Frenchy's Rant

The WWE merry-go-round stopped in Moline, Illinois today for RAW. Directly across the street from the Mark of the Quad Cities Arena, is this place:

Moline is home of John Deere’s worldwide headquarters, and an interesting museum of past and current John Deere farm equipment.

I know… farm equipment sounds so… boring. But this museum is cool because they let you climb up into the cockpit of their biggest tractor, the 8030, and a gigantic cotton picker (model 9970).

Looking down from the cockpit of this enormous cotton picking contraption, I wondered what it might be like to work on one, plugging in a DVD or listening to XM radio, slashing through the cotton fields with a $265,000, 250 HP piece of farm equipment at my command.

Then I realized, after about an hour, it’d probably be pretty boring.

As I climbed down from the mammoth machine, I noticed little warning labels – the kind lawyers require almost everything to have these days – affixed to the most dangerous parts of the machine. Look what can happen to you if you are a stick figure and operate the 9970 improperly:

The last one I saw summed it up.

Be careful out there, cotton pickin’ stick men.

Some days the words just flow out, from some unknown source, to the page, or blog or whatever. Others it feels as though my head is filled with pudding. Today is one of the ‘Puddin’ Days.’

Originally, I wrote ‘Feels Like The First Time‘ on Tuesday, and I thought it was decent. Not stellar by any means, but not that bad. When I tried to publish it on Blogger.com, it just… vanished. No explanation, no warning, no way to get it back. Nothing.

I took it as a sign that while I thought wasn’t horrible, it actually sucked. I don’t really like to go back and read old posts, because I think -with a few exceptions – most of them suck. Then my head filled with pudding, chocolate and butterscotch to be exact, and I couldn’t get it right again.

In a few days my riding buddy Abi and I are leaving on a cross country motorcycle trip, which might explain all the reviews of motorcycle journeys on my other blog. One of my goals of the trip is to get the pudding out and write an article for a motorcycling magazine. Another goal is to have enough pictures to stack this blog up for days when the butterscotch and chocolate overwhelm me again.

Thanks for reading!

You always remember your first time.

From your first kiss, to your first frothy sip of Guinness, to the first time you drove a car without Mom or Dad, all are memorable moments, to be sure.

This past Monday I experienced another first, one I won’t soon forget.

RAW was broadcast from the Ford Center on Monday. The day was an unremarkable one, right up to the beginning of the show. After the opening pyro, the fire alarms in the building were triggered. This happens from time to time, but what happened next was a first. Suddenly, all show related power in the building, all 1600 amps of it, was shut off.

No lights, no sound system, nothing at all, just darkness. The crowd cheered in bewildered amazement, thinking this was all part of the show, the TV truck reacted with panic, knowing it wasn’t. Because the production truck was powered by a generator, we were still live on the air.

After a few minues of stalling, with no flashy entrance videos, no music, not much of anything in fact, the first match started, the ring lit only by four working spotlights.

Lights? We don’t need no stinking lights!

The show must go on… in the dark!

A surreal, scary seventeen minutes passed before power was restored. The audience never really knew what had happened, and the remainder of the show continued without incident.

The time the lights went out in Oklahoma was another first I will never forget.

The shock has finally worn off enough that I can talk about it. After a long and drawn-out period of denial, I finally said a sad goodbye to an old friend this week.

We met in late 2002, and almost from the beginning were inseparable. Whenever time would allow, we’d sneak away on an adventure, sometimes nearby, other times venturing further away, camping in Kentucky, to Virginia for my brother’s wedding, to name a few.

But as time progressed, we grew apart. As it tends to, life happened. Work and other obligations always seemed to get in the way. My circle of friends grew, and my old friend and I had less time to do the things we used to enjoy so much. I started hanging out with a faster crowd. Sadly, my old companion just sat around, pretty much never leaving the yard.

A few people tried to make friends with my old mate, but those tenuous friendships always seemed to fall through. Life passed by at an ever accelerating pace, while my former partner in crime sat, doing nothing, growing older.

Finally, just this past week, my old friend moved on to a hopefully better place.

That’s right, after more that two years of procrastination, I finally sold my old, faithful Suzuki Katana 600, better known as the ‘Nip-Cycle’.

Farewell Nip-cycle, you will be missed.

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Bring ’em on.