Vacation Time!

Rooty the Dog and I are leaving later today for the beach, actually for several beaches, and a few bridges. I decided our destination this year had to be within two days drive, there had to be sandy beaches with crystal clear water, and locally grown watermellon.

Since someone besides David is housesitting, there will be no new posts until we return in August.

Are you color blind?

Click here or on the image above to test for Red-Green color blindness. Remember, colors vary from monitor to monitor.

Click here for an interesting reverse-color-blind test.

I'll explain later today (Friday)

The fire truck blocking my driveway was the least weird thing that happened on Thursday!

(There was no fire. The fireman were at another house, they just parked in front of my driveway. The engine was running -- I so wanted to take it for a spin!)

Could you become a citizen?

MSN has some of the questions asked on the citizenship test given by the Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services (BCIS), formerly the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). There are other sites that also offer online citizenship questions but all are very similar.

Can you pass the U.S. Citizenship Exam?

Thinking of fleeing to Canada to avoid the Draft or those ex-wives? Try the Canadian Citizenship Exam. (Click on "Take our Canadian Quiz.")

This should kill a few hours at work

Follow the link to find out how many points your name would be worth in Scrabble (ignoring the fact that proper names are not allowed in the game). My actual name is a 27!

Pholph's Scrabble Generator My Scrabble© Score is: 15. What is your score? Get it here.

The Generator is based on the official point value of each letter in the game:

What to order to drink if your date is a mermaid...

...from the menu at Sonic!

A dog is running for governor of Alaska!

Altogether not a bad idea!

If Rooty were governor:
Tummy-scratching would replace lobbying.
Chipmunk and squirrel would be served in public school cafeterias.
Vetoes would be replaced by a bite-in-the-ass.

We need a new word...

...to describe guys
who jog or run
on the shoulder of the roadway
facing traffic
with their shirts off
at rush hour
not more that 20 feet from a parallel hike & bike trail!

My thought is that we use a portmanteau -- a word combines part of one or both of two original words to form a new word -- for example, guesstimate ( guess + estimate).

Here are my candidate words:

exhibitionist
show-off
hotdog
peacock

ps. If he's wearing speedos, you're allowed to hit him with your car in three states.*

*I realize the sentence is grammatically incorrect, but I kind of like the incorrect meaning!

I always had trouble just coloring inside the lines...

I know it looks as if the blue triangles are painted on top of the photo above, but they're not. Artist Felice Varini paints lines and circles on things that, only when viewed from a specific point, produce images that appear to float in space. Check out the two photos below -- the one on the left shows how the walls are painted, the one on the right shows the effect when viewed from that one magic point. Some additonal examples follow. It's just hard to believe!

We need to find the guy...

...who invented the universal combination gutter and curb!!!!

And beat him senseless!!!

Or, make him drive back and forth across those axle-breaking abominations for the rest of his cursed natural life!!

The gutter is the channel at the edge of a street or road that carries off rain water. The curb keeps the adjoining property higher than the roadway, helping to keep water out of yards and off sidewalks. Traditional perpendicular curbs also helped to protect pedestrians from traffic since tires will tend to following along a curb rather than climb it (that's why concrete barriers on freeways have a curb-like perpendicular area at roadway level).

Enter some fool who decided that we could have a universal gutter-curb combination that did not require special cutouts for driveways -- they could just build great lengths of these inverted speed bumps and people could add driveways wherever they wanted.

Nice plan.

It don't work!

Have you ever gone across one of these things and not have it felt like the wheels were going to fall off of your car?

In the picture above, you can see that the home owner on the right has filled the damn thing with asphalt. I've seen concrete. I've seen boards. What I want to see in that trough is some inventor's butt!!!