collisionbend.com

…just can’t wait to get on the road again… (and that’s a cool, unintended effect with a WordPress plugin! I think I’ll leave it…)

NEWTOWN, CT — We arrived in Connecticut yesterday after driving half of Saturday to Cooperstown, NY. We only had a little rain early on, then it cleared up and allowed us to drive without hassle.

Getting to Cooperstown isn’t 100% easy. Sure: I-90 east to Route 28 and go south. But Route 28 can get stacked up at times, and it twists and turns all over the place.

The Hall of Fame itself was a sight every baseball fan should see at least once in a lifetime. The other exhibits bored me after a while, truth be told. And the Museum Shop was a disappointment as far as those things go. The staff was almost entirely kids, 16 to 18-ish, and they were nice enough, but three words I never heard uttered from their lips: “excuse me, please” when they cut you off in a crowded hall or bumped into you. That irritated me.

The rest of Cooperstown is a quaint little place — and just about the largest souvenir stand in existence. Every store for three blocks in any direction sells nothing but souvenirs of Cooperstown, or baseball, or Major League Baseball — which is really nice if you’re a Red Sox fan, or a Yankee fan, or a Phillies fan, or a Mets fan.

The rest of MLB? Fagettabouddit!

We ate in the Shortstop Restaurant just down the street from the museum (and down the stairs) and had a pretty good meal. I tried an Old Slugger Pale Ale, a local brew from the next town over, and enjoyed it. It’s not Great Lakes, but it can hold it’s own — no one’s going to steal home on this brew…

Google Maps leaves a little to be desired in these situations, sometimes, let me tell you!

We arrived in Connecticut yesterday afternoon, and the restaurant photo over there in the Moblog was the building — a century home, actually, converted into a restaurant — and now it’s a sushi place. The sushi was very good.

And now to relax: a little golf, play with the nieces a bit, do some photography, catch up on my redesign when it rains… time to decompress.

Tags: Connecticut, cooperstown, Google Maps, MLB Hall of Fame, Old Slugger Pale Ale, souvenir, sushi

You may have seen this in the news the last couple of days: a Los Angeles Department of Transportation traffic officer is suing Victoria’s Secret for selling defective women’s underwear. She claims that a defective metal piece flew off the thong and hit her in the eye, damaging her cornea.

Ummmm… besides this being an obviously trivial lawsuit, I have a few issues with the whole thing:

First of all, NBC actually showed the offending lingerie during an interview with the plaintiff. When I saw the panties themselves, I realized that the metal trim piece would locate itself somewhere around half-way between her spine and the curve of her waist, at least some 70 degrees — and almost 2 feet — away from her eye.

So if it snapped when she was wearing it, she would have had to be standing behind herself: the clip, since the tension would be forcing it away from her body almost perpendicular to her body, would shoot out, not up. No way that thing clips her eye.

Else, she was turning around looking at her behind in the mirror (making sure it didn’t look fat), and it flew upward. However, it would not fly upward with anywhere near the force required to damage her cornea, considering the aforementioned stress on the garment.

Bouncing off the mirror doesn’t work, either: it would lose approximately half of its velocity in the carom.

The only other method I could see this happening is in the act of donning the garment. Where’s the stretch to snap it — until it gets around your butt?

The only way that decorative trim could fly that far that fast would be if the garment was stretched to its limit — meaning that it would have been about 3 sizes too small for her — which would not be in accordance with the “used in the manner intended” ascribed in the lawsuit. Either that, or she got her foot caught in it and stretched the hell out of it — which would not be using the product “in the manner [it was] intended” to be used.

Lastly — and this is the damning evidence to me — when something flies toward your eyes, a human’s first reaction is to — what? blink? close your peepers? actually lower the lids over your eyes so something like this won’t happen? I’m sorry, she couldn’t have missed that — even my eyes aren’t that bad!

Obviously, I think she is going after money. The same with her attorney. I saw the interview on NBC this morning, and they lacked specifics, they wouldn’t release the thong for VS’s examination, and were a bit cagey — in my opinion.

So this brings me to another set of points: what is a Los Angeles traffic officer doing wearing a thong in the first place? To remove a panty line from her work trousers? Is she trying to stop traffic or cause an accident? Come on!

And at 52 (I’m not going to ridicule her for wearing a thong at age 52 — that would be plain wrong), you would think she would know better than to expose herself with such a flimsy lawsuit.

And speaking of flimsy: have you seen the companion bra for the thong? Nipple holes?

I wonder if she purchased both pieces on clearance.

Tags: cornea, lawsuit, nipple holes, thong, victoria's secret

And I’m dead tired. This is the fourth site launch in as many weeks for me, and each one has been a challenge in one way or another. This site was going great last night in my development partition on my live server, so it was time to push — and a few things are now a little wonky.

The Pages listing in the Rail (far right column) isn’t listing Pages. The navigation menu just below the masthead isn’t giving up its dropline with the subpages on hover; in fact, WordPress isn’t generating the subpage menu at the moment, so I’m not surprised the Pages listing in the Rail aren’t working — the two are somewhat related. The weather plugin in the right column has died as well.

The rest is going as it should. The Moblog column works as designed, although I wish I could res up the photos a touch; that would be nice. Archives, etc., are functioning better than I thought: no glitches from the nickel seats — so far.

Yes, I know the new design is a reverse, and I know there are some who despise the style… but there will be a style switcher coming soon, and the other choice will be this same layout, same color palette, same everything, except a white page with dark text and a different masthead image (and different RSS and “made on a Mac” footer image).

All in all, however, things being as they are, and as tired as I am, I’m content enough to call it a night — I just can’t do any more tonight, that’s for sure.

Anyway, come on back, especially over the next 10 days or so, as I get the issues worked out and some content added to both the Photography subpages and the Moblog (I think I’ll have some interesting stuff to show in the Moblog over the next few days).

I’ll let the tech specs wait until later. Sweet dreams!

Tags: design, Moblog, WordPress