Mark Knows It All

Every now and then you come across something that is just to good to pass up. This past week’s Business Week magazine contained a story about the massive amounts of manure in Stephenville, Texas, home to a plethora of Texas dairy farms. An equally massive fiberglass bovine named Moola the Cow is plopped right down in the middle of the square in tribute to the area’s primary agricultural product. Of course, downwind of Stephenville is another story altogether. Those of you who yearn for an idyllic life in the country most likely haven’t lived there. Life on the farm has many advantages. Fresh air isn’t one of them. But do not run away, green technology will save the day. A company named Microgy came riding into town with a holster full of federally backed green dollars to build a poop to gas plant (technical name: anaerobic digesters). Huzzah!!! The town was thrilled that this green upstart outfit was going to take the cow manure off of their hands and boots, and turn it into pipeline ...

The other day while sitting in a bar having a drink to calm my holiday rattled nerves, the big screen television was showing the Oprah Winfrey Show…the Oprah Favorite Things 2010 edition!!! For those of you in the minority who don’t know what that is…everyone in the audience gets all of Oprah’s Favorite Things to take home. Now I am not an Oprah fan, and have only rarely watched even a part of her show. But this big screen television was in my face…and what I saw was both frightening and fascinating at the same time. It was a greed frenzy of the third kind. Begin with she “gave away” a whole lot of stuff, from food to lingerie to fragrance to food to I-Pads to more food to jewelry to a Volkswagon…cars for everybody. Of course we all know that in reality, she gives away nothing. It’s the product manufacturer that gives the stuff away in return for a major plug on her show to her vast audience. But a Volkswagaon? Really? The people in the audience were whooping and hollering. They were s...

Here we go, folks. It’s time for my annual Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) rant. Those who suffer from this unfortunate malady really, really hate winter. How we handle it, however, varies from person to person. For those of you who don’t know, SAD is a depressive disorder directly related to the amount of daylight. As summer flows into autumn, and autumn into winter, the decreased amount of daylight has an adverse psychological affect on sufferers such as me. Individuals handle the situation differently. The most severe sufferers should consult a physician and take proper medication. Moderate sufferers, such as me, can use other alternatives. One popular method is to sit under a specially designed light that mimics sunlight. My house is fortunate enough to have ample mercury vapor lighting in our backyard which helps a lot. My SAD operates differently than most. The problem kicks in with the anticipation of less daylight rather than actually experiencing it, usually right around Jun...

I have come to the conclusion that Vivaldi must have been a Democrat. He has planted an earworm in my head, and I can’t get it out. I have done everything to get this horrendous gavotte out of my head, but Domine Dei Unigenite keeps be-bopping around between my ears. I even tried banging my head against the wall, and all this Republican stuff came flowing out all available orifices leaving Domine Dei Unigenite ba ba-ba ba-baing over and over and over again in the caverns of my brain. I dare you to play it more than once, and you will be humming it forever and ever and ever and ever…and I don’t mean the Hallelujah Chorus. You can listen to it here. Let’s start with the basics. Wikipedia defines an“earworm” as “a portion of a song or other music that repeats compulsively within one's mind, put colloquially as "music being stuck in one's head." If you fancy yourself to be a half baked musician like myself, it happens over and over again. My last earworm was a song my c...

I did it. I moved the dark side. I crossed over into the land to techies and “text-ies.” I bought a smart phone. More specifically, my new best friend is now a Blackberry Curve. It slices. It dices. It will even wipe my nose. We are, quite literally, joined at the hip….with this really neat belt loop black leather carrying case for $19.99!!!! How did I live without it? Seriously, folks, I use my computer all the time for just about everything. I bought a net book to take on vacations, and it is a tad on the slow side. But I have always been behind in the mobile device area. I had this five year old LG flip phone which I had difficulty hearing while talking on it. It was a bit frayed around the ages. And to be honest, it was humiliating to pull it out. My son, who is on our family plan, had the identical phone and seemed to get by with it fine. He could text on the number key pad, a skill I that was way beyond me. He could hear. He could talk on in it. And he told me he would never get...