We're Going To Need A Bigger Boat

This is both cool and scary and some of the language is not safe for work.

Can you imagine having all those Killer Whales surrounding your boat? What if they mistake it for a huge seal? Cute or not, you saw what they did to the salmon. I'll watch Shamu from the stands at Sea-World, thank you very much.

Wanted: Guest Writer

Being that Still A Dog is the biggest lover of dogs I know, I'm going to ask him to write a post on this. I can't wait to read it.

I Like To Fish

Yes, I voted for him...twice. <---- Click!

Salad Bar

Thanks for the contribution Still A Dad. This is hilarious. There are too many jokes coming to me all at the same time. Wouldn't dude float if he just held his breath and lay on his back? I wouldn't be surprised if he shoots himself in the head later this week after he reads all his news clippings.

5 Sheets My Ass

This article is ludicrous. You have to be shitting me. Let me tell you what's going to happen to anyone who installs these machines. They are going to have to keep replacing them, and replacing them, and replacing them....because people like me are going to break them, break them, break them. Dispense 5 sheets per load? 5? 20 inches of paper? The article says that on average an American uses about an arm's length of paper. Good God I think I use twice my height and I'm a little over 6 feet tall! 5 sheets? I can't clean up a dead spider that I've squished with a slipper with 5 sheets let alone what happens the morning after a meal at Chili's. Depending on what was eaten and what it was washed down with - you could potentially use 12 ft of paper, 2 baby wipes (a Howard Stern trick), some fine sandpaper, a paint stripper and a pressure washer. Other times, a lone sheet will do. I would like to take the logic of this machine a step further. I would like to give all Americans a card for these machines not unlike an ATM card. It will be called your ASS card. Automated Shit Sheets. You swipe it when you start your business. ASS swipe. Yup. You see, you "earn" 5 sheets per use, but if you happen to only use 2-3 sheets, you can "bank" the rest of them until next time. Use 2 sheets today, say hello to 8 sheets tomorrow. This way, you can save up for a cheap beer or Mexican night and know you're not in trouble the next morning at work. I think restaurants should have a card reader right at your table. "Bill, what are you having tonight?" "Well sweety, I don't know, let me check my card." (Swipes). "Hmmm, I have 27 sheets saved up - I guess I'll have the ribs and baked beans!". There will also be several after market services developed as well. Instead of eBay, we'll have eBowel - where after entering your swipe code - you'll be able to sell your unused sheets. If Bobby Bo Ray is a heavy user, he can go online and bid on Lindsey Lohan and Nicole Ritchie's extra sheets - you don't eat when you're doing coke and if you don't eat........well, you get the picture. This is just so ridiculous I can't even believe it. Think about it...a big burly guy sitting at the booth next to you eating wings at your favorite tavern - he has to go - NOW! 5 sheets does exactly 10% of the job for him. Now he comes back to the table unable to finish the job God intended him to do. Yuck. You know how the faucets work for 5 seconds when you put your hand under them? Think how funny it's going to be when everyone is in there ramming their asses up against the faucet to get some water to finish what 5 sheets of paper could not. Better yet, lots of people will come out of the stall doing the penguin walk with their pants around their ankles, shut the door - open the door and return to the stall to get another 5 sheets! See, they didn't QA the system yet. What if it takes your ass print and will only dispense 5 sheets per incident? You could go to another stall while walking the penguin...but if they are all networked together (WAN: Wide Ass Network) the stall 2 doors down will know you already got your 5 sheets. In the year 2007, 97 out of every 100 people are carrying a cell phone with them at all times. In 2009, the cell phone will be replaced by a roll of toilet paper as the object of choice to carry around. Lanyards will be created to make them easier to carry. I'm sure Belkin will have a line of "skins" and belt clip attachments. Apple will develop the iPoop which is a tubular iPod that fits snugly in the empty roll. It will come standard with a USB "NUMBER 2" cable (which is different than USB 2.0) which dumps and loads songs really fast...faster than the splash after you drop the kids off at the pool in the morning.

Weird Google Search

Wow. Every once in a while I take a look at the searches that link to Steel City Slant. There was one yesterday from "Google France" with this typed in the search input "LES FOUTE DE HAYLEY ET WILL MR . PERSONALITY". Huh? I bet they didn't find what they were looking for since it linked to a post about American Idol and Haley from this year's competition!

We Ain't Scared Of No Voldemort

My daughter and I went to see Harry Potter and the Order Of the Phoenix tonight. What a cool flick! While some kids may be afraid of He Whose Name We Will Not Say, we just laugh at him. I've kind of equated him to Dr. Drakken of Kim Possible fame in her mind. I did jump really good once during the movie and she laughed at me! Harry and his cousin were running home from a storm when two Dementors showed up quite unexpectedly. I liked Dumbledore going off at the end and to me it looked much more realistic than when George Lucas had Yoda go off in a similar manner. Think about this....if Voldemort is one of the most powerful wizards ever - why doesn't he conjure up some better dental work? Seriously! Dude has the teeth of either a hillbilly or a Brit....take your pick.....um, water pic that is!

The Economic Naturalist

I just finished another good book. It's called The Economic Naturalist by Robert H. Frank. When I first picked it up in the bookstore and read a few pages - it reminded me a lot of Freakonomics, The Tipping Point and Blink. The subtitle is "In Search of Explanations for Everyday Enigmas". He teaches economics and the collections in the book are papers that students turned in for their final grade - expanded upon and edited by Frank himself. To give you a flavor of the book, some of the searches include "Why does milk come in square containers and soda round?", 'Why is there a light in the refrigerator but not the freezer?", "Why are DVDs packaged in huge boxes when they could be in the same size packages as CDs?", "Why is squatting legal?", "Why can you rent a $20,000 car for $40 a day, but a $400 tuxedo rents for $125?". These types of things interest me as I like to know how things work. What the book is trying to get you to do is to understand that there are a myriad of reasons behind the costs associated with consumer goods. The more of these snippets you read - the more likely you'll be able to come up with the next answer yourself. It's also broken up into very small sections making it a good book for the pool or before bed. If something comes up, you usually only to have read a little further to get to the next snippet. While it's not as good as the other books I mentioned here - it's good enough to satisfy the curious reader.

Dead Pool Anyone?

So yeah, I like to wager. I was called "The Commish" at one place of business because I ran every pool you can imagine. I ran the golf league, the fantasy football league, the weekly nfl pool, the ncaa bracket, the super bowl grid....we even drew horse names for the big horse races. If you could bet on it - we did. We even ran a "Dead Pool" for a while. We held an initial draft where 5 people kicked in money and we picked 4 celebrities that we thought might die soon. Morbid! Every 2 weeks we added more money and had another round of drafting. It ended up being won by Still A Heff who had 2 people on his list die THE SAME DAY. I kid you not. Look it up. It's a fact. March 27, 2002. Dudley Moore and Milton Berle. I saw both names over a span of a few hours and I thought I was going to have to look up the official time of death to make our league official. As it turned out - he had BOTH of them. Anyway, my point here was that if you were starting one today - I don't care how many 98 year-old celebrities are out there, I'm taking Pacman Jones. Trouble doesn't find you for no reason. He'll be dead in the next year. As an aside, Still A Heff also won the only other round we played by having John Lee Hooker. I hope down there near Baltimore Heff isn't having any bad dreams about me!

al Ka-Ka

I have a great uncle who used to use "ka ka" as a synonym for, well, "$hit". I would like to make a declaration that al-Qaida will now and forever be known as al Ka-Ka. After reading all the news clippings today and yesterday of how they are retooled and rebuilt, it really makes you wonder. I voted for President Bush twice and I'm not ashamed to admit it. Sure, he's not the best president in the history of the country but he's not the worst either. Anyone who tells you he is probably can't name 25 US Presidents, let alone tell you what they did in office. Right now, I think Bush and the Republicans are stuck between Iraq and a hard place (sorry). Why do I think that? Every time the administration tries to warn people about a terror alert - the liberals and media make fun of them and say they are trying to sway national attention away from something else or using fear to garner votes. If a spectacular attack would go off next week in this country - they will be blamed unmercifully - even after every warning gets brushed aside. They will say the war in Iraq caused it even though this can never be proved or disproved. If a democrat happens to win the presidency and THEN a terrorist attack happens on our shores, the complaint will be that Bush didn't do enough when he was in office to squash future threats and all he did was stir the pot. Basically, he's screwed if he tries to fight them now, he's screwed if they attack before he's out of office and he's screwed if they attack shortly after he's out of office. Like or dislike Bush - there is very little doubt in my mind that Gore or Kerry would have handled these situations better. Nothing is going to appease the fringe groups who are always going to be terrorists. Violence is the only thing they understand. If another attack happens, we find the area of the world where they trained and planned - whether it be a region, city or country - and we make it inhabitable by man for 100's of years. Get the picture?

Great Band Names

Every once in a while, something I say or think sounds like the perfect name for a band. I love creative names for bands. When I used to play with friends back in high school and college the bands were called "Blind Vision", "The Answer" and "Meltdown". I think all 3 showed some promise (in name only!). We had "The Answer" back in 1986...not sure when AI started using it. Anyway, it looks like after doing some Google searches - the 3 I came up with over the past few days are already in use! All 3 are work inspired. "Feature Creep" is something that faces IT people on a daily basis. I've been working on a report for the top of the food chain and the scope gets bigger every day. It hit me the other day that it would be a cool name. Along those same lines - "Works As Designed" is something QA people face all the time as well. It's a daily battle to point out things that are obviously wrong with software but aren't explicitly written into the specifications. I think it's a cool name for a band as well, and so did somebody else. On a funnier note, I walked into the bathroom the other day and my God....the smell could have melted you! I thought Jesus Christ, buddy, how about a Courtesy Flush? Then I smiled - Courtesy Flush would be a killer band name!!! And.....it is.

Only In America

Boo Hoo.

The Greatest Rivalry In Sports

Would be Mike Tomlin's Steelers vs. Bill Cowher's Browns. I myself don't think it will happen, but there are a ton of rumor type websites addressing that very issue. This one is right off of KDKA's website. I think it's one article that started all of this and then all the other sites ran with it. Peter King reported that he thought Cowher may stay out of coaching for 2 years after talking to him earlier this year. Bill needs to remember one thing - remember the blank "deer in the headlights" look he had most of last year as his Super Bowl team fell to 8-8? After any stupid play or big play against them, they would show him on the sidelines and it looked like he was already thinking about wearing a bathrobe and slippers at 3:00 pm on a Tuesday....that will be him 8-10 times per game...EVERY game....if he ever decides to coach the Browns. I always thought he would come back - but come back to the NFC. If he came back to a team in our division? Wow! At least the Browns are a joke, if he took over the Ravens I wouldn't know what to do with myself. I may take his bobblehead likeness off of my collection shelf and hand paint Ravens colors on it and then think of new ways to desecrate it every week on video and upload them to YouTube.

The Pit

I finally got around to grilling on the new charcoal grill I built yesterday. I bought "real" charcoal as recommended by Still A Dog and I must say it worked out very well. My only problem was controlling the initial burn when the chicken juices started dripping on the hot coals. The pieces got a little crispy (ok, a LOT crispy) on the outside but were perfect on the inside. Later in the night I used one of the grates as a fireplace screen and lit a nice wood fire in the pit to make s'mores. Even though it seemed kind of weird to light a fire on a day when it was almost 90 degrees, by 10 o'clock at night it felt just right. Now all I have to do is sync up my calendar with The Dog's and allow him to cook the perfect meal on it - whatever he chooses!

Nike Steals Paris Hilton's Slogan

In this video clip of Wayne Rooney displaying his deadly accuracy, Nike pulls a fast one on Paris Hilton by using her personal mantra and corporate slogan without her permission or knowledge. According to her lawyers, her "knowledge" isn't that broad in the first place. To put it in today's perspective, the average person has the mental capacity of an 8gb iPod Nano. Doctors, Lawyers, Surgeons and Software Engineers have the equivalent of a 30gb iPod for a brain. A genius would then be sporting an 80gb iPod for their gray matter. In contrast, political and sports pundits would use a 4gb iPod Nano. Politicians would use a 2gb iPod Nano. People who worship celebrities would have the 1gb iPod Nano while most celebrities themselves would have the 1gb iPod Shuffle (it's still the same capacity as the smallest Nano - but it's style over substance and it's really tiny). We asked Hilton's personal psychiatrist to equate Paris' mental capacity to an electronics gadget. When told that "Toaster" did not qualify as a gadget - the doctor needed more time to think but did come up with a valid answer: the original Texas Instruments LED calculator. He was quick to point out that the calculator analogous to Hilton's brain did not have a memory function, square roots or exponentials....just basic addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. He also asked for the purposes of this comparison if we could all pretend that the relic computational device only held 6 digits.....knowing full well that it really held eight. Anyway, after the nice man kicks the soccer ball (soccer? what the hell is soccer?) into the target, you will see the stolen Hilton slogan. It's what she tells most people that she meets. If you remember, Hilton tried unsuccessfully to sue Nike when they first used "Just Do It" as she claimed it was a blatant ripoff of her massively popular "Just Do Me" slogan at that time.

Slanted #48

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Bush Commuting Libby

I read several article headlines today and saw many news clips about President Bush commuting Scooter Libby. A lot of folks seemed upset and complained that he shouldn't do it....especially liberals. Aren't liberals supposed to champion the environment? Why shouldn't President Bush stop by and pick up Scooter on his way to the office? It would allow them to use the car pool lane on the Beltway and catch up on things
while commuting Scooter to his new job. Bush has always been attacked for his stance on the environment and I think this is a step in the right direction. If this works out, maybe he'll rent a bigger car and swing by and pick up Rummy as well. He should really commute all of his friends that used to work for him. It's just like the liberal media to attack him for something and when he tries to do something about it - they attack him for that. The poor man just can't win.

We Are A Nation Of Idiots - Anna Nicole Smith

This headline just caught my eye on Yahoo's front page.

The teaser that made me click it read "Anna Nicole Smith's 10 month old baby daughter makes OK! Magazine's list of most influential". What?! She headed up the list for the "Survivors" category. How in the mother truck does a 10 month old "survive" something? She is lucky right now if she can point to her nose and toes, let alone comprehend what has happened to her. If she makes it to 12 without selling herself on Sunset Strip, then maybe she survived something. Katie Holmes is influential? All she did is marry someone who guarantees her that she'll never have to work again. Hmmmm, maybe that is influential? OK ! Magazine should make a list of worst magainzes and this article should make a list of worst articles. The author should make a list of worst authors and the person who selected the font should make a list of "worst font selectors". Furthermore, anyone who reads said article and takes it seriously should make the list of "stupidest celebrity worshiping idiots".....well, unless they wear helmets and pads and play football on Sundays....then it's OK to worship them.

Rooney Rules

The latest article from SI writer Michael Silver ranks the NFL's current owners. Dan / Art II rank 9th this year, up from 10th last year. Last year's article infuriated me so much I sent an email (thoughtful, not attacking) and received a great reply from Mr. Silver. We've since traded emails on numerous occassions and the information that he gets is rock solid. I still think the Rooney family belongs in the top 5, but that's beside the point in this post. Although he doesn't go into any detail (I've asked for some, though) he reports that it was Dan's call to hire Mike Tomlin over Art II's vehemently disagreeing with him. Art II wanted one of the in-house guys (Grimm, Whiz) to take over. That blows up my theory of Art II sticking it to Bill Cowher by not hiring one of his staff. In the end, I think we're going to be happy with Tomlin and I respect Rooney for making the tough decision and not going with the insider. I think after the bad season they had - they needed to shake up the team and get the edge back. Grimm or Whiz would have been like a substitute teacher taking over for a year. Silver also claims Cowher leaving was all about the cheddar and that he would have stayed if offered market value. That's a tough one to swallow unless he was really more upset with Art II than anyone let on. He never seemed the type to me to leave for money since he's a Yinzer at heart, has money like Fort Knox and job security for life. Is that worth 2 million a year? I think it has more to do with Bill Cowher wanting to run the entire show - which is what he will get at his next stop, unless of course he becomes a NASCAR driver.

Boys Night

The girls traveled back to western PA this weekend for my mother-in-law's surprise birthday party. They got to hang out with Still A Dad on Friday night and then spent the rest of the weekend with her family. I couldn't make it due to work complications - see some previous posts where I complain about this! Anyhoooo, when I realized the house would be relatively empty on Saturday night - I shouted out to Moor Cowbell and a guy I met at my new office to come over and jam. We grilled some fish, had some beers and then tried to find some songs that all three of us know. New Guy is 10 years younger than Cowbell and myself so he knows more 90's music - although he is a classic rock guy as well. We played some AC/DC, Van Halen, Floyd, Rush, The Cure, J Geils, Bush, Pearl Jam, U2, Priest.....and too many others to remember. My arms hurt! I went from playing 3 songs every month to playing for 4+ hours. I recorded a song that we actually all knew the beginning, middle and ending to...which was rare! It's "Hey Jealousy" by the Gin Blossoms. The sound isn't that good due to the fact that it's recorded on a digital still camera with a weak mic.....but hey, it worked. It sounds much better if you actually know the song I guess so you can hear it playing in your head as well.