Twofaced Faceless Facebook Facelift

A short time after I started this blog a friend of mine suggested that I start using Facebook. I actually already had a Facebook account although it was pretty much empty. Or was that MyFace or Spacebook or SpaceCaseFace or something like that. Anyway I was always having to get on some kind of social path networky thing in order to find bands that I wanted to check out. It was getting to where nobody had websites anymore. A place with all of their info, stuff like where they were playing, projects they had in the works or whatever. I found it very annoying. If I could find them at all their ‘page’ was usually filled with so much unrelated info from the page owners and or other social networking nitwits that you could never tell what was real and what was just posted up poop. Anyway, my friend went on to say how he ran into this guy and that guy and these folks who were doing this or that and how he was having so much fun talking to all these folks he hadn’t seen and so forth so I decided to give it another look. The first thing I noticed was my ‘profile’ didn’t have picture. It just had a silhouette of a human head. Kinda like a standard issue Facebook bag to put over your head so nobody could recognize you. Just like the unknown comic.

I noticed many Facebook residents were using pictures of their dogs or cats or something just to personalize themselves without actually putting a photo of themselves online. I don’t blame them. Putting my picture out there on Facebook where anybody in the world or, I guess, even beyond can see just sounds kind of dicey. What if there was somebody from elementary school or something that always wanted to kick my ass but couldn’t find me, forgot to do it or just never had the time. Now he’s retired, has plenty of time, sees me on Facebook and says “There he is, that’s him. As soon as I get out of the foot doctors office I’m going to find him and kick his ass.” He’ll probably send in a friend request to me and invite me to my own ass kicking. If you’ve read my previous blog entries you’ll know that this is the kind of thing that can happen to me. So I put up a picture of something that many people will relate to me. That seemed safe enough and it has been. So far. I have run into lots of people that I haven’t seen in decades and it’s been, for the most part, a positive experience. I even have Facebook friends that I have never met, nor never knew in the 3D world. I don’t know how that happened. Those are the kind of things that happen on Facebook. A few month ago I got a friend request from a guy I used to know a long time ago. I remembered him all right. He stole my drums back in the 80’s and took them to Houston and pawned them. His name was Mike. He knows what he did. Somehow that dried up turd rattling around in his skull made him believe that since this is Facebook it’s not the real world. This is one guy that definitely should have said no to drugs. NO MIKE, not even on Facebook will you be my friend. As many people as he has conned and stolen from, HE has his real picture on Facebook. Unbelievable! There are a lot of things you can do with your friends on Facebook. You can go farming with you friends at Farmville. You can play something called Mafia Wars. You can look at their pictures. Write on their wall. You can send them gifts. You can even Poke your friends. I haven’t quite figured this last one out yet. I wonder if you should send them a gift before or after you poke them. Is there some way to avoid being poked. Lately I have been getting strange things from friends posted on my wall. It’s always something like they tagged a picture of me or they are asking something about me which requires me to click on a link. When I do I see this.

Gee Facebook, I don’t know. Kind of a vague message for me to risk it. I almost sounds like I am going to allow Facebook to hang my Internet underwear out online so to speak. Sometimes I wonder about Facebooks motives. On this one I always decline. The other day I got on Facebook to find that they did a face lift. I still can’t find anything. These website designers always have to be jacking with something just to be jacking with something. Anyway stop by sometime and give me a holler, if you can find me.


Ta Ta!

It's Complicated

Why is everything so complicated? It seems like everything I do these days is way more complicated than it should be. Am I getting stupider or is everything around me getting more complex? Even creating this file was more complicated than I imagined it would be and that was when it was only two words long. I saved it as a word file but forgot to change from the default name. So I had to attempt changing the name three times and finally close the program before I could change the name and proceed with what I was doing which was writing a blog called “It’s Complicated”. The problem is, that doesn’t surprise me at all.


My wife is a very busy person at work and routinely brings work home to do at night. To get this work done she needs to be online. This tends to complicate things if I also have to get online to do anything at night. Her employer thoughtfully agreed to purchase her a laptop to have at home to alleviate tying up our home computer. This should help to uncomplicated things. Right? Well, now we needed something called a wireless router to make all of this work. OK, they bought the laptop, we can buy the router. Why, I don’t know, our home computer worked just fine without a router, but whatever, it’s no big deal. So we go buy a router at the neighborhood router store. When I get it home I call my friend the computer guy. He does a lot of IT work. I ask him if setting up a wireless router on my home computer is going to be complicated. “No” he says,”just hook it up, follow the instructions, accept the defaults and it should be fine.” I hope I’m not getting to techy here but bear with me. The first thing they tell me to do is to unplug the ETHERNET cable on my modem and plug it into the router or something to that effect. The thing is, on MY modem I’m not using an ETHERNET cable I’m using a USB cable.  Ya see, on MY modem, when we first got cable Internet years ago, the ETHERNET thing wouldn’t work but the Time Warner guy said “no problem we’ll just hook it up with a USB cable and see if that works. And it did. But now I have router and there is no place to hook up a USB cable on my router. So here I am years later with this ETHERNET thing biting me in the ass. So…I look through my drawers and finally find the ETHERNET cable that was left over from the cable hookup. (Just to clarify, I looked through my DESK DRAWERS not MY drawers. This should be obvious but in these complicated times if guys can run around with bombs in there underpants, I guess it’s not to far fetched to think Snappybob carries spare ETHERNET cables in his underwear. We’ll save that for another blog). Anyway, so I hook my modem up with the ETHERNET cable just to see if it will work now since this is not the original modem. No dice. It still don’t work, but by now I have my IT buddy over and he says it all points to a bad modem. Great, now I need to drive to the Time Warner Saturday Afternoon Flying Circus and swap out my modem. After standing in line for 30 minutes listening to the counter lady scream like a prison guard “NEXT,... PAYMENT ONLY…….NEXT, ...EQUIPMENT ISSUES ONLY…..NO RUNNING PLEASE. I finally swapped my modem for a brand spanking new one. I take it home, hook it up, YES, we have Internet and, with an ETHERNET CABLE. GLORY BE TO GOD ON HIGH. Not so fast, Even though I have Time Warner digital phones, for some reason, I have to have my old analog phone line plugged into the modem or my phones don’t work. So I look on the back of the modem and guess what? Can you guess? I don’t see any place to plug the STUPID PHONE LINE!!!! I call my IT buddy since he went home when I left to go to TW and he says to look real good on the left side of the back of the modem. I see a sticker that says something about telephones and some other techy nerdy stuff I don’t understand. I pull off the sticker and underneath is phone jacks. Two phone jacks. Of course they don’t work. Two phone jacks that don’t work. So, I know what I must do now. I need to call my old friend Rusty, Rusty works for Time Warner at their help desk, he lives in Pakistan. He has a part time job at Fruit of the Loom sewing bombs in jockey shorts. Nice guy. Anyway after about half an hour of Rusty amusing himself by having me perform cable switching stunts under my desk where my PC sits he decides it’s break time and maybe he needs to just schedule a service call. Perhaps I’ll have my phone service back in a week or so. Oh well, we still have the cell phones. Let’s just get the router thing working. Remember the router? So I hook the router up just like the instructions say following the step by step program on the supplied CD. Of course the router doesn’t work. Never in my wildest dreams did I ever think that this thing was going to work right out of the box for me. OK, so I look this company up on the Internet, Cisco BTW, and see that they have this live tech chat help line. When I get hooked up with the chat line it says that they will be with me shortly, I am #29 in line. At this point I think, good, and I go and get a beer from the fridge. When I get back I see that now I am 27 in line. I sit there for about an hour chill’in an watching my number gradually decrease. At one point I look at the screen and see that I am #7. Getting close! The next screen I see says “Sorry, but chat tech help is not available at this time. Please check back later.” Nooooooooo! Nooooooooo! This can’t be happening!. I get back in and try it again. Now I am #29 again. Just then, I heard a harp playing in the background, a miracle has happened. On my screen I see these words. “ Hello my name is Chad, how can I help you”. CHAD! CHAD! IS IT YOU! I sobbed like an over melodramatic soap opera star. Me and Chad chatted back and forth for two solid hours. I would chat to him, he would chat back to me, I would holler to my wife. “Are you online now?” “No, still nothing.” We chipped away at it diligently changing codes and changing settings until finally we were online via a radio signal emanating from this wireless router. It just substantiates what I already knew. What’s ‘plug and play’ for most folks is going to be ‘beat and pound’ for me. I have seen this scenario played out over and over in my life. Things rarely go any other way. That’s just my life. It’s Complicated.



Bye

South Texas Winter

It looks like we are in for another winter blast in a few days. The local media will make a veritable circus out of it. THE 2010 WINTER BLIZARD EVENT. The ice, the snow, the sleet, the sand on the freeways and all of the ICE RELATED freeway accidents. Don’t forget the THREE P’s. Plants, Pets and Pipes? How about Paranoid, Preposterous and Pandemonium? I heard the weather nerd on TV talking about how much snow we might get. He had that same look in his eyes as that guy who used to sell Sham-Wows and Mister Microphones on late night TV. I never expect it to snow around here because the only time it DOES snow is when nobody sees it coming. Around here if it gets cold enough to snow it’s because the skies are clear and if it clouds up enough for precipitation it stays just above freezing and we wind up with that ugly sloppy mess that is typical south Texas winter.

Sometimes it doesn’t even get cold at all. We go from hot, hot summer to springtime / fall for about 5 months and then back to summer. Here lately with no rain in all that time either. I can always predict Texas summers. Hot and dry, then dry and hot and then it gets hot and dry again for a while. Predicting winters? I gave up. I’ve sat in deer blinds in November and hosed myself down with insect repellents mixed with sweat and then a few weeks later had to break the ice on the water troughs so that the cows could get drink. I’ve skinny dipped on Padre Island in October and shoveled snow out of my driveway in January. OK, I only shoveled snow from my driveway once in my lifetime and probably will never have to do it again as long as I live here but I DID do it once. I had the most fun on my surfboard that winter day than I ever had on any summer day.

I don’t know about you but I’m going to be packing in supplies for this weekend. I need to bring everything it takes to make a big pot of Chile and a weekend supply of hot toddies. But I didn’t just step off the bus into south Texas yesterday. I’ll also be sure to get some ribs for the BBQ and some Bloody Mary and Margarita mix and we’ll see how things go. So Old Man Weather, what’s it going to be? Are you going to have the chills or a fever?

Ya’ll Keep your Mittens handy just in case.

Bye

Happy New Years

I can't believe the "0X's" are almost gone and we're already starting on the "1X's". I still haven't cleaned out my Y2K bunker. That SPAM is still good right? I was thinking on reflecting back on New Years Eves of the past but, for some reason I'm having some trouble remembering some of the details. Like where I spent them and what I did. A sliver of remembrance pokes through the fog here and there but surely that's some fantasy that my subconscious mind fabricated just to shock me. That couldn't have really happened, could it? New Years Eve falls on a Thursday this year. That's great. It gives me Friday to recoup and Saturday and Sunday to have a normal weekend before the first Monday of 2010. As usual, there are more festivities going on than I can could, or should, possibly attend. The crew here at work wants to kick things off Wednesday evening with Wings and Beers, then later that night an old friend is having her annual Night before New Years Eve Birthday Bash at a club she manages, Then on New Years Eve Night there is a New Years Eve Jam with some picking buddies. That should be a Hoot. My phone just rang a few minutes ago. It was another old friend that has a construction yard out in the country. He was inviting me to a New Years Eve party out there. He says the festivities there will be fairly unlimited. I was told you could bring guns  or bombs or whatever struck your fancy. Sounds interesting to say the least. I think I'm going to try and round up a half dozen or so suicide bombers. At midnight we can light those guys off. They seem to like that kind of thing. I don't know if I'll make all of these events. Next year I probably won't remember if I attended all of these or not.

Many people make New Years resolutions. They're going to lose weight, stop smoking, stop drinking, get a job, get married, get divorced, lower their cholesterol, raise their awareness, write a book, read a book, I've heard it all. Me, I'm not going to promise any of those things. Not even to myself. I'll be lucky to be able to keep doing what I'm doing. Which, I guess, ain't much.

I lost a lot of good friends in 2009 and not in the usual way. These died. As a matter of fact in the middle of the last paragraph I got a phone call alerting me to the passing of another old friend. Over my lifetime I've amassed a great number of people that I consider friends. The reality of that is that as we all get older, the number of them that are lost every year tends to increase as the years go by. A balding old man once told me that as he gets older he spends much more time at doctors offices and funeral homes and much less time at the barber shop. I guess that's true.

As I look back on 2009 it seems fairly uneventful. At least for me personally. Could this be true or do all the eventful things just lose their shine after a while, like tarnish on a new piece of brass. Of course there were a lot of powerful and meaningful things that happened, in general, in 2009. I won't get into that, we'll hear enough of that in the days and weeks to come until the media settles into 2010 or something else happens for the talking heads to cackle about.

This will be my last blog for 2009, unless something happens and I find something else to cackle about. So everyone, be safe, be happy and be careful out there and I hope to see you all back in 2010.

Happy New Year

From

Snappybob!

Christmas Time

Sorry about my post slacking lately but work has picked up, finally, and with the holidays and all the blog kind of got shoved to the side. It's not that I haven't thought about it but with everything on my mind and Christmas too I just haven't had time to think about what to write about. So let's blame it on Christmas and as long as Christmas gets the blame I'll also have to give it the spotlight. So for today's blog I give you the very talented, the always beautiful, the one and only Christmas. Christmas runs the emotional gamut from person to person from totally meaningless to completely taking control of ones life from Thanksgiving to the last bowl of Black eyed Peas on New Years Day.

 From a practical standpoint Christmas is very important, so I'm told, to the economy. I'm no economist but I think it must be very important to a capitalist based economy to get an occasional shot in the arm. A mechanism to keep the cash flow going. A means to keep the poor folks poor and the rich folks rich. It's for our own good I suppose.

For many folks it's a time for religious services. A time to remember and celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ. There will be services on Christmas Eve, on Christmas Morning and on Christmas evening as well. There will be Christmas Pageants where children will get there first taste of trotting the boards and being the star of the show on stage. My first remembrance of being in a Christmas Pageant was in elementary school where they dressed us up like Angels in a choir and put red lipstick on everybody so the audience could see our lips move. Yes, everybody got lipsticked. There will nativity scenes with farm animals, some real, some not. Homes, lawns and businesses will be decorated with lights and inflatable snowmen.

For many it is a time to gather friends and family together. It's that one time of year that you will see certain people. For some it will be the only time, for some it will be the first time to see the new friends or newborns. For some it will be the last time to see old friends. You just never know. Just think how many people were here last Christmas that are no longer with us. As we depart we will say "We must get together more often" but we won't in most cases. It's the just the Christmas spirit talking. The Christmas spirit is magic but fleeting.

So Christmas is special, I would think, to everyone. Whether you especially despise it, especially endear it, your especially, financially, enriched by it or especially financially crippled by it, it is special non the less.

On that note, I would like to take this opportunity to wish all of you, my dear readers, a very special Merry Christmas and a very Snappy New Year. I hope to see you all back, ratcheting up my new hit counter in 2010. Comments are always appreciated. Happy Holidays Everyone!

Rattlesnake Tequila

A few years ago my step brother Jerry told me that he was going to make something called Rattlesnake Tequila that he had heard about. If you've never met Brother Jerry or just haven't seen him for a while, here's a pic.

Brother Jerry

As you can see from the photo he is about 9 1/2 feet tall. He's the only guy I know who buys elevator shoes and has to have them specially set to basement just to keep his hat from wrecking the ceiling fans. He's sixty something years young, has most of his hair, all of his teeth and then some and jogs to work and back. He claims he owes it all to Rattlesnake Tequila. I don't think you can buy bottled Rattlesnake Tequila. You have to buy it by the shot or make it yourself. Are you intrigued yet? Here's a recipe I found on this website.

http://www.gumbopages.com/food/beverages/vibora.html

1 gallon (or so) of cheap white tequila

1 small rattlesnake (red diamondback preferred)

Catch the rattlesnake with a "special stick". Place the rattlesnake into a gallon jar, then fill with the cheap white tequila. As the snake drowns, it (allegedly) emits "minute amounts of compounds with certain medicinal properties." When the snake is dead, remove from jar, gut snake, then put back in jar. Put the jar in the sun for three months, then in the shade for three months. Serve as shots. "

The first thing Jerry needed was a rattlesnake. Well this IS Texas and we have plenty of people with access to them but all he was being offered was dead ones. I've often heard the phrase "The only good snake is a dead snake" but for Rattlesnake Tequila you need a live snake and only a live snake will do. Jerry finally found a snake handler some where out in the boonies that had snakes for sale. Jerry went to see him and convinced him that he wanted to raise the snake as a pet. He purchased the snake from the snake handler and brought him home with some, justified, trepidation. It seems the snake handlers hand was severely swollen from a previous snake bite and had several scars from other bites. Jerry and his buddy Tom get the snake home and begin preparations for getting the snake into the jar that will be eventually filled with Tequila. Jerry never forgets the details and had the presence of mind to put this part of it on video. Check it out, click SEE THE VIDEO under the picture of Jerry's Rattlesnake in a jar on this site. Rattlesnake in a jar.

I must admit that I never tasted Jerry's Rattlesnake Tequila and I think the brew has been disposed of by now but the story will live on. Jerry and his brother (my other step brother) Jim are good friends with Texas singer and songwriter Brian Burns Brian Burns website. Jim lives in Amarillo and sees Brian from time to time since Brian's home base is in the Dallas / Fort Worth area. One night Jim was shooting the breeze with Brian and started telling him the story about Jerry's Rattlesnake Tequila. Being the excellent song writer that Brian is he immediately saw the opportunity to turn this into a song that would fit onto his newest album that he was working on at the time, American Junkyard

Well the song has been written, the album has gone to press and the story of Jerry's Rattlesnake Tequila has been told. Of course Jerry is not the first one to make Rattlesnake Tequila and probably won't be the last but he did it and lived to tell the tale. And had the tale told by others. I know a lot of people will recoil (sorry couldn't help it) at the notion of killing a poor snake for the sake of making tequila and Jerry is not the type of person to go around killing things for the fun of it. It was just something he had to do.

Click here for words to song and audio clip in upper right corner.

Right now I think Jerry's on a train headed to Nacona Texas to be in the audience of the Brian Burns Christmas show there on December 4th. I wonder what stories he will bring back from this trip?

Here's some pictures of other jars of Rattlesnake Tequila sitting on bars around Mexico.

Adios Amigos!

Heads Up!.........Red Molly.

Today I'm going to introduce a new feature on the blog. Let's call it Heads Up! Today on Heads Up! we will be featuring a female musical group called  Red Molly. They are an acoustic trio from the New York area that sound like they should be right out of Austin or somewhere else in the hill country. Perhaps everyone else has already heard of Red Molly and this is just another opportunity for me to look silly but I'll risk it. It would, after all, be just another drop in the bucket. I stumbled across these ladies when doing a YouTube search for Steve Goodmans song "Lookin For Trouble". I found a video of these gals doing a rendition of that song at what looked like a party. I was immediately taken with the arrangement and their harmonies really blew me away. I started checking out other videos by them and found this one and then this one and then I watched this one. Well I went and did a Google on them and found their web page. Here' Tis You can listen to a bunch of their songs on there as well. I checked to see if they do much touring and found out the they will be doing a House Concert in Austin on January 30th 2010. They are playing Dallas the night before on Friday(Hear that Buffalo Gal) then Austin on Saturday then Houston on Sunday. Sorry no San Antonio. I guess their tour manager figures Texas only has three real cities Dallas, Austin and Houston. Whatever. Anyway I'm seriously thinking about going. It's $15/person with a pot luck dinner. I guess that means with any luck we can smoke pot after dinner? It IS in Austin. I called the people who are hosting it and they said they could seat about 50-60 people. They are not advertising the January show yet in the Austin area but they figure it will be a good crowd. Reservations would be pretty much necessary. Anyway check out the links and let me know if there are any takers. I figure if all of my readers want to go we can rent a VW Beetle and take the dogs too.

For the first Heads Up! post I am going to feature a Bonus Heads Up! Fellow Snappybob follower Leigh also has a blog. She just returned from a really nice Photo Safari in Arkansas. She did some extensive camping and hiking and posted some really nice photographs on her blog. It's always a really good read also.
Visit her blog here...BuffaloGal

OK, thanks for dropping in. Hope to see you soon! Bye!