Beware of the Flying Water Heater

First off, I want to take the time to declare that I am in no way, shape or form a "tree hugger". I hunt. I drive one of these...

However, I do care about the environment. I don't understand the US public's aversion to diesel fueled vehicles (do you know that if I lived in Europe that I could get a 3.0 liter diesel engine to power my Jeep that puts out 300 horse and gets 30+ miles to the gallon?) However my biggest gripe is a little known "holiday" that is celebrated for one week in the Fargo-Moorhead area every spring. It's called "Clean Up Week". Basically, you're allowed to throw all sorts of shit out on to your curb and you just let it sit there until the city comes and picks it up. Apparently, it's your oppurtunity to get rid of unwanted and oversized items, but in this day and age you would think a city on the grow such as this area would definitly revisit such a practice.

To start off, garbage collection in the city really has few rules. Basically, as long as you make sure that no bag of trash you throw out weighs more than 40 pounds (because they still have a guy that physically throws all your trash in the truck), you can throw out as much crap as you want 51 weeks of the year. On top of this, the city charges extra for curbside recycling...basically discouraging anyone to do it. My neighbors are a retired couple and on a week to week basis there are as many as a dozen 30 gallon trash bags out in front of their house on trash day every week. I lived with 3 other guys and we never exceded our 60 gallon container when I lived in the city (well, we probably did tip the scales when it came to the volume of recyclable cans and bottles that left our place).

So not only does the city do nothing to encourage people to limit the amount of trash dumped in the city landfill, but for one week out of the year, they expect you to throw in more. In defense of cleanup week, the number of "scavengers" in town explodes. I'm sure there is a lot of discarded items (typically furniture) that finds its way into many college apartments around town. I remember my last year at NDSU. We basically just brought our entire furnishings out to the curb on cleanup week and they disappeared well before the trashman showed up.

To give you an idea of what cleanup week looks like, check these out...

I've left out one thing. North Dakota is also well known for the amount of wind we have here. Never fail, clean up week ends up during one of the windiest weeks of the year. Have you ever had to dodge a junked water heater as it rolled down the street? I have. I encourage you to learn more about this pathetic holiday. We've even given it an entire website...

http://www.cleanupweek.com

Step Away From the Brillo Pad

To be perfectly honest, I can't really say that I've had all too much happening that was bloggable. There might be, but until I confirm what really happened a couple of weeks ago in St. Cloud...everything is just an unsubstantiated rumor.

Back at http://spaces.msn.com/sweeneyland/ one of the most popular posts was my rant about Menards. After spending several days taping, sanding and texturing this weekend, I decided to just rent a movie and spend the last few hours of my weekend just relaxing. I settled on Peter Jackson's new "King Kong" remake, which ended up bringing up some Menard's like rage.


Remember back to the golden age of video rental? Let's say you ran down to your local Blockbuster (or down to the local gas station for us hicks who grew up out in the middle of nowhere) and rented a film that had come out on video a couple of years before. Odds are that the cardboard cover on the shelf was quite a bit faded and you knew the quality of the tape was going to be a crapshoot and you might experience some garbled soundtrack, some iffy picture in places. That was cool though, odds are you were paying like 79 cents unless you forgot to rewind it. If some moron ruined the tape, it was pretty obvious and they pulled it off the shelf and threw it away.

We've progressed as a society. We now have DVD. Your player will never destroy a DVD. The quality of audio and video will never degrade because you felt the need to watch Braveheart every Sunday afternoon for a year.

Now all we need to worry about is handing over your $3 for your silver disc, putting it in your DVD player and then watching 20 minutes of the movie. At that point, you might start to see some nasty stuff happen. Weird pixelation, the voice track is off the video track by a short time, loud screaching digital noises, blank screen...and if you're lucky enough...all of the sudden your DVD player might just suddenly eject the DVD.

The best part of this entire experience is that this will rarely happen in any mundane or uneventful parts of your movie. This will always happen right in the middle of the action. Even better for me is that since I use a DLP Projector in my basement with little ambient light in the room, I have to fumble around for like 5 minutes trying to turn on lights to find out what went wrong.

The worst part is always removing that DVD from the player. I guess I never look when I put it in to see what sort of condition it is in. How hard is it? They send you these neat little cases. You take it out, put it in the DVD player...and then when you take it out you put it back into the case. Apparently, some of you out there decide to take either a brillo pad or steel wool to it before putting it back into the case. Some of you insist on spraying 'mystery liquid' on DVDs before returning them. So in defense, I should let you all know that there is no need to try and sterilize these discs (if that is what you're trying to do). In one instance, it looked like there was a bike tire tread across the edge of a movie. Why?

Put down the brillo pad. Stay away from my DVD collection.