even more crap from johan

I went over to Tekgnar today and got a new board. I think the long shots of skating in Paranoid Park got me thinking about getting a new board.

Prices haven't changed much. This one was about $190, and i think the old one was about $150. I got about 24 years out of the old one -- that's like $7 a year or something. (Though i guess i only skated about 8 years on it.... still, that's like $19/year...) Hell, with inflation, the boards are probably cheaper now.

What's cool is i might be able to skate to work.

It's sort of a retro setup -- all stuff i could have bought in 1985:

• Powell Peralta Ripper deck
• Independent 169 trucks
• White Rat-Bones 97a wheels

Long boards seem a lot more popular now, and have new tech... the decks are a bamboo-carbon-fiberglass-epoxy sandwich. I like the look of this Loaded Dervish.

Large hail and high (70 mph) winds last night, around midnight, here in Central Austin. (Reports of funnel clouds a bit more North, around Marble Falls about 21:00.) Lots of very big parts of trees down. Broken car and house windows from hail and tree limbs.I got lucky -- screens on my W-SW facing windows probably kept them from being broken by the hail, and i parked my car under a branch. (Luckily the branch didn't fall, and it seems to have shielded the car from the hail.)

About 1am, me and my neighbors were clearing the tree limbs out of the road. I gave a couple of flashlights to my neighbors across the street who were without power. I never lost power, but cable Internet service went almost right away, and only came back about 09:00. I had a small crown of a hackberry come down in the backyard, but i don't have any big trees left in my yard after last year's ice storm, so there wasn't really anything to get blown over.

I'm starting a new blog category for bad drivers. Seems like i see a "fresh" automobile accident every 2-3 days, and pretty much daily, i see a driver do something dangerously illegal. So i might as well take pictures. This first one is the South-bound lanes of N. Lamar, just South of 29th St., about 19:30 14 May 2008.

(Sorry, just the camera phone... i need to get a decent but pocket-sized point and click digital.)

I was at The Movie Store and i took some pictures.

Just ran across this quote as i was packing books for the impending move:

Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation, whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion, and you allow him to do so, whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such a purpose — and you allow him to make war at pleasure. Study to see if you can fix any limit to his power in this respect, after you have given him so much as you propose. If, to-day, he should choose to say he thinks it necessary to invade Canada, to prevent the British from invading us, how could you stop him? You may say to him, "I see no probability of the British invading us" but he will say to you "be silent; I see it, if you dont."

The provision of the Constitution giving the war-making power to Congress, was dictated, as i understand it, by the following reasons. Kings had always been involving and impoverishing their people in wars, pretending generally, if not always, that the good of the people was the object. This, our Convention understood to be the most oppressive of all Kingly oppressions; and they resolved to so frame the Constitution that no one man should hold the power of bringing this oppression upon us. But your view destroys the whole matter, and places our President where kings have always stood.

Representative Abraham Lincoln, letter to William H. Herndon, February 15, 1848 — The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, ed. Roy P. Basler, vol. 1, pp 451-42 (1953). (I found it in Respectfully Quoted A Dictionary of Quotations Dorset Press, 1992, edited by Suzy Platt.

Over at google:
Results 1 - 10 of about 578,000 for "no rest for the wicked".
Results 1 - 10 of about 59,800 for "no rest for the weary".

So i guess now we know.