Horse Manure Park

I had a comment from my cousin Connie that I'd like to answer first: Yes, of course it is okay that you copy my stuff and send it to your mom (thank you for asking!). Sometimes it is easier to do that than to persuade someone to visit a web site. [Editor's note: once again, the following discussion is about football, which some readers will find as entertaining as the mating habits of the Lebanese tree frog] Troy Williamson is not the brightest candle in the Menorah. During week 17 of this past NFL season, he once again dropped a perfect pass which would have been six points. After the game, Williamson told reporters that he dropped the pass because he was “too wide open.” This is the equivalent to a hunter missing a deer because the deer was “too close.” Talk about scraping the bottom of the excuses barrel. As it turns out, this comment was the last nail in his Vikings coffin. Williamson caught 79 passes for 1067 yards. In three seasons. Combined. That’s beyond awful, especia...

[Editor's note: The following is a football discussion, which some readers may find as effective as Ambien or Lunesta] Starting tonight is one more enjoyable times in the NFL offseason: free agency. It is a fun time to be a Monday morning quarterback and critique each team's moves. But one move has already stupified me. Tonight the Oakland Raiders re-signed someone named Tommy Kelly to the largest contract ever tendered to a defensive tackle: seven years, $50.5 million dollars, including over $18 million in guaranteed money. We're not talking spare change, folks. A few things you should know: I follow the NFL closely. I keep up-to-date on the latest NFL news 365 days a year. I guess you could call it my hobby. As a result, I am familiar with nearly every player in the NFL on both offense and defense. I am not saying this impress you, rather to prove I really don't have a life. I must admit that I've never heard of Tommy Kelly. After doing a bit of research, I found ...

Over the past couple of days Beth has been “spring cleaning” and getting ready for her garage sale this spring. This is another way of saying that I have been forced at gunpoint to sort through my stuff and part ways with things I know I won’t use. It is just as well, because I have a tendency to hold onto silly things that I know I’ll never use, but feel that I should keep them around just in case . The most important thing I have been doing is sifting through the dozens -- no, make that hundreds -- of newspaper clippings, articles and other assorted things that my mom and dad had collected over the years. A whole pile of these clippings had been lying around in a cardboard box in my house for at least the last 10 years and I decided it was time to either organize them, or just get rid of them. Now, if you know me, you know darn well that I wasn’t going to get rid of them! So I have been looking through all of these clippings and odds-n-ends that Mom and Dad had saved. I found some s...

It is 27 degrees this morning and it feels pretty nice out there. It was foggy earlier and now the trees are a beautiful white, which I do believe is called hoar frost. Or is it whore frost? Say, if Jack Frost nips at your nose, what does Whore Frost do? These thoughts keep me awake at night. Nevertheless, the trees do look postcard perfect this morning. I can’t believe it is Sunday already. This week has flown by. We had all kinds of appointments this week. Ava had her two year check-up. She’s doing great. She’s very tall for her age. Our pediatrician recommended bribery with potty training, and by golly it is working. Gummy bears (or “dots” as she prefers to call them) are working well so far. We’ve had too much advice regarding potty training and a few people have made us feel like we should put Ava up for adoption to a good home because she wasn’t potty trained by 18 months. Something tells me that a successful life isn’t based on whether your pooping on the toilet before you know ...

In honor of the record cold that is supposed to be invading us tonight, I thought I would spruce up the site a bit and add the most desolate, depressing winter scene I could find. Man, I am so sick of winter. The funny part is that this has been a typical winter and we just haven't had one for a while. Still, this stinks. The good news is that four weeks from tonight, yours truly will be on his feet at the Xcel Center shaking his booty to Bon Jovi (there's a visual for you!). I am sure I will talk more about the upcoming show as we get closer. I am getting excited, that's for sure. Hey, it looks like it is just a matter of time now until I can buy Cuban cigars legally here in the States. Fidel Castro stepped down today, and incredibly, this momentous event was treated as a mere side story in the media -- at least it was on the newscasts that I watched today. Man, the U.S. government has been trying to get rid of this guy for nearly a half a century as he stood alone...

Happy Presidents Day, everybody! I am sure you are all excited about it. I kind of smirk a little when I think that we "celebrate" a day honoring our Presidents. Not that I think it is a bad thing, but we all know it is just an excuse for government employees to get a three-day weekend. I would feel a little better about it if more than 10% of American citizens could name the first seven Presidents without consulting a resource. I am willing to bet $1,000 right here, right now that if you randomly went up to 100 people on the street tomorrow, no more than 10 of those 100 could name the first seven Presidents off the tops of their heads. They wouldn't even have to name them in chronological order, just name the first seven. ...Screw it, I'll up my ante to $100,000. Any takers? I got an e-mail from my brother Dale, and I thought I had better clarify something in my last blog, which I now realize could have been easily misunderstood: Bethany is NOT pregnant! When I got w...

I have decided to do a little make over on the site. Actually, I went to Stacy's blog and saw that she had some cool new graphics, so I just followed the links to the source. Pretty neat. I decided on a winter scene since we just got several inches of snow over the last couple days and outside it is colder than Bill and Hillary's bedroom. I'll find something more "springy" after while. I've also modified the "Comment" section (since changed to "Smart Remarks" section) so anybody can leave a smart remark, not just registered Google users. As you can see, I am endorsing my own presidential candidate: Gene Simmons. America would be a better place if he was the Big Cheese. I would strongly recommend reading his autobiography Kiss and Make Up . Don't worry, the demons of Hell won't come flying out of the book. It is actually a very interesting read. He came from total poverty as an immigrant from Israel (his mother was a prisoner in a c...

Time for my mid-week report. It is a work week, so not much is happening, but I like to jot a little something down anyway. I was wondering if someone could tell me who gave all these congressmen, who obviously have nothing better to do, my permission to investigate wrong-doings in pro football and pro baseball? Who gave my permission to waste my taxpayer money to figure out why the NFL destroyed the Patriots “Spygate” videotapes? Why is my taxpayer money going to waste figuring out whether Roger Clemens took steroids? Obviously Arlen Specter, George Mitchell and all the rest believe everything is hunky-dory stateside and there’s really no issue more important to national interest than figuring out if a dumb forty-something jock pumped himself up with juice in order to compete with 20 year-olds. And to think I was outraged when I read the University of Washington was given a $100,000 government grant to study the effects of global warming from methane gas generated from cow farts (a...

The weekend is over. We had Ava’s birthday party on Saturday night. The Kampen and Stokes families came over. Beth made a bunch of good food, we all had a nice visit and Ava got just a ton of presents (way too much!). But she is having a blast playing with them all. Now we’ll have to do some swapping -- out with the old toy, in with the new toy. Keeps things interesting, ya know. Now the football season is officially over. I really didn’t watch much of the Pro Bowl, maybe 7 or 8 minutes. Enough to know that Adrian Peterson looked like he did back in the beginning of the season and enough to know he was named the Pro Bowl MVP. A meaningless title, really, but it definitely makes me wonder what happened to him the last four weeks of the season when he all but disappeared from the running game? It seemed at the time that defenses had him figured out, or the O-line wasn’t doing their job, or Peterson was no longer seeing holes -- but that didn’t seem to be an issue at the Pro Bowl. He loo...

Finally home. I've been busy over the last couple of days. Yesterday I spent the entire day at the hospital getting re-certified in ACLS (advanced cardiovascular life support), which is required every two years for my job. It was just a refresher course and I know the material about as well as a person can know it (I work charge nurse 99.9% of my shifts, so I have to know my head from my ass on this particular subject), but after eight hours of critical thinking and testing, your mind is pretty much numb for the rest of the day, even if you know that material. Glad it is over for another two years. Then I was up at 6 a.m. this morning and back to the hospital for an inservice on a new piece equipment that we will be using, but I found it to be an immense waste of my time. They showed us a video which we were told would "explain everything," but when you start using words like "anti-nucleotide mediators" and other $50 words I don't understand, my mind starts ...

Are you kidding me? Have you seen that new commercial now flooding the airwaves? The Vermont Teddy Bear! The Perfect Gift for the Perfect Girl! Oh brother. Because I am the way I am, I had to go to The Vermont Teddy Bear website , to see what all the fuss was about. All I can say is Holy Toledo! The average cost for one of these things is $80. Perhaps I should repeat that: the average cost for one these teddy bears is $80 . And if you really feel like pulling out the stops, you can buy a $200 teddy bear for that special someone. (I had some chest pains when I saw the price tags, but I feel better now). But back to the commercial. This ad is high on the vomit scale. The scene is focused on these trout-lipped models, posing as secretaries in an office and a guy comes in and delivers a Vermont Teddy Bear to a lucky gal. “Oh, it’s so cute!” gushes one. “I can’t believe how BIG it is!” squeals another (and they say size doesn’t matter?). The first thing that bothers me about this stupid c...

I will begin this entry by quoting myself in my last blog: If the Giants win, they will definitely deserve it, having won all their playoff games on the road, including knocking off both the #1 and #2 overall seeds in their conference, and then defeating a seemingly unbeatable team in the Super Bowl. But I don't think it will happen. Which means it will , because I am usually wrong . So, I guess this means I sort of predicted the Super Bowl correctly, right? Gee, how well do I know myself? I never get this kind of stuff right, but I never stop trying. For anyone who watched the Super Bowl yesterday, I think it would be hard to argue that it wasn't one of the best games you've ever seen; not just Super Bowl games, but football games in general. Not only were both teams giving it everything they had for every second of the game, but the game itself was well-coached, well-officiated (I cannot remember one bad call -- and I was stone-cold sober for the entire game!) and it was...