the 'Mania has been update free for nigh on 2 weeks, please enjoy an End of July summary.

I arrived home 2 Saturdays ago to find that it was hot inside the house. Normally when the temps creep near 100 the A/C has a hard time keeping up, so I'm not terribly worried when the indoor thermometer reads 80. Saturday around noon it read 85. I went outside and noticed that the fan on the outside unit wasn't going *whrrr*whrrr*whrrrr*. One of my biggest fears had been realized. It was July and I had no air conditioning. I went and hid at Gina's for the night, but came back Sunday to do some chores. At some point on Sunday it reached 91 inside. Hot. Hot hot hot. Monday the A/C guy came and pumped in 3 pounds of whatever refrigerant they have to use these days and the fan started spinning and the house started getting cooler. For about 3 hours. Then the fan quit again. Tuesday the A/C guy came back and replaced the fan motor. Since then it's been nice and cool inside. Most importantly I learned I won't die if the A/C quits!

Last Tuesday was errand day, one of those errands was to get the 15K mile service on the car. The only thing other than my usual oil/rotate/balance was checking the fuel and air filters, so it wasn't as expensive as I feared. On the way back home the next day I was driving via the interstate and finally got the car over 60 when I noticed my arms hurt. They hurt because I had a death grip on the steering wheel that was wobbling back and forth. Seems I was the victim of a bad balance job. I took the car back to the tire place the next day and they were able to fix it up in about 15 minutes.

Saturday was my social day. Saturday afternoon the kids came by for an Unsanctioned Widgey as part of Evil Mathias' belated birthday extravaganza. Special thanks go to Gina for whipping up some rotel cheese dip which was a big hit. Cheese dip seems to be very messy I learned. Not bad messy, but enough that you need some post-cheese dip cleaning on the stove afterward.

After the extravaganza was wrapped up, I made my way to Huntsville to join the boss at the final game of the season for local arena football team. We had seats down on the floor behind the end zone. Well, there were seats but we didn't really sit. You have to be on your toes when these guys are running around. One pass went over our heads and about 5 of us reached up/back/over for the ball. When I looked back to where I had been standing by the wall there was a football player laying there.

Sunday I made a dent in my washing chores (dishes, clothes, me) before going over to Gina's and watching Brooklyn's Finest. Although I get a lot of movies, the previews of this one led me to think the re-watchability was low. Now that I've watched it, I can confirm that is the case. The movie has a good ending, it just takes a long time to get there.

Now to see if I can do better with the updates in August.

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Random Surfing

07.19.2010

I sometimes wonder what leads me down a path of web-surfing to an eventual laugh, guffaw, or snicker. I paid attention to that path this morning, but it doesn't make a lot of sense.

In looking at Amazon's DVD Gold Box deals they listed an amalgamation of 70's TV show first seasons, including What's Happening and What's Happening Now. Seeing those 2 advertised, I couldn't remember if Fred Rerun Berry was dead or alive, so I took a trip to Wikipedia to find out (died in 2003). While reading a about Fred Rerun, while I was there, I saw that he was a member of The Lockers. While reading about The Lockers on their site, I came across the following answer for What is a Locker?:

"A" LOCKER has been ,For decades anyone who subscribes to the Locking lifestyle and is a student of the dance of Locking...

That is the worse definition of anything I have ever seen. The syntax just throws it over the edge of being bad.

This definition can be used for so many other things. "A" NERD has been, for eons anyone who subscribes to the nerd lifestyle and is a student of the art of Nerding. Does Bill Clinton know about this? It could be that this is so stupid it's genius!

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Widgey Update

07.11.2010

Last week game nite came back to life as the men-folk gathered to play Frag. Wade, the most athletic of us all, succumbed to sitting around and rolling dice instead of doing something constructive, like building a house or running up brick walls and flipping backwards. I'm so proud.

I've been in a board game mood of late, which I don't know if it's caused by surfing Board Game Geek or if I get in the mood and then start surfing the site. Either way, Amazon ends up getting some business out of it the majority of the time. I finally got myself a copy of RoboRally so that Jer doesn't always have to remember to tote his copy out to the boonies. I also picked up a road racing game by the name of Formula D, which is based on a license from a 1991 game.

I took a couple of test laps of Formula D Sunday afternoon to see what I thought. The first verdict is that it's easy to learn. After 2 laps of the "beginner" game I was ready for the advanced rules. The advanced rules require a little more referencing the rules when bad mojo occurs, but it didn't seem like anything a little cheat sheet couldn't fix.

I think this is going to be the next game we try out, although there isn't any shooting. There's not really any crashing, just spin-outs that make you start from a standstill. I may have to pick up a copy of Rush n' Crush and see if it integrates well with Formula D. Until then, be on the lookout for Nascar Naswidgey!

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WWE Raw in Nashville, 07.05.2010

07.06.2010

February doesn't seem like that long ago for when Matt and I went to our last wrestling show. Maybe it was because that trip was when I finally made it backstage and it's been an almost weekly topic of conversation during Wrestling Night at Matts? Regardless, Jason and the crew were making another trek to Nashville and once again we took advantage of his generosity. We took extra advantage because Westar Joe tagged along for his first wrestling event!

Although just another show, the fun part was teaching Joe how wrestling fans act. From the Nascar shirt wearing women that are bigger than me to a Ric Flair "Woooo" crossing the arena like The Wave, it was all good. Joe seemed to enjoy himself, but Joe's one to enjoy something new like that. Storylines progressed as normal, and we were in a good little group of people who enjoyed a good zinger. The zingers I remember:

• Calling out Alicia Fox as RuPaul after watching a backstage segment where she acted just like him.
• When Darren Young was getting beat down, Matt was crying "Don't beat the Pencil Troll!!!!

The most important part of this show was that Matt and I learned that our favorite cameraman is Marty, not Rico. As such the Rico Fan Club is now the Marty Fan Club, so we have to change all of the stationary. Between the last televised match and the dark match Marty grabbed his camera and was leaving and managed to walk our direction. Since there wasn't yet a massive roar of the crowd for the dark match I yelled out "MARTYYYYYYYYYY" and actually got his attention to follow up with a "You da man Marty!" for which he gave me a thumb up. I believe everyone should have a fan following. Marty gets us.

Once the dark match was over, Matt, Joe, and I went over and chatted with Jason (mostly about motorcycles). Justin Roberts came over for some pictures and we ended up talking about about entrance sets and Canadian accents. I've never talked to anybody with their own Wikipedia page before. I'm currently in negotiations to see if Justin will be the announcer for the Marty Fan Club.

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Rockin The Booty, Doing My Civic Duty

06.26.2010

This past week I had the occasion to serve jury duty. Like most people my first thought was "how do I get out of this", but I decided (for once) to just sit idly by and see what the system would do with me. ?Obviously I've learned my lesson, because the system decided to screw me over.

Monday morning at 8:15 there were roughly 70 of us potential jurors at the Limestone County Courthouse. Initially we all had our turn stating out name, place of employment, spouse's name, and spouse's place of employment for the record. After that the first round of 20 to leave were smart enough to claim a valid reason not to be there - people with hearing problems were the most prevalent. That left us to begin the questioning by the lawyers. This was civil court, with the plaintiff suing a home builder/developer, so there were no "do you believe in the death penalty" questions. No, the first question asked by the plaintiff's lawyer was "does anyone have a bumper sticker on their car". The second question was "does anyone belong to a professional organization besides a church group". The second question had answers from Accounting organizations to the NRA to a Girl Scout troop leader. The plaintiff's lawyer (Mike) then asked certain people individual questions based on their answers to the at-large questions, or to clear up any details on our place of employment. Spiritus doesn't automatically equal programmer to the average joe, so I wondered why he just didn't ask what our job was instead of where we worked. But I'm not a lawyer.

My favorite person to answer was Amber Last-Name-Not-To-Be-Published. Initially she stated her name and her place of employment was "dancer at the Boobie Bungalow". Later on the lawyers asked if anyone had been a defendant in a court case before, and Amber offered that she had been brought to court on an assault case. When asked about the resolution she said that it had gone to the judge 3 times and the other person never showed up, so it was dropped. Later on the lawyers asked if anyone had to testify in a court case. Amber once again spoke up, this time stating that her mother had been brought in on an assault charge, but only because she reached the girl coming after Amber first. When asked about the resolution for that one, oddly enough it too went ot the judge 3 times, although the girl that brought the charges had showed up late the 3rd time, the judge still dropped it. I've met a few dancers in my time, and it seems the vast majority of them have stories like that.

I was only asked about what my job actually was. The accountant sitting next to me wasn't asked anything. I had a feeling this wasn't good. At the end of questioning us the lawyers took turns telling the judge numbers which magically equated to us. Finally they called 13 to take a seat in the jurors box. Me and the accountant got called, along with 4 other males that had engineering backgrounds. Not too hard to see how I got screwed on this one.

For the rest of the week I sat in court and learned more than any average person would ever want about soil erosion, drainage systems for a subdivision, all the different names for a ditch, and looked at 81 plaintiff exhibits and 43 defendant exhibits. Lots of pictures of dirt, mostly. I got a little tickled at people on the stand rambling on when asked a yes/no question by one of the lawyers, or even better giving an answer that had nothing to do with the question.

Finally, after way too many days of looking at pictures, the lawyers stated their cases and the judge told us what the charges were. Our lucky 13th alternate got to go home while the rest of us stayed to deliberate. At that point I saw how screwed up our legal system is as we couldn't have a copy of what the judge had told us the law on which we were supposed to render our judgment was based. Maybe it's the engineer in me, but 12 people halfway listening to a judge talk about the minutia of various legalese will get you 12 different things you're supposed to base your judgment on. Even worse, it wasn't a "guilty/innocent" verdict per count, but only an amount of damages if ruling for the plaintiff on any occasion.

After 4 hours we finally reached a unanimous decision on what to award - deciding to award something took 10 minutes, but the total amount took a while since everyone had a different opinion of what was fair. The plaintiff's lawyer had told us that they were suing for $41,000 in damages, and if we were to award punitive damages they are normally 1 to 3 times the amount of the damages. Only 2 of us heard that at the beginning of our deliberation voting for $41K and $82K in damages, while everyone else was between $9K (the cost of the land in the dispute) and $25K(just a made-up number). We had no way of figuring out what was fair other than what the plaintiff's lawyer had said, and he was going to get apiece of it so of course he would want us to be high. Finally enough people were tired and hungry that we agreed on a number ($70K total) and that was the end of the trial.

Basically I learned that no matter how much you're supposed to be impartial during a court case, everybody lets their feelings in at the end. One woman wanted to max out the penalty due from the home developer because the same thing was happening to her. One guy who's a contractor thought the penalty amount was too high because the developer needs to keep hiring workers and make a living not just for him but for the people he hires. People make up numbers for the punitive damages because it sounds like a fair amount to them based on their lifestyle. When it comes down to it, I'm not even sure the defendant was really guilty because of what I thought the judge told us the law(s) were, but if I'm the only one that heard it that way I'm not going to argue the point because deep down I just don't care. It's not even that deep, it's pretty close to the surface.

The main thing I learned is to never get sued around here.

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