It’s 11:45 and I’m done working for the day, the weather is a balmy 50 degrees, and I’m gonna go jump out of an airplane. Today I’ll do my first untethered jump.

Update 5:43 — Drat! About an hour before we made it down there, the plane’s engine done ‘sploded and we weren’t able to jump. But at least the drive was nice, the weather down around the I-70 corridor was up in the 60s.

I was just down in the main office, trading jokes with some co-workers. Here are my two favorites:

Why do Gorillas have such big nostrils?

Because they have such big fingers!

A panda finally gets freed from the zoo and is allowed to rejoin society. His first instinct, naturally, is to go find himself a girl panda. So he goes off to the singles bars and, sure enough, he meets a willing pandess. She takes him back to her place and fixes a meal and things progress from there. After the Panda-style, he darts out the door and heads back to his place. The girl panda shakes her head and says to herself, “Well isn’t that like a panda, he eats shoots and leaves.”

See the first one is funny because gorillas like to pick their nose, and the second one is funny because Panda bear mating habits are so interesting.

I am soooo jealous of these dudes.

(The pictures in this post may not work temporarily, I’m testing something out).

Here’s the surprise I’ve been so excited about the past few days. I’ve never bought any furniture for myself aside from an office desk and chair and a file cabinet… maybe a few shelving units, but that’s it. All my furniture is hand-me-downs or stuff that was lent to me and never taken back. My bed had seen better days, and my living room was barren, making it very difficult to entertain guests. This is all an unacceptable situation for a respectable 26 year old to let himself into. So on Saturday morning, I went furniture shopping. For anyone in the market for furniture I recommend Ann at Rhode’s Furniture, she set me up. I’d been to a few places before then, but most of the stuff I’d seen was shoddily built and overpriced. But I ended up finding exactly what I wanted. I got this couch:

It’s a Lazyboy sofa, the side sections recline and the middle folds down. I anticipate it will be perfect for Mario Game Kart. Those throw pillows I bought at Bed, Bath, and Beyond for ten bucks a piece. My girl picked them out… Blues/Rams colors. I nearly shed a tear.

I also got a new bed. It’s a Simmons Beautyrest, a queen-size pillowtop with individually pocketed coils. I slept great last night, and was up before five feeling like a million bucks.

I also picked up some new sheets at BBB, taking Jeff’s advice by going for the Modal fabric. Those are some super nice sheets. It’s a silkier variant of the Jersey sheets I’ve enjoyed sleeping on for so long. I had a hard time getting out of bed this morning because it felt so good rubbing my beard in the pillowcase. This also gave me the opportunity to put one of my spare bedrooms to better use as its namesake, moving in my old Centennial Hall dorm bed.

All this pleases me greatly. Gotta get to work now, I have seven videotapes in queue for digitizing, editing, and conversion to streaming video. Should have a chance to read the news later and resume sensible blogging and end bragging later on.

I call BS on this article. BS, I SAY!!! I’m friends with this guy’s son, so I know for a fact that ain’t no world record.

All missions accomplished this morning. My teeth are screwed. I’ve got to go back for a “deep cleaning” which is two appointments. They’re going to chip away a bunch of calcium deposits near my gumline. And I have to get six small fillings. That’s a lot of drilling, and no novocaine for the L-Train. Should be fun. I’ll have pictures up later on of the other surprise. Around 8 or so.

Just finished one of the nastiest jobs I’ve ever had to do. Remember that fridge that died on Jan. 23rd? It’s still in my kitchen, in the middle of the room. I hadn’t cleaned out the freezer or the drip pan in the bottom of the main refrigerated storage until just now, a month and a day later. I was wearing a heavy duty dust mask, that blocked out most of the nasty. It’s amazing how aggressively those mold spores will cake up and try to mock us multicellular organisms by standing upright. A roll of paper towels later, and I showed them who’s king of this rock. A few more chores to go, and I’ll be ready for tomorrow’s big surprise. I’m real freaking excited. I’ll take some pictures.

I’m not above linking myself. Here goes! That’ll take you to my position post on gay marriage, which drew precisely the reaction I expected–nothing, you uncombatative slouches. I only bring it up because once again that not particularly interesting issue is back in the news.

Updated 2/26: In this article, Donald Sensing states that he is against the FMA on Federalist grounds and I’m guessing that also means he is against the proposed amendment making the FMA constitutional law, but he offers what I consider sound and compelling arguments in opposition to institutionalizing same-sex relationships as marriages. In spite of what Chris in CU says in the comments, this issue isn’t all that important to me, except that I don’t want to see the constitution amended to increase the power of the feds at the expense of individal liberty. I also don’t like seeing the rule of law flouted as in the 3,000 pretend marriages in San Francisco recently. (Pretend because California voters already passed a referendum defining what sort of thing the state of California considers a marriage to be, a definition that rules out same-sex marriages.) So basically, I think it makes sense for some places to recognize same-sex marriage and for others not to, and little sense for the federal government to go to battle against local communities over it. I’d rather live in a place that does recognize them, for pro-business reasons more than the satisfaction derived from feeling that you didn’t discriminate against anyone today, and I’d rather live in a country where people can choose to dwell in either sort of community for any reasons, be they personal, solemn, or even bigoted.

The Blame Bush Blog is friggin’ hilarious. Satire is at its best when just scarcely indiscernible from reality. Reminds me of stuff my former boss in construction, not so ironically named Frenchie, might very well say.

Jeff just called to tell me that Coach Q was fired today. He heard on the radio during his commute home, I don’t see an article up yet. Press conference is scheduled for 6:30 CST, I imagine something will be out then. I have mixed feelings about this. Joel Quenneville is a great coach, and I like his defensive schemes. But we’ve been spending way too much money lately and getting little in return come post-season. Coach has to bear some of that responsibility. He’s a great pregame coach, but I don’t consider him to be one of the more inspiring bench coaches out there. Not by a long shot. Hopefully we can replace him before the season really spirals out of control. And if anyone mentions Keenan (aside from Prongs) they’ve got ten tons of grief coming their way.

Update: Just got back from a nice dinner at El Toro. Had the “El Toro Fajitas” and finished about a third of it. It was good, the company was better. ESPN has an article online about Joel’s being fired, and I think Bill Clement’s analysis is spot-on. We fired a great coach towards the end of a tough season to scare the team into short-term performance just to guarantee a playoff berth. Don’t forget we were counting on a Norris quality defensemen in Al MacInnis this season and Barrett Jackman has been out too. The corps is stretched thin. What we’ll be left with is a lesser coach in a longterm contract and a team that doesn’t respect the management. And I hope Coach Q goes somewhere and tears up the league. Hopefully he goes somewhere in the East.

March is next week, and that makes me very, very close to becoming Unkie Weeum. If I disappear for a few days all the sudden, I’ll be in Nashville with the sis n’ bro-in-law meeting the first nephew. Here’s a picture of the two of them with my godfather, observing me perform a backspin at their wedding reception:

I don’t ordinarily go for conspiracy theories, but the evidence is just too overwhelming for this one not to be taken seriously. Even the normally scopious IG-88 explanation does little to reveal the truth of what happened that day.

Tip of the hat to Emily, whose advice is wise, and sage. Too bad we’re dealing with an anti-democratic, anti-capitalist f*ckwad with cross-eyed artistic vision.

Cartoons like this will hurt Kerry. I’ll be proud to vote (again) for the man that enemy dictators liken to Lex Luthor.

The state of Illinois has gone batty. Straight-up batshit loopy. There are two bills in the legislature about new drunk driving laws: the first mandates that anyone with three DUIs on their record replace their license plates with “a brightly colored license plate with the words ‘repeat DUI offender.’” That’s stupid because not all drunks are unmarried slouches, and their spouses might share the car. Not to mention a repulsive power grab by big brother. The second is even stupider, dropping the legal limit from the already ridiculous .08% to .06%. I had three beers with dinner last night, and I’m probably still over .06 percent. These jokers are nickle and diming us back into prohibition. I blame the taxi-cab lobby. There really is a taxi-cab lobby, did you not know? A fairly good number of students here at the U of I live in nearby Rantoul, and the bus system that all students are required to pay a fee for was considering running a limited route up there. But one of the local taxi companies had just made a major investment in vans for servicing the Rantoul-Champaign corridor and pressured MTD from opening the route. I’ll try to find a source for that later in the day. Gotta get to work now and bewilder everyone by showing up before 10.

Took another quiz:

Which 1990′s Subculture Do You Belong To?

[Another Quiz by Kris

@ couplandesque.net]

Just because I drink Budweiser, people think I’m angry and mean. I do listen to some heavy metal, but don’t think it’s “nu.” Most of those questions were pretty tough to figure out the best answer for, you’ll probably agree.

Found the quiz at the abode of the super-grunge Illinigirl.

Jeff wrote his first quizilla quiz, and boy is it a dandy. I took it and lo and behold discover that:

The problem is, aside from when I’m too busy working on something or paying attention to something, I am thinking about sex. It’s my resting mental state. Also notice in the quiz that Jeff mentioned a sock. “HE HAD TO USE A SOCK TO CLEAN THE S4!T OFF!” Oh, that’s funny.

Fark listed an article in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch titled Beer for Breakfast. Not suprisingly, I’m quite familiar with one of the three profiled in the article. The summer after my freshman year of college, I used to work midnight shifts at the brewery. And so when the whistle would blow at 7 or 8 (depending on which side of the pasteurizer I was working on), I’d head over to the bars with the other workers on my shift to slam some cold Budweisers. Those were pretty good times, aside from the near absolute lack of sleep, which on one occasion caused some rather disturbing hallucinations at work. I was sort of half-asleep on an unloader. My job was to clear jams and make sure the unloader picked all the bottles out of the cases. In my stupor, I sorta dreamed with my eyes open that the boxes zipping by were little cartoon race cars being driven by Heckle and Jeckle. And I was talking to them. “You can’t be driving around with an open beverage container in your car…” Yoink, I’d pull a bottle the unloader missed out and set it up on the line. Back to the story: I used to hang out at the Cat’s Meow sometimes. They had Patsy Cline and Gordon Lightfoot on the jukebox. You could get a Natural Light draft there for a few quarters, which made it my friend Larry’s favorite joint in town. I don’t recall the people they mention, but I didn’t start bothering to learn peoples’ names until fairly recently. It wasn’t one of the places I hit frequently. The Stress Center was more popular until it burned down. And Filling Station is a great place, I still go in there for a beer and to talk to the bartenders whenever my friends head up to Venice Cafe across the street. Those were good times. Leaving a bar at 11am, nicely lit up with the summer sun blinding your eyes. Buy some Gus’s pretzels from the guys hanging out in intersections, and jump on the highway. Head home and sleep for three hours until my girlfriend at the time would come over to hang out. Then it would start all over again. A great summer. It paid for my car, may she rest in peace.

Since I’m so vain, I chose to take down the post with pictures of me in Mardi Gras beads. Can’t give my enemies the opportunity to have evidence that I am, in fact, a Sasquatch. But there was something that came up in its

that I should probably mention. My pal C-bot, a.k.a. Caleb Eckhardt, was recently engaged to an outstanding young lady named Stephanie Trickle, and they plan to tie the knot in October. Here’s a picture of them accidentally taken when my camera went off unexpectedly:

As per Chris’s instructions, I will extend his congratulations C-botward.

A photo essay in honor of Donald Rumsfeld’s fighting prowess featuring 21 of his 1000 gung-fu styles. My favorites are “Fist of the West Side!” and “Drunken Temple Boxing!”

So, do you buy the story that special forces (ops?) have Bin Laden surrounded and are awaiting orders to snatch him? I hope so, but the details in the story seem a bit too made-up to take seriously. Helicopters on donkeys swooping into caves on a grab-n’-go? Of course, there is no doubt a nugget of truth in the story: Bin Laden is boxed in. I hope we see Ol’ Osama on the news in the next few days getting his ears checked, but I’m not keeping my hopes up too high. Little Green Footballs is all over the serious and useful analysis of this story being done by our friends on the Left.

On totally unrelated news, I got a lot of stuff done today. I went out and did something that I should have done a long time ago. Bought some stuff. That’s all I can say until Wednesday, because it’s got to be a surprise.