March 17, 2006

Netvibes.

I am a fan of web portals for my start page when I open my web browser. I’ve bounced around between a couple, Google, My Yahoo and My MSN being the three that I like the best. I also like the direction the new Windows Live portal is heading, though I’m still a Mac fanatic through and through.

Today I found a portal that I absolutely love. Take a gander at Netvibes. It has clean, simple to configure interface that works with the majority of popular browsers.

Way cool.

I Love A Parade.

As I was heading for my car to escape for lunch, I noticed that the city DPW painted the traditional green line down the middle of the main street in celebration of St. Patrick’s Day and the big parade tomorrow.

The St. Patrick’s Day parade here is usually very interesting. Traditionally, Mother Nature blesses us with a last blast of winter so there’s often snow on the ground. Sometimes there’s a blizzard. In fact, Dolly Parton was once stranded in the downtown hotel after a performance the previous night and was unable to leave due to the blizzard hitting the area. Bored, she looked out her hotel window and saw the St. Patrick’s Day parade proceeding right through downtown. You could barely see the floats from all the snow, but there it was, your average parade in the middle of a snowstorm. Dolly relayed the experience to the rest of America on David Letterman the following Monday night.

Back in my radio days, the station I worked for made an appearance in the parade, reminding folks why our station was best. One year we tried to get fancy and hired a tractor trailer to provide the stage for our music, inviting listeners up on the bed of the trailer to dance along with the music. We set up the booth traditionally used when we were on location, which was unwieldy at best. (It wasn’t meant to be moving). The bed of the trailer was so icy that we had to form a human chain and hold on for our dear lives so that people wouldn’t be pitched off the back everytime the parade started moving. Since there were several youngsters aboard, the music director reminded us that we should watch our language. The truck took off and she punctuated the experience with a “holy fuckin’ shit” as she held on for dear life. After the initial shock we pummeled the crowd with tootsie rolls, lollipops and dum-dums, because nothing says “listen to the radio” better than a rock hard frozen tootsie roll.

The following year it was 75 degrees for a change and I convinced the new night jock, a handsome young man, to go shirtless to “tease the ladies”. Come to find out, he was too good at teasing the ladies and had to be fired when I found him more than just teasing the ladies in the studio during his air shift.

Ah, good times.

So tonight Earl and I are going to have swig of beer and eat something festive like cabbage to celebrate the holiday. We’ll skip the parade tomorrow since it’s no longer mandatory for us and because I’m on call.

I’m betting it’s going to be snowing.

Bad Fan.

This morning I was checking up on the American Idol Message Boards before getting ready to work and found out that the third time is a charm.

I’ve been banned from the AI message boards under three different usernames.

Apparently only pro-contestant responses are allowed, because each time I’ve been thrown off the board it was because I made a negative remark about the finalist dubbed “Chicken Little”, Kevin Covais.

I’m sure Kevin is a nice kid. This past episode he showed off his cocky side by sassing back to the mean ol’ judge Simon Cowell. And he sailed through this week’s round without a problem, undoubtedly plumping up his ego a little more. Paula “I’m stoned or drunk betcha can’t guess which” Abdul keeps telling him how sexy and “squishy” he is. I think he’s believing his own hype.

My issue with the kid is that he has a serious speech impediment. Or a therious thpeech impediment. And I can’t get past that.

It’s not the kid’s fault that he has this impediment. His parents probably should have had whatever is causing it corrected when he was younger. But there he is singing “Isn’t she lovely” and covering my television screen with spit. Apparently you can’t bring attention to this on the AI boards because it’s consider rude and inappropriate. Another no-no is mentioning Vote For The Worst.com, the site that is encouraging people to vote for the worst AI contestant so they’re stuck with a turkey in the finals.

So I’m off the AI boards. I can take a hint. I’m probably done with the show too.