recognized it. She asked if he had gone to her school and he said yes. When she gave her maiden name he instantly recognized it. Turns out his wife also went to school with them as well. That was another reunion. They had all gone to the same elementary, middle and high schools.

What’s even more interesting is they all went to school together hundreds of miles away, on the other side of the state.

Pretty neat.

Click to view

Alternate titles welcome. Such as “Meet mah lil friend!”

From 1969, Episode 1, Season 8 of the Beverly Hillbillies

Scene:
Jethro enters the Clampett house with three male friends, all wearing nearly identical yet outlandish outfits, hairstyles and sunglasses. He had offered to introduce them to his single cousin, Elly, as a favor to the family.

- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – -

Uncle Jed:  These is, uh, college students?

Jethro:  Yes, sir, fetched ‘em right off the campus.  Oh, this here’s my uncle jed.

Uncle Jed:  Howdy.

Mitch: Hey, man. how are you?

Uncle Jed:  Oh.

Jethro:  This here is Mitch. He’s been to 12 colleges.

Uncle Jed:  what all’d you study?

Jethro:  Study?  They don’t study. they protest.

Uncle Jed:  Well, what do they protest?

Jethro:  Everything.  You name it, they protest it.  They march up and down in front of the college holding signs.

Uncle Jed:  Well, how about you? ain’t you learning nothing?

Jethro:  Oh, yeah, I’m carrying three subjects.

Uncle Jed:  Oh, good, good. what are they?

Jethro:  Down with the dean, down with the faculty, and down with the regent.

Uncle Jed:  You walk around carrying signs too, huh?

Jethro:  Heck, yeah.  That’s what college is all about.

Uncle Jed:  Well, don’t you go inside at all?

Jethro:  Starting tomorrow I do.  They’s gonna let me bust down the dean’s door and tie him up.

Uncle Jed:  And why you gonna do that?

Jethro:  ’Cause I’m part of the academic revolution.  I’m fightin’ for intellectual freedom.  I’m throwing off the shackles of the economic power structure and putting down you corporate entities and conglomerates.  I have done solved my identity problem.  I know where I’m going and who I am.  I’m free to make up my own mind and do my own thing.

Uncle Jed:  And what is that?

Jethro:  They ain’t told me yet.

There’s been some interesting articles pouncing on this revelation. This Slate article makes a very detailed look at this and there’s even a UK outlet taking advantage of this, like used US jeans in Japan.

The obvious other option is Skype. I’ve been using Skype for a while but mostly as a chat mechanism and the infrequent video chat or voice calls with folks overseas and family. I never had anyone calling me so much. And I have the Skype app on my Android phone but again only used it for chatting.

I needed a solution where people can call me on a publishable local number and I can answer on my cell or computer (wireless headset), they can leave voicemail and I’ll be notified via email when they do and I can call out to any mobile or landline and my published local number will appear via caller ID.

Skype can do all this. Here’s all that’s needed:

1. A smartphone with the Skype application installed. Note that Verizon preloads a version that won’t use the data connection to make calls to non-Skype contacts (read landlines and mobile numbers) so it burns up your voice minutes. Just ignore it and get the official Skype application.
2. A $2.99 per month subscription enabling unlimited voice/video calls to US/Canada numbers.
3. An assigned phone number for $30 per year (current 50% discount offer) with caller ID and voicemail

That’s it! With some simple math, I’m going to be paying $5.49 per month for my work phone with unlimited minutes. And in Skype’s fair usage policy, that’s a whopping

• 10,000 minutes per month
• maximum of 6 hours per day
• no more than 50 different numbers in total can be called per day

But even if I go over any of these limits (I really hope not, because that’s a lot of jabber-jawing), I will only be charged 2.3¢/min and 4.9¢/call. I can live with that.

UPDATE/ADDENDUM: For the philosphic in the crowd consider this; only your cell phone company requires you to use the single device they sold you to be able to access (send/receive) messaging through the account (aka phone number) they assigned you. Email, Twitter, instant messaging, Skype calling,  etc. all enable you to log into your account from multiple devices and send/receive. I’m feeling as if, with the change detailed in this post, I’ve started to distance myself from this restriction.

I came to learn many years later that the movie Blazing Saddles had more to do with my current surname than did any horse thief.

In Rock Ridge, the setting for Blazing Saddles, everyone in town has a last name of Johnson. It’s a hysterical element revisited throughout the movie. There’s Gabby Johnson, Ben Johnson, Howard Johnson, Johnson & Johnson, etc.

Apparently a similar scenario had played out in Eastern Canada for the Provencher families. There was just too damn many of them. So it was decided that the eldest, youngest, short straw, who knows which son should take on a new surname. And for whatever reason, my ancestor’s choice or assignment was Beaulaurier.

The following is translated from a snipping taken from associationprovencher.org:

Today, although the majority of descendants have retained the surname Provencher, several families of the Provencher adopted the names Beaulaurier, Béland, Belleville, Ducharme, Fleurant or Villebrun.

I wonder if there was a Gabby Provencher. That would be awesome.

<

History of US Deficits and Surpluses

Overview of US Debt

History of Unemployment rates

ps. Terms I see people misusing a lot:

• Deficit and surpluses are the result of the government spending more or less than it makes through taxes, fees/fines and investments.
• Debt is a negative book balance coming from more deficit years than surplus years. Ideally, we should have a cash balance, not a debt balance.

I’d love to see a page view trend line for that page. Has FB reached a tipping point? According to google’s search trends, 2008 was a very popular time to bail from FB permanently and so was 2010. 2011 is on track to match 2010. Hmmm…

So if you’re a drug dealer, international spy or anyone else that doesn’t want their voicemail listened to by others, set up a voicemail password that’s always required.

For just a little more than two weeks prior, I had been doing my best to prepare to participate in (I just can’t justify saying that I “ran” it) the Warrior Dash in North Bend, Washington last weekend. I had undertaken to walk/jog upwards of 4 miles at a time around town in the hope of quickly building some essence of endurance that would allow me to at least finish the course unassisted in an upright position. During those two weeks, I think I was able to drag my lazy ass out to run all of four or five times, justifying the days in between as healing/recovery periods that would help make me stronger.

Back at the start, I advised my daughter not to look back once the group was released onto the course and to feel free to clean off, get something to eat, write home, etc. before looking for me at the finish. And this was even more important since she had brought a video camera to document the day with. Video evidence of my participation was not something I was going to encourage.

If you’re not familiar with what Warrior Dash is, it’s an obstacle course strewn across over 3 miles of pasture land and woods. It’s become very successful, being held at dozens of locations around the world. The obstacles include

• Barricade Breakdown
• Climb over 4′ wall, crawl under 2′ beam, repeat and repeat.
• Road Rage
• Run (?) through dozens of tires, climb over junker cars, repeat
• Warrior Wall
• A too damn high vertical wall with meager footholds and a rope on one side and a framework of 2x4s to climb down on the other side, no repeat thank gawd
• Cargo Climb
• Cargo net rope thrown across another too damn high vertical framework. Climb up/down the netting.
• Chaotic Crossover
• Cross a cargo net rope laid horizontally. Think elephant walk
• Blackout
• Crawl across wet dirt under 2′ beams while in total darkness. If crowded expect to be nose-to-ass with someone and not able to know when to avoid contact.
• Deadman’s Drop
• Climb vertical wall only to discover no footholds on the other side. Nothing to do but slide down the slight incline.
• Warrior Roast
• Jump over line of raging fire, repeat
• Muddy Mayhem
• This is the finish line photo prep stage. Crawl on all fours through deep mud. Failure to stay low in the mud will risk an encounter with the barb wire set overhead.

Sounds fun right? It is, if you’re conditioned to hoof four or five miles in a reasonable amount of time. My challenge was I could run a little more than a mile before needing to break stride and walk a bit to recharge (read catch my breath). Also, I suffer from an irrational (is there a rational version?) fear of heights. This made the too-damn-high vertical obstacles extremely foreboding and I’m sure my facial expressions while making the transition from climb to descent (read flopping over the top) were great entertainment for those silenting urging me not to seize up in a frozen terror.

Much to the benefit of my pride, I accomplished all the vertical obstacles on the first attempt. Surprisingly, the one that tripped me up and I aborted was when I had to navigate some uneven 2x6s laid 3′ above the ground. I envisioned slipping off and straddling the beam. That likelihood was just too much and I bailed about 1/4 the way through. Heck, I’d just climbed a bunch of walls and shit. My pride could handle walking away from this little teeter-todder obstacle.

Near the end of the course, slippery uneven terrain become slopes of deep shoe-sucking muck. I thought I was weary by that point but I had no idea how tired I’d get over the last quarter-mile. Plodding through deep muck is the most tiring thing ever. It sucked the very life from me at that point. Another wall to climb over, check. Fire barriers to hurdle, check. Enter the Muddy Mayhem, holy hell…

Somewhere in the crowd I heard what sounded like my daughter yipping and yelling, “Go Dad! Woohoo! Here he comes!” I looked over (a real trick at this point because it was all I could do to slog forward without tipping over) and there she was with that damn camera in hand. I feigned a smile and a salute (seeing the video later you can see my hand barely reaching my chin so it looked more like a John Wayne impersonation). Someone ahead of me layed down in the mud and started making a mud angel. “Make a mud angel Daddy!” I heard from the side. “Oh hell, no,” I thought. “I’ll never get up.” I went belly down under the barbed wire and made it to the finish line (enough said). I sincerely believed that I couldn’t have gone another fifty feet in that mud. I was spent.

I'm finished

In true warrior fashion, the means of washing off the muck was to stand by a water truck and wait until they unleash a 4″ pipe of icy-cold water on the crowd. I couldn’t breath. It knocked the wind out of me so I quickly (?) staggered away only a little less muddy and swearing that I had a newfound appreciation for my mud coating and I didn’t need it gone after all.

So that’s the long and the short of it. After about fifteen minutes or so I had returned to a less zombie-like appearance, could speak in complete sentences and most people had stopped pointing.

This is definitely one of those things that “seemed like a good idea at the time,” “I am glad to say I did it,” and I sincerely doubt I’ll do it again.

My daughter did really good and not just in comparison. She finished 278th out of 559 in her age group. Consider she accomplished that videoing all the obstacles while providing narration.

My time and rank? The top ranking warriors finished the course in 23 minutes. There were 105 warriors in the males age 50-54 bracket and I finished 98th in that group taking over an hour to finish.

Yea me! I’m not last! I’m good with that.