This guy had a great comment on the 5 Hour Energy drink reviews:

normally, by 1:45pm i start to get the heeby-geeby’s, the jimmy leg,cold flashes and profuse sweating, around two, i usually take 2-3 key bumps of decent quality Pablo in rapid succession, this takes care of the temp. extremes, then around three – three thiry, 2 keys of blow with 4 keys bone white smack from Wan of Chinatown. this gets me to the train, the train to my house, then i chase the dragon for the rest of the night. now last week, i swapped my first two keys of blow with 3 bottles of pomegranate 5 hr stuff. works well up to my three thirty speedball(s) Then WHAM! im working circles around anybody near me, i can answer ANY crossword puzzle q’s and at the same time, flip a morgan dollar across my knuckles on my right hand! All this while doing Electrical work in a heavy industrial setting. This stuff turned me into a process control ”GURU”. The nights arent as good as the daytime, but hey> we work for the weekend right? thats another article altogether. Tank you Innovation Ventures, LLC. youve got a customer for life, you can do a study on me, too if you give any of the pomegranate away for study, send it this way!
Read more: http://www.rateitall.com/i-863544-5-hour-energy.aspx#ixzz0xeOoUc2C

I offered to cut Sebastian’s hair in the garage and the relatives wouldn’t let me.  Now I know why … 

Readers Note: This week’s offerings are being tossed in ahead of time, because we are out of town for the week.  However, thieves beware, for my brother-in-law is staying at the house.  And, we have a watchturtle!

… which, of course, they are.  The Consortium readership may not total in the millions – unless you count Grannymar’s readers – but that doesn’t stop us from opining about a multitude of topics and, since you are reading it, it is information consumed.

Definition of Media by YourDictionary.com: The dictionary defines media as all the means of communication, as newspapers, radio, and TV, that provide the public with news, entertainment, etc., usually along with advertising. Essentially, that means almost anything can be media as long as it is watched.

Actually, that is slightly inaccurate.  The last line should be as long as anyone consumes its information.  The fact that you read what we write and that we enjoy presenting ideas to you is, I think, a very positive thing.  In fact, many of the consumers of the information are purveyors themselves, for many of the blog readers are blog writers.  More than at any earlier time in history, media are interactive, quite often two-way.

Rick Sanchez at CNN has been doing this for a considerable stretch of time, trying to use social media as part of his news input.  He actually follows Twitter during the show, used to have Tweets displayed along the bottom of the screen in a running marquee, and tried to use Skype dialogues as live entries from viewers for awhile (see: http://www.levintel.com/first-live-cnn-chat-streamever/, an experiment that I was involved with).

The difficulty with both is that a new level of responsibility is placed on both sides of the communication that interactivity has created.  If we as viewers are giving live input to the news person, are we now creating news rather than observing it?  If the news person doesn’t react to our opinions, what is the point?  But, if he or she does, is this a tainting of unbiased reporting?  Does the news person have the tendency to want to play to the audience more and forget objectivity at times?

Even as bloggers, how much information do we feed that is misleading, because we have not fully researched what we are saying?  Well, as long as you know this is really an op-ed source and don’t take us too seriously – and from your responses, I don’t think we too much to worry about on that front, LOL – it is pretty harmless and actually good fun.  Some of it even thought provoking.

But, for the professional media … well, it makes me a little nervous.

Starting Sunday, though, I will be making up for lost time, so comment away and I’ll catch up.

Enjoy!!

But, here it is, late rather than never.  Why?  Because I really do treasure what I share with you, the reader, and with my fellow bloggers in this group.  They are listed on the left with clickable links and I encourage you to see what they have to say on Books, a topic brought to us by gaelikaa.

My original idea was to take photographs of my bookshelves, some leisure reading, some technical in my office, but decided instead that this post should be more book-like itself, lean, descriptive narrative unadorned.

This is a generation who reads, but I fear they may lose the joy of book reading, just as our generation lost the joy of sitting around the radio as a family, listening to a mystery on the radio, listening to a mesmerizing voice, images forming in your head.  No two had the same experience, for what isn’t explicitly supplied must be supplied by the imagination, by the receiving party.  The trick is for the presenter to be so descriptive in what is supplied that filling in, adding to, is involuntary.  Television, unfortunately, does that filling in for you, the viewer becoming more passive, less actively engaged.

Now, why am I talking about the radio suddenly when this is a post about books?  Because the analogy is apt.  In our migration to on-line reading and to social media and to television, we are losing those same types of engagement that we lost with the passing of the great radio dramas.  That, quite honestly, is the joy I have in seeing younger people caught up in the Harry Potter series; a re-engagement of the imagination, creation of a shared sub-culture entered through the pages of a book first, on the screen second.

The strongest argument I can make for the joy and magic of book reading is this: characters brought from a book story to movies or television virtually never meet the standards or the reality of that character who formed in my mind while reading.  THAT is why I read for pleasure.

Today, I noticed a couple of changes and just had to take a picture of them:

Notice that it still has Free Air and Water.  Free, that is, unless you want to pump it into your tires!  That costs $1.00 now – but you apparently can still breath the air for free.  Oh, and the water for the radiator is out of order, even if you have a dollar.

I was the only one in the station.  I think that is the first time.  Probably just a coincidence.

And active they are, too.  It is kind of an extension of my blog life with a lot of the same people.  This is a funny bunch!  I love those email letters!

Part of me misses the old days, though, the days when a letter arriving in the mailbox was a special occasion.

It came right along with the catalogs and everything else.  I remember Mom telling us when we had a letter from Grandma and we kids would sit down while she read it.  That, of course, was back before handwriting was vestigial, back when people ended sentences with Ha! instead of LOL!

Now, the postal service was already pretty reliable by the time I was a kid.  You sent a letter, it got there in pretty decent time.  You wanted the postman to pick one up to send it by raising the flag on the mailbox. 

Those letters weren’t just for family, either.  I found some old love letters sent back and forth between Carol and me a few years ago … read a bit … and lapsed into a diabetic coma.

It is some form of insanity.  A few years of marriage is the cure.  They were an important part of the mating ritual just a few decades ago, though, and I wonder if ANYONE writes and sends them anymore.

As I compare our instant communication today including the written word, voice and even visual with the letters of yesteryear, the letters of my own experience, it makes me wonder how much different it would be to find yourself thousands of miles from family and communicating by, well, let’s say pony express:

Now, that’s a letter to sit around the fireplace and read!  And read again and again.  That’s a letter of which you take some time and care in the writing.  That’s a letter that someone saves.

Traveling back further in time, here’s a letter sent by the high-priest Lu’enna to the king of Lagash informing him of his son’s death in combat.  The letter was c. 2400 BC.

Now, THAT’s a letter!  How long do you think this took to “write?”  I can just hear the moms of the time now: “Sharpen your chisel, Amenhotep, your writing is almost illegible!”

I wonder what blogs were like back then??

My thanks to Grannymar for the topic offering for this week’s Friday Loose Blog Consortium offering.  If she had sent it in the form of the letter received by the King, it is highly unlikely that you would have the joy available of clicking on links on the left side of this page under Loose Blogger Consortium to see what the others have written on this topic.

But, she didn’t send it on a rock … so … leave me a brief note, a mini-letter, and check them out.

Of the more essential things around, I would count a stove and an oven and lights and a refrigerator and … well, practical things you use in day-to-day survival.  Things can be replaced for the most part and most that can’t are fine gone, for it is people, pets and relationships that matter.  However, there is an interesting class of inessential belongings that are a bit different.

Hard to know what possessed me to make these guys somewhere along the way, but I don’t think they should be tossed.  You can’t find them in a store … for a reason.  But, I made them, it was a hoot, and it makes me and Mom feel good when we look at the silly little jaspers.

The kiwi bird is blown glass around a piece of kiwi fruit from the land of the kiwis, New Zealand.  We got him as the perfect complement to the Murano glass dolphin we bought when visiting Venice.  As with the pieces below them, none of them would cause the world to stop if they disappear – but they sure bring back memories!

This hammer, refitted with another handle over the years, was the hammer used by my great grandfather, the first blacksmith in Central Kansas.  I don’t really need the hammer, because I have sledge hammers for big jobs and smaller hammers for smaller work.  It is easy to get a hammer at a store.

But, that hammer might as well be Thor’s Hammer as far as I’m concerned!  You know what I mean?

So, what it comes down to is that the least essential of the things we have are often the ones most valuable to us.  They are actually the touchstones of meaning for people.  Priceless!

What do you have that is totally unneeded in any practical sense, but that is precious to you?

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This is another in the Friday offerings of the Loose Bloggers Consortium, this topic suggested by the Magpie himself.  Check out the inessentials of the other members whose links you will find on the left under – you guessed it – LOOSE BLOGGER CONSORTIUM!

Be patient if someone doesn’t have an entry.  They may be having fun with their items as we speak.

Sometimes I feel like I will have no time alone ever again.  That, of course, is not true – and I don’t wish it as a regular diet.  But, we have had so many interactions continuously with so many people recently that I need a little meditative time now and then.

So, how exactly is a guy supposed to balance these needs?  By playing it as it lays!  It is possible to be alone surrounded by thousands of people, as every city dweller can attest:

Yet, it is possible to be together even though separated by oceans:

Solitude, sometimes desired, sometimes regretted, seems to seek us and avoid us according to whim.  This may seem like a curse … or perhaps like an opportunity, depending upon current circumstance.  How we decide to relate to it determines a great deal of our happiness.

Oh, and did I tell you that Mom and Grannymar talked together on Skype for about an hour or more?  I have video of GM talking with the Queen, but I reckon I’ll have to get a release from both before showing that to you!

As George Costanza said in one episode (for our Seinfeld fans), “Worlds are colliding here!”