Monkling's Blog

It’s kind of interesting looking out your window and seeing a news truck, camera people & a reporter doing a live broadcast and watching the broadcast on TV at the same time.

I also had no idea just how noisy news trucks can be. There’s this loud, humming sound coming from across the street. Sounds like a generator.

2 weeks ago there was a gas leak and a house on the block behind me blew up. The explosion was so powerful, everyone on my block, including myself, thought it was in our own house. That’s how badly our homes shook & how loud the blast was.

Now they’re having some sort of community meeting in the school across the street with a bunch of politicians and the local utility company. I guess I should be there. That is, if I wanted to sit for 2 hours and listen to a bunch of garbage.

Frankly, they can tell us all they want about what they’re doing to make sure this never happens again and that I’m safe and my house isn’t going to blow up but I won’t believe a word of it. And I’m pretty sure it’s little comfort to the husband & 3 kids who lost their wife/mother in the explosion.

First, let me say (in case anyone wanders in here who doesn’t know me and thinks I am completely insane) that I am not in any way diminishing the seriousness of the earthquake in L’Aquila, Italy. It was a horrible tragedy and my prayers are with the people affected by it.

That being said, it is time to move on to my son and our conversation today. (Luckily, he does not read my blog.) He said he was woken up early yesterday morning when the bed shook. His bed is lofted. He had no idea what was going on so he decided to sleep on the couch after that, not being too anxious to be on the bed if it collapsed.

He went all through the day with whatever it is seminarians do when they are off from school and planning a trip. It wasn’t until today that he found out it was an earthquake.

Me: “How could you have no clue it was an earthquake?”
Him: “It’s not like I have a TV in my room.”
Me: “It was all over the Internet.”

Apparently he doesn’t read the news online. Nor in the Italian newspapers, for that matter.

We spoke a bit about his upcoming trip to Ireland, where he will spend Easter & stay for a little over a week. Then he signed off and went to have dinner. A few hours later, he signed back on and IMed me again.

“We were at dinner, talking about the earthquake. Suddenly the table started shaking. I thought it was one of the guys screwing around until I looked up and saw the lights shaking.”

Those must be some powerful aftershocks if they can feel them 70 miles away in Rome. He is quite glad to be leaving tomorrow and hoping the earth will have settled down by the time he gets home.

Then he tells me how there’s a fault line that runs throughout Italy. That way I can have something to be concerned about for the next 4 years…

A few days ago, at the tail end of a post, I was complaining about an awful website whose sole purpose seemed to be to make young college students more stressed than they usually are. It was a gossip site where you could anonymously post hateful crap about people.

Citing falling ad revenues, Juicy Campus has closed it’s doors. That has to be the best impact of the bad economy.

I’m a firm believer in the idea that good things come come out of bad situations so I’m glad to see one good thing come from the bad economy. Let’s hope that site is never resurrected.

This morning I was reading an article online about Google’s newest venture. It involves GPS and maps and you can use it to track people. At first it did sound kind of Big Brother and all until I read that you have to actually allow it & all that.

Yeah, I’m sure it’ll take the hacks all of a day to break through it but I figured hey, if someone is really that bored that they want to see what I’m doing, well they’ll just drop down dead of boredom.

I could have used a device like that a few minutes ago. My darling daughter used Mapquest, which had her getting off at the wrong exit so she was lost someplace in the Bronx. Trust me – you do not want your 20 year old daughter lost in the Bronx.

I had to play OnStar and guide her over to her friend’s house in Yonkers. Of course first I had to find her location on my map, which would have been way faster if, say, she had a GPS device in her phone which then beamed me her location. On the other hand, if she had a GPS, she probably wouldn’t have needed me, eh?

Now I’m thinking of all the ways one could use Google Latitude. You can spy on your kids, knowing their every move. Or your husband. (Right now my husband happens to be out in -34 degree weather on Wall Street waiting to get a cab home because if he traveled his usual subway/bus route, he wouldn’t be here until 11:30.)

Yeah, the ultimate stalker can really get high-tech now.

The question is not, Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?” because the answer to that one would be we all know, thanks to the news.

No. Today, being Groundhog’s Day & all, it just got me to thinking about groundhogs & shadows. In NYC, the groundhog didn’t see his shadow. In PA, he did. It would seem we’re getting a short winter but PA isn’t, if you believe in shadows & all that.

Then there was the story about our mayor, Bloomberg, getting bit when he tried to hold the groundhog. I’m not quite sure why on earth someone decided it would be a good idea for him to hold the thing.

What do they do in warmer states where they don’t really care if winter ends soon or not because there’s no snow on the ground? Do they use groundhogs, too? Maybe they use armadillos and lizards. If you see a lizard chasing it’s tail, it means 6 more weeks of winter and if you see an armadillo waddling towards the east, it means spring is coming sooner.

Hey, neither of those are any less absurd than trusting a groundhog. Just ask Mayor Bloomberg how much he trusts groundhogs now.

Please tell me people aren’t quite that dumb. I was looking at the FDA website to see just which products were recalled. I don’t really have any peanut butter products, just plain old peanut butter & wanted to make sure that wasn’t on the hit list.

On the page that describes the peanut butter salmonella issue, there is this statement:

Do not eat products that have been recalled and throw them away in a manner that prevents others from eating them.

I’m sorry but if you know your product was recalled and you eat it anyway, you deserve to get food poisoning. You are a complete idiot and, as punishment for being a complete idiot, you get to puke your guts out for a few days.

And how does one throw something out in a way that prevents others from eating it? I’m thinking if you’re throwing stuff out, you’re not setting it out on your front porch with matching dishes and silverware. I’m assuming it would go into a trash barrel. Are you supposed to lock your trash up? Perhaps you need to put warning labels on the trashcan saying, “Caution! Eating garbage may be hazardous to your health!”

If anyone is interested in seeing a list of recalls – while the FDA does have the info on their website, you have to click a hundred different links to see the complete list. This website has a list with everything on one page.

I was happy to see that Jiff wasn’t on the list. Now, after all this talk about peanut butter, I’m getting hungry. I think I’ll go make a peanut butter sandwich.

Yep – a new way to find Jesus. Literally. You’d think this was a new church movement for people; yet another way to find religion. It’s not really quite how it sounds. You see, at this time of the year it seems people steal baby Jesus and assorted other figures from creches. Some of the figures are life size and none of them are cheap. If people keep running off with your wise men, it can run into quite a bit of money having to replace them every year. So they are installing GPS locators into Jesus, the Blessed Mother, St. Joseph and probably a few camels.

It’s kind of pathetic, in my opinion, that people would steal from churches but that’s another story altogether.

Speaking of Christmas, the other night Frank & I came home and were completely shocked. You know our neighbors? The loud ones with the cars they park in the backyard? They have lived next door for at least 17 years. In all that time, they have never, ever had any sort of Christmas decoration up. They’ve never had any decoration for any holiday up. No pumpkins, no flowered Spring wreaths on the door. Nothing. Not in the entire time they have lived in that house. There hasn’t been as much as a red bow. Well there, smack in the middle of the lawn was a Christmas tree with lights. The lights have been on night & day. The extension cord is draped out of their dining room window and makes it’s way to the front of the house.

If it was in front of anyone else’s house, it would seem perfectly natural. But in front of theirs? It just seems a wee bit strange. I wonder what else is in store…

This morning I saw an article in the paper about a couple who were divorcing because the husband cheated in an online virtual world. I guess that brings cheating to a whole new level.

Apparently this couple, themselves, first met online in that same virtual world, Second Life. Now maybe it’s just me but the whole thing seems a little weird and creepy right from the start. I guess on the one hand, these people had a lot in common since they were both apparently obsessed with this fake world. But uh… if that’s what you spend all of your time doing, pretending, well it just seems to me maybe they both are missing a few pieces upstairs in the first place?

I can’t imagine anyone spending hours & hours in a virtual 3-D chat room day after day, pretending to be someone else. I have a hard enough time keeping up with what I think and feel in real life. I confuse the heck out of myself as it is. Yeah, then toss me in someplace where I’m supposed to make up a second life?? I don’t think so.

I know my blog is supposed to be funny & I think most of the times it is. Once in a while, though, you know I get off the humor track. Normally I don’t like to post serious stuff. I especially like to keep away from politics. Today I’m going all out and mixing serious stuff and politics.

I am posting a link here for a video. If you’re an unwavering Democrat, you probably won’t like this. If you are Catholic, you should look at this.

Eleventh Hour

If I lose half of my regular readers for posting this, so be it. It’s not like I have that many people reading my blog in the first place.

Yes, you read it here first. I have come up with the solution to deliver us from our reliance on oil and electricity. It’s the perfect plan. Obviously if we can keep the thermostat lower in the winter and raise the air conditioner temperature in the summer, we’d save energy and money – right? So here’s the brilliant plan:

In the winter, take some sort of drug that lowers hormone levels so that you get hot flashes. (Naturally, if you are already in menopause, you already have that covered & don’t need any drugs.) If you can get those hot flashes fired up enough, you’ll barely have to turn on the heat all winter. There’s even evidence that this might work for men. Of course that article speaks about how to avoid them and that’s not what we’re talking about here but I just wanted to illustrate that my energy saving plan will even work for you guys.

For that hot weather, we need something a bit more drastic. I got this brainstorm at ‘that time of the month’ when I felt colder than normal. You’re going for anemia here. You want to drop that iron level down. Sure you might pass out and feel weak but hey, it’s a small price to pay to feel cool during the hot summer months.

If you do that for a few years, I bet you can save enough money to go on a nice, European vacation. Now would all that sweating through hot flashes and passing out from anemia be worth it?