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Archive for the ‘Pointless remarks’ Category

I must admit defeat. It’s painful. But shit happens.

So, yes, we did go to that Arabian Night dinner show (link). Hey .. unlimited beer!

I had it all figured out, I would get my own beer glass, and my wife, who doesn’t drink beer, would get ‘hers’, but pass it on to me.

I was SURE I would have the place bankrupt (and out of beer) by the time the show started.

But I hadn’t taken Jay into account: “I’m Jay, your server, and I will take care of you tonight”. BOY did he ever!

Here I was sitting with TWO large glasses of beer in front of me. I REALLY started to like dinner shows.

The problem was, that everytime I took a sip (read: gulped down half a glass), Jay would RUN up to us and fill my glass again. COOL! My wife’s remark to him that I would be in love with him by the end of the show didn’t deter him in the least.

Since he kept my glass full all the time, I realized that my wife’s (read: MY OTHER) glass was getting warm, so I started to drink that too. And, consequently, Jay started to keep THAT one full too.

 I LOVE dinner shows!

On the way back I learned from my wife that there were horses in the  show.

I also realized that these people could have been BILLIONAIRES!

If only they’d charged a ‘one buck’ entrance fee to the restroom!

So, okay, they’re not bankrupt.

YET!

Actual email exchange between my wife and me (we used email, because we were in different rooms)

My wife: 

I want to go see this!

http://www.arabian-nights.com 

It is a dinner show, and Kathleen said it was VERY nicely done.

PLUS – you get unlimited house wine and beer with dinner.

We COULD go tomorrow night – go see the horseys.  If you want, I will call them in the morning!  What do you think?

Me:

Let’s go! (you drive back?)

She:

**smack** Did you even READ past the  ” unlimited house wine and beer with dinner“??

Me:

There was more?

I’m SOOO thrilled.

I bought a gadget on eBay for $50: a pair of  Netgear powerline Ethernet adapters (link).

You plug one into a power outlet and connect it to your router. The other one you plug into any other outlet and run an Ethernet cable to your … whatever… pc, laptop, you name it. And you have a network connection. An alternative to wireless.

Why am I so thrilled? It’s just something you plug into a wall outlet, NOTHING to configure, NOTHING to install… and it just simply WORKS!

Compare THAT to that friggin’ webcam I installed and took me three nights and 3rd party software to get working! (http://70.118.43.165:8080/ select ‘javascript’ and you MAY catch one of my cats .. or both).

Disclaimer: I’m not saying that powerline is better than wireless. In fact, I also used a Buffalo wireless bridge that ALSO just worked out-of-the-box. No installation, no configuration, just plug it in and connect the Ethernet cables.

I LOVE stuff that ‘just works’ …

This is so cool.

I have waited for it for so long, knowing it would come some day.

But then, I started to lose hope, and after years I simply gave up on it.

And then, all in a sudden: surprise! Out of nowhere … Who’d have thought …

Finally, Time Magazine has elected me ‘Person of the Year 2006’.

Link to Time’s “Person of the Year 2006” site

Okay.

Here it is. Time for me to come out and confess.

I admit it.

I’m an ailurophile.

So. There you have it.

I hope we can still be friends.

This is another riddle. And I’m going to use it to gauge if what I just experienced is part of American culture or just a bizarre experience.
I will moderate your comments so as to not give away the clue (if there is one).
This Friday I was driving a car in Cincinnati, Ohio.
With me were my wife, her daughter and the daughter’s boyfriend.
At some point we passed a fast food restaurant and everyone (except me) started to yell.
They HAD to eat there! They hadn’t had THAT in YEARS.
That was SOOOO good .. they couldn’t believe we were so fortunate to run into (actally: pass) one of ‘those’.
They made me turn around.
I parked. We went in. My wife ordered the food and returned to our table with …
(I’m not making this up!) … TWENTY hamburgers!
Did I mention there were only four of us?
I ate 5, my wife ate 4, her daughter ate 5 and the boyfriend, not a big guy at all, ate 8.
I know, that doesn’t add up to 20, but in all fairness, I only ate 3, but when we walked back to the car I burped … and two came back up.
As a further hint I can tell that for the 20 hamburgers, 4 servings of French fries and four soda’s my wife paid … $14.99
A further hint is that the next day we agreed that it hadn’t been such a great experience after all.
We were STILL tasting the stuff, that now was being described as “pure grease and salt”.
I personally agree with the “grease and salt”, but not with the “pure”. I think it was half-recycled industrial waste. Probably radio-active as well!
Sometimes you get what you pay for!
ANYWAY … was this just a fluke or could you think of the name of the hamburger joint we visited?

 

1. British Zoologist Professor Richard Dawkins

2. The International Space Station

3. Martha Stewart

4. A/S Regnecentralen (A Danish computer manufacturer that I worked for in the seventies)

5. Robert Metcalfe (co-inventor of Ethernet and founder of 3COM corporation)

6. Hungary

7. The Princeton institute for Advanced Studies: Theoretical Physics

8. Seattle Symphony

9. Georgetown, Cayman Islands

 

I’m looking for the common factor … If you know it, email me at paul@paulclaessen.com (subject: blog riddle) and, if correct, I will acknowledge that fact here:

(and I DID leave a clue in this post)

 

Correct answers sofar, from:

– Paul Claessen (Duh!)

– Victor de Keijzer Himself (3rd attempt)

– Dawnell Claessen

– Rob Lagesse (with a little help from Jay Leno ;-))

–

Honorary Laureates (people who weren’t completely correct, but made a much appreciated and original attempt):

– Victor de Keijzer (Yes, THE Victor the Keijzer *proud look*, the world famous Dutch author from www.victordekeijzer.nl who, incidently, has a sister who once worked for A/S Regnecentralen as well -such a small world-)

–

People whom I fully expect to solve this:

– Dawnell Claessen 

– Bob “Injun” Cuyt

– Charles Simonyi

– Peter Westergaard

– Victor de Keijzer (on 2nd 3rd attempt)

– Rob Lagesse

The other night, right after work, my wife went for a nice cool-down swim in our pool.

While happily splashing around she suddenly noticed she wasn’t alone in the pool.

Calmly and quietly she left the pool and called me at work, asking me to come home and escort the intruder off our premises.

Which I did.

Here’s a link to a picture I took of the intruder prior to urging him to leave.

(Disclaimer: my description of the manner in which she left the pool may be slightly in conflict with reality)

 

My blog’s right sidebar is too wide, especially for smaller screens; I need to fix have fixed that.

Every year the bi-monthly magazine Annals of Improbable Research awards the so called Science Ig Nobel Prizes for ‘results that cannot, or should not, be reproduced‘

The purpose of this post is to invite you all to read the list of prizes awarded so far, and leave a comment here indicating your favorite(s).

The list can be found here.