Tomorrow begins the first day of the last month in which no games will be played in the NFL. Preseason games begin early in August. The regular season is still pretty far off, as evidenced by the merciless javascript countdown timer.

What's more annoying in your cube farm: Bad music on speakers, or bad music being played so loudly through headphones that you can hear it in all its tinny glory four cubes away?

I finally got around to doing some work on a web page for the Kansas City Bridge Studio. My first design was this one, but Bex commented that I probably didn't need two sidebars, so I tried it this way. The owner is looking it over and deciding what else he wants on there.

Does anybody know of any good open-source web calendar apps out there? I don't think it would be difficult to write my own, but there has to be something out there I can just plug in. I just need something where I can enter events and have them displayed on a calendar that lets you navigate one month at a time. Maybe I'll just use something like this.

And heck, if Lee doesn't like what I did with it, I just replace KC Bridge Studio with Gimpysoft, and viola... Free blog redesign.

Phillip Seymour Hoffman in Mission: Impossible III?

Huh?

Be sure to read this long ass article on Suck.com when you have a chance.

Dang, and speaking of the former Sucksters, I finally found Chris Bray, the Suckster known as Ambrose Beers, and the guy who joined the army so he could better report on military matters.

Well, it would be a good thing that I had found where he was writing now if he wasn't on his way to Iraq. Well, I suppose I can always read his archives.

(found at Metafilter)

Has anybody else noticed the string of fairly large business closings over here in Johnson county? First Ultimate Electronics shut its doors. I suppose that wasn't really a shock. Did it really make sense to put an Ultimate Electronics across the street from both a Best Buy and a Circuit City?

Then we lost our Expo. That one kind of hurt a bit. I never did a whole lot of shopping at Expo, but I did get some towel bars and bathroom hardware there when I remodeled my bathroom. Plus, it was fun to look at all the cool kitchen stuff that I'm not going to be able to afford for a long, long time.

Just this week I noticed that Organized Living is going out of business. We stopped in last night, and even at 20% off their stuff is still too damn expensive.

So what's going on here? Are the constant Sprint layoffs finally starting to have an effect on our local economy? Are there no longer sufficient numbers of upper-middle-class folks here to support stores that sell overpriced crap? I think that this does not bode well for our local economy, and the Sprint-Nextel merger layoffs haven't even arrived yet.

Now that is a cat-lover.

Let's see: What are my main post topics?

Sunday Liquor Sales? We've got 'em. Nothing going on there.

Former Kids In The Hall Updates? Well, I am sort of interested in seeing Sky High since Dave Foley and Kevin McDonald seem to have somewhat prominent parts. (Not to mention Bruce Campbell!)

We did get the NewsRadio DVD, and it was worth the wait. There are commentaries for nearly every episode from almost all the actors, from writers, and a very interesting one in which series creator Paul Simms gets a bit confrontational with the former president of NBC about why the show was moved around so much. The former NBC president half-apologizes, but it was kind of a cool moment. The cast commentaries are some of the best, though, particularly any with Dave Foley.

Terry Gilliam? Well there, there is some news. The Brothers Grimm should have been out last year, but was pushed back for some reason. It has a release date of August 26, only a few months away at this point. In addition to that, he's pretty much done with Tideland and expects a fall release. So after a long drought since 1998's Fear & Loathing In Las Vegas, it looks like we'll get not one but two Terry Gilliam pictures in the space of a few months. Awesome. Awesome.

Bridge? Bah. After taking first last week, we took second to last this week. I spent some time last night going over the hands and still don't see how we did so badly on the boards we got 0's on. There was one board where we did well, but the board was scored wrong, so we were awarded a -180 instead of the +180 we actually got. That still doesn't entirely explain why we did so poorly, but I did find a few things I can discuss with partner before next Tuesday's game.

Music? I did go to Wakarusa last weekend. Sound Tribe Sector 9 pulled out just before the festival, and as expected I wasn't able to stay up until 2:30AM to see Galactic, but I did get to see Wilco, Particle (twice), the Mark Bilyeu Band, and The Gourds (made it just in time for Gin & Juice, but missed most of the rest of their set). I saw a few bands I hadn't seen before, some OK, but a few that I'd go back to see sometime. I kind of liked Shanti Groove, and really liked Calexico (other than the moment where the lead singer said "This is a song about suburban sprawl." Puke.) Best New Band award definitely goes to Pnuma, one of those live trance/drum-n-bass bands that are starting to show up these days. (Unfortunately, the also win Worst New Band Website.) They're all just kids, but they were really good, and they had the whole crowd dancing.

The Packers: Not much to report here. There doesn't seem to be any news about Javon Walker's holdout. Favre showed up at the end of the minicamp in much better shape than he's been in in a while. He's apparently been working out with a personal trainer in the offseason. Will this help things? I'm still convinced that the problems Favre has are more mental than physical. It doesn't seem like he makes throws that don't go where he wants them to go, but instead makes throws that he shouldn't have made at all. (For example, when he's in front of the LOS.) Everything I read seems to say that Aaron Rogers is going about things in the right way, and if he can learn under Brett for a few years, things might not be horrible under Rogers.

Still, even the preseason is further down the road. In a few weeks I'll probably send out an email so we can get started organizing this season's fantasy league. Tonight Basketball is over, so I'd think we'll start to get more pre-season football talk on the sports stations.

OK, I think those are all the topics. Guess I don't have to post for another week or so.

Wow! My representative Dennis Moore actually had the balls to vote against the idiotic anti flag-burning amendment.

More surprisingly, the folks at Fire Dennis Moore haven't yet jumped on this as more evidence that Dennis Moore is out of touch with blah blah blah...

If you don't make it out to The Onion much anymore, make sure you make it out there this week for their 300th Anniversary Issue. (There's sound on this one.)

Gurney commented on having wanted to learn bridge, and I was writing him a response when it turned longer than I thought it would, so I thought I'd throw it out front since I haven't posted anything in a while.

I definitely have been having fun with bridge. I used to play spades, hearts and pitch with some coworkers and friends from Sprint, and we had talked about taking Bridge lessons for a while. My pals came to the first half of the lessons, but dropped at the halfway point.

If you're interested in learning, I'd definitely suggest lessons, or at least reading a book. (Our class had us read books from a series by Audrey Grant, but I can't find the title we used on Amazon.) Learning the basics of play doesn't take long, particularly if you've played another trick taking game with bidding, but learning a bidding system can take a long, long time. My beginner series was twelve 2.5 hour lessons, and at the end I still don't feel like I've fully absorbed what we learned, and from reading bridge publications I know that we only learned the very basics of what you need to bid the most common hands you come across. There are conventional bids for all kinds of special situations, and there are several bidding systems completely different from what we learned in our class.

I'm having a lot of fun with it, but I'd definitely say my biggest complaint is the age of the participants. I'd say that about half of the people that play at my club are over 60. There are some in their 30s and 40s, and even one pair that I'd guess is in their mid-20s, but the average age definitely is up in the 50s or so. It would definitely be fun to have more folks our age out there. The partner I'll be playing with tonight is around 60 or so, I'd guess. I think that the age of the players was a good part of what drove off the pals I brought with me to the class. Myself, I'm anxious to be a 75 year old man, so I'm OK with the Bridge Studio.

There are some good places to play online, too. Our instructor recommended Bridge Base. Bridge Base is a locally installed program, and just that extra step seems to be enough to keep out the bad elements you find in online play in general. I'd definitely recommend against Yahoo! Bridge for a beginner, but I never felt up to playing at the intermediate tables there. Those might be more fun, but Yahoo! Bridge seemed to have a lot of people show up who didn't know the basics of play, and that would just make things frustrating when you tried to play a hand.

Bridge Base seems to draw a good crowd that's pretty serious about bridge, and there's even a separate Beginner/Intermediate section with teaching tables where you can play some hands then a more experienced player will give you some pointers on how you did. Online play is still somewhat sketchy, with people joining and dropping often, but Bridge Base does run tournaments pretty often. I haven't joined one yet, but I gather that If you enter a tournament people generally stick around to the finish.

Tonight is my first game at the club with a partner I've played with before. I felt really good about how we played last week, so we'll see how we do this week.

It's very early for this sort of thing, but Yahoo is now taking registrations for 2005 season Fantasy Football.

So who's Kommisar this year?

Crap, Sound Tribe Sector 9 aren't going to make it to Wakarusa. That is a shame.

Are the spikes on Batman's cowl "horns" or "ears"?

Well, after last week's Bridge Disaster, I rebounded nicely in last night's game. My partner and I tied for first in a field of 5. That was my first straight out win, and it's the first time I've really felt like I was communicating well with my partner.

Bridge is really a parnership game, and you're going to do your best when your partner and you are in agreement about what bids mean. My first game I was paired with a woman who had been playing bridge socially for many years. She had taken the class to improve her social game, but it was pretty clear that she didn't agree with everything that the instructor said, so many times she would make bids that didn't mean what I was expecting them to mean. Still, in general all her bids were natural and we ended up tying for third place in a field of eight that night.

My second week I was paired with a woman who had been playing duplicate bridge for about a year, but whose husband was out of town. She stuck closer to the system we had learned in Lee Goodman's class, but I made some mistakes. Still, we ended up fourth out of nine.

Last week was the disaster. I felt that I hadn't been bidding agressively enough, so decided to bid more at the low levels. As a result, I ended up playing contracts I couldn't support. Add to my foolishness the fact that my partner was making bids that didn't make sense either, and things just went downhill.

Yesterday was very good. She stuck with the system we had learned in class, and the couple times where we ended up in a contract we shouldn't have been in we were able to go back and figure out where we went wrong in our bidding. She doesn't have a regular partner either, so we agreed to play together next week as well. That's really cool, because every time I had a new partner we'd have to spend our before-game time just reviewing the basics to make sure we were both on the same page. Now that I know that we're on the same page, we can discuss adding other conventions, or discuss what happened last week so we don't make the same mistakes again.

Cool, so I have a bridge partner now, and she actually seems pretty good. My quest to be 75 years old continues unabated!

Why am I listening to the Michael Jackson verdict when I really don't care how it turns out?

!

I used to think that Gurney_Halleck was the best MS Paint artist. I thought that until today when Patrick pointed me to MS Paint Guernica.

Top that, Ed...

By far my favorite recent blog discovery is Cooking for Engineers. Like Cook's Illustrated, they don't just give you a recipe, they often explain why. They often have instructions for things you wouldn't think to make yourself, like marshmallows or today's excellent article on making your own butter. Their recipe pages are pretty cool, too. The format for their recipes is unique; It's actually a table showing which ingredients get combined when, and what you do to combine them. Take a look at this recipe for New England Style Clam Chowder (choudair?) as an example. Scroll down past the photos and description and you'll see the table I'm talking about. It's really a cool way of visualizing all the steps you go through to make a dish.

Add in their deals blog, a rundown of weekly sales on cooking gear, and you have a very valuable resource for anybody interested in cooking. Now I want to get a gallon of heavy cream from Costco and make myself some butter.

Cutting the cord and going cell-phone only doesn't seem like as good of an idea after you lose your cell phone.

This year's Lebowskifest in Lousiville, Kentucky is set for July 22-23. That's still probably too far for me to travel, but They Might Be Giants being there makes me give it some thought.

It was so much fun last time, let's do it again. The last ten songs Winamp played for me:

1. Squeeze - Up The Junction
2. Pearl Jam - Alive (live 7/11/95)
3. Smashing Pumpkins - My Mistake
4. MC Frontalot - Indier Than Thou
5. Cake - Perhaps, Perhaps, Perhaps (In town July 5! Woo-hoo!)
6. The Flaming Lips - Suddenly Everything Has Changed
7. Beck - Jack-Ass
8. Portishead - Numb
9. The Postal Service - Clark Gable
10. MC Frontalot - Listen Close

I'd be tempted to say it's 90's day today, but I suppose every day is 90s day with this playlist. I need to bring some new stuff in. I need to get my other file server hooked back up so I can start ripping our CD collection again. I'm only up to about D.

It's a sad sight to see Big Smith with nothing currently scheduled. At least I'll get to see Mark Bilyeu's new band at Wakarusa next week, but I'm hoping the guys are playing shows again soon.

In the meantime, I hope they're enjoying their well-deserved break.

The city of Green Bay certainly has their legislative priorities in order. Some nosy Milwaukee police officer was reading through the city ordinances and discovered that their open intoxication ordinance actually made tailgating at Brewers games illegal. Green Bay checked their books and, to their horror, discovered that they have a similar ordinance. Green Bay City Council to the rescue!

Granted, Green Bay police never enforced the current ordinance but a new law would make clear what is legal and what's not.

It would make alcohol "officially" legal outside Lambeau Field for 70,000 fans on game day, and that's not the only place.

"Lambeau Field is exempt from this ordinance and any sporting events that are there. There's also special events that will be exempt such as Americafest, Artstreet, events around town where people are walking around with a beer," Hanson said, "and if I've missed anything, we give the chief of police the ability to make a waiver." For example, a block party or neighborhood event, Hanson said.

The libertarian in me approves of legislative time being spent to make fewer things illegal. I hope to take advantage of Green Bay's hospitality sometime this season.

Yesterday's duplicate bridge session was my very first Bridge Disaster. Trying to compensate for last week, I was bidding rather aggressively. The partner I got paired up with bid very timidly. When we did win auctions, we would invariably screw up the cardplay.

Although I would love to blame my partner for our result, taking dead last for the night (by a mile) was truly a team effort.

Harry ate my glasses this morning while I was in the shower. Lenses scratched, frames destroyed.

Well, it was getting to be time for a new pair anyway.

Saturday afternoon, Bex and I went to Lawrence to do some walking around. We hit some antique shops and bought a painting so cool it is going to displace my Simpsons sailboat painting above the couch. I think I'll sell the sailboat painting on Ebay. Bex wanted to go to Lawrence's new TJ Maxx, so I spent some quality time with the Sirius radio in her Jeep. (By the way: Sirius kicks major ass. I don't think I want to spend the money to buy a receiver for my current car, but my next car will definitely have it. I just can't imagine how I ever took a road trip without it...)

After the shopping ended, Bex and I headed over to The Bourgeois Pig, which is about the perfect place for Bex and I. They have cheap, good drinks, and a full coffee bar so Bex has something to do. Also, since it is in Lawrence, it isn't terribly smoky.

The specials were a $3.00 Bass and a $5.25 Bloody Mary. I was going for the Bass when Bex pointed out the pot of pepper infused vodka above the bar. After asking the bartender if that's what they use in Bloody Marys and finding out that it was, I changed my mind. Good choice. The Pig makes the single best Bloody Mary I've ever had in my life, bar none. It was pepper vodka filling about 3/4 of the glass, then topped with at least six dry ingredients and topped off with some good thick tomato juice. What were the dry ingredients? I can come up with Pepper, Celery Salt, and Salt, but then I run out. I should have asked, but I didn't. I don't think I'm ever going to order anything else when we're in town, but I do think I need to try something with their Blackberry, Pineapple, or Lemon infused vodkas. Bex and I really need to spend more time in Lawrence.

Sunday was an exciting day of housecleaning and grocery shopping. No good Bloody Marys were had on Sunday, but I did make barbecue sauce for some chicken, and I think it's the best sauce I've made so far. I left out the vinegar and honey that I normally add, and I wonder if I really need them in my sauce at all. The lemon juice might provide enough tart, and I really don't like sweet BBQ sauces.

Sunday night we watched Family Guy (barbecue chicke is not good TV watching food), some NewsRadio and then went to bed. Six Feet Under starts tonight. I know many think it's gone downhill, but I'll be watching for the rest of this season. I never liked Entourage, and I've heard that The Comeback sucks. What is HBO doing in the Fall? Is Rome going to be their big show until Sopranos starts up again next Spring? And when do we get the fourth season of The Wire? HBO says 2006, but will that be Spring, Summer, or Fall? I guess I'll have to wait and see.

The Royals may not have much to be proud of this season, but sweeping the Yankees almost makes up for the rest of this season.

How have I never before noticed the Oklahoma Joe's Pit Boss Flash Game? All the fun of running your own smoker, in convenient Flash form.

Awesome. Just awesome.

I was starting to feel like the football off-season was starting to wind down and pretty soon we'd be thinking about the start of next season.

Then I went out to Packers Training Camp.com and was confronted by their "Countdown to Season Opener" clock.

Still 101 days to go.

I'm always fascinated by who NPR's Morning Edition chooses to recognize on their birthday. Sometimes they seem to just come out of nowhere.

This morning, they chose to wish a happy birthday to Simon Gallup of The Cure.

So happy birthday, Simon!