Category: Blood is Thicker then water cooling

Memories Can’t Wait….

I present to you now a series of text messages between myself and my cousin the high school english teacher…. I was simultaneously delighted and dismayed by these messages….

 

CHSeT (Cousin High School English Teacher): You would be proud; I used and episode of “Star Trek:TNG” in class!

Me: Next time DS9… more thematic english type elements.

CHSeT: We watched the pilot. Our theme for the year is “what does it mean to be human” and we are doing a unit on confilict. What better episode then “Q” putting humanity on trial?

CHSeT: IDK what’s sadder though, that some didn’t like it. Or that many didn’t understand it!

Me: the “BattlestarGalactica” mini series from 2003

Me: I weep for the next generation of students

CHSeT: Was that pun intentional or just a stroke of ironic genius?

Me: Yes.

 

So knowing the audience for this blog, I know that all of you know that the pilot episode was “Encounter at farpoint” and as Renee would say… “the first couple years of TNG are a bit rough”…. In 1987 we were still in the Cold War, little did we know it would be over in 2 years and those early episodes had the same “hope for the future” quality that the orignal Star Trek episodes had… My overriding memory of that episode is one of great underlying tension throughout the episode.   Again overtones of the cold war.

A high school freshman is typically around 14 years old…. which puts them born in 1998 (dear lord I was in college in 1998) high school students today have no concept of the “soviet threat” (not that I did at 14 (which was in 1993, and at that point the cold war was officially over and the major concern was rouge nuclear warheads… my how times haven’t changed)) the boogeyman for todays kids are al-qaeda and sleeper terror cells.  Much diffrent from the supreme soviet threat.

I guess the part that has me most disturbed is TNG marked the start of a mini golden age of sci-fi on TV… Star Trek:TNG/DS9 (and to a much lesser extent Voyager), Babylon 5 (fuck you Curtis, B5 is awesome!), Farscape, Stargate SG:1.  TNG even influenced shows as distant as the new “Battlestar Galactica” (Ronald D. Moore creator and executive producer of the new Battlestar Galactica was a writer for TNG back in the day).  I guess at the end of the day I’m more sad that my beloved sci-fi channel has become the “syfy” channel and now runs shows that are more soap opera then somewhat episodic science fiction…. I’m looking at you ‘Eureka”

 

I think in the final assessment I can’t fault me cousin for choosing “Encounter at Farpoint” for the course material, but for the record I tend to thing that “Best of both worlds” (parts 1 and 2) are a less obvious and far better example of human conflict and what it means to be human. Mainly because the writing was much better and it has the borg, and honestly who doesn’t like a good borg episode of Star Trek?

Excuse me while I go watch more Dr. Who.

 

How to kill a fat kid’s dream….

So most of you my dear readers know my brother in one form or another, so use your context of my brother to fill in the gaps of what follows…. Or you can take it as it is and just run with it.  Run all the way to the hills with it.

My brother used to come down on a regular basis once upon a time, but due to changes in his personal life and scheduling conflicts he hasn’t been able to come down in almost a year.  Sometime last month he signs up for a conference in Phoenix so he can have an excuse to come down and try and hang out with his brother… at least that is what he told me.  At the very least he saved his work a few dollars by crashing at “Chateu de me” instead of a staying smart at a Holiday in Express.

So I roll in from work at my usual time and there is my brother watching TV on my couch… strange how he always has a key to my house, but yet “the key to his house can’t be copied and he has only one” very very very strange.  So we chat for a bit and I ask “what do you want for dinner?” because as you all know I keep exactly enough food for one person for about 2.5 days in my house.   After the usual hemming and hawing he doesn’t really have a answer.

At one point he was wanting to do the “Man VS Food” challenge at Chompies in Tempe, but he backed out of that because “he wanted to make sure he like the sliders first”…. Ok kind of weak, but I will give him the pass our family is known for having notoriously sensitive stomachs.  So I suggest the “Tilted Kilt” the following conversation ensues…

LilBrother (LB); What’s “Tilted Kilt”

Me; Bar food but more of a Irish flavor, even though Kilts are Scottish.

LB; Uh ok, I guess.

Later on in the truck as we are pulling into the Tilted Kilt on Baseline and Gilbert in Mesa….

LB; So really all this way for something we could have gotten around the corner from your house?

Me; Food yes, but the service is really good here.

And as we walk up to the door and I open I all I hear from my brother is…

LB; whoa (just loud enough that I could hear it)

So yeah, he enjoyed the “Tilted Kilt”  after we finish he says “I saw this place called ‘Aunt Lena’s’ by Chandler Mall we should go there…. OK the boy doesn’t get out of the sticks much I will indulge him…

Turns out that using his smart phone to look up directions is not something that ever occurred to him… I finally have to pull over to look up the place… and it’s nowhere near Chandler Mall it’s over on Arizona and Ocitllo… The following conversation ensues…

Me; how did figure this place was near the Chandler Mall?

LB; I saw it on “Diners, Drive Ins, and Dives” and I when I saw the background shots it looked like the strip malls around the Chandler Mall.

I guess nobody told him that all the strip malls in that part of town look the same.  So we trek out there… and sure enough there are two identical strip malls across the street from one another the only difference is one has a Lowe’s and one has a Home Depot.   So we drive through both, I do the Google maps thing, and we can’t find this place.   Finally little brother calls the place listed on Google maps page… and the number is disconnected….

LB; Man way to kill a fat kids dream there

So we begin the trek home… somewhere along the way we get detoured to a cold stone and a movie about a guy who kills people with carrots… The movie was almost as good as the Kilt…

As a interesting side note on why you should research before going anywhere, after I put in a cursory Google search I found this article and it’s #1 on the Google results!

http://thedish.freedomblogging.com/2009/01/05/restaurant-closings-aunt-lenas-lucs-carrabbas/2660/

I think someone missed the boat just a touch.

They don’t stand a chance…

A while back I talked about one of the pains of being me in that I had a excellent opportunity for a AR-15… well about 10 minutes after writing that I decided to snag it. So today I along with a few other individuals made our way out to the shooting range to basically shoot to our little hearts content.

In the process of this two things happened.

1. I fell in love with my AR-15… even though I can’t shoot the damn thing for shit right now.

2. Curtis had his first experience with a .50 Cal rifle… The gentlemen next to us were sighting in their competition .50 cal rifles at 300 yards with some experimental loads that they had concocted. Well we get to chatting…

Ok Don and Curtis get to chatting with these gentlemen and next thing I know Curtis, Matt, and Renee are shooting the .50 cal.

I don’t know the specifics of what transpired, and I will let Curtis tell the full story if he so chooses. I do however want to show what Curtis looks like with a .50 Cal.

There is a shorter video somewhere, but I do not care enough to edit this one and there is one bit in there that I find pretty funny.

Not to pull your halo down…. or talk you to the ground….

I hate the first two weeks in Feburary, it’s just a crappy time across the board.

Mean while I have nothing but good mojo for the first two weeks in March, mainly because the weather turns consitently good, but not hot.  It’s the perfect time of year to live in Arizona, until summer arrives and find myself hibernating indoors from June until sometime in late September.

So I guess at somepoint someone said you can pick your friends your stuck with your family? Really that is news to me!  I guess I’ve always lumped the two groups together for better or worse they are the same in my book… which really makes the holidays kind of a pain in the ass.  If that is my biggest complaint though I guess I don’t have much to complain about.

3 More to go….

So Christmas was a while back and as is tradition in the Kern household we gave each other gifts… Parent’s get the kids junk, kids get the parents junk, and the cycle perpetuates itself.  This year was a little bit different as the junk count was down, but the at the time percived awesomeness factor was up.

My little brother got me a ice chest filled with Coors, now the gift was the ice chest but he couldn’t give it to me empty so he gave it to me with a 30 pack of Coors in it.  With each CAN being lovingly wrapped by himself and his assistant.

Did I mention there were a few that were double wrapped?  No?  They were….

So for the better part of the last 2 months I have had all of this damn beer in my fridge slowly working my way through it.  Because as we all know I like fat tire and Guinness, in a pinch or when I’m on call I will drink Coors.

Why not throw it out?  Well first off it was a gift that is just rude, and second you don’t throw out or cook with beer (except keystone it’s ok to cook w/ keystone just replace all water wth beer).  So I’ve been “suffering” through getting all of this damn beer drunk.

I’m down to my last three and two of them will be gone in the next hour and after that I only have one more to go.

Finally….

And what did I do to extract revenge on my brother? I bought him “Call of Duty4” for his birthday.  He gives me coors, I give him something that will suck the social life out of him.  I’m just evil like that.

Happy leap day!

Don’t you trip like I do?

You know I really need to do something about all of this crap on my floors and all of the tripping that then follows the crap around. It’s bad enough I’m tripping lord forbid the roomba trip over itself…

Oh yeah I got what could only be called two of the most throughly awesome xmas gifts one being a 30 pack of Coors light (individually wrapped (thanks Scott)) and a Roomba (Thanks Grandpa, people are going to have to work hard to top that gift) The roomba is a awesome little piece of technology while it does not replace traditional cleaning it makes the time between cleanings a little less dirty. I’ve actually been very surprised at how well it works, and it has a 5 pin serial port so we all know what that means… roombas with chain guns and rockets.

I may have to put a lift kit and beer cooler on the thing to just to complete the redneck motif.

Oh and I need to find a Tony Stewart bumper sticker for the roomba too!

Hopefully everyone had a quiet and pregnant new year where no streaking or feats of mass quantities of alcohol were consumed… Hell I was just happy that I didn’t spend this year curled up in a ball sick like I have 3 of the last 4 years. I did break with one tradition this year and watch Dick Clark on ABC… uh yeah… he’s going on the top of my death pool this year or at the very least most likely to end up cryogenically frozen in Scottsdale.

What does 2008 hold in store? Who knows thats why linear time is so cool! My only hope is that 2008 holds more quality strippers then 2007 did (for the record the # of quality strippers in 2007 was 8 one night in April)

And world peace… but honestly I would just be happy with more strippers.