ATTENTION Howard County drug users!

If you purchased drugs from James Watson (the fat guy at the Columbia Restaurant Park McDonald's, or you may possibly know him from Deep Run trailer park) in the spring of 2015, they may have been cut with cat ashes.

Yes, as in the remains of a dead cat. MY dead cat.

So if you started licking yourself for no reason, or randomly knocking stuff off tables, or kamikaze jumping on the bed at 3am, now you know why.

Oh, and if James gifted you with a deep fryer or a vinyl-to-mp3 converter, it was stolen from my house.

Wow, I've been gone a while!

The last year and a half has been really hectic (understatement!). Soon, I hope to be in a position to go into further detail about that.

...meanwhile, I couldn't resist taking another swipe at that ridiculous civility campaign that seemingly brought the hypocrites out of the woodwork.

From Spending some time in a Howard police car: View from a cruiser gives new perspective on traffic:

[The officer] watches several motorists make half-hearted pauses at the [stop] sign but lets them slide. With so many flagrant violators out there, she feels no need to clamp down on technical violations.

But there's nothing technical about the way the driver of a Honda Civic races through the stop sign and takes a right on Hesperus, going at least 40 mph up the residential street. On the rear bumper, a sticker reads: "Choose Civility."

...the [18-year-old] has 5 points on her driving record. One of her tickets was for going 65 mph in a 25-mph zone...

Good grief!

Sign o' the times?

The Po Spouse and I visited the Sheraton's champagne brunch today. Sadly, we practically had the place to ourselves. It was nice not to wait in line at the various food stations, but obviously such low turnout is not sustainable long-term.

Was it the rain?
...or the economy?
...or swine flu?
...or maybe even the Ravens/Broncos game?

I'm rooting for rain or the game — unlike the other options, they should be self-correcting, rather quickly.


Brunch begins at 11:30 am on Sundays. The just-under-$30 price includes bottomless mimosas (and possibly bloody marys?) and unlimited trips to the food bars, which include fresh fruit, smoked salmon, oysters on the half shell, a carving station, and made-to-order omelets. The lake view is also included in the price :)

Incivility caught on... pixels?

(We can't say it's "film" anymore!)



This pic is almost as old as my last post! It's been a weird year to say the least. I hope to be able to post more than I have been...





Seen at Longhorn Steakhouse:




Despite being a short-bed, this rude parker takes up almost the whole sidewalk — with a shin-busting extended trailer hitch thrown in for good measure!

Wait, what's that on the door?

Yes, that's not one, not two, but FIVE choose civility magnets!!
(Apologies for the lousy-resolution cell phone pic.)

I can only hope this was a guerrilla application... but I doubt it.













Hypocrites seem to be, uh, magnetically attracted to these magnets. All jokes aside, what's the psychology of these things? You're still a jerk, even with the little green civility magnet! Really! We can still tell! Multiple magnets don't have a cloaking effect, I promise you.

Tell me again how many taxpayer dollars we've blown on this nonsense? (Or private dollars that could have gone to something useful like the Elkridge Love Mission?)

Thank God the magnets are almost gone. (Then the only way to get one will be to steal it. Oh the irony!)


Yes, I know, someone — like this guy/gal, who seems to have an excess supply — might decide to give up a "used" one voluntarily. The theft irony was just too fun to ignore. Don't be a killjoy ;o)

Second Chance scoop?!

Howard County bloggers have been all atwitter in anticipation of the reincarnation of the Last Chance Saloon. (I've been atwitter myself, just haven't blogged about it til now! :))

The new owners apparently (finally!) caught on to the desire for information, and put up a web site some time in October... which, unfortunately, doesn't tell potential customers a whole lot.

Today I lucked into this page — it looks like our wait is almost over! Apparently, the Second Chance will arrive the first week of December.

What I can't understand is why we are having to scrape for information, especially in this economic climate — you'd think they'd be shouting it from the rooftops...??

Not cool, Ken. Not cool.

My offhanded crack in the snake post about my job going to India reminded me of a recent moment when I wondered, "what the hell were you thinking?!"

This requires a bit of background. The company I work for used to be in another county. A few years ago, they moved here to take up residence in a spiffy new building (with a leaky roof and urinals that flushed with hot water, but that's another story), renting 1.5 of its 2 floors.

Yay Howard County — you stole 200+ jobs from a neighboring county!

Meanwhile, the company was cultivating a relationship with another company in India. Then the two companies got financially entangled. Then a third party came along and bought the whole shebang. The third party just happens to be a tight-fisted ^%$&*^% that has managed to run off about 40% of the employees here — and doesn't really give a rip, because the people in India will work cheaper (until the dollar tanks — but, again, that's another story).

So, they've given back one-third of the previous floor space here. And ~40% fewer employees are spending their lunch, gas, and after-work $$$ in Howard County. [March 2010: the old office is now down to less than half of one floor, and the estimated 40% job loss is probably close to double that figure.]

I'm passing through the lobby of some local establishment a few months back, and the headline on the local free biz paper screams at me:

HOWARD EXECUTIVE LEADS INDIA TRADE MISSION

accompanied by a pic of our handsome young exec smiling as he shakes hands with a bewildered-looking Indian fellow, who represents a company with a storefront here in HoCo that sends all the actual work to India.

The story tried reeeeeallllly hard to make it sound like this little junket benefited the county.... but I saw very little in there that didn't amount to us selling them the rope to hang us with.

I don't blame the Indian people for taking whatever jobs they can get. If idiot Yanks are willing to send dollars over there by the bargeload, it's not their fault. But we elect our politicians to at least make a pretense of protecting us, rather than blatantly giving away the store.

Every time I pass by a pod of empty cubes in our once-bustling office, Kenny U.'s little photo op flashes in front of my eyes. It'll be stuck to my eyelids when I go to the ballot box, too.

I brake for snakes

It's been too long between posts. (If there are no posts to a blog nobody's reading yet, does it make a sound?)

Anyhow...

Longer ago than I care to admit, I was heading home from my dead-end job (well, dead-end unless I want to move to India — that's where all our work is going!) in a local office park. In the middle of the main drag were 2 young men who appeared to be flagging down cars in both directions.

When I get out of that place, all I want to do is GET HOME — now I'm dealing with panhandlers/hitchhikers/robbers/?.

I had little intention of stopping, so I was planning a route to keep moving without hurting anyone. Then the guys started moving to the side of the road. WTH?

That's when I saw the snake — probably a good 3 feet long, black with some kind of colored pattern on its back — making a beeline for the curb.

Only in Howard County does a snake get not one, but two crossing guards!

Glass-half-empty type that I am, you'll see a lot of griping in this blog (which I can only hope to make as humorous as Cranky in Columbia)... but there are also a lot of positive scenes like this one that make Howard County unique.

And I plan to publish them when I see them — even when they reveal my own misjudgments ;)

Civility works both ways

Hello Howard County! With my inaugural post, I need to get something off my chest.

Has anyone else noticed that those ubiquitous "Choose Civility" car magnets (don't call them bumper stickers!) are disproportionately* affixed to vehicles piloted by clueless or obnoxious drivers?

Any "incivility" (horns, fingers, etc.) such drivers are experiencing may be self-inflicted.



*Notice I did not say "exclusively". Feel free to believe I'm not talking about you — but as my late MIL might have said, "if the foo s#!ts..."


UPDATE: How did I miss this blog inspired by, and mostly devoted to, the potential hypocrisy of proclaiming civility? Enjoy!