2008 January | Bill Roehl

Archive for January, 2008

Engrish Classic Lamp Concinnity!

Published January 27th, 2008 in Uncategorized | No Comments »

Classic Lamp, suit both refined and popular tastes

Kim and I headed up to Chris and Laura’s for an afternoon of bean bags, drinking, snacking, dinner, etc.

Soon after arriving Chris and I headed downstairs to play a game of bags and I noticed this gaudy, horrendous, bright, colorful and fascinating device sitting on a table in their basement running parallel to the indoor court. At first I tried to ignore the shimmering star lightning up the darkened basement court but on subsequent visits to the basement during the day, I couldn’t help but ask what this fantastic object was all about.

Chris let me know that their families have a White Elephant at Christmas and that this was one of the unbelievable items they “won”. Laura wanted to immediately swap it with someone else but Chris insisted that they bring it home to place on their mantle — the table adjacent to the bean bag court and next to their used 15″ CRT will have to do for now I suppose.

On one of our trips up and down the stairs, I noticed a strange blue box in their laundry room. Laura eventually brought this curiosity upstairs because, according to her, it was better than the device itself. I was pressed into service to attempt to read the box and decipher the content it contained. To my trained eyes this was what I believed to be a foreign language still spoken today known as Engrish!

I began to read the side of the box which contained the warnings. I was having a pretty difficult time translating what was on the box as it didn’t make much sense, the punctuation was off and more importantly, I was laughing so fucking hard that I couldn’t make it through without tears rolling down my cheeks (please note, this was most likely do to the numerous beers I had already imbibed!)

I, knowing my mobile camera would not do this beauty any justice, decided to hand copy the warnings for your reading pleasure. Please note that any punctuation, spelling or grammatical errors are intended (by me):

Warning:

Use the batteries wrong will cause the batteries broken or the pile out,And do damage to the people and property.

Do pay attention to the followings:

1.Do not install the batteries with the wrong polarity,and the supply terminals are not to be short-circuited.

2.only batteries of the same or equivalent type as recomended are to be used.

3.Do not mix old and new batteries.

4.Do not burn the batteries or put batteries. in a high tempereture circumstances.

5.Replace the exhausted batteries as soon as possible.

6.Do not recharge the batteries.

Now, as I said above, the device itself is just absolutely fantastic. It’s very much a beacon of ownage that needs to illuminate desks, mantles and/or dining room tables around the world. I personally would love to have it on my desk at work but I wasn’t permitted to take it with me — even after much drunken pleading and whining. I was especially drawn to this object because the box had told me that it suited both refined and popular tastes, something which I hold close and dear to my heart.

The construction, a plastic fake log cabin facade, along with a moving fish tank below a sudo-cuckoo clock was awesome. Instead of having the switch to turn off the fish tank in the back along with the controls for the clock, alarm and electrical cord (which only powered the fish tank and not the clock), they put it on the bottom of the front, in red, so that you wouldn’t miss it — well, if you weren’t mesmerized by the illusion of swimming, radioactive fish!

I really wanted to try the alarm but being that the electric cord only powered the fish tank and we didn’t have any batteries on hand, I couldn’t. It was quite the bummer for me there.

I look forward to a subsequent trip back to Chris and Laura’s to test out the alarm but I may have to do so soon. Laura is interested in bringing it into work to put on her desk to see if anyone notices… She’s bratty like that ;)

See all the pictures from our time with Chris and Laura (including shots of their excellent wild rice and chicken dinner) here (mobile).

Kashi Go Lean Truly Vanilla Hot Cereal/Oatmeal

Published January 26th, 2008 in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

We went shopping on Monday after I arrived home from my annual caching trip and I picked up the necessities for the next two weeks. I also picked up a few “not so necessary” items, one of which was a box of Kashi Go Lean Truly Vanilla oatmeal.

Now, as part of my daily eating routine I have a cup or so of cereal and lately I’ve been eating other versions of Kashi’s Go Lean dry line like Honey Almond Flax or Original Crunch. I don’t do well with most milk products so I eat half dry and half on top of my “Key Lime Pie” yogurt.

So today I figured would be a good day to eat a bowl of this stuff. I’ve never been a big oatmeal fan as I’ve always been partial to the comforting feelings I get eating Farina or Cream of Wheat instead but I figured this wouldn’t be much different than the other Kashi cereal I had been eating for months… You can’t just add boiling water to the mix because, as the bag warns, the whole grains will not cook. Instead you have to add 2/3 cup of water (I will use less next time as I like my hot cereals to be a near dry cement consistency — a holdover from mornings with my grandmother who preferred it that way herself) and put it in the microwave for 1.5 minutes. The problem with cooking oatmeal this way is that it almost boils over the top and you have to pay very close attention to it to make sure you don’t end up with shit all over the inside of your microwave.

Well, I followed the instructions and sat down to eat my “Truly Vanilla” hot cereal. Bite after bite reminded me that this was not your typical hot cereal loaded with sugar-like solutions, dried fruits and chemicals and instead it was supposed to be healthier. Well, I have been eating plenty of food items that are healthier and they all have some flavor — good or bad. This, true to it’s name, was “truly vanilla” and offered almost no identifiable taste. I really felt like I was eating hot, soft, wet, cardboard. Yuck.

Not one to be a quitter and knowing full well that your first experience with any Kashi product, save for the Honey Almond Flax, can be a bland one and that I should continue to eat it until it’s done. Who knows, maybe it will help me end up like the rest of Minnesota eaters — someone with no verifiable taste buds that enjoy eating at shitty restaurants that pride themselves on horrible service, awful food and then vehemently argue that they are a viable location to return to time and time again.

Or, then again, maybe not :)

Neilsen Media Research Families for TV Ratings

Published January 24th, 2008 in Uncategorized | No Comments »

A couple of weeks ago we got a letter in the mail which let us know that Neilsen Media Research would be giving us a call to participate as one of their Neilsen Families to determine their Neilsen Ratings. After they called us they let us know that we would be receiving a payment of $30 for our tireless service over the next week.

After a reminder postcard, a packet of information including our $30 (in cash strangely enough), and a “diary” for us to enter our TV watching habits appeared. Kim was in charge of everything and took care of setting up the booklet to reflect that we were satellite TiVo watchers.

The diary started on a Thursday, for whatever reason, and ran through yesterday. For DVR users you have to write what time a show originally aired and on which channel and then at what time you watched it. I wasn’t here over the weekend because I was geocaching in Des Moines and Omaha so Kim was the only one around between Friday and Monday night when I returned.

There were columns for each person in the household and you are to mark when each person is watching (or even listening to a show). I routinely talk about “passively watching” TV with Kim. I’m usually pounding away on the keyboard on some post, code or whatever and while I’m physically in front of the TV I’m rarely watching it. I guess Nielsen feels that TV affects you regardless of your active or inactive status.

Here was the breakdown for our week’s TV watching:

1/17

Three hours
Six shows
- Kim - 6
- Bill - 3 (actively watching 1)

1/18

Three hours and forty-five minutes
Four shows
- Kim - 4

1/19

Thirty minutes
One show
- Kim - 1

1/20

One hour
One show
- Kim - 1

1/21

No TV

1/22

Five hours and fifteen minutes
Five shows
- Kim - 5*
- Bill - 3* (actively watching 2)

* - One of the shows, the season premiere of Breaking Bad was miserably awful and we only watched 10 minutes of it.

1/23

Five hours and fifteen minutes
Five shows
- Kim - 5
- Bill - 4 (actively watching 2)

So, after 6 days Kim watched 18 hours and 45 minutes (3.13 hours/day) and I watched (passively included) 13 hours and 30 minutes (2.25 hours/day) of TV. That’s quite a bit more than I ever believed we watched and very close to the world-wide average of Industrialized Nations which watch about three hours of TV daily.

So while most people probably take the $30, happily record their watching habits, and return the “diary” to Neilsen for entry without ever thinking about how much their life is sucked into allowing the cable TV to wash over them, I will be doing what I can to drag myself away from the TV even more than I already thought I was and read and surf just a little more.

That’s healthy, right?

Book A Week: Interview with the Vampire

Published January 22nd, 2008 in Books | 6 Comments »

Last week’s book was The Catcher in the Rye which I finished this weekend during my trip through Iowa and Nebraska to cache in Des Moines and Omaha.

I mentioned before that while I could see how The Catcher in the Rye was a book that ended up on so many “banned books lists”, I couldn’t really understand why it was popular I read through the entire book thinking that it was nothing more than an attempt at vulgarity and had little worth outside of the historical perspective that it was so different than anything that was published at the time. The prominent parts at the end that repeated “fuck you” seemed there solely to say “fuck you” rather than some sort of emphasis or important statement. To me, the entire book is quite pointless and shouldn’t be read by anyone in this day and age.

I dug through the books we have looking for something to do for this week so that I could take it on the trip with me. I knew we’d be doing quite a bit of driving w/o interruption on the way home so I figured I’d be at least able to put a good dent in the book during the front end of the week. I wanted something that was easy to read and moved along quickly. Going through the books that Kim picked up at the used bookstore fairly recently, I came up with Interview with the Vampire. I, like many others, have already seen the movie (actually, I saw it in a packed theater on opening night and the only reason I remember that was because it was the first movie I was carded for and some random woman claimed she was our chaperone due to her disdain for the “stupidity” of carding people for an R-rated movie) and figured that I’d be able to move along with that knowledge without too much of a problem.

The book moves along just fine and the writing is quite visual for me which makes it an easier read. The only problem I have with it is the lack of chapter breaks or any real break in the text at all. The first “chapter” is on page 35 and the next is on page 95. That’s a lot of reading to do for me as I don’t like to break mid-page. When I do break mid-page and restart later, I find myself having to read back a page or so in order to restart my frame of thought. Oh well.

Thanks to Andy, and the Century College Common Book Project, I’ve already received next week’s book selection which happens to be one of the books that was under consideration for next year’s “Common Book”, A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishmael Beah which describes his journey from child soldier in Sierra Leone’s civil war to the years following his rescue by UNICEF. While the back cover quotes Pulitzer Prize winning author Steve Coll as saying that it’s a, “beautifully written book,” from what I understand it’s one that some English professors refuse to use during their lessons because of the Beah’s obvious limited English writing skill.

We’ll see how A Long Way Gone works out after I finish up Interview with the Vampire.

Geocaching Trip: MN, IA and NE: January 18th - 21st, 2008

Published January 19th, 2008 in Geocaching, Vacations | No Comments »

Somewhere in Rural Iowa

Chuck, Dave, Steve and I are currently on our annual Martin Luther King Day Jr Weekend caching trip. This year (the third year in a row) we’ve headed down through Des Moines and over to Omaha, NE for some fairly rigorous caching through sub-zero temps.

While temperatures at home were bottoming out in the -25F range, they were far more balmy here in IA and NE with the lows at -5F and highs just under +10F ;)

We have two more full days of caching and driving to do and we’ve already revisited a favorite of Dave and mine from 2005, Austin’s Steaks and Saloon where three of us enjoyed some amazing Omaha steak.

We’re hoping the predicted snow holds off and that the temps rise just a bit. I’m pretty tired of having to defrost my eyelashes to get my eyes to open and having to dry and warm up my socks under the floor heater in the truck between caches :)

See all the pictures from the trip so far here (camera).