our 62nd weekly open mike
Let’s see what happens when your host (me) has nothing to say. Step right up, speak your mind, tell a story, sing a song, whatever.
1/10/2026
Anything goes — 1/10
14 responses to “Anything goes — 1/10”
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I’m curious, has anyone here had any experience with Yankee Screwdrivers/Drills. I suck at power drills and thought this might be my answer. So far I really like the drill but am unsure about the Screwdriver.
Robert DeNiro scence for reference.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZD8iVpZPKk
Bonus Blue Brothers scene
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“Are you telling me that this is illegal?”
I am not Mr Handy, and currently own *two* screwdrivers, one phillips-head and one flat-head, and no other tools at all.
For years, though, I had a hand-crank drill that worked on the same principle as these ratchet screwdrivers. Seems so much more practical than having it be powered by electricity. No cord to get cut or in the way.
Totally American, ain’t it? Let’s build a damned machine to do something that could be done easily by hand, and sell so many of the machines that a hand-powered device now looks downright comical.
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One more annoying question.
Do folks have a favorite King? Blues King that is.
Freddy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CiUPyrMA78Q
BB
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFi3C_5U9_Y
Albert
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Your three samples, thanks, rocked my morning here, and I’d go with Freddie. Call me heathen and I know it’s wrong, but my ears hear the blues as a subset of rock’n’roll. Funk, punk, jazz, and country, too, though country is, of course, the worst.
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This was meant to be two distinct seperate questions. but oh well
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Quote: “Though it may be stressful from sunup to dark, if it ends in an orgasm it’s a successful day.”
(I said that…)Doug, do any of your room mates or family know that you have this blog?
Just curious…
Could you do me a favor, the 49ers are coming up to Seattle next weekend to play the Seahawks,
could you place a $5 bet with Dean for me for SF to win?
(I know they won’t but still…And keep track if Dean is actually dressing up and going to a playoff game…))In tool news, last week I changed a light switch for the first time,
it took an hour and four calls to the hardware store, whew…Can’t Do Shit
Saying I don’t have a mechanical mind is putting it gently, letting me down very easily. There are repairs which are probably simple I’m embarrassed to ask the carpenters here to do. I wouldn’t want them to think I was that incapable though it’s the truth. I came up during the weed boom, just hired everyone to do everything and had no interest in learning how to do it myself. (The neighborhood joke was that I had to hire someone to wipe my ass— all in good fun, roll another one, I just smiled sheepishly and sold another pound.)
Face it, I was one of the original fake “homesteaders” in the mid-seventies, another middle class white kid who moved to the hills and didn’t know shit. (When I was a kid I could repair a flat on my bike but damned if I could do that today. A Whitethorn neighbor once taught me how to make a trucker’s knot but in a week or so I forgot how.)
I used to feel uncomfortably inadequate when a friend or neighbor came by to do something for me but I’m way over that and just made a shameless list of things I’ll ask the new carpenter to do, including installing a new tail light assembly on my truck (this just in: I installed that car part myself last night!) after I slammed into a little tree like a doofus last week.
I do have to give myself some basic plumbing credit setting up water systems out in the hills for years, five-sixteenth wrench baby! I can also wire an electrical plug and re-installed my micro hydro power system, so wow, a mechanical genius after all?)
I did try once or twice to be capable and competent: I crawled under my ’65 Dodge Dart with a wrench to bleed the brakes but when I tried to turn the bleeder open I broke the damn thing off—that’s it, I quit! (Do they even bleed brakes anymore?)
It gives me a jolt of emotion thinking about asking a neighbor for help with this simple project, figuring out how to make the outdoor shade blinds go up and down, although he knows how I am and if he judges me for it I don’t care—I deserve it. (We once honestly rated the handyman capabilities of ourselves and our friends and neighbors. In this case the clueless bastard couldn’t figure out the blinds either!)
I’m good at some things (he said, suddenly defensive) like expertly finding my way along the ins and outs of a woman (well, who can’t?), though tragically didn’t learn those tricks until I was thirty-eight. I’m also good at stringing words into sentences and paragraphs to make little narratives like this, but mostly I’m a mess, can’t do shit, and will probably die lonely and dependent on low-paid immigrants to take care of me, if I’m lucky.
Not only that, I’ve spent my life destroying things through negligence, can’t keep a woman, can’t cook (except boring healthy food), never grew any fruit trees successfully, terrible at maintenance, can’t build anything (except simple greenhouses and drying sheds back in the day), and I guess all I’ve really got going is some organizational abilities and my no-bullshit mentality, though that could be a myth after all.
Otherwise, life is great! (That’s the coffee talking this morning, which cures all ills.)
(Photo: My tool shelf…)-
Nope, nobody knows about the zine. That’s always been necessary, else people ‘play for the cameras’ so to speak, and I start worrying about hurting people’s feelings and such.
Nothing much else I can say, because it would be about me & my own very limited handyman skills & that time I set the apartment on file when I tried to rewire a light fixture, etc.
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YouTube can teach you almost anything but I won’t fuck with wiring. The worst thing that happens when you paint or drywall yourself is you have to do it over again, and pick little bits of paint off of everything because you only bought one drop cloth that is actually a bedsheet. Worst thing that happens with electrical wiring is being known as the CLUTZY MURDERER OF MARVIN GARDENS or whatever street you live on.
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my tool shelf
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I see the duct tape, necessary for any tool shelf, but where’s the fishing wire and bungee cords?
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(don’t worry, got bungies hanging everywhere…)
Too Much Ibuprofen!
I have so many lists on clipboards they’re piling up on each other all over the house. Some of them are odd, like the thirty-five desserts I ate in Mexico last summer, and some haven’t been written down yet and are very needed, for example a list of all the out-dated meds and other orifice-related health items overflowing from the medicine cabinet. (When I organized the attic, cabin, closets, cabinets, and cupboards last year I just couldn’t deal with the old meds, etc.)
Yesterday I got back from Eureka with samples from the dentist: floss, toothbrush, and proxa-brush, and couldn’t jam them into the cabinet or the shelves above the toilet, there was no room and had to put the bag of dental tricks in the living room. (Remember George’s wallet on Seinfeld?)
When I was explaining this to a friend on the phone an old pill bottle fell into the toilet. The other day I put the lid down in case an earthquake launched the shelf collection into the dreaded drink: new and old toothbrushes, glasses-cleaners, floss, hairbrush I use once a year, and a collection of hair clips, mascara, earrings, and other items women have left over the last twenty years, which I endearingly and irrationally hang on to.
I suppose I need to follow those Dutch rules and get rid of anything I haven’t used in the last ten years, or was it six months? (Same diff.) That is my goal for this week, to clear out the unnecessary items and make the shelves and cabinets useful again, a place for things I actually use on the daily or weekly.
Of course “getting rid of” mostly means finding an out-of-the-way place to stash them, someday I may need that hydrogen peroxide, Viagra samples, hydrocortisone, Voltaren, antihistamines, iron supplements, pain pills, and all the rest, right? I will throw away the J and J baby powder, that causes cancer, and the stack of ancient, lonely condoms.
(Two hours after writing and posting this on Facebook, I had cleaned out the cabinet for the first time in twenty-two years, so you see, once again self-shaming works.)
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Bring old meds to some central collection point for disposal, the asswipes say, but this asswipe agrees with you — keep the old meds in case you need ’em again. You never know. Better to have Viagra and not need it than to need Viagra and not have it.
My room is George’s wallet.
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My Sex Life, Part 17:
In 1973 when I was nineteen I met eighteen-year-old Trudy, a sweet little Jewish girl from Brooklyn, at the rock festival in New York, and she invited me down to New York City. We walked 9th Avenue looking to buy contraceptive foam and later I squirted it into her as she lay on her aunt’s bed.
In 1975 when I was twenty-one I went up to Washington to pick apples. I got together with a nice young girl whose name I forget, and once again there was no foreplay or protection. What an innocent inexperienced idiot—well, it was the seventies.
I’m running out of memories of the early days, the early girls, as I sit here at sixty-four at the college cafe (UPS in Tacoma) with all my luscious “granddaughters” bouncing around me. I realize I did have my shot back then although I didn’t get a clue about how to really pleasure women until a lover gave me some lessons when I was thirty-eight. (And I guess I could say I didn’t really learn until nine years ago when I asked my surprise lover all the right questions: Higher? Lower? Faster? Slower? Harder? Softer? I found that some erectile dysfunction would be forgiven if you wielded that flat tongue enthusiastically.)
Sitting here remembering those young girls when I was a young guy made me take the next step and I tried to remember all the women I’ve ever been with.
When you make a list like this you have to define terms: What is sex? Does there have to be penetration? If someone has an orgasm did sex occur? There could also be penetration and no orgasm, right? My definition will be I got laid if there was either some penetration or an orgasm. No, I did not get laid if I only got a finger inside. If I kiss you and get a tongue in your mouth, no I didn’t get laid. If I sleep with you then come in my pants while dry-humping you in the morning (as I did with the woman with the Micky Mouse pajamas she pulled out of her purse) then yes I got laid. (TBC…)-
Not sure those are the demarcations and definitions I’d choose, but so long as you’re consistent the stats should be reliable.
My definition would be an orgasm. Anything less is just fooling around, but if more than one person’s involved and there’s an orgasm, that’s sex.
Guessing you’ve been there, done that more than me.
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