Joe's Place

Do you believe this? Yes it is officially Spring here in these parts of Missouri, even if it doesn’t look like it. It was 80°F just three days ago.

Enough of this already, we’re supposed to be playing golf by now.

Does your day start like this? My lovely wife had forwarded me an email with this headline and image. It had to do with coffee so I was instantly curious.

“FIND THE MAN IN THE COFFEE BEANS”

The email states at the beginning that it is the “Brain Exercise for the Day.” I like brain teasers, so this is worth doing.

The email challenges you to look at the image and find the man somewhere in the image. Seems simple enough. So I look and look and look and about ten seconds later I spot the guy. Sweet, found him. So far so good. Below the image the email stated the following:

OK, that’s cool, my right brain is normal, I think to myself. Thanks Honey for the interersting little brain teaser and ego booster to start the day. That should have been the end of it, I should have taken it for what is was meant to be and moved on to the next email. But you know what happened. I couldn’t just leave it at that. Curiosity and skepticism got to me.

I checked snopes.com and truthorfiction.com to see if this scientific claim was true. Snopes had nothing on it and TruthorFiction stated that it was unproven. Ah ha I say, I had good reason to be skeptical of it. Did I stop there though? No, I was still curious.

I went to Google. Put this exact phrase, “man in the coffee beans” into the search box and boom, 511,000 hits. Amazing! And even more surprising there were 9,490 hits on images with that exact phrase. And in blogs, Google reported “about 9,990 results.” Are you kidding me? (So much for thinking that my blog had original content.)

No wonder I can’t ever get through my email.

The other day my lovely wife (who by the way IS the loveliest woman on the planet) asked me about an email that she received as to whether it was one of those internet hoaxes, frauds or rumors or was it in fact real. (My lovely wife has in fact annointed me as the world’s top cynic and that I should know these things)

The truth be known (pun intended) I am indeed extremely cynical, but I don’t know everything and require assistance occasionally. So I have compiled some internet sources with which I can usually perform quick research with a reasonable degree of certainty. And for all of you professional news writers and journalists out there who will point out that internet sources are largely unreliable, I will agree with you, particularly as it pertains to the pure journalistic method. But we’re talking here about email and people and entertainment and speedy answers etc.

So it’s in that vain that I thought I’d share with you a few of my trusty, bookmarked sites that I use to check on these kinds of things.

• Snopes.com
• Truthorfiction.com
• Scambusters.org
• Urban Legends Page at About.com

I’m sure that there’s plenty more, but these usually get the job done for me. Some of these are more straightforward as to how to perform the actual research, but they at least all have a search function to let you dig into their information database.

And as an extra bonus to you, I am also providing this link to a great post on another blog detailing some of the most entertaining internet and email hoaxes of the past few years. Good stuff here. We are amazingly gullible!

So I hope this information will be useful to you the next time that you’re tempted to click the “forward” button to something that sounds a little too bizarre or believable. Cynics Unite!

OK, I know I’m a little weird, but I’m hoping this same thing happens to you too. Do you ever get up in the morning and some obscure song from your distant past comes to mind and you just can’t get it out of there? Such was the case this morning and it was driving me nuts.

Way back in my early teens, like in the early seventies, I remember this crazy little song about pollution. It wasn’t performed by anyone mainstream, it was a political satire to increase people’s awareness of the purported mess that we were making of the environment. (Most of you know that I’m not an environmentalist whack-o, so please don’t misinterpret my motive here.)

Until I googled it a little earlier, I couldn’t remember who sang it, but it had very catchy lyrics, obviously, since they have stayed with me to this day.  Isn’t it freaky how things you try to remember escape you and other things come to mind that you’re not trying to remember? Anyway, once I sorted through the different Google search results to get the artist’s name, I then looked him up on YouTube and sure enough, a number of people have uploaded videos of the song being performed on TV somewhere.

The artist, Tom Lehrer, was a pretty accomplished composer and had written many parodies of society in the 1960′s and 1970′s. Strangely he was a professor of mathematics at the same time and eventually returned to full-time teaching after he retired from performing.

He performs the song wearing the classic black suit, white shirt with a skinny black tie that beckons memories of the Beatles, and other musicians from that era. And after watching the video I was reminded at how those times seemed so complicated to me back then. It’s amazing how your perspective of the world and events changes.

So anyway now that I’ve got you all juiced up for this thing, I present it here only for nostalgia and entertainment value. I don’t necessarily agree with the message.

Pollution Song

Do any of you remember it?

I was born and lived my first twelve years of life in North St. Louis County and then returned here with my own  family many years later and have lived the last twenty-three years here. So while I haven’t lived here my whole life, I have certainly spent a major portion of my life here. I say that to say that in the span of all that time, winters here are typically very tolerable and in most cases just a tiny speed bump between fall and spring. But ever since the beginning of December, the winter season has really made its presence felt.

I’m no expert in meterology but in my very unofficial opinion, seems like we’re on the way to having an unusually cold and snowy winter in the great gateway to the west. Part of my theory for this (which admittedly is loosely based in science) is a simple observation. Take for example the following photograph:

This is a view of our back deck after a nice 9″ snow a little before sunrise on January 20, 2011. Yeah a 9″ snow is a bit unusual for this area, I think the last one that we had like that was in March or April 2009. So that in itself is nothing out of the ordinary but what I find to be a little unusual, and the basis for my theory, is evidenced in the next photo:

This is our back deck again photographed about 50 hours later. Anyone that has ever lived in this area will know that it is very unusual to still have the majority of  that snow still here. We can get some crazy snow and ice in the St. Louis area, but if you give the elements a chance to adjust like they usually do, conditions improve.

OK, so this isn’t exactly a huge revelation or even newsworthy, but it’s all that came to mind this morning as I sat here with my lovely cup of freshly-brewed Starbucks Sumatra, while watching the forecast for tomorrow — another 3″-5″ of snow predicted! I just love it.

When waking up to snow on Christmas morning, the world just seems at peace. Having family spend the morning with you is priceless. From the Renaud household we wish you and yours a blessed Christmas. May the real reason for our celebration — Jesus– resonate with you today and every day.

This video from CBS News is way too cool and… so totally male. Females are allowed to view, but please be warned that it will not stimulate the right side of your brains. (Please forgive me for CBS’S short commercial at the beginning.)

Anvils Fall from Sky – CBS Evening News

Isn’t that awesome? Let’s think about the possibilities here. Toilet shooting?

It’s not exactly news that GM has been closing plants and has been downsizing itself the past few years. But you know that things are really tough when the former world’s #1 vehicle builder asks its 37-year service icon to turn in his walking papers too. Yes that’s right. According to the LA Times on Tuesday 11/9, Mr. Goodwrench has been asked to turn in his tool box.

So if you see a kindly old gentlemen on your street corner that looks like the man in the photo below, give him a couple bucks. It may take him a while to get hired somewhere.

Last night’s switch to Daylight Savings Time here in the U.S. came and went without a hitch. And I suppose it left me desiring change too because after several years I’m giving the title my blog a new change and a different header image too.

The old blog title, “Keep it in the Fairway,” I’ve used since I started blogging (October 8, 2006). That post and others sort of implied that the blog would have an emphasis on playing golf. Over the years I’ve had a number of folks visit this blog and even subscribe to tweets from this blog based on the their interest in the sport. But admittedly, the number of posts on golf over the years is fairly small. And while golf is still one of my passions, it certainly is not the only one. So I felt a change in the title was in order to better reflect the content of my posts.

The new header image still reflects one of my passions. The picture is of a lonely little gravel beach located on the Black River in the upper end of Clearwater Lake in Southeast Missouri. And oh yeah, if you look real close, you’ll see me sitting in a rocking chair on that gravel beach. And the significance of all of this? I’m not really sure, but my mind certainly works in ways that even I don’t understand.

In the big picture of life it’s not a real big deal but it’s still a change nonetheless. So for those of you visiting this blog over the years, I thought that you might like to have an explanation. Thanks for reading.

It’s not very often that I compliment Apple. Admittedly, Steve Jobs and Apple have long been considered masters at marketing especially when it comes to video commercials.  (Who can forget the Super Bowl ad for the introduction of the new Macintosh?) And while Apple’s marvelous advertising campaigns haven’t exactly managed to separate me from very much of my money in the past, after watching a recent video at Apple.com that may be changing soon.

The simple reason for this is that Apple’s good taste in video has now risen to new heights for me. You see, my lovely and very beautiful starlet wife was featured in a recent Apple spot presented on their website, “iPad in Business Profiles.” O.K., well technically she wasn’t the featured actress and actually she only appeared in a couple of frames in the video. But nonetheless she was still in the video. I’m so very proud of her.

Now, before you click that hyperlink to view it, I need to warn you that the whole video is pretty long and her couple of frames are easy to miss. So like the loyal, loving and supporting husband that I am, I did a little video editing and provided the clips below to help you get right to them.

Video Clip #1 – This is the best clip of her and it certainly will be the one that the gets her noticed by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. That’s my girl!

Video Clip #2 – Admittedly, you have to look real close to see her, but trust me it’s her in the background.

Yes, Apple’s marketing is quite lovely. As for me buying an iPad — well, not just yet.