Thanks Laura! You were right, this one is a good one!

Little Alice was in her 5th grade class when the teacher asked the children what their fathers did for a living. All the typical answers came up - fireman, policeman, salesman, doctor, lawyer, Alice was being uncharacteristically quiet, so the teacher asked her about her father.

"My father's an exotic dancer in a gay cabaret and takes off all his
clothes in front of other men and they put money in his underwear. Sometimes, if the offer is really good, he'll go home with some guy and make love with him for money."

The teacher, obviously shaken by this statement, hurriedly set the other children to work on some exercises and took little Alice aside to ask her, "Is that really true about your father?" "No," said Alice, "he works for the Bush administration, but I was too embarrassed to say that in front of the other kids."

- these thoughts flowed through Jeff's fingers @ 1:34 PM

Today the Redbirds beat the Brewers 4-2 in an afternoon game for our 100th win of the season. That makes our overall record 100-52. We're only the 7th team in Cardinals history to reach the 100 win mark, as well as the first in the major leagues to do it since Seattle in 1997. If we can pull out 7 more wins over the course of our next 10 games, we have a shot at breaking the all time Cardinals win total of 106.

Coming soon.... my thoughts about the post-season.

- these thoughts flowed through Jeff's fingers @ 5:24 PM

Click the photo to read the text within.


I'm sure that'll confuse the religous right. 

- these thoughts flowed through Jeff's fingers @ 4:52 PM

Disorder	Rating
Paranoid:	Low
Schizoid:	Low
Schizotypal:	Moderate
Antisocial:	Low
Borderline:	Low
Histrionic:	Moderate
Narcissistic:	Low
Avoidant:	Moderate
Dependent:	Low
Obsessive-Compulsive:	Moderate
-- Personality Disorder Test - Take It! --

- these thoughts flowed through Jeff's fingers @ 10:37 AM

Check out this story about a Minnesota State Trooper who clocked a motorcyclist doing 205 MPH on the highway earlier this week. Now, I know I shouldn't really be that shocked because I've actually seen stuff like this before. Once on a Saturday night on highway 55 in St. Louis I was fortunate enough to be part of a motorcycle gang's idea of good clean fun, as about 30 - 40 crotch rockets sped down the highway at about 160 MPH all at the same time. I had half a mind just to toss on a blinker and take out about 10 of them.

Is this really necessary though? It's a prime example of ultimate stupidity. Your chances of surviving a motorcycle accident at 205 MPH are probably less than 0.05%. In fact, motorcycles in general are pretty lame if you ask me. They are by far the most dangerous vehicles on the road (for the riders at least) and the National Traffic Safety Bureau reports that on average, every long term (10 or more years of consistent riding) motorcycle rider or driver will be involved in a potentially life threatening accident at some point in their lives, regardless of how safe of a driver they are. My dad rode one for two years before his first accident where the only thing between his skull and the pavement was a helmet, which the doctors said saved his life due to the fact that he landed on his head.

It also seems that motorcycles provide a sense of pseudo machismo, giving some riders the false feeling that they are "bad to the bone" for lack of a better term (no offense to Nick or anyone else who's a got a bike). Not to mention they are unnecessarily loud and annoying as hell. There's a fine line between cool and stupid, between exhilarating risk and just plain dangerous. I would trust myself to drive a motorcycle, but on a daily basis I see other drivers around me do some of the dumbest shit possible with a car. I think back to my accident two years ago when my car got totaled. Completely unavoidable and entirely not my fault. My car did exactly what it should have and the seatbelt and airbag saved me from major injuries. I walked away with a couple of scratches and a sore back for a few months. I can guarantee you that had I been on a bike, I wouldn't be sitting here typing this right now.

- these thoughts flowed through Jeff's fingers @ 9:19 AM

In a slick marketing move by Mel Brooks & MGM Studios, they decided to run full page ads (some of which are quite funny) in major publications advertising the "re-release" of Spaceballs on DVD to coincide with the release of Star Wars on DVD.

- these thoughts flowed through Jeff's fingers @ 3:01 PM

Last weekend, my parents finally got out to visit my brother at work at Circuit City. Of course they weren't really there to visit, they were there to buy our first HDTV on his sweet employee discount. So here's what they got. Pretty sweet if you ask me. Sure we could have gone bigger, but the room it's going in is going to act as a second TV room and is only about 10' x 10'. Charter Cable has already been contacted about coming out and upgrading our cable from the digital signal to the HD signal and giving us the new cable boxes with the DV (digital video) output. A couple of features that I really dig on the new TV (besides the HighDef picture of course) are:

- 9 video inputs, one of which is co-axial cable only, one is DVI only, 4 are component video, and the remaining 3 are S-video or composite (One of which is on the side of the TV for easy access. This input also has an RGB connection for computer signals.)

- A slot on the front for SD picture or video cards. Pretty cool cause my FujiFinePix Digital camera just happens to use that type of media. Now I can view any pictures I take on an HDTV screen.

- A nice split screen function which enables you to watch two different channels (even if they are coming from the same video source) simultaneously. You only get the sound from one of the channels, but I'm sure it will come in handy when you've got multiple football games going on at the same time.

- The fact that instead of being a CRT projection screen, it's an LCD projection screen. This means no picture tube. Making the 43" TV weigh only 68 pounds and only 13" deep. Easy to move whenever we need to.

Maybe I'll have some folks over to watch some Cardinals baseball games during the playoffs and possibly some Rams games as well.

- these thoughts flowed through Jeff's fingers @ 10:02 AM

Look who's back...

Remember me? 

So if you hadn't guessed by the picture, Nintendo is currently working on the newest game in the Zelda series for the Gamecube which is expected to be released in the USA sometime towards the middle of next year. They've left the cartoon graphics of some of the more recent games behind and opted to go back to the more realistic graphics that I think pretty much everyone likes more. It actually looks quite a bit like "Lord of the Rings" if you ask me. If you're looking for more info on the game, you can check out the story here, or you can go download the video preview here. At any rate, here's a couple more cool screenshots:


One deadly mo-fo. 


Hmm, shouldn't there be some Hobbits in this picture? 

- these thoughts flowed through Jeff's fingers @ 1:19 PM

Apparently it's really true....



*looks at the current world's population* You must have a lot of frustration then.

What pisses you off?

Created by ptocheia

Thanks to Chris in CU for the link to the free content.

- these thoughts flowed through Jeff's fingers @ 10:09 AM

So has anyone besides me heard of Jamie Cullum yet? Apparently so since his major label debut album "Twenty Something" just broke the platinum mark. Check him out. Similar to one of my other favorite new male piano oriented singer-songwriters, Gavin DeGraw, Jamie sounds a bit like the male equivalent of Norah Jones. Could be the Billy Joel for our generation. Listen to some sample tracks here.

- these thoughts flowed through Jeff's fingers @ 11:58 AM

First off, in case anyone hasn't heard yet, the original Star Wars trilogy will be released on DVD in less than a week. Ok, not the "original" original, but the revised & updated 1997 versions of Episodes IV, V, and VI.

Also, in case anyone is interested in spoiling the entire final Star Wars film, "The Revenge of the Sith" for themselves, you can check out the plot summary here.

Here's the first teaser trailer for the new Batman movie entitled "Batman Begins".

And it seems as though the new Dukes of Hazard movie will be injected full of MTV style and very little substance as Sean William Scott and Johnny Knoxville have been cast as the Duke brothers and Jessica Simpson has been cast as their cousin, Daisy.

- these thoughts flowed through Jeff's fingers @ 11:21 AM

Colin Powell admitted just the other day that it's unlikely that we'll ever find any WMD's in Iraq. Even after he guaranteed that they existed and were plentiful in his arguments for the invasion of the country back in early 2003. I'm sure there's a possibility that they were destroyed, or shipped out of the country, but with everything that has been said by UN weapons inspectors in the past, if they were ever there, I doubt they were as plentiful and useful as we were led to believe.

- these thoughts flowed through Jeff's fingers @ 9:56 AM

I'm not a big believer in curses and such, but this story is pretty damn spooky.

While attending a Red Sox vs. Angels game last week 16 year old Lee Gavin was struck hard by a foul ball hit by Boston outfielder Manny Ramirez. The ball which hit the boy in the mouth, knocked him back and took out two of his teeth in the process. He recovered the ball, and his teeth and ended up being OK. So far nothing too out of the ordinary.

Turns out, Lee Gavin lives on an old farm that was purchased in 1916 by a certain baseball player with an address of 558 Dutton Road Sudbury, MA. Oddly enough, the house is nicknamed "Home Plate Farm" because from 1922 - 1926 it's where Babe Ruth hung his hat. Pretty crazy huh?

The Sox went on to win the game 10-7.... on the same night the New York Yankees (the team Babe Ruth was traded to) were defeated 22-0. The worst loss in team history.

AHHHH!!! That's some strange stuff. Could the "Curse of the Bambino" be finished? I suppose we'll see in a few weeks.

- these thoughts flowed through Jeff's fingers @ 5:15 PM

Now don't get me wrong here, I (as well as every other guy I know) love the new Hardee's commercial for the Western Bacon Thickburger. You know it well if you live here in St. Louis. It's the one with the really cute twenty-something blonde riding on a mechanical bull while eating a western thickburger while "Slow Ride" by Foghat plays in the background. The announcer comes on and says something along the lines of "We could have shown you a cowboy sitting around a campfire eating this burger, but isn't this better?", or something like that.

There's another commercial for the same product that shows a bunch of crazy college frat boy types going wild in a hotel room. Then all of the sudden one of their buddies bust through the door with a bag of western thickburgers. They all start scarfing the burgers down silently without a word and only the noises of slurping BBQ sauce can be heard. Of course the announcer tag for this commercial has something to do with calming the savage beast.

The common thread here is the beautiful body of the female, and the cut, almost bodybuilder physique of the gents in both these ads. Now, if there were any truth in advertising, wouldn't we be looking at some folks that weigh about 400 lbs in both these commercials? I've never seen anyone that inhales entire burgers the way they do in these commercials look remotely like these people. But of course, who wants to watch 400 lbs of flab slosh around on a mechanical bull?

There's too many commercials using actors that would never actually use the product they are attempting to sell. I guess it works though. I'm sure you can think of some more on your own. Anyway, just a random thought for the day.

- these thoughts flowed through Jeff's fingers @ 1:31 PM

I finally got the correct type of RAM for my old, slow ass computer here at work. It's a HP Pavilion, 500 MHz Pentium III that was running Windows 98 and is now running Windows 2000 Pro (I upgraded the OS about 2 years ago). When it was purchased, it only had 64 MB of RAM in it. Now, six years later, it's maxed out at 384 MB which means that it's still slower than hell. At least now it's less slow. Funny thing is, out of all the computers that we have here (all of which are newer than mine), mine is the only one that consistently runs perfect. Maybe that has something to do with the fact that I'm the only one here that knows anything about how to take care of a PC.

By the way.... I was wondering if anyone out there knew where to find some RAM that was more challenging to install. You know, cause shoving a delicate computer chip with all your force behind it into a slot only 2 mm wide that you can't even see at the back of a dark computer while your hand is contorted in such ways that it starts to look like a pretzel is just way to fucking easy.

- these thoughts flowed through Jeff's fingers @ 1:20 PM

Quotes of the week from your President and Vice President:

While speaking about the topic of higher insurance premiums in Poplar Bluff, MO earlier this week (story), the President said:

"Too many good docs are getting out of business. Too many OB/GYNs aren't able to practice their love with women all across this country."

I'm sure that the first thing that women look for when searching out a good OBGYN. Some good loving. Maybe Bushy should concentrate less on the war in Iraq and more with his apparent fight against the English language.

Moving on to a Dick.... I mean Dick Cheney. In a campaign stop in Des Moines, IA earlier this week (story), the Vice President commented thusly on the upcoming election:

"It's absolutely essential that eight weeks from today, on Nov. 2, we make the right choice. Because if we make the wrong choice then the danger is that we'll get hit (by terrorists) again and we'll be hit in a way that will be devastating from the standpoint of the United States."

See Dick speak. See Dick make stupid threats. See Dick have another heart attack. Dirty politics is one thing, but to essentially attempt to dupe people into believing that the terrorists aren't going to attack us if Bush is re-elected is just fucking dumb.

There you have it ladies and gents, your countries leaders.

- these thoughts flowed through Jeff's fingers @ 3:48 PM

Blues forward Keith Tkachuk had 4 goals and an assist for Team USA in Tuesday night's 5-3 victory over Team Russia, which means he had a hand in every goal. And on an all-star team no less. Let's hope he can carry that swagger back into the Blues locker room this year.

- these thoughts flowed through Jeff's fingers @ 8:28 PM

Ahh.... life is good in the sports world. And here's why:

The Cardinals continue to dominate as we swept the Padres this week in true ass stomping fashion. This is a team that's fighting for a playoff spot too. Sweeping teams like the Pirates or the Reds is nice, but to beat three great pitchers and play an entire series where we were never down even a single run is pretty damned awesome (we out-scored them in the series 20-7). Edmonds, Pujols, and Walker are all playing home run derby now. Edmonds has 8 in 7 games (now 1 HR shy of 300 career) and Pujols has homered in 4 straight. We now have three players with 100 RBI's this season for the second year in a row. Oh yeah, and we reached the long awaited double over .500 mark!! The next big test is this weekend against the NL West Division leading Los Angeles Dodgers. Could be a quick preview of the NLCS, seeing as besides the Cubs, the Dodgers will present the biggest challenge to the Cardinals in the postseason. I can't wait for the Walker, Pujols, Rolen, Edmonds VS. Gagne matchup. Look for Ankiel this weekend as well.

Kobe's a free man. The money hungry slut who he supposedly "raped", dropped the criminal case because she refused to testify. Reports are saying that if her past and recent sexual activity (which reportedly includes in excess of 50 sexual partners before as well as after the date of the apparent rape) came up when she was on the stand, it would pretty much completely cripple their case. Not to mention her apparent affinity for being attracted to wealthy black men, specifically those of celebrity status that visited the Vail Resort where she worked. The accusations came out, as the defense argued, as a means to get attention from or make jealous an ex-boyfriend, or possibly even for pure financial gain. This theory becomes even more compelling now that the criminal trial was dropped, yet the woman still plans to follow through with a civil trial where money can be the only reward for winning the case, as opposed to the criminal trial where justice prevails with a prison sentence. I'm horribly disgusted by rape and I think next to cold blooded murder, its the worst thing you could possibly do to someone. But not every girl who wakes up the next morning and regrets having sex with some guy the night before, or has a one nighter and then gets burned cause he doesn't call her back, gets a free pass to yell out "RAPE" just because they can. And yes, I understand what date rape is and that it does indeed happen quite often. And yes I even realize that most of this evidence is circumstantial. But it's pretty overwhelming.

On a lighter note, it's pretty awesome to get a taste of Hockey in late August.

- these thoughts flowed through Jeff's fingers @ 1:55 PM

That's a large portion of a cow that man is ingesting. You think he wants fries with that? Man, I hope he's got some Tums ready.


Ronald McDonald watches in horror as Mayor McCheese is devoured. 

Here's a better look at it...


Mmmmooooooooo!! 

- these thoughts flowed through Jeff's fingers @ 5:56 PM

Yesterday the St. Louis Cardinals recalled pitcher Rick Ankiel from the AAA Memphis Redbirds. At one time Ankiel was thought to be the top pitching prospect in the National League. But after a great season in 2000, he had a meltdown in the playoffs where he lost all of his command and was throwing wild pitches and walks all over the place (11 walks and 9 wild pitches in 4 innings). He was unofficially dubbed "The Wild Thing" like he came straight out of the movie "Major League".

After surgery, and a two year rehab assignment, he's now back with the big club after posting phenomenal numbers this year in the minor leagues (23 2/3 innings pitched, 23 strikeouts, 9 hits, 2 walks, and an ERA under 1.00).


Can Ankiel be a difference maker in the playoffs? 

But, the question is, can Rick handle the pressure to perform in the big games? We'll see as the Cards travel down the stretch, how he does as a filler for the injured Steve Kline. Who knows, maybe with a little luck he'll be helping to close out a couple of World Series victories. For more info & opinion on his return, checkout the articles here, here, and here.

- these thoughts flowed through Jeff's fingers @ 12:47 PM

Got this in an E-mail forward. Thought it was worth a chuckle. 

- these thoughts flowed through Jeff's fingers @ 6:47 PM

Last night was the big Fantasy Football Draft at the Majestic. After tossing a few cold ones down the hatch, we set up the big dry erase board and went at it. Looks like we're going to have 10 teams in our league this year. We ended up picking 14 players for each team (1-QB, 2-RB's, 2-WR's, 1-TE, 1-kicker, 1-team defense, & 6 additional bench players at any position). My starting line is as follows:

QB - Donovan McNabb - Eagles
RB - Jamal Lewis - Ravens
RB - Kevan Barlow - 49er's
WR - Marvin Harrison - Colts
WR - Joe Horn - Saints
TE - Alge Crumpler - ATL
K - Mike Vanderjagt - Colts
D - Kansas City Chiefs

When I left last night, I wasn't too thrilled with my picks. After looking through a couple of this years projections though, I feel much better about my picks. In fact, among most of the 2004 pre-season projections I saw, all my starters were ranked in the top ten in each category. Which in theory would make sense since there are 10 teams in our league. Except that both my RB's and WR's were consistently ranked in the Top 10 which gives me at least a statistical advantage over a few other teams in my league. But hey, this is football.... so I'm not counting my chickens just yet.

- these thoughts flowed through Jeff's fingers @ 5:08 PM

The lineup that some critics were touting as the best ever assembled in baseball earlier this season lost last night. They lost big. In fact, it was the worst loss in the 101 year history of the New York Yankees organization. And it came at the hands of the Cleveland Indians no less. Both funny and pitiful at the same time. I'm sure BoSox fans everywhere are smiling today.

- these thoughts flowed through Jeff's fingers @ 12:31 PM