You win some

Huh. Last week Lenovo announced a worldwide recall of 205,000 laptop batteries manufactured by Sanyo because they could overheat.

When I bought my StinkPad, I got two extended-life battys. One overheated and fried within a few months of purchase, and the other I’ve used sparingly since then.

Now they’re both (allegedly) being replaced. Score one for the home team!

Oh, and I should also mention that the state posted their annual abandoned property list, and my name appears to be on their for something that’s value in excess of $100. I dunno what, but we’ll have to find out…

And all this on top of a $3500 income tax refund. Yow! WTF, over?

Livin’ Large in LiscombLand

This one is two of my favorite stories. Really!

As far as I can tell, there are only about five Liscomb Streets in the US: one in Los Angeles, two in Texas, one near Detroit, and the only one anywhere near me: a tiny little side street in Worcester, Mass.

Way back when, on January 4 1989, I drove from Maine down to Massachusetts for an interview with a company called MediQual in Westborough. A couple weeks later, they’d given me my very first post-college job offer.

When I next drove down it was to look for apartments. Of course the first thing I did was grab the local paper, the Worcester Telegram, to look for apartment listings (this was way before teh Intarwebs). I picked up the January 27th issue, and on page two, a picture caught my eye: the one you see (badly) reproduced at right. Apparently the driver of the sanding truck was trying to go up a really steep hill in Worcester, when his load shifted and the truck popped a permanent wheelie. It was left on its back, pointing straight up in the air!

Now that’s pretty damned funny in its own right, but if you read the caption, you’ll see that it happened on none other than Liscomb Street! Now, how improbable is it that on the one day that I went down to scout out apartments—the only time I’d ever even seen that newspaper— there’d be a picture of something like that happening on that street? C’est impossible, non?

And now for the rest of the story…

My wife and I lived in Shrewsbury for several years, only two miles from Liscomb Street. Then things started going south. One night I returned from a business trip to find Linda packing. She was off to live with a girl friend of hers. I bet you can’t guess where this friend of hers happened to live…

Yup. Linda, who had of course taken the name “Liscomb” when we married, left me and took shelter with a friend who had an apartment on none other than Liscomb Street! That must have been incredibly bizarre…

So those are my two Liscomb Street stories, both of which seem ludicrously implausible to me. It’s all a bit surreal, but every word of it is true, BIOFO!