i once heard that the fbi can access your video rental files and use the titles to profile you. marketing agencies try to do it too.
the republican party has a database that tracks certain demographics about you and determine what type of message will best reach you – or if you’re unreachable – not waste resources on trying. a friend of mine is a thirty-something, single female, who lives alone in newton and subscribes to national geographic. based on these demographics, the republican database determined that she was likely to be liberal. of course, she was also head of the young republicans group in the boston area, so she quickly went inside the database and corrected the assumption.
anyway, i’ve always wondered how the government/a political party/a marketing agency would would “profile” me based on some of my movie/book/etc purchases.
i was thinking about this tonight because of the selection of mail i received today. i got a barney’s catalog, a bass pro flyer, an ll bean catalog, and a junior league newletter. it just struck me as a weird mix of mail….i thought it was kind of humorous to see a barney’s catalog next to the bass pro flyer.
this weekend was a car-free weekend for the ’skis.
i got home friday from work, parked the car, and haven’t touched it since. we didn’t deliberately try to make it a car-free weekend, but sitting here on a sunday evening, i realized that it was.
i logged 13miles on foot between the two days. 3.5 miles of them running for exercise, but the rest were just walking to and from errands and dinner dates.
kind of makes me feel better about having all those harpoon ufos, the artichoke dip, curry fries, and hot fudge sundae.
alright readers (all three of you)….. spurred by a comment from mom, the ’skis just realized that we’ve had the “comment option” turned off on our lastest posts. we just thought that you guys didn’t love us anymore, but now we realize that we’re just remedial wordpress users.
the comments problem has been fixed…. please comment away….
when i was younger, every day when my father got home from work we would sit at the kitchen table, drink a cup of coffee and eat a jelly bread. the jelly bread was a very complex recipe that only my mom or dad could make correctly. it consisted of a slice of white bunny bread (MUST be WHITE bread not any of that fancy wheat/potato/nine grain nonsense) with some sort of grape jelly smothered on top. the bread must then be folded in half vertically. sometimes, if the eater felt particularly adventurous, one could dip the bread in the coffee until it was so soggy that the top 1/4 would actually separate from the remaining portion of the sandwich and fall into the cup of coffee (the maxwell house brew, of course). the sandwich/java combo was a perfect supplement to one of our family’s favorite past times: watching cars go by. if it was nice outside, we may even sit on the front porch swing and watch cars go by — which added an extra bonus of seeing the cars crest Crosstown hill a quarter of a mile down the road and follow them until they passed by the house. once the car was in front of our house, one of two things happened: 1) it honked. which we would respond by saying their name, nodding, and waving. ex. “uncle willie” or “doc” 2) it didn’t honk. which then would prompt us to say, “who dat?” or loosely translated, “who is that person that thinks they can drive down our country road with out us knowing them?”.
many precious hours were spent eating jelly bread and drinking coffee.
fast forward a few years and a few thousand miles away in boston. i got home from work a little early the last two days. the day still had a few hours of daylight left in it, so i was stricken with an overwhelming desire to have a jelly bread and a cup of coffee.
now, the jelly tasted a little bitter without the front porch swing and the country road and although there were plenty of cars passing by and honking, i found i was saying “who dat?” way more than i was saying “uncle willie.”
however, it was still a nice way to wind up the work day and enjoy a little taste of the past.
i was blessed with two parents that believed in taking vacations to national parks rather than commercial destinations like disneyland. my very first vacation was to took was rocky mountain national park before i even turned 2 years old. then came yellowstone. and grand teton. the badlands. and glacier national park. and the list on up to 24 parks.
my favorite national park was glacier national park. it was the first place that i took a hike. first place that i spent the night in the backcountry. first place i saw a glacier, first place i saw bear. needless to say, glacier has a special place in my heart.
one of my favorite locations in glacier (or rather, just outside of glacier) was polebridge. polebridge is a small community at the end of a dirt road that consists only of a mercantile, a saloon, an outhouse, and a few cabins. there is no electricity in the tiny community. it’s far off the grid, far from civilization, but so close to the rugged beauty of northwest glacier national park. it’s amazing.
originally, it was my dad’s idea to visit polebridge. we were a little skeptic of his idea as we drove 40 miles down a mudpuddle laden dirt road, however once we visited the “merc” we recognized his genius. stepping into the merc, was a step back in time, but a step that was greeted with the glorious smell of fresh cinnamon rolls and other baked goods. the baked goods were sold to us by a hippie-esque employee that talked about homesteading and living without tv for 3 years. this store was so filled with charm that we would make the 40 mile trip down a gravel road every time we traveled to montana. polebridge became a place i regularly visited in my daydreams.
so, imagine my delight, when i stumbled across this article while surfing the web. that’s right — the iconic polebridge mercantile is for sale! it comes with all the inventory of the merc and even a cooking lesson for the world-famous cinnamon rolls! all for a small price tag of $950,000.
As a complete surprise, my beloved wife signed me up for rich man’s T.V. (HBO) so I spent the weekend watching the series John Adams and the final season of the best darn show T.V. has to offer: The Wire ~ a great present day Baltimore police drama.
Becuase Season Five of the Wire was about to expire in two days from its posting on On Demand, my fellow Wire enthusiast and myself spent roughly eleven hours in front of the T.V. Saturday watching in glee back to back episodes of the final season. We started at one thirty in the afternoon and finished watching the show around midnight. Great season! I won’t go into details about the show, but it was a great ending to a great cop drama and I especially enjoyed the way the director focused on the newspaper the Baltimore Sun. The Bunk, Omar Little, Bubbles and salty McNaulty will be missed. (Oh and I don’t recommend anyone sitting in front of a T.V. for almost 12 hours. You start to twitch after the fifth hour.)
On another note, I also completed the final season of my other favorite show: Jericho. Great ending to a show that got so little respect. I absolutely loved the idea that there was an Independent Republic of Texas.
Sorry everyone. The reason the ski’s haven’t been blogging as mightly as before is becuase we were busy preparing for and celebrating Dyngus Day!Dyngus Day is a secret Polish-American holiday always held on the day after Easter. I say secret because no one outside of the northeast or midwest knows about it ~ and most within the northeast and midwest don’t know about it either for that matter! It is sort of the Polish version of Mardi Gras in that a blowout celebration is held, in this case it is after Lent and not before.
But wait, it gets better.
Dyngus Day provides an outlet for singles to express their desire to get to know another person a little bit better. This is accomplished by men sprinkling women with water and women tapping men with pussy willow branches. If you are Polish, this just seems sensible. If you are not Polish, you will never be able to understand, trust me.
ever since the ’skis visited alaska in 2006, we’ve been following sarah palin’s governorship very closely.
palin has a pretty interesting story: she is a mother of 4 and her husband is an oil worker on the north slope. he races snowmachines. she got her start in politics by serving as a mayor of a small town. she was miss alaska.
she caught our attention in 2006 because she beat an incumbent governor (frank murkowski) in the primaries. she went on to beat tony knowles (very seasoned and well-known alaskan) to be governor. since taking office, she has enjoyed an approval rating that has gone as high as 90%. she has been in vogue magazine and has been dubbed “america’s hottest governor.” lately, she has been mentioned as a possible running mate for john mccain. a blogger has started a “draft palin for vp” movement. the weekly standard and even bush has mentioned that she would be a possible candidate for mccain’s running mate.
so, with all of the buzz about palin’s future, you can imagine the shock when she dropped this news at a press conference last week.
that’s right. the 45 year old governor is preggers. not just prego. she’s 7 mths along….and no one could tell.
interesting news from the last frontier. a 45 year with her fifth child on the way…… i just hope my sister doesn’t get any ideas!!!!
The ski’s would like to officially endorse Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination. On the morning of this very important day, we would like to give the voters of Ohio and Texas the following reasons to vote for Senator Clinton:
As Bill Richardson stated on Sunday during the show Face the Nation, this is D-Day for the Clinton Campaign.
Can the battle hardened veteran legions of the Hillary Camp successfully storm Obama beach and wrestle control of the Democratic party from the clutches of Barrack’s untried grass root volunteers? Only time will tell. As with the storming of the beaches of Normany many years ago, much did not go as planned but in the end the beaches were taken. So with that said, can Hillary pull this off?
Whatever happens, tonight is going to be one heck of a news watching experience. Oh and even if Richardson was a bit of a wimp to not endorse a candidate either way, he does score points for the metaphor.
boyski
girlski
