This has been the coldest, windiest Spring in the last 10 years in Atlanta.

I am sick and tired of the “tree-hugger”, politically-correct mindset mentality which is dictating the direction of our energy policies.

Human-induced global warming is a pathetic hoax.

I say drill the heck out of Anwar to get more oil than we’ve used in the last 100 years –– and shut-down the oil company lobbyists so we can create alternative fuels to release us from the grip of dependence on foreign oil.

What would Ripley Do?

She sure as hell wouldn’t pay $4 a gallon for regular!

Again, another advertising | marketing slam dunk and a deal at the same time. Warrant Officer Ripley, played by the tough-ass Sigourney Weaver needs to be our next president. She is devoid of “cankles” and is sharp as a tack.

The Quadrilogy box set is the bargain of the week. $46 for 9 DVD’s! That’s five bucks a DVD… better than the bargain bin at Wal•Mart.

Based on the fact that white men have mismanaged the train wreck that our society and economy has become, I think the country agrees that someone new needs a shot at the least attractive job in the world.

The 3 dubious candidates currently running are most definitely the “B” team at best.

Ripley takes on surly crew members and intensely aggressive female alien creatures without a second of panic.

And she handles high-tech, high-powered weapons with ease and aplomb. Reminds me of my lovely wife!

Check out what’s in the box… I couldn’t even fit it on my kitchen table for this awesome photo!

I recommend a write-in campaign in November. Vote early and often for Ripley. And vote to drill in Anwar for oil, as well as to bring back the nuclear-powered Pinto to release us from the grip of mid-east oil and $9 a gallon gas!

Yahoo is gunning for Google! I got this package in the mail and immediately began to annoy my 22 year old son at the crack of 11am with it.

They dropped some serious coin on this project. The box it came in is top-of-the-line solid and the printed marketing material inside is on heavy, premium paper. They want everyone to know that Yahoo is prepared to rule the “Search Marketing” world. In other words, get buyers to your site.

Once you open the box, you find an “Easy Button”, like the one from whatever office supply company uses that in their ads. Seriously, I can’t remember which one, which is marketing death for any clever ad. “Love the ad, can’t remember what it’s for!”

Sheesh! There goes a quick $mil in development and placement costs down the drain.

I now use the button each time I bill out a job, get a check in the mail or win the lottery (haven’t used it for that yet.)

Click below to hear what pushing the button sounds like (as if you’ll be surprised!)

Recorded directly from the device.

CLICK ME!

Been out of town doing wet work for the CIA, then came back to a loaded voice mail tape. More paying work. No body disposal. Most excellent.

That being said, I will leave you with this image from my epic journey back from the southland…

Arby’s! What are you thinking?! A Roast beef outfit positioned next to a place that displays roast…? Never mind. You are judged by the company you keep.

And the next time you decide to install a fire hydrant in the middle of nowhere, please do a better job of securing it to the truck!

This 900 pound, fire-engine red potential projectile of bolted and welded steel was bouncing around on top of the PVC pipe like a BB on a vibrating cookie sheet.

Truckers of the world, secure your loads! Or you’ll have some “’splaining” to do!…

The CIA just called. I need to blow town for the weekend. But the confirmation code I had to leave to get my La Quinta room reservation reminded me of the way our nation has horribly degraded in it’s letter identification protocol when relaying sensitive personal data to strangers on the phone.

For instance, let’s say your confirmation code is CFG12HLM6. Do not try to identify it as a young lady attempted to repeat to me recently: “That’s “c” as in Camilla, Fred, Gigli, one, two, Hermimi, Latte, Mustard, six. Got that?”

Uh, no, sweet-cheeks. It goes a little like this:

A: Alpha
B: Bravo
C: Charlie
D: Delta
E: Echo
F: Foxtrot
G: Golf
H: Hotel
I: India
J: Juliet
K: Kilo
L: Lima
M: Mike
N: November
O: Oscar
P: Papa
Q: Quebec
R: Romeo
S: Sierra
T: Tango
U: Uniform
V: Victor
W: Whiskey
X: X-Ray
Y: Yankee
Z: Zulu

Lock and load, soldier! Know your damned alphabet!

Now, anybody seen my Papa Oscar? I gotta make notes on the road.

…but when I do, I find it impossible to note that irony abounds. Take this proud automobile owner, for example.

First of all, isn’t Daewoo best known for making low-end boom boxes and other questionable electronic devices?

Isn’t the company’s chairman in prison for embezzling something like $41 billion from shareholders?

And how about the boss of their northern brethren, the short guy with the baggy pajamas and funny hair rug struggling to create a nuclear fruitcake-sized bomb intended to threaten our sovereign nation?

That being said, what the hell is a “Leganza” anyway? A Legendary Lasagna? What the @#*% were they thinking?!

I mean, I know we are running out of natural resources faster than blood spewing from a stuck pig at a summertime pork-fest. The only thing bleeding faster is cutting edge names for new automobiles, but I thought we’d pretty much bailed after “Pinto”, and that was 1972.

Finally, we rolled over and just started punching in letters and numbers like SX5… Whoa! That is SO cool! It sounds like a fighter jet!!!

But to get a vanity plate for your Daewoo Leganza and label it “SWWWEET”, well, I’m sorry, sir, that’s just wrong. I ask, what else in your life are you over-hyping?

The good news was that I was on my way to enjoy a simple family dinner with my amazing daughter and son, both of whom I swear were crawling around on the floor just ten minutes ago, biting my ankles. Visual evidence proves otherwise.

We enjoyed a fantastic meal of chicken, black beans and rice as well as a spirited debate over the presidential election… Obama – 2, I don’t know – 1.

On my way home, at 9:30 or so, I had the pleasure of driving down an amazingly open I-85 with wonderful abandon.

Normally the average commute speed in Atlanta is somewhere below the progress of a calcifying elbow joint, but with free lanes in front of me, I caught myself being passed by a Hummer H3 (great car name, by the way) as I crossed beneath the vaunted “Spaghetti Junction” at a tad under 94 miles per hour.

Whoa, big guy! Life moves way too fast all by itself… No need to push it yourself.

So I backed off, eased over to the right lane and settled back to enjoy the balance of the evening, scanning vehicles for the stupidest names.

As my new found friend would say, “SWWWEET!”

Tip ‘o the hat to Dr. Steve for pointing out this breaking news. “Neanderthals have spoken out for the first time in 30,000 years, with the help of scientists who have simulated their voices using fossil evidence and a computer synthesizer.”

Holy Crap, what a great use of intellectual resources. That whole alternative fuel thing is such a waste of time…

It gets better: “In contrast to a modern human “e,” the Neanderthal version lacks a quantal hallmark, which helps a listener distinguish the word “beat” from “bit.”

Which means Neanderthals were simply ancient rednecks. I went to college with a Texan who had to differentiate between “pin” and “pen” as follows: “Got an ink pin?” or “Why did you poke me with that hat pen?”

The irony is biting.

Well, that’s all Lil” Neanderthal needed to hear before figuring the the time was ripe for the “Campaign ‘08″ to “get a hook up on” the “wazzz’ up” of 50,000 years ago and how they “played it”.

I know… Those are his terms. Don’t get me started. And give him a break. He just started speaking after 30,000 years of keeping his yap shut!

Oye Vay, the children. It’s always about the children!

Anybody got an ink pen? I need to change my vote.

There are so many things, so wrong about this story, I’m sure that “Tony” eventually thought this was a Hell of a Day to Quit Drinking.

And I quote:

A Brazilian priest who rode a bundle of party balloons into the horizon to set a flight record has disappeared.

Rev. Adelir Antonio di Carli took off Sunday from the coastal city of Paranagua in southern Brazil, buoyed by 1,000 helium-filled balloons.

Wearing a helmet, aluminum thermal flight suit, waterproof clothes and a parachute, he was attempting to break the 19-hour record of human flight by party balloons.

Eight hours after takeoff, di Carli was reported missing after he lost contact with authorities.

Rescuers said they have found the balloons floating in the ocean off the coast of southern Brazil but have seen no sign of di Carli.

Meanwhile, a flight instructor who expelled di Carli from flight school three years ago has publicly criticized the priest for his stunt, Gancia said.

“He called him undisciplined and an exhibitionist, and he was always bragging about his faith and how his faith was going to carry him and take him safely through his journey.”

He was carrying enough cereal bars and water to sustain him for five days and had a GPS device, satellite phone and buoyant chair with him.”What we’re hearing now is that he did not know how to use his equipment, the GPS, and he was ill-prepared for his flight.”

While di Carli had intended to drift inland, weather conditions forced him over the ocean. Authorities have also found the chair he was traveling in.

OK… jeeze, where do I start? How about key words: Priest, party balloon flight record, expelled from flight school, cereal bars, ill-prepared with his equipment, buoyant chair… I have to stop!

This kind of stuff just writes itself so I’ll let you figure it out.

And the Pope was having such a good week, what with his epic visit to the U.S. and his 180th birthday celebration and all.

Until now.

While researching the novel I’m writing, I tried to ask the all-knowing internet a simple question: “How many satellites currently orbit the earth?”

Guess what? No one knows!

NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center reported almost 25,000 man-made objects: 8,681 currently in orbit, and over 16,000 objects in a state of decay in September, 1997!

That was 11 years ago. If something was decaying then, what does it smell like now? And I sure as heck don’t want it raining down on my noggin’ tonight! Know what I mean?

Latest data indicates over 100,000 “objects” with between 8,000 and 10,000 “satellites” active, between private data/communication and military uses.

I downloaded an Excel spread sheet from a NASA-related site which only identified 874 satellites, with names in the “A” category like:

Afristar: USA / WorldSpace Corp. (searching for Africa in America)
AGILE: Italy / Italian Space Agency Civil Scientific Research LEO (who knew? investigating pizza in space!)
AIM USA: “Center for Atmospheric Sciences, NASA” (searching for Al Gore and his Global Warming scam)
Alsat-1: Al Queda WHOA!

China leads the world in anti-satellite destruction technology. Apparently unsatisfied with simply poisoning our American children with lead-based paint, applied to innocent-looking, cheap-ass toys, they aim to destroy our global data and communication abilities with the push of a button!

Kung-pow chicken? How about Kung-pow, there goes your iTunes download, mid-stream!

I don’t know about you, but I plan to spend a few more moments at night looking up for “incoming”, and then ordering Italian take-out.

Lil’ Neanderthal is a plastic toy figure that talks to me in thought bubbles. Yeah, right. I’m nuts. No, I’m not!

Lil’ N was uncovered during a Spring Cleaning event that I don’t even want to get into now. That was last Spring and he was discovered at the bottom of a box of infant toys which I don’t even know why we still had. My kids are alleged adults now.

Anyway, I couldn’t bear to put Lil’ L in the yard sale; that amazingly American invention of selling your garbage to strangers…

What a sweet deal. You spend 15 hours marking up your trash with florescent orange stickers, hovering over each item, wondering whether that soap dish is worth 50¢ or 25¢, knowing that some old fart is going to beat you down to 15¢ in the end.

Lil’ N was not to meet that fate.

And once I liberated him, he began to speak (in thought bubbles because Neanderthals hadn’t quite worked out the details of witty repartee on account’a they lived 130,000 years ago).

Anyway, he will check in here from time to time with thoughts that are amazingly cogent and relevant to the world we live in today.

Dude is actually pretty sharp.

OMG, the economy is in a tailspin and we are all going to go bankrupt and die a horrible death.

Not so fast, cha-cha. After a huge expansion of economic growth, mostly due to (let’s face it) a whole lot of people charging a whole lot of stuff on their Discover cards, rationalizing it by saying things like, “But look at the miles we’re racking up!”, our universe has responded with a natural contraction.

I’m no physicist, but the concept of expansion and contraction is clearly evident in our daily lives.

We get fat, we feel guilty, we diet. Then, feeling flush with the rush of being back down to our “fighting weight”, we return to the lifestyle that made us happy and fat. The boiler grows back and the cycle begins again.

The stock market goes up, and people buy in, happy with their “gains”. Then the evening news announces that XYZ Corp was fudging on their balance sheets. The Wall Street Sheep panic, and OMG! Look how much I lost in my retirement fund!

First of all, meatball, you didn’t lose anything. It’s all on paper. Unless you are a day trader, which is analogous to being a professional Russian Roulette Play’a, you are fine. Statistics are brutally boring, but they are valid for a reason. They play out consistently in the long run.

Things go up and down all the time. Yesterday, you nailed a presentation and were the hero of the sales team. Today you found out that your top account jumped ship for a low-price competitor. That’s freakin’ life! You go up, you drop down. Expansion and contraction!

So here is my gem of wisdom. Rent your fun, but buy your dreams… Rent your vacations, your toys, your indulgences. Invest in the things that really matter.

1. Your loved ones. Do you really think that anyone cares about what you wear or drive. Ahhh, no. Those people are obsessed with what they wear and drive.
2. Your health. Eat well. Work out. Make time to relax without chemical assistance. Try it! You’ll be surprised.
3. Your Evolution. Push yourself to grow intellectually, spiritually and emotionally. “Status Quo” is a Latin term meaning “Holy Crap, you’re a cranky old man”.

And finally, give thanks to your Guardian Angel. Agnostic or not, we all have one, pal. I am fortunate enough to have married mine. Believe it or not, there is someone up there looking out for you.

Keep your nose clean and hold your head high.

We’ll come out of the other end of this contraction just fine.

NOTE: Give me a moment in the “Was” and I’ll tell you my opinion of the “Is”.

This is what I was doing 36 years ago today. I stumbled across this photo by accident, digging through an archive of logos I’d designed over the years, knowing I had created something in the past that would inspire my current assignment.

The fact that I found this photo in a folder marked “Old Logos” wouldn’t be a surprise to those familiar with my wildly chaotic filing system.

Still, it was a surprise to me. Dateline: April 17, 1972.

Wacky-looking as I appear, I am not jumping for joy, nor am I trying out for “So You Think You Can Dance!”.

I am actually following through on a discus throw. The fact that both my feet are in the air is testament to my poor form at the time (maximum throwing force is applied with both feet planted securely in the circle).

Good Lord I loved those high, striped socks!

According to the artfully lettered legend I’d written on the back of the image, this throw took place in New Jersey at a dual meet between Glen Ridge and Wood Ridge (there are many “Ridges” in New Jersey – a surprise to those who only know the state by ripping down the NJ Turnpike at 80 miles an hour, windows up, wearing gas masks).

Glen Ridge won the meet that day, 79 – 56. I managed to best the competition with a less than impressive 145′4-1/2″ and won the “Best Effort” Award…

Not sure what that award meant or how it impacted my junior high school year’s dating life.

I hadn’t recalled that day until now, but the photo spurred my memory, and I did remember this.

The school record at the time was over 156′. In my mind that day, I was woefully short by 11 feet. Even though I’d won the event, I was disappointed with my performance. All I could think of at the time was breaking that record.

Here’s the “IS” point > Embrace your “moments”, daily. Our world moves so fast, driven by intense stress and anxiety. Take time each day to enjoy what you have accomplished, to enjoy your blessings and your loved ones. Give yourself a chance to live in the “IS”.

If you don’t do that, all you are left with is living in the “Was” or the “When”.

Which means you aren’t truly living, are you?

“Living”, by definition, means existing in the “IS”, if only for a few minutes.

Now, back to me. For those of you dying to know, I did finally break the record at the end of my senior year, by 16 feet… a record that still stands.

But who cares. That accomplishment exists in the “Was”.

What you see displayed to the left is $6/US of red grapes destined for the freezer. Each grape is approximately 4 calories.

Combined, you’re looking at about 960 calories. That’s a bit less than half the healthy FDA daily recommended caloric intake for an adult.

But you wouldn’t eat them all at once, and even if you did, you’d know it wouldn’t be a balanced consumption of nutrients.

We live in a consumption-oriented society. Consumption has driven our economy for years.

Problem now is that while we could have afforded to eat each consumption grape, paying 4 calories at a time, we chose to charge the whole 960 on plastic, figuring that before we ate them all, we’d be able to pay for them.

Looks like it didn’t turn out that way. Apparently, those 960 calories of grapes weren’t satisfying enough, so before we paid them off, we called Pizza Hut and ordered that deep-dish pepperoni with everything on it and put that on the card as well. And it didn’t stop there.

The feeding frenzy blew itself out of proportion and expanded, much like our distended boilers until the natural order of things stepped in and our fragile world of debt-grapes contracted with a bang. Welcome to today.

The Media loves a fall from grace, doesn’t it? Do yourself a favor and turn off the TV. Use the local newspaper to train a puppy. There is no need to panic, especially on Tax-Man Day.

We all know what we need to do to get our houses in order. We are in a period of required contraction. Embrace the lessness and know that the unworthy and greedy are being weeded out by the natural process of elimination.

Meanwhile, enjoy life, one frozen grape at a time. Heck, they’re only 4 calories each!

If I hear one more business wonk use the following pep-talk bromide, “Hey Team, let’s ‘Think Outside Of The Box‘ on this one”, I swear I’m going straight for his neck.

That being said, if you somehow feel uncontrollably compelled to invoke this ancient, tarnished and abused shibboleth, please understand what it really means.

It actually does have an interesting history which dates back to, drum roll please, 1914!

Oh! Wow! Was that the sound of some fast-track, marketing up-and-comer, hitting the floor with a satisfying thud?!

The Box is not a ‘Box’ in the way that you think I mean ‘Box’. It’s not the box you get at the UPS Store to ship your re-gifted present to mom on her birthday… four days late.

It started out as a puzzle with three rows and three columns of nine dots. The challenge was to connect the dots with four straight lines, never lifting your crow-quill pen off the parchment. The only way to do that was to go outside of the ‘box’ that your mind told you bounded the matrix of dots. Brilliant!

I want to introduce you to a guy who not only thought out of the Box, he forgot there WAS a Box.

John Kanzius is a retired business man and former radio technician who six years ago was diagnosed with terminal leukemia. He endured 36 rounds of painful, toxic chemotherapy during which he watched children suffering the same, but not understanding why that had to be. John knew there just had to be a less destructive way to beat cancer.

He couldn’t sleep at night during the Chemo treatments and at one point he had an insanely wacky idea inspired by his youthful pastime of building radios from scratch. He got up, focusing on that inspiration, and began rummaging through his wife’s collection of pie pans, quickly getting to work.

Of course, his bride thought he’d completely lost it, but after tons of testing and over $200,000 of his own money invested, big league cancer centers have taken notice and are doing critical testing which has yielded very promising results. Click on John’s name above to see the entire story which ‘60 minutes’ ran as one of their most fascinating segments (sorry Andy).

So, kids, you want to think out of the box? Knock yourself out… just don’t tell me that is what you are doing.

However, I suggest you forget there was ever a box bounding you in the first place!

My power went out in the middle of a wicked electrical storm last night, so I shut the computer down, silenced the insane bleeping of the UPS back-up battery tower and went to bed.

As I lay motionless in the dark, I noted the deafening silence inside the entire house. No humming, buzzing, ticking… not a single vibration. It was a vacuum of sound made even more obvious by the occasional claps of thunder outside and intermittent squalls of rain pinging against the windows.

It is amazing how much ambient noise all our electrical devices create. We tune them out on a conscious level, but you have to wonder what all that racket is doing to our inner psyche.

I drifted off to a light, restless sleep in the uncomfortable stillness and slammed full force into a nightmare of epic proportion.

If all of a sudden they stopped making electricity, how would I ever be able to enjoy my crispy bacon strips? Even gas ovens require the gas company to have electricity in order to deliver their flammable product.

Use a camping stove? No way! Cook it on the grill and the resulting grease cascades into the flame resulting in a fireball that could burn the house to the ground. Use a pan and the delicious strips of fat and salty pig muscle are rendered greasy and limp.

I like my bacon CRISPY!!! And then it came to me (in the nightmare, of course). I’d trot out to the garage with a trusty flashlight, crank up the old ‘67 Rambler, hook one end of the jumper cables to the battery and the other to each side of a fresh piece of bacon. Fat is an INCREDIBLE conductor of electricity. In seconds my cold, limp, slippery strip of pig meat would be crisp and delectable!

I awoke refreshed and confident, whistling as I journeyed through the house resetting clocks, power sources, modems, routers, and my computer. I had a bullet-proof back-up plan for bacon in a Power-Company-Free world!

And not just ANY bacon… Crispy, delicious electric bacon!

Do you believe in resurrection? Not the one Jesus managed, which is the cornerstone of the Christian faith. This is not a religious post.

I’m talking about personal resurrection. The kind where you’ve screwed up badly, maybe WAY in back in the past, but are finally able to develop the confidence to put it behind you and move on. To rise from your own ashes, so to speak.

Letting the pain of your mistake(s) go is the hard part, but once you develop that key skill, moving on is liberating.

There’s a guy out there who refers to the part of you that can’t let go of your errors as the “pain-body”. It’s the part of you that manifests itself in your internal dialog. It fosters doubt, regret and anger as you let it take control of your emotions.

The pain-body spirals some of us into insanity, some of us to lash out at strangers and loved ones with odd and inappropriate venom – often followed by regret; and the rest of us to drink heavily!

Of course, that feeds the pain-body further, building up a pile of crap inside you that can be a bitch to manage.

When you feel that rise of emotion, embrace your pain-body, grab it by the throat and tell it to piss off.

Oh, it’ll come back for sure… but you’ll be locked and loaded.

The first step to beating it back is knowing who and what the hell it is!

I have a problem with my old school iPod. It has a night life.

OK, it’s not an iPod. It’s a clip-on radio with an impossibly long cord which runs up to grappling-hook-like ear pieces. I swear MacGyver could use these things to hurl over a roof ledge to rappel up and save the world.

When I walk around the kitchen in the process of preparing gourmet-style meals (I’m legendary for my great hot dog-based recipes) the cord inevitably snags every cabinet knob in sight which results in either the plug getting yanked out of the socket at the most important point of an interview or the ear pieces being yanked off my head with a crunching bend to my ear flaps.

Either way, it elicits an involuntary curse and a flush of frustration that this happens routinely, and yet I can not prevent the next incident.

But the real problem is what happens overnight. I carefully coil the massive cord to avoid all tangles, yet the following morning, the MacGyver clips and wires have spun themselves into a tangle not unlike the Christmas tree light Russ is asked to unravel in National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation.

So, you ask, what does this have to do with The Grid? Do you have any idea what this next leap of technology will do to our concept of the internet? I’ll tell you what it will do! It is guaranteed to tangle the cord and earpieces of your internet mind!!!

For those of you not familiar, The Grid is a leading edge logarithmic leap in sharing electronic data and communications. The Grid, based on fiber-optic connections, boasts speeds nearly 10,000 times faster than a typical Broadband connection, and that may soon render the Web obsolete. Sounds great, right?

Not so fast, cha-cha. Whereas security was built into the Web as an afterthought, The Grid’s foundation is built on security from the ground up which means Big Brother won’t just be watching, he’ll be inside your system looking out. Not to mention, The Grid will go live, coinciding with the ‘red button day’ when they will switch on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) or the new particle accelerator built to probe the origin of the Universe.

Scientists are “pretty sure” that the collider won’t cause such a massive collision that it creates a Black Hole into which the earth would be sucked never to be seen again. But that’s a topic for another post.

Where the hell is my rotary phone?

Have you ever woken up in the middle of the night on the way to the bathroom with a brilliant idea, like the lock-down cure for cancer or the next blockbuster movie concept, smiling and nodding to yourself how you’d change the world in the morning only to wake up and forget not only the details, but even the “big picture” concept that you’d settled contently back into bed with?

That’s why I keep my 15 year old Panasonic Brick on my bed stand. The Smithsonian Museum has repeated bid on it, unsolicited through eBay, begging to add it to their “History of Ancient Technology” collection.

Not so fast, cha-cha.

I had one of those moments last night, recorded my gems of knowledge and slipped blissfully back to sleep knowing that in the morning I would rule the world.

The morning alarm went off and I grabbed the brick, thumbing the rewind switch. The tape backed up with more promise than John McCain’s campaign and I crunched the play button down.

Nothing happened. I checked the batteries, which was stupid on the face of it because the tape had rewound. I pulled them out and reinserted them on the off chance that the connections were not sound. I considered the possibility that the “play” setting required more power than “rewind” and replaced them with fresh AA Duracell’s.

Still, nothing.

Failing any other sane logical diagnostic plan, I chose the default… “Percussive Maintenance”. I threw the recorder across the room with an overhand twist like Roger Clemens delivering a slider. It twisted in slo-mo through the sparkling morning light, flying across the room and smashing into my oak highboy.

Plastic and batteries exploded out into a remarkable radius, and I was immediately embarrassed by my loss of anger management. Gathering the parts, and reassembling the amazingly intact device, I pressed the play button to no avail. I tried the rewind lever and it spun the tape with a speed that mocked me.

Frustrated beyond imagination, I squeezed the play button in raw anger.

It worked! Unfortunately, the sleepy, babbling discourse that burst from the speaker, interspersed with insane laughter, was incomprehensible, and at best, pathetic…

I was stunned. How could that be? It was brilliant 5 hours previous! WTF.

Hell of a day to quit drinking.