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Madelyn loved growing tomatoes, but couldn’t seem to get her tomatoes to turn red. One day while taking a stroll she came upon a gentlemen neighbor who had the most beautiful garden full of huge red tomatoes.

She asked the gentlemen, “What do you do to get your tomatoes red?” He responded, “Well, twice a day I stand in front of my tomato garden and expose myself, and my tomatoes turn red from blushing so much.”

Madelyn was so intrigued by the idea that she decided to try doing the same thing to her tomatoes to see if it would work. So, twice a day for two weeks she stood naked in her garden hoping for the best. One day the gentlemen passed by and asked the woman, “How did you make out? Did your tomatoes turn red?” “No!” she replied, “but my cucumbers are enormous!”

One Wish a Day for Three Days

Photo courtesy of FileFap.com

A tribe of Indians capture a cowboy and bring him back to their camp to meet the chief. The chief says to the cowboy, “You are going to die. But we feel sorry for you, so we will give you one wish a day for three days. On sundown of the third day, you die. What is your first wish?” The cowboy says, “I want to see my horse.” The Indians get his horse.

The cowboy grabs the horse’s ear and whispers something, then slaps the horse on the åss. The horse takes off. Two hours later, the horse comes back with a naked blonde. She jumps off the horse and goes into the teepee with the cowboy. The Indians look at each other, figuring, “Typical white man — can only think of one thing.”

The second day, the chief says, “What is your wish today?” The cowboy says, “I want to see my horse again.” The Indians bring him his horse. The cowboy leans over to the horse and whispers something in the horse’s ear, then slaps it on the åss. Two hours later, the horse comes back with a naked brunette. She gets off and goes in the teepee with the cowboy. The Indians shake their heads, figuring, “Typical white man — going to die and can only think of one thing.”

The third day comes, and the chief says, “This is your last wish, white man. What you want?” The cowboy says, “I want to see my horse again.” The Indians bring him his horse. The cowboy grabs the horse by both ears, twists them hard and yells, “Read my lips! POSSE, dåmn it! P-O-S-S-E!”

Author’s Note

On a side note, finding a cucumber was hard enough, but do you know how frustratingly difficult it was to find a nice, wholesome, artistic picture of a nude lady riding a horse on the Internet? There are FAR too many frightening images of horribly perverted women doing really disgusting things to animals out there. Where on Earth do they find these freaks of nature, and what possesses them to generate photographic evidence of their sickening actions, let alone put them online?! Yuck!

UPDATE: At least in 2012, the right kind of wholesome “Lady Godiva” style of pictures of naked girls riding horses are much easier to find, if you know where to look.

Last night just before midnight, as I neared the end of a two-year-long journey, I found myself racing down a residential street in frustration, heading towards yet another park. Three simple questions arise from that statement: What journey? What the heck was I doing out there around midnight? Why the frustration?

Just over two years ago, I discovered geocaching, a high-tech scavenger-hunt-type game that uses computers and satellites to pinpoint the approximate location of geocaches, hidden containers that generally hold worthless trinkets and a log book in which to sign your name. These geocaches (also known simply as caches) range in size anywhere from 35mm film canisters (or smaller) to large 10-gallon buckets, and are secreted away in playgrounds, parking lots, forests, malls, almost anywhere. You think it sounds too easy thanks to technology? Keep in mind that the GPS gets you only within 20 or 30 feet of the hidden location, and it’s up to you to do the rest. Caches are located in almost every country of the world. While some countries or locales are home to no more than a dozen geocaches, if you live in the Bay Area, as I do, the region is so over-populated with them that it is very likely that you pass within a few hundred feet of one every day!

To me, that’s part of the appeal of geocaching. Finding something hidden within feet of where ordinary people walk, drive, or work everyday seems so cool, and slightly clandestine. I’ve found geocaches on, near, or under fire hydrants, electrical meters, telephone poles, light poles, bridges, park benches, picnic tables, playground slides, phone booths, fences, just about everywhere you can imagine. And 99.9% of the passers-by are oblivious and clueless, known in the geocaching world in Harry Potter style as “geomuggles” — although I sometimes hear “Did you lose something?” or even the rare “Hey, are you doing that GPS thing?” There’s also the element of getting out into nature, the base aspect of geocaching’s origins. I call geocaching my visit to the gym; on multiple occasions, I’ve walked as much as 13 miles roundtrip in wooded trails to find a single cache high on the top of the mountain. The views are often spectacular, and the joy of and incentive in spending time outdoors adds to the value of the sport. In some locations, such as Washington DC, physical containers cannot be left. The caches located there are “virtual” in nature; you must visit the site and describe some esoteric visual characteristic that the creator wants you to locate before you can claim the find, i.e. a date inscribed on a fountain, or a name engraved on a tombstone.

After I serendipitously watched an episode of World’s Best on the Travel Channel while on a leisurely vacation that listed geocaching as the 7th best lost treasure, I was intrigued. After I got back home, I bought a $100 Garmin GPS receiver on Amazon, and found my first geocache on August 10, 2002 with my son. I was hooked. It was then that I gave myself the goal of eventually finding 1,000 geocaches.

Which brings me back to last night at 11:52, and me driving frantically around my neighborhood from park to park.

Last year on August 9, the day before my first anniversary, I found my 500th geocache. I then set the goal to find my 1000th cache by my second anniversary. Yesterday. By the end of the day the day before, August 9, 2004, I had accumulated a total of 970 caches. Now while there are megacachers out there who can find 100+ in a day, the best daily total I’ve ever had was 39 — and that was an entire day of geocaching from dawn to well after nightfall. Finding 30 in a day was a daunting task, albeit a self-imposed daunting task.

Thanks to work duties rightly coming first, it wasn’t until the afternoon that I truly had the opportunity to begin the long trek. Annoyingly typical, the first few searches came up blank — I found nothing and gave up after quite a bit of thorough searching at each location, wasting precious time and daylight. Then I managed to get on a roll and found several in a row. Hour after hour of successes and failures, working my way back towards home, led me to the point of reaching #997 at around 10:45 p.m., the goal just outside my grasp. Taunting me. It was then that I hit the worst snag: I was very near home and I’d already found most of the caches in the area, making the distance between ones left to find them much greater. It didn’t help that many of the ones nearest home are “micros”, containers made from 35mm film canisters or even smaller. Much harder to find!

At 11:52, I had just left a park where I could not find (according to the published instructions for this particular geocache) a one-inch-long breath strips container that was camouflaged to blend in with its surroundings. I spied one more cache in my GPS not far from home in a park I knew reasonably well. I raced towards it, with neither time nor the night on my side, knowing I had only eight minutes left before the stroke of midnight. At 11:54, I arrived, got out of my car, located the general area with the GPS, and began searching every nook and cranny of the three trees to which I was led. Three minutes later, I spied the matte black finish of a painted (once again!) one-inch-long breath strips container poking out of a small gap in a piece of bark, and nabbed the cache.

With three minutes to spare, I’d found my 1000th cache on my second anniversary! Done!

You want to know the worst part? After doing a preliminary audit when I returned home to make sure that I’d found all 30 caches, it turned out that I’d miscounted during the day and that I’d actually found 34 geocaches instead! So, all that racing around at midnight wasn’t even necessary; I’d found the 1000th about two hours earlier!

Well, at least I accomplished my goal.

Oh, and for future, no more %#@&$ geocaching goals!

It’s looks like my Ramblings and my (our) other blogs are going to be stuck loosely based on Movable Type version 2.63 forever. Six Apart, the creators of this terrific blogging system, have released version 3.0D and adversely updated their license agreement.

Because I have more than five authors, I’d be required to send them $100 (as of August 2004) in order to continue blogging if I downloaded a new version of the software — even the 2.661 version that was released a few months ago before the new license. And that’s even for personal, noncommercial blogs. Downloading any version of the software from their website (which requires agreeing to the new license agreement) immediately makes the five-author limit effective. I can’t even download it for evaluation. True, the three-author-limit version is only $70, but that barely covers my family as users.

I can’t blame them entirely. Six Apart is a company. It has to make money at some point. But publishing the world’s most popular and best blogging system gave them many avenues they didn’t take. I, for one, would have lowered the dollar amounts and increased the usage thresholds.

Movable Type as a whole will suffer thanks to this move.

Hey, at least I don’t have to worry about upgrade paths anymore when I’m tweaking my blogs. I can make all the modifications I want as long as I don’t distribute the changes (as per the old agreement to which I am still bound) and as long as my nifty plugins continue working.

I’ve been busy today implementing a few changes, including smilies ;-), spam comments removal, and more work on categories (not yet implemented)…

Update

I’ve since moved over to WordPress and no longer have the restrictions mentioned above. This long-thought-out decision also means a looming end to my development and continued support of my MovableType plugins.

As of November 2012, the blogs for our family and our few other related sites would rack up a whopping $495 in additional license fees just to download and install the latest major upgrade from Six Apart. So glad I switched to WordPress eight years ago!