Rambling Rhodes

ROME!

Oh boy! Oh boy! Oh boy! Oh boy! Oh boy! Oh boy! Oh boy! Oh boy! Oh boy! Oh boy! Oh boy! Oh boy! Oh boy! Oh boy! Oh boy! Oh boy! Oh boy! Oh boy! Oh boy! Oh boy! Oh boy! Oh boy! Oh boy! Oh boy! Oh boy! Oh boy! Oh boy! Oh boy! Oh boy! Oh boy! Oh boy! Oh boy! Oh boy! Oh boy! Oh boy! Oh boy! Oh boy! Oh boy! Oh boy! Oh boy! Oh boy! Oh boy! Oh boy! Oh boy! Oh boy! Oh boy! Oh boy! Oh boy! Oh boy! Oh boy! Oh boy! Oh boy! Oh boy! Oh boy! Oh boy! Oh boy! Oh boy! Oh boy! Oh boy! Oh boy! Oh boy! Oh boy! Oh boy! Oh boy! Oh boy! Oh boy! Oh boy! Oh boy! Oh boy! Oh boy! Oh boy! Oh boy! Oh boy! Oh boy! Oh boy! Oh boy! Oh boy! Oh boy! Oh boy! Oh boy! Oh boy! Oh boy! Oh boy! Oh boy! Oh boy! Oh boy! Oh boy! Oh boy! Oh boy! Oh boy! Oh boy! Oh boy! Oh boy! Oh boy! Oh boy! Oh boy! Oh boy! Oh boy!

Sunday night!

And, yes, Atia IS a tramp.

And, Vorenus IS a madman.

And, sure, Pullo is a thug, I guess.

Cleopatra is a fiend? Well, now I think they're just being harsh.

I can grant that Brutus is a traitor. History has not been kind to that man.

Servilia is a murderer. And I would add "bitch" as well.

Mark Antony is a coward. Well, maybe, but he was brave enough to do a full frontal nude scene in the first season so, you know, points for that.

Lunch

I wonder what it says about me that I just ate a cheeseburger and fries. . . AFTER I said aloud to no one but myself: "Man, this burger smells like ass!"

Perhaps it's best I not know.

Church on Thursday

Ryan says: I feel weird. I just assigned an article to "Jesus."

Caroline says: WWJD?

Ryan says: Jesus Grana.

Caroline says: His grammar is immaculate

Ryan says: I know it's probably pronouned "HEY-ZEUS," but still.

Ryan says: I'm going to be afraid to edit it.

Ryan says: I won't want to CROSS anything out.

Caroline says: Yep. Hell. And it's barely 9:30 a.m.

Ryan says: And before Jesus rose to Heaven, he said unto his followers, "Hey, before I go, I should really write an article about how IBM usage and Accounting Manager lowers the barriers to virtualization and allows clients to better account for IT as a contributor to business results- our ability to cover AIX advanced accounting collector etc-"

Caroline says: And it will be good.

Ryan says: Etc. . . AMEN!

The Great Prognosticator

Let's see. I'm going to take a stab at some weather prognostications for 2007. If I remember correctly, around the 1997/1998 timeframe, the two huge stories getting lots of play, besides the Clinton thing, were the stock market boom and El Nino. Do you remember El Nino? I remember El Nino. I remember El Nino because I only got one fuzzy channel at my college apartment at the time, and that channel was CBS, and I actually developed a pretty good impression of the way Dan Rather said El Nino.

Well, there's apparently a lot of other important things going on, all these ten years later, but make no mistake, El Nino is back in effect, although a more moderate one.

Also, in the summer of 1998, southeastern Minnesota got whalloped by a series of amazingly strong thunderstorms, and many experts attributed the unusual whalloping to the effects of El Nino.

Sooooooooooo. . .

I'm going to put on my forecasting hat and say the summer of 2007 will see some unusually strong thunderstorms around the area, followed by a fairly cold winter that will see little in the way of precipitation through December, followed by snow up the pooper in January and February 2008.

What about the rest of the winter for 2007? Not sure, but if we're spared snow for the entirety of the season, I can't say I'd get all that upset about it.

Yikes

My Own Personal Cell

For many reasons that make sense only to me, I've resisted getting a cell phone ever since the infernal devices started becoming popular. Primarily, I'm not what you'd call a "phone person."

Talking on a phone, for me, is the equivalent of listening to an infant wail into my ear. I don't pay attention very well when talking on a phone, so drawn out stories narrated to me by the person on the other end are typically missed in their entirety. For me, phones are a means by which to attain a pizza delivery, and that's about it.

My resistance to joining the cell phone technology revolution irritated more than just a few people, the privacy-invading micro-managers at my job being top amongst them. "What do you mean, you don't have a home phone number? How are we supposed to contact you outside of work?"

EXACTLY! Being inaccessible outside of work was one of the most alluring aspects of not having a phone. It was empowering, in a way. After 5 p.m., it was like I hit the "off" switch on my work-related
availability.

Unfortunately, there were others who continually cajoled me about getting a cell phone, and these were people I actually cared about, like my girlfriend, and my parents, and my friends, and the good people at Pizza Hut.

So it was, when I received a cell phone over the Christmas holiday from my girlfriend, it was with a resigned acceptance of the inevitable march of time and technology.

Having experimented with my new cell phone now for a couple of weeks, I've come to the conclusion that it's basically a miniature computer, which means all the annoyance and non-intuitive interfaces of a computer has been mini-sized to fit in my pocket. Only, instead of using a mouse and standard keyboard, I'm required to use the phone's keypad to navigate to everything from ring tones to new voicemail tones to tones alerting me to new available tones. I can also
associate a picture with a given phone number, so in addition to seeing a person's name appear when they're calling me, I can also see their face. This is a feature I intend to use sometime shortly AFTER hell freezes over.

It's not that I'm anti-technology; far from it. I LOVE technology. If it weren't for technology and computers, I wouldn't have a job. Rather, my gripe with cell phones is that they feature entirely too many useless features. For example, there's an option to play Solitaire on my cell phone. Honestly, who would want to do such a thing? I mean, if you have the time to play Solitaire, surely you can
play with an actual deck of cards. Or, hey, here's an idea: if you have the time to play Solitaire on your phone, maybe you should CALL someone, a friend or family member, perhaps. Just call and say "Hi."

I'm not saying you have to catch them up on every little thing, but just a quick "hey, howya doin'" so they know you think about them from time to time. You know, rather than playing Solitaire on your cell phone. Just a suggestion.

Not that I'm in any position to offer up any such suggestions, what with my aforementioned disdain for phone conversations, but it just strikes me that cell phones seem to be more about providing a means by which to avoid people rather than engage with them. Even text messages strike me as a conversational life support system. Is it just me, or wouldn't you rather hear somebody laugh at your joke than have "LOL!" flash up on your phone? And, really, when somebody writes "ROTFLMAO," I have sincere doubts they're actually rolling on the floor laughing until their posterior tears asunder from the rest of their body. That's something I have to see, in person.

At any rate, I guess I'm just acclimating to the new reality of being one of the cell phone toting chat bots I used to deride and mock. Now I'm one of them, and it's a hard adjustment to make. I need something that adequately reflects my emotional state regarding this new cell phone world I find myself in.

Maybe if I change my ring tone. . .