Advertising Highmore

As some of my readers may have noticed, I have been running a wee ad for the town of Highmore at the top and bottom of my web pages for the last couple of years. Since I get upwards of a million visitors a year at my web site, I figure I must have had some success in calling attention to Highmore. Let’s see: If the hit rate is .0005% on those ads that would be 5 whole souls that decide to check out Highmore. Now that is the power of advertising in action.

However I am not the only person getting out the good word. From out of the land of the Sky High People (that would be Pompador Hills in northern Hyde county) a hero has come, a hero yclept Jacob Rinehart who has called the attention of the world to Highmore by his very actions. Jacob has the stature of a hero. He stands six foot seven in his stocking feet and weighs nigh onto three hundred pounds, all muscle.

In the ancient days of myth he could have slain dragons, rescued maidens, and brought down evil empires with one stroke of his mighty broadsword. (Sorry about that, Jacob, I had to unload some of my inventory of purple prose.) These days the dragons are long gone (they didn’t have protected species laws in the old days), heroes need protection from the maidens, and Evil Empires have machine guns, to say nothing of nuclear weapons. It’s not a good time to be a hero.

Jacob wrestles steers instead. Wrestling steers is a Rinehart thing. Two of his cousins are professional steer wrestlers, and a third is married to a professional steer wrestler. It’s actually rather impressive watching Jacob steers. He grabs one by the horns and flips it over much as you or I might turn a pillow.

Recently Our Lady of the Large Black Dog and I were visiting Jacob’s proud parents whilst Jacob was appearing on TV in a televised rodeo in Houston. (Watching rodeos is another Rinehart thing.) When he was up the announcer would babble about big Jake Rinehart. a mountain of a man from Highmore, South Dakota. A lot of people watch rodeos.

I figure between my 5 a year and Jacob’s 50,000 we’ve got Highmore covered.

Priests to Purify Site After Bush Visit

From The Associated Press, 3/9/07:
By JUAN CARLOS LLORCA
Associated Press Writer

GUATEMALA CITY —

Mayan priests will purify a sacred archaeological site to eliminate “bad spirits” after President Bush visits next week, an official with close ties to the group said Thursday.

“That a person like (Bush), with the persecution of our migrant brothers in the United States, with the wars he has provoked, is going to walk in our sacred lands, is an offense for the Mayan people and their culture,” Juan Tiney, the director of a Mayan nongovernmental organization with close ties to Mayan religious and political leaders, said Thursday.

—–

Evidently modern Mayans are rather wimpy compared to their anscestors. The old time Mayans would have greeted Bush with a chant of

“One of us! One of us! …”

I’m cool, are you cool?

The nice thing about the internet is that you don’t need the acknowledgment of your peers to settle how cool your are. All you need is to go to the right web site to find out how cool you be. Maybe you didn’t where to look on the web to find out. Well now you do. Here is the magic, “Are You Still Cool?”, website:

http://www.elks590.org/main/cooltest.htm

It has a little test based on how cool you were in High School–what crowd you ran with, etc.

It will tell you if you are cool or still the same as you were in High School.

You may want to send it to your friends so they can see how or if they’ve changed.

Takes less than a minute.

(Thanks to Joe Ross for this valuable information.)

Bloggers Redux

I have learned that Hyde county has three more blogs, all of them by Nancy Kutz. Be warned; she writes under the pseudonyms “Puppy Breath” and “All Puppies”. If you are interested in fine dogs be sure to check out:

http://luv-a-pup.blogspot.com/,
http://nancyswestys.blogspot.com/, and
http://minidoodles.blogspot.com/

There may be more underground blogging going on in these parts that I haven’t heard about.

What is now soon will have been

Always remember, Big Sister Loves You.

A gripping hand compliment

I was googling the other day and came across this:

By the way, if you haven’t been reading Richard Harter’s World, you should. It’s a sort of antediluvian blog, with none of the conventions we’ve grown accustomed to, but it’s an amazing pile of entertaining and random oddities…including the Piltdown information, monthly joke collections, bits of math and poetry. It’ll keep you busy for days, at least—the archives go back to 1996.

In The Mote in God’s Eye by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle there are these aliens who have three arms, two for delicate work and a big honking one for gripping. I’ve had left handed compliments but I think this one was a gripping hand compliment.

Antediluvian blog indeed. Snort.

15% Human

According to my ever reliable source of nerd news scientists have created sheep that are 15% human. Apparently the plan is that people who need an organ transplant can grow the their own clone organs in sheep. I don’t know about the transplant business, but I’m impressed by that 15%. Hell, there are people in Highmore who aren’t 15% human.

Renovations at Chez Harter

After having taken large amounts of time off (time well spent traveling, thinking, reading, and, ah, er, other activities) I’ve been working on the great renovation project again. This time I tiled the floor on the smallest of the bedrooms and repainted it. This was more work than it sounds like because it was being used a place of convenience to put things. I still have a few odds and ends of things to do like putting in baseboards and putting everything back – hopefully in more order. Some day it will all be done, but probably not until the next millennium.