Joe says…
Eating
Drinking
Sleeping

How dat be?

Dave says…
Dig it
Love it
Looks awesome

How many nights are we staying in Victoria?

A guest post from my brother Jim!

I enjoyed these lists so much, I made up my own with Dave’s encouragement…

Four jobs I’ve had:
1. Laborer for a road construction company. It was a job Dad lined up for me with the company that repaved the parking lot at the hospital. I worked there for one summer, long enough to know I didn’t want to do that for a living. Emulsion is really stinky stuff, and asphalt is really hot to work with on a 90 degree day.
2. Grunt for commercial photographer. The guys studio was downtown in an old warehouse building on Bradley. Or maybe it was the Bradley Building. The pay was decent, and I got some experience setting shots up for him.
3. Lab rat for Aerocon Photogrammetric surveys. I did darkroom work for an aerial survey company. Processing 250 foot long x 9 inch wide rolls of film, and making really huge enlargements to scale. We once made an 8 foot long x 6 foot wide enlargement of the City of Beachwood. This job encouraged me to get out of photography.
4. Private ambulance medic. I got to know the City of Chicago pretty well, and all the places to get really tasty fattening food cheap. It paid the bills until I got hired at Mount Prospect FD.

Four movies I can watch over and over:
1. I gotta go with Band of Brothers too. It’s a guy thing, I guess…
2. The Outlaw Josey Whales. Just a classic Clint movie. “Might as well ride along with us, everyone else is.”
3. Apollo 13
4. Saving Private Ryan

Four places I’ve lived:
1. In Grandma’s house with Dave. Playing spoons with Carl was a blast.
2. The apartment on East Merry Street in BG with Dave, Doug Hughes, and Eric. We played full contact basketball in the living room with a nerf ball and net. We taped a basketball key to the floor. It was a riot. We also set up a miniature golf course with the same nerf ball and a hockey stick for a putter. We had a water hazard (9×13 pan full of water) and everything.
3. Our first apartment in Chicago. We were assured it was a good neighborhood by the lady that found it for us, then after we moved in, I visited the firehouse on the next block where they said “ You live WHERE?” Two months later a gangbanger was shot dead at the end of the street. We moved as soon as our lease was up to…
4. Our apartment in Mount Prospect. Crawling distance to the bar, and we made a lot of friends there.

Four TV shows I watch regularly:
1. My Name is Earl
2. Rescue Me
3. Tour de France on OLN. Sure it’s only 21 days long, but that’s what I watch in the summer.
4. Anything on The History Channel

Four places I’ve vacationed:
1. Cancun
2. Jamaica
3. Several places in Florida
4. Seattle

Four of my favorite dishes:
1. Turkey Divan
2. BBQ ribs and German potato salad
3. Santa Fe Salmon Salad
4. Deep dish Pepperoni Pizza, Chicago style!
5. for Dave, An Old Style and a Polish! NOT!

Three sites I visit daily:
I really don’t have four but…
1. CKW
2. Dad Gone Mad
3. Two Dinks… to see if you guys get around to posting anything ; )
[4. bicycling.com, when he’s not at work — since those tools have it Websensed -Dave]

Four albums I truly enjoy:
1. Again I’m with Dave. The first Boston is excellent.
2. Rush “Moving Pictures” — it’s flawless.
3. Van Halen. The first one and 5150. Their first effort with both singers had great energy. Gary Sherone doesn’t count.
4. Green Day “American Idiot”
I know that’s really 5. Sorry.

Four places I’d rather be:
1. On the Beach in Negril, Jamaica with Tina, sipping a Rum Drink.
2. At the Winter Olympics.
3. Riding a bike somewhere warm, dropping Dave, then going to the movies.
4. In a pub in Ireland with my friend Brian, enjoying a frothy Guinness.

[okay , I may not forgive him for the “dropping Dave” comment, but thanks to Jim for writing! If anyone else wants to follow suit, send me your list.]

Four jobs I’ve had
Nothing very interesting. In no particular order:

1. Soda Jerk. After Cocktail I took a bartending course (which was a blast). I couldn’t find a job as a bartender because I was too young, so I ended up as a soda jerk at a retro diner where I sometimes splashed Amaretto over someone’s vanilla sundae.
2. Video Producer. I always wanted to be a film producer. Still do to this day. In my early 20s I pestered the only “film guy” I knew which was some schmuck who shot car commercials at the lot my dad worked at. He finally caved and would call me when he got some crap job offer like shooting a video for articling law students. Although I can’t claim writing credit, I proudly produced, shot and edited, ‘Law Trek’. I would like to thank the academy.
3. Tool Delivery Driver. Yeah. This was pretty much a stoner’s job. I got fired after a few weeks because I would stop on my routes at any and all video game arcades and play Galaga for 45 minutes to an hour.
4. Ziebart Manager. You know, the car undercoating place? They have them all over the world. I started at the bottom and worked my way up to store manager at my location. That means they had to give me the keys to the front door. So I invited my friends to the shop after hours and we partied there all night. Some guy had his car locked in the shop overnight. It was a tricked out AMC Gremlin with wide slicks, line-lock, and bleach lines attached to a pump. I did a two minute brake stand inside the shop, bleach and all. I literally bore a hole through the concrete. There was so much smoke we couldn’t see our hands in front of our faces. We had to open the bay doors to let the smoke out. The people from the restaurant next to us phoned the fire department.

Four movies I can watch over and over
1. Moulin Rouge
2. Band of Brothers (YES, ME TOO)
3. As Good As It Gets
4. Damn it, I’m gonna have to go with The Fifth Element

Four places I’ve lived
1. Vancouver, Washington. We moved back to BC during the eruption of Mt. St. Helens. When I say “during,” I mean that the Toutle River bridge was wiped out by mud and ash moments after we crossed it.
2. Mt. Holly, North Carolina.
3. Minnekhada. This is now a regional park. At the time we lived there, a portion of it was leased by the provincial government to the Bouviers (not those Bouviers), a local horse racing family. My parents went through a horse racing phase when I was between 13 and 17 years of age. We owned 7 or 8 standard bred pacers — the kind that pull the sulkies, if you’re familiar. We sub-leased the foreman’s house on the property. The Bouviers lived in the main house, which was actually the original worker’s quarters. I recall the top floor had at least a dozen small bedrooms and one washroom. The property has a remarkable history including having hosted polo matches with British royalty.
4. An apartment in Burnaby, BC, with a girl whom I was not dating or romantically involved with.

Four TV shows I watch regularly

1. Lost
2. 24
3. CSI anything
4. Sopranos when it’s running but since it’s not I’ll throw in PBS in HD.

Four Five places I’ve vacationed

1. New Orleans
2. St. Lucia and Martinique
3. Hit & run European tour including London, Paris, Munich, Hopfgarten, Lucerne, Verona, Orvieto, Venice, Rome, Pisa, Lucca, Florence and Pompeii. I said it was hit & run.
4. Orange, Massachusetts to interview a second world war veteran B-17 waist gunner, Mo Moriarty,  who was shot down over Nazi occupied France.
5. Clevelend, Ohio to see my bestest friends, Dave and Julie.

Four of my favorite dishes
1. Rack of lamb
2. Grilled lobster and steak
3. N’awlins Muffuletta
4. Pasta

Four sites I visit daily
1. Clan Robot forums
2. What do I know
3. Google news
4. Dealer CreditWeb

Four albums I really dig

1.  Jimmy Buffett, “Tales from Margaritaville”.
2. Green Day, “American Idiot”.
3. Van Halen. Anything with David Lee Roth but then usually only half of any given album except “Van Halen”.
4. It’s tough choosing a whole album. Even “Tales from Margaritaville” is a compilation of favorites. I give up.

Four places I would rather be right now
1. Paris.
2. I have to steal one of Dave’s again and say, at the movies.
3. In a dimly lit research library somewhere far from here, working on a screenplay.
4. Home with Diana and the girls (our two border collies, Dixie and Jessie).

For those of you who’ve forgotten this nifty trick*: say you’re reading a website. Say it’s this blog. And say you’re the author and you’re wondering whether you spelled “unbeknownst” correctly. Put your cursor over the word in question, and hold down command-control-D. A dictionary window will pop up with the word and its definition.

*This is a Tiger feature. If you’re still running Panther, it’s not gonna work. And by the way, “gonna” is in the Oxford dictionary as “a contraction of ‘going to’. “

Okay, first of all I have to confess at least 62% of the reason I’m doing this is because Joe seems to have an aversion to memes.

Without further ado, nor any form of explanation*, I give you my list of four.

Four jobs I’ve had
1. Meat market whipping-boy. I did exciting things like use a band saw to cut up chickens. I also ran the sausage making machine; attach the pig intestine to the “out” thingy and shovel meats and unidentified bits into the big hopper on the top. These are probably two things one shouldn’t trust to a 14-year old. I think I lasted three weeks, because I moved on to…

2. City Park Dept. Maintenance. They’d load 15 or 20 of us young teenagers into the back of the city trucks and drop us off in pairs and threes at the various city parks, along with lawn mowers, weed whackers, and “pick sticks.” Pick sticks were basically tool handles that have had a nail driven into the end and sharpened to a point. We used them to pick up litter. They’d leave us for an entire day in the park, from 7:30 until about 3 p.m. If it was a small park we’d be done with actual work by lunchtime and spend the rest of the day goofing off.

Two vivid memories: being stuck at Jindra Park in the pouring rain. Maybe 15 minutes after they dropped us off, it started to pour, and there was no place to seek shelter. We sat on a picnic table for about an hour, waiting to be picked. Unbeknownst to us, the ancient metal gas can sitting on the table with us was leaking. We thought our jeans were getting wet from the rain. They were, but we were also soaking our asses in gasoline. Turns out gasoline doesn’t have to actually burst into flame to burn your skin like a sonufabitch.

Second memory: it was a rare treat to be assigned to one of the trucks instead of a park. On a few occasions I had the honor of being on the park garbage detail. This basically meant we drove to all the parks in town emptying the 55-gallon drums that were used as trash cans. It also meant we were the ones who were called out to pick up any animals that had been killed on the streets. There’s nothing quite as fun as scraping a flattened skunk off hot asphalt in July. We’d take all the trash down to the city dump, which has a very large, very disgusting pond in it. Any animals we’d picked up, we would wire a hunk of concrete or something to it and toss it in the pond, for reasons unexplained.

3. Burger flipper at Wendy’s and two McDonald’s. Bathing your teenage face in burger grease does wonders for your complexion.

4. Production Manager at the BG News. This was in the days of waxed galleys, X-acto knives, and non-repro blue pencils. Thankfully, we were beyond the days of optical typesetting. I did learn how to shoot halftones in a big damn hurry. The best thing about the job was my usual after work activity: after we’d put the issue to bed (at 1 a.m.), John Nemec (the copy editor and a KKPsi brother of mine) and I would head across the street to Myle’s. We’d put back a large pizza and a couple pitchers of beer before they closed at 3. We were both smart enough to have no class to get to before noon on Friday.

Four movies I can watch over and over
1. The Fifth Element (I have absolutely no idea why.)
2. O Brother, Where Art Thou?
3. Band of Brothers. Yes, the whole damn thing.
4. The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

Four places I’ve lived
1. Apparently I lived in the projects when I was a wee small child.
2. An apartment in college with my friend Jim, an evil bitch named Renee, and Frodo the paperwad-chasing cat.
3. My grandmother’s house, with my brother Jim, after she was too frail to live alone and moved to a nursing facility. I was moving back to Cleveland from Cincinnati and her house was sitting empty. Worked out well for my mom (worrying about the empty house) and me (happy to live rent-free for five months).
4. Our very own Money Pit, a bungalow built in 1925 with a leaky basement, racoons living in the eaves, and an inch of soot falling on our faces when we tore down the original kitchen ceiling. That’s the short list of character-building challenges Jul and I faced.

Four TV shows I love watch regulary. (I had to change that one; “love” is too strong a word for anything on television.)
1. Lost
2. Mythbusters
3. This Old House
4. South Park

Four places I’ve vacationed
1. Kauai
2. Punta Cana, Dominican Republic
3. Jackson Hole, Wyoming
4. Vancouver and other parts of British Columbia

Four of my favorite dishes
1. Lasagna
2. Chicken Bryan at Carraba’s
3. A bucket of chicken at the beach with Julie
4. Key Lime Pie!

Four sites I visit daily
1. Clan Robot
2. Fark
3. Dad Gone Mad
4. Daily Dose of Imagery

Four albums I really dig
1. Boston. The first one. For my money, one of the best rock albums ever made.
2. Collective Soul, “Youth” I dig just about everything by these guys, but this album is my favorite.
3. Maroon 5, “Songs About Jane” A great collection of songs. It’ll be interesting to see if these guys can do it again.
4. Evanescence, “Fallen” Amy Lee’s voice is just amazing. That, and it’s playing on the stereo right now.
That’s the first four off the top of my head. There are plenty more.

Four places I would rather be right now
(a moving target, depending on where I am at the moment)
1. Taking Julie to Spain
2. In the pilot’s seat
3. In a movie theater with Joe, James, or my brother Jim (and of course Julie)
4. Some place warm. NE Ohio in mid-February pretty much blows.

I now challenge Joe to waste forty minutes writing up his list of four.

*Okay, one note of explanation. These things are in no particular order of preference, just the order in which they came to mind.