Someone posted a few days ago about life without sports due to the current issue and suddenly discovering there was a lady on his couch who seemed nice.
The basketball coach at Mrs. Cow's school is a hardcore sports fanatic.?ÿ He put the same basic message on Facebook about 10 days ago.?ÿ He has been providing updates every day that are rather humorous.?ÿ Today's message for example:
Day 10 of no sports.?ÿ Dashed to the microwave while zapping a burrito to shut it off with only one second left.?ÿ At last, the thrill of a buzzer-beater.
The last 7 minutes of the local news here is usually reserved for sports.?ÿ Last night I looked up at TV to see OU's basketball team with a tremendous buzzer-beater...hey wait...that clip was about ten years old.
They're reduced to running "classic plays" for the nightly sports. Sad.
This poor fellow was about to watch camel racing one day until his pre-school children convinced him they needed to watch some kiddie show that was vital to them.
NASCAR ran a "virtual" race on Sunday.?ÿ About 12 or 15 drivers all logged into a computer program of the Homestead (Miami) track and raced for 100 laps.?ÿ For those of us about to go into withdrawal it was a hoot.?ÿ They even had commentators and interviewed the drivers during the race.?ÿ The graphics on those programs is unbelievable.?ÿ Some scenes you could almost believe were real.?ÿ I've been ordered by my wife to stay put, not even to run to the grocery store.
Andy
In case you didn't know; the traffic in the greater Puget Sound region sucks...usually.
For the past week, at least, the traffic report has been non-existent. I guess no news is good news.
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I used to run with some of that bunch when they first started online racing back in about 1995 I think.?ÿ We had paid $4000 for the latest and greatest Gateway 2000 desktop with a bunch of add-ons, tower speakers, etc.?ÿ Windows 95 had just come out, and it came with the Nascar Racing Sim.?ÿ Being a big fan, I got into it and discovered they were beta testing the online version.?ÿ For me, that was a long distance call to Boston on a dial up connection.?ÿ I know Junior, the guy who became his spotter (now Logano's spotter) TJ Majors, Martin Truex, and several others were on it.?ÿ Was quite addicting even then, and the graphics were nothing like the current version.?ÿ Had a wheel and pedals hooked up, had a few $300 phone bills, but it was great entertainment.?ÿ If we had better internet I'd still be doing it, but as the sim got better my connection made it unusable.?ÿ Probably did it for 10 years or so, was a lot better when they set up servers you could access online.?ÿ I know they now scan the tracks to get the most realistic surface models, even of the seams in the track.?ÿ?ÿ
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@eddycreek Yeah, they said that the bumps even showed up and the track darkened as the rubber was laid down.
Andy
I watched Camel racing on TV in Kuwait.....bizarre, and felt sorry for those Camels.....being whipped by electronic crop robots, because any rational camel would drop a human off and try to eat them for doing that to them for that long......
Years ago I read a book about a lady that travelled across Australia on a camel, and she wrote that camels are the only animal other than humans, that spit. I hated camels after that and re-arranged my MO to avoid them, but I see these cute critters also can do it:
Same in Orlando. You can actually drive through Orlando in 15 minutes without having to stop once! It's usually 70 minutes of complete stop and go. ????
They will spit when provoked. Watch their ears. That will give you a few seconds of warning before PPPTTTEEEWWW. Right in the face.
I am expert as I own several of these lovely critters. Had about 40 of them at one time.
I think somebody else (i.e. not me) mentioned in a different thread that in some place in the USA the farms had gone bust and the farmers had let the stock out into the wild, and the wild stock had some dangerous behavior - something like stalking and running down surveyors, possibly to get close enough so that the surveyor provokes them, which is apparently what surveyors tend to do.
Anyway, having said all that about camels and llamas, I've just noticed my avatar photo.
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I believe the story you may be remembering involved the emu craze. They went from being high-priced to nearly worthless in a short time. I did hear of some being turned loose. Closest I came to that was encountered an adjoiner to a survey years ago who started talking about the worthless ostrich he was still feeding. My young co-worker said he would love to have an ostrich, so the guy gave it to him. All he had to do was go back with a trailer to get it. He had it resold before he ever picked it up and made a tidy profit for his time.
A standard defense mechanism for camelids (camels, llamas, alpacas) is to spit juice that is actually their cud. Being ruminants they hold their food, regurgitate and rechew it several times, much like a cow. NASTY stuff. During early Spring when the plants are loaded with moisture the cud can be exceptionally watery making it appear to be saliva. One should attempt to stay upwind of these critters. An example being when more than one is attempting to eat feed out of a trough at the same time. That is not normal llama behavior. They resent the other llamas stealing their food. This leads to a quick spurt aimed at the offending llama. On a windy day some of that material will head down wind, where no one really wants to be standing at the time.
Even in remotest NZ maybe 25 years ago we had a neighbor farm-life-style-block with a couple of long-legged-feathered-boomers (the booming sound carried for a mile or so, all day, all night) spring up overnight, then disappear just as quickly. You'd wonder what the cost of that was: buy two birds (Jack and Jill), fly them in (they themselves cant fly), quarantine, special fencing, vets, feed, a massage or two for the investors, subsidy applications, permits, Jack and Jill don't like each other and in regard to the landscape (hilly) think WTF, zero yield, write-off, disposal.
In my mind I'm sure the llama story was from one of the Texans maybe Mr Monte or Mr Harris and I'm sure there was a photo of a llama in some low level rugged plants reaching out to the horizon, a fence, and a captioned warning. Perhaps it was alpacas.
I can remember parts of the conversation and not all that was mentioned at that time.
Most of my history of the various beasts that locals have thought they were gonna get rich from in a short time came from local people that ventured into.
A few made their money early by selling their investment to others while the end of the phenomenon was approaching.
Had their packaging plant ever been approved and built, the idea may have had a chance to make others money too.
At the end of college, I appreciated that cows and horses had paid for my tuition except for the last semester when I had to borrow money from the bank to buy books.
When I sold my last critter I promised myself that I would not ever depend upon a horse or cow or goat or pig or any other farm critter to bail me out of anything and that was the last critter I'd ever own.
Which was a good thing because since I began surveying there has not been time for me to tend to critters.
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