Dan Poynter

Author's posts

323 x 3

My Mazda Protégé 323, hit 323,000 miles today, 3/23. (the pic of the odometer is 1 mile off– it took me a little time to stop on the side of the highway)

Boom!

My dad was a welder and a torch-cutter. Years ago he was working night shift a place in the Kansas City area. One of the pranks the guys would play on each other is to make a little bomb out of a plastic bag filled with acetylene and oxygen, put a masking tape fuse on …

Continue reading

Is ‘skanks’ a bad word?

There are some questions that you are prepared for when you walk into a room. Furthermore, there are especially some questions you aren’t prepared for when you walk into a room at church. The asker  of the aformentioned question was a boy about eight years old who was cleaning up the room with a couple …

Continue reading

It’s Crayons, Dang It!

Unlike so much of American English, the proper pronunciation for those little bits of wax you color with as a child is phonetic: crayons. Not crowns.

I.T. Toolkit

Lots of places that sell computer and computer accessories also sell “computer toolkits.” I put that in quotes because they are kind of a joke, consisting of one useful tool and a bunch of useless stuff you will never use. If you work on computers or plan to, here is the list of items in …

Continue reading

Jesse James and Caves

Missouri is known as the Cave State; we have over 6,000 caves. Besides caves, Missouri also has the most famous outlaw of the Old West: Jesse James. On the surface, it doesn’t seem like those two facts have anything to do with one another. However, every cave you visit in Missouri has a sign stating …

Continue reading

Overheard: sizes

Woman: “We have medium, and there are large behind you. What size do you need?” Rotund Guy: “Texas!”

2010 Hummer H4

“It addresses a real need.” So says David Puncil, head of GM’s flagging Hummer line of sport utility vehicles. “Our customers have given us a lot of feedback, and we’ve listened,” he says. “Over and over again our customers told us they want an oversized mammoth of a vehicle that takes up a lot of …

Continue reading

A Long Ordeal

Heather went in for gall bladder surgery on Thursday. It was an outpatient procedure, and we were supposed to walk out some time Thursday afternoon. We didn’t leave the hospital until Saturday afternoon. The surgery itself went fine, but recovery took some time due to complications, so we ended up staying quite some time and …

Continue reading

Overheard: the smoker

“But, the smoker, I’ve killed a couple of people with the smoker.”