Modern Vespa

It's funny that you mention concert tickets.

My favourite Canadian band are touring the UK at the moment and there are a few tickets still available at a venue an hour from me but the combined costs have put it out of reach for me.

Arse.

Doooo tell. The Arcade Fire, Cleopatrick, the Kooks, Rush, Terrance and Phillip?! Cowboy Junkies? Godspeed You! Black Emperor?!

It's Nickleback. Isn't it.

So close and yet so far.

The Barenaked Ladies who I must have seen 6 times.

The trouble is once you've seen David Byrne it's downhill from there.

I thought that was going to be too obvious. Should have went with my instinct.

This might be Blur's last and only US show. Worth every penny. Just hate the ticket buying process.

Yeah, I think I'm done with it.

If Stephen Page decided to tour I may reconsider but I've ticked off most artists from my list.

Talking of Nickleback, a friend of mine is seeing them later on this year.

I'm not sure if they are being ironic or not.

The last "gig" I went to was Bill Burr at the Albert Hall in London.

Ol' Billy Beans is a fellow masshole. That guy made podcast adverts entertaining.

Yeah, I'm a bit of a fan.

The best add reads are when he loses the sponsor soon after the broadcast.

One of the best. No question.

Came in to make this joke. Leaving satisfied (and slightly disappointed that you beat me to it).

Always the Bridesmaid.

I am visiting my son in Melbourne, VIC.
I have been here for 14 days now and I'm getting serious Vespa riding withdrawal...
We just did a nice 7-day road trip that screamed at me to be done on one of my Vespas. Unfortunately they are 10 000 kms away.
Damn but these things are expensive to hire !

I'm sorry, but Masshole is a registered trademark for every driver from the great state of Massachusetts, while in other states. Ich bin Masshole.

where did you ride? and did you actually find rental for vespas in melb or are you referring to rental of some other bikes?

My metal lic plate came in the mail. I noticed that the paper plate was kinda wonky, but no big deal -temporary, untill I get ready to mount the new metal lic plate -I realize the oblong red reflector right above was put on crooked from the factory. AARRGggggggg. Off 1/16" and nothing makes me madder than something crooked. All they had to do was align w/top edge of mount on the fender. So I had to Remove reflector, remove mounting tape from it and the mount , then clean everything up. Install new mounting tape and install correctly. Good grief.

My BV400's license plate bracket broke sometime after I attached the new plate. Probably vibration and metal fatigue was the cause. Better watch it.

Made me think of last year's route through the Porkies. Surprised we didn't all lose plates.

Thanks JKJ-FZ6. I don't know if/what yr model differences to the rear fender/lic plate mount. My fender and the mount for the plate looks very robust. The mount itself bolts to the fender in (3) places. However I will keep a eye on it. BTW, What yr model is yours ?

2023.

An old (beautifully) renovated theater in Phoenix, the Orpheum had shown silent movies twice yearly before COVID. Tickets were $10, General Admission. It was great fun. Some time around Valentines Day they would show a silent love story. Near Halloween, a silent horror movie. Each movie was accompanied by a vintage Wurlitzer pipe organ, played by an expert in these machines.Good clean fun.
A week or so ago I received an email; Silent Sundays were returning. Yippee! I thought, until I went to purchase tickets. Ticket price has doubled and the added fees were as bad as Ticketmaster. Guess I'll pass.

Strange isn't it when you realise that something just isn't worth the price they are asking.

Isn't it a good feeling knowing when to walk away ?

Mountain Cedar (Juniper) pollen is pissing me off.

I grew up (mostly) in Wisconsin. I never had allergies while living there.

I didn't have allergies until I moved to Texas. During the almost 35 years I've lived here, my seasonal allergies have progressively gotten worse.

This year has been the worst so far.

I started to get sinus congestion last Thursday. By the next day, my throat felt like I'd been gargling razor blades, and I was exhausted. Saturday was no better. Sunday was slightly better, but I still felt exhausted. Sunday night was so bad that I ended up oversleeping, and called in to work on Monday to rest.

I don't feel quite so congested today, but still have minor sinus drainage, and exhaustion. And my eyes are itchy.

I live pretty much in the center of that big red blob of pollen on the map below. And according to the allergy tracking app I use, I can look forward to high levels of Mountain Cedar Pollen until the first week of April. Oh, joy.

Ouch!

My sister and BIL are in the South for the next month or so ( ultimate goal visiting their kid in Miami). They've done this the past few years and my sister's observation this morning is one of the downsides is that it extends the allergy season a couple of months.

Cat treats.

Cat treats are pissing me off.

Not those little buck-and-a half packets at the grocery store...no, the $7.42/1.25 oz. packets of freeze dried animal matter that I can only find at Petco.

I could be giving them convenience store ham or turkey lunch meat for a lot less than that.

The saintly woman who captured our furry children as feral kittens, 'socialized' them, then got them hooked on these gourmet mouse parts or whatever they are, and sent them to us with a heavy treat jones that requires me to spend stupid amounts of money to satisfy their nightly treat fix before bedtime (mine).

I would make them go cold turkey and shake this horrible dependency, but I'm just too wishy-washy to be able to look them in their little blue crocodilian eyes and go to bed without doling out their nightly kitty dope ration.

"Made with Free-Run Poultry and Wild-Caught Flounder".

Should be "Made with Fee-Run Rodent Parts and Wild-Caught Basement Spiders", if you ask me.

That's almost $25 worth(?) of freeze-dried bio-crap in those three 1.25 ounce packages...or about $96 per pound.

If you really read the labels on the major brand treats, you'd do everything you could to switch.

When turkeys go on sale for pennies a pound, we buy a couple/three of them and freeze them. We'll pull one out and cook it, eat some and freeze the rest. A lot of it we freeze in packets to thaw for table scraps for the dog. She's old and we try to be careful with what we give her from the table. As long as it's meat, she seems to be fine with it.

They do charge a bundle for good treats, but if you can find a less expensive healthier option, it's worth the effort.

That's a beautiful Siamese, BTW.

That's the male, 'Graham'. I didn't name him that, his foster kitten mom did and it stuck.

He's a half brother to our female, 'Gracie'. Same father, different mothers. Born a month apart.

They get along very well...

Our cat Jack also enjoys treats before bedtime at night. We purchase the brand "Temptations" with multiple flavor choices. His favorite is Catnip. Yes, he puts up a fuss when it is times for treats. You can count on it that I will not introduce him to your treats.

Bob Copeland

I'm lucky that with four cats, only two of them like treats.

The treats that we get for the two that eat them are freeze dried salmon pieces that we get a 0.92 oz bag for $4.69.

We don't give them treats every day, though, so one bag will last more than one month.

Of the two cats who don't eat treats, one doesn't eat them at all, and the other only wants carbs (bread or french fries). I'll give him a couple of small pieces of bread now and then, and he seems to be really happy with that.

We buy 'Temptations' cat treats as an emergency backup. They'll eat them, but they won't do their little 'dance of anticipation' and rub all over me when they see them, like they do with the pricey stuff.

Tell ya what, Bob, how about I send you two free packages of these fancy-pants cat treats and see
how your kitty likes them?

My son took us for a drive up to Canberra, overnighting in Bright.
We returned via Eden and Lakes Entrance overnights.

I was not able to find a rental Vespa in Melbourne and even a SYM 125 is expensive,
let alone other bikes !

PS - I am a South African and my crappy pension there is only the equivalent of AUD 2600.

It is a good feeling. Most of the concerts Mrs Syd and I see are at the Musical Instrument Museum (mim.org). they sell their own tics, no TMaster or LNation involved. But once in a while, there is a show we'd really like to see. Then we struggle with the near 30% fees added to any ticket TicketFucker sells.

Yeah, I may be done going to gigs now.

I've been spoilt in the past and pretty much ticked everyone off my list so I don't think that I'm going to miss much.

As I said, maybe Stephen Page and then I'd go.

People who can't (or perhaps won't) learn.

I work in cyber security. It's my job to keep the bad guys out of my hospital's network. As part of that we provide continuous education on the latest scams, how to recognize a phishing email, or a bad URL, all the basics. We test people, and re-train if they don't get it. We've also got automated systems to keep most of the bad stuff out to begin with.

Today I see a phishing message has got through our filters, and of the 400 employees who got the message, 6 tried to click the link (to a fake version of a major Canadian telco's website) before the security software started to pull the message out of people's in-box. A limitation of the software is that it can't pull a message you've already opened, so those 6 people still have it. Each of them got an error message when they clicked the bad link, explaining that it was a phishing site and had been blocked for their safety. Five of them were OK with that.

Contestant number six calls to complain about the blocked site. I explained why it was blocked. I showed him how he should have recognized that the site was faked (he passed his test on this just four weeks ago), I showed him how he should have recognized the email was fake (same test, same time), I referenced the specific training material he'd seen to teach him that, I told him directly that the link would only take him to a fake login page to steal his username and password, and I pointed him to the real web-site if he thought he needed to go to it.

Some of this stuff is pretty hard to catch, I've had one or two fool me as well, but when the expert is on your screen and in your headset showing you exactly where the tells are, you'd believe him, right?

This guys response; "the email says I should use their link".

I'm convinced that some people are too stupid to be let out of their own homes unsupervised.

This thread is surprisingly therapeutic. Thank-you for letting me vent.

I feel your pain. Boy howdy. Our pleasure!

I think
"Congradulations on your sucessful pishing indercept. Click here for your free chocolate phish" would catch about a third of people.

It was like that when I started. But with (a lot) of training and testing, we send out some very convincing test messages now, and our 'click rate' is down to about 3%, so in general our staff have been very teachable. But there's always one...\

So, I need a new lower dish rack for my dishwasher. It's about 13 years old now, and the plastic-coated wire bits are starting to rust. At least one or two upright "peg" dividers have broken off already. A new dish rack is about $120.

But that's not what's pissing me off.

The new dish rack doesn't come with wheels, or any of the other bits that you would think would be part of the dish rack. But again, that's not what's pissing me off today.

What is pissing me off is that the new wheels for this particular dish rack cost...

Seventeen Dollars and sixty-nine cents.

APIECE!

And I need eight of them. Which comes to a grand total of (checks abacus) a jazillion dollars!

Or it might as well be a jazillion dollars. Because I'm not spending that kind of loot on plastic wheels.

FFS.

Fucking gouging motherfuckers.

Take the wheels off of the old rack and put them on the new one?

OFG

Hi Jess,

You probably already tried this, but if you haven't, try Amazon and Ebay. I have found various non-OEM parts for things that aren't critical for much less than the OEM replacements.

Latest example was a sun visor for my 2013 Mazda 3.

OEM part was over $50. The replacement I found that was plenty good enough was less than $20.

This is "spend 2k$ and as many hours on a 3D printer" territory for sure.

Otherwise could you make these work?

https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MX572ZM/A/apple-mac-pro-wheels-kit

Oh, definitely. I bought the dish rack itself from Amazon. It's generally the first place I check.

Here's the same wheel (correct part number, anyway) on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/5304475625-Dishwasher-AH2379470-EA2379470-Aftermarket/dp/B0B75LHPLX

That one is $54. Apiece. So, yeah. There are actually a bunch of listings on Amazon for this wheel, and they range from $14-ish to this one for $54.

They must be made of gray plastic gold. Or maybe they come with a beige dragon varsity jacket.

You can just bite me, sir.