the door at work

so the office in the building in which i work is accessible by two doors on opposite ends of the area; both are magnetically locked and can only be opened with the proper badge and reading of the code on said badge by the door lock sensor.

that is, until yesterday when someone leaned too heavy a shoulder or something into the door near my end, the result being that the metal arm lever that brings the door to a mechanically controlled slow, smooth close was broken off from its moorings to the door frame and now acts as a wedge that keeps the door from being closed properly.

maintenance should be by to fix it in short order, but the interesting thing to me for the time being is, having gone through the swipe badge / open door / proceed through door routine for a long time now, that i get this weird Pavlovian sense of unease whenever i now walk through the door standing listlessly agape.

there are no free and open doors anymore, it's lunacy! there must be some requirement to gain access, it boggles the modern mind to just flow through unchecked.

brave dog survives danger, shoddy writing

so cnn had this story on the air about a fourteen-year-old dalmatian that got stuck in a storm drain underground for four days; concerned friends and family eventually rescued him.

i went to the web to find an article of this happy-ending story that i could forward to my wife and her sister (both ardent dog lovers)

and this.... this is the first article i find:

KLTV in Tyler - proofread what you put on your website
________________________________________________________-
8/21/07 Wayne County , West Virginia
Dog Buried Alive Trapped Four Days Underground

Dog trapped underground in a storm drain for four days has been rescued.

Listen carefully, and you'll hear a grown man cry: Tears of triumph over tragedy. Finding his buried dog: alive.

This is a story of sheer perseverance! It could have had a completely different ending. The threat of a cave in, after heavy rain, was very real!

Alex the Dalmation was trapped 15 feet underground in an old storm drain. He crawled in to cool offand got stuck.

A danger, not only to the trapped dog, but it's owner: who had been digging for days to try and free Alex. A friend with a backhoe came to help, inching dangerously close. It's giant, iron claw capable of ripping the animal in half. A hole large enough to swallow this ladder whole and everyone and everything in it.

That was the thing we had to whisper a little prayer for last night, because these dogs get to be like part of the family.

But after 4 days of searching and two days of digging, Alex, was free.

For 14 years he has bee a part of Thompson family.

Alex was taken to the vet, early this afternoon: he arrived on a stretcher. iI's a miracle.
______________________________________________________


a veritable minefield of:
- exclamation points! !! !
- colons and commas dispersed on a seemingly random basis
- fragment sentences that start almost in mid-thought and end jarringly abrupt
- apostrophes where no apostrophe should be
- missing letters and misspelled words


it's so bad, it's almost poetic. brave, brave doggy.

30 is the new 20

hey, my friend of friends, Steven, who in the beginning gave birth to this website, was given birth to on this earth this day thirty years ago!

so happiest of birthdays to you Steve, my contemporary. if your thirtieth year is anything like mine it'll usher in an era of curiously increased focus on the richness of the green color of the lawn grass bordering your domicile. then again, recent home ownership may have contaminated me as a subject for purposes of the scientific "age 29 vs age 30" study.

i'm alive

that is to say, i'm more alive than my blog has been of late.

same excuse remains: work and process of moving into home, trying to keep track of all the things to buy and errands to run.

bright spot of hope: probably going to get a new laptop soon so i can take care of my computer reponsibilities wirelessly from the comfort of our couch at home. this will enable some more responsible blogging frequency (and possibly catching up on old post ideas that have been mouldering) than what i am able to accomplish at odd moments during the workday

another FOX News watch post? ...... yes

ok this is going to be kind of a weak post after almost a month's absence but been super-busy with goings-on at work and home, both environments being full of much activity. i'll deal with the backlog of post ideas later, but for now:

the subtitle script as Fox News' own Neil Cavuto interviews one football player to get his thoughts on how the wealth of another football player was not sufficient to remove said other football player from enjoying rougher, less socially acceptable hobbies:

"Ladainian Tomlinson thoughts on the the Vick dogfighting case"

first the Fox News monkey typist is a poor grammar student, now he's a stutterer.

at the Target checkout

so grace and i were on a low-quantity Target run for some miscellaneous grocery items and we're behind this guy in line.

probably about in his late twenties, i think he was indian; he's buying exactly two DVDs and nothing else.

engaging in a casual invasion of privacy, i glance over to see which titles he had elected to purchase.

consider this:

Dreamgirls

and

Action Force (starring Steven Seagal)

what an odd mix

now i can understand if this DVD run was the result of some compromise; girlfriend / wife wants Dreamgirls and in return guy gets to have an action flick, but if that's the case why isn't he buying one of the classics, like the first Die Hard? or Aliens? or Predator?

what drives someone to not only buy a Steven Seagal movie but also one of his certainly more recent direct-to-DVD releases? i mean, if he was buying Hard to Kill i might give it a pass, but Action Force? i'm starting to think a review of the man's collection at home might also include a few seasons of Walker, Texas Ranger.

check your dictionary, son

so i was waiting in Fuzzy's Pizza late evening last night for my to-go order of pizza to make its way out of the oven.

tired and a little bored, i sat down near the racks of free local magazines and started perusing.

found one called "DISH" apparently concerning all matters of food and cooking, or at least those matters that could be discussed within its ten or twelve pages. high-color production but the flavor of the articles and illustrations pointed toward a less-than-professionally-trained crew. case in point was the magazine's cartoon strip which was three frames depicting various people's positive interactions with DISH magazine and their efforts to pass along knowledge of DISH magazine to other people at restaurants and parties and such and how those other people were equally as pleased with what DISH magazine had to offer.

flipped to the back and found some fluff paragraph all about the Blue Bell Creamery in Breham. the sentence that caught my eye read something like this:

"just a short drive outside of town you can find the Blue Bell Creamery, in a melancholy world all its own."


melancholy....i'm sure the author meant to intend something else. i went to the Blue Bell Creamery as a kid, seemed pretty upbeat to me. but it's been many a year since then; maybe i'm mistaken, maybe i've been living inside the fog of assumption that a business entirely centered around pleasure food was immune to the pitfalls of gloom and depression.