GoingLikeSixty and his wife up and sold their house in Kentucky and are moving to Costa Rica in just a few weeks. He’s been posting about the upcoming move and the huge culture shock they’re facing by moving to a less-developed country. I would make a joke about how he already lives in a third-world country right there in Kentucky, but we both know it’s not really a joke. His wife, Nancy, who also blogs, has some backstory to explain how they decided to chuck it all in the first place. I have a client who spends the winter months in Costa Rica, and she makes it sound pretty good, too, but I have a hard enough time living in suburbia; I think I’d lose what little sanity I have left trying to live the pura vida.

Joel Sax apparently wants to give us all nightmares by talking about all the horrible things that happen to your teeth. Personally, I’m not too concerned about developing meth mouth, but having suffered with dry mouth as a side effect of prescriptions for a couple of years, his descriptions brought back some unpleasant memories. I know Joel has had to deal with complicated and difficult dental procedures over the years, and it’s a fate I would not wish on anyone. I count myself as incredibly lucky not to have had many dental problems over the years, despite never having been a regular customer of a dentist until I became a parent and had to put my money where my mouth was, so to speak.

Even as other bloggers fall by the wayside, my buddy Jack Cluth manages to keep grinding it out after all these years just by keeping up with the headlines. This morning, though, he offers us this very helpful infographic that distinguishes between Canadian beers and unnatural sex acts. This should be especially useful even to Canadians, who just last week voted en masse to fuck themselves.

Earlier this year, Cisco finally did away with the Linksys brand name on their home wireless networking gear (they had acquired Linksys all the way back in 2003). They added some swoopy industrial design, redid the configuration UI to be “easier”, renamed the product the “Cisco Valet”, and jacked up the price of a basic home wireless router from about $75 to $129.

My blog-buddy “Going Like Sixty” found himself of a new router the other day and bought one on the premise that it would be very simple to set up, but, as he tells us here, any visions of “breezing through the simple screens” quickly disappeared into that sucking morass known as “Bangalore Tech Support Madness”. He’s a little bitter about the whole thing.

Frankly, I’m having a hard time imagining why the marketeering geniuses at Cisco thought setting up a wireless router needed to be “easier”, since wireless routers have been probably the simplest bit of home computer tech ever created. In fact, they have been, to some degree, TOO easy because it has always been possible to just plug one in and have it work with very little intervention required, with the result being tons of home wireless networks being set up with nobody ever changing the default admin passwords or implementing the built-in (and equally simple-to-enable) encryption. And now most people don’t even need to bother with their own wireless router, since the cable companies wised up and built them right into their cable modems. Jacking the price and alienating the technically-disinclined doesn’t really seem like a great business plan…but, then again, we are talking about Cisco.

My blog-buddy “Going Like Sixty” says he’s figured out a way to game those Coinstar change machines you find in supermarkets: go to the customer service counter and cash in two $20 bills for quarters, pump the quarters into the Coinstar machine and get an “eCertificate” from one of a number of popular retailers that includes a $10 rebate on your purchase. Even after you calculate out the fee Coinstar charges, you’re still ahead of the game by about 8 bucks. Makes Christmas shopping more like a trip to Vegas!

Yesterday, he shared the story of a little red car called a “DKW” that only had seven moving parts in its engine: three cylinders and pistons, three connecting rods, and a driveshaft. The engine was a two-stroke type (not unlike what powers your lawn mower), with five speeds. But five was four too many for GLS’s brother, who was given the car as a high school graduation present by their father back in 1961. He drove the little car with his foot on the floor all the time.

Anyway, I’ll let him tell you the story, because it’s a good one.

My list is after the jump.

1. Started my own blog
2. Slept under the stars
3. Played in a band
4. Visited Hawaii
5. Watched a meteor shower
6. Given more than I can afford to charity
7. Been to Disneyland/world
8. Climbed a mountain
9. Held a praying mantis
10. Sung a solo
11. Bungee jumped
12. Visited Paris
13. Watched lightening at sea
14. Taught myself an art from scratch
15. Adopted a child
16. Had food poisoning
17. Walked to the top of the Statue of Liberty
18. Grown my own vegetables
19. Seen the Mona Lisa in France
20. Slept on an overnight train
21. Had a pillow fight
22. Hitchhiked
23. Taken a sick day when you’re not ill
24. Built a snow fort
25. Held a lamb
26. Gone skinny dipping
27. Run a Marathon
28. Ridden in a gondola in Venice
29. Seen a total eclipse
30. Watched a sunrise or sunset
31. Hit a home run
32. Been on a cruise
33. Seen Niagara Falls in person
34. Visited the birthplace of my ancestors
35. Seen an Amish community
36. Taught myself a new language
37. Had enough money to be truly satisfied
38. Seen the Leaning Tower of Pisa in person
39. Gone rock climbing
40. Seen Michelangelo’s David
41. Sung karaoke
42. Seen Old Faithful geyser erupt
43. Bought a stranger a meal at a restaurant
44. Visited Africa
45. Walked on a beach by moonlight
46. Been transported in an ambulance
47. Had my portrait painted
48. Gone deep sea fishing
49. Seen the Sistine Chapel in person
50. Been to the top of the Eiffel Tower in Paris — Okay, I chickened out of going to the top, but I went to the second stage
51. Gone scuba diving or snorkeling
52. Kissed in the rain
53. Played in the mud
54. Gone to a drive-in theater
55. Been in a movie
56. Visited the Great Wall of China
57. Started a business
58. Taken a martial arts class
59. Visited Russia
60. Served at a soup kitchen
61. Sold Girl Scout Cookies
62. Gone whale watching
63. Got flowers for no reason
64. Donated blood, platelets or plasma
65. Gone sky diving
66. Visited a Nazi Concentration Camp
67. Bounced a check
68. Flown in a helicopter
69. Saved a favorite childhood toy
70. Visited the Lincoln Memorial
71. Eaten Caviar
72. Pieced a quilt
73. Stood in Times Square
74. Toured the Everglades
75. Been fired from a job
76. Seen the Changing of the Guards in London
77. Broken a bone
78. Been on a speeding motorcycle
79. Seen the Grand Canyon in person
80. Published a book
81. Visited the Vatican
82. Bought a brand new car
83. Walked in Jerusalem
84. Had my picture in the newspaper
85. Read the entire Bible
86. Visited the White House
87. Killed and prepared an animal for eating
88. Had chickenpox
89. Saved someone’s life
90. Sat on a jury
91. Met someone famous
92. Joined a book club
93. Lost a loved one
94. Had a baby — Since I do not own a uterus, I did not actually give birth to a baby, but I did father a child.
95. Seen the Alamo in person
96. Swam in the Great Salt Lake
97. Been involved in a law suit
98. Owned a cell phone
99. Been stung by a bee
100. Ridden an elephant

Hillary is getting all souped up to win the Kentucky primary today. This time for sure she’s going to PROVE that she’s the rightful nominee. I think she’s going to need a WHOLE LOT of Maker’s Mark to get there, though.

Over at Going Like Sixty, our Man-On-The-Scene reports that some extra-vigilant security people confiscated the little American flags he and his family brought to a Hillary Clinton rally because the sticks could be used as weapons.

Because, after all, Hillary is a firm believer in the “sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me” school of politics.

Ah, the joys of middle age, where nobody can tell you you can’t smoke big smelly cigars and swill down throat-scorching alcoholic beverages. There are indeed advantages to sliding into geezerhood.

I used to enjoy an occasional cigar, and by “occasional” I mean like one or two a year. Even at that low frequency, though, I bet I haven’t puffed on a Cuban Death Log in a good ten years. I do have a good reason not to pick up a real smoking habit, but I don’t have any particular explanation for having gotten so far away from enjoying an occasional cigar. I suppose sipping whiskey and smoking cigars are sort of complementary behaviors, actually. Done right, they just about cancel out the associated unpleasant flavors in the mouth and tell-tale odors on the breath, and induce a similar degree of buzziness in the head. And that can’t be all bad.

Once summer starts up around here, I might have to consider spending an evening on the deck with a glass in one hand and a cigar in the other, contemplating the fireflies.

Now, who’s the expert on chasing younger women?

The other day, Mark at Going Like Sixty clued me in to this list of “The 50 Most Powerful Blogs” that appeared in the Manchester Observer (the Sunday companion paper to The Guardian) last weekend. Unsurprisingly, it also turned up yesterday for the requisite dose of snark and derision at MetaFilter.

Mark said that he only reads one of those fifty on a regular basis; I count six of them on my daily blogcrawl (and, yes, one of them IS “I Can Has Cheezburger”, thank you for asking) and another one that is a frequent-but-not-daily stop (Huffington Post). But I have close to 150 feeds in my RSS reader, so it’s fair to say that my net casts out far and wide beyond the biggest fish.

The MetaFilter crowd was a bit huffy about not making that list, even though lists like these should in now way be confused with reality, but I don’t know if this is a list anyone wants to be on. Are we really supposed to believe that “I Can Has Cheezburger” is 1) powerful and b) more powerful than “The Drudge Report”, which almost brought down Bill Clinton’s presidency? And if online gossip websites like PerezHilton and TMZ are “powerful”, then maybe I’ve been underestimating just how doomed civilization really is. It doesn’t help that the article doesn’t tell you what it means by powerful; do they mean these sites have the most visitors, that they generate the most revenue for their advertisers, or that they sway public discourse in some important way? Again, if that third one is true, it means that silly cat pictures with bad spelling and grammar have become the Bible and the Communist Manifesto for the 21st Century. Let that sink in for a moment.

People have been ranking and rating blogs in a myriad of ways for almost as long as we old-timers have been blogging. So this particular article is decidedly old hash warmed through and shouldn’t affect anyone’s reading anymore than the Bloggie Awards or the circle-jerk they call SXSW. On Boing Boing (#2 on this list), Cory Doctorow, the Busiest Man On The Internet, was egotistical kind enough to link to his own article at Information Week wherein he pontificates on how you, too, can be as elite, famous, and good-looking as he is. (Hint to all those SEO bloggers out there, it has NOTHING to do with you)

1. Mark at Going Like Sixty gets top billing because he posted about how the now-classic Peace Symbol came to be.  Today happens to be the 50th anniversary of the creation of that symbol, which was meant to represent the semaphore codes for the letters N and D for "Nuclear Disarmament".  These days, people tend to confuse the peace symbol with the Mercedes Benz logo, since owning a Merc has superseded working for peace in the minds of a lot of Americans.  By the same token, Winston Churchill’s "V for Victory" hand gesture was also appropriated by the ’60s youth culture to mean "peace".  Churchill originally used the gesture with his fingers turned inward like this:

He turned his hand around after someone worked up the guts to tell him what that gesture actually means (HINT: it ain’t pretty).  I imagine more than one American traveling Europe has gotten punched in the snoot by some local misunderstanding this little gesture over the last 40 years.

2.  Hollywood has wasted no time since the conclusion of the WGA strike to make sure that quality scripts are being hurried into production.  The Hollywood Reporter tells us that Hasbro has signed a movie deal with Universal to make a series of movies based on the classic games "Monopoly", "Battleship", "Candy Land" and "Ouija".  What, no Yahtzee?

3.  The new five dollar bill is about to be launched.  The fiver was one of the first bills to be re-designed back in the 1990s, but this re-design incorporates the various anti-counterfeiting measures that have been instituted in subsequent bill designs including colored ink, microprinting, and watermarking.  That should keep the counterfeiters at bay for at least a week.
 

4.  Apparently MSNBC isn’t the only news network engaging in various acts of douchebaggery against Barack Obama.  Crooks and Liars reports that the closed-captioning of Anderson Cooper’s show on CNN  included a statement that Al Quaeda had called Obama to congratulate him on his primary win in Wisconsin.  Cooper himself did not say this, it was just in the captioning, but a lot of public places with televisions turn on the closed-captioning so that patrons can follow a program even if crowd noise drowns out the audio.

5. It’s Official: George W. Bush is the WORST.PRESIDENT.EVAR.

Mark at Going Like Sixty is the only person I’ve read so far who noticed that Roy Scheider, who starred in “Jaws” thirty-odd years ago, died on the same day as the Discovery Channel’s “Shark Sunday” 

One of the best blogs ever, the inimitable Mister Pants, may or may not be back after a two-year hiatus. I sure hope he is, but that latest post is now almost a month old with nothing to follow up.

After Mitt Romney dropped out of the race for the Republican presidential nomination, a regular at Talking Point Memo wondered out loud if his military-age sons would now go and enlist. (Previously the Mittster, when asked why his sons weren’t serving in Iraq, said they were helping defend America by working on his campaign.) Oh, and by the by, did ANYONE notice that Ron Paul dropped out over the weekend so he could run for re-election to Congress? Didn’t think so.

Internet and marketing guru Seth Godin had a very interesting post about the business of marketing food, which was a totally non-existent field prior to World War II, but holds a dominant place in our economy and in our cultural perceptions of food. There’s a book brewing in this post, to be sure.

Lastly, fellow fountain pen aficionados will probably enjoy this essay by English professor Paula Marantz Cohen, wherein she considers the psychology and the symbolic potential of the fountain pen. She says a friend has been trying to convince her to buy one, so she writes from the perspective of someone who doesn’t own a fountain pen — some of her thoughts and observations are well-considered, but anyone who owns and collects them will probably recognize the clunkers right away. I hope she bought the pen.