Thursday, January 7, 2010

Volume 4, Number 9: Still More Miscellaneous Mumbo-Jumbo

(Note: I originally posted this entry on my Yahoo! blog on September 8, 2009.)

My latest achievement: Giving new life to a 30-year-old snowblower. I rescued it from the garbage on July 29 and, in the process of searching for a manual for it online, came across this web site, where another guy had troubles with the same snowblower and gave step-by-step instructions showing how he was able to fix it. After about 50 unsuccessful attempts to start mine, I decided I had nothing to lose and so I might as well check out that web site. A few hours later, I have a working snowblower for the first time since I moved to my house nine years ago. (The ad below is further proof of how old it is--it's from a September 1980 newspaper--and it also gives you some idea of what it looks like.)

I'm overweight and it reminds me of something I heard somewhere: "You could lose weight if you leave a little food on your plate." Actually, you could do the same if you cooked less food beforehand, or better yet, bought less food at the supermarket to begin with! It's just frigging wasteful to leave food on your plate; it meant you cooked too much food, and besides, there are people starving everywhere, including here in America.

When it comes to buying electronics, there are certain brands I swear by (Panasonic, Sony, JVC) and brands I've had bad experiences with (Apex, Funai). Unfortunately, Philips Magnavox recently decided to have Funai make all their HDTVs and DVD players so I will have to add Philips to the verboten list.

Shows I've been watching as of late: Hoarders (A&E, Monday nights at 10); Operation Repo (TruTV, usually on Mondays); Drop Dead Diva (Lifetime, Sunday nights at 9--yes, isn't that something, I'm actually watching a Lifetime show) and of course, Hell's Kitchen (Tuesdays at 8 on Fox). That first show is about people who compulsively hoard stuff to the point that their houses turn into big garbage dumps. Operation Repo chronicles the goings-on at an LA repo company--fighting, swearing and all-out idiocy abound. Drop Dead Diva--a vapid model is killed in a car accident and her soul gets transferred into the body of a smart but, er, heavy-set lawyer and I like fantasy shows like that.

Kitchen Nightmares' third season will start airing this fall (probably after the World Series is finished) and I've heard that Gordon Ramsay will try to turn around restaurants in Miami and Philadelphia as well as New York and LA. Being Erica returns in two weeks on CBC, too. I miss Life On Mars and wish ABC hadn't cancelled the show; prior to that cancellation, I had been looking forward to seeing Sam Tyler continue to cope with being stuck 35 years in the past as 1973 became... 1974.

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