That’s all I have to say about that.

A few years ago, Budweiser ran a commercial of a young couple preparing for a horse drawn sleigh ride.  The young man gave the lady a candle to hold, and as he was making his final preparations, the horse got a little gassy.  When the camera came back to the lady, her face was smoldering, her hair was blown back, and the candle had been extinguished.  Next to some of last years Doritos commercials, I had never laughed so hard at a Super Bowl commercial before.

Budweiser obviously found  nothing funny this year as they chose to focus on the banning of prohibition instead.  Meanwhile, I sat there drinking Fat Tire.

Bridgestone had a couple of good ones, and Doritos had one that I can remember.

Note to Super Bowl advertisers.  If you’re going to show us duds, let us know.  I had to pee.

Regarding the half time show.

Meh.

What can I say that hasn’t been said already?

My original impression was that she nailed it and overall did a good job by keeping things to her own genre without dragging good rock music into the muck and mire of pop.

Elaborate productions combined with the right song choices and lip syncing tend to come off that way.

Just sayin’.

I guess.

Case in point, between Wifey and me, one of us was kind of gassy in our sleeping hours last night.

Early this morning one of our alarms went off this morning making irrational demands that it was time to get up.  The alarm tone used was the sound of a harp.  It was quite a heavenly sound compared to some other choices we have on our phones.

Shortly after the alarm went off, the one of us who was supposed to get up remained in bed contemplating a return to sleepy land.

During the contemplation, the other one of us who wasn’t getting up for 30 minutes cut the cheese in a pure display and validation that flatulence is for the most part, an involuntary process.

The other one of us who was thinking about staying in bed reacted accordingly.  “That’s a snooze button I’m not going to hit.”

The potential tragedy of sleeping in was averted.

Onward and upward.

In just a few short hours, the New England Patriots and the New York Giants will parade onto the field to play what I expect to be a pretty good game.

Of course there’s plenty of hype around the game.  There always is.

The commercials are in the can with the promise of either hitting a home run or throwing a gutter ball.  I’ll reserve comment until I see the homage to Ferris Bueller.

Bueller?

In preparation for the big event, Wifey has made salsa.

Wifey makes good salsa.

This time around, she’s changed it up a little.  She normally makes a mild batch, and then segregates a portion out in order to add chipotle to it.  It’s gooooooood.

Today, she’s made two batches.  The first batch was chipotle.  As I said before, it’s goooooooood.

The other batch has five habanero peppers in it.  It’s hoooooooooot.

So here’s the thought.

If I start digging into that stuff during the first half of the big game, I should pretty much be in the middle of an “Occupy Wall Street” exercise in the privacy of my own bathroom at the point the NFL lays an aesthetic assault on my senses and 42″ TV when Madonna performs for what the Mayans predict will be the last Super Bowl half time show ever.

That’s right people.

I would rather endure the gastronomical pain an anguish of my 43 year old systems dealing with habanero salsa than to sit there and watch Madonna play the Super Bowl.  Just for the record, I’m guessing both of those encounters will create a burning sensation when I pee.

Note to the NFL.  This is your last Super Bowl (according to the Mayans).  Can you cut it out with the crappy half time shows please?

By the way. I don’t really understand why members of the male gender wear those things.

So anyway, there is a collection of country artists on he TharpSter 4S, even though I generally prefer to bang my head.

One of those songs is “We Shall Be Free” by Garth Brooks.  It’s loaded up with a bunch of lyrics about getting along and curing that which ails us.  Once all of this is taken care of, we shall be free.

Isn’t that nice?

Garth has pretty much set the bar which will define when we  shall be free.

Allow me to adjust that bar.

When I can order a hamburger anywhere I want (not just Fuddruckers) and be asked how I want it cooked,  I shall be free.

When I can tell the grill cook at work to stop cooking the red out of my burger without getting a stupid look, I shall be free.

When the Texas Man Law (the redder the better) trumps some stupid ass health regulation that burgers have to be cooked to the point of ruination, I shall be free.

Now redo my burger and get it off the grill when I tell you to.

This morning at the ever so unsociable time of 6:30, I participated in the annual biometric screening sanctioned by a company who’s striving to stay up with all of the fads, fashions, and practices of the time.

If you want my real opinion about the program, keep reading.

Anyhoo, this morning I wandered into one of the bigger conference rooms typically reserved for, well, wellness events.  It was there that I was obliged to fill out a Scantron form with all of my pertinent information.  Height, weight, age, name, political affiliation, and favorite cheeses were just some of the items I had to bubble in on the form.

Note to the people who publish those infernal forms with the small font and colors which don’t contrast enough for those of us with bad vision who struggle in providing correct personal information as a result.  Stop it.

After negotiating the form, I presented my middle finger to the tech charged with extracting a sample of my red stuff.  That thing stung for a moment, and then inhibited my ability to type the letters “E” and “D” for the next few hours.  I don’t type “X” a whole lot.

Five minutes later, I was escorted to a separate room with a self proclaimed health coach in order to go over the results of my blood test.  I started with the most pressing question in mind.  “Did the rabbit make it?”

After feigning the minimum amount of amusement for my comment required by law, the coach preceded to go over my results.  “Ok, let’s look at your BMI.”

“It’s 42.”

Offering no response, she broke out the color coded chart, identified my height and weight on the X and Y axis, and navigated her way right into the red zone.  “…and your BMI is 42.  How did you know that?”

“It’s the answer to life’s most important question.”

“What I would suggest is that you lose about….”

“Ok, here’s the deal,” I chimed in.  “I’ve been consistently trying to lose weight since last spring.  I exercise at least 3-4 times a week, try to eat lean protein, fruits, and veggies, and have pretty much plateaued at my current weight.  Recently I realized I was doing too much cardio, so I altered my routine.  Beyond that, what can I do to lose the weight?”

The health coach then donned a look on her face that told me she was about to ask me a delicate question.

“Do you cleanse?”

“Cleanse?”

She nodded.

“I’ll say ‘No’”.

At that point, I learned about the capability of my intestine to hold a whole bunch of ….., nah, you probably wouldn’t  believe it anyway.

“There are teas you can drink which will clean you out and give you a jump start.  Just don’t drink it here at work as you may get a surprise.”

With the discussion of the contents of my lower GI set aside, she then moved on to what I should be putting in said intestines.  “For the next  2 weeks, eat only fish and salad.”

“Uumm, as a valiant crusader for the rights of our friends under the sea, I don’t eat fish.”  That was only half right.

“Okay, chicken.”

“That’s fine,” I responded.  “…and how may cups of ranch dressing am I limited to with this approach?”

Big picture, it would seem that I need to embrace white guilt on this one and avoid eating white food.  Fortunately, Reese’s are a mix of brown and tan.

Speaking of which, I may have found an avenue to jump off of the wagon where those bad boys are concerned.

In the past, I could pretty much be accused of mainlining the miniature, individually wrapped version of their peanut butter cups.  I’ve been a good boy about not giving into temptation and buying a bag of those things once or twice a month.

And then I found the minis.  It’s a cheaper, smaller bag.  The cups are not individually wrapped and they’re about half the size of the miniatures.  These features alone allow me to open a bag and poor them into the ole piehole.

Isn’t that wonderful?

Now where was I?

Oh yes.  The wellness program at work.

For the next 10-11 months, I will endure assorted campaigns to improve my “wellness”.  I do online activities and read assorted articles.  I’ll participate in local activities like The Great April Grape Toss, and the November Name That Odor Event.  For each one of those events, I’ll earn points which I will track on the special website.  If I earn enough points by the end of the year, I’ll garner some extra cash on my December 15th paycheck.

For that, all I can say is this.

Yeah, whatever.

Imagine my surprise.

For several years, the filing of my annual taxes served as the equivalent of a February Bonus.  The year 2012 marks a turn in that path.  When I did my taxes yesterday using software that even a Treasury Secretary could handle, I was informed that I will owe.

Its a relatively small amount, but even still the issue irks me a little.

My income for the most part was the same as it was in 2010.  In essence, there were no capital gains on the lottery investments I made throughout the year.

And then I lost one of my child tax credits because the kid was 17 by the end of the year.

I’ll have to dig through previous years’ returns to determine if that’s been changed recently.

Crud.

As near as I can tell, I’m guessing I crossed into a new income bracket and am now being expected to pay my “fair share”.

Whata buncha Streep.

On a side note, I received a note from Dad (Thor) last night about the birthday tribute.  Turns out he wasn’t born in Roswell, but he did live there as a young Viking.  I guess that’s why I said he was born in Roswell proper, which generally meant Roswell and it’s surrounding area.

Roswell proper (click to enlarge the map)

McAmy, Texas, the reported birthplace of Dad, is what I’m guessing to be part of Roswell, New Mexico proper.

He also reminded me that “Tharp” had been misspelled on his birth certificate.  As a result, he was inducted into the Army (where he would learn how to make SOS) as Thor Edward Thorp.

Too bad I forgot that part when I wrote the tribute.

My Uverse is back up to par and is running at full expectations.

I’ll give you a moment to calm yourself and come down from the mirthful elation you’re experiencing right now.

You good?

Good.

Whether you’re aware of it or not, Tharpster.Org in its infancy was produced from Google Chrome. At one point I made some minor changes on the look of the site and a few other things, and bam, I couldn’t access the site on anything but Internet Explorer.

It drove your favorite blogger nuts. Not as nuts as typing these posts out on my phone, but you can imagine my frustration.

A few months ago it all started with a periodic need to reboot the DVR. We could deal with that.  Shortly thereafter, my iPhone lost its ability to stay connected to the WIfi. After troubleshooting that issue mercilessly, I took it to the Apple store where I explained my situation to the young gentlemen donning a blue tshirt, ear peircings the size of the lug nuts on my truck, and about the ugliest pair of glasses designed to make military issue birth control glasses look pretty darn sexy.

After he exhausted all of the tools and expertise ascribed to him as a “Genius”, he generally said; “Screw it. We’ll give you a new phone.”

Great.

I took it home and rebuilt the personalization on it. I reloaded all of the apps and placed them in the assorted folders. I also assigned that picture of my two dogs um… watering the lawn as my wallpaper.

For the record, it’s wallpaper and not a screensaver. They’re two different things. Stop confusing them.

Fortunately, the new phone picked up the Wifi and all was kinda right In my world.

Save for the DVR.

Stupid piece of junk dumped all of the movies I had recorded on those free movie channel weekends.

Bad DVR! I’m going to rub your nose in that!

Finally, after several calls to AT&T, they sent a tech out who determined that the DVR and the gateway (router thingy) were “all jacked up” (his words, not mine).

After summoning the necessary vocabulary and elocution to describe our predicament, he replaced both units.

Things are working beautifully now.

I can use different browsers now to upload pure crap to the internet. In the meantime, I have an iPhone that didn’t need to be replaced.

Yet still, I find myself fighting the keys on the bottom of my virtual keyboard and how my phone thinks I’m hitting the space bar instead of actual letters.

In other news, there was a report on the news tonight that more and more people in the 18-35 year age range are taking their smart phones to the bathroom on a regular basis.

Just sayin’.

The name only stuck for an hour or so.  After the couple came around from the overwhelming joy on the arrival of their newborn baby boy, they had two epiphanies.

The first one was that people not named or familiar with the name “Tharp” often mispronounced it as “Thorp”.  To hear the name “Thor Wayne Tharp” (more commonly  Thor Tharp) get perpetually mispronounced as Thor Thorp could bring too much to bare for all of the Tharps in general.  It would sound like the person inadvertently butchering the name of “Tharp” was stuttering.  Add to that the potential for indiscriminate spitting by those who couldn’t handle the correct execution of the “th” sound due to an improperly shaped tongue or lack or 21st century orthodontics.

Kids are cruel, and back in 40′s when sensitivity for the feelings of others was just a little too namby-pamby, there was an immediate concern that young Thor would succumb to a bunch of crap from his peers that he probably didn’t need.

On the other end of the spectrum, the name of Thor could carry an aura of general badassness.  Imagine notes sent home from school to Mr. and Mrs. Tharp (most likely misspelled as “Thorpe”) which explained how Thor had spent a better part of his time on the playground pulling pigtails, dispensing purple nurples, and generally causing a whole lot of trouble.

The Tharps didn’t need a wimp or a bully.

The other epiphanic thump on the head the new parents embraced was the fact that they were Christians.  Naming their first born after a Norse God would probably bring up some questions at Bible study.

And so, Odie and Carrie (both of whom really liked the name Thor) opted to go with the moniker they had originally planned to name their boy, which was Edward.

Edward Tharp.  E.T.

You just had an epiphany, didn’t you?

E.T. was born in Roswell, New Mexico in the 40′s.

Coincidence?

I’ll let you decide, even though I know the truth.

Thor…. Um Ed went on to have a few kids later on down the line, one of which has chosen to exercise his creativity by writing eye popping, jaw dropping, blog posts on the internet which are primarily loaded up with quarter truths (at best) and outlandish claims which represent nothing but delusions of grandeur.

For all of that, the whole crew here at TharpSter.Org offers up a Hee-Haw style salute to one of it’s founding members.

Happy Birthday Dad!

No kudos are really due to me for exhibiting a keen sense of observation though. He actually announced his ailment right before I noticed anything was wrong.

I probably wouldn’t have noticed it otherwise.

“I started working out this morning. I’m sore and I can’t stop sweating.”. A proper application of all things Seinfeld would explain the sweating to be a result of the Kung Pao Chicken. George likes his chicken spicy.

Summoning all of the empathy and concern for my coworker, I took the natural next step. “Good Lord, why would you want to do that?”

My concern wasn’t really lost on him. “Well I lost all of that weight dieting, but haven’t lost any more. I figured I have to exercise to lose anymore.”

Ladies and gentlemen, I’m going to stop right here and rant about something else. I was going to follow up with the story about how he felt a lot less stressed and had a new sense of optimism. I was going to point out that I’ve been working out 3-4 times a week since March, and that my optimism was still missing like the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction which all of the evidence stated were there, but managed to get squirreled away in Syria or somewhere else.

Instead, I’m going to talk about the letter “N”.

It’s pissing me off where Autocorrect and the virtual keyboard are concerned.

Have you ever wondered why on Wheel of Fortune during the final puzzle, they always give the contestant the letters R, S, T, L, N, & E?

I’ll tell you why. They’re the most commonly used letters in the English language.

Did you see the “N”?

Whether you’re aware of if or not (you should be, as I’ve mentioned it before), I type about 90% of these daily blogs out on my phone.

There’s an app for that.

Whenever my thumbs are flying over the keyboard on my iPhone, the letter “N” (a commonly used letter not only in the English language but also here on TharpSter.Org) tends to get confused with the space bar by my phone. As a result, Autocorrect kicks in and suggests wording and spellings which serve as 100% unassailable proof that I’m on crack.

Just for the record, if there’s going to be proof that I’m on crack out there, it’s not going to be based on the context of my writing as I entered it on a phone. Instead, it will be based on me posting pictures of super heroes here on TharpSter.Org more than once in a given week.

That last statement should be taken in no way as a foreshadowance or a hint of what will be featured in tomorrow’s post. Don’t bother looking at yesterday’s post either.

Regardless, all of this talk about the stresses of producing a daily blog from my phone is stressing me out. I should probably go work out to relieve some of the tension.

Yeah, yeah.  I know.

I rarely do.

Recently at the auxiliary office, discussions happened within the conspiratorial gaggle in which I participate on a “per hour” basis on who was going to shepherd the next project.

After we determined who had five minutes left over in a given week, it then came down to making the final decision.

I’d tell you who “won”, but it would be non-conducive to the direction of this post.

We didn’t flip quarters, play eeny-meeny, or draw straws.

Instead, we resorted to other methods of allowing the universe, chaos math, karma, and a couple of monkeys to help us out.

In posting this picture, it occurs to me that the GOP nomination process will most likely resemble the events portrayed in this piece, which most likely deserves to hang over any American mantle.