Author: John Winkelman
Tiny
And I Think It’s Gonna Be a Long Long Time
What do you get when you bring together the following people: A grunge bassist; a grunge drummer; a soul/jazz singer; a Christian-rock guitarist; an electric violinist with anger-control issues; an indie-rock percussionist; and an ex-factory worker with a theremin?
An amazing version of Rocket Man . (linked .mp3)
And a great story , too. (linked RealAudio file)
Birds of Prey
Photos taken at the Silver Leaf Renaissance Faire. Birds provided by Accipiter Enterprises (website is kind of half-broken at the moment). If you have never been close to birds like this, you are missing out on a truly beautiful, humbling experience.
The Man, Showing His Love
President Bush will be visiting my humble city today. He will be speaking this afternoon at the Ford Fieldhouse of Grand Rapids Community College.
In order to keep those who Love him at an adoring distance, the local constabulary will be shutting down a fairly large chunk of the center of downtown Grand Rapids. After all, we wouldn’t want his adoring fans to return the Love which Bush has shown us for the past three and a half years.
What I want to know is, if everyone Loves Bush so much, why shut down the freeway while his motorcade is traveling from the airport to the center of town. Wouldn’t it have been much easier for him to just catch a helicopter in? Or is Bush trying to show us Midwestern rural folk how much Love he has for us by parading around town in a Love-proof limousine surrounded by secret service agents?
I think now would be a good time to take a quick vacation out to the lake. After all, downtown would be an overly stimulating place to be if one of our friends from overseas decides to drop in and spread some Love around.
In case that happens – or if this post is misinterpreted to be a slam on Bush for being an arrogant, useless idiot (or something else equally silly) and I am arrested for it – well, it’s been good talking at you.
Wow. So much Love in the air. Duck and cover.
I Am Easily Distracted
I was going to write some stuff but instead I spent all my free time reading Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About . You should read this, too.
Are You Looking’ At Me?
Anybody Want a House?
Current Project
Currently filling in my free time working on version 3 of the Flash photo album. This one will be highly user modifiable; “skinnable”, if you prefer, and will hopefully be ready to launch within the next couple of weeks.
Of course this raises the questions… If I come up with something which is both useful and easy to use, should I try selling or licencing it? Or should I release it into the wilds of the Public Domain?
Guess the answer to that depends on how attached I feel to my soul at that moment…
Road Commission Blues
One day at the job was pretty much like any other: Show up, wake up, look at the map, prep the truck, head out, get the counters from the day before, come back, reset the counters, go to lunch, set out the counters, come in, go home.
The truck was kind of cool. Huge, in the way only a mid-70s Suburban could be. Orange like a traffic cone. Indestructible. Ugly. Perfect.
Our first day out we got stuck on a gravel road when we turned on the on the job
light, and left it on through lunch and drained the battery dry.
Once we spent the day doing truck maintenance and discovered that we didn’t know where the oil dipstick was. There were several dipsticks, and they all came up covered with the same brown-ish fluid. It wasn’t until a week later that we figured out that the one dip-stick we had been looking at, which said the truck was all full-up with oil, was actually the power steering fluid dipstick, which was telling us that the power steering fluid was turning into taffy. When we actually found the oil dipstick it was dry as a bone, and probably had been for the entire summer. The truck was running just fine.
Then there was the day I got stuck in the ditch.
After the first couple of weeks on the job Phil and I realized that there was no way we could fill up a 40 hour week with the work we were given, so we began to take long lunches. These would usually start around 11:30, and run until 2 or so. We had no cell-phones, no CB radio, no way of contacting Road Commission Central without actually driving back. And they had no way of tracking our whereabouts.
In 1990 Jackson County was full of small parks, as often or not on the shore of a small lake which might be surrounded by small houses and specked with large people in tiny bathing suits. Over the course of the summer we found all of them. It didn’t matter where we were at the start of the day. Come 11:00 the map would come out and we would debate the plusses and minuses of driving all the way across the county to find beautiful women in bikinis, or a place suitably up-wind of a farm, or the border of Ted Nugent’s property. Try as we might, we never saw one of the Nuge’s black panthers. He was probably lying about them.
More as time allows.