One clear day the inventor of the Harley Davidson Motorcycle Corporation, Arthur Davidson, died and went to heaven. At the gates, St. Peter told Arthur, "Since you've been such a good man and your motorcycles have changed the world, your reward is that you can hang out with anyone you want to in Heaven."

Arthur thought about it for a minute and then said, "I want to hang out with God."

St. Peter took Arthur to the Throne Room, and introduced him to God. God recognized Arthur and commented, "Okay, so you were the one who invented motorcycles, eh?"

Arthur said, "Yeah, that's me!"

God commented, "Well, what a big deal in inventing something that's pretty unstable, makes noise and pollution, and can't run without a road?"

Arthur was apparently embarrassed, but finally spoke, "Excuse me but aren't you the inventor of woman?"

God said, "Ah, yes."

"Well," said Arthur, "professional to professional, you have some major design flaws in your invention: There's too much inconsistency in the front-end protrusion; it chatters constantly at high speeds; most of the rear ends are too soft and wobble too much; the intake is placed way too close to the exhaust; and the maintenance costs are outrageous!

"Hmmmm, you may have some good points there," replied God, "Hold on."

God went to his Celestial supercomputer, typed in a few words and waited for the results. The computer printed out a slip of paper and God read it.

"Well, it may be true that my invention is flawed," God said to Arthur, "but according to these numbers, more men are riding my invention than yours."


[ via Gary ]

• It has been an interesting week for sure. And of course by "interesting" I mean "awful." The strangest part about it was that nothing particularly evil happened. Work has been busy, but good. Sum it up to just having been one of those weeks, I guess.



• My car started sputtering yesterday on my way back to the office from Arby's. I have heard suggestions that the cause of this intermittent issue is the spark plugs, spark wires or perhaps the fuel filter. An agent at work gave me the name and number of a local mechanic who does good work inexpensively. He will be receiving a call from me this afternoon.



• I just watched some guy out the window leaving the office wearing a t-shirt that stated, "If you can't race it or take it to bed, it's not worth having."



• I was very pleased to find out that the network operations centre that is home to my server was not forced to use emergency generators to maintain service, despite their being only a thirty minute drive from Manhattan. This event reminded me of a time I was driving through Jacksonville from Tallahassee on my way to Orlando and the power company there, JEA, suffered a failure that blackened the largest city geographically in the contiguous United States (Sitka, Alaska is the largest in the entire United States). I grew up fifteen minutes away from Niagara Falls and have been on the public tours of the hydroelectric power generation stations, one of which was alleged to have been struck by lightning yesterday.



• I do not have any big plans for the weekend. Probably going to stay home most of the time and do things around the house.

I love the irony in this second ranking result from a Google search for "URL Stickers."

I would like to share a message I recently received from someone who, via search engine, found Mount Sutro and decided to share a story with me. We have exchanged a few e-mails since and she has given me permission to share her original message here.

Your website about Mt. Sutro is very interesting. I myself have always had an "inexplicable fascination" with the tower, since I was a little kid back in the early '70s. We actually lived in the valley, but my grandmother, who was very sick with cancer at the time, was being treated at UCSF hospital there on the mountain. I recall as a child sitting in the back of the car, driving to San Francisco to visit her and my parents always telling me to "look for grandma's tower" and by that I knew we were getting close. It was visible as we'd come over the mountain into the bay, before we'd reach the bridge – it was so tall. The tower, of course, is located just behind the hospital, so I'd spot it and watch as it got closer and closer until we were finally there. So now even to this day, I can't make that drive to the City without seeing that tower and thinking about my grandmother, who has since passed. Isn't it bizarre the things we associate certain people??

Anyway, it was really fascinating to read all of your facts about it. Something stirred in me to run a search for Sutro Tower, and so I stumbled across your website! Cute cat, by the way. :-) I have three.

Have a good weekend,
Melinda

Thank you, Melinda. Your message made my day.

Despite the continual rain while walking around Downtown Disney and waiting in line for entry to the House of Blues, the Train concert was, for lack of better verbiage, fucking awesome. The opening act, Blue Merle, who I had never heard of before was actually good. Their music was an interesting, but well-defined combination of various music styles including rock, bluegrass and jazz using mandolin, acoustic guitar, fiddle, stand-up bass and drums. I would have let the mandolin player strum my strings, but anyway, I digress.

Train puts on a very high energy, potent performance that not only commands the attention of the audience, but also demands it. Front man Pat Monahan belts out his thought provoking lyrics with an amazing voice, coupled with his reserved, yet subtly flamboyant stage presence and hint of sexuality. The play list included a great variety of songs from their first self-titled album, award winning and map-placing sophomore Drops of Jupiter and their latest offering, My Private Nation. Just as the energetic performance reached a peak following powerful renderings from Nation and singles such as "Respect," "Calling All Angels," "Meet Virginia," "Drops of Jupiter" plus a crowd-pleasing cover of "Whole Lotta Love" by Led Zeppelin, the band left the stage begging the question of what the encore had in store for us. After returning to the stage with the crowd wildly applauding, stomping and screaming, Train erupted back into playing with another classic rock idol, Aerosmith's sixties anthem and personal favourite of mine, "Dream On." As they wrapped up the encore, I wondered what could possible follow such an energetic feat, one that nearly brought the house down. It turned out to be my favourite Train song, "Hopeless" from the Jupiter album and originally featured on their non-label independent release, One and a Half. I had not planned on hearing this ballad during the show due to its never having been a single and its placement on older albums, but it turned out to be their second encore only to be followed by the concluding and self-described "favourite" of the band themselves, "Your Every Color," from Nation.