willwheels

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-joliet-prison-park-18jul18,0,1444403.story





"This could be Joliet's Disney World."

"This city has improved so much since. We just had a big NASCAR race last week, we have a minor-league ball club -- we have everything you could want."

Gosh.

#1 in a Series

If you are

from New Jersey
care about race relations but are tired of people who are too earnest about it
like honky tonk music

and

have a secret crush on Jack Black

check out "Be Kind Rewind"

Further bulletins as appropriate.  As you were.

http://www.exoticfelinerescuecenter.org/

This is in my backyard, just south of being on my way to The Indianapolis Motor Speedway. And, in fact, apart from that, the greatest place in the entire world, the Exotic Feline Rescue Center has to be the coolest place in Indiana. They take in large cats that have been abused, injured, abandoned, illegally kept, or all of those. And more. Unfortunately. Currently have more than 190 cats, not all available to be seen.

So I left Maggie and the unnamed Baby Girl to go visit, and maybe get a name for the unnamed Baby Girl from the cats there. Totally in the middle of nowhere, I got a little bit lost and stopped to try to look up google maps, but couldn't get a signal. So, I turn around on the gravel road I turned off on and before pulling back out onto the main road saw the street sign that this was it. Unturned back around and headed in.

Eventually got the tour started, very cool, but you have to tune out the stories or you'll be sobbing. Any and every bad story you could think of has resulted in a cat living there: one's ears are too short as they were frostbitten when they got her, another walks like he's drunk due to nerve damage due to a poor declawing attempt, others were skin and bones from malnutrition when they were picked up from a USDA-approved facility that is still in business, two tigers came from a guy arrested when his meth lab was raided but he refused to give up the third white tiger (a white tiger was abandoned dying at the Purdue vet, and it's assumed that it was that one but they can't tell for sure), even the ones that are healthy don't have a good story: several well-fed and well-cared for tigers are there as their former owner is now serving over 100 years in prison for molesting 120 boys over the years he had hired to care for the tigers. It goes on...

The enclosures are relatively open and close. Well-fenced in, but you could easily lose your hand through the fence (and the guide repeatedly told people to stay on the gravel away from the fence, etc.) I have some video on my phone, I'll see if it's any good later. They get almost no federal money, their two primary sources of money are visitors (at only $10 per) and Tony Stewart. Everything cool in Indiana, he's associated with it. GO TONY!

No jaguars but did have a couple of black leopards, one out and she was quite happy prancing about. The cougars all seemed to be pissed off, guess no one was buying them drinks. But in general most cats were out, weather was perfect: mid 60s so they weren't all sleeping off the heat.

One tiger in particular was trying to spray everyone but I didn't see anyone get hit. Across the path from him was a family of three lions (the male was thought to be too young to breed when they paired him up with a female, wrong, they have a daughter and aren't going to have anymore now...). The daughter is quite devious and she works with the tiger across the way: she'll run up to the fence and get everyone to pay attention to her so that the tiger can spray the crowd from behind. They've done this enough times that the staff are sure they're colluding. Awesome. The male, named King, was bought by a woman who only wanted to raise him to be big enough to shoot and get stuffed. Her neighbors knew about it and got him rescued. He apparently gets annoyed with people and will ROAR right up at the fence. We were warned to only calmly walk away when he did, but he didn't.

Tigers are BIG. Two were strutting around showing off right next to the fence and we could all see how big they actually were when a third one charged in, batted one away and the other ran off. The much bigger tiger now properly strutted in His Territory. They are FAST. And big tiger wasn't even trying as hard as he could've run. If they want you dead, you're dead.

Our guide ranted about circuses from the small roadside atrocities to the big named ones, even those are on the road for 300+ days a year traveling in small cages. She, the animal lover, recommended Cirque de Soleil if you had to a circus. Funny, even I think French-Canadians are animals too. Maybe they don't mind the cages, who knows?

A big enclosure held six female lions which the guide warned us about being careful to not be close to the fence facing the other way as the only way you'll know that they're behind you is if they want you to know they're behind you. And that if there were any toddlers in our group they would've already targeted it and spread out, they hunt in packs.

Group member: "Why toddlers?"

Guide: "Because they're prey-sized and lions are fucking awesome!" (paraphrased)

Saw several name possibilities for the unnamed Baby Girl: Tinker, Squeaky, and Knickers (though they spelled it Nickers on the sign). But then there was an enclosure that included a lioness named Maggie. But she was no where to be seen and the guide said that was normal, Maggie hates people. Right next door to Maggie's enclosure was a lioness lying there being too cute named Baby. Baby Girl now has a name! It's "Baby"!

Awesome place, awesome day, will be back many times, maybe even to volunteer. Anybody with toddlers want to go along?

Today I met up with Mike and Paul D to paddle around the bay. Last time I did this, on June 13th, I faded, had to ride wash for a mile, and then faded even more and had to just drag myself in the last half mile or so. This time, I started out riding wash, but got them to slow down to a more sustainable pace, and ended up paddling without assistance for the last half, and I actually got bored of waiting for the two of them and surged ahead for the last mile or so. Last time, I did 10.65 miles in 1:59. This time I did 10.92 miles in 2:02. Not a huge improvement, but an improvement none the less.

Originally posted at Rants and Revelations

It should have been a good night. There was almost no wind and no waves on the Bay (except the inevitable boat wakes) and the creek was still fairly high. But as soon as I got in my boat I felt “off”. I don’t know if I ate too much before hand, didn’t eat enough, or just wasn’t recovered from Saturday, but I almost didn’t feel like racing. I did a good long warm up, mostly slow but with a couple of “pick ups” to raise my heart rate to see if it would make me feel right, but it still wasn’t good.

To try to spur myself to try harder, I lined up behind Paul D. I started 30 seconds or a minute behind him, and I made an ok but not great start. Half way to the first buoy, though, my speed was dropping under the magic 6.0 mph, in spite of the low wind. I could see Paul pulling away from me even by then. After the turn, my speed increased a tiny bit, but it still wasn’t great, and Paul D was pulling away all the time. My spilt was horrible, 9.55 (compared to 9.50 last week and 9.43 the week before), and once we got into the twisty bit I mercifully lost sight of Paul D disappearing into the distance. I also noticed that I was ducking my head down more and more to try to look over the tops of my sun glasses, so I had to stop and take them off, which cost me a few seconds. At the turn, it was obvious just how much I’d lost to him, but the last half mile felt the worst. My speed felt horrible, and I wasn’t able to put on any speed for the finishing straight, and I couldn’t even see Paul D up ahead he was so far beyond me.

At the finish, my time was 19.12, which isn’t the worst I’ve done, but it’s the worst I’ve done in a month, which is a disappointment, especially since it should have been a PR kind of day. My disappointment was both lessened and increased because it turns out that Paul D was having a blistering time, and knocked about 20 seconds off his personal best. I don’t know what he was doing for that week and a half he wasn’t coming to team events, but whatever it was it sure worked for him. So I guess I’m going to have to improve a lot before I can start thinking of him as a rival again.

Originally posted at Rants and Revelations

I realize you're going to turn it off less than 10 seconds in, BUT IT GETS WORSE. The fucking customers add in the fucking University of Alabama's "ROLL TIDE ROLL" into the chorus.

Shudder.

---

To cleanse yourself from that horrendousness, here's an odd mashup of "Sweet Home Alabama" that works very very well (but adding the lyric "I'm fuckin' lesbian twins now" makes any song better, obviously):

We just got a voice mail welcoming us to a new service at Frontier. The call came from 570-631-4560, and the message said to call 888-791-9198. Obviously I was suspicious because we didn’t have any new service, and so I checked on-line and none of those numbers agree with anything that Frontier normally uses. I called Frontier’s advertised customer support number, and sure enough there was no change on our account and nothing to welcome us to. So obviously the point of the scam was to get you to reveal details of your phone account to some nefarious third party, but I wonder why?

I don’t have to ask if people are stupid enough to call somebody they think is the phone company, and not get suspicious when they don’t know your name and address based on your phone number, because there is ample evidence of just how stupid people are all over the internet.

If you get a call from these scammers and you’re smart enough to not call them back without first googling it, I’m hoping that by posting it here somebody will find this warning. Good luck.

Originally posted at Rants and Revelations

The guy next to me on the bus this morning was reading a boring programming text, and my only curiosity revolved around wondering why, if you are going to use a bright yellow highlighter, you would choose to highlight every single sentence of the text rather than just making a mental note that this is important text, pay attention!  But I soon lost myself in Beckett and forgot about my seatmate.

This afternoon on the way home I sat beside a brown gentleman who was reading a book called The Complete Idiot's Guide to English Grammar and Usage.  It appeared to me that he might be Middle Eastern or from the sub-continent, somewhere such as that, and he obviously desired to improve his English, which one wishes more native speakers would emulate.  In any case, I did not wish to appear to be reading over his shoulder so I just darted my eyes toward the page occasionally and picked up the odd sentence here and there, sentences that were clearly designed to show off some feature of the English language that the authors thought a reader could use.  And then my eye happened upon this sentence: "The milk of a camel does not curdle."

Well!  In the first place, I thought this was quite funny because let's face it, "curdle" is just a funny word in and of itself.  Next, I thought that the authors were being very politically correct since it was likely that the average reader of the book would be slightly more at home around camels in general than the average native English-speaker.  Maybe.  But then I thought "HOLY SHIT! Is this true?"  First, I wondered if it was one of those "duck's quack does not echo" factoids but after giving it some thought and searching my brain for any scrap of evidence for camel cheese I concluded it must be true.

What are the implications of this stunning fact?  And I'd appreciate it if smarty pantses named Ian or Matilda could keep it down for the rest of us and not  act like show-offs at this point. First, what magical property is it that prevents camel's milk from curdling?  Is it a lactose or lactase thing?  If so, might this be of benefit to humanity, because maybe you could inject some of the camel milk juju into other milk and make it more potable for the milk-challenged?  Then again, when I think about camels I don't think of a big swinging bag like a cow has.  Perhaps the poor babies just get a few sips and then they have to learn to store it in the hump, I don't know.  Finally, I really began to think abouit the implications of an entire culture, a desert, nomad culture, that has had to subsist on a cuisine entirely devoid of cheese.  I can imagine that this might make people pretty damn cranky, which would explain a lot, I won't go into more detail lest I appear intolerant.  But you know who you are.

So --- public transportation!  Never a dull moment.

http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/Reference/?view=usa&ci=9780199208999

...and that people used to watch CNN.

http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/offbeat/2009/07/15/moos.obama.mom.jeans.cnn

What the fuck is wrong with that company? How much time did it spend on that? Seriously. It cannot be saved, kill it with fire now.

Who knew, when I inherited the curiosity after Madeleine's passing, that Beckett would turn out to be so damn funny?  I read that whole Molloy trilogy and milk was coming out my nose.  Well, not ordinary milk but more like tear-milk.  Now I'm reading How It Is and it is doing a number on my mind because it seems to be about being born and dying and the evolution of the species.  The first 20 pages, anyway.  So it makes me think very much about my father curled up senseless in his bed (in the mud) and it also makes me think about the lack of flocking, and the lack of togetherness.  And being born.  But not about giving birth.  One thing I notice about Sam, he's very much a guy.  Thank god there isn't a female Beckett or I would just split open.

So First Daughter calls me an hour or so ago to report that on her way back from dinner with the Cussin Cook she found a wallet, full of money and credit cards.  The CC needless to say advised her to return it PDQ as did I.  Because she is geographically challenged she intended to mail it, but when she told me the address I realized it was reasonably in the 'hood so I said, you sit tight and I'll come get you and we'll deliver it, because it this poor guy has to wait for the mail he will have gone to all the trouble of canceling his cards and worrying about ID theft and so on.   So I jump in the car and we find the address, which turns out to be literally ONE block away from Obama's house!  She rings the bell, and the intercome guy says "yes?" and she says "I have your wallet" and at this point we predicted the advent of loud hoofbeats running downstairs which is exactly what happened.  He gave her a big bear hug, wanted to give her ALL the money in the wallet -- she settled for a goodly portion but you could tell it was well worth it due to avoiding the aforementioned hassle of cancellation and worry.  I passed on the hug (though the guy was cute, but married.....) on the grounds that I was merely the driver.  But we both emphasized the moral of the story, and I've actually experienced this as both a recipient and a donor, and I don't want you guys to forget it: WHAT GOES AROUND, COMES AROUND!  That's as good as any Golden Rule in my book.

I forgot to post this up here: The Eye of... well, drugged-out-ness. Done in pastel on red paper. Love colored paper :D

And I FINALLY FINISHED THE FELLOWSHIP. All of my comments are noted in the link, but in short:

*I found myself greatly disliking hobbits.
*Frodo has garnered my deep hate.
*I can't draw chain mail to save my life.
*I really liked Boromir's picture.
*Aragorn is still hawt. Not just hot, but hawt.
*Gandalf was surprisingly easy. Gimli took forever, but wasn't very challenging.
*Merry's photo ref made him look incredibly odd.
*Legolas' lack of looking-like-Orli is made up by the fact that he looks awesome.


On a completely and utterly unrelated note, my Mom and Dad are Made of Awesome. More awesome than you :o :D

I love life. Heart it, even. *nod* Cheerio people! Less than two weeks to the Con!

Been calling her "Baby Girl" as her finders did, it works. Not sure how well that will when she's grown.

I thought Ashley was The Name before I got her, but it just doesn't work once I saw her. The only name that I haven't yet rejected is "Eli" (pronounced "Ellie") after the girl ("I'm not a girl, Oskar...") vampire in Let the Right One In (and that totally works for Maggie's current feelings, and her fierce predator instincts for those who've managed to sit through the whole films of her now documented violence) but I don't think I want to carry the vampire theme forward forever. Good memories, though.

She'll probably just end up being "Baby". Don't know why I have a naming block going on...

“It could be worse – it could be raining”
– Marty Feldman, Young Frankenstein

One of my top goals this year was to finish a 10 mile kayak race, and today I did it. The Armond Bassett race takes place here in town at the Genesee Waterways Center, a place I’ve paddled a lot in the last year. Maybe I’m not being fair to the organizers, but in some ways the AB seems like a canoe race that reluctantly allows kayaks to participate. I can’t really explain why I feel that way, but I do. Maybe it’s because on the second day (tomorrow), they have canoe races that *don’t* allow kayaks to participate.

Read the rest of this entry »

Originally posted at Rants and Revelations

http://www.factoryofinfinitebliss.com/?p=1027

or, It’s a Bad Day to Be a Royals Fan.

Betancourt is terrible, has been terrible for years, and without a brain transplant and months of Nutrisystem, is going to continue to be terrible. One of the worst regulars in baseball, if not the absolute worst. And the M’s fleeced KC for their best pitching prospect, and a lefty reliever prospect. There is zero wrong with this deal.

It’s getting easier to be an M’s fan again. The wounds from the Bavasi era are starting to heal.

http://www.factoryofinfinitebliss.com/?p=1027

or, It’s a Bad Day to Be a Royals Fan.

Betancourt is terrible, has been terrible for years, and without a brain transplant and months of Nutrisystem, is going to continue to be terrible. One of the worst regulars in baseball, if not the absolute worst. And the M’s fleeced KC for their best pitching prospect, and a lefty reliever prospect. There is zero wrong with this deal.

It’s getting easier to be an M’s fan again. The wounds from the Bavasi era are starting to heal.

Good News:

The schedule is up! I'll be looking at it and talking with my friend about it tonight.
Edit: Only Thursday is up right now. The rest will likely come this weekend. San Diego people, expect messages from me around Monday.

Bad News:

The TORn panel is at Thursday at 10:30. The house we're staying out won't be available Wed night. I'm going to have to leave home at 5 am to get there on time. *headdesk* Oh life, why oh why...

... anyone know someone who has a floor to offer for (likely) allinthecookies and I for one night within a 20 mi radius of the convention center? XD

http://www.factoryofinfinitebliss.com/?p=1026

An Alaskan perspective on why she quit. Essentially, she quit because she’s an incompetent, narcissistic weasel.

We already knew that, but it’s nice to read an Alaskan account, with details.

http://www.factoryofinfinitebliss.com/?p=1026

An Alaskan perspective on why she quit. Essentially, she quit because she’s an incompetent, narcissistic weasel.

We already knew that, but it’s nice to read an Alaskan account, with details.