Luke ‘n’ Bill

This week I’ve been back in South Dakota for most of the week.  Wednesday I worked from the office here, Thursday I worked with a client at their office and now Friday I am back at the office.  Luckily on this trip back to the Blend offices I was able to mix a little pleasure with business.  Along with getting to see all the Blenders back at the office I get to visit my good friends in Sioux Falls.  On Wednesday and Thursday I stayed at Josh’s place, helping him put some very sexy rims on his new 300C, going out for a couple drinks and just relaxing.  Friday I am heading out to Ruppert’s to hang out with the Ruppert clan and get a good night’s sleep before the climax to the week.

Saturday is Brook’s bachelor party.  The plan is to get all the paintball guys along with a couple other guys in the bachelor party group over to “Paint the Farm” near Bridgewater for their annual “Farm Wars”.

I haven’t played much paintball after getting excessive with it last year.  Actually in total this will be the third time this year I’ve played.  That’s less than I used to do in a weekend.  I’m actually thinking that this may be the last time that I play paintball for quite a while, I may sell my gear after this weekend.  I think it would be a good way to end it.  I started playing paintball around 8 years ago and started really getting into it about 6 years ago when a good friend from back home in Warroad got me addicted to it.   I’ve been able to travel around the U.S. doing it and have had a great time, but I think it’s a good time to step back a bit from it.

Anyways, back to this weekend.  Farm Wars is a big scenario game that they do every year.  They’ll come up with some big plot that you follow and do some themed “missions” that keep people doing something all day and keep things moving.  It is on a huge old farm with plenty of different landscape to play around throughout the day.   We plan on doing that for 3 or 4 hours in the morning and then heading to the next gun themed event, sporting clays!

Even though I really never get a chance to do it (I think the last time my Shotgon has fired was at Ruppert’s bachelor party) I have a great time shooting shotguns.  Sporting clays is especially fun.  You pay your X amount of dollars and that pays for your clays along with the ammunition you use.  Then your group goes from location to location shooting clays set up in different scenes.  One setup will have a sporting clay coming over a tree at you slowly before dropping, the next will have one coming out of the reeds while you’re standing in a boat and another coming from behind you over your shoulder.  All of them are set up on automatic throwers that you just hit a button on them and send them flying.  You’ll shoot one round off to see where they go and then you take turns shooting them and keeping track of your score.  It’s a lot like golf…except for with guns!  Infinitely better!  There are tons of “holes” that you shoot your way through and they are all a blast.

After that we’ll most likely head up to Brookings (our old stomping grounds) and finish the night off right.  Should make for a great end to a great week.  (also, Sunday I’ll get to go back to Rochester and see my girl that I haven’t seen since Wednesday morning, so that will for sure put a smile on my face)

So the other day I was reading about the confirmation of water on Mars and it got me thinking, well some day I guess they really could plant someone on Mars. Which led me back to the thought of…well some day they’ve got to try to put someone on the moon. Which led me to the thought of….Who owns the moon?

Traditionally throughout history, the first time someone “owns land” is when the civilization that killed off the last civilization was organized enough to do some type of surveying to lay claims on the land. For example, North America. Indians follow the mammoth in, kill them off. Europeans run into the side of the continent and kill the Indians off. Europeans survey it and lay claim. After that it can really all be summed up with this great excerpt from Eddie Izzard.

Now this brings me back to a thought I had a while ago…who owns Antarctica? I can’t remember how I found out back then if I just asked someone or what, but my good friends Google and Wikipedia can give some answers to that. Apparently somewhere in the early 1900’s countries started laying claim to territories on Antarctica up until the 50’s when they started signing treaties on it. What I find interesting is this:

In 1991, 24 nations approved a protocol (addition) to the treaty that would ban oil and other mineral exploration for at least 50 years.

So I’m going to go ahead and make the call…I’ll give it 10 years before the US starts drilling there (5 before they start exploring for it).

But all of this still doesn’t answer the question….who owns the moon?

I love the band Flogging Molly!

Ok, I just wanted to put that out there before we got started. Last Friday I went up to the Irish Festival in St. Paul, thanks to Ross for letting me know about it. The whole reason that I went up there was not for a Guinness. Which by the way, I found out that they didn’t have on tap there…anywhere…I’m pretty sure that is the reason why it rained a little after I got there…God was crying!

Anyways, the reason I went was because the headliner of the nights Irish music was the best Irish band ever (and best punk band ever) Flogging Molly. If you disagree, it’s ok, you’re wrong. If you haven’t heard Flogging Molly before, do yourself a favor, go to Itunes and download a song. Any song will do, I really can’t think of a song I don’t like.

So yeah, I headed up there Friday night…met up with Chris McMacken and we started to check out the festivities. There were tons of people there selling everything they could Irish, a few cool entertainers including a couple soccer teams playing in the center of the park, a few guys boxing in an old style boxing setup, plenty of kids doing their little irish dances and finally a large assortment of great Irish music.

The best of course was Flogging Molly.  This was the second time I got to watch them live and they have just as much energy and excitement as they did 6 years ago.  There is something awe inspiring with seeing 7 people on the stage making music with a such soul that it literally grabs you by the neck and forces you to sing along.  They played a fairly long set which was nice, being that I only was able to see their Friday show and they were going to do it all again the next night.

Here’s to Irish Punk.

I had wanted to write just a quick “general complaint” for a while about government as a “business”.   Every job out there works with “customers” at some level or another.  Your customers may be employees of the same company in a different department or even the standard definition of customers being the general public.  The first thing you are taught going into these jobs is that the “customer is always right”.  No matter how dumb their request is or how ignorant they may be you always…even in the worst cases, need to sugar coat it when you tell them they are wrong.

This all boils down to what drives businesses to be better, if the customer doesn’t spend their money with you, they’ll spend it somewhere else.

Somewhere where this is turned on its ear is government.  It really started to annoy me for the first time when I sat in a line of about 15 people at the DMV waiting for 2 totally incompetent and lifeless individuals to “help me”.  I watched as the most mundane tasks, which a mentally handicap chimpanzee with a limp could have completed in record, took them forever to complete.  After sitting in line for entirely too long while the line moved 1 person, I decided I could not wait another 3 hours for this, I needed to go back to work, for a real company that had real customers.

The next place that I saw this was the licensing center.  This was a much shorter wait due to the fact that no one was in there however I had to deal with the same quality of individuals.  I sat there listening to how Sally had talked to Edna and oh my goodness… yada yada yada….not work appropriate and someone shoot me in the face this wait is painful!

The painful truth that is evident in both of these locations was that their pay checks are not dependent on their company surviving.  Their paychecks are depending on the fact that everyone doesn’t want to get arrested for breaking the laws of proper licensing.  They do something that all of us have to pay for both in taxes and in the fees we pay for these “services”.  If these were services that were done in the general business world they would have been automated years ago to streamline the process but they do not need to be, because of the lack of competition.

Moral of the story….there is no moral to this story, I’m just ranting.

Oh and…maybe lick your drivers license before you hand it to them so that they might catch a cold tomorrow….making their day horrible tomorrow in return for making your day horrible today!