I love the song. It's witty, playful and full of vengeance. Really there is so no better combination to me.

"The Mariner's Revenge Song"

We are two mariners
Our ship's sole survivors
In this belly of a whale
It's ribs are ceiling beams
It's guts are carpeting
I guess we have some time to kill

You may not remember me
I was a child of three
And you, a lad of eighteen
But, I remember you
And I will relate to you
How our histories interweave
At the time you were
A rake and a roustabout
Spending all your money
On the whores and hounds
(oh, oh)

You had a charming air
All cheap and debonair
My widowed mother found so sweet
And so she took you in
Her sheets still warm with him
Now filled with filth and foul disease
As time wore on you proved
A debt-ridden drunken mess
Leaving my mother
A poor consumptive wretch
(oh, oh)

And then you disappeared
Your gambling arrears
The only thing you left behind
And then the magistrate
Reclaimed our small estate
And my poor mother lost her mind
Then, one day in spring
My dear sweet mother died
But, before she did
I took her hand as she, dying, cried:
(oh, oh)

"Find him, Bind him
Tie him to a pole and break
His fingers to splinters
Drag him to a hole until he
Wakes up naked
Clawing at the ceiling
Of his grave"

It took me fifteen years
To swallow all my tears
Among the urchins in the street
Until a priory
Took pity and hired me
To keep their vestry nice and neat
But, never once in the employ
Of these holy men
Did I ever, once turn my mind
From the thought of revenge
(oh, oh)

One night I overheard
The prior exchanging words
With a penitent whaler from the sea
The captain of his ship
Who matched you toe to tip
Was known for wanton cruelty
The following day
I shipped to sea
With a privateer
And in the whistle
Of the wind
I could almost hear
(oh, oh)

"Find him, Bind him
Tie him to a pole and break
His fingers to splinters
Drag him to a hole until he
Wakes up naked
Clawing at the ceiling
Of his grave

There is one thing I must say to you
As you sail across the sea
Always, your mother will watch over you
As you avenge this wicked deed"

And then, that fateful night
We had you in our sight
After twenty months at sea
Your starboard flank abeam
I was getting my muskets clean
When came this rumbling from beneath
The ocean shook
The sky went black
And the captain quailed
And before us grew
The angry jaws
Of a giant whale

(oh..)

Don't know how I survived
The crew all was chewed alive
I must have slipped between his teeth
But, oh, what providence
What divine intelligence
That you should survive
As well as me
It gives my heart great joy
To see your eyes fill with fear
So lean in close
And I will whisper
The last words you'll hear
(oh, oh)

Basra has grown so much in the last month. The dark areas are new growth that haven't bleached yet. All of the new growth is perfectly flat. I wish he could stay outside all year.

At the same time I am ready for winter to freeze the fucking bugs out. I am tired of being covered in ants and spiders. I just face Basra a bath because he was totally coated in ants after eating the pears.

I feel so car sick from a long ride in the hot car. The whole way here I kept thinking I can't wait to get in the air conditioned mall and walk around. Then I looked at the other people doing the same thing and realized I am getting old fast. Somehow heat makes me sick now. I never used to feel that way.

Either these are bigger ants than the ones from the cheesy puffs or just fat ones from all the granola goodness.

I was a my parents house for (e:Mike)'s birthday and he brought out his first Nokia cell phone from 1999. This thing was huge and did just about nothing. What a world of difference. What will 10 more years bring.

I hope now that your birthday has arrived, our allergies can depart.

No seriously, have a great year in your new apartment in the city!

So, in relation to my last entry. Petra Ecclestone also recently picked up the Candy Spelling Mansion for $85 million. It was one of the most expensive real estate transactions in the US but it was almost half off as it originally had a $150,000,000 asking price. She is clearly a bargain shopper as I already pointed out.

According to the LA times, Petra wasn't into all the antiques in the 120+ room mansion, so some antique dealers came in to bid on the stuff. Discussing a chandlier one dealer said:

"It's a $10,000 investment just in order to get it ready for sale," Boltiansky said. Anticipating a price in "the low six-figure range," the antiques dealer will not discuss exact figures until after the sales and then only with buyer permission.

Boltiansky is the president of Jan & Company in LA. And the LA times article links to their website: On the site it says, "Our 24,000 square foot showrooms in Los Angeles, California is filled with furnishings acquired from some of Europe's most prestigious residences."

But does this seem like the website for a place selling six figure chandeliers? Maybe they are just 100% committed to antiques of all genres, after all I would argue that the site qualifies for status as an antique web site.

Its so old it still has the inline dreamweaver javascript detecting netscape navigator 4 which was released in June 1997

function MM_reloadPage(init) {  //reloads the window if Nav4 resized
  if (init==true) with (navigator) {if ((appName=="Netscape")&&(parseInt(appVersion)==4)) {
    document.MM_pgW=innerWidth; document.MM_pgH=innerHeight; onresize=MM_reloadPage; }}
  else if (innerWidth!=document.MM_pgW || innerHeight!=document.MM_pgH) location.reload();
}
MM_reloadPage(true);

Poking around on the site I found this page which had the dates for the aquisition html templates:

Which brought me to the spelling mansion one.


Wow, that is one seriously impressive residence. Imagine greeting people at the front door.

Back to the site. Clearly managing the site involves a lo of copying and pasting template html pages and FTPing them back to the server. It seems like they could really benefit from something a little more automated. Something more 2011. Something with 3d views of the antiques. Maybe its time to re-invest some of that money in an upgrade of the web presence.

Clearly, those people are experts in antiques but web design - not so much. Maybe its a case of reaching out to student grandkid who didn't follow through with that career path.

On the upside they do have a very interesting glossary you budding antique enthusiasts

The world's richest bride Petra Ecclestone got married this weekend in Rome . Her father is billionaire Bernie Ecclestone -

They got married at the same castle as Tom and Katie Cruise. Everyone tacky and famous was there. Fergie with the Black Eyed Peas, Alicia Keys and Eric Clapton played. Paris Hilton was there, sigh. The only thing missing was that (e:mike) and I were left of the guest list as an apparent oversight. Someone needs to get fired.

But really oversights like that are to be expected on such a shoe string budget -- it only cost $5,000,000.

At first that figure seems shocking. Like $5,000,000 could feed or blow up a small country (depending who is doing the spending and if we deem the inhabitant terrorists or underprivileged). I know, I know - "its too much excess", "the rich gets richer while the poor get poorer" --- blah, blah, blah but then when you really think about it $5,000,000 seems really like a dollar store wedding for a father with a billion dollar fortune.

I mean guys making $40,000 give their daughters $10,000 - $20,000 weddings. I would expect this guy to at least throw a $20,000,000 wedding and that still really kind of thifty for his fortune. Maybe the problem is really just that nothing is expensive enough.

Sure every guest had Chateau Petrus wine at $6,500 a bottle but any self respecting billionaire dad would have had each guest a personal kegger of cristal.

In a way, the rich splurging like this is a good thing. Think about all the money that changed hands, how many people got paid. Its like we are finally seeing trickle down economics really pay off.

Could it be true, researchers in canada have come up with a Cat allergy vaccine I am not going to bother with weekly painful shots, if this kind of thing might pan out in the near future.

Researchers have developed a new vaccine to desensitize people with a cat allergy that is faster and safer than traditional immunotherapies, according to a study in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology. Cat allergy affects up to 10% of the general population and is a key trigger of childhood asthma. Standard treatment involves weekly injections of cat allergen in incremental doses for a year or more, but severe allergic reactions are a risk. The new vaccine, developed in Canada, uses synthetic versions of short peptides from the protein responsible for most cat allergies. The peptides are 1,000 times less allergenic than traditional cat allergen, researchers said. The vaccine was tested on 66 volunteers; another 22 received a placebo. Skin responses, an indicator of the severity of an allergy, were measured after eight hours and compared with reactions to cat allergen. Adverse responses in the vaccinated group were reduced by 40% and 10% in the placebo group. Researchers said the results are comparable to a year of traditional immunotherapy. The vaccine, which is in the final stage of development, is expected to require four shots at the same dose.

I think this is the study here

I have the worst allergies I have had in my entire life starting thursday night after this crazy bike ride with (e:terry) and (e:yesthatcasey). Today I tried the netti pot. One nostral finally got unplugged. The other would not even let the water pass.

It seems like an impossible amount of every kind of allergy including freakin poison ivy - although so far a pretty minor case. The only thing that could make this worse is if I was sealed up in a plastic bag with a cat. The only thing that could make this better is seeing every cat in the world vacuum sealed in plastic bags. I guess that's unfair because I don't think cats had anything to so with it this time.

I am experimenting with the poison ivy, seeing as I have it on multiple sites. I cleaned it up real good with technu right away as it was obvious from past experience what was happening to my arms and legs. Luckily its not as bad as some other cases I have had. I am still debating if I should just burn my clothes or wash them. Same with my bike.

The ones on the arm I tried a benedryl lotion on. The ones on the back of my knee are driving me crazy. I decided to just cut one of the blisters off and see what happens. Sometime I find things are easier when they are healing cuts instead of whatever they were before. I am sure tiny can hear me cheering, Amputate, Amputate.

The worst is that I have gotten to the point where I am allergic to tap water I think. I don't think I am actually allergic to water. But this seems to happen the end of august every year. Maybe whatever pollen or spores gets in the water makes my allergies worse during this short time. Usually, during the rest of the year showering makes everything better.

I found it interesting that my geographic tongue drama did not flare up. It seems to have peaked at WEMF. Maybe it really isn't tied to allergies. At least not the rest of them.

The fact that (e:mike)'s allergies are so horrible also right now makes me feel less alone. I guess it had finally come to the point where next year I need to go to an allergist and try some immunotherapy.