Random Scandal Sheet for Sunday 7/6/14

What southern Florida is talking about this week:

... an underwater flag unfurling here in the Keys.

Admittedly, I went looking for something suitable for the holiday weekend, which means I had to sort through all the news stories about the tragic fourth of July boating accident (right after the fireworks ... details are still being gathered) ... or the undercover cop shooting that was just a few blocks away in a restaurant parking lot (he intervened in a domestic dispute) ... or the upcoming governor's election (my vote is *really* going to count down here, is all I'm saying for now) ...

Eventually, I found an article that caught my eye about a retired US flag from Morris IL (a "suburb" of my former hometown of Chicago, in the sense that anything between Chicago and Milwaukee/St.Louis/Springfield is just a suburb of Chitown to anyone who's lived there) that once hung in the 9/11 Memorial Park *there* that was sent to the Keys *here* to be placed on the scuttled-five-years-ago Hoyt S Vandenberg (a former military ship "retired" to the ocean floor).

So there you go ... if you look hard enough, you can find a "good news" story hidden in the interwebs somewhere, befitting of the wrapping holiday weekend ...

THE FLAG UNFURLING:
http://www.nbcmiami.com/news/local/Divers-Unfurl-US-Flag-at-Shipwreck-Near-Keys-265899721.html

MORE COVERAGE OF THE FLAG UNFURLING:
http://www.naplesnews.com/news/2014/jul/05/divers-unfurl-us-flag-at-shipwreck-near-fla-keys/

THE FORMER HOME OF THE FLAG:
https://www.facebook.com/Morris911Memorial

Random Soapbox for Saturday 7/5/14

I don't mean to go off on a rant here, but ..

... I found the missing Malaysian airline last night (or, more accurately, early this morning) in the back woods of Louisiana.

It all started with this job at which I was interning and I was in town for a conference ... but my job was to make sure that there was enough food to eat.  Except that the host of the gathering for whom I interned didn't have anything because she was losing her house and was living in delusion, so all the ladies that were her friends went to the nearby deli and made a sandwich and brought it back to me so I could cut them up into smaller pieces and make the food "stretch" to cover all of the participants.

With that crisis averted, the conference continued until it ended abruptly because a colleague of mine had supplied the wrong numbers, due to a rounding error.  We headed to the airport to come home, but not before first running into a former colleague of mine (he with the fondness for all things Les Liaisons Dangereuses), who was inexplicably adorned with a little lord faunterloy pageboy haircut.  We glared at each other in passing, committed as ever to never again exchanging words, and I overheard him explain to his partner that I was in town for a work meeting.

Then, on the plane on the way home, my colleague with the reputation for faulty math was taken by terrorists when he went to use the washroom, and they mapped out an alternate flight path, as he casually explained to  me when he returned to his seat.  Our plane was suddenly close to the ground in the back woods of Louisiana, and on one of the turns, I saw the Malaysian airlines deep in the woods, where these same terrorists had taken it, all camouflaged with vines and such.  However, our descent was not going so smoothly, and I could tell we were in trouble.  First, there was some man walking out in the woods and so there was a witness, which the terrorists didn't want, as they hadn't had any witnesses the last time they did this trick.  That caused them to abort the landing at the last minute ... but then my colleague looked at me and said, "oh no, I made the same rounding error", which all happened in the seconds shortly before we crashed.

And what a spectacular crash it was, right out of a Michael Bay movie, dare I say even somehow in slow motion, tail over nose, with a breaking apart of the aircraft just a few rows in front of me so that I escaped the fireball that consumed the front part of the plane, catapulting my section into the main street of whatever town was nearby.  Since I was wearing my properly fastened seat belt, I just unbuckled and walked away from the accident.  I went looking for the terrorist pilots, but they were gone AND ... so was my faulty math colleague, which made me think that he was in on this all along ...

So how is this a rant?  I mean it's my own fault that I allow television to rot my brain ... and I'm genetically wired to be a little on the dramatic side ... and I'm completely comfortable letting my subconscious have a heyday when it comes to dealing with the villains in my life ... BUT ... I did not sign up for a world where the threat of terrorism is so pervasive that it winds its way into my dream life so casually as to be just another plot point.  And on the off chance that the collective subconscious of all those souls who probably perished in the actual Malaysian aircraft tragedy have reached out to me as a vessel to tell the world what really happened a la Whoopi from Ghost, well all I gots is a little blog and a Facebook following, the majority of whom probably abandoned this bit of randomness by the second paragraph, so please please pick somebody else.

And one final disclaimer ... I did NOT drink last night.  (It was the puppies' first Fourth, and they needed to be calmed and comforted amidst all the noise and confusion in the 'hood.).  But I may have watched a little RHONY and CNN before bed.

FOR THOSE OF YOU UNFAMILIAR WITH FAUNTERLOY:
http://thegenealogyofstyle.wordpress.com/2013/03/14/the-boy-who-kicked-out-a-shoe-model/

FOR THOSE OF YOU UNFAMILIAR WITH RHONY AND THE INTERNS:
http://www.bravotv.com/the-real-housewives-of-new-york-city/season-6/videos/a-day-in-the-life-of-sonja-morgan-s-interns

FOR THOSE OF YOU UNFAMILIAR WITH OTHER MALAYSIAN PLANE THEORIES:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/style-blog/wp/2014/03/18/these-are-all-the-internets-best-theories-on-malaysia-flight-370s-disappearance/

Random Flashback for Friday 7/4/14

Were I absolutely true to my concept on Fridays (telling my story one week at a time ... but twenty years in the past), I'd have a photo of Smokey Robinson singing somewhere near the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art before the fireworks ... or of a photo of Wendy W and Judy W who hosted the party that Fourth of July 1994 ... or Brigette C who lived nearby that year and who joined us for the main event (because doing the Fourth with Brigette was something I did *twice* back in the nineties).

But alas, I don't have any photos of that shindig ... so I'll kick off my Fridays *this* July (about July twenty years ago) with another series of mysterious murder quest photos from when we performed on the campus of Lebanon Valley College that summer twenty years ago.  This show was "Holly Hemlock and Mistletoe", and this picture was 80% of the cast who had gathered for the customary photo shoot beforehand.  After all, Christmas in July worked back then ... so it will work for today as well!

More to come from this production in the weeks ahead ... but as for today, a safe and happy Fourth of July (with or without Smokey Robinson) to you and yours from me and mine!

Random Thought for Thursday 7/3/14

At the risk of ruining my street cred/reputation for verbosity, today's random thought is simply ... no.

As in NO the recent viral video saying you could open a bottle of beer with a magnet and a quarter DOES NOT WORK.

I'll feel good about the fact that my first instinct was to try it instead of just believing it after I saw it on the interwebs.  But I do have to admit that I was slightly disappointed as everyone loves a good party trick.

Last thought ... how's about my stock expression for dubiousness?

THE AFOREMENTIONED VIRAL VIDEO LIE:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZxBz4fTe50

A SCIENTIFIC DEBUNKING OF THE BUNK:
http://skeptoid.com/blog/2014/02/15/open-a-beer-bottle-with-a-magnet-an-instant-internet-hit-thats-likely-fake/

ON THE OTHER HAND, THESE DO NOT APPEAR TO BE FAKE (TRY AT YOUR OWN RISK):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYW3pSCTuNs

Bonus Post: Fond Memory 25 (LHS Quadranscentennial Celebration Edition)

Fond Memory 25 

on this, the Quadranscentennial Celebration of 

my Lebanon High School Graduation:

According to my calendar, there are 100 days until my 25th high school reunion back home in Lebanon PA.  

And, because I do so love me a countdown, starting tonight, and every 4th day thereafter (because my public school education taught me that 100 divided by 25 is 4), I'll be counting down 25 fond memories from those years (at least at the beginning, in no particular order).

To kick it off, here are two different ID cards from my junior and senior year.  A close inspection illustrates the following facts:  

1.)  Even though they *are* two different years, my high school mistakenly put the same year for my junior and senior IDs (I mean, I did well in school, but not well enough to collapse both years into one).  

2.)  I went to the poor city school, as the ID cards are clearly in black and white (and this was in the late eighties, so color photos had been around for a long long time).  

3.)  It appears I discovered my middle initial between my junior and high school years (take a peek at the early versions of my signature).

I'm very much looking forward to the weekend of Oct 11-13 this year ... but I'm just as very much looking forward to the counting down to it!  See you for memory 24 on Sunday the 6th!

Random Wordplay for Wednesday 7/2/14

Fap.

Used in a sentence:  "To counteract the feeling of getting too old and unhip, I do a few things ... I watch MTV programs, I catch a show or two on the CW and I keep an ear out for new words entering into the lexicon such as FAP."

Here's the disclaimer ... if you don't know that word and if the mother in the movie Carrie is your type of gal (or, for you literary types, the book Carrie), then you should probably move on and not continue NOR look at the links below.

Otherwise, then link through with abandon knowing that you were forewarned.

From what I can tell, there's a certain poetry to the onomatopoeia justification behind anime determining that this word could be used in manga comics to intimate (verb) the intimate (adjective) act of the male taking matters into his own hands, to asphyxiate the capon, to "subject the surface of a thing or person (or a thing on a person, as it were) to pressure and friction, as in cleaning, smoothing, polishing, coating, massaging, or soothing"-one-out as we used to say (ish).

And, for those of you who stuck through to the happy ending, now we're all hipper than we were before we started this post.

A GIF IS ANOTHER YOUNG PEOPLE'S WORD:
http://guycodeblog.mtv.com/2012/03/06/fapping-gifs/

UM ... I'VE NEVER KNOWN IT TO BE "FEEDING BOLOGNA TO THE SMURFS":
http://www.dribbleglass.com/subpages/euphemisms.htm

WARNING ... THIS PAGE CONTAINS MATERIAL THAT MIGHT BE NSFW:
http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/fap

Random Tune for Tuesday 7/1/14

Ok ... it's time for something big.  No, not exploding boats (exactly).  But starting tonight, and over the course of the next 39 weeks, I'll be letting a certain twenty year old two cassette mixtape dictate the tunes heard on Tuesdays.

Why?  Well ... because it's my blog so I can do what I want.  Also because it's been nearly twenty years since I've heard some of these songs (although, don't worry, they're timeless).  And because I hinted to Jon M that this would happen when he invited me to the Pearl Jam concert last fall.

And especially because these three sets of thirteen songs were carefully chosen to commemorate a few months in college where a number of lives intersected to be forever changed (Kim H, Brad H, Jon M, Rich G, Suzanne W and a host of others in addition to me).  The location?  Lebanon Valley College in the Funkhouser East building, at the end of the hallway on the second floor closest to the stairs (it was featured in quite a few Friday Flashbacks on this blogat the end of last year) ... known affectionately as FE 213.

Without further ado, *this* is the first song of the first side of the first tape of the mixtape known as FE213 Anthology I:  Long Live Uniqueness.

MAYBE NOW THE IMAGE MAKES SENSE:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FUP9DnurODw