Cat food that sounds better than people food

I do a lot of the dinner cooking in our home. Wife get’s busy with the youngest, doing homework. Our youngest has some learning disabilities, so homework takes longer. While I’m cooking, I turn on the evening news. There seem to be only two types of commercials. The pharmaceutical companies selling pills. And the cat food commercials. We have two cats. Wife believes in supplying them with a cafeteria. They have two or three different dry foods down and one wet food. None of it looks anything like what they show on television. On the TV ad’s, it’s always spring time, the cat is healthy and sleek. At our place, well, it’s different. The cats are fat and sleep all day. And then wake us up about midnight to Yeowl at the moon. And then they go to sleep until about 5 AM when they YELOWL again. Even when you toss them out, they fall asleep. They sleep in the middle of the yard, in the driveway, under the cars, in the flowers. They sleep 22 out of a 24 hour day.

So I’m standing there making dinner and listening to cat food commercials. The cat food on the TV looks better than what I’m cooking! Hey, I’m not a bad cook. It’s just that Taco’s out of a box, looks about like cat food. So I’m listening to this cat food description and I’m flat amazed. It sounds like a gourmet meal at a five star restaurant.

“The new Kitty Delight cat food is specially designed to enhance the dining experience for your favorite feline. All of our foods are prepared from special recipes developed by our own chefs in our laboratories. We pride ourselves on using only USDA quality ingredients, such as real tuna, salmon, turkey, beef and duck. For a well balanced diet, we include 23 essential vitamins to help keep your precious pet healthy. We only use the freshest grains our buyers can fine. We search the world for the proper rice, lettuce and peas for your cats. We maintain strict quality controls over all our manufacturing processes, so that you and your cat are assured the highest quality foods for your pet.”
Meanwhile, the cat and human are smiling and petting and such. Well, the lady is smiling and petting the cat. What did you think?! The cat is doing what ever cats do, which is not much. The cat food is sitting in a china plate, flowers in vase in the background, the cat runs up all happy to be eating the stuff.

Marketing blather at it’s best! I’m waiting for the sprig of parsley next to the cat food. Oh, there it is...


Let’s try for some reality.

“The new Kitty Delight cat food is some ground up parts of parts of animals that were not fit for human consumption. We toss in enough preservatives to make this stuff have its own half life. Most of what it is, is horse meat, pig guts, a few turnkey bones, and duck bills all ground up. We included those recalled vitamins and ground them up also. For some cheap bulk filler, we get tofu. We get that crap by the boat load from the Far East, where it is grown by political prisons. We grind this mess all up and pore it into some rusty cans we buy second hand. We cook it for a while, so it has some gravy”
Meanwhile the cat is shown pulling the legs off a cricket, batting the tail off a lizard. The human sobers up and opens a can of this goo and plops it into a plastic dish. Kitty comes a running, as the human only sobers up and remembers to feed it about twice a week. Through the smears on the kitchen window, you can see the three feet tall weeds waving over top of the busted washing machine on the porch. Like this bruiser.


Here is the beans I was cooking while dreaming up this drither.

Baby On Board signs

Remember those Baby On Board signs? I was sick of them when I saw the third one. I mean, what was the point? Were we supposed to drive more safely because you might or might not have the rug-rat in the car? Are you saying you and your kids lives were more important than those you shared the road with? Were you bragging that you and the old man could still “do it” and resulted in a kido? When your incredibly poor driving skills resulted in a crash, was the sign supposed to let the ambulance driver know to keep looking for bodies? When you stuck one on your window, did you ever think that you just endangered your kid by reducing your field of vision out of the car?

I wanted to post some changing versions;

BEER ON BOARD
HOT BABE ON BOARD
HOT LIFEGUARD ON BOARD
PIT BULL ON BOARD
SCOTCH ON BOARD
ACCOUNTANT ON BOARD
SUPERMODEL ON BOARD
BIG MAC ON BOARD

I Heart you

You must remember these signs. I “Heart symbol” my Wife.
I Heart my Doberman.
I heart my Shetland Pony.
I heart Beer.
I heart my Car.

I get tired of them. I’m glad they are not around much anymore. Occasionally, I still see one. I think they were replaced by auto license plate frames that proclaim what the driver would rather be doing.
“I’d Rather be Driving a Titleist”.
“I’d Rather be flying my F-4 Phantom”.
“I’d rather be drinking beer”.
“I’d rather be making you eat that cell phone”.

How come we never saw these?

“I Spade my dog”
“I Club my honor student”
“I Heart Diamonds”

Home Grown or Store Bought

Has everyone heard of this? I ran a Google search on it and found all sorts of web sites. Most had to do with if home grown or store bought tomatoes were better. Or potatoes. A lot of sites proclaim the advantages of home grown blueberries. I even found one discussing growing your own pineapples. Close, but not quite what I was meaning. There are also a lot of pages devoted to Halloween costumes. The advantages and trouble of making your own compared to just walking down to the store and buying one for Billy and Suzie.

I’m not talking about any of that. I’m talking about a game I first heard of at church. Yes, at church. The person I heard this from, rides motorcycles. He’s a biker. Or was. I’ve not been in contact with him for about five years. The game he described could be played most any place, but he usually played it while sitting in a bar with his biker buddies. It’s a simple game, but could become complicated, depending on how many beers were consumed. The game is to discuss ladies breast. When a lady would enter the bar, they would take guesses as to if her breast were “home grown” or augmented, “store bought”. You could just keep it simple and discuss this over a drink. Or, you could place some drinking bets on it. Maybe have the most sober person, actually go up to the lady and ask her. But then you’d probably get pounded by her biker husband/boyfriend! You can also get into heated discussion over celebrities and if they were still home grown or had gone to store bought.

So, play along.

Pharmaceutical advertisements during dinner

I’m sick of pharmaceutical advertisements. Especially during dinner time. I think it just feeds the “pop a pill, solve anything” mentality that is too prevalent in America. Does the twenty percent of the country watching television, really have the disease that the pill is to help with? I doubt it. I wonder if most people are like me and my family. We get to feeling bad, we see our doctor. We discuss the symptoms and let the doctor figure out what might be going wrong. And get a physical, based on what how often your doctor thinks you should. Case in point. I walk a lot. Like five miles a day, five or six days a week. I was having some pretty bad ankle pain. I took a few days off. It didn’t get any better. I was also having joint pain in my hand. I could rationalize that the ankle was due to the pounding of walking. I could rationalize the hand pain to too much mouse clicking! After a few days, I went to see my doctor. With two areas of joint pain, he suspected GOUT! I’d have never thought of that. I guess that was why he went to medical school. He takes some X-Rays looking for bone issues and doesn’t find anything. He takes blood work to send off, but also gives me a prescription for an anti-inflammatory. Three days later, I’m doing much better and the blood work results come back. No gout, but high cholesterol! So he starts a low dosage for that, a new list of things to eat, and not eat. And tells me to re-do the blood work in 30 days. Oh, and the joint pain is much better with rest and the medicines.

Now, I trust my doctor. Do I really need to be bombarded with pharmaceutical ads? I want my doctor to hear my complaint, search for the cause, and choose the best method and medicine to treat that with the least amount of side effects. He’s good and always tells me of the side effects and that if side effects become too much of a bother, to call the office and they’d call in a different medicine to try. Maybe most doctors are not like that.

Otherwise, why do we need to hear about some medicine for some condition that most of us don’t have? All the advertisements sound like this:

“Hi. I’m Sally. I have monthly bloating, festering skin lessons, intestinal blockages, osteoarthritis, seasonal allergies and erectile dysfunction. Do you suffer like I do? Perhaps you should do like I did and talk with your doctor. He recommended I try the new once a year dosage of Phrenocolic. I like it because I only have to take it once a year”

The person then goes about some Martha Stewart thing, like arranging their kitchen knives, or jogging, and the announcer comes on:
“phrenocolic is not suitable for everyone. Only you and your doctor should decide if phrenocolic is right for you. Side effects might include, but are not limit to: dry mouth, erections lasting longer than four hours (why is this a bad thing?), kidney failure, dry skin, liver failure, one arm growing longer than the other, regrowth of male-patterned baldness, hair loss, excessive saliva, night sweats, toe nails growing an inch a day, one eye turning albino, uncontrollable spasms, excessive sweating, dry eyes, intestinal blockages, diarrhea, bloody stools, cravings for chocolate and gambling, constipation, oily skin, bleeding skin pores, restless leg syndrome (RLS), heart palpitations, uncontrollable sexual urges, eyes tearing or runny nose. If any of these side effects become a problem, seek your doctor’s advice”.
Meanwhile, in a font of about eight: they flash on the bottom of the screen, some disclaimer
“Phrenocolic is made by Big-company. Big-company tested the product on two rats and a shrimp. We paid off the government, so we can sell this crap. We make this crap at a factory on a back road in some third world toilet. We sell it for a buck a pill over there, but plan on paying $30 a pill in the USA. Big-Company is not responsible for any side effects as a result of your taking our drug. If phrenocolic doesn’t solve your problem, we are not responsible. Don’t bother to complain to your elected official. We set him up with a hooker and he’s happy to know us.
We have an entire floor of lawyers and we know how to use them”


I guess we should thank them for not showing the person needing their drug.

Weather forecasters

I’m getting sick of the local TV weather people. I live in a large metropolitan area. We are blessed with about four major stations all vying for viewers. We have been watching the same news program for about twenty years. It used to be the best Dallas station. Then, the news director left for another station. Half the staff went with him. We still like the newscast, but the weather is getting to be too much. The station recently hired a new chief guy. We call him doofus”. That’s close to his real name. He loves to hear himself talk, endlessly. They have tons of graphics, which they love to show off. They still are only about 75 percent accurate on the next days forecast. I’ll even give them 50 percent accuracy for the two and three day forecast. They then forecast out TEN days! Their accuracy, except in the Texas Summer months, is zero. In the summer, I think they are computer generated anyway. Here’s what weather people do during the summer in Texas. They hang at the beach. They have some poor intern using some computer tool to make it look like their clothes change. All they have to do is point to Texas and say “HOT. REAL HOT. Highs in the 90’s to 100’s. Lows, if we are lucky, in the mid sixties”. That’s it. For the months of July through September. I don’t think they show up for work. Then they come back from the beach and start showing us their new graphic toys to tell us they still don’t have a clue what the weather will do past 72 hours.

I think they are also getting kickbacks from the local cities. It’s not enough to tell us that “the region will have highs around 78 to 82 degrees”. Nope. To get their kickbacks, they have to mention the various towns by name. So we get about 2 minutes of this, with graphics flying around.
“Dallas will be 82. Fort Worth will by 80. Down there in Duncanville, you will be 78. Over in Denton, how about 78. In Frisco, you will be 80. Addison is always up there. You will be 82”.
See, kickbacks explain that. Or they just love to rattle off all these town names, as it keeps them on camera even longer.

We had some bad storms blow through this week. Texas Springtime storms. I’ll give it to the weather people, it is tough to forecast when or if the strong storms blow up. This line was close to us and I happened to be home. There was some “rotation” in the clouds, which means a possible tornado. Boy, the news people got on the TV and talked for about three straight hours, except for the commercials! At 6:30 PM, they were STILL showing the tape of the clouds from 3 PM. Shoot, it blew past by 4 and we had sunny weather. But for another two hours, tapes and chatter about the storm. OK, yes, they needed to mention to those towns where the storm headed, to be aware. But guess what, 30 minutes after it went by me, if had dropped to just being a regular Texas thunderstorm. For all I know, he might still be talking about it.

The guy on the AM talk radio, he knows what he’s doing. Three day forecast. I think the TV guy waits and just uses the radio guys forecast, guesses about the last seven days and adds all sorts of graphics.

And collects his kickback.

Exploding concrete

I’ve done a bit of building around our place. Twenty years ago, I built a shop. I don’t do the excavation, the pouring of the concrete, the brick work, the sheet rock hanging, tape work or the texture work. I do about everything else. About ten years back, I built 900 square feet of living space onto our home. It included a bedroom and a bath. This was built onto the back of our house. To get this done, I had to remove a patio. The patio was concrete with bricks around that. The bricks had been added on. They were already allowing grass to grow up through the mortar. I used a crowbar and just chiseled them apart. This exposed the edges of the concrete patio, which had been poured as part of the house foundation. That foundation is what is called a “post tension” design. Instead of using a lot of rebar in it, they used these cables. The cables are in a plastic sleeve. They pour the concrete into the form and let it harden around the cables. Then, they use a hydraulic machine to pull on something like 10,000 pounds of pressure. This places the concrete under tension, so when it cracks, it stays together. Remember, concrete is guaranteed to do two things. Turn grey and crack! Knowing that these cables require a professional, I call up a company to come out and advise me about the tension and the cables. Over the phone, they tell me that what they do is show up and saw through the concrete and into the cable. This busts the cable and releases the tension! Once I get the patio jack hammered out of the way, they will come back and apply tension to the cables in the old foundation. I can then use a hammer-drill to drill into the old concrete, set some anchors and use those to use standard re bar construction on the new foundation. So the old foundation will remain as post-tension, and the new foundation is anchored to that with rebar. Sounds like a good plan and I schedule them to come and cut the cables.

So the guy shows up and checks out the exposed patio concrete. He just has a power saw with a large circular cutting blade on it. He eyeballs the concrete and notes where the cables exit. He finds one going across it and three coming out of the house. He takes some chalk and marks the patio where he thinks he will hit and cut the cables. He dons some gloves and safety goggles and advises me to stand clear. It seems that when the cables cut, they sometimes shoot out of the concrete! He said, sometimes by 20 feet! He goes about cutting the first one. The saw makes quick work of the concrete and hits the cable. When it snaps, you hear a dull “thump”. The steel cable shoots out, but only a few feet. He and I grin at each other as he cuts the rest of them. This would make a really cool man-hobby.

After he finishes, he hands me an invoice for just the cutting part. He tells me when I get the patio jack hammered out, to call them and they will come apply the pressure to the cables sticking out of the house.

So I spend the next miserable Friday, using a jack hammer. Those things are WORK! I use some heavy gloves and eye protection. I’m chipping away with a concrete cutter on the jack hammer. I reach the first tension cable and cut around it. The concrete doesn’t stick to the sleeve that the cable is in, so the concrete pretty much just falls away from the cable. This is looking pretty good but it is wearing me out. I get about half way across the concrete in about four hours. I hit a cable and hammer around it. About six inches later, I hit another sleeve for a cable. What? Why is this so close to the last one? They were spaced about two to three feet apart! I get down and look at the concrete from the edge. I come to a very bad conclusion. This next cable was not relieved of its tension! What to do! I’m too tired to be thinking clear, the cable is forty percent exposed already, so I make the numb-brained decision to just keep jacking around it! What is the worst that can happen! I was about to find out. I decide to try and use the jack hammer and cut a hole down to the cable and hope I can cut it with the jack hammer blade. I go about this, trying to cut at an angle to keep from standing too close to this hole. After about 15 minutes, there is an EXPLOSION of concrete, and a loud BOOM. I feel something hit my leg. A minute later, when breath returns to my lungs, I check my leg. I’ve got an inch long gash in it, but it isn’t deep at all. I run inside to look over the rest of me. Mostly, I’m as white as some notebook paper. White from exploded concrete dust all over me. No other bodily damage is found. I head back out and shut off the air compressor running the jack hammer. Lying in the pile of busted concrete is a tangle of inch diameter concrete tension cable. It looks like a rubber band that has been played with for days. It is gnarly, concrete still hanging from it. For about ten feet around the site, the grass is now white with exploded concrete dust. Looking across the yard, there are chunks of busted concrete, some about three inches around that were blown out. All in all, about three FEET of concrete, has vanished into dust and chunks.

I’m one lucky dude!

About a week or two later, after I finish busting and hauling off the concrete, I get the site excavated. Then, I call the tension guy back and have him apply the pressure to the concrete. I mention what I’d done. His eyes get as big as pie plates and he tells me I’m lucky to still be alive.

About a year later, I’m building a two story playhouse / fort for my girls. While I was up on the second floor of the fort, I look over to the roof of my shop. The shop is about 75 feet from the new addition that I built. I see some rocks up on the top of the roof. But there aren't any rocks around that look like that, which the kids might have thrown up onto the roof. I switch the ladder over there and head up. Yep, I got bits of concrete that were blown on TOP of my shop, which is 75 feet away from the blast site, up hill, and the walls are 10 feet tall. And the bits of concrete were blown on TOP of that.

OSHA would be so proud.