Kevin's Guest post

Ok thanks, Jill said I have to do a post. So back by popular demand, it's me. Im here to delight all four readers of this blog with pointless crap from the internet.

Let's start with pictures of how people in North Carolina fix things:

I love this one, who says you need a trailer for an ATV?!



This is the great website where I got these pictures (Dad you'll love this site): http://thereifixedit.failblog.org/


Now, animals that should not have been created:






Animals that should have been created. How cool would a bear-shark be?


I decided I would have a travel segment. Below is a chart of pros and cons for the places I've lived, this will be useful if youre considering a move to one of these states:


Buffalo New York

Pros:
· If you like sports teams you’ll be entertained.
· If you like winning sports teams go somewhere else.
· Has the best drum store in America.
· 95% of my family live within 20 feet of each other so you can see everyone at once if you stand in the street and spin around.
· Mighty Taco.
· Only state that has more than once choice for good pizza and wings.
· People are nice in Western New York.
· They get less snow than Marquette Michigan.
· Note: my mom loves Buffalo. If Buffalo had a plague of locusts, after a nuclear holocaust and it was raining, my mom would still think it was the best place on earth and would be ‘talking proud’.

Cons:
(sorry mom, gotta do it)
· The only city I’ve been scared to venture in at night.
· The only city where I found a bullet hole in my car.
· You cant escape Buffalo, if you drive 10 miles you’ll still be in the city, if you drive 10 more you’ll still be there –if you keep driving you reach Erie Pennsylvania or Niagara Falls (which are both worse than Buffalo).
· All the names of the places sound like they were invented by Indians with speech impediments (Cheektowaga, Lackawana, Scajackwada, Tonawanda, etc.).
· The only place I’ve lived where people know what Dingus Day is.
· No sidewalks in most places that I remember, too many cars, no one bikes.
· It’s named after a big, slow, almost-extinct animal.
· Home of Mrs. Broska (and Nativity school in general)


Morton Illinois

Pros:
· Good for people who really, really love corn.
· In September one can experience creepy carne people while seeing pumpkins at the same time.
· My mother in law lives there and it’s 1690 miles away (she knows Im joking...)
· If you need to move you can just drive 30 miles to the next town and not miss a thing, they all look the same.
· Big margarita pitchers at La Fiesta
· They call bags ‘sacks’ which never stops being funny to me.
· We were dirt poor when we lived in IL –that was a good thing to experience (I wish I had pictures of the free car someone at church gave us –it was held together with duct tape).

Cons:

· The highest features in the state are power-line towers.

· you get sad to see people ‘trying’ adventure sports in Illinois (watching someone pretend they are an ‘extreme’ kayaker on the slow, muddy, Mackanaw river, or watching people ‘climb’ a 20 foot rock, or ‘camp’ in a cornfield breaks my heart.)

· But a pro: you don’t have to worry about where to find adventure gear –there’s only one shop in the state and it’s never busy (but don’t ask the sales guys for help with the ski or climbing gear, they have never used any of it).

· I had to work in the tire shop at Farm and Fleet with polyester clothes in 100 degree heat changing truck tires.

· Jill’s mom is equally passionate about Morton as my mom is for Buffalo. Diana could be in the middle of a tropical paradise on a catamaran sipping a pina colada watching the sun-set over the ocean and would still say “this is nice but Morton has all this”.

Harrisonburg Virginia

Pros:
· Great climate
· More Mennonites than you can shake a stick at.
· I met Jill with her weird hair and weird clothes there
· It’s the place where I first lived on my own and learned that you cant freeze tomatoes but you can make dozens of meals from a $3 box microwave chicken patties.
· There was a guy named Dixon there (Dixon is a cool name)

Cons:
· The city either smells like dog food from the dog food factory, or chicken from the chicken processing factory.
· Home of the 3 worst jobs I ever had: working in a book factory, working in a car wash, working in a Chinese restaurant. That makes me think of another Con: it’s filled with NASCAR folks who think you don’t have to tip people if they work in a Chinese restaurant.
· They win the ‘most trucks with pictures of Calvin pee-ing on something’ award.


Greenville North Carolina

Pros:
· Only an hour from the coast.
· Learned to sail there with Charlie
· Good place to live if you are into the Rebel flag.
· If you don’t like trash cans you can just throw your trash on the ground –it’s a regional tradition.
· If there is a football game you get to decorate your car and drive it around like that every weekend!
· I won the watermelon throwing contest one year at the 'Watermelon festival'

· Learned to play roller hockey.
· Was in the best band I’ve ever been in.

Cons:
· The culture is centered around BBQ-ing animals.
· Everyone talks like their mouths are full of spitting tobacco –because they are.
· Every year or so a hurricane will flood the city (But that doesn’t affect it too much, it just means there are more wet mattresses on the side of the road than usual)

· everyone there is obese, has diabetes, and cant climb a flight a stairs yet they seemed genuinely confused at recommendations that they shouldn't eat 'fat back' (bacon fat fried in fat)

· I could write 10 pages here, I will stop.

Burlington Vermont

Pros:
· Great food available everywhere (Remember Donnies?)
· Church street on Friday night.
· Had a fast boat and no kids to whine while we sailed it.
· Cider and Cabot Cheese.
· The place where I learned to snowboard

Cons:
· The place where I learned that I suck at snowboarding.
· Houses cost more than small islands in the Carribean.
· Winter is 7 months long.
· It took us 4 years to make friends there.
· The university colors were yellow and green and the mascot was a catamount (aka a mountain lion).

Rochester Minnesota

Pros:
· Mayo clinic
· Met 5 nice people
· learned all I ever wanted about Red-wing shoes and the Mississippi river
· It gave me perspective in that for the first time I could understand why people would take drugs to escape boredom.
· They deep-fry hard-boiled eggs there

Cons:
· Mayo clinic
· Nothing to do (makes Illinois look like New Zealand).

· The only person anyone has heard of is Garrison Keller (I met him in the halls of Mayo once)
· Coldest place we’ve lived –the early morning winter wind still haunts me.
· I had to wear a jacket and tie to work every day.
· I had to take a bus to work every morning and engage in small talk with riders (I learned I could wear headphones with no music to avoid this).

Marquette Michigan

Pros:
· Pristine forests with no people.
· Lake superior is awesome in all 4 seasons.
· Great kayaking

·Sarah Paternoster's snickers dessert thing

·Learned to cross country ski as a family

· Got to be the head of an academic department.
· It was only 4 hours to some of the neatest places in America along Lake Michigan.
· It’s so far north that it doesn’t get dark until around 10:30pm.
· Our neighborhood had a bear in it.

Cons:
· Had to be the head of an academic department.
· Winter was 9 months long.
· Had to shovel the roof off 3 times.
· 15 feet of snow in one year.
· NMU colors were green and yellow and the mascot was a mountain lion.
· Nothing grows there, the soil is sand, there are no farms so people eat rocks and hunt moose.
· The lake is too darn cold. You die of hypothermia if in it more than a few minutes (which makes kayaking more exciting -pro)


Portland Oregon

Pros:
· Has the most majestic scenery we’ve gotten to live near.
· There is windsurfing, skiing, hiking, climbing, alpine mountaineering, biking, scuba, sailing, salmon fishing, ocean, volcanoes, dessert all within 2 hours.
· More wineries and breweries than one can handle.

· Salmon everywhere.

Cons:
· People here have never heard the word ‘church’.
· If you don’t have a tattoo here they know you are from the East.
· Everything does cost more on the west coast.
· You cant pump your own gas.
· People here are too ‘hip’ (I will never wear a v-neck undershirt with a scarf around my neck and red pants, although this outfit would be normal downtown).
·It's too far for most people to visit but you're all welcome!

BTW for those non-buffalonians, "were talking proud was a buffalo marketing initiative from the 80s." (Yes, the logo was in fact a two legged, red buffalo on a stick.)


Jill is right in her last post that you couldnt handle the picture of me with no shirt on. I scare myself with how ripped I am. Here's a picture of what steroids can do for you (if you want to look like me). This guy was arrested for steroid use. I wonder why they suspected him and what evidence they could use?




I will resurrect the tip of the day. Today's tip: you dont need a casio keyboard. At one time in everyone's life they see a cool mini keyboard or synthesizer and think "if I had that I would quickly be a master musician and rock the world". I went through this stage. The problem is that the 80s casio keyboards were all monophonic. You couldnt play 2 notes at the same time. A piano/keyoboard without the ability to play chords seems unethical to sell yet everyone in high school had one. And all had the mandatory Harpsichord sound (cause everyone loves the sound of a harpsichord!) And every rock star needed to learn the one-note monophonic tune of Greensleeves.



Things that I want to deep fry:
-a might taco
-blue cheese (I think it would be good)
-a nutty-buddy cone
-meatballs

Why is it that fish sticks are lame and are relegated to being junky 'kids food'. yet if you took a fish-fry and put it on a wooden stick it would be awesome? I want to invent a new kind of fish stick:



Things you can already get deep fried:

Snickers bar (I wish I thought of that first)

Pickles (come on, even Mary would eat those right? Mary, mom said you probably wouldn't eat potato chips anymore, you are not a Foley, you really were adopted).

Oreos: instead of 70 calories per cookie, 150.


Coke: yes, they fry coke-batter into little pellets of cardiovascular risk.



I'll leave you with my choice for worst album cover ever:



This is by Devastatin' Dave, the Turntable Slave. Never heard of him? Im sure the reasons for his obscurity are obvious.





Go to this link to see more awful album covers. http://www.coverbrowser.com/covers/worst-album-covers

Finally,
the dumbest thing I've seen in awhile:

What's the difference between playing with stuffed animals and a puppet show? Apparently nothing to these two idiots. We saw these guys 2 weeks ago at one of the farmers markets. They were doing a "puppet show" but it was really two strange people shouting in weird loud voices while moving stuffed animals across a little stage. No curtain? No hiding behind a wall? No moving mouths? I guess hiding or using a sock puppet with a mouth that actually moves would have messed with their 'high-art' performance. Jill and I watched this for a few minutes to see if it was real. it was. Im astonished that people were subjecting their kids to this. I wish I had a movie -you would be on the floor laughing. I do better puppet shows with a napkin at the dinner table.

I guess that's enough. It's hard to blog without Jill to make fun of...

-kevin