The hippies running my city decided to issue me a notice of public nuisance today. I have until May 6 to remedy a nuisance violation, a class 1 offense against section 11-62: Vegetation, tree or shrub debris, or accumulations thereof, which by reason of the manner, location, or condition of such results in visual blight or constitutes a health or safety hazard.

Their specific complaint is even more hilarious.

I live on a corner lot, backed by an alley. Every week, before I mow the yard, I have to do a walkthrough to pick out the liquour bottles that were tossed into my yard. In my back alley, I’ve noticed an accumulation of plastic bags full of leaves. I have no idea where dead leaves are coming from in April, but they are there.

The complaint is that the bags of leaves in the alley have to be removed and a “pile of brush” in my yard needs to be removed as well. I call that my compost heap, but WTF. Tomorrow, I will be burning the leaves and the pile of brush in my backyard; and grilling porksteaks. Monday, I will bring the form in to City Hall and explain to them how thorougly my violation was abated and that the $25 fine ought not be levied against me. And try to sweet talk the identity of the complainer out of the clerk.

In other words, BBQ at my place tomorrow.

The Cards lost their long rain-delayed game today, four to three. Still an excellent week. Tomorrow’s going to be an excellent game, it’ll be a matchup between Mark Mulder for the Cards and Tim Hudson for the A’s. I “brightsided” Mulder’s early season woes by arguing that he was cleverly manipulating the other players into a psychological mode where they wouldn’t think they’d be able to take a day off–he’d need some sold D and run support to get some wins. I was bullshitting, for sure, but I think the rest of the team has got to love this guy after his last two starts, and they’ll want to play their asses off for him. It’s gonna be a tough game though, although even with our offense not producing as it should, I give us the upper hand.

More long-term exciting news: we exchanged Hector Luna for Kevin Jarvis on the active roster. Luna’s got to get some work in as an everyday shortstop, and Jarvis is pitching like a big, scary man. He’s got my great respect for accepting an assignment to our AAA club. I think only good will come from this: Jarvis belongs in the big leagues, he’ll either be a dominant force in the Cardianls bullpen or attractive enough to get a trade offer for a minor league outfielder by the time Pulsipher’s recovered. He’s a good pitcher, and he ain’t going back to Memphis. Jarvis’s numbers in AAA: 2-0 0.78 23IP 20K 5BB

I generally consider myself a fairly hard man. Drop me off on a desert island and I’ll have shelter and procedures for feeding myself in place within a few days. But I’ve got my soft spots, and they are two: monkeys and sports. Going into crunch time, when my mental gears are all smoothly grinding on one another in the fluid unison of a fresh semester’s education, a wrench is tossed into those gears by my good friend C-Bot. A Monkey Wrench. Really an ape that plays hockey.

Naturally, my weakness exposed, I went straight to the video store to pick up the movie. My heart leaped when I saw that this talented Chimpanzee starred in not one, but three films–MVP: Most Valuable Primate (the hockey picture; MVP2: Most Verticle Primate (he skateboards around, I guess… HILARIOUS!!!); and MXP: Most Extreme Primate (the chimp was pictured on a snowboard.)

I did make fairly convincing progress on my grammar writing tonight. I’d been going at it backwards. Much better now.

The next post down has a funny link, this one is straight-up geek.

I mentioned a while back a fairly nasty audio project I had dropped in my lap, one that involves 10 wave files of 320 minutes in length, or 3,200 minutes of audio, or a little over 53 hours. The client wants them on CD-Rom in wave format, and broken up into manageable filesizes that a normal computer could open without too much trouble. Going through 53 hours of audio, cutting out ten minute pieces with the mouse and pasting them into new files, and then saving them would be a hassle. If there’s one thing I really hate doing, it’s that sort of busy bullshit work–the repetitive point n’ click crap that takes up hours of labor.

I work hard to avoid this sort of nonsense by writing scripts to do jobs for me. The audio machine I use is a brand spankin’ new G5 running Mac OSX, an operating system which is basically a degenerate version of Linux, offering a fairly malnourished Bash environment for me to work in. This is much better than Windows, where there’s fairly little you can usefully do from the command line with an out of the box system. OS X also comes with a Python interpreter installed, and Python is my best friend.

Check this out:

Fuck it: I tried using pre tags to format the shit (took me longer than it took to write the program). Just download the script. This pre tag BS is too fancy for me.

Including testing and debugging, it took me less than an hour to write that, and will save me at least two days of work. And if a job like this ever comes up again, I can use this script again, and so can my co-workers, and so can you lucky readers.

Between Python and me, you got all the friends you’ll ever need.

And I’m hoping this will leave tomorrow wide open for working on academic projects.

I posted a few days ago about changing the oil in my lawnmower and a subsequent cutting of the front and massive side yard of my lawn. Kerry’s taking LBing to a whole new level in this post, featuring flying lawn mowers. She also posted a link to the chimp who drinks his pee Monday (and then goes back for more), making her blog a veritable clearinghouse for hilarious videos the past few days. Now I’ll have to dig up the video of the chimp who scratches his ass, sniffs his finger, and falls out of a tree. And then work on my projects after that.

Update: And Presto!!! Chimpanzee Video…

I’ve rented quite a few movies over that past week or so. Here are my impressions of them:

The first was Aliens vs. Predator, a movie I’d been anticipating since I was in Junior High and I read the comic series from Dark Horse of the same title. It was very different from the comics, although the story the film used wasn’t bad. Pretty much like a cross between Stargate and Aliens III, but with Predators attacking people in the beginning and a Predator and a woman banding together to fight Aliens in the end, which was cheesy at times. It’s a movie worth renting, there are some very cool scenes to it. Overall, it’s a bit too stylish for me, if stylish means all the trendy slow motion effects that The Matrix popularized in the extreme.

Last night, I watched Sideways, which was universally well reviewed in the linked RT page. It was better than I expected, and fairly amusing, but it wasn’t a great movie by any stretch. It was a lot like your standard shitcom that’s been popular since Home Improvement’s second season or so. All the men in the story are incompetent nitwits who are devious to both themselves and the people who inexplicably spend time with them. Meanwhile, all the women in the story are moral and highly intelligent. You know the kind of show I’m talking about: ‘Yes, Dear’ and the one about the fat mailman with the hot wife. Turn on a major network between 5 and 9 and if there’s no news or sports, you’re watching one of these television shows. There are two exceptions that I noted: the balding character’s ex-wife’s husband seems like a hard-working decent sort; and a chubby waitress that the dude from Wings sodomizes. The latter plot element leads to a sex scene that may very well cause me erectile dysfunction for a while. I’m probably the last person to see the movie, but I’ll make a recommendation anyways: it’s a two hour cbs shitcom with more nudity, foul language, and moral bankruptcy. On the other hand, there are some very beautiful shots of California’s wine country. Especially noticeable in the driving scenes, the camera angle captures the rows of grapes perfectly, everytime.

I popped in White Hunter, Black Heart and got about halfway through before calling it a night. So far, so good–and I haven’t even gotten to the safari yet. The only comment I’ll make is that I recall a Blood Work reviewer saying that it was the first movie in which Clint allowed himself to lose a fight on camera. That didn’t sound right at the time, but in this movie, he clearly loses a fight. It’s a good scene, too. He’d just finished a hostile and enjoyable diatribe toward a British woman who’d defended Hitler’s treatment of the Jews when a much bigger, younger man was abusing the “black bastard” African workers at the hotel they were at. Clint picks a fight with him and loses badly. It’s possible the reviewer meant that Clint had never lost a fight without coming back later in the movie to win a fight with the same person, since there are clear examples throughout his career–most obviously “Hang ‘em High.” I’m only halfway in, so that seems like a possibility. I’m guessing this has got to be the last Clint movie I haven’t seen. I don’t know how I’d missed it.

Part 2 of this Two-Part Post:

This semester has officially entered the Crunch Time phase. I know when it’s hit because I fall asleep thinking about my work, dream about it, and wake up throughout the night with an irrepressible urge to write code. I came up with a lot of good stuff while sleeping. Also had a few whacky dreams about ninjas, like usual. Those probably won’t prove as useful.

Next Tuesday I will be presenting my semester projects, all on the same day. After that, I just need to finish up the write-ups and the Spring 2005 semester will be in the can. This means that I’ve got a ridiculous amount of crap to do in the next six days. I made significant progress on the Computation Semantics project, and I’m confident it’ll be ready to go for Tuesday, although not in the polished shape that I’d like it to be in. I was also a bit too ambitious when I said I’d have a cgi up for it by this weekend. Let me describe the project real quick. It’s a natural language interface to a database of individual player baseball statistics. So far I’ve written a set of scripts to spider a website to collect the webpages that the stats are on, then parse the information out of the pages, then build the information into a prolog database. I’ve got all that put together, and now I’m working on the grammar for the query language. Just a few minutes ago, I made a fairly significant breakthrough in that I figured out the semantics for questions like: “What is Albert Pujols’ batting average?” It may not sound like much, but now I have a general solution for all the basic statistics. What remains is coming up with a semantics for words like per, in, most, highest, for and so on and so forth. That would let me answer queries like: “which player has the fewest errors with the most innings spent in the field?” A lot of these queries are asking for ratios from one statistic to another, and the semantics gets fairly complex. The idea is that the NL interface would allow you to generate your own rules for sorting and combining statistics using a language you grew up speaking. I don’t expect it to be all that useful in terms of providing insight into the performances of players, but baseball’s a good domain for doing lots of things in NLP, I’ve convinced myself, if only because of the complexity of questions like the one above. I don’t have an appropriate program for reading in the queries yet, and that’ll be the last thing I’ll work on–that’s the reason I don’t expect to have a web-version up this weekend, or even by Tuesday.

I’m considering using some transcribed speech from Snoop Doggy Dogg in my other presentation. First things first, though. (First thing’[i]s first, though? 603,000:15,100 –google count)

In today’s game, Mark Grudzielanek hit for the cycle: a single, double, triple, and home run. And he’ll have at least another at-bat before the game’s over. Chris Carpenter has 11 strikeouts through seven innings. If we can hang on to win (currently we’re leading the Brew Crew 6-3 in the bottom of the seventh) we’ll match the 1968 Cardinals start with a 14-5 record. Outstanding baseball we’re seeing these days. Or maybe not seeing, but following online while at work.

Update: We got the win; the Cards lead the NL at 14-5. G-Man’s cycle was only the third by a Cardinal at Busch stadium. The other two were by Lou Brock and all-time home run leader at Busch, Ray Lankford. This young season, the last at Busch, is looking to be quite a special one.

Update again: It just occurred to me that two of the (so far) three Cardinals to hit for the cycle at Busch Stadium were cast-aways from the Cubs organization.

The Cardinals announced immediately after the final out that Isringhausen had suffered a right abdominal strain and is considered day to day.

–StL Post-Dispatch

What’s up with our Generation K lefty-righty tandem hobbling out of the gates? The next line (slightly dowdified here) in the article is even more frightening: Julian Tavarez steps into the closer role!

As interesting as Izzy made his 7/7 saves/opps this season, the prospect of Tavarez closing games in April doesn’t settle well with me. Why not Burger King?

Today was my mom’s birthday. My brother left me a voicemail while I was at work to remind me. Like I’d forget my own mother’s birthday. In truth, I probably would have if I hadn’t spent this past weekend in St. Louis, and she hadn’t mentioned how nice it was to have me home around her birthday. I’d forget my own birthday if it wasn’t written on my driver’s license, and if it weren’t Bruce Lee’s birthday, too. I’d forget my little sister’s birthday if it weren’t two days before mine, and my brother’s if it weren’t the day Frank Sinatra died, and also 12/12. I did forget to call my older sister on her birthday this year (sorry!). Birthdays just aren’t all that big a deal to me, since I’m a jerk. The only holidays I get into are Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. And Valentine’s Day when I have someone to celebrate that day with. And of course New Year’s. That’s the best holiday by a long shot. Opening day is pretty much a holiday. A religious holiday.

My mom had a real nice, 12-amp vacuum cleaner for a long time, but we could never find a replacement bag for it, and it ended up turning real stinky. She got so frustrated with it that she bought herself a bagless cleaner during those insane day-after-Thanksgiving sales last year. When I was home this past weekend, she gave me her old, stinky vacuum cleaner. I found a model number on it, and apparently the thing had been bought at Sears, and not Best Buy as we’d assumed. Sears is a good company in a lot of ways. One of those ways is that they supply parts for all the appliances they sell, so you can actually fix a broken machine like in the days of old instead of just replacing the whole unit. (Another way is that they do a lot for their employees who have to leave work for National Guard duty.) I found the bags it needs (Part #020-50690) for $7.99 a three-pack. I’ll also have to see if the electrician at work will let me use his air compressor to blow all the stinky dirt out of it. Too bad most of my house has hardwood flooring–it’s almost a waste of a good appliance.

Update: For those interested, I bought the bags at the store, installed one in the machine and vacuumed my bedroom carpet. After a minute or so, I caught wind of the dreadful stink of overheated rubber. The belt needs to be replaced too. The sears parts website lists it at $2.99 and says it’s stocked in all stores. Guess I’ll have to make another trip out there. Might as well buy a new shirt while I’m there.

For one of my classes, I’m reading Andrew Kehler’s syntax book. I despise syntax, although the book is really quite interesting. Written in 2002, the biggest beef I have with it is his use of political sentences throughout. That sort of thing used to be widespread in scholarly linguistic writing in the sixties and to a lesser extent always has been done. I find it distracting and a little bit cutesy. The only time I’ve ever used a political sentence to make a grammatical point was Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf’s famous sentence: “There are no Americans in Baghdad. They are driving around the desert aimlessly.” (Or something very close to that). I observed that this was a case where negation isn’t statically closed for anaphora as most grammatical theories require. But they is coreferential with the Americans, even though the antecedent is within the scope of a negation operator. Most theories use static negation to rule out sentence like: “There is no man in the park. He sat down.” I could have avoided using a political sentence by saying, “The schoolchildren are not on the playground. They have a field trip to the zoo today.”

Kehler’s examples are sentences like: “Al Gore supports a prescription drug benefit, and George Bush smirks a lot.” Cutesy and lame, if you ask me.

Today there was a good example where political data came in handy, only for the familiarity of the characters in the sentence. Kehler observes this is a sentence a native speaker of English couldn’t easily interpret and wouldn’t likely say, “Laura supports George, and Tipper Al, and Mary does too.” In the middle conjunct, supports is missing by what syntacticians call a gap, and the third conjunct is the problematic one where VP-ellipsis is taking place, leaving a stranded auxiliary. The prof pointed out that pseudo-gapping is allowable here, as in “Laura supports George, and Tipper Al, and Mary does John.” But check out this super-neat case that I made up, where VP-ellipsis IS allowed in the third conjunct: “Laura supports George, and Tipper Al, and Badnarik’s wife does too.” My native speaker intuitions are fairly promiscuous, but that sounds like a perfectly good sentence to me. I’m not sure whether a strict reading is possible in this case, where a competent English speaker could interpret the sentence to mean that Badnarik’s wife supports either Al or George. My intuitions say the reading is possible, but strongly dispreferred.

The Brickhouse opened up last Friday. (Brickhouse is T K Wendl’s, for those of you keeping track of these things.) I popped in there tonight and my socks would have been blown off my feet, had they not been new socks with such enthusiastic elasticity.

The place is really nice. They resurfaced the lot with gravel and the interior is scarcely recognizable with all sorts of open space. The name “Brickhouse” is in reference to the faux-brick finish they put on the drywall on the inside. There are also about 5 or 6 high def televisions mounted into the walls, making it a legitimate sports bar. The dancing room is long gone and has been split so that 1/3 is a pool hall and 2/3 are a pizza/sandwich joint which has yet to open. I peeked through the windows and saw that it’s gonna be nice though. The batting cages are still around, and softball teams were playing tonight in the rain.

The bartender told me that the owner was successful in getting the lot annexed by Urbana, which means they’ll have sensible hours over the summer.

That means if you see an ugly man switch-hitting in the batting cages late at night, it’s probably me.

On a productive note, I printed out the code for a program I have to extensively hack for a big project. I went over it thoroughly and figured out what sorts of difficulties I’ll be tearing through tomorrow. I’ll have a CGI up by this weekend that you can play with.

Something that makes me really happy is cutting my lawn. My grass had grown pretty long when I’d left town for the Lou, and I was happy to have that chore to do today. I changed the oil in the mower and it started up and ran like a dream. That’s a good little lawn mower, having been sitting in an extremely leaky shed all winter. I’ll need to build a new shed for it to hang out in. I’d been fantasizing about building a garage in the back yard, accessed by the alley behind my crib–thinking I could store the lawn mower in there. I’m just not wealthy enough for that. And I could probably build a shed in a weekend. And the mower would love me for it.

Something else I like is that noisy, twangy guitar riff from “I feel Fine,” which you can listen to for free here. I found the tablature and tried playing it on the acoustic my former roommate had left when he moved out. It didn’t sound so hot and was hard to play on those fat strings. C-Rae finished repairing my guitar over the weekend (thanks man!) and said I could pick it up on Tuesday. That’ll be the first thing I play on it. And how sweet will that be?

Very sweet.

Yet another thing that pleases me greatly is when the Cardinals play well, and they have been. They’re 12-5 and just swept Houston. Tomorrow brings us Milwaukee, who we swept last week. The Soup pitches tomorrow and seeks his first home win. He should be aided by the fact that the opposing pitcher will be the Brewers’ bullpen. This also means that whoever starts Tuesday’s game against Carp will have to pitch long to give the BP some rest. So don’t put your brooms away just yet. You wouldn’t have to get them out again on Wednesday, at which point you’d have to dust off a broom, which is–strictly speaking–an asinine thing to do with a broom. I mean, what would you dust the broom off with? A smaller broom? And wouldn’t you be inclined, seeing as you’re the sort who dusts off brooms, to have yet a smaller broom with which to dust off the small broom that you’d use to dust off the broom for sweeping defeated ballclubs out of town with? As should be obvious to all, eventually you’d need a broom so small you wouldn’t be able to tell with certainty whether you were holding it, no matter how precise your equipment. Heed my advice then: don’t put away the broom.

Writing really stupid jokes makes me happy.

To wit: a priest, a rabbi, and a nun walk into a bar. The bartender says, “What is this, some kind of joke?”

This joke is funnier.

How sweet would it be to win the Baby Ruth Best Road Trip Ever? It’s a contest in which a team of two will travel, Amazing Race-style, to 60 ballgames in 60 days (I believe in all 30 ballparks), all the while performing stunts. I suppose if you do well enough at the stunts and contests, you win the grand prize of facing a hall of famer, not necessarily a HOF pitcher, in batting practice.

Very sweet. But I’d get fired or I’d do it on my own.

I’m back from a fine trip to St. Louis. To recap: Thursday I made it to the 12:15 Cards v. Cubs game in which Chris Carpenter pitched a shutout win. Thursday night was Chuck Berry at Bluberry Hill. The opening act was excellent, although I have forgotten the name of the band. I’ll dig it up later and post it. Chuck played for about one and a half hours, his son gave a ten minute speech about how everyone had gotten their money’s worth, and the show was over. This was a bit before midnight. It was worth it. After that, we met Nate Dogg and Pete at Maji for a few more drinks and called it a night ourselves after that.

Friday was cold. I took my mom to dinner, and afterwards met Keydog and Hansenelli at Frick’s to watch the end of the game and celebrate the weekend’s birth. Hansen was supposed to go home to write a paper, but we kidnapped the angel on his left shoulder and joined in with the devil on his right shoulder and kept him out until closing time. (He later finished the paper on time.)

Saturday was even colder. I had lunch and picked up some hardware at Lowe’s to install a baby swing on my mom’s deck. On the way home, KMOX was doing the Cardinals pregame show, and I commented that Mulder vs. Clemens is a huge pitching matchup. I watched an inning of the game after putting the swing together, then took my mom to the Botanical Gardens, which was more impressive than the last time I’d been. The Hydrangeas were kicking ass, although we’d missed the cherry blossoms in the Japanese gardens by a few days, judging from the flower petals on the ground. When I got to my car, I discovered that Mark Mulder has officially reached legendary status as a Cardinals pitcher by tossing 10 SHUTOUT INNINGS with only 101 pitches in a showdown between 2005 NL Cy Young contenders. In the words of the Michaleen Flyn in The Quiet Man: “Homeric!” If there’s one thing I’d rather be doing than watching possibly the greatest pitcher’s duel of the season, it would be walking around the Botanical Gardens with such wonderful women as I did today. I sure would have liked to see it though.

Matty Mo goes tomorrow, looking to follow up on the gem he threw in his season debut.

Update: Bernie Micklasz posted a column about Mulder’s performance tonight. I’ve got two beefs with it: one is that he incorrectly credits Brad Lidge with the loss. Lidge allowed an inherited runner to score. He isn’t the losing pitcher, he gave up the game winning RBI. Second, he writes horseshit like, “Somewhere, Bob Gibson was smiling.” Bernie, why didn’t you call him up and ask him what he thought? It’s not like he’s a mean guy or anything. I could write lines like that. Micklasz is a big-time columnist, and should have cultivated a relationship with guys like Bob Gibson that he could talk to them when he wants to. After a game like that, I’d want to talk to Gibby and kid him that the 4th inning bat-head comebacker that whacked Mulder in the ankle actually hurt him worse than he’d let on, and that he’d actually pitched that game on a broken leg. The Post-Dispatch sports columnists just aren’t that strong on baseball. Burwell alternates between silly “controversial” pieces and sillier faux-nostalgia pieces, tossing in even sillier inane columns about how “injuries will make or break this team” or the like. Micklasz occasionally phones-in one of those last type of columns.

Found it at Amaravati.

And yes, I am baffled that I’ve lived in the midwest for a long time and display no detectable features of the characteristic MW speech. Sometimes I pronounce I-44 as Farty-Far just to amuse myself, although they didn’t ask about that one.

Update: This quiz is unreliable at guessing the dialects of British speakers too.

Good news: My roof is watertight.

Bad news: The Cards allowed the Cubs a 3-1 win tonight.

More bad news: I’ll be at work until at least 1am, and need to be on the road by 9 tomorrow morning.

Zambrano pitched a hell of a game, and had a run-scoring triple early on. (Suppan neglected to bean him in his next two at-bats.) The Soup pitched well if not efficiently, although better than I’ve come to expect of him at home. The Cardinals bullpen was characteristically solid, with some excellent work by Randy Flores and Ray King coming in to replace an ineffective Julian Taverez with the bases loaded and 2 outs in the ninth. Naturally, he coaxed a pop-up out of the sCrUB swinging a bat. Our bullpen has now gone 8 games without giving up a run. Quantified evidence of the bullpen’s recent hard-assedness through yesterday available at Random Redbird Reasoning.

I was outside about an hour ago, and it was 80 degrees, a few clouds in the sky, sun shining brightly. I just went out now and it is POURING, with bolts of lightning lancing across the sky.

I’m gonna have to call it quits at work for the day, run home in the rain, and see how my new roof is holding up.

A few days ago I’d linked to a new (to me, at least) Cardinals blog, called Cardnilly. Can you imagine my surprise when I found out it’s maintained by a fellow Parkway South alum–and from my graduating class as well?

That should amuse Chris, Jeff, possibly the otherwise stoic Nick, and a few other readers of this ‘page.

And check this out: that guy blogs too!

And here I thought I was the only one who kept up with my friends from High School.

I just got invited to a barn-raising!

Actually a gazebo-raising–which, though swankier, isn’t as cool as a barn-raising.

My friend was asked to find a tall, strong man to help out, and naturally I’m the first one she thought of. Frankly, I consider myself the prototypical tall, strong man. I think I’ll change my name to Apollo.

It’s supposed to rain tomorrow, and rain hard. You can bet that the first thing I do when I get home from work is climb up in my attic and take a good hard look at how well that new section of roof is holding up.

I’m actually nervous. I’ve put roofs on houses plenty of times. I even repaired a section of my mom’s roof once. Never was I in the least bit concerned that I hadn’t fixed the problem any of those times.

A funny story: I was taught roofing from the legendary Dan. Years later, I was putting a roof on a room addition that the company I was working for at the time had built. I was working with an older guy that I’d thought a competent construction worker, when I noticed that he was nailing the shingles in from the top. I said to him, “WTF, man! You gotta nail on the tarline!” We got into an argument about it. His position was that if you nailed at the tarline, if a shingle blows off, you’re gonna have a lot of trouble replacing it, since the row of shingles above it will be have been nailed through the top of that shingle. My position was that if you nail the tarline, each row is nailed in twice as well, and you won’t get any shingles blowing off. The bundle wrappers had directions to nail the tarline, so I won the argument. My suspicions about the dude were confirmed weeks later when he confessed to me that he learned how to do construction work from watching TLC, which was heavily home improvement at the time. To his credit, he did train his dogs exceptionally well. He had two golden retrievers that could count and retrive specific objects. He went on to join the painters union, where they recognized the extent of his skill and set him to work taping off moulding.

Come to think of it, that’s not a funny story at all. I’m just bragging about my mad roofing skills. I’ll continue in that vein. The yahoos that reshingled two other sections of my roof did a shitty job. They went right over the old caps. And when they cut their caps, they made straight cuts from the crotches of the tabs,so there’s the black backing material sticking out across the whole ridgeline. You gotta cut at an angle, so only the tab part of the shingle is exposed on the caps. Fuckin’ amateurs.

Assuming my roof is watertight, this will be my last roofing post, hopefully forever.