brykmantra.com

Well it’s about freaking time.

I did something on Tuesday night that I’ve been itching (figure of speech) to write about ever since, but I wanted to post video for full effect, and I’ve been having problems with the video (which I’ll go into later …)

Anyway, the video is now ready, so I’m ready to report:

I infiltrated the local Democrat Caucus.

I’m surprised I didn’t do this (or something similar) years ago, but the fact remains that I did it, and got some interesting video. This is some local Dem honcho or other, giving a pep talk to the faithful, because everyone was having to wait three hours for the stragglers and procrastinators to finish voting before the actual caucus to begin (and the Democrats sure do seem to have a lot of them!). Let’s listen in:

There’s a surprising lack of Republican bashing, although he does take a swipe at McCain’s temper.

Anyway, I’ll write more in the next few days. In the meanwhile, it’ll be interesting to see if I get any hits on YouTube …

We had snow yesterday, for the second time in a week, and I don’t think we had any snow at all last winter.

And unlike a few days ago, there was actually a substantial amount of snow this time, with people making snowmen and everything. I sent this picture in to a local news station, but so did another 2000 people, so I have no chance in finding mine in their 17 galleries.

But anyway, I’m just posting to say that I’ve really been trying to post something since Tuesday, but my video editing program keeps choking on the final 1% (I’ll nickname it my Tony Romo program), so that will have to wait …

But trust me, it was quite an adventure, at least for boring old me …

Let’s see if we can make this quick:

It’s snowing! And it’s the first and probably the last time this winter, but it snowed quite a bit, already 3 inches accumulation on our cars at 9:00. This is on top of the fact that it was 80F here on Saturday, and pretty warm yesterday too.

And yes, I probably should have posted this a couple of days ago … but I did actually finish the RPM Challenge! And since I actually finished, on time, and my finished album isn’t a total humiliation, I’ll gladly give credit (as opposed to blame) to Yay Kim, who told me about the challenge and encouraged me to enter.

Of course, I also need to thank my wife, who told me I really needed to do the challenge, and was patient through all the time I spent doing music. She understands creative urges like that.

Anyway, I’ll give you a link soon to listen to my stuff, but until then, listen to somebody else’s stuff, namely that of Another Cultural Landslide (ACL), one of my favorite artists from the challenge, in an instrumental track cryptically entitled Fred and Ethel Go Bowling.

So why hadn’t I posted until now? Because I was at the Irish Festival yesterday, duh, and that brings me to a shout-out that I promised Emily from Luton, England. Emily works in one of the clothing shops during the festival. I bought a shirt from her last year, and we talked about the TV show that she & my wife like (“Keeping Up Appearances”), so this year I decided to snap a picture and make her a part of my festival commemorations.

You can see more of my festival pictures (just the first 100 that I’ve uploaded so far) by clicking here. (That picture yesterday was one of them, the most amazingly healthy bit of festival food I’ve ever heard of, a fruit salad served in a hollowed-out half-pineapple! And it was great!)

More pictures forthcoming.

And speaking of this month’s Irish celebrations, our Flickr friend Miss Sarie rode in the Saint Patrick’s Parade and fun dog show in Old Town Alexandria, Virginia (they have it early to beat the rush, apparently). The first year she went, she won the coveted “Best Irish Costume”, and this year she got her picture in the paper. Click on the picture to see more!

And now for something completely different: One of the commercials in the Snickers “Feast” series.

I didn’t really care for them at first, since the whole concept seemed kind of pointless, but for some odd reason I get a kick out of this one that they’re showing these days:

You can just never tell what’s going to make me laugh …

It was almost 80 freaking degrees today!

Okay, okay, that’s not the announcement. But it was unseasonably warm for a February 3 (thus the word “unseasonably”), so I had to point that out now.

Seriously, it was warm. I went on my lung-walk without having to wait for it to warm up first, and afterward I got out in the back yard, put on a Cherish the Ladies CD, and trimmed the rose bushes for probably the first time since before my surgery (2 years ago next month!).

But I digress once again.

Here’s the major point here:

Even though it was probably inevitable, it feels like an announcement is in order:

I’ve decided to do the RPM Challenge that I mentioned a couple of weeks ago.

And after three days of noodling around on my Cakewalk software, I have come to an inescapable conclusion:

I am so over my head.

What have I gotten myself into??

I blame you, Yay-Kim! You got me into this!

No, but seriously: Everything I’ve ever accomplished seemed hopeless at one point or another: My karate test, my first time onstage doing comedy, my A+ Certification — Those things all looked totally out of reach, after I committed to them, but I pulled them all off.

How?

By panicking like an idiot.

Seriously. Panicking like an idiot is highly underrated.

I’ll just learn the program better, and study a little music theory, and practice writing tons of music of which I’ll only use ten percent, and when it’s all over, I feel confident that I will have risen to acceptable mediocrity, with minimal worldwide humiliation.

Let’s hope.

I was updating my resume last night and trying to get up to date information on the credit union I worked at in Lubbock, but there was nothing about it on the Internet, so I emailed another credit union whose location was near a branch office I knew about.

It turns out that the one I emailed is the one I worked for, after many moves and mergers and name changes. In fact, the Executive Vice President started out as a receptionist when I was working there!

So here’s my shout-out to Kristi! I’ll try to find some embarassing Christmas party pictures and post them here!

I was checking out some old posts today from my site logs, and ran across a reference I made a couple of years ago to a slideshow making site called Slide.com, and I realized I had never done anything with it.

I decided that I can use this thing to make effortless T-shirt slideshows for my sidebar, but first I’ll test it on something I’ve already got ready: The Plainview Cattle Drive photos.

Pretty cool, huh? Yes, I can think of lots of uses for this …

Couple of different things:

The Spook tells me that country singer Jake Kellen is backing Ron Paul for President, and has recorded a song (based on one of his existing songs) about how Congressman Paul is going to win in a landslide.

Eventually, it is assumed.

You can check out the song on the Ron Paul 2008 MySpace page.

The reason I mention this is because it gives me a chance to mention that I went to high school with Kellen’s mom, Debbie (who occasionally leaves comments here), and his uncle, Guy, who is also his producer and possibly his management Svengali. Also, it was my best bud from college that bankrolled Kellen’s first album, and it says so in the liner notes.

Seriously, this is the closest brush with fame I’ve ever had. We can’t all have a boss who ran for governor, you know …

Next: My wife likes Steve Zahn and what’s not to like?), who co-starred in the miniseries “Comanche Moon” this week. That gives me an opportunity to mention Zahn’s new movie, Strange Wilderness.

The reason I bring it up is because it gives me opportunity to show this part of the movies trailer — the part that had me cackling out loud:

Okay, okay, so it’s an acquired taste. Anyway, here’s the whole trailer, if you insist:

And finally, via Attack of the Show: Rubber band machine gun!

Yes, my 5th Blogiversary bullet point is working well, so let’s continue pounding it into the ground with this miscellaneous stuff:

Well, Winter’s back, or what passes for Winter in Texas. It had been around 80F for the past three days, but now the temperatures are more seasonal. While it was nice to putter around in the garage — We actually cleared out a couple of paths! We took some old junk to the charity resale shop! — it’s nice for the night air to have a nice little bite to it again, since for most of the year it’s way too warm here. Let’s enjoy the cold while we can.

The Wife did her part by making her special tortilla soup recipte tonight.

Speaking of winter: Even though it was warm, I started geting a hankering for my “Classis Rock Winter Mix” CD, that I’ve been rocking since the Winter of 88-89. The exact song lineup has changed slightly over the years — due in part to what I’ve got available on MP3, as opposed to what I had available then on vinyl — but there are a few unwavering pillars, like Led Zeppelin’s “California” and “Battle of Evermore”, Leo Kottke’s “Bean Time”, Melanie’s “Ring the Living Bell”, ELP’s “From the Beginning”, Steve Miller’s “The Window” and “Wild Mountain Honey”, and of course “Bare Trees” by near-original-lineup Fleetwood Mac.

I hadn’t listened to it as much the past couple of winters, but for the most part the mix has been a huge factor in helping me recover from the post-holiday blahs of the past 19 years.

The problem this year was that over half the songs in the directory where I keep these MP3′s had fallen victim to the Great MP3 Drive Corruption of 2006, and I couldn’t find any of the CD copies of the mix.

Except this weekend I found it in the above-mentioned garage, so everything’s cool now.

Speaking of cool music: I’ve been listening to some older CD’s lately, like “Star” by Belly. You might (or not) remember their (very) minor 1992 (or so) hit, “Feed the Tree”: Here they are performing it on Letterman:

Hey, remember when bands used to do “music videos”? Good times! Anyway, here’s theirs for this:

The whole album is really good, especially for late nights: It’s jangly flow-of-consciousness quirky chick rock, the perfect soundtrack to after-midnight blogging with the headphones on.

And for something totally different: Today was the day of the New Hampshire primaries. And going back to something I said last week, a lesser man myself might say that this was the day that a bunch of sap-witted lobster-jockeys get to dictate which candidates the rest of the country doesn’t get to vote for when our turn rolls around.

But I certainly wouldn’t say it, in part because I happen to like who the lobster-jockeys chose to put in first place, at least on the Republican side.

On the Democrat side: Ever wonder why the Democrats have had such a hard time holding on to the Oval Office in the past 40 years? Maybe it’s because they’re horrible judges of the American public — specifically, in this case they haven’t realized that the only one of their current candidates who could beat the Republicans — pretty much ANY Republicans — in the general election is John Edwards.

Seriously. Nominate anybody else, and they’ve got a tsetse fly’s snowball in Hitler Hell chance.

The only other person who could win is Clinton — BILL Clinton, that is, and there’s that pesky matter of presidential term limits, so Edwards is it.

Need more proof that the Dems are clueless?

I used to think, without knowing much about his policy’s, that Bill Richardson might not be too bad, for a Democrat.

Then he goes and gets Martin Sheen’s endorsement.

And now I have to be embarassed that I could even think that he’s a passable candidate.

Plus, Richardson is mired even more hopelessly in the single digits.

It’s just like four years ago when Howard Dean was just so freaking proud to have Michael Moore’s endorsement …

… an endorsement which just happened to immediately precede the candidate’s massive flameout.

Gee, I wonder why that was.

Let’s see if we can make this quick, starting with re-using my 5th Blogiversary bullet:

I was trying to run a boot-from-disk Linux distro on the computer I keep in the garage, and got this on the screen.

“Ok, booding dhe kebnel.” I thought the computer might be drunk …

Actually, it’s probably a corrupted RAM chip. I haven’t used the thing since last spring, so anything can happen with the temperature extremes we have around here. I’m sure I’ve got some suitable spare chips around here somewhere — what kind of geek would I be if I didn’t? — but they weren’t in any of my garage stashes, so I blew it off for tonight.

Anyway: “Gelcome do dhe KNO@@IH life Lineh-on-CD!” Click here for an easier-to-read view.

The reason I was trying to use the outside computer is that it was unseasonably warm today, probably close to 80F, and at least 20 degrees higher than the high yesterday. I finished raking the leaves in the back yard as my exercise (since my tendonitis was killing me from the fitness center treadmill yesterday). After I was done, it was still so nice out that I decided to sort out some of our (my wife’s) endless boxes of Christmas stuff in the garage so we could actually WALK out there, what a concept.

And by the time I was finished with that, the ABC News/Facebook debate was in full swing on TV and Thistle and Shamrock was starting on NPR, and since it was still a nice night and all that was still not enough stimulation (not that I have raging ADD or anything), I decided to boot up my “live” Knoppix games disk, since unlike some other distros I’ve got (like Ubuntu) it would work well on the 256 megs of RAM on the garage PC.

But alas, it was not to be.

Molly & Bristol “helped” me rake the leaves, and I got to show them off when a guy down the alley brought down his little girl who had begged him to take her down to see the two barking dogs. As a bonus, I also got some footage of Bristol bouncing like he’s spring-loaded as they were walking toward the yard, and it might be enough to make it worth editing a little and posting to YouTube. That new little Olympus of ours can do amazing video, as long as there’s enough light.

About 10 tonight we heard a police siren give a couple of blasts, like somebody was being pulled over, and it sounded very close. Then Molly started barking at the front door so I thought I’d check it out.

There was a fire truck, all its lights flashing, in the middle of the street in front of our house, an ambulance in front of it, and cop cars both in front of and behind those. Cars on both sides were forced to turn around and go back down the street from when they came.

It turns out that all the action was focused on the house to the east of ours, the family from Mexico. We never did figure out what was going on, but I’m going to ask around on our community bulletin board, because you just know there’s always got to be a Nosey Nellie monitoring the police scanner to be up on all the juicy goings-on.

Don’t you just love the Internet.

And finally some sad news today: I’m always mentioning the World’s Greatest Dentist, Dr. Mary; today her mother-in-law passed away. My wife was taking the news hard since her dad and Dr. Mary’s husband’s dad were friends from way back, and the families new each other well.

Sorry to end the day on a bummer note, people, but sometimes that happens.

It worked out so well on the previous two nights, so let’s continue celebrating my Five-Year Blogiversary by posting more random chatter:

Tomorrow is the day of the Iowa Caucuses. Someone who is not as civilized, polite or considerate as myself might say that tomorrow is the day that a bunch of bucktoothed cornshuckers tell the rest of the country who they can’t vote for.

But I wouldn’t say that, because I’m too nice.

Seriously though, you know that I love every creature on God’s green planet, and I have nothing against Iowa. But let’s face it: Every election year, after Iowa and New Hampshire get through voting, half of the candidates of both parties are dropping out before the most populous states like California and New York — and yes, Texas — get a chance to have a say in the matter.

Not that I would probably like the candidates that would be hand-picked by the Big Apple and Wackyfornia; and the candidate I was rooting for in 2000 actually won in New Hampshire.

But it’s the prinicple of the thing: People in 48 of the states have to watch their favorites get plucked out of the race like feathers off a dead chicken, and these limited choices are dictated by these two tiny states (population-wise, anyway) that aren’t representative of America (not that any states are a microcosm of the whole nation).

And I think that at least one of my blogging friends might agree with me, since her candidate has been about 2% in Iowa.

Anyway, I’ll have more to say when all this is over.

The late night talk shows are back! The writer’s strike isn’t over, but the shows have either struck private deals, or figured out how to work without writers.

Letterman did fine during the strike of 1988, using what he called “Network Time Killers”, like a fountain that he would fill with various liquids, like milk or Scope mouthwash; he called in The Dancing Waters, until he discovered that someone else was using the name, and he changed it to The Prancing Fluids. Another NTK was the Del Rubio Triplets.

Anyway, I mention Letterman so that I can also say: He has a beard, a big gray bushy beard, and it looks awful. He looks like he just climbed off a package of old-timey cough drops.

Leno is trying to make it without writers, and it’s going about as well as Letterman beard looks. It’s a total amateur hour.

But at least he had the new Jibjab cartoon, and his first guest is Iowa front-runner Mike Huckabee, and my wife is actually interested in a candidate in the first time in all the years I’ve known her.

Anway, it’s good to have the talk shows back with new material; I know we can’t be the only ones with this end-of-the-day ritual …

One day this past weekend, when it was fairly warm, I raked half the leaves in our back yard; I would have raked more but I had completely filled our trash tote plus a 30-gallon paper leaf sack, so I figured that would be a good place to stop.

There was better weather to rake in a month ago, but all the leaves hadn’t fallen yet.

And finally: I’d like to welcome the newest addition to my blogroll, Kristie from Norway, a friend (or at least a reader) of RennyBA’s blog.

Welcome to the insanity, Kristie!