THIS PARTICULAR POST was written when I was uncertain as to what type of blog this site would be. It was a diary/journal type of entry, and not at all what I found that I want Neal Umphred Dot Com to be. So, rather than just delete it and create an error page for the url, I’m substituting a joke . . .
A man was driving home, drunk as a skunk. He suddenly swerved to the left to avoid hitting a tree. Then he swerved to the right to avoid another tree.
Trees were everywhere as he swerved left right left right.
Finally a cop pulled him over.
The officer asked, “Have you been drinking?”
The man told the cop about the trees all over the road.
“Listen, buddy,” replied the officer, “that’s your air freshener swinging about!”

Mystically liberal Virgo enjoys long walks alone in the city at night in the rain with an umbrella and a flask of 10-year-old Laphroaig who strives to live by the maxim, “It ain’t what you know that gets you into trouble; it’s what you know that just ain’t so.
I’ve been a puppet, a pauper, a pirate, a poet, a pawn, and a college dropout (twice!). Occupationally, I have been a bartender, jewelry engraver, bouncer, landscape artist, and FEMA crew chief following the Great Flood of ’72 (and that was a job that I should never, ever have left).
I am also the final author of the original O’Sullivan Woodside price guides for record collectors and the original author of the Goldmine price guides for record collectors. As such, I was often referred to as the Price Guide Guru, and—as everyone should know—it behooves one to heed the words of a guru. (Unless, of course, you’re the Beatles.)