Today's Date: 1911

For all you 1911 lovers on 1-9-11...

Oddity on my street

It's not uncommon for people to find early parking on my street for the 4th of July firework display. We're walking distance to the town's festival attractions and from the field where the pyroshow will take place at dusk.
What is uncommon, however, is the pattern of vehicles across the street.
Call me kooky, but how often does this happen anywhere but a dealership's lot?

Mkay.

You know how you're not supposed to park close to a fire hydrant because you might block access?
Today, I saw a hydrant at the edge of a Wendy's parking lot...
with TWO spaces marked off as places to park. Right in front of it.

On the other side of it, there was a stretch of about 50 feet or more of grassy ditch and then 70mph interstate.
Huh.
Couldn't figure that one out...

Whaddup, World??

Just a weird observation that I wish I could ask about...
Sadly, I'll never know;

This morning, within six minutes of each other, all these people in all these places hit my blog from an image search. (Click the pic for a bigger view)

The image was the blue sky with puffy white clouds from this post.
It's just odd. Stuff like this intrigues me.

What goes around, comes around.

This has been sitting on my desk for a little while now.
It's a dollar that I had in my pocket when I went to a gun show back in 2007.
I was talking to a vendor that I was buying some cleaning stuff from and we got to talking about how it's nice to get different opinions about brands before you buy and how great the internet is for that since you never see stuff on regular TV.
I mentioned RimfireCentral.com and the guy hadn't ever heard of it. He didn't think he'd remember the website and not having a card or any paper for me to write it down on, I wrote it on the top of one of the dollars I used to pay him.

A few months back, the husband unit was getting some ones out of his wallet for something and said, "Hey! Look at this!" and pulled that dollar out thinking someone else who frequents the site must have written it.
We were all surprised that it was the same dollar I had a couple years ago that I'd written the website on.

It's sort of a reminder to me now about how to treat people.
You never know who will cross your path again down the road and you never know what might come back to you.
Be careful what you send around because...what goes around, comes around.

Cool As An Igloo

One of the back roads we travel to reach civilization is home to a very cool house.
Literally. It's an igloo.
OK, it's not made of ice, but it's designed from that concept.
From a distance you wonder if your eyes deceive you at first.

Nope, it's sure round.
Are those solar panels on top?
Why, yes they are. And why not?

What's better than an igloo house?
Why, an igloo house with an attached igloo garage, of course.
Oh, and it also looks way neater in the snow. :D

I love "stupid criminals" stories

Especially when they're caught on tape.
Enjoy:

Welcome to 1983. Again.

Sometimes you just have to sit back and wonder, "Good gawd, WHY?"

Michael Jackson's iconic 1983 music video "Thriller" may become a stage musical. The theater producer Nederlander Organization officially announced Monday that it has acquired the rights to the video and plans to turn it into a Broadway show.
Rumors of the project first surfaced last fall on New York gossip pages. And because the Nederlander Organization controls Broadway in Chicago, such a project could have a pre-Broadway debut in Chicago.
"Could be," said James L. Nederlander, the coy lead producer, on Monday morning. "I'd like to."
To come to Chicago, after all, Nederlander would mostly have to do a deal just with himself. "We have a lot of disagreements," he said, "me, myself and I."
"Thriller," which has yet to acquire the rest of its creative team, will be at least a couple of years away. But Nederlander said that Jackson would be personally and fully involved in the creation of the show.

Don't get me wrong, I owned the album...in fact, a copy still sits in a closet in a catch-all room in my home. When the movie 13 Going on 30 came out, I dusted off the ol' Thriller moves to impress my kid, just like a lot of other dorky moms probably did.
But this? A Broadway musical? Why?
Why why why?

Oh...I know...

Double Take

Quite sometime back I uninstalled the site meter from this blog. Not too long ago (just after the whole Blogger/Site Meter incident that crashed pages everywhere), I put it back after the bugs were all worked out. Sometimes it’s just fun to see how far away people are reading from or what their searches might be.
One of the reasons I decided to ditch it for awhile is because someone in the Carolinas hit on my blog with a search term about getting a gun to deal with an abusive stalker ex-boyfriend. It bothered me for weeks. I wished there was a way to contact whoever it was and find out if they are OK. I decided that I couldn’t fix the world, but the world was making me lose sleep, so I uninstalled the meter.
Anyhow, that was over a year ago and since I’ve put it back, I sometimes forget to look anymore. I looked today and found a search that made me go “huh??”.
It was someone in Iran (Tehran) searching for information about Dan Cooper (the former CEO of Cooper Firearms).
It seemed so out of place. But kinda cool!

Side of a Bullet - - - Updated

~
Nope, not Nickleback's song...
The ACTUAL side of a bullet:
MiniMe was shooting at a plastic pop bottle full of water today and when we cleaned up our mess afterwards, this is what was in that bottle...coolio:



Edited to add RigRat's 100 yard shot recovered bullet (see comments).
Awesome.

New Link / Passing Link

I've had a lot of fun reading the installments at News Of The Weird (down there on the left under "Stuff that Amuses Me").
But like many things, it's run its course. A snippet from today's entry says;
"Effective tomorrow morning, you can read Yr Editor's daily column of news 'n' commentary at its new home, www.WeirdUniverse.net!"
I'll still leave NOTW up over there because you can still use the links on that page to subscribe to the Google Groups e-mail feeds of the weekly News of the Weird column.
I've put Weird Universe on the list down there.
Have fun in search of YOUR "weird"!

Rumble rumble rumble

Somewhere around O'Dark Early, the sound and vibration of trouble at the depot woke us. The longer the rumble and the more intense the vibration, we realized it wasn't train related.
It was an earthquake. Holy Moly.

Triple Vision

When I was about ten years old, my cousin Michelle and I were playing dress up in our grandma’s attic. We found stoles and strings of beads and hats with veils. And shoes…my word, the woman had shoes! In amongst the various articles of clothing, we’d find some other treasure. One was a cookbook that was a step by step guide to making fried chicken. When I say “step by step”, I mean the instructions started with how to kill it and pluck it.
We also found a walking stick that had the coolest swirling design carved in it. The “design” turned out to be the work of termites. My grandpa had found that perfectly straight stick with the termites long since gone, and thought it would be a neat conversation piece.
The object that held my attention for the rest of that musty afternoon in the attic was a gadget I found.
It was a stereoscope sitting on a box of post cards.

I was so spellbound by that device! It was my first introduction to 3D and I was hooked.
Several years ago, someone used the idea of lining up stereoscopic digital pictures and voila… Magic Eye© posters, books and calendars were born. I’ve always been a sucker for those.
JL is one of those people who’s never been able to “see” them, and I’ll admit it’s hard at first until you train your brain to *un-focus your eyes. That’s the key.
Today’s blog is a “how to” for those of you who can’t seem to see the magic picture inside all the squiggles and dots.
We’ll start with the original stereoscope type postcard picture.

This is typical of the type of vacation postcards people would send to friends when traveling.
It consists of two identical pictures (somewhat skewed from left/right perspectives). The objective is to look at this picture and slightly cross your eyes so that you see three.
Once you’ve done that, focus on the picture that your eyes have created – the one in the middle. All of the sudden, it will have depth and crisp clarity that the original two didn’t have.
That is the same method you use when looking at a Magic Eye© photos. Practice a few times with a stereoscope picture and your eyes will sort of have a memory of what to do to focus on one of those digital pictures.
Here’s an easier picture to start with that doesn’t have a lot of distracting colors.

You should have been able to see a bunny near the center in that picture.
If you did, then move on to one a little more complex with colors.

That one was just a bunch of 3-D wormholes. I counted 11.
Once you’ve got it down, you’ll be able to hold focus on moving 3-D object whether animate or true life.
Remember, cross your eyes slightly until you’ve made a third picture appear in the middle and then focus on that one.
Enjoy.