introducing the 44th President of the United States

ah, I finally found something that I'd be happy to see under The Tree this year: Kinky Friedman's DVD: A**hole from El Paso.

Knowing that becoming Texas governor is simply a formality* to becoming the next President of the United States, I know who I'll be supporting in the election ...

* how else do you explain the current Moron In Charge?

unrelated: please put down your potato peelers! The Sundry on Thursday blog is hereby updated.

Christmas Shopping By Phone

<telephone rings>

Gene Bob:       Hello?



elderly woman:  Do you have any women's nightgowns?



Gene Bob:       Uh, no.  

                I think you've reached a wrong number.  

                This is a house.



elderly woman:  Oh, I think I have.  Sorry.

<click>

... and then I checked my closets, just to make sure. Indeed, I have no women's nightgowns.

suddenly, I feel BrainBoost'ed

I was using a9 to find the average lifespan of an indoor cat, when I spotted an unfamiliar site in my sight: BrainBoost™ - Question Answering Search Engine.

Hmm .. the results were useful (albeit contradictory, for the indoor cat query) but I see potential here that was never quite realized by Ask Jeeves (probably the best-known interrogatory search engine). I shall bookmark BrainBoost for future use. Also (if you scroll down their home page) you just gotta be amused by their sample questions (such as "How much meat was on the Titanic?").

As a test, I asked the age-old question "How much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?" and didn't find an answer. Maybe some things are not meant to be known.

One cool thing about the BrainBoost site is the (refreshing!) recognition that there are other search engines, and provides a one-click way of seeing their competitor's results. For example, I asked about the distance between Dallas and Amarillo, and BrainBoost said "I don't know." It then suggested:

Compare our results, Try your question on other engines:
Alta Vista | Ask Jeeves | Excite | Google | HotBot | Lycos | MIT's START | Yahoo

Unrelated ...

I continue to be frustrated with the employment scene .. most potential employers are happy to post job openings on their web site, but make no attempt to even acknowledge receipt of a submitted resume. Sadly, networking isn't helping yet either, although Everybody Knows™ that's the best way to approach The Job Hunt. Yesterday, I heard of a lead - in Nogales ("walnuts") Arizona .. the social Mecca of the USA.

---

Everybody Knows is a trademark of Fox "News"; Rush Limbaugh Productions; [Ann Coulter's] Foul Mouth Enterprises; and the Christian Fascist Republican Party.

Texas captures all 5 of the Top 5 - woo hoo!

05:47 am Pollen.com says today's worst cities (for pollen) are ALL in Texas: Austin; Brownsville; Dallas; Laredo and San Antonio. Ah-choo!

11:27pm update: don't ask why, but I looked again, late in the day and found the Worst Cities list now says: Abilene; Amarillo; Brownsville; Laredo and San Antonio. That's odd, since the map appears to show that Dallas is still in the middle of an allergy storm.

I know, I know .. this is all so terribly riveting.

Aside: it's supposed to be 26F overnight here in Dallas. Brrr.

magical (!) time of the season

Sunday paper : 3 bags (plastic, not paper) on the lawn. weight: about 17 pounds. percentage of pages dedicated to Christmas ads = 73.6%. Fah la lah.

snail mail usually arrives by 11am. Today it's here just before 5pm. Fah la lah.

doorbell rings at 6:45pm. It's been dark since 5:15pm .. UPS has left a package. Fah la lah.

8:45pm .. decide to sneak in a quick phone call to my aunt. call ends 2:05 later. Fah la lah.

almost midnight .. finally tired. Beta the Wonder Dog wisely crashed hours ago. Fah la lah.

winter officially arrives next Tuesday. me, i'm in need of a serious snowstorm. in Dallas, they cancel school when 2 inches of snow have fallen, or the temperature is below 40F. well, maybe not .. but it seems that way.

Zzzzz .... oops. Forgot to Fah la lah.

who needs an umbrella when it ain't raining?

A few weeks ago, my homeowners insurance renewal arrived .. with a substantial premium increase over last year. What did I do to deserve that? Must be that hailstorm in April 2003 when my roof (and several thousand others in the Metroplex) were totalled. That event happened BTB [Before This Blog], so there aren't many details, but .. suffice it to say that I wouldn't have known my roof sustained that much damage if it hadn't been for Drew-Bob, a former co-worker who was in the roofing business at the time.

Drew-Bob offered to swing by my home and inspect for damage, and after a few minutes, he suggested I call my insurance company. They sent an adjuster, who concurred that my roof was a total loss (even though my naked eye, from the ground inspection showed no damage). After some competing bids were secured, Drew-Bob's company won the work.

I'd only been covered by that insurance company about 5 months when the storm happened, and they renewed me last December at about the same cost as before. But this December, they decided to go for the glory and offered a 50% increase. I like to be loyal to a company, but .. it was time to shop.

Surprise! Most quotes were about the same as my renewal. But, I'd already changed auto insurance earlier this year, and if I changed my homeowners insurance, I'd lose my umbrella insurance (no company wants to write only your umbrella) so it made sense to try to put all policies with the same company. There's probably a discount in there somewhere for doing that.

Bottom line: all policies will now be with my new carrier (USAA) on Tuesday. I had them when I lived "back east" but dropped them when I moved to Colorado in 1982 (I don't recall why). Being a prior USAA policyholder made me eligible to "come home again".

In doing so, I saved about 10% over GEICO's auto insurance, and increased the policy limits a bit (seldom a bad thing). I commented to the underwriter about why not everyone spends the extra money for an umbrella insurance contract, above what's provided by the base auto and homeowner's insurance. I guess most people just don't know, or are willing to accept the extra risk. Not me; a $1 Million umbrella is (relatively) cheap.

For extra credit, see the Texas Insurance Commissioner's Bulletin # B-0025-97 which is riveting stuff. Maybe they'll make it into a movie?

hunting the wild and unpredictable Müslix

I wandered across eHow.com - Clear Instructions on How To Do (just about) Everything when I was looking up Müslix today. Google's list of pages related to eHow include such forgettable URIs as SoYouWanna.com, Learn2.com, EveryRule.com and so forth.

When I searched for Müslix using a9 the first return was Texas A&M University! Indeed. I tried it again, and the link to Texas A&M vanished. Lesson learned: software rocks! {giggle}

It turns out that Mueslix (Müslix) is a Swedish word meaning "Trail Mix Cereal". Well, okay .. maybe that's not in the dictionary .. but it should be. I'm amused that Kellogg's markets the cereal in this country as Müeslix, apparently because most Americans don't know that ü = ue (hence Müeslix==Mueeslix !)