It’s finally here! I’ve been counting down for the past 1460 days. For a while I thought it would never arrive; but at long last it’s Leap Day! I am so excited, and I just can’t hide it. I’m going to spend the whole day leaping over anything and everything that crosses my path. Toadstools, stair-railings, weasels, moving buses; you name it I’m going to leap over it.leapfrog.JPG

Back in 2004 I think I leapt over almost two different things. This time I going to do even more. I’ve been practicing for the past four years and I been working out my legs so that they’re super strong. I think I could almost leap over a tall building in no more than a double bound. My lower body development is huge; I haven’t even bothered to work out my upper body at all so that all my strength is in my legs.
Everyone else out there should celebrate this festive time of the four-year. Get up from your computer (after you finish reading this post and commenting on it), go outside, or stay inside, and leap over something. You’ll feel fantastic if you do.

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I guess you might have noticed I haven’t been around The Redneck lately. I was very preoccupied making my newest and possibly best (to date) video. I was lurking around YouTube and our Beer Buddy Josh Rimer caught me and I found myself “tagged”. So here are five little known facts about me. If anyone else wants to share, feel free.

Lately, our Bar-room Brawl Tag Team Champions; Tammy and Gerri have been…concerned about the lack of competition.  It seems that their legend grows each week and everyone out there is simply feeling too daunted to even challenge the ladies.  No one seems to believe that they won’t be utterly humiliated if they step into the ring.  Due to this problem I have been working hard to devise a solution.  My first thought was maybe force Gerri and Tammy to fight sober.  But it’s hardly fair to enforce such a harsh punishment on them (besides we are running a bar, it would be just plain stupid to suggest that anyone not drink).  Then, after several hours of watching old WWF matches from the early ’90’s, I came up with a plan.
We will have a series of “gimmick” matches for the title belts.  First up will be a beer-bottle-on-a-pole match.  There will be a tall pole attached to one ring post.  By standing on one’s tipppy-toes on the top rope, one will be just able to reach the Blue Beaver Beer bottle hanging off of the pole.  Then one can use said bottle (after drinking the contents, obviously) in whatever way one wants in order to gain an advantage.  I would suggest being creative with it.  Pretend it still has beer in it, set it down, when your opponent goes for it you can give him a double-axe-handle across the back.
Next up, we’ll have a boiler-room-brawl.  The two teams will start off in the boiler room and they have to battle their way out until one team can make it back to the ring and claim the case of Blue Beaver Beer that I will be holding.  Of course you can use anything you can find in the boiler room as a weapon (although in Alberta, Fire Code Regulations state that you are not allowed to store anything at all in the boiler room).
I briefly considered a mud-wrestling match, but that usually tends to be demeaning to females.  I want it to be known that I am not that kind of guy.  Instead we will be having a gravy-bowl match.  There will be a large pool full of chicken-mushroom gravy.  Two teams enter clad in very tasteful bathing suits and they fight until a pin-fall is achieved.  Mushrooms may be used as weapons.
So anyone out there who wishes to challenge Tammy and Gerri, just pick whichever match you like and then practice in your backyard until you’re really good.  Then come on down to The Redneck on a Monday night and maybe, just maybe you might have a shot.  As well, we will be having a tournament to determine a singles champion.  If you think you got what it takes, let me know and I’ll schedule a match for you.

Well, I finally got around to making another video. It’s another episode of “Ask Ernie”. You will notice that I used it as an opportunity to get some attention from another YouTube personality, Hot For Words. Hopefully she will respond in the near future. Enjoy.

The other day I got to thinking about that, “we didn’t have it in the old days” speech.  We’ve all heard it from a parent or older relative at one time or another.  I’ll admit I’ve even said it once or twice (with a little bit of irony though).  Then I started wondering what will our children say to their children.  I think it might go something like this:

Child: Can I download a video game off of Skynet into the chip implanted in my head now.
Parent: Have you uploaded your homework yet?
C: Yes.
P: Did you program your robot to clean up your room?
C: He did it a half-hour ago.
P: You know when I was your age our video games came on CD’s.  And we didn’t play them inside our minds, we had to watch them on t.v. and use a hand held controller.
C: You had t.v.’s?  Those are like antiques now.  And what’s a CD?
P: We didn’t go to the Virtual Mall either.  We had to log on to our computers and order stuff from websites.  Then we had to wait 4-6 weeks for it to be delivered.
C: Geez; I’ve never had to wait for more than 10 minutes before something I ordered from the V-Mall got made in the replicator.  Can I download some new songs now?  I’ve been listening to the same ones inside my head for, like, two days now.
P: Did you give the verbal commands to dish washer yet?  Y’know when I was a kid we had to load it by hand and then press a button.
C: Well we could just replicate new plates everyday like everyone else in the world.  Zeus-dammit, you’re old.
P: And when I was a kid, we took God’s name in vain.  Miss Manners-bot, wash this child’s mouth out with soap; and do it for real, not just virtually.  I’m going to replicate a Blue Beaver Beer.
C: Wahhhh!

I realize that by now that’s most likely a cliché and not a really original one, but that’s never stopped me before.  I really started to take notice of this phenomenon a few weeks ago.  I was looking through a local newspaper and as I quickly leafed past the sports section, one picture caught my attention.  A picture of a fight at a hockey game; with a four sentence caption underneath that described the fight being depicted as well as mentioning other fights these two men had recently been in.  Then the other night I was over at Sandi’s and for some inexplicable reason she was watching the game (I can only guess that living in the home city of The Calgary Shames has somehow infected her mind).  I attempted to pay attention for a little while in order to possibly understand the appeal.  Less than five minutes into the game a fight started.  The commentators took the time to fill us in on the background.  Apparently these two teams had a game just a few nights previous and this fight was a carry-over from the last one.  The brawl was broken up and they started playing hockey again…for about another five minutes.  During the second fight they put up a statistic on the screen regarding fights between these two teams throughout the season.

Around this time I left the room to go play video games with the children.  It was far more satisfying to actively battle giant rats, kobolds, orcs and gelatinous cubes than it was to passively watch a hokey fight.  I eventually went back to the living room and watched the last five minutes of the game.  Amazingly there were no fights during that time (although at one point two players were nose to nose “talking” to each other.

Now I suppose there are a lot of people out there who think that these fights are “part of the game”; however since it’s my blog I’m just going to go ahead and say that you’re wrong.  I think sports games should be about the game itself.  If you want to watch and /or participate in a fight, come on down to The Redneck for our Monday Night Brawl For Y’AllGerri and Tammy are eager for some competition.

     I was watching t.v. the other day (as I so often do when I’m trying to steal new ideas for posts) and I saw a really interesting documentary.  It was all about how to warp time and space.  It was pretty technical information but I made sure to write down some notes record the show for later replay.  The best part was this guy who claimed that warping the space/time continuum could be done using common household items.  A blender, the heating element of a toaster oven, beer, and plutonium 244.  Unfortunately I was fresh out of plutonium 244 and only had 239 on hand; but I figured what difference could a few grams of atomic mass possibly make.
After following the experiment precisely, the result should have been a stable wormhole that would allow me to travel back in time to visit myself in the past.  I was going to go back to last Friday and remind myself to return my movies to the video store on time.  Alas, something went horribly, horribly wrong.  No wormhole was created.  Instead it just blew up in my face; the result of which was soot all over my face and my hair sticking up in a crazy looking way.  Also, this happened to my clock:

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The other day one of the patrons at The Redneck was asking if anyone could recall a t.v. show that featured a bar called The Eager Beaver.  No one in the room was able to answer her question exactly, although one person suggested she might be thinking of The Regal Beagle (from Three’s Company).  Someone else suggested that she go online and use that one obnoxiously popular search engine, you know the one called (expletive deleted), in order to find the answer.  She was concerned, however, that searching for beaver on the internet would result in some unpleasant results.  I couldn’t imagine what she meant by this.  After all, nearly everyday someone out there searches for “beaver shots” and they are accurately directed to a post Tim did a while back.  Now, if she had searched for the exact phrase “the eager beaver”, she might not have been directed to our site.  At least not before; however if I have understood Tim’s tips regarding the seeding of keywords into a post I may have just ensured that more people will be dropping by The Redneck after this.

Man did they suck.  I just can’t explain what the hell I was thinking back here:mulletino-heat.JPG

If you would like to know more about the ’80’s and what I may have been thinking read, “No Beaver, No Problem pt. 2“.  Perhaps it will give you some insight into an era best left forgotten.

Ah, the eighties. I forgot all about those crazy times, until I read I Love The 80’s so you don’t have to at JD’s site. If you take a look over there, you can read her list of 80 Things I Did in the 80’s So You Don’t Have To. I would have never guessed that JD was such a wild Eighties chick! I can’t compete with her 80s hair photo, but I did have quite the mullet on me if I do say so myself.

What do I remember about the eighties?

 Crazy Music Videos, like ‘Wild Boys’ by Duran Duran. There was one guy tied to this water wheel, and it was spinning and kept dipping his head in the water, and then that monster came up ….. pure art, man! And how about Thriller?

Awesome Hatchback Cars. Those were so cool, especially if the shock wore out on the hatch and you had to steal your mother’s broom handle to prop the sucker open so you could get the beer in and out. Can you remember the power under those flimsy hoods that you also had to prop open with a little rod? I tried to close mine once but forgot to put the support rod down and put a bend right in the middle of the hood.  Those babies were like riding a speed rocket …. not! It was even more cool when they all broke down and were retired to the auto wreckers.

House Parties! Yeah, I bet there are house parties going on now, but I don’t hear of any parties like these ones. I’m talking those houses that were owned or rented by some animal who liked to fill the joint with people every weekend. The kind of party where everyone takes their shoes off and piles ‘em up outside because there’s no room left inside and you have to force your way into the crowd.  You know you’re at the right house if the cops raid the joint and everyone makes a break for it wearing the wrong shoes cause you didn’t have time to look through the enormous pile for yours so you just grabbed a couple hightop Reeboks and hightailed it outa there.

Arcades Full of Stand Alone Games and Pinball Machines  These were the best. Video games were a social thing mostly. Of course there was the Atari 2600 and a few others, but for the good games you had to go down to the arcade with your friends and hang out with the rest of the punks. Now teenagers (and adults) sit all alone in a dimy lit room and play with themselves, I mean with their games.

Maybe it was the lack of sleep, all the beer I drank or I blocked out a lot of stuff, but a lot of the eighties is really foggy. Between a few heavy metal concerts and the Suzuki GSE 1100 Streetbike, and did I say all that beer, I kept pretty busy.

Anyone else feel like sharing their 80’s memories?