While I am not able to indulge this particular habit very often due to diabetes, I am inordinately fond of so-called “Sport Drinks”, those wholly-contrived concoctions of sugar, artifical flavor and what basically amounts to human sweat. I’m not sure why, but sport drinks seem to stimulate my yummy centers in a way that can’t be achieved via water, fruit juice, family, religion, etc.

The bottle pictured here is Powerade, a product of the Coca Cola Company. It is not quite as sweet as Gatorade, and comes in a variety of colors (none of these things really have “flavors”, which explains why so many of them have names like “Blue Ice” and “Green Squall”) that my palate finds appealing.

It was the Nutrition Facts panel of ths particular beverage, however, that really caught my eye. Look at the bottom of the highlighted portion. Under the “Calories” legend, the manufacturer helpfully added the parenthetical term “Energy” by way of further explanation.

Thanks for the information, guys! While you’re at it, why don’t you further illuminate the word “water” with the term “(hydration aid)”, expand on “sucrose acetate isobutyrate” by adding “(go-power)”, and clear up any potential confusion about “Red number 5” with the phrase “(good old-fashioned American ‘Can-Do!’ attitude)”?

Then again, what more can you expect from a product that touts itself as a “Liquid Hydration + Energy Drink”? Thank goodness; I’m really tired of trying to hydrate myself with, say, sand.

….but we here at Uncle Andrew Dot Net experienced some unanticipated downtime yesterday. Damn computer didn’t quite shut down for its once-weekly shutdown, and since I’m currently at the beautiful Chico Hot Springs Resort in Montana, ’tweren’t a durn thing that could be done about it until our roommate got home and gave the thing a kick in the ass.

We know you have your choice of blogs, and appreciate your patronage and understanding.

Here’s the last batch of pictures from this year’s Seattle Breast Cancer 3-Day. Too wiped out to include any comments; that’ll be up to Margaret to provide later on.

Approximately 2400 walkers generated approximately 6.5 million dollars in pledges….

I’m so proud of my wife I could burst into song. Thank goodness this isn’t an audioblog.

Thanks again, everybody.

And here is today’s batch of pictures from the Seattle 3-Day. Enjoy, or face the consequences!

Okay Folks, here’s a link to the first set of pics from Margaret and Susan’s adventures at the Seattle 3-Day Walk For Breast Cancer. Sorry the HTML is so crummy, but I’d rather let iPhoto do it for me than hand-code it myself.

By the way, walkers raised over six million dollars for breast cancer research. How do you like them apples? Or melons? Whatever.

Today is the first day of the Seattle 3-Day Walk for Breast Cancer Research, in which Margaret is participating, along with our good friend Susan. It’s off to a rainy start, which I suppose is better than blazing sun and 90 degrees.

For a team name. they chose the name “Team Eccentrica”, a Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy reference (Eccentrica Gallumbits is the triple-breasted whore of Eroticon Six). Here’s the logo I put together for their shirts:

Upon reflection, I really should have spelled “Eccentrica” with three C’s. Ah, well. 😳

I’ll be going to visit her this evening at base camp, after which I’ll be posting photos she took during this leg of the walk, so stay tuned.

To all those who contributed to her fund drive, Mahalo Nui Loa for your kokua!

Eighteen minutes ago, someone from the UK reached my blog by following a link from Yahoo! Search.

Their search was for “M&M HIGH ENEMA”.

Just goes to show that search engine technology could use further refinement.

Our roommate Shawn left for work at 5:30am on Monday. In preparation for same, he took a shower. After the aforementioned, he left the bath mat on the floor, instead of hanging it over the shower door like he’s supposed to.

Consequently, when our cat Scrum passed by Shawn’s bathroom, he noticed the bath mat down on the floor, ambled over and took a leak on it. He proceeded to do so at least one more time during the day.

(Don’t ask me why he does it: old or new, red or blue, Scrum likes to piss on bath mats. Not sofas, not carpets, not down comforters or reproductions of the Magna Carta, just bath mats. Many of our dog-loving friends are rolling their eyes right about now, but I’ll take an animal who pees on bath mats over an animal that eats feces any day of the week and twice on Sundays.)

That evening, as Margaret and I were putting the cats to bed, I went into Shawn’s bathroom—which is adjacent to the room where we incarcerate the cats for the night—to refill their water dish, and saw the bath mat on the floor, with the tell-tale signs of illicit cat activity: rumpled and folded corners, where Scrum had tried to cover his “business”. I took one sniff and knew exactly what had happened.

So Instead of going to bed at a reasonable hour, I stayed up to launder bath mats and clean cat urine off a bathroom floor.

Shawn was quite apologetic. He knew he was not supposed to leave the bath mat down, but he had been completely exhausted that morning.

Why had he been exhausted that morning? Because he had been up all night.

Why was he up all night?

Because he was reading,

And what was he reading…..?

Why, the latest adventures of that most nuzzleable of neophyte necromancers, Harry Potter.

My last post? I take it back. Throw me in with the Christian fundamentalists; Harry Potter is a tool of the Devil.

Is anyone out there in my circle of readers besides myself not sitting around waiting for their copy of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince to arrive?

Why of course there are, Andrew; those who joined the throngs at the bookstores at midnight. 🙄

Look, I’m happy for all of you, really; the mere fact that this phenomenon has united people from age four to four hundred says something positive about it—so long as mass weddings officiated by J.K. Rowling don’t follow.

But oh Lord, am I tired of hearing about it. I’m sure I would love the series. It is, no doubt, what I have been waiting all my life to read. I imagine my very existence would triple in value if I were only to pick up Harry Potter and the Freemason’s Stone….The Goblet of Hemlock….The Order of Fries….whatever the first book in the series is called.

On the other hand, it is precisely because of just such adjurations from my fellow carbon units that I will most likely never, ever, ever pick up any of these books. Over time they have metamorphosed from books into a character-building exercise, from an entertaining passtime into something akin to mowing the lawn: a chore that really must be done before it gets any worse. I’m an adult, so I don’t have to do things simply because other people tell me that I ought to. At the same time, I’m just immature enough to not want to do something, simply because other people tell me that I ought to.

So, dear readers, enjoy your Potterage. I hope it’s everything you were hoping for. Me, I think I’ll spend the time rereading Shadow of the Giant, or playing Grand Theft Auto San Andreas, or upping my regimen of J-Horror flicks while I wait for this thing to blow over.

At least until Harry Potter and the Prolapsed Colon comes out in 2007.

I took this picture at the office. The cabinet in question is our server cabinet—actually a converted office-supply cabinet holding five computers and a blower set in the top for exhaust, hence the admonition to refrain from stacking things on top of it.

This edition of Irony Supplement has a certain deliciousness for me, because the the sign is mine, as are the boxes stacked on the cabinet. My philosophy is, if you built the cabinet—as well as the computers within it—then as The Creator you are released from the restrictions by which mere mortals must abide. 😀

I have moved my blog to yet another another server, this one my old PowerBook G4. I’m attracted by it’s low power consumption and built-in battery backup.

Anyway, if anyone has any problems, let me know. Blog-related, that is; spare me your sob life stories. You want to do that, getcher own blog. 😉

I picked up a few organic juice boxes for our July 4th bash, in case anyone chose to bring their children—or, I suppose, someone else’s children, for that matter. No children were in attendance, so I turned distribution of the itty bitty drinkables over to our roommate Shawn, who has a six-year-old daughter. She took to them with gusto.

The other night, Shawn wandered into the living room holding a box of organic grape juice and said, “I don’t think this company paid a lot of attention to their package design. At least, I hope they didn’t.”

Margaret and I stared at the package for a moment. She got it before I did.

I then had to get up and go check to see if the organic lemonade box somehow managed to spell out the term “forcible sodomy”.

I listen to local NPR station KUOW just about every morning. Lately I’ve noticed a pattern that has probably been in place for some time.

The Morning Edition time slot is hosted locally by Deborah Brandt. Like most NPR hosts, she is articulate and has a pleasant voice. Unfortunately, she also has a really lame sense of humor.

And the sounding board for her lame sense of humor is, inevitably, poor Bonnie Brown, the woman staffing the Metro Traffic desk during the same time slot. She is forced to play straight-man to someone who thinks it’s funny to conclude a traffic report with, “wow, maybe we should change your name from ‘Downtown Bonnie Brown’ to ‘Slow Down Bonnie Brown’!” You can hear the poor woman’s exasperation in her feeble attempt at laughter, a sort of “oh, heh heh heh, mmm.” She can’t just ignore the comment, she can’t say what she really thinks about Brandt’s little bon mot, so all she can do it grit her teeth and chuckle gamely—or perhaps “gamily”.

How I wish I could free Bonnie Brown from social convention—and disciplinary action—for just one morning! I’d give just about anything to hear her say something like, “Oh, puh-leeze, Deborah, can’t you for the love of God just say ‘Thanks, Bonnnie’ and leave it at that? Must you force me to play Ed McMahon to your endless cornucopia of ham-handed segues? What is wrong with you?”

Then again, I’m not sure I’m mentally prepared to listen to a Public Radio host cry on the air.

In case you aren’t a regular peruser of SlashDot and you don’t have anything better to dowith four minutes and sixteen seconds of your life, I’m mirroring a copy of a movie from the folks at A Dog Named Fish (some of their mirrors are dog-slow right now). They used about 7,000 captures from their Web cam to create a stop-motion video of them building a Lego Star Destroyer from the ground up. My very favorite part is the fact that the guy is wearing an “All Your Base Are Belong To Us” T-shirt. Talk about a nerdfest. *Sigh* My tribe… 😛

Click here for the AVI version, and here for the QuickTime version.

One of the houses in our general neighborhood (still Normandy Park, but in the high-rent district) has gone simply gangbusters in their celebration of this auspicious holiday. I just had to share it with y’all.

Happy Fourth, everybody.

I pledge allegience to the flag of the United States of America,
And to the republic for which it stands,
One nation, indivisible,
With liberty and justice for all.

My friend Shawn just sent me a link to this. If you haven’t seen it yet, go check it out. Very amusing. 😀