My art

Remember. It's all about me. Me, me, me, me and oh yes...me.

If you are truly narcissistic you can have art made out of your DNA, sort of.

http://www.dna11.com/gallery_portraits.asp

These people will send you a kit to allow you to take a swab of your mouth and then they will make art out of it to make your room decor. I would like to see Sherwin Williams beat that! Then you will have something else to talk about besides yourself. Oh wait, I will still be talking about me when I talk about my new painting.

I wouldn't want my DNA. I wonder if Britney would submit to a swab? Or maybe Justin? :)

Begonias and pineapple

Not so long ago I was complaining to Lovely that she was getting too old and that I couldn't fool her anymore. All that changed one day while we were at one of Shamoopie's gigs. Shamoopie plays in a new age band which brings out the blue hairs in droves.

Lovely and I were sitting together to watch the show with the audience. Usually we watch the show from backstage or the side of the stage but this time we sat in the audience since it was an outdoor show.

During the show Lovely turns to me and says "I smell pineapple". I turned to her and with a straight face told her that was the old people sitting to our left in the shade of the trees. She questioned me once and I answered her back with a question. "What direction is the smell coming from?" She said "Over there". I asked and what is over there and she said, "old people". So she agreed that old people could smell like pineapple. I also tried to convince her that sometimes they smell like Ben Gay or peppermint but she wasn't so sure about that but she did witness the pineapple smelling old people.

Later after the gig we were discussing it again in the car on the way home and of course Shamoopie wounld not let it ride that old people smelled like pineapple. She had to spill the beans. Shamoopie was the one who ruined my begonias by telling Lovely that begonias don't have a smell. I had Lovely convinced that my gas smelled of begonias, well sort of.

Anyway, I was happy that I still was able to convince Lovely of something even if it was only for a short time.

Granny Dancing

I have coined a new term. "Granny Dancing" or "Granny Dancin" which ever you prefer.

What it refers to are the moves that older women do at shows when they can't get down and shake it anymore. There was an enormous amount of it at the show. Most of the women were over 40 and some looked to be in their 50s at least.

They kind of move back and forth and side to side in their "space" and never really doing much of anything. Like I said there were many of them there and they seemed to run in packs. Like at one time they all went to see Styx and now that the children have left home they are out to party like it's 1999. Wait a minute that was Prince.

Some of them actually brought their children. It was strange and wonderful to see all at the same time. They move like they are afraid that they might break a hip.

Well anyway, I call it Granny Dancing. You will know it when you see it. Whenever older women start dancing to the music by themselves.

The rest of the show

I became so overwhelmed by the Davis Spade aspect of the show that I forgot to comment on the rest of it.

Foreigner was by far the best act. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that there was only one original member in the group. The rest of the guys were much younger than the guitarist Mick Jones. They could all sing and play. The keyboard player should not have taken his shirt off. It just looked, well there is no other way to say it, gay. He looked gay. Not that there is anything wrong with that. The band just sounded great. The lead singer might be a love child of Steven Tyler because he looks just like him.

Styx played well and they sounded like, Styx. The keyboard player looked and sounded like a leprechaun. Other than that a great campy Styx show.

Def Leppard. The main act. Had all the lights and all of the sound system. They sounded like crap. Joe Elliot blew his voice out on the second song. I think he was just out of breath. The dude is fat and looks really out of shape. His "job" is to be a rock star. That's his job. I think that when they are off the road he hits the Ben & Jerry's a little hard. The guitar players should keep their shirts on. By song number two one of them had his completely off and the other had his open all the way down. Shamoopie says that Joe could never really sing and that his being out of shape just makes that worse. I expected better from the headlining act. We left early.

I have decided that to be a rock guitarist you must be in shape and take your shirt off. You don't really need to be able to play. Just be able to walk around with your shirt off.

It was great to see a one armed drummer and I must applaud the fact that they stuck by him after he had his accident. He seemed to play well but I have to admit that the there was not anything difficult being played on the drums.

As Meatloaf said"Two out of three ain't bad".

David Spade of Rock and Roll

OK. Shamoopie and I went to see Styx tonight as part of the show they did with Def Leppard and Foreigner.

At the Sytx poing in the show Shamoopie and I turned to each other and said "The David Spade of Rock and Roll". Tommy Shaw looks like David Spade, only of Rock and Roll. They might even be the same person.

Here is our proof.

David










Tommy












Take a good close look. This is conclusive evidence that the two of them are in fact the same person. Think about it. You never see them together. They are both little guys with blond hair. Your honor, we rest our case. God bless America. :)

Ford Focus drivers and others

Having a relatively long commute, (at least for this area) I have noticed a few "trueisms" about drivers and their vehicles.

People who drive the Ford Focus just don't care and seem to be really pissed off. This is the third day in a row that someone driving a Ford Focus (different car and different people each day) has swapped lanes and driven like a lunatic while I was driving home. They are driving a piece of crap and want to prove to you that it's not, so they drive really fast. I guess they figure that the cops will take pity on them since they are driving a Ford Focus?

BMW drivers always want to be in front of you and will cut you off at the drop of a hat. The same with SUV drivers.

All minivan drivers think that they are driving a Porsche. They are not. But they think that they are or are dreaming about driving a Porsche while behind the wheel of their minivan.

No matter what lane I am in on the interstate, it seems to be the one that everyone wants to be in. It's the "in" lane. I get in one lane and I stay there. If the lane stops. I stop and wait for it to start moving again. It usually does as soon as the guy in front of me gets out of it.

Back to the Ford Focus driver. All the lanes stop at one point where traffic merges and there is a big lane shift for people to exit and go in different directions. It's not a good design. People in the right had lane are going left and people in the left hand lane are going right and there is a large traffic group merging into this shift all at the same point. The lane that I was in was where Mr. Ford Focus wanted to be because my lane happened to be moving so he cut in front of me eating up all of the cushion that I had placed there in case my lane stopped. Traffic stopped right after he got in the lane but I had already backed off of him enough to stop long before I even came near him. So now our lane stopped moving. He somehow sped up and cut back into the lane he came from when it started moving again. My lane immediately started moving and his stopped. He was pissed. A woman did the same thing the day before and she was also driving a Ford Focus.

We are all going to get there people. It's a packed highway and all the lanes will move like an inchworm. That's just the way this traffic thing works. Too many cars for one highway slows them all down.

Traffic clears after this intersection and then comes the charge of the minivans. They speed up and go as fast as their engines will go to pass you to get to the next traffic point where everything comes to a halt again.

And so it goes like this every day on the the way home from work. People don't seem to be in a much of a rush to get to work in the morning. The drive much slower. Also the traffic opens up on the way to work at all the same points it closes down on the way home. Another great plan by the traffic engineers.

And Crypt Keeper will rock...

Van Halen is going out on the road but Dave has already been out there and acting wacky. He performs Jump on the Late, Late, Late Show.

You really need to see this people if you are thinking about going to see Van Halen. There was a whole CD of this crap made in 2006. John Jorgenson was leading the charge. I am now glad that I sold his signature guitar. It's worthless now.

Dave does look a lot like the Crypt Keeper. Take a good look people. That's all I am saying.

Still my hero

Look, Bill Murray has been know to do a few crazy things in the movies. Who knew he was not acting? Not me. So he decides that he needs a drink and doesn't want to drive a car. He take a golf cart instead. It's Sweden for Christ sake, what are you supposed to drive a Volvo?

I love this guy. He should have drove the Winnebago instead. :)

Business in the front and party in the back.

Shamoopie and I tried to go to a Def Leppard, Styx, Foreigner concert tonight. We got rained out. After following two Cameros into the show, we made our way to our seats.

On our way in I noticed all the left over mullets. I guess the saying from the eighties was "business in the front and party in the back". All I can say now is that business isn't looking so good. When is it time to ditch the mullet you had? Maybe when all the hair on the top of your head is gone? Maybe? Well maybe not for a good number of the men at the show.

We booked it out of there as soon as the show was canceled. The mullet men had been drinking for a few hours and may not have been ready to drive home yet. We didn't want to chance it. So we followed two pickup trucks out the of the parking lot to go look at baby furniture and get some ice cream at Ben & Jerry's.

To sum up the evening....
"Babe, a nice evening but I was waiting for a girl like you to stop bringin on the heart break. It became urgent due to the hysteria that the lady, a former Miss America, caused with the renegade Mr. Roboto."

There I have already said too much. :) I must go and cut off my mullet, get in my Camero and drive off into the sunset. Listening to "Come Sail away".

Barry White

So at work the ladies like to listen to the radio. I don't mind it at all myself. Today I got a little punchy after programming a program that would make anyone punchy. Barry White comes on the radio and he says. " Yeah baby when we made love and make love...." I said in my best Barry White impersonation "I make a sandwich".

They found no humor in this and shut off the music station and turned on NPR. Man am I in trouble again.

Now what's wrong with making a sandwich? Barry? Help me out.

Baby...yeah!

A new thing to loath

I have found a new thing to loath. Windows Vista.

Shamoopie needed a new computer for the school so we bought one at Costco. It's a nice HP with dual processors and two gigs of ram. Sweet. Running Xp this thing would kick ass. Instead this thing runs Vista...oh joy.

I thought that the Mac commercials were joking. They were not. You must answer okay every time a program trys to write to your hard drive. I mean EVERY time. Some of her XP programs won't run and others will run but won't shutdown.

My first thought is to wipe the thing and start over with XP. I just may do that this weekend. Then wait until they fix the bugs in Vista and upgrade, maybe. Vista didn't recognize my network card. I use a strange off brand....not. It's a Linksys, only one of the most widely used cards out there. How do you not have drivers for it. Then it wouldn't load the drivers even after I put them on a memory stick. Finally I installed the card and tried to connect to the network. Vista couldn't figure out my security setting so I finally did it all by hand. It tried for a few minutes then just closed the window without and notice as to what just happened.

Remember that memory stick that I used to download the Linksys drivers. About ten minutes Vista tried to format the stick on it's own and failed. I was using the stick at the time and then Vista wouldn't read it anymore. Stuck it back into an XP box and all the data was still there and you could read and write to it just fine.

At some point I will buy a book on Vista and find out why all these things are happening. Until I believe I shall avoid it like the plague.

Worst movie ever

Nicholas Cage is a good actor. I loved him in "Raising Arizona". The last movie I saw of his was "National Treasure". It was a good movie. The whole family enjoyed it. This movie was by far the worst movie ever.

Even worse than the last Jim Jarmusch movie I saw. Which by the way, Jim you still owe me $15 for that movie.

The movie I am talking about is "Wicker Man". It should have been named "Shit Man Don't Watch this Movie". After ten minutes Shamoopie and I looked at each other and said "This better get better." It didn't.

The ending was the worst part and the fact that I sat through the whole thing to get to it just pisses me off.

One of us is wrong...

Shamoopie syas that the bird is a girl. I say that the bird is a Larry. So, one of us is wrong.

I am already anticipating having "man days" with him just like her brother has with his youngest son. Cheetos, cartoons, sugar soda, and spiderman pants. Maybe even some "Walker Texas Ranger" or Clint Eastwood, when he gets older.

Lovely and Shamoopie want a little girl. We even have girl dogs. I need another y chromosome around here!

In this, I am alone. :( It's not easy being me.

It's a cruel, cruel joke

The damn boxes look the same except for the fact that there is a light yellow stripe. I am talking about regular Diet Mountain Dew and what must be a new version call "Caffeine Free Diet Mountain Dew".

Shamoopie and I went to Target and I have to have some Dew for my morning commute. It's the only way I survive it. We buy a fridge pack and while I am loading it into the car she asks why did you buy caffeine free?

What? Caffeine Free! What's the point? You drink the stuff for the caffeine. Not because you like the taste. It has the same amount of caffeine as four cups of coffee. Making it caffeine free is ridiculous and stupid. What moron though to of this? Wait I am blaming this on one person. This smells of group effort. I bet it was done by committee. Things always work better by committee. Wrong!

So we stopped by the local grocery store so I could get some Dew and all they have is caffeine free also. I hate you PepsiCo. and your committees that ruin all the fun.

Next they will try and put vitamins in the Dew just like they did to diet coke. As my neighbor says "Bastardos".

Scary, scary....

I was frightened today and it's not even Halloween yet! I opened an ebay listing for an amplifier and saw this ...
Take a close look at the picture. There are more of her on the listing. Remember he is trying to sell a guitar amplifier. All of his listings have really scary women in them. Dean guitars in the 70s would include good looking woman in their adds. But they were good looking and they caught hell from the woman movement so they stopped for a while. They are back now with guitars made in Korea and guess what...the bitches are back.

I was expecting to see a Matchless amp. My first thought were "Get your ass off the amp I want to look at it." I bet the amp now has "skank stank" all over it. You know that funky stripper smell that leaves a puddle when the woman exits the room. At least she didn't show me her tattoos! I bet there is a tramp stamp on there somewhere.

Here is her sister, she plays guitar...

Cell Phones and Crazy People

Growing up just outside New York city. Say it with me now in a southern drall, "New York City". You could tell who the crazy people were. They were dressed funny and would walk around talking to themselves. The state mental institutions would let people out once or twice a year when they were running low on funding and it seemed that they all of these people ended up in the city.

Mostly you avoided them. Sometimes they would steal your Coke cans while you where sitting at a table eating in Little Italy. You didn't try to chase them down because they were talking to themselves. You knew they were crazy. They left you alone if you left them alone. They had problems and you knew it.

Tonight there was a guy sitting in his car in a parking lot with engine running and the AC on because it's 101 degrees outside and he is just talking to himself. Is he crazy? Maybe. But he did have a thing stuck in is ear. Maybe he was on a cell phone? You see these people everywhere they are walking around and just talking up a storm. Sometimes it looks like they are talking to you. I feel like De Niro(ing) them and asking..."you talkin' to me? Are you talkin' to me?". But then I would seem crazy.

So now a person who walks around talking to themselves may not be crazy? Maybe. So now I do the same thing I did before. I leave them alone and they leave me alone. Some how it still works.

Trim the trim

Ladies,

If you are going to show your whoo whoo out in public please take the time to trim it up! The Shamoop and I were eating at a restaurant at the mall the other night (since we don't have a kitchen yet) and the "lady" at the table across from us decided to show us her whoo whoo. We say it at about the same time. She knew I saw it and I knew she knew I saw it.

The couple was an older couple and looked to be out on a date. She was wearing a very short skirt and he was wearing god awful plaid pants. She must have had plans for later or just enjoyed showing her whoo whoo. She sat on the bench across from us and just opened her legs. At least she could have cleaned it up a bit. Shamoop and I were trying to eat. It was difficult not to laugh at the site of an older woman showing her whoo whoo in public.

If I were going to wear a kilt and have Mr. Happy hanging out I would at least do some Manscaping to help Mr. Happy look his best for the outing!

Blinded by the light,
Manfred Man