Dave Mancuso dot Com

The Profile (The Old Man of the Mountain) in New Hampshire crumbled and fell sometime in the past few nights (no one is sure when, because clouds covered it for much of the past few days). It was a naturally formed rock outcropping that looked like the craggy profile of a man’s face if you looked at it from the right angle.Franconia Notch was a great place to camp–I stayed there in 1994. The Profile was just rock, but it’s still a bit sad. The story is here.

We’ve been exploring timelines on the Internet recently for our teachers and students at work. There are some really cool ones, and I’m kind of getting into them. Tonight I found an excellent timeline of art history at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The title above is from the book Ben and Jerry’s: The Inside Scoop. In the early days of their company, Ben and Jerry would occasionally need to fire people who just couldn’t do their jobs at all. So they would start saying to each other “The monster is hungry, The monster must eat.” That was the code that meant Ben was going into monster mode and letting someone go.

It means something different to me now. This blog is slowly growing into something of a monster itself, and it seems to need me to feed it words every day. Right now it’s lived on meals of “link posts” for a while, but it wants more war stories. It wants a lot of them. Some of the stories it wants are big. I have to chop these stories up into manageable sections though, or they’ll never get done. I hesitate to put some of these stories to words, since they cast some doubt on my relative sanity, but they all happened a long time ago and things have changed, right? Besides, I don’t think there’s really a question of my sanity–it’s been gone now for a long time. 😉 I think I’m out of time tonight, so I’ll have to start tomorrow. But it has to be soon: the monster is hungry, and the monster must eat.

My top nonfiction book would have to be Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. This book is a new journey each time I read it. Each time I pick up a little more of the Metaphysics of Quality. It’s a powerful book. I’m not sure if it completely ties together Western and Eastern philosophy as it claims, but it’s good stuff.

Turning on NPR as I drove back home from Lancaster today brought a breath of fresh air into the car. I immediately heard the familiar strains of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon flowing through my speakers. NPR had a whole segment on the album. 30 years ago this week, Dark Side of the Moon reached Number One on the BillBoard charts. In fact, the album stayed on the BillBoard top 200 for 741 weeks. The runner-up in second place is a Johnny Mathis album from 1962 with about 400 weeks on the charts.

You can find the NPR story here. The sound samples on this page are great, including the Dark Side of the Moon/Wizard of Oz connection (I had forgotten about that until today–it’s kind of a sideways urban legend, or a–ahem–meme, if you will). By the way, for the guys in the office: the engineer on Dark Side of the Moon was none other than Alan Parsons.

It seems time for another small war story. This one’s pretty minor. About ten years ago, I worked at Sunrise Computers with Joe Way. Sunrise had a small fleet of vehicles for store use. One of them was a big old red Ford van. I used to haul computers back and forth from Camp Hill to Chambersburg to set up training classes every month. It was a real pain. The van’s steering had a huge amount of play, so I was always oversteering to correct the side to side drifting.

It did have a pretty strong engine, though. One day I finished unloading the computers and felt pretty bored. I had to move the van from the front of the store to its parking place, a simple twenty foot maneuver in most cases. But not with me. With Joe in the van’s passenger seat and me behind the wheel, I had an incredibly stupid idea. “Hey, watch this,” I said. I revved the engine up to 5,000 rpm or so while keeping the van in park. Then I pulled the gearshift straight into Drive. The tires screeched and peeled out, and I shot forward–directly into the path of a car that was whipping around the side of the building.

I slammed on the brakes. He slammed on the brakes. Our vehicles screeched to a halt about 1.5 feet from each other. Joe’s face turned white. The guy stared at me for a few moments while the van rocked to a halt, and then slowly and carefully drove around us. I slowly pulled the van into its parking spot. Everyone came out of the store to see what had happened (to say it had been loud was kind of an understatement). Joe looked at me and said (I’m paraphrasing here) “Are you freaking nuts?!? Don’t EVER do that again!”

I don’t think he wet himself. But I can’t verify that. 😉

You know you’re on the Atkins diet when you begin regarding orange-flavored Metamucil as just “grainy Tang.”

You can find DesktopJoe here. But he didn’t name it “Tales of the Bark Side” like last time?

🙂

Milton the Monster.

Heh.

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