Hey, I don’t want to pimp my own stuff here too much, but be sure to go buy my album, okay? And check out me and my band.

And then while you’re at it, check out the motorcycle that I customized.

If you need some pictures taken, I’m your guy. Of course, you’ll have to go to Manchester to visit my studio.

Sometimes in my spare time I design children’s books or paint on walls.

Terre Haute, Indiana built a high school on the site of an old, closed-down airport that had been named after me.

I once won the “Nobel Prize” of the environment and have taught at BYU-Hawaii, occasionally giving lectures there.

I’ve actually done drawings in a number of styles. Here’s some more of my work.

If I’m feeling aggressive, sometimes I’ll play a little rugby in London. I look good carrying the rock, although this picture doesn’t really show my face.

Bird flu attacks Cambodia? I’m there, dude. (Another really bad picture of me.) (Okay, it was just an exercise to prepare for a bird flu outbreak, but still- I’m the man.)

Need a bridge built? My team and I can whip one together for you- check out the last two pictures on this page.

How about some whole life or health insurance in California or Oregon? I’m your guy.

My Wikipedia page is a testament to the movies I’ve made.

Please don’t ask me about the two people I slaughtered in a drunken blackout state, or all the legal appeals back and forth that happened after I confessed to it at an AA meeting. (That stuff is supposed to be confidential!)

In 98-99 I played some soccer. (That was before I moved to rugby, you see.)

My speeding ticket outside of Plymouth on the A303 was utter bollocks, I tell you. (Another lousy picture of me.)

Unfortunately, my experience as a lawyer is all in the United Kingdom, so it doesn’t really help me that much here in the States.

I’d rather not talk too much about the movies that I starred in, thanks. (Warning: Adult content in that link.)

In my spare time I enjoy coaching some football.

For a while I had a nice perm that really gave me curly hair. Then I gave up teaching the cello.

Despite being a Buddhist, they still let me do a little personal counseling at the Christian Psychological Services in Kansas.

You know, all in all it’s remarkable I have time to post to this blog (which I know I haven’t done enough of recently) when you consider how busy I am running a telephone company in Utah (first column third row down), helping out with researching waste management at the University of Northhampton in the UK, serving as chief counsel for the Fraternal Order of Police in Ohio, managing my 3000 acre ranch in Kansas, or serving as dean for the School of Professional Studies at Vanguard University of Southern California.

Whew. I’m a busy guy.

Just out of curiosity… have you ever run your name through the web pages at Google Images? You should give it a shot sometime.

You know, when I navigate to this page, I’m shocked by the headline (of the next post down). I mean, I can’t believe I wrote the post below the way I did.

I think the post makes it quite clear what I *really* think and feel about racial slurs, but just in case anyone misses the point… I do NOT approve of them and am using an intentionally shocking method to wake people up to how wrong it is.

Just wanna make it clear. (It’s one of those posts you write and then late think “man, did I really write it that way?”) Heaven knows it’ll kill any future run for President, so I guess I can scratch that off of my “list of stuff to do in my life”.

On the flip side… it isn’t killing McCain’s run for President, so I guess I’d just have to decide to run as a Republican. (And if you’re a Republican and just got offended that I called your party a bunch of racists… well, there’s another reason to not vote that way this year, and change your party.)

At some point in the past month or three, my spam filter caught and threw out the 100,000th spam comment submitted to this blog.

It’s pretty mind-bending to think that a tiny little blog like mine, which is read by maybe 50 or 75 people on a daily basis (and thanks to each and every one of you!), would be worthy of the spammers blasting over a hundred thousand comments this way.

I know they’re all automated, but at some point you’d think that the spammers would use some kind of computer program to figure out which blogs are really worthy of them spamming. You know, like how Google ranks pages; why bother spamming the little blogs?

But they do. Of course, it might very well be that the big blogs get a million spams a day or something, and the 100K that were sent this way are just a drop in the bucket. (Actually, I’m quite sure they’re a drop in the bucket compared with the net overall.)

It does make me realize, though, that spam is still a way-more serious problem than we give it credit for… and only enhances my opinion that the bigwigs who run corporations in the world still don’t understand what’s going on behind the scenes in the IT world.

If they did, they’d demand some governmental action on the entire spam issue, for both email and for blogs. Junk faxes were more or less stamped out by the government; why not spams? Because they haven’t bothered, that’s why.

I might be offline for a while. I seem to lurch, from time to time, in and out of activity; now I’m trying to get myself going on a pretty major change to the other blog, the FAA Follies.

The Follies is my workplace rant. It’s about the insanity that’s taken over the FAA; said insanity stems directly from the nutjobs currently ruling the nation from the West Wing of the White House. The same kind of crazy things that we have been getting nationally- like how there wasn’t really a terrorism problem in Iraq until we went and started a war there, and now since there’s terrorists there we must stay because to leave would be to let the terrorists win- have been going on in the FAA.

Like last week, for example, we saw FAA officials in a Congressional hearing, sitting there and solemnly promising that the agency was going to start doing things differently and creating programs so that safety inspectors would have a method of bringing up problems to be resolved.

You see, they need these special programs to ensure that their whistleblowing is heard because the agency’s normal methods of resolving these issues- like the safety inspectors actually having some power to regulate the FAA- are somehow broken.

Now, a normal person (or at least a SANE person) might think that since safety inspections are, you know, what the FAA is supposed to be all about, it’s pretty stupid that they have to come up with new special programs to do this, isn’t it? I mean, what the **** (fill in the expletive of your choice there) have they been doing all this time, anyway?

But this is America, where:

• a dried-up drunken cokehead fratboy can dodge the draft using his rich, incredibly well-connected politically powerful ex-head-of-the-CIA father’s influence to get himself attached to a National Guard unit and then dodge out of even that service;
• get millions of dollars in seed money to start several businesses, running each one into the ground;
• keep getting more money from investors (many of whom are incredibly rich Saudi oil families for whom the money is mere chump change that lubricates their smooth relations with said fratboy’s father who by now is the #2 leader of the American government and on his way to be President soon);
• get a deal where he gains control of a major league baseball club with big-time loans and a leveraged investment from still more of his daddy’s buddies;
• get bored with that, dry out, and decide to go into politics;
• do a half-assed job running one of the more corrupt, blatantly politicized states in the naion; and then get himself “elected” President while losing the popular vote…

And despite all of THAT, he’s still seen as a “common man of the people”, just a down-home aw-shucks good old boy.

So given that kind of leadership at the top, the FAA’s problems are pretty much right in context with how things are going these days.

Oh yeah… forgot to add that naturally all the same people in the FAA (who made the decisions and created the environment that led to a safety inspectors’s boss coming into his offices and threatening their livelihood, their families’ welfare, and their career) are the ones who are now sitting in front of Congress and swearing how seriously they take safety and are going to be creating and implementing these new, much BETTER programs to ensure safety.

So yeah, I’ve been a bit busier with the Follies web site than I intended.

When I started THIS site, I meant to emulate the example of my netfriend Luis (and now that I’m living with a flight attendant, I suspect my odds of meeting Luis in person are considerably better, especially since her airline flies daily from Seattle to Tokyo- hi Luis!) who has been writing blog entries daily for a stunning five years now. (And huge congratulations on that, Luis. Wow.)

But looking back, between the Follies work, the stuff I’ve contributed to my union’s internal discussion BBS, and this blog, I’m not feeling too shabby. I’ve averaged at least a post a day between all those sources for some time, so that’s cool.

Anyway, we’re trying to ramp the Follies up to the next level. WordPress (the software I set up for hosting the blogs) just put out a moderately major revision that looks really neato, there’s some newer themes I’d like to try, and we’re going to get fancier with news feeds and maybe even host a few blogs other than just the main Follies blog itself. The readership over there is up over a thousand a day and I’d like to make it more like two or three thousand a day, keep spreading the word about how things are going to more people.

Besides that, I’m back taking a math class at the local community college this quarter- Math 098. It’s college level algebra, this week we did lines of regression and 3X3 equations and junk like that, and if I can just scrape through with a 2.0 or better then I’ll have satisfied half of the AA degree requirements (which, in turn, satisfy the BA degree requirements) for math.

I’ll still have to take a more advanced class that deals with numbers- probably statistics for social sciences, or maybe one of the various classes that deal with reasoning- but the odds are none of them will be quite the grind that straight-ahead math classes are for me.

It’s kind of funny. Like right now, when I’m procrastinating doing my homework, I hate the idea of doing math. But when I actually get off my ass and do it (which, come to think of it, is a funny saying since I do it sitting at my dining room table) it’s kind of fun. Solving the problems by combining the equations, figuring out which variable I’m going to eliminate next and do it with the least number of steps and least amount of work (my teacher says that math always rewards someone who’s lazy and finds an easy way to do it)… it’s kind of fun. It’s a mental challenge.

So there’s that. At least right now there’s no really major home remodeling types of projects; oh, there’s some things that need to be done, but overall none of that right now.

But of course the baseball season is going, and what with working all swing shifts the only games I can see are on the weekends, so that’s a time cruncher…

And the damn Xbox continues to sit in the living room, tempting me to completely blow a few hours at a time shooting bad guys playing online. I love, love, LOVE playing “Call of Duty 4″. The graphics are incredible- when you first glance at it, it almost looks like an actual movie or picture or something, that’s how good they are. I also enjoy “Rainbow Six: Vegas” but COD has been gobbling up about 95% of my Xbox time.

Anyway, that’s what is up with me lately. How about you?