He’s: (a) Clinton’s former Secretary of Labor, and (b) an aggravating little bastard.

That’s that.

Another Bike Suggestion for Spoons.

If the 400 mph crotch rocket I suggested a couple days ago is too pricey or too hard to handle, this one should be a snap to drive, even with its 320 horsepower Chevy V8 engine. However, if neither of those is acceptable, there is always this.

via Attu Sees All

“The number you have reached has been changed. The new number is …” How many times have you heard that message? It turns out that the voice you (and approximately 22 million other people per day) heard belonged to Jane Barbe. She died yesterday at age 74. Ms. Barbe had been recording messages for phone companies around the country for more than 40 years. Pretty amazing.

I wonder if Ms. Barbe ever met AOL’s “You’ve got mail” guy, maybe at some kind of convention of people who make recorded messages heard by gazillions of people every day.

Link via My So-Called Blog

TJ at Twisty asked herself this question and identified the five living and five deceased celebrities she chose.

One of the five deceased celebrities she chose was “grandma.” She conceded that “grandma” was probably only a celebrity to her, but that she “would love to watch her smoke, slug back a brew and listen to her sassy, colorful commentary about the afterlife.” I would love to have a beer with her too, although I always called her “mom.”

TJ made my heart smile.

Several people, all of whom used to be friends, are parties to a New Jersey lawsuit over the ownership of a $25 million lottery ticket. It seems that the fellow who regularly collected a couple bucks each week from a group of co-workers (these days he is called “defendant”) is being sued by his co-workers who claim that he passed off the winning ticket to a former neighbor (he also is known as “defendant”) and shared the winnings with him.

Not surprisingly, the facts are hotly disputed, and no one’s story seems perfect. However, for what it’s worth, the Lottery’s Deputy Director believes the former neighbor who says he has no relationship with the office pool guy, and he doesn’t know anything about any office lottery pool. A Superior Court judge will have to sort it all out.

The moral of the story is that if you take people’s money for a lottery pool, after you buy the tickets, run – don’t walk – to a photocopy machine, make copies and see that everyone in the pool gets copy of the tickets you bought for the pool. This is particularly true if you also buy your own tickets. Cover your ass, because when $25 million is involved, lawyers are easy to find.

It’s not bad enough that New Jersey has what the DOT considers to be lousy roads, and that it leads the nation in car thefts, now we learn via DynamoBuzz, another Jersey Blogger, that we pay the highest auto insurance premiums in the nation. I have a feeling that these three things go together.

Would somebody please call Tony Soprano to get this straightened out. Oh, I forgot. He’s vacationing with the governor.

It’s a bitch when you’ve written something, and you take a look at the several hundred words on the screen that are supposed to be the finished product, and there’s no denying it. It stinks. I just created such a beast. I tinkered with it for a few minutes and finally came to the conclusion that it was just plain lousy. It seemed like a good idea a few hours ago as it began to take shape in my head. Maybe it was even a great idea, but ideas aren’t worth spit if you cannot bring them to life with words.

I closed the document, and the pop-up message taunted me: “Do you want to save the changes you made to Document 1?” No thanks. A blank screen is far more interesting.

Maybe my literary beer fart was the result of having seen a good bit of a perfectly idiotic television show called “Dog Eat Dog.” Now there’s a real stinker. Buff contestants, stupid stunts and a hostess with a body to kill for and the brains of a piss clam.

I’m sure of it. That damned fool television show turned my brains to shit.

I hope it’s only temporary.

Right We Are pointed to a post on Outside the Beltway discussing TTLB’s reporting of traffic statistics. TTLB tracks almost 3,600 sites. Of those, Outside the Beltway notes, there are 985 sites that have open Site Meter traffic statistics.

All this counting leads one to wonder just how many bloggers are out there (out here) plugging away.

According to information published at Blogcount, a site that is chock full of blog and blogger demographics, it turns out that the 3,600 blogs tracked by TTLB are but a tiny fraction of the estimated 2.4 to 2.9 million bloggers in the blogosphere. Imagine that. There are 2.9 million similarly situated nutbars out there (out here).

That would make one helluva long blogroll.

OK, here is the logo, but you may never see it where it belongs, because for two nights I have been pulling out my gott-damned hair (Did I mention that I have great farookin’ hair?) trying to get it to come up on the page correctly.

Right about now I am fresh out of patience, and I’d like to find the person who dreamed up HTML and hang my foot in his/her ass.

Phooey!

Spoons recently received his motorcycle license and purchased a used Kawasaki. However, he has his sights set on something a little spiffier. This one is perfect. It is the Dodge Tomahawk. It boasts 10 cylinders, 500 horsepower, and will accelerate from zero to sixty in about 2.5 seconds (hold on!), with a theoretical top speed of 400 mph (really hold on!).

Unless Spoons is representing Kobe Bryant, he may need a weekend gig to pay for this silver beauty, which carries a price tag of $250,000.

Check out all the details here.

Link via The Presurfer