Friday, April 30, 2010

Just giving a farewell post to TC, which has been good and fun and odd, and has fallen under the wave of technical hassles and real-life intrusions. Off to do something constructive, like paint a child's room purple.

Labels: 2010, admin, baby girl dance, feeling old, local flavor

23:46 bone daddy

Saturday, February 13, 2010

Labels: local flavor, pictures

12:16 cdogzilla

Labels: local flavor, pictures

11:54 cdogzilla

Thursday, February 11, 2010

Labels: booze, local flavor

11:35 cdogzilla

Sunday, January 17, 2010

Following up on c-dog's post about UConn's beatdown of Notre Dame, I'd say this UConn team reminds me most of the 2002 version. That team had the best starting five in women's history - Sue Bird, Diana Taurasi, Swin Cash, Tamika Williams and Asjha Jones - but not a lot of depth. Everyone kept wondering what would happen if they got in foul trouble or had an off game. That talk continued right up to the championship game, which they won.

C-dog, you should see this team if you get the chance. I took Ivy and a friend to Gampel for the North Carolina game and even though it was a blowout, I could tell we were witnessing something special. You need to see Maya Moore in person before she graduates. Sooner or later you're going to wear some UConn colors to Duke. Might as well warm up with the women's game.

Labels: anti-Duke, local flavor, TV, uconn

00:07 bone daddy

Saturday, January 09, 2010

Labels: atheism, local flavor

15:03 cdogzilla

Thursday, December 10, 2009

ARTICLE VI:
"Sec. 8. Disqualifications for office.

The following persons shall be disqualified for office:

First, any person who shall deny the being of Almighty God."

Not that I was planning on it or anything but still ... it would've been nice to think I could run for public office in NC if I wanted to.  I guess I'm lucky they let me vote.

Labels: atheism, local flavor

22:43 cdogzilla

Friday, October 23, 2009

Hooker Day Parade Canceled - Cityline | Hartford News: If you're not a Nutmegger, it's probably not what you think. More about Thomas Hooker at wikipedia...

Labels: history, local flavor

16:04 cdogzilla

Monday, October 12, 2009

Labels: local flavor

19:20 cdogzilla

Thursday, October 08, 2009

Raleigh is America’s Smartest City | New Raleigh
: Word.

Labels: local flavor

12:50 cdogzilla

Monday, September 28, 2009

'Music festival's atheist ties stirring controversy' by wistv.com - RichardDawkins.net: Least controversial "controversy" I've ever seen.

Labels: atheism, local flavor, music

18:20 cdogzilla

Friday, September 25, 2009

4. Nuclear Waste Pools in North Carolina | Project Censored: Errrr, I don't like this at all.

Labels: local flavor

21:28 cdogzilla

Friday, September 18, 2009

Girl, 6, helps mom give birth - FUQUAY-VARINA, N.C., Sept. 17 - UPI.com: "Johnson, a nurse at Raleigh's Tammy Lynn Center, said Diyana helped her deliver baby Madisyn before emergency crews arrived. Johnson and her father, Torris Jones, praised the 6-year-old for her help and bravery during the incident.

'I just thought that was awesome,' Jones said. 'She said, 'I almost cried when my mama was screaming. You told me to be a big girl, and I was a big girl.''"

Labels: local flavor

23:33 cdogzilla

Tuesday, September 15, 2009

Barrel Monster at SparkCon | New Raleigh:

"Guerrilla Artist, Joe Carnevale, is working on a new Barrel Monster for SPARKcon. The new project is expected to be a “Seventeen foot tall dinosaur.” Look for it at the corner of Hargett and Fayetteville Streets."

Barrel Monster looks a little less ominous in the light of day.

Labels: local flavor

23:22 cdogzilla

Friday, September 04, 2009

The metal does the talking - Lifestyles - News & Observer: Interesting article that'll prompt me to drive by and check it out. Wish a photo was included in the article though. Google Street View is probably a bit out of date and not exactly easy to make out.

Labels: local flavor

17:28 cdogzilla

Tuesday, September 01, 2009

Paper carrier gets impaled on fence :: WRAL.com: "'On a scale from one to 10 – 10 being the worst pain – it was about a 10,' he said. 'Blood just kept running out of that the whole time I was there.'"
----------------
Now playing on YouTube: The Fall - Everything Hurtz
via FoxyTunes

Labels: local flavor

22:28 cdogzilla

Saturday, August 29, 2009

12 weird sci-fi statues you can buy for your garden: "Your typical garden gnome might be good enough for some people, but not for those of us here at SCI FI Wire. We need something a little more exciting on our lawns, something that makes more of a statement, something a bit more ... well ... sci-fi!

So when we saw the cement Yodas (above) that a savvy shopper spotted for sale this week in Raleigh, N.C., we realized just what we needed to liven up the yard. Here are some dinosaur, zombie and alien sculptures that will have you forgetting about bird baths forever."

----------------
Now playing: Misfits - The Haunting
via FoxyTunes

Labels: local flavor, sci-fi

10:44 cdogzilla

Thursday, August 20, 2009

Here's a great E.J. Dionne Jr. column Leave the Guns at Home. I'm glad someone finally had the courage to point this out:

The simple fact is that an armed citizenry is not the basis for our freedoms. Our freedoms rest on a moral consensus, enshrined in law, that in a democratic republic we work out our differences through reasoned, and sometimes raucous, argument. Free elections and open debate are not rooted in violence or the threat of violence. They are precisely the alternative to violence, and guns have no place in them.

I'm kind of sick of hearing from people who believe that their firearm collection ensures my freedom. Speaking of loudmouths, I should link to this letter to the editor from someone who shares E.J.'s fine last name, if not the patience he demonstrates in his writing.

Labels: Conservative Goons, local flavor, Obama

14:50 bone daddy

Saturday, August 15, 2009

Google Map of the Architecture of Brooklyn:
"Brooklyn Typology

Brooklyn Typology is an investigation of the New York borough's population and urban form. The project consists of 2,100 photographs taken in a sample of blockgroups in Brooklyn, plus detailed census, historical, and typological data about the residential and housing in the area. Together, the interlinked photographs and data form a portrait of the urban fabric of Brooklyn.

The project, by Neil Freeman, is both a planning and an art project. Here's what he has to say about the project,

'I gathered census demographics for each block group, historical information on Brooklyn’s development, and made maps to guide me. Overall, this looked very much like the early analysis phases of a planning project.

Soon, I was riding my bike around the borough, visiting each site and photographing it in turn. I wanted to explore the city, visit every neighborhood, and see it from ground level. Once the photography was completed, the photographs and data were edited, collated, and organized onto the website.'

It is possible to browse a representative selection of the photographs directly from a Google Map of Brooklyn. Each map marker on the map opens to reveal a photograph of the type of building in that block, information about the population density and details about that neighbourhood.

Via: Digital Urban & Urban Omnibus"

Labels: local flavor

12:06 cdogzilla

Tuesday, July 28, 2009

The Associated Press: Conflicting portrait of NC terror suspect emerges

Labels: local flavor

20:07 cdogzilla

Thursday, July 02, 2009

Arrest Made In Connection With East Hartford Shooting - Courant.com: East Hartford, so much to answer for. The old hometown keeps making the news for all the wrong reasons. Murder on Tuesday followed up by a murder on Wednesday at the vigil for Tuesday's victim.

Labels: crime, local flavor

20:27 cdogzilla

Wednesday, July 01, 2009

Barclay Villa: We went to wedding at the beautiful Barclay Villa a few weeks ago. They quote a bit from Frederick Law Olmstead, who stayed there in the 1850s on their website, but they refer to the book they took the quote from as "Cotton Kingdom". When I tried to find a Google Books clip I was stumped at first, then found the text in "A Journey to the Seaboard Slave States in the Years 1853-1854".

If you check out the website, look for the Stop Audio link at the bottom right.

Labels: history, local flavor

22:24 cdogzilla

Mysterious 'sewer creature' sparks curiosity :: WRAL.com

Shared via AddThis

Labels: cryptozoology, local flavor

20:52 cdogzilla

Friday, June 26, 2009

RI closer to changing state name over slavery - Yahoo! News: I lived in RI for eight or so years and never had a clue its full name is "State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations."

Labels: local flavor

18:40 cdogzilla

Saturday, May 30, 2009

You Want the Hurtline? You Can't Handle the Hurtline!: Marcari, Russotto, Spencer & Balaban -- Don Marcari was the JAG lawyer who was the basis of the Tom Cruise character in A Few Good Men. He does personal injury law here in NC. If your denture cream gave you zinc poisoning, he will pound tables and stare down even the most Jack Nicholson-y of Denture Cream Defense Lawyers on your behalf.

Labels: local flavor, movies

15:41 cdogzilla

Friday, May 15, 2009

Concord Waterpark - Great Wolf Resorts - Indoor Water Park Resort: That's where the C-Dog family will be headed this weekend in advance of the kids' birthday. Blake is fascinated by statues; I expect to hear a great deal about how, "Woof-Dog statue is not moving!" the days we are out there. And, more than likely, for a long time after.

Labels: local flavor

12:47 cdogzilla

Thursday, May 07, 2009

raleighskyline.com video :: Supercell/wall cloud over downtown Raleigh on May 5, 2009

Labels: local flavor, youtube goodness

12:22 cdogzilla

Monday, April 20, 2009

The Mitchell Blog » Solar Panel Installation is Happening NOW at The Mitchell in Downtown Fuquay-Varina: "The new roof on The Mitchell building has been done for a couple of weeks now. But if you’ve been in downtown Fuquay-Varina lately, you have likely seen more activity up there. Baker Roofing is now installing solar panels!! These are not typical solar panels that you’ve seen mounted on racks, rather these are 1/4? thick x 18? wide x 72? long flexible panels (manufactured by Uni-Solar) that adhere to the top of the roof. They are called BIPV’s or Building Integrated Photovoltaics and are flexible laminates that adhere to the barrel shape of the roof. Eighty of these panels are being laid side by side and will combine to capture 15kwH annually."

This is just down the road from Stick Boy, our local bakery and Saturday morning post-library hang out. So far the only tenant is a wine bar with some kind of wacky automated tasting technology. The amount of sun we get down here, and the intensity of it, makes me wonder if similar panels would work on our house.

Labels: local flavor

20:35 cdogzilla

Sunday, February 15, 2009

The Last Hustler

Over his long and, more importantly, profitable career, John "Fast Jack" Farrell has lived by two rules: Get the money and get out alive.

The first has always been a cinch, easy as breathing for a knock-around kid from Manchester [CT] who became, arguably, the best card and dice hustler on two continents.

And he's still around. That proves he hasn't missed yet on the second rule, even if there have been close moments.

He's been chased by a mob of bat-swinging highway workers. He has been gouged, slashed, stripped, beaten, drugged, dumped in the snow and shot at. He once was warned, as he prepared to beat a mob dice game in Queens, that a "leak" — a slip of his crooked dice — could leave him hanging from a hook in a meat locker. He walked away four hours later, buzzed on adrenaline and thousands of dollars ahead.

There's a movie in the works.

Labels: crime, local flavor

09:55 cdogzilla

Saturday, November 29, 2008

Hope everyone had a pleasant Thanksgiving. It's been a blast here in the c-dog household. Even though it was just us this year, we did the whole turkey-potatoes-stuffing-yams-cranberry relish spread ... first time either the missus or I had attempted it instead of just fixing a side dish to bring to a relative's. Came out great, if I do say. The turkey was moist and flavorful and, thanks to my America's Test Kitchen cookbook, I made the best mashed potatoes I've ever eaten.

With some time off I've been able to catch up on watching my Dr. Who commentaries. Fun stuff. Listening to the actors cop to their acting mistakes, tease one another, point out when poor Matthew (Adric) Waterhouse was hungover and puking off-camera, etc. is great fun. (Learned just now via the wikipedia link that Mr. Waterhouse has lived in Connecticut since 1998. Bit of local flavor there. Couldn't verify with whitepages.com though, the one Matthew Waterhouse in CT is 35-39 yrs old, so too young to be our Adric.)

Labels: doctor who, local flavor

15:39 cdogzilla

Friday, October 10, 2008

Yah Us!
This just in: Connecticut Supreme Court rules that gay marriage is constitutional. For those of you keeping score at home, we finished third in the fifty state race to common sense.

Labels: local flavor

17:18 bone daddy

Friday, June 27, 2008

Friday X-Posting
Items recently shared on my Google Reader page include:

• A note about the baptist church picket George "the profane atheist" Carlin's funeral via the New Humanist.
• A reminder that Angle Season 1 is now on Hulu.com.
• A note about the Hartford Courant (America's oldest continuously published daily paper) cutting newsroom staff and number of pages devoted to news.
• A clip about the guy from the underappreciated "New Amsterdam" moving on to a new show that is apparently going to be a series of something's-gone-wrong-on-the-holodeck episodes of TNG via Sci-Fi News.
• And a nice little clip of one of Obama's advisors reducing Laura Ingraham to a demented harpy. Well, even more of a demented harpy than she normally is via News Hounds.

And on a personal note, I've got a bunch of pictures up at flickr of our day trip to Carver, MA where the littl'uns got to meet their favorite train.

Labels: google, local flavor

09:09 cdogzilla

Thursday, June 19, 2008

Nutmeg News
The All-Bad Edition
So everyone has probably seen the video of the hit and run in Hartford of Angel Torres. If you type "Hartford" into YouTube search, about four of the suggestions lead you to it. Nothing else you'd want to see in Hartford, I guess. Or you probably saw it on your local news. (So no, I don't feel like linking to it.) What's shocking is after two cars race into the wrong lane and one of them hits the 78 year old nobody does much of anything for forty seconds or so. None of the bystanders reach him and not one of the ten passing cars stop. Of course it's the existence of video that turned Hartford into the latest example of man's inhumanity to man.

Colin McEnroe, as usual, has the thing worth reading about this. Sometimes, we want to believe the worst about ourselves. Or hey, not ourselves, we're good people. I'm talking the worst about people who live in cities. There's a reason the legend of Kitty Genovese (referenced by Colin) has lasted for so long. Ånd if you think none of this has anything to do with race, you're welcome to visit the Hartford Courant's reader forums, which have gotten pretty ugly, even by Internet standards. So ugly that Mayor Perez has complained to the Courant. Meanwhile, the police chief has complained about our "toxic relationship with ourselves." Okay guys, maybe you could do something better with your time, like catch a hit and run driver or something.

I won't excuse the people in the video who do nothing except to point out that four people called 911 within a minute, a fact being dropped from almost all reports.

Forgive me for thinking this is mostly an excuse to call blacks and Hispanics "sub-human" and "savages." I don't remember this rhetoric being quite this heated for the college students responsible for the fatal hit and run of a 19 year old. Heck, the parents chipped in after the fact to help cover it up so you have some man's inhumanity to man there too and for longer than 40 seconds.

Meanwhile, the Mark Twain House and Museum is in financial trouble, despite some recent state grant help. The Twain house is much more than just a house he happened to live in. Twain designed it and the house remains imbued with his personality and life story. It's a literary and architectural landmark. I've taken the tour three times now and each one was different (except for the "tainted money" line, which was included on all three). Most of the trouble comes from a visitor's center built a few years ago. It is impressive, but seems in size and design better suited to a convention center and it's probably a monster to heat, even in reasonable times.

There are also layoffs and news page reductions coming at the Hartford Courant, which does not currently exactly overflow with news coverage.

Also, what the Courant calls "possibly the state's single most recognizable product" (Hey, not an insurance form!), the United Technology spacesuit, will now be made in Texas by a deep sea company with no space experience. Thanks for forty years of problem-free performance, too bad you HQ in a blue state. At least the company that won the bid isn't named Halliburton Space & Sea.

Also making us sad around here is the news that UConn recruit and national player of the year Elena Delle Donne has left the summer program after two days to return home. I take the statements at face value that this has nothing to do with UConn or her teammates. I'd guess that if she plays basketball it will probably be for UConn. While it would be a shame for someone so talented to give up the sport, you just have to wish her the best and hope things work out for her.

Meanwhile, Dodd looked like he wouldn't be a VP candidate, now maybe he will be. I like Dodd and he certainly didn't get a chance to shaw what a good campaigner he can be during his bid, still I'm not sure what he adds politically to the Obama ticket. Connecticut is certainly in Obama's column and Dodd is nothing if not a Beltway insider. Still, I think he'd be a far better campaigner than the miserable performance turned in by our other senator in 2000. I was rooting for Webb, but that's not to be.

I will be posting even less than usual around here because I'm going on vacation for the week. Any wonder why?

Labels: Books, crime, local flavor, Obama, sports, uconn

23:11 bone daddy

Monday, May 26, 2008

Happy Memorial Day to all!
What you're looking at is the flyover of our parade by Chinook helicopters. We used to have A-10s do it, but since Connecticut Air National Guard no longer keeps the A-10s, the helicopters were called in. The A-10s were cooler, to tell the truth.

Labels: local flavor

20:22 bone daddy

Thursday, May 15, 2008

My Kinda Show

If I went, I would get soooooo drunk. :)~

Labels: local flavor, music, shadowboner

14:30 cdogzilla

Friday, April 11, 2008

Good Ol' EHHS
The former stomping grounds of several Cryptonauts only shows up in my news feed when:
(1) Sexual Assault charges lead to the dismissal of faculty member,
(2) the basketball team (or Doug Wiggins) either does well or some current or former player gets in trouble (eg. Doug Wiggins), or
(3) the high school receives a bomb threat.

Like today apparently.

Labels: local flavor

16:05 cdogzilla

Sunday, February 03, 2008

Something Happening Here
When Rep. Rosa DeLauro endorsed Barack Obama for President, she did it in front of her house that has an entrance hall filled with pictures of Bill and Hillary Clinton. DeLauro's husband is Stanley Greenberg, Bill Clinton's longtime pollster. I don't read more into DeLauro's endorsement than what she says,

"We all were challenged to engage and serve our country by John Kennedy. That is my starting point," DeLauro said. She believes Obama is now the charismatic figure inspiring the young to register for the first time. "This is a once-in-a-lifetime moment, and I felt compelled to join."

Still, she travels quite a bit of personal distance to reach that conclusion.

Labels: 2008, local flavor, Obama

11:05 bone daddy

New England, Where We're Slow to Accept New England
The Land of Steady Habits took a long time to embrace the Patriots over the New York Giants. I like that the article also points out that Connecticut's location breeds combo fans that seem strange to outsiders. Many Giants fans who are also Red Sox fans. And those like me, who root for the Yankees and the Patriots. I was nine or so when I picked the Patriots as my favorite team. There were so few Patriots fans around (none) I had no idea they were also the "local" team. I hadn't quite figured out that I lived in the same New England. They happened to win the game I was watching when it was time to pick a favorite team and - more importantly - they wore red. It all worked out.

Labels: local flavor, sports, TV

10:55 bone daddy

Sunday, January 27, 2008

Someone figured out that exactly halfway between Foxborough and the Meadowlands lies my town of Durham, CT. (Go Google Earth.) HBO came to town yesterday to film a Patriots/Giants rally on the town green. When they air this, you can expect to hear the phrase "sleepy little town" at the beginning, middle and somewhere towards the end. I do take issue with the woman in the video who says this is the biggest thing to happen in Durham in a decade. I mean, that crowd wouldn't even make a decent morning line at the Durham Fair giant donut stand.

I remember way back in the day, I just about never saw another Patriots fan. Just as well, considering how ugly the old logo was. The fan base grew in the 90s. Toss in the bandwagon of the last few years with the sagging fortune of the Giants over the last few years and it is pretty much an even split around here.

Labels: local flavor, sports, TV

21:33 bone daddy

Saturday, October 20, 2007

Mrs. BoneDaddy had already seen these by the time I passed it along to her, but some of you might enjoy this photo collection of the World's Most Beautiful Libraries. A little too European and cathedral-ly for my tastes - I figured Yale's Beinecke was a lock - but some undeniably beautiful rooms in there.

Labels: Books, Lists, local flavor

14:13 bone daddy

Wednesday, May 30, 2007

I met a guy at the barber shop last night, an older gentleman, who (as the discussion in the shop made it's way to moneymaking schemes and pyramids) claimed to be Charles Ponzi's nephew. Yeah, that Ponzi, of Ponzi Scheme fame. Frankie the Barber is quite a character in his own right, and I hear a bunch of interesting stories every time I'm in there among the North End's Italian element. Fioremonkey's people. I keep going back as much for the atmosphere as the convenience of having a barber who knows what I want so I can just sit down without having to try to describe a haircut ... not to mention he only charges $10. Anyways, in the course of learning way more than I probably needed to about Frankie's credit situation, past bankruptcy, gambling problems, battles with drug addiction, etc. the guy next me perked up when Frankie started giving his pitch on some miracle drug he and some of his hustler buddies were peddling.

I got the whole story of how this product has been mentioned on Oprah, how Papelbon and Clemens are selling it, how it helped his buddy recover from cancer, how it battles free radicals in your body and is (ostensibly) the "number one food source" in the world -- I let that last bit go, having no idea what that could possibly mean. I couldn't catch the name of this wonderful snake oil pill ... Motiv8, or something like that? So as Frankie's giving the pitch and describing how you get involved in selling it and recruiting other sellers to work under you, this guy cautions Frankie how you don't want to get involved in these pyramids because his uncle invented them and they're a scam. I'm sitting there thinking, "What? You're going to tell us now you're uncle was Charles Ponzi?" and no sooner do I think it than he says, "my Uncle Charlie screwed a lot of people, people in my family, with his stamp scam."

He then described how Ponzi tried to take over the Hanover Bank and outlined roughly what's outlined in the Wikipedia article linked above. I didn't press him for names and dates or anything, but I think he really was Ponzi's nephew. Not exactly a brush with fame, but I thought it was kind of cool anyways. Mildly relevant given Cianci's release into halfway house today. It's Italian Heritage Day here at TC.

Labels: crime, local flavor, six degrees of separation

10:39 cdogzilla