{"id":4199,"date":"2007-01-25T06:47:57","date_gmt":"2007-01-25T12:47:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/gazette\/2007\/01\/25\/random-thursday-20\/"},"modified":"2024-09-25T12:38:50","modified_gmt":"2024-09-25T17:38:50","slug":"random-thursday-20","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/2007\/01\/25\/random-thursday-20\/","title":{"rendered":"Random Thursday"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Serving up the freshest, hottest, most succulent trivialities of the day&#8230;<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>I&#8217;m hardly a credible film critic, having seen only one of the movies that got an Academy Award nomination for best picture &#8212; <em>Little Miss Sunshine<\/em> &#8212; and coming away from that viewing completely unimpressed, but I have to think that if you still believe that the Oscars are non-political and only about the art, you&#8217;ve surely done a monumental job of rationalizing why <em>Apocalypto<\/em> didn&#8217;t get a nod in the foreign language film category.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>The power of the internet to bring people together is amazing, isn&#8217;t it? If you&#8217;ve been paying attention, you&#8217;ll recall the <a title=\"From the Gazette Archives\" href=\"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/2011\/01\/09\/110109_potatopeels\/\">Great Potato Peel Fiasco<\/a> from last Christmas. Apart from providing great amusement to a certain sadistic segment of the Gazette readership, it&#8217;s apparently also attracting similarly afflicted souls from around the world, as our visitor logs are showing fairly regular searches for phrases like &#8220;garbage disposal clogged by potato peels&#8221; or &#8220;why can&#8217;t garbage disposals handle potato peels&#8221; or &#8220;instructions for inflicting a painful death on (&amp;#*%&amp;^(Q garbage disposal clogged with potato peels.&#8221; OK, I made that last one up, although I&#8217;m almost certain that&#8217;s what the searchers are thinking. Anyway, one such searcher came to the Gazette, then actually emailed me. Here&#8217;s the amazing thing: it was a former Fort Stockton high school classmate now living in Illinois whom I haven&#8217;t seen or corresponded with in decades! Imagine reconnecting via a shared potato peel experience. There&#8217;s bound to be a Hallmark movie idea in there somewhere. Or at least an e-card.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>Incidentally, I apologize to those who are coming here in hopes of finding a solution to your potato peel clogs, although I suspect you&#8217;re at least a bit content to learn that you&#8217;re not the only ones who experienced this tragedy.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>Despite good intentions to the contrary, I forgot to watch Tuesday&#8217;s live webcast from Odessa&#8217;s Alliance Hospital of a &#8220;minimal incision total knee replacement.&#8221; So, I popped over to OR-Live.com this afternoon to view the archived footage. I was doing pretty well until the first scalpel cut on the patient&#8217;s bent knee laid that tissue wide open and then I remembered I had to wash my hair, mow the lawn and wash the car. If that&#8217;s an example of &#8220;minimal incision,&#8221; I don&#8217;t even want to contemplate the alternative.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>Speaking of minimal incision, the tree service guys came out yesterday and completed the pruning and clean-up of <a title=\"From the Gazette Archives - The Sad, Sad Story\" href=\"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/2007\/01\/20\/nature-is-a-harsh-arborist\/\">our ice-damaged oak<\/a>. Here again, I&#8217;m not an expert, but I have this nagging feeling that they could have exercised a bit more restraint in their pruning. Ah, I&#8217;m probably overly sensitive; what do you think&#8230;does it look OK to you?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<div style=\"text-align: center;\"><img decoding=\"async\" style=\"border: 1px solid #ccc;\" src=\"https:\/\/www.ericsiegmund.com\/images\/fireant\/screenshots\/deadtree.jpg\" alt=\"Photo of a dead tree\" \/><\/div>\n<div style=\"text-align: center;\"><span style=\"color: red; font-weight: bold; font-size: 110%;\">Update: This is not our tree.<br \/>\nRepeat: This is NOT our tree!<\/span><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Tomatoes and potatoes, trees and knees&#8230;we got it all at the Gazette.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4199","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-random-thursday","entry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4199","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4199"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4199\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14318,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4199\/revisions\/14318"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4199"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4199"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4199"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}