More Good Clean Fun

My soon to be world famous video Coin Pusher (hopefully it's appeal will continue after YouTube approves it ad-worthy) was first introduced here on this blog under the title "Good Clean Fun." (Oops. That's actually Fun and Prizes, here's Good Clean Fun about looking at barnyard animals - maybe this post is poorly conceived.) This weekend I found more Good Clean Fun at the Charles Town Racetrack.

I'm not all that into horses. And I'm not a big race fan. But somehow, the marriage of the two creates the perfect blend. It's so intense, yet leisurely. So uppity, yet common. So confusing, yet simple.
When I first walked up to the track and heard the surprisingly loud thundering sound of the horses racing past, I knew I would love the horses. When I saw the lay-out of the indoor stands with tables and giant windows and computer gambling station, I knew I would love the betting. And when I saw all the old men sporting suspenders and fancy hats, I knew I would fit in perfectly.
I'm trying to find the right way to sum all this up, but I think the best way is to say that it's just good clean fun. We had so much fun on Sunday, we ended up going back on Monday! You can't get enough fun.

Charles Town, WV is famous for their horse track, which now includes slot machines. Slot machines are most definitely not good clean fun. Twenty bucks at a slot machine might last you 30 minutes. Twenty bucks at the race track could last three or four races, unless you're really unlucky. Charles Town is currently adding table games to open soon. Twenty bucks is barely enough to start playing craps, and it could disappear in one throw of the dice. That's just bad and dirty, albeit it can be really fun.

The upcoming table games was also my justification for going a second day in a row. Maybe we can get this out of our system before a trip to the races could get dangerous.

Finally, Some Recognition

It’s been almost two years since I met my first, and only, coin pusher. In a testament to my greatness and forward-thinking, that momentous event was caught on film.

Over sixteen-thousand views later (I was a little shocked by that one), it looks like I may just walk away with some money after all. That’s right, I’ve brought so much traffic to the good folks at YouTube that they’ve asked to advertise specifically through me. My ship has finally come in! And it’s about time, because my tip jar’s not bringing in the big bucks that it used to.

YouTube amazes me. I’ve added my fair share of videos, and a few of them are still viewed somewhat frequently and I even get a comment every week or so. I mean, besides the Coin Pusher, it seems people just cannot get enough of Jack LaLanne’s Power Juicer Pro! (Holy Canolies! This has over fifteen thousand views!)

I know I got enough of it though, as I still blame it for this. It really did change my life!

And who could forget this gem from the winter of 2008?

It made its way to some ab-cruncher website and got far more hits (just 51! I'm disappointed!) than it deserves.

I’m waiting for Pass the Pigs to be the next big breakout fad.

It occurred to me that I’m missing out on a prime advertisement for me here at the Muted Guerrilla. Perhaps, I should have an intro that says, “The Muted Guerrilla Proudly Presents:” and do some fancy editing like in this video.

I think that would be brilliant.

The Simple Life

That last post got me thinking about a movie I saw recently. No Impact Man is a documentary about a man’s, along with his wife and toddler, attempt to live a full year with making as little impact on the environment as possible.

It starts out with them giving up elevators and eating out and by the end of the year, they’d spent six months without electricity and even longer without toilet paper! There was no mention of what they smelled like by the end.

While their experiment was a bit extreme, it all made me think. Like, why am I using disposable razors? How cool would I be if I could shave with an old-timey straight edge blade… I don’t even know what they’re called! I could spread the shaving cream with a little brush, all the while wearing my white undershirt and khaki suspenders! It would be great.

And why am I driving twenty some miles to work each day? Why can’t I catch the trolley while I hold onto my hat or maybe ride my mule to work? “Whoa, Gordon!” I would say, because he would surely be going much too fast. Or wait, it’s 2010, shouldn’t I be vaporizing from place to place by now. Maybe I should just think about being at work and then I’d be there.

I guess all of this is to say, I’m ready for the simple life. Move me to the country, because I want some dirt under my nails and sun on my neck. I want to wake up with the sun and enjoy the dark night full of distant stars. I want to unplug the TV, the radio, and maybe even the internet. I want to take the ringer out of my phone. I could then enjoy greeting the mailman each day, who would bring me contact from the outside world and undoubtedly, tidings of good cheer. Then he would be off to the next house, some 40 acres away.

Maybe all this has gotten a bit extreme. But if I stop and think, I do feel quite a bit gluttonous and destructive, like the mess around me is my responsibility. If I could just get a camera crew to catch my good deeds, I would be in business!

Kids These Days!

So, it’s Monday, May 24, 2010 and I just turned on the air conditioner. It’s been rainy and damp the past few days, and the weatherman says it’s going to be downright hot in the next few days. Tomorrow it’s supposed to be close to 90; by Thursday it’s going to get over 90. The weekend should be cooler but rainy and damp again.

Turning on the AC always reminds me of when I was a kid. I didn’t have control of the thermostat then, but even if I did, I knew the rules. The AC does not turn on until either the third consecutive day when the temperature topped 90 degrees or the Fourth of July, whichever came first… although I do have sweaty memories of July 4th too. And I knew not to break those rules.

It was always great when it kicked on too. It would be the second or third ungodly hot Saturday of the season. I would be covered in sweat, still half asleep, still half-covered by a thin bedsheet, when I would hear the powerful roar of the air conditioner awaken from its hibernation. Then I would feel the cool air blowing through the vents. Then my Dad would call up, “Make sure all the windows are closed. I just turned the AC on.” In my mind, I’d have all the windows in the whole house slammed shut in thirty seconds flat.

Oh, good times. But the real part of the story is that we roughed through quite a bit. The air conditioner was a luxury - even growing up in the Georgia heat! - whereas now, we’re not even through with May and the AC’s already up and running. There is a threat of warmer weather in the near future. We had better be prepared! Don’t worry, the Weather Channel updates the forecast every 10 minutes, we can track the heat outside from the comfort of our climate-controlled home.

It all makes me want to say “these kids don’t know how good they have it!” except there aren’t any kids to blame. My intern Jeff has been pretty vocal about it though; that guy, all he ever does is complain. I'm still waiting on that new layout too.

Regardless, I still plan to brave the weather five days a week to enjoy my Peanut Butter and Jelly sandwich in the shade by the lake, with just the shy and gentle breeze to keep me cool.

Hat Rack

My wife took this picture of the front yard used in the previous post. She took it the day after the planting, immediately after work. If you study it closely, as I’m sure my many devotees have, you’ll find something exciting and far too uncommon, a package resting by the door.

As exciting as packages through the mail are, this one is particularly exciting. It’s a hat rack! I’ve wanted an old-timey coat rack for a long time, but after this past Christmas, the coat rack that I wanted became the hat rack that I needed. Tiff’s family, quite unlike my own, relies upon the Christmas wish list to fill the bottom of the Christmas tree. So, apparently – I have only a vague memory of this – when Tiff asked me what I wanted for Christmas, my reply went something like, “Hats. Let’s see what kind of hats everyone gets me.”

At the time, this seemed like an innocent joke and an admittedly distracted answer, but it turned out to be a pretty cool request. Here are a few of the hats I collected. The classic fedora: The Chinese hat, I’m not sure if there’s a real name for these: And the Scout Leader hat:

They’re all so cool in their own ways. I also got a coon skin hat, but I need to find it before I can take a picture of it. It has the makings of a neat collection if you ask me. And as a result a hat rack shot up the list of you-know-what-would-be-cool-to-have. Ebay it turns out is a great place to find them. And while the one we got is not antique or unique, the price was right and it was what we were looking for. Unfortunately, it doesn't make sense for the hats I got for Christmas, so we ended up with a very nice coat rack.

Yard Work for the Blog

It's been over a year now since Tiff and I moved into our new place. And it's been over a year that I have tried to let the beautiful Mother Nature beautify our little lawn. She has taken down an ugly tree, which is a big step in the right direction, but over the year, I was hoping to see a little more progress. Mother Nature is almost as slow as my intern Jeff!

We decided to take things into our own hands. Tiff called upon some reinforcements in the form of her Aunt, who actually provided all the plants and did most of the work, but the final product look pretty great!

Not bad, eh? Yeah, it may need some work along the side there, and the part not shown along the street needs help, but what an improvement! We're on our way to a full-on flower garden. We just need to start taking care of it.

In that respect gardening's kind of like my blog. Water it every now and then, weed out the bad stuff, and just give it some love, and pretty soon, my blog will grow healthy and strong with beautiful blooms and maybe even some nutritional fruit from the tree of John Duffy. In my case, I have to do quite a bit of pruning too; pruning back my own blogging ambition... it hurts a little bit every time.

Also, gardens are intended to be enjoyed. They feed off the energy of admiration and appreciation. And flowers don't last forever, so you know, come on by for the peonies and in a couple days, come on by to check out the petunias. You never know what you'll find.

Unfortunately, my blog garden has had winter seasons too. Hopefully, I can find some interests and inspirations to last the whole year round.

Gettin' Stuff Done

We just finished painting the bedroom, rearranging and making the place a bit homey. It only took us a year!
It looks so good that I think the only proper description is “SMOKIN’! Yeah!” I even painted the ceiling! The ceiling color is a bit brighter than normal ceiling color but the name of the color is White Smoke, which I thought went well with the Aqua Smoke color of the wall. Smokin’, yeah!

The furniture all got rearranged with this moving here and that moving there. It’s strange how rotating a bed can change so much. Waking up in the middle of that first night becomes just a little disorienting. “Wait… but I’m at home.”

Anyways, for over a year, we’ve had one chilly wall; yep, one lone painted wall desperately in need of a second coat. (rimshot!) Then, in a burst of energy, we painted the ceiling, all four walls and the trim in a little over a weekend. I’m beginning to learn that productivity is much more satisfying than I previously thought.

I saw a home improvement show on one of the cable channels recently where the host made a comment that went something like, “All these unfinished projects are just creating a low level of stress in your life,” and at the end of the show, the homeowners were like “I didn’t even know I was stressed!” So I’m going to call it background stress.

I have quite a bit of this background stress in my house. The bathroom needs work, the basement needs work, the doors, the windows, the gutters, just about everything needs work. The garbage disposal just broke! They say it’s true of most homeowners. I say it’s all part of growing up.

I turned thirty, recently. I guess that's part of growing up, too. To make it significant, I'm trying to be more productive, to get more done, and to wipe out the background stress.

Maybe the good feeling that comes with these productive displays, checking things off the to-do list, is more from relieving this background stress than the sense of accomplishment. I don’t know though, I can’t say that the bedroom is complete until a few minor things are corrected, which it might be another year or so before they get done.

Church Thinks

Church I thought would be a prime location to just sit and think, but as it turns out, it’s not.

I went to church yesterday, which for me is a pretty rare event that only occurs when Tiff is swayed by the pleas of family members. It’s actually a pretty neat church, out in the country, down a dirt road. The parking lot is always freshly mowed and the plaque beside the door to the red brick building reads something like, Tiny Little Church, Established in 1771.

The May meeting, as it’s called, is always nice, because the temperatures usually right and the church is surrounded in rain-soaked green of spring, if that’s a color. Plus it’s always nice to see the sparse crowd of happy old people, and nothing makes old people happier than young people going to church. 1771, as chance would have it, is not only the year the church was built, but the cumulative age of the dozen or so worshipers in attendance.

I enjoy every part of this little church, including wearing my Sunday best!, except the actual church-y part of it. I’m down with G-O-D, I just like having him be more of a sideline part of my life than front and center.

So I decided on the way to take advantage of the sit and think time and use it as a time to perfect my active visualization. You see, recently I’ve been introduced to the mysterious powers of intention. It all began when Tiff signed me up for a daily email from The Universe. It always offers a basic positive message with a hippie vibe. Today’s message is a great example:

Sometimes the most obvious thing in the world, John, isn't obvious at all, in the absence of wonder.

Obviously,
The Universe

There’s always a zinger on the end too. I love the zingers. Anyways, that was a few months ago, and since then I’ve stumbled into one thing after another that sheds more light on the power of intention.

As part of it, you can make things happen, get closer to your goals, just by putting some serious thought into the outcome… I think more by moving the goalposts than anything else. I’m drawn to it though as I like the idea that sitting and thinking can actually get stuff done. I was hoping to begin getting stuff done while at church.

In an unexpected twist though, I found I couldn’t not listen to the preacher preach… and preach… and preach. This went against years of childhood training, week after week of actively not listening. So my plans were foiled and my thought experiment put on hold, but I have theory behind the downfall. It’s all those old people. They put so much collective energy into visualizing me paying attention that my own free-will was rendered helpless! Or, I think maybe I was compelled to listen because it’s what everyone else was doing. I was just the old sheep-in-the-flock, or maybe a fish in the stream of energy being focused on the preacher. I could only swim one way!

Anyways, I have a closing with no segue. If everyone would please join me in envisioning a change in my blog, it should change on its own.

Foggy Lens

I would like to change things up a bit on this blog. That's why I've asked my intern Jeff to create a new layout and some new features to make the Muted Guerrilla more of a destination website. He hasn't gotten around to it yet, though. I guess you get what you pay for. I was also hoping to get his input on a bigger issue, but one thing at a time.

The bigger issue is: where do I go from here? It seems like the somewhat successful blogs have some focus or specialized interest. If I were a vegetarian lumberjack, or a professional dart thrower (a dartist, perhaps), or a traveling lion tamer, or even a water witch, I think I could write a pretty bang-up blog that could be appreciated for generations to come! But as it is, I write about this wide array of life that is me, and generally falls into one of three categories, the mundane, the mundaner, and DC United. And the world already has a surprising number of DC United fan blogs (there are many, many more too).

I've thought maybe I should get really into the local scene and use this blog as a way to stay connected to my community, but it's hard to get excited about a place called Manassas... although, I did just move. Although, in all likelihood, I will probably move again sooner or later. Hopefully someday I can write about my local community out on the farm in the middle of nowhere.

The other stuff that I would like to write about are all things that I would just like to learn more about, so I am far from an expert on any of them and, therefore, have no real basis for writing about anything. In fact, that's my problem. I don't specialize. I'm more of a Renaissance Man-blogger.

I should rename my blog... who am I fighting anyway? I'll take suggestions, but my top-choice right now is definitely something like "All the Wonders of The World's Last True Renaissance Man and His Proclamations for All the World to Hear." ...or read.

I like it already! Hopefully that will get my intern Jeff off his duff, too.

The Future's Got Potential

The crazy thing about my long silence these last six months is that I’ve had a boo-koo amount of things to write about. I could write a book-Oh! I’ve been so busy doing one amazing thing after another that I’m not sure I would have had time to write it all down. It would have been better than the best blog in the world!

I have done some really cool stuff and found some interesting things to think about. There’s no time to look back, however. Life gets too complicated if I spend my time rehashing events that took place days or even weeks ago. What I need to focus on is the here and now and what I had for lunch… another Peanut Butter and Jelly sandwich hit the spot. The future’s got potential, too.

Another word about lunch: Oreos. I packed a few oreos with my lunch today. I was a little worried about them, because I didn’t put them in anything so they were just floating around. They did not disappoint though.

A couple of days ago, I ran into trouble when I tried to put Oreos in the same container that carries my Peanut Butter and Jelly sandwich. My sandwich got all hard and my cookies got all soft. It was disastrous! But that’s neither here nor now… although it is about what I had for lunch.

Did I say the best blog in the world? Oh yeah, I thought so.

Once Again...

It happened once again. A long and painful silence from the Muted Guerrilla. It is always such a sad thing. People the world over have tried to deal with the absence, some coping better than others. In some places, entire nations are on the brink of collapse! (I’ve heard I’m huge in Greece .)

But blogging has become so passé. I should be tweeting my twit in outbursts of wit or videoing everything for YouTube. At the very least, I need to log in to FaceBook!

Maybe, I’m writing too much to hold people’s interest, most importantly mine. Maybe I should just write “I had a Peanut Butter and Jelly sandwich for lunch today. Mmm. It hit the spot.” And leave out the part about the row of goslings that walked right behind me or the ducklings that swam around in front of me or the surprisingly loud noise of several geese flying just over head. Or that I got to thinking about the huge number of geese that are always at the lake compared to the number of ducks, and if I were to go around and bop them on the head, most likely I would say “Goose. Goose. Duck!” And if this is the case everywhere, how did the game become duck, duck, goose?

If I’m going to have another run at this, maybe I should get a new format. I could get a swankier website with really cool applications. I could take polls and surveys and respond to fan mail. I could hire an assistant and a publicist and three or four roving reporters and an intern named Jeff. I could see it now!

Perhaps I’d have better luck if I just wrote more for my audience than for myself. So, here it goes… Hey Dad! How are things going? Things here are good. Tiff says hi. The toilet is making a whistling sound when it flushes, any guesses?