Editor’s Note: Yet another new category. La-La Land is reserved for those things that are so ridiculous, outlandish or just plain weird that they simply need their own category.

It’s nice to know there are still people with senses of humor in this world. Or, at least, IT staff who forget to QA (Quality-Assure) new code before it makes it out to the Web. I’m not quite sure where the Atlanta Botanical Gardens falls, but this is just too good to pass up. The image below is an undoctored screenshot (made it myself) from their Donation Web site, showing a list of titles available for use (as in, “Mr.”, “Mrs.”, “Dr.”, etc.). I really can’t add anything to this to bump the level of humor up any higher than it already is.

Editor’s note: I’ve added a new category for posts called Random Shorts in which I’ll pick random news items at random times and make random statements about them.  These will appear on random days.  Pretty random, eh?

Jimmy Carter, who, for the last three decades, has been America’s Champion for Peace (but has also been teetering perilously on the threshold of insanity and dementia the entire time), has lost his marbles.  It’s not that he is (again) blasting current U.S. policy in the Middle East.  It’s not that he’s maintaining his traditional, “whatever Republicans do, I do not” stance.  It’s not even that the photo that accompanies the link above makes Carter look like someone told him that one plus one equals two, and that he just can’t quite figure out how that equation computes.

It’s the fact that he’s throwing his support behind Hammas.  The same Hammas that has been officially labeled by most of the non-radical world as a terrorist organization.  The same group within the Palestinian “government” that just overthrew the group’s president’s ruling part in the Gaza Strip in a violent clash that left scores of people dead.  The same group that has called for the annihilation if the nation of Israel (which, by default, requires violence).

The United States’ bastion of peace supports terrorists.  Of course, this is the same man who single-handedly sparked the radical Iranian Revolution, so it’s really not all that surprising, given the right context.  Okay, I take it back.  He didn’t lose his mind this week — he lost it over thirty years ago.

Among other uses for water, the guy in the video below has found a way to use it for welding. Through a new, highly efficient method of electrolysis, he has managed to separate out the hydrogen in water in such a high concentration and purity that he can run a welding torch on nothing but pure water. And because the gas being burned is hydrogen, it burns insanely hot. He also runs a car on the stuff (also in the video) that covered 100 miles on four ounces of water. To do that kid of distance in my 2003 automobile, it takes between four and five gallons of gas (depending on how impatient I am that day).

I won’t spoil it any further. You have to see it to believe it, so here you go.

The whirlwind is over. After nearly two months of wrangling first a new home, and then a new job, InvertedMind is back at it. I’ve managed to get the family relocated with relative ease, given the things that nearly went wrong had our timing been even slightly off. There were a few delays, but some of the happened to play into my favor. For instance, we were supposed to close on the new house on June 5th (Tuesday). The NASCAR race in Dover (Sunday, June 3rd) was a washout, meaning it was going to be run on Monday. Had settlement not been delayed until Friday, I wouldn’t have been able to witness this:

This was the end of the storm that nearly resulted in me having to waste a hundred bucks

The race finally ran on Monday, with me in attendance, and all was right with the world. And, because I had quit my job effective June 1st, I didn’t even have to fake a cough that morning.

Thursday was Load-the-Truck day. I estimated 2 hours, starting at 6:30 p.m. It took six hours. Six. And we were supposed to be up and on the road by 5:00 a.m. Friday. We finally rolled about 6:15, now well behind schedule, and our GPS (”Demandy Mandy,” as we’ve come to know her) told us we’d be arriving at 12:52 p.m. The bad news: settlement was scheduled for noon.

Son of a &!%@#.

A few hours, lots of walkie-talkie back-and-forth between me and Her Hotness, and several frantic calls relayed from us to the attorneys through our Realtor, and we were rescheduled for 2:00 p.m. Crisis averted? Well, almost.

The attorneys’ office was located in the outskirts of Durham, N.C., inside a little village-like community that had nothing but single-row parking spaces and garage parking. Try fitting a 17-foot truck and a 12-foot trailer in a parking garage. Fortunately, I found some road-side parking in the residential area of the village and we made it with about ten minutes to spare.

Getting to our new house was no picnic, either. The truck (advertised at 10 miles per gallon but only achieving about 4.5 MPG) was running esentially on fumes, and Demandy Mandy apparently had never been to Durham but felt confident in telling me that a gas station was located right…there!…in the middle of the forest across the street that had been growing for no fewer than 100 years. I’ve heard of green fuels, but this is ridiculous.

Miraculously, we finally located a station, fueled up and headed east toward home. We arrived to a nice sidewalk-chalk welcome sign in the driveway and Burger King in the kitchen. We weren’t the first to get to the house — not by a long shot. In fact, even the Realtor had beat us there from settlement, and she had left behind a nice Welcome Basket full of very useful household goodies. The woman should one day be Sainted.

So, we unpacked…in 97-degree heat and about 90 percent humidity. Breaks were long and frequent, and at the end of the night we managed to get about two thirds of the truck unloaded, including all three beds and our nine-thousand-pound sofa. We finished unloading on Saturday, and we’re now mostly finished and several hundred dollars lighter in the bank account. Ouch.

But it’s been worth it, and I wouldn’t trade our new, cozy home for any mansion in Delaware. I miss my family and friends, but I love it here. And, finally, we have a place to call our own.