Yep, I got one of those emails. The one with the two pages of forward headers at the top and five ‘>’ at the front of each line. But this one had some gems in it. And since I am from Amarillo, I have to share a few lines

You know you are from Amarillo, Texas if…

• Friday night high school football is a sell-out.
• You laugh at out-of-towners who actually attempt to eat the free 72 oz. steak.
• You think that trees naturally grow leaning to the north east.
• You know where The Canyon is.
• You’ve never seen smog, but you’ve been through a dust storm.
• You know that the Cadillac Ranch isn’t a real ranch.
• 40 mph wind is, ‘a little breezy.’
• You’ve had to pull over and remove tumbleweeds from the grill of your car.
• You’ve seen rain, hail, sleet, and snow all in the same storm.
• You’ve seen tires on the roofs of trailer houses and you know they’re there to hold the roof on.
• You know how to pronounce Dumas.
• You accept the fact that the most prominent vehicles on the streets are pickup trucks, SUVs, tractors, then cars (in that order).
• You can get a sunburn one weekend and the next weekend it snows!
• Some mountain weirdo or hill country hippie has called you a ‘flat lander‘ and you were proud of it.
• You tell people you live in a red brick house with a tan shingled roof and and a tiny little tree in the front yard, and then realize that describes every house within a 5-mile radius.

I love Randy. I really do. But he should have at least warned me that the link he sent would cause my corneas to hemorrhage. So, as a public service to you, my faithful viewers: Don’t Click This Link.

Bonus points for the first commenter who knows what movie that poem is from. (Hint: I own it and love it.)

Double bonus points if your the first to tell me what Evan wants you to buy him.

We live in a brave new world where anything is possible, including getting over 800 complete strangers to play freeze tag in a park.

Improve Anywhere’s MP3 Experiment #4

That’s friggin’ awesome.

No really. Do you? Cuz I forget.

Oh, that’s right. I remember now. I hate when I get to work on Monday and have this vague recollection that sometime during the weekend something really funny happened and I said to myself that I would definitely have to blog about it, but now I have no idea what it was or why it was so funny.

I really hate that.

For years I’ve said that you simply can’t believe your eyes anymore. The very first time I scanned in some 4×6 prints of pictures I’d taken in Colorado and used PhotoShop to “clean them up”, I realized the power of digital retouching. The coolest one was when I deleted a guard rail and recreated one of my feet so that it looked like I was out in the wilderness, instead of standing next to a road. It took me five minutes to teach my mom how to “stamp out” lead ropes and ugly background buildings in the pictures of their horses.

It’s now a full fledged industry, not only turning wrinkled, freckled, and baggy eyed actresses into ravishing, sex-goddess cover shots, but also piecing together video so you can fly through the interiors of luxury cars while they’re blazing across the dessert at 100 miles per hour.

Just to show off their talents, some retouch artists enter contests on a site called worth1000.com (as in “A picture is worth…”). My favorites are where they do the exact opposite of what they get paid for, like artificially aging Katie Holms.

There’s a short demo real on YouTube the shows just what today’s marketing wizards have at their displosal. Click to watch “Everything you see is fake.”

There’s a company called iWANEX that retouches celebrity photos. Click to go to the iWANEX web site, then click on “Portfolio”. Click on a thumbnail to open it, then mouse-over and mouse-off of the picture to compare the before to the after. It will really rock your world. (My favorite is Kelly Clarkson’s amazing chin and butt reduction.)

While the state of Louisiana certainly has its faults, I must applaud a recent development in several LA local governments.

I guess I’m old fashioned, but it just drives me up the wall when I see guys walking around with their boxer shorts exposed well past the point of reason. I know I don’t want to see your underoos, and, try as I might, I have yet to find any one else who does. When I ask guys why they prefer to have their butts hanging out of their pants, they never seem to have a good answer. “Ah’dunno. Iz coo’ I guess.” Riiiight.

Well, gentlemen, there are now several communities in Louisiana in which it is very not “coo'” including Mansfield, a small community just south of Shreveport.

“Pull ’em up or pay up.”

That’s Police Chief Don English’s interpretation of a new law that takes effect in Mansfield on Sept. 15

Anyone caught wearing sagging pants who exposes his or her underwear will be subject to a fine of up to $150 plus court costs, or face up to 15 days in jail.

The laws being enacted are most often clarifications of existing indecency rules already on the books. You can read the complete article here.

This weekend Tammy and I watched the MythBuster’s Mega Movie Myths DVD from NetFlix. One of the myths covered is cutting through a sword with a sword. Highlight the next line for the results. (Hidden with magical spoilerific technology!)

->Busted. You can’t cut a sword with a sword. You might bend it to the breaking point, but that’s not the same thing.<-

It reminded me of a video I saw a while back in which they try to cut a bullet with a sword. It’s from Japanese TV, so they could be talking about short bread and shoe shine for all I know, but the video shows what happens when you shoot at a well built katana with a pistol.

You probably want to hit pause until the video fully loads before you try to watch it.

Clicky clicky.

(Title translation for folks who don’t deal with teenagers: “Oh my gosh! That’s so not fair!”)

You may have heard the sad sad tale of Windy Hager. (It’s “Windy” with an “i”. In this, I feel her pain.) Windy is 16 years old (Almost an adult!) and for months, her parents had been total jerks when it came to her boyfriend, Brenton. They tried everything to keep the two apart. When Windy and finally had enough, she pulled the teen angst trump card and informed her parents that she “hated” them. It was at this that her parents, Dennis and Betty Hager, finally relented. They would let Windy and her boyfriend do whatever they wanted to do.

So far, this is just like several million other cases in which parents wimped out to the detriment of their own kids. But in this case it’s much much worse. You see, in this case, the boyfriend is Brenton Wuchae, Windy’s 40-year-old track coach and the parental relent involved signing consent forms for their under aged daughter to marry the old perv.

Like I said you may have heard this story because it was all over the news a month or so ago. What you may not have heard is this follow up story. When Windy moved out, she left behind some things. One can imagine that she’d be in a hurry to get out before her parents came to their senses.

She recently took her parents to court to try and get her stuff out of her old room. I am totally not making this up: a mounted fish, a sculpture, a PlayStation game system, and a Beanie Babies collection valued at $300. Now how could anyone doubt the maturity level of a girl who sues her parents for custody of her beanie babies? (And believes that such a collection has any monetary value whatsoever.)

The judge promptly threw out the case because a parent of a minor legally owns all the possessions of their children, especially when they paid for them in the first place. Like I said, “TSNF!” Windy has the right to appeal the case, but it’s unlikely that screaming and throwing things will go very far with the appellate court. And everyone knows that judges couldn’t care less if you hate them.

When we were on our mission trip, a very inebriated gentleman approached some of our kids near the Alamo. Before they had a chance to ask him if he knew Jesus as his personal savior, he introduced himself as Jesus. The Lord and Savior then asked them if they had any weed they’d be willing to part with.

In the news, a man went for a walk in his birthday suit (That means nekkid for your yankees.) around the county court house in Palestine, Texas. (Palestine! Coincidence? I think not.) When police confronted him, he said it was okay because he’s friends with Jesus. Oh! I see. Carry on then.

(As an aside, the journalist gets extra points for this line, “[The police officer] said he had never been exposed to such an incident.” Ahaa! Exposed. Ba-dump tshh!)

And in a story we’ve all heard a million times, some nut jobs in Connecticut claim that Jesus’ image has “miraculously” appeared in the wood grain pattern of their kitchen cabinet. (Insert your own shellac fumes joke here.)

So, what I want to know is this: In countries with different religious backgrounds, does this still happen? Do drunk Indians (towel, not feather) claim to be Shiva before they ask you for some vegetarian doobage? Do Middle Eastern Muslims ever “see” Mohammad’s face in their falafels? Would a French Atheist ever walk around naked and then claim to be friends with no one? Well, I guess that last one is pretty probable, but you get my point.

Is the link between insanity and Jesus a purely American invention?

My apartment gets a 48/100. My office, only 32/100. My buddy, Dave, lives in a 12/100. That’s what you get for living in that Richy-Rich neighborhood, Dave. (Hey Butler! Go get me a slurpy™. Take the Porche™, cuz I want it fast.) *wink*

Find out yours at http://walkscore.com/