Hehe. Someone thinks I’m good. (Insert smiley here.)

Get your own. And no, I’m not on commission, I’m doing you a favor. Say “thank you.”

I’m gonna go set up the coffeemaker right now.

One of my less-incompetent stitching jobs. I was just looking it over and I thought, maybe that’s good enough to upload here.

I was really beat, what with driving around, getting sunburned, and then snacking and sampling fine wines. My body wasn’t adjusting to hotel beds that well. But the lady kept needling me and needling me, that I should get my fat ass up out of bed, because I said I wanted a sunset picture. I’m glad she insisted on it.

Click to blow ‘er up.

The dialogue is always the same.

She: Okay honey, it says 25 mph.

He: Yeah, whatever, don’t worry about it.

She: SLOW DOWN!!!

He: I am slowed down.

Toward the background you see some repair that has taken place because of a washout. The whole distance is like that. Guardrail that’s supposed to be there…wooden-steel reconstruction that shouldn’t be there…more evidence of washout…hairpin turn after hairpin turn.

The local coming up on your rear bumper would like you to speed more than you’re already speeding. The one in the car ahead of you, has all the time in the world. And your better half in the passenger seat? She’s hanging on for dear life.

Click pic to explodey it.

Update 6/4/09: Like your sense of humor, m’friend.

I should add, so I don’t get in troub the record is made accurate, that the new lady isn’t like this. Not like Phil’s wife either…somewhere in between the two extremes.

Good news, this one was taken the morning after I turned my brain back on and took the toy camera off one-megapixel mode. It had been set that way since Halloween when a couple of enterprising females were trying to take the blur out of some costume shoots…seven months later, they’re screwing up my vacation pictures because I just didn’t have picture resolution on my mind. Until the day before yesterday. Also, note, on this model picture resolution has nothing to do with blur.

Shoulda put my foot down. Sometimes I’m just not enough of a chauvinist pig for my own good.

Anyway — things are all fixed now. Click for glorious 2560×1920 goodness.

Oh, and to get here. I have to write this down because it’s a new discovery, and my over-forty memory is playing tricks on me lately. Here’s the secret: Proceed from Petaluma toward Bodega Bay. Follow the highway to the junction between Highway 1 S (toward Tomales) and Highway 1 N (toward Bodega Bay). Take the N, which means staying on the road and going straight. You pass through Valley Ford about a mile and a half later, which is a charming spot, kind of a “look both ways ya done seen it all” place. As you leave there is a road veering off to the left, toward Dillon Beach. Follow that about six miles, it ends on another highway that is unlabeled. You’ll know it because it’s the first time you see the ocean and there are two enormous rocks there by a vista, from which you can take some stunning pictures, I imagine…we did not partake. Anyway. Take a right and go another two miles, you’re there.

We’ll be repeating this one, I think. The day-use is a little steep, seven bucks, and no camping or fires allowed. But it does have its purposes and unlike my more traditional spots, this one is mostly undiscovered.

Good thing I posted it in The Blog That Nobody Reads so things will stay that way.

Click pic to embiggen.

Click pic for 1024×768.

We’re just boppin’ up and down Highway 1 N. Perhaps a few more times than we should — which is a story unto itself. I’ll elaborate further, later, maybe.

This is a spot well known to me, “downtown” Jenner, somewhere around Mile 23. Russian River is three miles south, and another ten miles further than that is Bodega Bay.

I’m disappointed. My excuse is that the 12th floor hotel window was un-open-able…didn’t seem like a problem at the time. Had I known my toy camera would so inadequately cope with the challenges, I’d have gotten off my fat ass and snapped a few pictures outside.

The image does not do justice to what was taking place. Desert storm approaching — twilight. Beautiful stuff.

We just got done meeting Kidzmom halfway between her place and ours, dropping off the boy for summer vacation after a long, harrowing school year. Final verdict — boy’s brain is turned ON. Hooray. He assures us it’ll still be that way at the end of summer. But you know how twelve-year-old boys are.

As our reward & celebration to him and to recognize a job well done, we saw the new Star Trek film, which you’ve probably seen by now. That review is for another post, I think.

Better pics tomorrow. Apologies again. Maybe we need to put a real camera on my birthday list. Giving it some serious thought…

Click for 1024×768.

Knight Rider.

Battlestar Galactica.

Wonder Woman.

The Dukes of Hazzard.

Buck Rogers in the 25th Century.

The Fall Guy.

I got ’em all. If it was on the idjit box, somewhere around the time John Lennon was gunned down, and it was something you pleaded with your parents to watch, because on a Friday night there wasn’t anything else for you to do — I’ve got it. And…here’s the funny thing…I don’t really understand why. This was not the “golden age” of inspiring, thoughtful, deep or enjoyable television shows. But I got ’em. Several pounds of ’em. It’s like quicksand. You step into it, and some force that wasn’t there before, just kinda pulls you in.

I blame some of it on the kid. For someone born in 1997, he asks profound, insightful questions about this stuff. And he notices things I didn’t notice. Things, like Arsenio Hall used to say, that make you go “Hmmmm.” Like, for example — whenever The Incredible Hulk takes on a bad guy, the only thing he ever does to them is throw ’em. No hitting, no kicking, no gouging, no biting. And he never throws ’em into a brick wall, either. Or a plastic shredder or a vat of molten steel or a bottomless pit. Nope. It’s always a pile of squishy stuff. Raaaarrr!!! Aaaaiiigghh!! (Zoop!) Plop, into the pile of squishy stuff. The stagnant swamp water, the pile of foam rubber, the empty cardboard boxes in the warehouse.

Whenever Bill Bixby gets angry, there’s gonna be ugly middle aged white guys in leisure suits with muttonchop sideburns flying through the air like hackey sacks, yodeling, sailing headlong into piles of squishy stuff. And a big green guy.

Much of what is unexpectedly addictive, has to do with what is eerily consistent. The women are always docile but have lots of fashion sense. They’re gorgeous but don’t think about sex very much. They really, really do dream of settling down with a truly nice guy. I blame these television shows for the genesis of my miserable misadventures with girls and women, as I suspect most men my age do; it cost me serious money to figure out the hard way that women aren’t really like that. As for the guys — the footwear is always pointy. That’s a rule. The pants are flared at the ankles, up to the size of a basketball hoop. The butts are tight, tight, tight. Size 26. Size 24. Smaller still…which, by today’s standards, look a little silly when paired up with a flowy cowboy button-down shirt open down to the navel, with a shirt collar bigger than your dining room table. Back then, men didn’t shave their chests; quite to the contrary, they wore chest-toupees. If they really looked like that in real life, they’d have had to scrub their chests every other day to keep from getting dandruff. They could smuggle sandwiches in there. And another thing — they were amateur psychologists. They used unnecessarily extravagant magic-words like “self-esteem,” even if the most complex or exotic thing they’d ever done with their young lives was to smuggle moonshine past Roscoe P. Coltrane for their kindly uncle…and they recited canned pysch-babble phrases like “you can’t bottle up all your emotions inside,” and “you need to confront him with all this rage you’re feeling,” and “you mustn’t blame yourself.”

Everyone had to rescue a Russian gymnast. Everyone. This was a rule nobody even thought of bending. It was like taking your turn on KP duty in the army, everyone had to do it at some time or another. Coy and Vance Duke had to do it. Buck Rogers had to do it. Yup, Buck Rogers rescued a Russian gymnast in the 25th century. Even James Bond had to do it. Twice. I do believe The Bionic Woman had to do it too, I just haven’t nailed down exactly the right episode yet. Goddamn, it was just raining doe-eyed whiny Russian gymnasts. There were more Russian gymnasts in need of rescuing than there were flattened rodents on the highway.

It was a time of transition. Toward the beginning of the era, the bad guys who you could tell were bad, because they were male, white, over 45 years old and they wore nice three-piece suits even at night — worked for government agencies. That was the Watergate influence. After Reagan was sworn into office, the bad guys were still male, still white, still over 45 years old, but now they worked for “corporations.” Nobody put a lot of trouble into figuring out why the corporations wanted to kill the good guy and the charmingly waifish but plucky single-mom he was constantly rescuing. The consensus that eventually emerged was that the corporations wanted to dump some toxic waste into the river. Yup. A complicated, fiendish plot to dump goop in a river. That must be quite the lengthy corporate income statement. Hit men, paid by the hour, to rub out anyone who gets in the way of us dumping our toxic waste into the river. And the hit mens’ suits, and moustache wax.

You might not have all this wonderful cultural decadence on your own DVD shelf, because you’ve been spending all your money and energy building up some silly iPod music collection, or some such. But don’t agonize over it. You mustn’t blame yourself.

Santa Claus in a Brown Uniform^* just delivered the new Tomb Raider game, and in so doing informed me in a round-about way that the drive on my PS2 console is shot. Quick trip to Gamestop and I got me a slimline, so I can continue to play state-of-the-art games without shelling out $400 bucks for some piece of hardware that doesn’t mean too much more to me than an oil filter wrench. Everything works, and the game’s reasonably decent. Don’t expect too much. One or two new features, a bunch of new puzzles. Like you expected.

Um, she also balances on things. This is a little aggravating, and is the subject & inspiration of what you see below.

I have a fantastic idea for Tomb Raider 9, though. Actually not so much an idea, just a suggestion about what to do differently. This one’s for you, Daphne.

What is Tomb Raider? Think all the way back to the first one. Think about every single installment since then. Here’s my take on it…

Lara Croft is this hot chick. As such, she’s a girl-woman. A female. Now, I’m a guy. I sit down with my joystick (hah!), engage Lara, and tell her what to do. I mean, I do that after I open up my wallet and pay for a bunch of goods and services to make this possible.

As I tell her what to do, she makes a show out of doing what I tell her what to do. Which is to say, sometimes she does exactly what I tell her to do…sometimes she only pays lip-service to what I tell her to do, and does something completely different.

Sometimes I tell her to go straight ahead, and instead she goes off kinda North-Northwest.

If she doesn’t do what I tell her to do, she falls off from things, gets hurt, sometimes gets killed, sometimes gets eaten.

If she lives all the way through to the end of the level and gets hold of the key/treasure/map/icon/whatever, Lara solved the level. Yay Lara! She solved the level by doing what I told her to do.

If she doesn’t do what I told her to do, and ends up getting killed, I got Lara killed. Even though she got killed because she didn’t do what I told her to do.

If you’re bright, by now you’ve seen where I’m going with this. She gets all the credit, I get all the blame, even though if she’d just do what I tell her to do, she’d get killed maybe only one-tenth as often as she does.

It’s a little bit too much like real life, y’know?

How about, when I tell her to veer off to the left so the fireball doesn’t hit her, and instead she just walks right into it like a lemming over a cliff…she looks right into the camera, apologizes profusely, asks for a do-over, and takes extra-careful steps to make absolutely sure she understands which way I’m telling her to walk. And then, if it still doesn’t work out, pulls an ancient scroll out of the knapsack of hers with a mailing address of someone who’d be happy to ship me a brand new controller — on her dime. After all, I’ve already been hit in the pocketbook plenty hard enough, and the Countess of Abbington is supposed to be independently wealthy, haven’t you heard?

That would be a pleasant break from reality.

^*The UPS guy. You knew that.

One of our favorite female blogger/readers had some comments that made me laugh out loud. Really. I know “LOL” is a lie 99% of the time, but this time it was true; ask my kid, he was worried I was going to have a stroke. It’s from where we go to get our ribald lagniappes of jolly smut.

My favorite male chauvinist pig in the whole world has a couple of fine entries posted. This deserves some attention, but the prolific bastard’s loaded umpteen entries since this morning and I don’t have the patience to dig through his trough for the other one I liked. He deserves a full visit on general principal, though.

This is how I visualize MKFreeburg when I’m reading him… all hot and nasty. I want to smack and kiss him in the same breath, even though he’s totally in love with the mighty fine Miss Cassy and not me.

Ah, I’m fond of you both, Daphne. I might mirror more of Cassy’s work because she spends more space & time trashing the feminists, which appeals to my puerile interests.

My heart belongs to another, though, and she isn’t even online anywhere.

Regarding this young fellow I’m supposed to resemble: He does seem to have the post-reveille pre-shower blogging attire down pat, but there the similarity ends and this exercise regimen in which he appears to be engaged doesn’t reflect me either. I’m more of a lift-beer-bottle-to-lips kinda guy, and truth be told, the physique might reflect that somewhat.

Why the burst lately? We just got the broadband compny to get their act in gear and now we’re taking advantage of the improved performance.

There’s pictures of me to upload, but they’re all on the local drive of the desktop in the other room. Perhaps that’s for the best. Don’t want to give Mr. Beckham a complex…