I just got this notification "250 photos in the album were rated an 11 and you've received 19,250 points and fuBucks!  Want to return the favor?"

The most photos I have in any album is 145.  I think my invisible pictures are of aliens, big foot, yetis, unicorns and American built small appliances.

Anyone else have imaginary stuff rated?

S.C. man loses snowball fight

and now a bit more of the story

Resident removes snowman's genitals to avoid arrest after complaint

Monday morning, a deputy spoke to the 45-year-old man who lives on Buffalo Westsprings Highway about the dyed-pink, male genitals on the snowman in his yard.

The story behind noradsanta.org

NORAD Tracks Santa, the official name of the program, began in 1955 when a Colorado Springs newspaper ad invited kids to talk to Santa on a hotline. The phone number had a typo, and dozens of kids wound up dialing the Continental Aerospace Defense Command in Colorado Springs, the predecessor to NORAD.

The officers on duty played along and began passing along reports on Santa's progress. It's now a cherished ritual at NORAD, a joint U.S.-Canada command that monitors the North American skies and seas from a control center at Peterson.

"It's really ingrained in the NORAD psyche and culture," said Canadian Forces Lt. Gen. Marcel Duval, the deputy commander of NORAD, who pitches in to field French-language calls on Christmas Eve. "It's a goodwill gesture from all of us, on our time off, to all the kids on the planet."

Duval is careful to say that tracking Santa doesn't interfere with the work of watching out for enemy threats to the North American continent.

Last year, NORAD Tracks Santa answered 74,000 calls and 3,500 e-mails, and organizers expect to top that this year.

Although the program is aimed at children, the volunteers answering the phones have a welcome bit of news for parents, too: St. Nick won't stop at homes unless all the kids are asleep.

Volunteer Liz Anderson said that when she tells kids that, she will sometimes hear parents say, "See! I told you."

It takes four months of planning to marshal the 1,200 volunteers, 100 telephones, 30 laptops and two big projection TV screens the exercise requires, NORAD spokeswoman Joyce Frankovis said. All the labor is volunteer. Google, Verizon, Air Canada, defense contractor Booz Allen Hamilton and others chip in.

On Friday, volunteers answered calls and e-mails in two conference rooms in a building not far from NORAD's headquarters. In a separate room, a three-member team fired out tweets and Facebook updates, checking against a schedule marked with a secrecy warning that said "Santa's Eye Only."

Civilian and military staff wore blue Santa hats with "Special Operations Elf" written on the white trim.

"It is tremendously fun," said Jim Jenista, NORAD's deputy chief for joint training exercises who has been volunteering to answer the phones for nearly a decade.

NORAD insiders drop hints about how they track Santa — "ultra-cool, high-tech, high-speed digital cameras," radar, satellites and Canadian Forces fighter jets.

But any inquiry into the technological particulars is met with a polite rebuff and a cryptic explanation involving the magic of Christmas.

The NORAD tradition is one of the few modern additions to the centuries-old Santa Claus story that have stuck, said Gerry Bowler, a history professor at the University of Manitoba and the author of "Santa Claus: A Biography."

Most embellishments never capture the public's imagination because they tend to be ad campaigns or movies that try to "kidnap" Santa for commercial purposes, Bowler said.

NORAD, by contrast, takes an essential element of the Santa Claus story — his travels on Christmas Eve — and looks at it through a technological lens, Bower said.

"It brought Santa into the 20th century," he said.

text begged borrowed and stolen from msnbc.com

Yesterday while I was stopped at a redlight I saw a small motorcycle, a Ninja 250, making an illegal u-turn.  On it was a medium sized man and a medium sized woman.  This in itself would be a spectacle as the small Ninja is tinyish.  The medium sized man alone would look outsized on it.

However sandwiched between the man and the woman was a shitzu.  I tried but failed to get a picture.  It would have drastically improved this blog.

Still I am sharing it for those of you with a good imagination.

I thought the Happy Hour Host,  *~Alley~*Co-Owner ofbigbucksweetride, was in fact Alley Cow.  That is how I read it.

Reading through all the tagged blogs I was struck by how many of the things I indentified with.  I am not sure if that means that I have populated my fu-friends with people like minded to me (Yay!) or all people are boringly alike (not so yay)

For my list I am stealing some of your comments that resonated the most with me. 

1. If my socks and shoes are both near me, I will put on sock, shoe, sock, shoe.  Otherwise it's sock, sock, shoe, shoe.

2. I didn't read any books for years. I just started reading again and I wonder why I ever stopped.  EDIT. I don't have as good as excuse for this as the person I stole it from and I didn't completely stop.  However I did go from being an avid reader for most of my life to rarely reading for a long time.  I am back to reading much more again.

3. I really cannot remember names and dates.

4. I refuse to go to chain restaurants while on vacation.  This is something that my parents taught me that has stuck.  EDIT Not so much learned from my parents but it is a good rule. 

5. I like the smell of my dog's paws but I don't like to get my face near them.

6.  I'm not one of those people who have no regrets. I have more than a few.  EDIT.  I regret how I acted more than specific things that I have done.  I can't say that I would for certain change any of the decisions that I have made but there are situations that I wish I could have the chance to be a better person in.

7.  Kids and dogs love me... even if the don't know me...  EDIT.  I am truely a 2 year old at heart.  I think children recognize this and stare at wonder at the biggest 2 yo they have ever seen.  As for the dogs my shoes probably smell like dog pee.

8. I don't understand how anyone can be afraid of spiders. I think they are beautiful and amazing.  EDIT.  Until I walk into a spider's web in the pitch dark while walking my dog.  Then they are bloodthirsty killers about to suck my brain out.

9.  I believe that there is good in all people but sometimes you have to search to find it.  EDIT.  I think there might be some people with so little good that it isn't worth the search to find it. 

10. I am always afraid I will forget to pay some important bill and ruin my credit. That's replaced my "I forgot to do my homework and have to repeat 7th grade" nightmare.  EDIT.  Then I show up at the bank to explain the mistake naked.

since i cheated and copied your answers.

11. I hope that if I ever have the good fortune to run into any of you in person you leave thinking "that is exactly how i expected him to be"  unless I get drunk and make a fool of myself but in truth that is to be expected of me at times too.

Vizzini: I can't compete with you physically, and you're no match for my brains.
Man in Black: You're that smart?
Vizzini: Let me put it this way. Have you ever heard of Plato, Aristotle, Socrates?
Man in Black: Yes.
Vizzini: Morons.

This is one of my favorite movie quotes of all time.  It is from The Princess Bride.  So much of what I read on here, in comments, more so in certain blogs, and especially in the mums reminds me of the hubris evident in this quote.

For my taste, too many people are their own biggest fan on here and not at all shy about letting everyone know how great they are.  It is tiresome.   

Yes I know that this exaggerated haughtiness is likely the result of deep rooted insecurities but I don’t really care.

Just some thoughts I wanted to put into words.  I am not sure if I am any better off, happier, etc. for having done so.

Hopefully remembering the quote makes some of you smile as it does to me.

Yesterday was a relatively slow news day.  The big story was the weather.  There were storms with flooding and lightning strikes cover the better part of Eastern South Florida. 

After the obligatory shots of cars driving through flooded roads that show some idiot in a Hummer flying through the water throwing up a wake the drowns anyone driving a normal car.  (I added a period instead of the comma that belongs because this was turning into a really long sentence)  The news came to their big exclusive story.  Lightning had hit a tree next to house and the lightning jumped from the tree into a utility room and had fried the washer, dryer, and water heater starting a small fire in the house.  No one was home at the time and the fire department was able to contain the fire to the one essentially outdoor room with no damage to the rest of the house.

I add all this detail in case you aren't familiar with Florida and South Florida in particular.  We are the lightning strike capitol of the world.  There may be areas with more lightning strikes but our board of tourism trademarked it so these areas if they exist can go screw themselves. 

Sorry back to the story.

The point of that aside is that houses getting hit by lightning stories are more common than Cuban corner cafes.  In fact when there are not enough corners for the cafes they open in the middle of the street and name themselves the corner cafe.

I know the story...

The reason that this story made the news as an exclusive is that two parrots were sitting in the tree when it got hit.   Perhaps it would be a better story if they had lived and could tell their tale.  "Polly got cracked in the ass by lightning"  They didn't.  They died.  The news crew was there to film the birds being picked up and stuffed in a trash bag.

The parrots were feral.  We have a lot of them here.  They escape or are released and find that the living is easy.  So two wild parrots were fried in the tree so it became a big story.

The news crew couldn't stop there.  The parrots were dead and there was no parrot family to interview.  So they asked the woman whose house got hit and caught on fire destroying three major appliances what she thought about the parrots getting killed. The woman, who looked to be in her 30's, was visibly taken aback by the question. You could see it in her face which was saying, “My house was hit by lightning, it caught on fire causing thousands of dollars worth of damage, I am lucky the whole thing didn't burn to the ground leaving me and my family homeless and you are asking me about a pair of wild birds I have never seen before in my life?”

She took a second and said something about being sad for the birds but happy no people were injured or killed.

So would anyone like to buy a parrot or two? They make a lovely pair.

Not so timely advice to the guy smoking crack in the open stairwell last night in my dream.

I wasn't there to bust you so you didn't need to try to be so inconspicous.  It was a lousy act and only drew my attention more to you.

In dream reality I was merely trying to find the rest of the people from a high school reunion I was attending even though I didn't go to that high school and neither did most of the people at the reunion.

I hope that you got back to enjoying your crack after I left you alone.   I don't remember catching up with the rest of the reunionees but I don't blame our little interlude.

Cheers.