Hi, all. First, and most importantly, Crap From The Past now has its own webpage as well as on-line audio (RealAudio for you propellerheads.) Go to www.kfai.org and find the Crap From The Past stuff. I have old playlists, too. Boy, am I keeping up with technology or what?
Well, Mother Nature has been totally wacked out for the last few weeks. I'll explain.
Friday, May 15th: Around 4 PM it got dark enough outside so that the lights in the parking lot went on, which is not a good sign because it's usually light until 9 PM this time of year. I heard rumors that a storm was moving in, so I just drove home. And it's a good thing I did, because Minneapolis got hit with a serious hailstorm. (Margaret confirms the seriousness of it, and she grew up in hailstorm country in eastern Colorado.) The skies got kinda greenish, then pitch black dark, then the winds started to blow pretty hard, then for about sixty seconds, the Twin Cities got pummelled with hailstones the size of melon-balls. (If you have a melon-baller, they looked like translucent pieces of canteloupe.) This may not sound like much, but it was enough to dent nearly all the cars that were parked outside (think ball-peen hammer dent every few inches on every car in town). Not mine, though, because I was a chicken and went home. It also dented the heck out of our aluminum siding on the south side of the house, and broke one window. The insurance appraisial: New roof, new siding on one side of house, new window, four new screens. (Woo-hoo! I would've needed a new roof in a few years anyway!) I saved a few of the hailstones in my freezer.
Two weeks later...
Saturday, May 30: It started to rain in the evening. Margaret and I were over at some friends' house. We got some serious lightning, and decided we better check in with the Weather Channel. (Cliff Claven's favorite!) We managed to see severe thunderstorm warnings all over the state briefly before cable went out. We decided that it was time go home before it got any worse, but nature had other plans for us, as evidenced by the wall of rain, the severe bendage of large tree on our friends' lawn, and the emergency sirens that went off. We spent a few minutes in their basement with a radio on, and carefully drove home about a half hour later during rain that was merely torrential. During the drive home, we heard that there were some large trees down and some power outages, but we had no idea what we were in for when we got home. We found a large branch about 10 inches in diameter resting on our garage, and an even larger branch about 12-15 inches in diameter resting between our house and the neighbor's garage. (It actually squashed a bunch of plants on her driveway, but I'll get to that in a minute.) It turned out that there were straight-line wind gusts over 80 MPH that took down lots and lots of big trees around the city, including the oldest tree in the state, which was something like 122 feet high. My house was without power from Saturday to Thursday, so we ate out a lot and I dropeed the leftovers at the fridge at work. The insurance appraisal: New roof on the garage. (More woo-hoo! That needed a new roof, too!) Needless to say, we lost the hailstones from the last storm.
So what about the neighbor's plants? Well, our neighbor is nuts. Literally crazy, we think. If nothing else, she's an idiot. She's in her 50's and she sells plants in an illegal garage sale from her driveway all summer. We wouldn't mind much if we liked her, but she's an idiot. (Too many instances to describe here. I'm sure Margaret could go on and on for hours, but suffice it to say that she's an idiot and Margaret and I wish nothing but evil on her and her stupid plants.) Well, when the huge branch fell off our tree, it missed everything structural and landed squarely on her plants. We think that God must be pushing the "smite" button.
So we got fed up with the idiot-neighbor's illegal garage sale and we called the IRS on her. (We figured that the Man would be more responsive than the police.) And sure enough, we watched with giddy kid-excitement as a Richfield public safety car drove up, the officer got out, the officer began asking idiot-lady some questions, and idiot-lady went ballistic yelling at the officer. Good plan! I'm sure the yelling part will look good in the police report. Well, that was two weeks ago, and we decided that since the officer's visit had no effect on her plant business (signs still up, etc.), that we'd call again. And sure enough, the Richfield public safety car drove up, the officer got out, the officer began asking idiot-lady some questions, and idiot-lady went ballistic again. Ooh - this is so much fun!!! The plan is to call a third time this Sunday when idiot-lady is in full swing, because this time they can cite her for a bunch of violations like not obeying the first two warnings, not paying taxes on her illegal business, and all sorts of good stuff! We hope she goes to jail. Stupid neighbor...
I have to say that the weather and the idiot-lady next door have totally dominated our lives for the last few weeks. I have seen two excellent movies and I will give them quick reviews here:
- "The Truman Show". I read a review that called it an 80 million dollar art film with Jim Carrey. I thought it was excellent, and unlike anything I'd ever seen before. I'd compare it to "Forrest Gump", but I thought Gump wasn't all that great. Two thumbs way up, and I hope it wins some Oscars next year.
- "In The Company Of Men" (on video). An indie film from last year about two scumbag business guys who try to both seduce and then dump a girl. That's pretty much the whole plot, but it doesn't convey just how scummy these two guys are. I don't think I have ever seen such despicable characters on the big screen (and I saw "They Saved Hitler's Brain"...) An excellent, thoroughly original, and deeply disturbing film. I loved it.
What if there was a stuffed animal store? Literally, a store where you could buy animals, stuffed.
We have riding lawn mowers. So why not a riding vacuum cleaner? Could you think of anything more fun than driving around the house on your riding vacuum cleaner?
I had a dream not too long ago in which I was at some garage sale and was looking through some kids' toys and found one of those old Fisher-Price "record" players, which has the mechanism for a music box in the little "tone arm" and plays those fake plastic records, each with a different "song" on them. I was looking through the records (as I have been known to do in real life) and looking at the titles, and I remember seeing some mundane songs like "Edelweiss" right next to a record by Parliament. PARLIAMENT?!?!? I imaged "Make my funk the P-Funk/I wants to get funked up" played in tinkly music box sounds, and I woke up laughing.
I just remembered my brother telling me about a body-builder friend of his who occasionally refers to people as "Quadzilla", "Tyrannosaurus Pects", and "Rippopotamus". I don't know why such things creep into my mind...
So be sure to tune into CFTP if you have a sound card and an internet connection on your computer. The website has statistics to tell me how many people are listening, and frankly the numbers are pretty puny right now. www.kfai.org
And be sure to wish evil on the idiot-lady next door,
Ron "Boogiemonster" Gerber
