Yesterday after work I went over to this bloke’s house to try to get the doors off his Jeep. As I wrote here, a doorless Jeep makes for both a “hell of a fun experience” as well - and more importantly - “a right of passage.”

As you can see, we got the doors off. Actually, it was funny, we first tried getting his doors off last week — the passenger side door, anyway — and the damn thing just wouldn’t budge. I asked my own personal source of Everything a Jeep Owner Would Want To Know, my boss Gary, for advice. He said to rock the door back and forth as you lifted, so we tried that, and it worked. It took a few minutes to get the door off, but Neckbone and I did. The driver’s side door came off considerably easier, possibly because it gets more useage.

Once we’d removed the doors and stuck ‘em in Neckbone’s basement, behind the couch (near the hardtop, and I’m sure the plastic side panels were down there somewhere too), we had to figure out which fuse to yank — see, without the doors to hold the watchamacallit in place, the interior light was on. Anyway, I remember that my fuse box was behind the glovebox, so I take that out and then Neckbone leans across the passenger seat and points to where the door would have been, and said, “Get the owner’s manual, it’s in the door pocket … oh, uh…”

Some guessing finally revealed which fuse was the correct one to pluck, and we took off, heading north into Phoenix, then back through Cockeysville. Our trip took us over this bridge, and Allison was right - it is fucking cool.

I felt bad, because on our drive, everytime Neckbone said something, I had to ask him to repeat it three or ten times … what with the air rushing past and the music and all … (he must think I’m deaf). I did hear him say, several times, and I’m paraphrasing here but along the lines of, “This is effin’ awesome!!!!”

Damn tootin’.

From USA TODAY:

Based on the tooth marks, the season and the location, the shark was likely either a small great white or a sandbar shark, said George Burgess, a Florida expert who is curator of the International Shark Attack File. He had examined an e-mailed photo of Horton’s injury.

Two local experts said they think it was a great white shark.

“In cool water like this, you would have to suspect great white,” said Richard Fernicola, who wrote a book about shark attacks off the New Jersey shore in 1916 that that left four people dead. “A great white is much more likely to be aggressive to man than a sandbar shark.”

Experts said the shark looked like this:

I don’t know about you, but I think I’ll be avoiding the ocean this summer.

Once, many many years ago, I built a webpage on Tripod, which provided free webspace. They might still, I’m not sure. Anyway, I built a webpage, and among other things, included a guestbook. I completely forgot about this webpage until tonight, when doing a google search on myself, I found it.

The latest entry in the guestbook — datedJune Third of this year! — was from some jackass spamming weight loss methods. Mind you, this old website has had a grand total of three-hundred plus hits. in theSIX YEARS! since I’ve last checked it.

Man, these spammers really are scraping the bottle of the barrel, eh?

Monday, sweating like hell, I knocked on the door of a mini-McMansion off a gravel road in the not-yet-surburbanized Baltimore County greenery surrounding the greater Loch Raven area. For a moment, there was nothing. Then the sound of a lock being turned, and the door swung open.

There was no one standing there. Literally. The door opened, and there was no one there.

If this was one of those big castle like structures that dot Jarrettsville Pike right after Dulaney Valley makes a sharp right-hand turn, I would have freaked, peed myself, and run screaming back to my car. Instead, I pursed my lips, glanced down at my shoes, and tried to think of how exactly one goes about asking a ghost to pay for their pizza.

Through the hall and past the dining room, I could see a couple of women and some children entering the house through the back porch. I cleared my throat, and one of the women walked to the front door. She took the pizzas, paid me, then asked, “Did he answer the door like that?”

My first response was to tell her, “Ma’am, as best as I can figure, the house answered the door.” Instead, I chose to go with a more polite, “Excuse me?”

“Gosh, did you not notice my naked toddler son?”

Just as I was trying to figure out how to respond to that startling bit of news, a buck naked toddler bolted from behind the door and raced upstairs.

Oh, that naked toddler.