John Kay and Steppenwolf

I was looking at the Steppenwolf web site ( http://www.steppenwolf.com/ ) and was saddened to see that John Kay has appearantly decided to retire from music and to stop touring.

2007 was the last year of their big international tour and if you have seen Steppenwolf in recent years you likely knew that John Kay and the band seemed to be everywhere, worldwide, during most of the year. They were certainly popular during Bike Week and other big motorcycle events.

John writes on his web site that he and his wife intend to travel during 2008 and be part of a charitable foundation that they established some years ago.

Kay and the original lineup for Steppenwolf have a really entertaining history incidentally. Kay was born in 1944. His father and mother were German, and Kay's father was killed in the fighting on the Russian front a month before he was born. Kay's mother took the infant John Kay into what would become East Germany and was forced to flee 4 years later as the Communists took over.

Making his way to Canada, John was asked to sing for a new band, The Sparrows, that had included members of another local band called the Mynah Birds. Two of the Mynah Bird members that didn't make the cut to the new band were an AWOL US soldier named Ricky Matthews, who would later change his name to {drum roll here} Rick James, and an underappreciated musician in a non-singing, non-writing role named Neil Young. It's a small world indeed.

Here's wishing John Kay a well-deserved retirement and thanks for some really good memories. And I guess that the moral is that we need to get out there and see our musical giants that inspire us so. 'cause they ain't gonna be around forever.

_________________

--PirateJohn--

http://www.piratejohn.com/

Where did I put those damned reading glasses?

Now that I have slightly passed the half-century point, I have to admit that some aspects of old age are starting to catch up with me. Specifically, I can no longer see as well as I used to.

More to the point, I have gotten to where lately I have had to walk around the office all the time with a pair of cheap reading glasses on my nose. That sucks.

I wear contact lenses and have for years, perhaps over 30 years. My vision can be adjusted to where it’s better than 20/20 at a distance, but it has become difficult to read without reading glasses.

A few years ago an optometrist suggested that I try bifocal contact lenses and I hated them. But today, as I write this, I am reluctantly trying them again and discovering that while my distance vision isn’t as sharp with the bifocal lenses, that I can once again read without reading glasses.

I think that the solution is going to be to get a prescription for both the standard lens and a set of bifocal lens, and change them as conditions require. In other words, my normal lens is going to be the bifocal ones, but when I plan a day (or multiple days) of motorcycling or driving I am going to switch back to the standard lens.

Interestingly enough, the way that the optician does this only one eye, the dominant eye, actually gets a bifocal contact. The other eye, the not-so-dominant one, has to make do with a standard lens.

As I told a friend, the military could send me to Afghanistan. My distance vision is great and I’d make a helluva sniper, if I would just lay off the coffee. The only problem is that I’d need reading glasses to load my rifle. Bummer.

Anyway, this is just another chapter in the “Better Living and Aging Gracefully Thanks to Technology” files. I frankly didn’t realize that bifocal contact lenses were readily available, but they seem to be nothing special these days.

--PirateJohn--
http://pyratejohn.blogspot.com/ (the *NEW* blog)
http://www.PirateJohn.com (my website)
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HumourList/ (the infamous joke list)

Enjoy!

Generosity

My Dad was an attorney. When he passed away, I found a collection of attorney jokes underneath his desk blotter, so you have to take lawyer jokes with a grain of salt. With that said ... here goes ... ;)

~~

The United Way realized that it had never received a donation from the city's most successful lawyer. So a United Way volunteer paid the lawyer a visit in his lavish office.

The volunteer opened the meeting by saying, 'Our research shows that even though your annual income is over two million dollars, you don't give a penny to charity. Wouldn't you like to give something back to your community through the United Way?'

The lawyer thinks for a minute and says, 'First, did your research also how you that my mother is dying after a long, painful illness and she has huge medical bills that are far beyond her ability to pay?'

Embarrassed, the United Way rep mumbles, 'Uh... no, I didn't know that.''

Secondly,' says the lawyer, ' did it show that my brother, a disabled veteran, is blind and confined to a wheelchair and is unable to support his wife and six children?

The stricken United Way rep begins to stammer an apology, but is cut off again.'

"Thirdly, did your research also show you that my sister's husband died in dreadful car accident, leaving her penniless with a mortgage and three children, one of whom is disabled and another that has learning disabilities requiring an array of private tutors?'

The humiliated United Way rep, completely beaten, says, 'I'm so sorry, I had no idea.'

And the lawyer says, 'So...if I didn't give any money to them, what makes you think I'd give any to you?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

--PirateJohn--

http://pyratejohn.blogspot.com/ (the *NEW* blog)
http://www.PirateJohn.com (my website)
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HumourList/ (the infamous joke list)

Enjoy!

Momma Has A Brand New Throne

subtitled: The Heartwarming Tale of a Woman, Her New Toilet, and The Man Who Loves Her


sub-subtitled: The Week From Hell, Part 1






Some weeks try a man's patience.

Some weeks drive a man to drink.

This week is just about ready to drive me to drink, except that I am too worn out to get into any trouble. So I think that I will just go to bed early tonight.

As many of you folks know, Yours Truly has become a full-time RV'er and lives in what is essentially a large bus. That right there has its own set of pros and cons and tall tales.

She Who Must Be Obeyed and I have been reconditioning this thing for about 2 years. It's a wonderful piece of machinery, but it's almost 25 years old so it's got its quirks. And that's putting it mildly.

We decided to replace the carpet with a combination of what they call pre-engineered wood flooring, with is pretty neat stuff incidentally, and a cork flooring product that is intended for industrial applications such as restaurants. The cork floor went into the bathroom and bedroom and that was our big project during Thanksgiving.

I am happy to report that the floor looks nice and that I still have all of my fingers.

As part of that project I removed the original RV toilet. Let me tell you brother, that taking out a 25 year old toilet is definitely taking one's life into one's own hands. Armed with rubber gloves and a mask, that wasn't fun. I felt like Ed Norton, Jackie Gleason's sewer-working pal from the Honeymooners. Egads!

The original toilet had a couple of leaks (thankfully all of the clean water variety) and I repaired those leaks. But when I was reinstalling the toilet a third leak occurred and that was the death sentence for that sucker.

So we bought a new, fancier toilet. Or "terlet" as we say here in the Righteous South.

Late on Sunday night we were still struggling with the terlet. It was installed, but we still didn't have the proper water hose. So rather than move the motorhome away from our workshop, schlep across town, and drive back another 30-40 miles I decided to take part of Monday off and get the job done once and for all.

And let's put things this-a-way. Screwing around with that toilet has been about the highlight and most satisfying part of my week so far. Things have been that tough around here!

I had promised myself that I would update the blog at least twice a week. You will notice that this is Thursday and well ... here we are. No tales of travel, motorcycles, UFO's, computers, outrageous living, silly guy stuff, and any of those good things. Nutin'.

A few weeks ago the server at The Day Job crashed. I will give you, Gentle Reader, three guesses as to whose responsibility that is. Three guesses, and as they say in the bars, the first two guesses don't count.

At some point the outside service that provides our POP3 mail decided to quit for seemingly no reason. Then, after about 24 hours, it magically started up again. The admins there claim to be completely puzzled and saying that it didn't impact any of their other customers.

And on our end everyone is looking at ol' John and asking "Where is my email?" You would almost think that if it was old style postal mail they would wonder if I had stolen the company mail bag.

And then, for the last two days we have been struggling with an Internet outage. Never mind that 1) we were in the middle of changing from one service provider to another, 2) the company that we went with is in the middle of a merger and it turns out that their records aren't in synch and they keep confuzing us with another company in the Heathen Northeast, 3) Said Large Phone Company has tech support scattered throughout the planet and the ones in the Phillipines that I got shuffled to literally couldn't understand what I was very plainly saying (and in some cases shouting), and 4) we were told that a fiber optic cable got cut but now I wonder if that wasn't just an excuse for the phone tech to avoid saying that they didn't have a clue.

Oh, and the registrar of our DNS records, for you geeks, is yet another entity and they didn't seem to be awake either.

All in all it's been a hellacious week.

So I am going to take tomorrow off in order to plan and plot something Bigger and Better.

All kidding aside, it's been a tough week, but a productive week. I stayed out way too late one night at a bar but came away with a 23 chapter outline for a fictional book that I am working on, almost as a dare. And yeah, after I got some sleep the frickin' thing still read pretty well.

I have been writing in biker bars using a laptop for years. Lately I've been using an EVDO card to get my Internet access so I, and about a dozen of my closest friends and fellow drinkers, can surf the 'net from the comfort of our bar stools. Lately, I'm not the only one there with a similar setup. This world is getting weird, I'll tell ya.

So you have to laugh at this nonsense. When life gets you down, you just have to keep plugging away and remember your goals. And work towards them. Even if your only goal in life is to make it to the end of the next NASCAR broadcast. Or to find the last piece of Three Stooges memorabilia on eBay. Whatever turns your crank, you have to keep at it.

That, and having a few beers at the end of the day doesn't hurt a bit either.

If nothing else, if you are a writer, you can always reflect and realize that you meet the most interesting characters in pubs and if that doesn't inspire your fictional characters then nothing will.

When life gives you lemons, the wise man makes lemonade. And he has a big smile on his face as he's stirring up those lemons.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
--PirateJohn--
http://pyratejohn.blogspot.com/ (the *NEW* blog)
http://www.piratejohn.com/ (my website)
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HumourList/ (the infamous joke list)

Enjoy!

The friend that sent this to me asked me if I have an alibi.

Let's just say that I wasn't nearby. That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.

~~~

From
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5gScKIIelzS99auF7ivTtOkGX4USwD8TC1FQ01

Irish Police Bust Beer Bandits
By SHAWN POGATCHNIK – 1 day ago

DUBLIN, Ireland (AP) — Ireland's national police force has arrested two men in connection with an audacious robbery last week on the landmark Guinness Brewery in Dublin — but said Thursday they were still looking others involved in the beer banditry.

The Garda Siochana police force declined to specify how many kegs have been recovered following the Nov. 29 raid, when a lone man drove a truck into the brewery, hitched up a trailer loaded with 450 kegs and drove straight out through the security gate into rush-hour traffic.

Guinness called it the biggest robbery in the 248-year history of the brewery.

Police said they recovered an unspecified volume of the stolen beer Monday at an undisclosed location in County Meath, northwest of Dublin, and arrested two men Tuesday on suspicion of involvement with the theft.

Police said one man was charged Wednesday with possessing stolen property and received bail pending his arraignment in Kilmainham District Court, west Dublin, on Dec. 21 — an unusual delay that reflected detectives' desire to keep looking for others involved in the robbery before showing their hand in court.

The other man was released Wednesday without charge. But police said he was suspected of lesser involvement in the robbery and a file of evidence was sent to the state prosecutors' office, a common practice in Ireland.

The Garda Siochana said it would not release any details about the two men, their alleged involvement, the location of the recovered kegs or how much of the beer booty remained at large, saying it could make it harder to catch others involved in the raid.

Irish detectives sometimes put bailed suspects under surveillance in hopes that they might help police to identify others involved in a particular crime.

The stolen trailer was loaded up with 180 kegs of Guinness stout, 180 kegs of brand Budweiser and 90 kegs of Danish brand Carlsberg. Guinness has a contract to brew and distribute those beers in Ireland.

Each keg holds about 88 British-sized pints, the most common serving size in Ireland — about 20 ounces each. The total theft involves 39,600 pints with a retail value exceeding $235,000.

The Republic of Ireland, a country of 4.2 million, has more than 10,000 pubs and bars. The Guinness brewery in Dublin is the biggest supplier, producing more than 5 million kegs annually.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

--PirateJohn--

http://pyratejohn.blogspot.com/ (the *NEW* blog)

http://www.piratejohn.com/ (my website)

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HumourList/ (the infamous joke list)

Enjoy!

Greetings!

Welcome to my Blog. Or, perhaps more correctly, my second attempt at blogging.

This whole electronic media/non-traditional publishing thang is a multiple-beer discussion. So pull up a chair.

Many people want to write about themselves and publicize their opinions. Very few are interesting. I am going to stick my neck out a bit and see if I can't offer some content, at least to a select audience. Or a demented audience, as the case may be - back in the early days of the HumourList we certainly did some free-spirited things. My travel stuff is still pretty wild (who else has pointers on hookers in Mexico and Daytona Beach, for example?). Perhaps we can recapture some of that spirit of good-natured upbeat rowdiness here.

Folks today are busier than ever and we are being overwhelmed with content. Decades of national policy in the USA are being reduced to one paragraph soundbites, for example. We are living in a dog eat dog world as far as publishers are concerned. The technology is changing rapidly, and it's becoming more and more difficult to be heard above the roar.

At the same time a small publisher or small commentator has an equal opportunity to be heard as many commentator with national network backing and finances. Love him or hate him, Matt Drudge showed that an individual with some lucky breaks and a web site could compete with the big dogs. So hope springs eternal, just as I keep buying those Florida Loto tickets. Could happen, I guess.

My late, sainted father was an author of legal textbooks. He had his own legal dictionary in print at the time that he died, for crying out loud. Do you know how hard it is to argue diction with a man who has published his own dictionary?

Anyway, Dad was a great guy. He was involved with a periodical that was, at the time, promoting the idea of the small press wherein every man could print his own books. Pretty radical stuff in the pre- small computer days of the late 70's and early 80's.

Another thought sticks in my mind when I think about Dad. He always wanted to write fiction, with him doing the technical legal aspects (Dad was a practicing attorney with a second graduate degree in Library Science) and Yours Truly writing the fictional plot aspects. Dad complained that Perry Mason and such was terribly incorrect. Some years later a Tennessee attorney by the name of Gresham came along and wrote more technically correct works of legal fiction (and with interesting plots - let's not forget the obvious); Dad might have been on to something after all and in one of my few regrets in life I wish that we had taken a stab at that format, just for funsies.

Back to what we are trying to accomplish here, my interests over the years have grown and grown in many directions.

Almost 15 years ago I started to distribute the HumourList ( http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HumourList/ ). At the time sending jokes over the 'net was pretty radical. I would hear my stuff on the local radio pretty frequently, but when Playboy Magazine sent me a couple of royalty checks, and when I heard my stuff being mentioned on the radio in Guam, I figured "Hey ... that ain't bad!"

Today the HumourList is pretty mild, and as we know EVERYONE redistributes jokes over the office email, but I am happy to say that almost 1,400 loyal souls still subscribe to the HumourList.

Since then I have put up a couple of websites ( http://www.piratejohn.com/ ) to take a stab at showcasing my interests and some of my writings. My current site is way past due for a makeover, frankly, but I figure that I'll get there eventually. Sort of a what-am-I-going-to-do-with-this/what-should-I-do-when-I-grow-up thing.

I also contribute quite a bit on various Jimmy Buffett, motorcycle, motorhome, travel, and other mailing lists and web sites. I run several mailing lists myself, and when I tell folks that I am on something like 350 mailing lists it's not a joke. Doesn't mean that I read every one in any detail or anything, but that's beside the point ;)

Lately I have been developing an interest in what can best be described as "mobile architecture" or the modern gypsy lifestyle. As much as I love my current hometown (Greater Jacksonville, FL) I have a yearning to move elsewhere, even if only for a year or two. There is so much to see and do and so little time, as many of my friends have sadly discovered.

A couple of years ago I published a free revised guide to the Florida Keys ( http://www.buccaneerpublishing.com/AdventureGuide.htm ), which was followed by a 250 page print book on motorcycling in Northeastern Florida ( http://buccaneerpublishing.com/products.htm ).

The Keys Guide has been very well received, even if co-author Captain Ron Thomas Smith has turned out to be a jerkoff and frankly an embarrassing buffoon on some other issues, and the Northeastern Florida book was VERY successful. When I say that the Northeastern Florida book was a roaring success you have to put this into prospective; most first time publishers, publishing their own materials, lose their asses big time. I broke even, which is a major success in the eyes of most of us who have actually tried publishing our own books (a lesson there - critics are plentiful, but few of those critics have the balls to do it themselves.)

Yet something is lacking ...

My jokes, commentaries on miscellaneous things, and my travel materials often appeal to different audiences. Oh, there's some crossover, but it's a difficult balancing act at times to keep the various mailing lists separate.

And I haven't had the time for the last few years to really write about the ins and outs of life, most of them pretty funny if not out-and-out exciting. I am hoping to get back to doing that, even as I begin new directions in my life and take on new tasks (more on that in another post).

But the big thing that I am trying to do these days is to organize my travel materials into a format that is indexed and easily accessible. Ideally, something that goes quickly from being online (and presumably readily updated) to something that can be printed out or put into PDF format pretty quickly. This blog, and it's feed to XML, is a bit of an experiment to see if myself and an associate or two can come up with a system to close that gap on the mythical ideal of push-button publishing. Sound like geekspeak to you? Does to me at times too, but we'll see what happens.

Organizing my travel materials may require a separate blog, or perhaps even a completely different format. I started a dedicated travel site many months ago using a popular software designed for chat boards but haven't populated it beyond a few entries. That site has never been publicly mentioned that I am aware of. Until now. Check out http://www.piratejohntravel.com/ if you dare.

I hope to see some of y'all drop into this blog every so often. Your comments, both public and backchannel, are welcomed, although I do warn you that I delight in deleting comments from those silly anonymous trolls that are popping up all over the 'net these days. Fun's fun, but you would think that some of those children and old geezers would have better things to do with their time.

Y'all drop back in, y'hear!

--PirateJohn--

http://www.pyratejohn.blogspot.com/

http://www.piratejohn.com/

Staring at breasts improves men's lifespans - if you don't get caught

This is perhaps not really typical of what will be in this blog, but hey. I used this gag on my joke list, it was handy, it was halfway funny, and it was a good first post to experiment with the layout of the blog. So enjoy.

And trust me. If you are offended by this, uh ... "young lady" ... the odds are that things are just going to go downhill from here ;)




Put this in the "I read it on the 'net so it must be true" files.

The original article is at

http://news.softpedia.com/news/10-Minutes-Of-Staring-Boobs-Daily-Prolongs-Man-039-s-Life-by-5-Years-72490.shtml

~~~

10 Minutes Of Staring at Boobs Daily Prolongs Man's Life by 5 Years...
- The beneficial starlets
By: Stefan Anitei, Science Editor



Listen, guys, now we know why Pamela Anderson made her transplants: to make us healthier. "Angels of mercy" like Jordan just prolong our life and Hugh Hefner knows it.

A German research published in New England Journal of Medicine and Weekly World News said that men staring at women's breasts in fact prolong their lives with years.


"Just 10 minutes of staring at the charms of a well-endowed female such as Baywatch actress Pamela Lee is equivalent to a 30-minute aerobics work-out," said author Dr. Karen Weatherby, a gerontologist.

The team led by Weatherby was made up of researchers at three hospitals in Frankfurt, Germany, and found this results after monitoring for 5 years the health of 200 male subjects, half of whom were asked to look at busty females daily, while the other half had to abstain from doing so.

For five years, the boob oglers presented a lower blood pressure, slower resting pulse rates and decreased risk of coronary artery disease.

"Sexual excitement gets the heart pumping and improves blood circulation. There's no question: Gazing at large breasts makes men healthier. Our study indicates that engaging in this activity a few minutes daily cuts the risk of stroke and heart attack in half." said Weatherby, who even recommended that men aged over 40 should spend at least 10 minutes daily admiring breasts sized "D-cup" or larger.

She said that this was as healthy as going to the gym for 30 minutes daily and prolonged a man's life by five years.

"We believe that by doing so consistently, the average man can extend his life four to five years." said Weatherby.

This is indeed a very serious reason for men to enjoy without shame those midnight TV shows, download low-budget women-in-prison movies and collect such instructive and health beneficial magazines like Playboy and Hustler.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
--PirateJohn--
www.PirateJohn.com