Laura Doesn't Grok "Blasphemy"

Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit points to a column by Laura Varon Brown on the Detroit Free-Press site, where she writes:

Parties were more fun when George W. Bush was president. You could debate, argue even, praise and condemn, throw darts and laurels and solve the world's problems over a bottle of wine.

No more. At least not in my circles. If you want to stop a conversation in its tracks, just question something President Barack Obama has said or done. It's not open to debate -- and I don't think that's healthy, for the country or the president.

It's especially unsettling for a free speech girl like me. The First Amendment is important -- but lately, it feels like my right of self-expression is being squashed.

Reading the whole column, it's apparent that like most of the media, she's an Obama supporter. She feels, however, that when he makes a mistake, it should be valid fodder for criticism. What she apparently doesn't understand is that for most of his supporters, Barack Obama isn't just the President of the United States, he is The Messiah. You can criticize a President, but you dare not criticize The Messiah. That's called "blasphemy," and it will get the same reaction among those on the Left in America as those Danish cartoons got from outraged Muslims around the world. The religious have always said that blasphemy doesn't fall under the rubric of free speech.

Sorry, Laura, you may not take the name of the Lord Barack Obama in vain. That was part of the deal you made when you guys voted him in. You're just gonna have to live with it until January 2013.

Now, for those of us on the other side who view him as an underfed incipient Mussolini who has yet to make the trains run on time, well, we can be iconoclasts. You can't, at least if you don't want your friends to stone you to death or burn you at the stake.

Who's Missing?

The U.S. Postal Service is teaming up with cartoonist Matt Groening to issue a set of stamps with the main characters from The Simpsons. There will be stamps with Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa and Maggie. I saw pictures of the stamps and thought, hey, wait a second! Someone important is missing! No Simpsons stamp set is really complete without a Mr. Burns stamp! But is there a Mr. Burns stamp? Nope.

I'm very disappointed.

Swine Flew

Re: Former RINO Senator Specter (now D-PA) changing parties, one of the writers at NRO's The Corner said something to the effect of "I'd heard that he was changing parties, but I was disappointed to learn that he's still a Democrat."

The only thing more odious than a turncoat is a turncoat who tries to paint his actions as motivated by principle. I saw his speech today and was nauseated.

This Little Piggie...

Unless you've been living under a rock for the past few days, you know that the latest scary thing to pop out of the news is the new swine flu bug from Mexico. It's scary because even though it's a swine flu virus, it is being passed from human to human. While none of the people infected in the United States have become seriously ill, around 100 people in Mexico (by the latest count I read) have died from respiratory ailments believed to possibly be related to the swine flu. The discrepancy is odd, and troubling.

It's possible that the people who have died in Mexico may have suffered from complications caused by air pollution. Mexico City is among the worst cities in the world as far as air quality goes. I'm not a scientist, and I don't even play one on TV, so I'm not going to speculate beyond that. But so far, we haven't seen any American fatalities yet.

Another troubling fact is that most of the victims so far have been in the prime of life, rather than the very young and the very old, who are normally the main victims of the flu. This follows the same sort of pattern which was seen in the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918-20, which killed tens of millions right after World War I. That particular virus caused a cytokine storm, where the body's immune system overreacts and attacks the body itself. That's a very, very scary comparison.

The other thing that's scary is that by the time cities and nations become aware that the virus is present and people are sick, it's already too late to avert a pandemic if the disease is virulent enough, because people are infected and contagious before they start to exhibit symptoms. Our magnificent transportation system immediately turns from boon to bane, moving infected people from one city, country or continent to another with ease at the speed of sound. You're going to see more and more cases reported, in more and more places, at an ever-increasing pace. We're just at the beginning of this situation. Don't panic, but stay alert.

Celestial Events

This morning, while driving home from work, I observed the near-conjunction of Venus and the Moon in the eastern sky. The crescent moon was just to the northeast of Venus, which was intensely bright. Not something that you see every day. I tried to get a picture of it when I got home, but my little digital camera made the picture come out grainy. Not a keeper.

Today is Earth Day, which started on this date in 1970. Of course, for me, it's more important because it's also my birthday. Another year older, another year closer to getting AARPed. Don't worry, it will happen to you, too. Your day will come just as surely as mine will, but today is not that day.

Thought for the day: Don't look back, because the guy with the scythe may be gaining on you.

Wrong Place, Wrong Time

As the details of the tragic crash continued to emerge, one thing became very clear: Nick Adenhart and his friends had the terrible misfortune to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. They weren't doing anything wrong, just driving through an intersection with the green light, and then a drunk driver blows through the red light at 50-60 mile per hour and broadsides their car.

How unlucky do you have to be to have something like that happen? Very, very unlucky. You have to be in the exact wrong place at the exact wrong time. I don't know how fast Courtney Stewart, the driver of the Mitsubishi that Adenhart was riding in, was going, but for an intersection like that, probably about 45 miles per hour. That's 66 feet per second. Had they gone through the intersection one second earlier, the minivan would have screamed through behind them. Had they gone through a second later, the minivan would have roared in front of them, causing nothing worse than panic braking and a blaring horn. Even a fraction of a section could have made a big difference, since it only takes about a third of a second for a car to make it across a lane of the road. But in this case, the minivan broadsided the passenger side of the car.

And so, for those who they left behind, the what ifs start: The postgame interviewer might wonder, "What would have happened if I'd asked him just one more question?" What if he'd taken a slightly longer or shorter shower after the game? What might have happened if any of the four friends had been delayed by even so much as a minute? What if the driver had been a little faster (or a little slower) coming off the last light? When the margin of life and death is fractions of a second, they all count. The tragedy is not knowing in advance when it would be a good time to keep a friend talking with you just a little longer before they head out.

I know what this is like. When my brother Karl and his girlfriend Monika were down here visiting three years ago, they got in a car wreck on US 41 the night before they were to fly back to New York. I'd been with them that afternoon, and I'd suggested that we could go to the dog track in Bonita Springs. They decided to go to the beach instead. Their injuries were comparatively minor given that the car was totaled (Karl had a broken collarbone and Monika had a broken foot), but they were still very traumatic to them. And I wondered for a long time afterward how things might have been different if I'd persisted a bit more with the dog track idea. I'm sure that there are a lot of people who knew Nick Adenhart and his friends who are wondering what they might have done differently that could have avoided their doomed night out.

When It's Your Time...

Yesterday, I was watching the news and they showed footage from Italy, where a 98-year-old woman had been pulled alive from the earthquake-caused rubble of her home. She seemed to be in very good condition, considering the circumstances. Obviously it wasn't her time to go yet.

This morning, there was breaking news from California: 22-year-old Nick Adenhart, a rookie pitcher for the Los Angeles Angels, was one of three people killed early this morning in a hit-and-run crash in Fullerton. He pitched last night for the Angels and threw six shutout innings in the best start of his young career. And today, he's dead in a senseless tragedy. It shouldn't have been his time to go, but unfortunately, it was.

This sort of tragedy happens all the time, of course, all over the country. Most of the victims aren't high-profile professional athletes, though. The families of the lesser-known victims suffer just as much. The other two people who died in that crash aren't just footnotes, and their families and friends also are in shock and pain.

Whether it's a young pitcher in a car wreck or an actress dying from a skiing injury, it just seems horribly unfair when people die before their time. It makes us feel sad, even though we don't even know them. And it reminds us that nobody is guaranteed tomorrow. You're odds are pretty good, of course, but sometimes shit happens. So hug your family and friends and let you know how you feel about them. Carpe diem.

"Are You Ever Going To Forgive Us?"

This has to be one of the most eerily timely commercials ever made:



It's "The Deficit Trials, 2017 A.D." which was directed by Ridley Scott and made for W. R. Grace in 1986. Watch it, and then realize that this was made 23 years ago to dramatize the future problems caused by a $2 trillion deficit. Nowadays, in Barack Obama's America, that's chump change. By 2017, we may have a deficit of ten times that much. Our kids may not even be able to afford rags.

Gee, Thanks, Kim Jong Il!

You might have seen something in the news over the weekend about the rogue nation of North Korea launching a ballistic missile. The North Koreans claimed that they were just launching a communications satellite, but it was obvious to the rest of the world that they were testing a possible delivery system for nuclear weapons. This rocket launch took place as President Barack Obama was talking up the idea of a "nuclear-free world," a world in which every nuclear power in the world would voluntarily give up their weapons of mass destruction. The American response to the North Korean launch (and that of other nations concerned about the renegade Stalinist dictatorship) was to appeal to the United Nations to DO SOMETHING! Alas, the United Nations was unable to come to any agreement about making some kind of strongly worded statement to condemn the North Koreans' action.

So here's a big thank you to North Korean dictator-for-life Kim Jong Il. In one fell swoop, he showed that Obama's fantasy about a nuclear-free world is hopelessly naive as long as there are people like Kim Jong Il (or the Iranian mullahs, etc.) in it, and he also showed once again how utterly useless the United Nations is. In the real world, when the lion and the lamb lie down together, it only provides an easy meal for the lion. And in the real world, an America without a strong nuclear deterrent is a potential victim for something a thousand times worse than 9/11 was. As long as there are evil leaders in this world, we must maintain the capacity to rain catastrophic destruction on them should they or their minions attack us.

Isn't It Odd?

I was watching the news coverage of the rioting going on in London ahead of the G20 meetings, and one thing struck me as being exceedingly strange: The crowd of anarchists, who are chanting slogans like "abolish money," seem to have a lot of very nice cameras, which they are holding over their heads to take pictures of the scene in front of them. I wonder what they would use to buy cameras (and other things) if they abolished money?

No Foolin'

Well, it's April Fool's Day, when it's customary to come up with some sort of wacky blog redesign or a post that varies 180 degrees from what you actually believe, just to put people on. I could do some paean about Big Brother's visit to Airstrip One, and parrot the lines from the Ministry of Truth about how things are going so swimmingly here in Oceania. But you know, I'm just not feeling it.

So I'll give you an interesting link instead. I found this the other day rather serendipitously:

Map Your Name

It's a site that allows you to enter family or given names, and then shows you maps for the United States, Europe and Australia broken down by the frequency with which the name occurs in the population. My family name is most common in Delaware (!), followed by areas in the South. This is not surprising, since beginning in the 1700s, my ancestors moved from Virginia to North Carolina, then to Georgia, Alabama and Texas. It would not be surprising at all if some of the people in those states were my distant relatives. The British map showed that the highest frequency for my name was in Dorchester, followed by other areas along the south and southeast coast.

The European map is particularly cool, since it is broken down into much smaller regions than the U.S. map, which only goes down to the state level.

Don't Worry, Comrades! Central Planning Is Watching Out For You!

Did you see that apparently President Obama wants Chevrolet to kill the Volt program?! Holy crap! I want an electric car so that I don't have to use gasoline purchased from countries that hate us. And Obama wants to kill the GM program that could produce one domestically? Stupid! Yeah, don't give me a domestic option and make me buy one from Toyota or Volkswagen or Hyundai when they bring one to the market.

Not to mention that they will be directed to cut the number of trucks and SUVs they produce and make more small cars instead, solely for political reasons, according to what I just saw on Fox News. Yes, Obama and Crew are going to be issuing production orders for GM and Chrysler. How idiotic is that? As one column I read earlier today said, these are the people who can't even do the switch to digital TV properly and now we're going to put them in charge of central planning for the U.S. domestic auto industry? Joy. They'll give us a car with four left doors.

Wanna see what's in your future, comrades?



And it will only cost you 25,000 rubles dollars and the Party will deliver it to you in two years. Sorry, comrades, there's a waiting list. Unless you're someone like Nancy Pelosi or Barney Frank or Chris Dodd, of course. They'll be getting their Lada limousines immediately instead of the Trabant, though. Waiting, like paying taxes, is for the little people.

The Agreeable Mirror

When I was a kid, we went to a carnival where there was a funhouse. Inside, there were warped mirrors that distorted the viewer's image, turning an average person into a fat dwarf or a skinny beanpole, as well as twisting the facial features into a caricature. Last year, during the presidential primary season, we encountered something that was exactly the opposite. When candidate Barack Obama appeared on the scene, many people observed that his lack of a substantial resume made him a blank slate upon which people could project their hopes and dreams.

However, after some contemplation, I think it would be more accurate to say that candidate Obama was the reverse of those funhouse mirrors: When people looked into the Obama mirror, not only did it make them look taller, take off those extra ten pounds they were carrying around, smooth out their wrinkles and clear up their acne, but it also made them cooler, because when they looked in the mirror, they didn't just see themselves. They saw themselves with The One, arm in arm, hanging out with the cool black friend that they never had. They were ready to do their part to expiate the sins of white racism in America. 'Hope' and 'Change' sounded good, so it didn't really matter what exactly they meant. Right?

It is a fact of human nature that we tend to like people who agree with us about things more than we do those people who don't agree with us. In fact, in English, the word "disagreeable" is a synonym for "unpleasant." We know, of course, that we are intelligent and wise and have all of the correct positions on every issue, while those who disagree with us are not and do not. This is why their very presence is disagreeable to us.

So if we are told that a person is seven different kinds of wonderful, but with not much in the way of specifics, then if we have to fill in the blanks using only that information, we would have to think that he must agree with us on most matters of substance. We are good, so if he is good, too, then he must think like we do. This is what happened to the people who looked in Obama's agreeable mirror: "He's such a wonderful guy! I know all his campaign talks about is generic 'hope' and 'change', but I'm sure he agrees with me about everything!"

This is how each of the various constituencies of the Democrat party could think that President Obama was in full agreement with them about all of their personal pet issues. This is how Independents and even some liberal Republicans who couldn't stomach voting for John McCain could rationalize that President Obama would probably govern as a moderate, because that is what they personally would do were they in his shoes. They looked into the agreeable mirror and said, "Well, how much different could his views be from mine, if he's so agreeable?"

Obama was able to do this because he had served for less than one term as a U.S. Senator, and had spent much of it running for President. Senators often have trouble getting a presidential nomination because they have a long legislative record, votes for and against various issues, and they are known quantities. Obama, however, had not been around long enough to do so, and therefore was that 'blank slate' that the pundits talked about. He could be anything that you wanted him to be, at least until January 20th, when he had to start governing and actually making decisions.

And it was at that point that many people who had looked in the agreeable mirror months earlier suddenly realized that they no longer recognized the other fellow staring back at them. "This is not the Barack Obama I knew!" they cried, as he spent trillions of dollars bailing out Wall Street. Who could have guessed that all of the talk about bipartisanship and reaching across the aisle to Republicans was all just smoke and, well, mirrors? Who would have thought that he would appoint hard-left ideologues and govern from the left rather than from the center?

Well, just about anyone who didn't depend on the mainstream media for their information. Anyone who listened to talk radio or watched Fox News had a much better idea of who Barack Obama was: The Democrat with the most liberal voting record in the Senate, such as it was; a man imbued with liberal values by his family; and a man with many friends and associates who espoused very radical left-wing views. We can always hope that the leopard will change his spots, but it's not particularly likely.

Neglectful

Yes, I've been neglecting you, dear readers. I must apologize. Between a nice vacation with family a couple of weeks ago and a couple of weeks of general indolence, it has not been a productive month here at Recycled Sip. This doesn't mean that I haven't been contemplating things to write about, it just means that I haven't taken the time to put pixels to screen.

I had a nice lengthy piece to write about how people who voted for him are beginning to realize that President Obama isn't who they thought he was, but really, you can read the same thing all over the internet. I may post it anyway, eventually, perhaps over the weekend. The problem is that I do some of my best thinking at work, where I don't have access to a computer keyboard. By the time I get home, I tend to lose focus.

I just watched country singer John Rich on the Glen Beck show, singing his new song "Shutting Detroit Down." It has a very powerful message. I happened to hear it the other night on the local Americana/bluegrass/country radio program that I listen to on the way to work on Sunday nights. And yes, normally I'm asleep right now, but the inconsiderate yahoo across the street was blat-blat-blatting his noisy ATV around 4:30 and woke me up. The only silver lining if Obama wrecks the economy and drives the cost of gasoline back up over $4.00 a gallon would be that the yahoos might not be able to afford to play with their noisy, obnoxious toys.

RTFB!

Hey, remember that stimulus bill that Congress rammed through in the dead of night, without taking the time to read it? Well, it turns out that that same bill specifically authorized those controversial bonuses to AIG executives. And now Congress is on its high horse, calling the AIG CEO on the carpet this morning, and pontificating about how they are so outraged by the bonuses and threatening to implement a special 100% tax on those bonuses to get the money back, even though that would almost certainly be unconstitutional.

Well, in tech support there's a phrase commonly used when someone asks a stupid question because they haven't read the documentation: RTFM: Read The F'ing Manual. And the corollary for Congress is quite simple: RTFB: Read The F'ing Bill! If our elected "public servants" (ha!) had taken the time to actually read the bill, they might have realized that this little ticking public relations time bomb was in it. This raises the question: What other stink bombs are waiting to detonate? Well, however many it may be, it couldn't happen to a more deserving bunch. The very same crooked congress-critters that are screeching the loudest are the exact same ones who were responsible for oversight of our financial system and who also received large campaign contributions from those same companies they voted to bail out later. Senator Chris Dodd (D-CT) was the largest recipient of campaign contributions from AIG, netting over $100,000 from them. So if you hear someone like Dodd bleating about his outrage, it's okay to yell at the television and tell him to STFU, using the full phrase in all its F-word glory. Trust me, I already have.

Ruins

My brother Karl was down here last week, and he brought quite of few pictures on his laptop computer, since he had bought one of those electronic picture frames for my father and was going to copy all of the pictures to the memory card that goes in the frame. Among the pictures were some from several years ago when Karl visited Athens, including some taking in front of the Acropolis. It reminded me of my visit to Rome back in the 1980s, and walking through the ruins of the Forum and other ancient Roman sites like Pompeii.

At the time, I wondered what it would be like to visit America's cities in a thousand years or so and see what the ruins of our civilization might look like. I also wondered how humbling it must feel to live in the long shadows of ancestors who were far more powerful than their descendants. Greece and Italy are fairly unimportant countries in the modern scheme of things, compared to the empires that their forefathers held across the Mediterranean Sea and beyond; they're the equivalent of small children playing dress-up who appear to be swallowed up in adult-sized clothes.

Well, we no longer have to wait a millennium to find out. There's a photo essay at Time magazine's web site by French photographers Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre, titled Detroit's Beautiful, Horrible Decline. It's a saddening portrait of forgotten places in a once-great city that is slowly crumbling into ruins. There are probably pockets of rot like this in just about every major city in America, but they're far more pervasive in the Motor City.

The photographers write:

"Ruins are the visible symbols and landmarks of our societies and their changes...the volatile result of the change of eras and the fall of empires. This fragility leads us to watch them one very last time: to be dismayed, or to admire, it makes us wonder about the permanence of things."

To paraphrase Shelley, "My name is Henry Ford, King of Kings: Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair..."

Lonelier Than the Maytag Repairman

[Phones ringing]

"Treasury, Timothy Geithner, please hold."

"Treasury, Timothy Geithner, please hold."

"Treasury, Timothy Geithner, please hold."

"Treasury, Timothy Geithner, please hold."

"Treasury, Timothy Geithner, please hold."

"Treasury, Timothy Geithner, please hold."

"Treasury, Timothy Geithner, please hold."

"Treasury, Timothy Geithner, please hold."

"Hello, this is Timothy Geithner, thank you for holding, how may I help you? Oh, hello, Congressman. You need someone from Treasury for a Banking Committee hearing? I'm sorry, Congressman, but right now, I'm the only one here and someone has to answer the phone. But I'll send someone over just as soon as we get someone through the vetting process. Thanks, Congressman, goodbye."

"Hello, this is Timothy Geithner, thank you for holding, how may I help you? Oh, good morning, Mr. President. Yes, I'm working on that list of appointees, but we keep having problems with, um, people not being fully forthcoming on all of their taxes... Uh, yes, sir, that does seem to be going around, doesn't it? No, sir, none of these jobs are as easy as we thought they were. I'll keep at it, sir. Maybe I can get a deputy secretary or two in the next week or so. It's not like the economy's really doing anything right now, so it doesn't matter too much, right? Thank you, sir, goodbye."

"Hello, this is Timothy Geithner, thank you for holding, how may I help you? Oh, good morning, Senator... The banking bailout plan? Well, sir, that's something that one of my deputy treasury secretaries would be working on, if I could ever get one confirmed. We had two drop out just the other day.

"I don't understand it, Senator: We have this exciting new administration, all of this hope and change, and all of the brightest and best seem to be taking one look at the problems we're facing and deciding that they'd rather stay in the private sector... Yes, Senator, very discouraging. Thank you, Senator, goodbye."

"Hello, this is Timothy Geithner, thank you for holding, how may I help you? New York Times? Oh, things are going great here at Treasury, just great! Couldn't be better!"

[Puts phone aside, fakes another voice]

Fake voice: "Mr. Geithner, we have the President on the other line."

"Oh, sorry, I'm going to have to go now, but we'll get back to you real soon. 'Bye!"

Happy Birthday, Barbie!

It was 50 years ago today that the Barbie doll made its debut at the New York Toy Show. The favorite doll of many little girls for the past half century is also a favorite of collectors. BBC News has an article about a woman in Germany who has over 6,000 of the dolls, basically filling her entire house with them. Needless to say, her 17-year-old daughter isn't as enthused as her mother is:

As Bettina enthuses, there is a passive indifference from her 17-year old-daughter, Melissa.

Like most young girls, she liked Barbie once. And like most young girls, she grew out of it.

But given the scale of her mum's collection, she is beyond being embarrassed and discreetly heads to her room with a friend.

Well, all teenagers are embarrassed by their parents, but I'd say that Melissa has more reason to be than many.

Growing up in a household that only had boys, we didn't have Barbie dolls. We had G.I. Joes, back in the day when G.I. Joe was the same height as a Barbie doll, before they shrank them down. The military action figures (NOT dolls!) didn't have flowing locks like Barbie; their hair was plastic, or else some kind of short fuzz. And of course, they had cool stuff like guns and grenades. We also had the Major Matt Mason ("Mattel's Man In Space!") action figures. This was back in the late 1960s, of course, when every kid wanted to be an astronaut.

So are Barbie dolls bad for fostering an unreasonable body image to young girls or are they good for allowing Barbie to have 108 different careers and showing those same young girls that many different career paths are open to them besides homemaker? (We won't go into Barbie's mid-life crisis back in 2004 when she threw poor Ken over for the Australian pool boy.)

My Tuesday Rant

I sent this to a friend yesterday in order to vent. I felt a tiny bit better afterward, but only a tiny bit:

Well, Monday was one hell of an expensive day for me. In the time between putting in the order on Friday night to move all of my retirement funds to the G fund, and the time it became effective Monday, my funds dropped another $3,000, pushing my losses to around 30% of what I had in January 2008. Needless to say, I'm not happy at all. I'm kicking myself for not doing this back in November. I'd still have a lot more of my hard-earned money than I do now.

Right now, I see the economy (and the stock market, which is shorthand for the economy as a whole) looking a lot like one of those rollercoasters that went from the ground all the way to the top, way up high, and now it's plunging down, down, down. We've got our hands up, the air's rushing past us, we're all screaming, and now we can see that the rollercoaster isn't going to stop at ground level, but it's plunging into a dark hole in the ground. How far down does it go? Hell if I know, I just want to get off this goddamn thing. But we're strapped in tight, and now we're screaming in the darkness...

My mistake was being much too optimistic about the economy being able to come back any time soon. I should have realized how the market was going to react to someone who it perceives (correctly) as being anti-business. Obama and crew talk about soaking the rich, but it's middle-class people like me whose retirement funds are melting away like snow in July. In Obama's America, everyone will be equal: Those who have retirement accounts will be no better off than those who don't.

And frankly, I'm not sure it's worth it to save money any more, because with the coming inflation, money saved will be worth less than it was. Might as well live like a grasshopper and spend every dime, then ask the government to bail us out when we run out of money. That seems to be the way things work in America these days. If you're an ant, saving for tomorrow and paying your bills responsibly, you're a sucker. I've got to figure out something to invest in as a hedge against inflation. Maybe guns and ammo. I'm not a firearms enthusiast like some of the guys at work, but maybe it's time to become one... :-(

"He Won The Bet"

That's what will probably end up on the tombstone of the late Sergey Tuganov (Yes, that's really his name! I'm not making that up!) who collapsed and died after a 12-hour marathon threesome, during which he consumed an entire bottle of Viagra. The maximum safe dosage is 100 mg, according to the doctor on the Fox News Channel, which is either one or two pills.

It seems that the 28-year-old man had a $4300 bet with the two women about whether he could keep them satisfied non-stop for the entire twelve hours. Tuganov won the bet, but had a heart attack and died minutes later; it was the ultimate Pyrrhic phallic victory.

I'm sure that well over 90% of the world's men would like to go out that way, although certainly at a more advanced age. Live fast, die young, leave a good-looking corpse? No, I want to look like Keith Richards and exit the stage as a centenarian.

That all begs the question: How the hell are they going to get the casket closed?

UPDATE: The comments at Fark.com (where Tuganov is referred to as "a modern day John Henry", among other things) are priceless.

I was particularly amused by this one, by a commenter named Tortilla Burger:

Today we salute you, Mr. Sex Mad Viagra Orgy Man.
(Mr. Sex Mad Viagra Orgy Man)
Some men are finished in two minutes and promptly fall asleep afterwards.
But you guzzled a bottle of Viagra and kept it going for 12 straight hours.
(Two women at the same time!)
There's no better way to leave this Earth than after a half-day threeway sexathon.
(Damn my hips are tired)
Perhaps you'd have lived if you gave up after the first 6 hours, but sometimes a man's got to stand by his principles.
(Other things are standing too)
So crack open an ice-cold Bud Light, O Beast With Three Backs. Let's face it, there's nothing you could do to top this anyway.
(Mr. Sex Mad Viagra Orgy Man)

Worst Idea of the Week

They had to go a long way to beat out President Obama's bloated multi-trillion dollar spending orgy budget, but the adult film company Vivid managed to come up with a worse idea: They offered "Octomom" Nadya Suleman up to $1 million to star in one of their adult movies.

Now, there is a market out there for porn flicks involving M.I.L.F.s, but most of them have had a few years to get their bodies back into shape. Anyone who saw the "belly" pics of the pregnant Suleman would realize that she undoubtedly hasn't had the opportunity to do so. If she was on her hands and knees, her belly would be dragging on the floor, which is not an appealing visual even to the kinkiest perv. The stretch marks on her stretch marks have stretch marks!

And if you think her belly is stretched out, well, that's probably not the only thing; after popping out 14 children, eight of them in the last litter, even a porn star-sized tool would rattle around in that thang like a clapper in a church bell. Please, Octomom, keep that last shred of dignity and spare our eyes.

Had Enough?

Me, too. I've been watching my Thrift Savings Plan (the federal version of a 401(k) plan) account dwindling over the past 14 months. It's down more than 25% from what it was in January 2008, and that's not including the money that I put into it since then. I've had enough. I was in the Lifecycle 2020 fund, which has a variety of investments of varying risk, set up for someone planning to retire around 2020, growing more risk-averse as time passes and retirement gets closer.

I had been thinking that Dow 7000 was going to be my floor, where I decided to get the hell out of the market, but as I watched the market continue to tank today, I realized that things aren't going to get better any time soon. With Obama and the drunk-on-power Democrats running things, the financial markets are only going to get worse. The left-wing soak-the-rich policies they are advocating are only going to make things worse, not better. There is no light at the end of the tunnel, and if there was, it would be an oncoming train.

So today, I took all of my remaining money out of that fund and put it all into the G fund, which is invested in low-interest government bonds and is the only fund guaranteed not to lose money. I also changed all of my future allocations to the G fund. I'm voting "no confidence" on Obama and his motley crew. I'm not going to even think about getting into any other fund until the Dow goes back over 9000. Sure, I'm not going to be able to make the money back when the market eventually starts going back up, but I won't lose any more money either if the market falls to 6000 or 5000 or God only knows how low. Screw it. I've lost enough, and it was money I worked damn hard for. My only regret is that I didn't do this on November 5th.

Wanna See Something REALLY Scary?

It was in a post I saw over the weekend at Gateway Pundit. Seems that President Obama is planning on getting the ball rolling this week on his cap-and-trade carbon plan to fight "global warming." It will, among other things, put punitive taxes on coal, which is used by many power plants to generate electricity. A Department of Energy study shows that the cost of coal for power generation could go up by between 161% and 413%. This would not only cause up to 4 million people to lose their jobs, increasing unemployment by 2.7%, but also would cause the electric bills of most Americans to skyrocket: They could double, triple, quadruple or even quintuple! Businesses would also be affected and would have to pass on the additional costs to their customers. Inflation would skyrocket as well. You think the economy is bad now? Watch what happens if this cap-and-trade plan is implemented. The economy took a major hit when gasoline went from $2.00 to $4.00 per gallon over a couple of years. What do you think will happen if electricity costs increase to something between two and five times their current rates, virtually overnight?

A lot of people are all in favor of "saving the planet," but how are they going to feel about it when their electric bill is almost as much as their mortgage or rent? Are they going to care about "saving the polar bears" when old folks on fixed incomes start dying because their power is cut off when they can't pay their bills, like that old codger in Michigan who froze to death a few weeks back? If Obama pushes this abomination through, I predict a run on tar, feathers and pitchforks among the citizenry.

Clyde Explains It All

It seems that two nuclear submarines have collided in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, one British, one French. The BBC story about the accident notes that "HMS Vanguard and Le Triomphant were badly damaged in the crash in heavy seas earlier this month."

This is what happens when you have people who drive on the wrong side of the ocean.

Presidents Day

Happy Presidents Day! (I'm assuming that there wasn't anything in the Democrats' stimulus bill changing the name of the holiday to Il Duce's Day.)

Well, it's been a couple of days since the Democrats in Congress passed their $787 billion stimulus bill, which none of them had actually read all of the way through. It would have been impossible for them to actually read it, since it was over 1100 pages long and only was completed late Thursday night; there wasn't sufficient time for ANYONE to actually read it. But no, they had to vote on it immediately, so that Nancy Pelosi could catch her plane to Italy for her vacation trip. The Founding Fathers must be spinning in their graves at such irresponsibility by Congress.

And Italy is a very, very appropriate destination for Pelosi, considering the path that our nation is on now. It is, after all, the original home of fascism, and as our government continues to bail out and buy out banks and businesses, it looks more and more fascistic all the time. If you haven't read Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism yet, now might be a good time to do so. Well, actually, it would have been better if everyone had read it before November 4th, but that's water under the bridge.

Despite the Democrats in Congress ramming the bill through so quickly, President Obama wasn't around to sign the bill; he'll sign it on Tuesday when he returns from his weekend trip to Chicago. This tells you exactly how urgent the bill was, if it could wait three days to be signed, after there was less than a day for Congress to go over the pork-stuffed monstrosity. It wasn't a stimulus package with some pork in it, it was a pork package with some stimulus in it. Most of the money being spent won't create jobs; it's going for every Democrat wish list program under the sun.

What's in the bill? We don't know yet. There are bound to be any number of nasty surprises in it for those who are not feeding at the Democrat trough, things that will funnel money to questionable and partisan purposes, things that will advance the growth of the power of the federal government over the lives of the American people. They, after all, are wiser than you: Why shouldn't they take more of your money and decide how it should be spent? You'd just waste it, after all, and spend it irresponsibly pursuing happiness. Congress and government bureacrats, however, will be fully accountable for how they spend your...

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Sorry, I just couldn't keep a straight face any longer. You have to laugh or else you'd cry.

We're all liberal fascists now. God Save the United States of America.

Happy 200th Birthday, Abraham Lincoln!

You're looking good, big guy!

You know, when I was a kid, this was a holiday...

Thoughts on Tuesday's Presidential Visit

I've been letting some thoughts percolate for a while regarding President Obama's visit to Fort Myers.

First of all, when the President comes to your town, it's a big deal, whether you voted for him or not. Roads will be closed, security will be tight, and the President won't see a whole lot of your town other than what he can see through the tinted windows of the Presidential Limousine. I doubt if President Obama spent more than ten minutes outside in Fort Myers in the entire time he was here, which was too bad. It was a beautiful day, but he was whisked from Air Force One to the limo, with a few minutes of meet-and-greet for local bigwigs, then he was off to the venue, where the limo went into an underground parking garage and inside the building. Afterwards, it was reversed.

One nice touch was that the motorcade went right down Martin Luther King Boulevard, which was Anderson Avenue up until several years ago when the main street running through the historically black neighborhood of Dunbar was renamed. When it became evident that the law enforcement presence was concentrated along that route, many people correctly divined that the President would be coming their way. There were probably a couple of thousand people along the road, cheering as the limo whizzed past them. It wasn't much, but it was deeply symbolic for many Dunbar residents. I'm sure that President Obama is the first president to ever go down that street, and those who saw him were thrilled about it.

For the President, of course, it becomes routine. He doesn't see any moving vehicles other than his own motorcade, because all nearby traffic is blocked off for security reasons. He doesn't see a red light, and won't for the entire four year term of his presidency. He is not just a VIP, he is the Most Important Person, as far as the Secret Service and local law enforcement are concerned.

It all comes with a downside, of course: The President's day is tightly scripted, and his time is not his own. He has some input into his schedule, of course, but many things are obligatory. Every word he speaks and every action he takes will be under the microscope. And wherever he goes, it is an EVENT, with prior coordination with the locals and scheduling down to the minute. He can't just say, "Hey, what's down that road? Let's go take a look." Security concerns won't allow it.

And no matter where he goes, he will have a Secret Service escort with him. That doesn't end when he leaves office, either; former presidents also have Secret Service details. For the rest of his life, the President will never be able to live a "normal" life; the loss of spontaneity is one of the costs of winning the highest office in the land.

An Ironic Twist

I saw in the L.A. Times that federal judges may force California to cut their prison population by up to 40%, leading to the release of up to 57,000 inmates. It seems that some of the inmates had filed suit, claiming that prison overcrowding was preventing them from getting proper health care and mental health treatment.

Now, if it was up to me, the first thing I would do would be to release every single non-violent drug offender. That would probably come pretty close to cutting the inmate population down to what the Feds want. Locking up non-violent drug offenders is, to put it mildly, stupid. People who have harmed no one but themselves are being branded as felons, and the taxpayers have to pay for the cost of their incarceration. It's a waste of money.

The ironic twist is that if California has to release 57,000 inmates, where will they then get their health care and mental health treatment? Considering that they will be ex-cons going into a tough job market, they'll have a hard time finding employment. Sure, it's all skittles and beer for the inmates remaining behind in their less-crowded cells, but the ex-cons suddenly on the street may find themselves even worse off than they were in prison.

Obama Coming Tuesday

I just saw on the White House press conference that President Obama will be coming to Fort Myers on Tuesday for some kind of town hall meeting to plug the stimulus package. White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs noted that a year ago, the unemployment rate here was 7%, but that it is now up to 10%.

During the housing boom, this area had one of the lowest unemployment rates in the nation, because everyone was building houses. With the crash of the housing market a couple of years ago, the people who used to work in construction were thrown out of work. This area had been overbuilt for the population, but everyone thought that they were going to get rich from real estate, buying properties and turning around and flipping them for big profits. It worked during the housing bubble, but when the bubble burst, the speculators were ruined. And because they had built so many new houses that nobody could afford to buy, many of them stood empty. Even more were abandoned half-completed.

I hope that Obama's people do their homework and understand the sort of questions they are likely to field at the town hall meeting. While both Vice-President Biden and Governor Palin made appearances here during the campaign, this will be Obama's first visit to Fort Myers. The good news for him is that that he should get some nice weather, much nicer than Washington. The bad news is that he won't have much time here to enjoy it.

Page One... (Updated and Bumped)

Of the new Obama administration job application:

1. Have you paid your taxes?

2. ALL of them?

3. Are you SURE?

4. Has your spouse paid all of his/her taxes?

5. Has everyone else in your immediate family paid all of their taxes?

(If you answered 'YES' to all five questions, continue on to Page 2.)

Hopes Daschled

It wasn't a good day for President Obama yesterday, as two of his nominees bit the dust due to tax problems. Former Sen. Tom Daschle, who had been tapped to become Secretary of Health and Human Services, and Nancy Killefer, who was supposed to become the newly-created Chief Performance Officer, both withdrew their names from consideration after their tax problems came to light. This was after Timothy Geithner survived his tax scandal to become the new Secretary of the Treasury (which oversees the Internal Revenue Service). As many people have asked on the internet in recent days, "Don't ANY of these people pay their taxes?" Or is tax-paying just for "the little people" like you and me? All I can say is that if Leona Helmsley was still alive, she'd probably have been nominated for a cabinet post!

Pity poor President Obama! He announced upon taking office that he would have the most ethical administration in history, but alas, all he had to work with to create an ethical administration were Democrat politicians and apparatchiks. You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. Not that the Republicans are much better; if Diogenes were to come back to Earth seeking an honest man, he might as well just skip Washington.

Visualizing Michael Phelps' Next Commercial

When I saw this picture of Olympic gold medal-winning swimmer Michael Phelps:



All I could say was, "Dude! I hope that's a water-pipe, man!"

Now, some people worry that this faux pas could cause him to lose some commercial endorsements. However, as I see it, this broadens his appeal to a whole new audience: All of those people who were too stoned to watch him during the Olympics. I foresee something like this:

"Dude! It's Michael Phelps, man! When 4:20 rolls around at my house, I usually get chronically hungry. When I do, I like to break out a big bowl of Orville Redenbacher's Gourmet Popcorn. Then, I like to hit Burger King for a Whopper with cheese and some onion rings. Super size it, dude! Then I like to have a big bag of Doritos, original cheese flavor, and for dessert... Dude, you gotta try these Oreo Cakesters! They rock! So for now, hang loose, and I'll catch you on the flip flop..."

Thoughts on Art

The other day, I spotted a postcard in the mail from a New York art gallery. I process mail for an upscale part of Naples, so that's not unusual. This particular postcard featured a detail portion of a painting by an artist named Larry Poons. If you click on his name, you can see a page with a number of his works on it. They are all extremely abstract.

To be honest, I'm not much for abstract art. I like art where the artist is trying to make me think or make me feel something, but in order to do that, it's generally necessary for the work to actually be clearly representative of something. If you can rotate the work by 90 degrees, either way, and not be able to say, "That's sideways," then in my opinion, it's not representative enough. It's just a color Rorschach test, and it's not for me.

There was another postcard a few days ago from a Naples gallery about an exhibition titled "Let's Go To the Beach," featuring paintings of the beach in various styles. One artist (I don't remember his name) had a couple of beautifully photorealistic paintings, one of waves rolling in from the Gulf, the other of water bubbling and pooling at the tide line, with sea shells on the sand. Most of the other works were impressionistic. As I told my partner on the machine, "Hey, if I want impressionistic, I'll just take my glasses off!"

The Difference Is...

Seems that Iceland is about to appoint an openly gay woman as its new prime minister. Johanna Sigurdardottir, a former flight attendant turned labor organizer turned politician, will lead the troubled island nation. The most interesting line in the story to me was this one:

She lives with journalist Jonina Leosdottir, who became her civil partner in 2002, and has two sons from a previous marriage.

The difference between America and Iceland is that when our journalists go down on the president, they only do it figuratively.

Gettin' Hopey-Changey

Well, not really, but I can at least play with the Obamicon.me site's poster maker like all of the other cool kids are doing. Here are my two efforts, so far. First, we have the generic photo for my Blogger pic:



And then we have the modified logo:



For my next poster, I've got to find a picture of Vladimir Lenin. It's gonna say "Change."

Ah, here we go:



You say you want a revolution, well, you know...

Manatee Park

Things have warmed up nicely. I read in the paper that there were hundreds of manatees at the Manatee Park on State Road 80, seeking the warm water that discharges from the nearby power plant. I decided to make a trip over there and try my luck at seeing some manatees. I've been there before and seen two or three. Let's just say that my luck definitely changed today.

When I left the house at 10:00, the temperature was up to 59 degrees and rising. By the time I got to Manatee Park, it was up to 63. The place was packed, with auxiliary parking in the grassy areas near the fence. I found a place to park and took my camera with me to the observation area. There were manatees all along the river, but the best spot for observing them was a shallow alcove where there were at least forty of them visible. They came in all sizes, from large bulls and cows all the way down to the babies. I really liked this shot of the baby manatee cuddling up to his mother:



Mostly, they lazed about in the shallow water, coming up every so often for air and to blow water out of their nostrils. We did see one that swam swiftly from one side of the alcove to the other as if he was late for dinner. He was the only one who showed any signs of being in a hurry, though.

I fired off a bunch of pictures, hoping that some of them would turn out well. I was surprised to find that most of them came out pretty well. Here is a nice group shot:



Many of the older manatees have scars on their hides from unfortunate meetings with boats and their propellers, as you can see on the big one in the middle of the picture above. I liked this picture of the baby manatee poking out of the water next to the two grizzled veterans:



All in all, not a bad morning. It's turning into a beautiful day.

Just Chillin'

Why? Because baby, it's cold outside! Not quite as cold as yesterday, when temperatures were below freezing (28 degrees) when I got home from work, but still cold. In fact, there was actually ICE on my windshield and back window yesterday morning when I got off work (it was 34 degrees there, according to my car's thermometer)! I had to run the heater for a couple of minutes before the windshield wipers could knock it away. (No, I don't own an ice scraper any more!)

The last three days have all been in the 30s when I got off work, but today is a few degrees warmer than yesterday. The added benefit is that due to the cold dry air, the sunrises have been marvelous the last three days, a Technicolor rainbow from purplish-red through orange, yellow, green, blue and then into indigo, all before the sun cleared the horizon.

I'm sure most of you are saying, "Hey, low 30s, sounds pretty nice to me compared to what we have here." And comparatively, you're probably right. What must be understood, however, is that low 30s is within spitting distance of record cold temperatures for the day in Southwest Florida. 30 degrees for us is about like -10 or -20 where you're at.

In any case, the cold sent me into hibernation. I slept most of yesterday, mainly because I could. I was well-rested for work last night. They're talking about one more cold morning tomorrow, and then things should warm back up to normal.

2,707

That's the number of days after the terrorist attacks of 9/11/2001, without another mass casualty terrorist attack on the United States. Thank you, President Bush, for a job well done. And I hope that President Obama keeps that streak going for at least the next 1,460 days, which would take him through the end of his term of office.

As many have noted, it was ironic that on the day a black man was inaugurated as President of the United States of America, the Senate's only former Ku Klux Klansman collapsed. And with two superannuated Democrat Senators being felled yesterday, that's not a good trend for the Democrats. If they keep dropping like that, it won't be long until the Republicans regain the majority.

So, how long do you think it will be until we start seeing some of those ancient liberals on the Supreme Court announcing their retirements, now that their replacements would be named by a Democrat? You know that the old coots have been hanging on, saying to themselves, "I can't die or retire yet, because then George Bush would name a conservative to replace me!" Maybe now they'll get a chance to stop and smell the roses... Or maybe they'll go out like Chief Justice Rehnquist did, with their boots on.

Inauguration Day

I'm watching President Obama giving his inaugural address. Well, nobody ever said that he doesn't give a good speech. It will be interesting to see what deeds may follow. I'll say the same thing to President Obama that I said to President Bush on Inauguration Day eight years ago: "I didn't vote for you, but I'm willing to give you the benefit of the doubt. Let's see what you can do."

God bless America.

Update 12:30 p.m.: They could have skipped the poet at the end. I don't like stream-of-consciousness masquerading as poetry. Poetry is supposed to have rhyme and meter. It's like abstract art where somebody sloshes paint on a canvas. Anyone can do that. Well, I'll say it: The emperor has no clothes, and the poet has no poetry.

Economic Silver Linings

The economy is a big, dark cloud right now. There are at least three commodities that are bucking negative economic trends, however. And two of them can be traced directly to the election of Barack Obama as president.

First, there are video games, whose sales were over $21 billion last year, with a big jump in December. People like to be entertained, and video games can provide good value for their money, with good games offering hundreds of hours of game play. Video games were among the few bright spots in an otherwise bleak Christmas season for retailers.

Second, sales of guns and ancillary products such as ammunition and clips took off immediately after Obama's election in November. Some think that Obama may be the "gun salesman of the year." Firearms enthusiasts believe, rightly or wrongly, that "Obama's coming after my guns," so they figure they need to buy and squirrel away as many of them (and as much ammo for them) as possible. Never mind the fact that they've been saying the same thing every time a Democrat has been elected since at least Jimmy Carter's time. Nope, this time the Obamapocalypse is upon us, and woe be unto him who is unarmed.

Finally, there are the thousands of kitschy products out there honoring soon-to-be-President Obama. Whether it's commemorative plates or coins, t-shirts, tattoos, and yes, even sex toys, there's an Obama product out there for everyone. In the future, everyone will own some kind of Barack schlock for fifteen minutes.

I wondered a bit about this phenomenon. I think it's comparable to a baseball card collector wanting to get the rookie card of the next hot "can't-miss" phenom. Sure, the kid hasn't played a day in the majors, but when he hits it big, the value of the card will skyrocket. Never mind that most of those "can't-miss" rookies never become superstars.

Similarly, people seem to want a piece of the man that the liberal media has already anointed as being as great as Abraham Lincoln or Franklin Roosevelt, in hopes that it similarly would skyrocket in value. Americans are still entrepreneurs at heart, looking for the main chance. They still want to buy something for a little now and sell it for a lot later.

But they are forgetting that value goes up only when things are scarce or hard to obtain. A memento of Lincoln is expensive because there are not that many of them, because so many disappeared over the years. But if there are hundreds of thousands of Obama items out there, they aren't rare. They are common. And that Obama quarter that people are paying ten bucks for is still only worth a quarter. It may have sentimental value to them, at least for now, but it is extremely unlikely to send their kids to college in twenty years.

It Was Twenty Years Ago Today...

January 13, 1989, was a much anticipated day for me. And why not? It was the ETS date on my military ID card, the date when my enlistment would be up. I had re-enlisted once, back in early 1985, but this time, I was ready to get out. If I'd stayed in, the Army wanted to send me to Fort Hood, Texas, no doubt to spend long stretches of time in the motor pool or on field training exercises. The Reagan era was coming to a close, with the first George Bush getting ready to take office. It was time for me to do something new.

And so, after painting my graffiti on the Berlin Wall, I caught a flight from Berlin to New York, and a bus from there to Fort Dix, New Jersey, the very same place where I'd begun my military career in 1981. I got there late on January 12th, and spent my ETS day outprocessing. Being a sergeant who was ETSing was certainly a much nicer experience than being a buck private going through basic training.

And then, I got a plane ticket from Philadelphia to Fort Myers via Tampa, and got out of Dodge. There was snow on the ground in Philly that day, and that was the last time I saw snow from that day to this. I had made the transition from soldier to civilian again.

Twenty years! Where does the time go?

Blago's Surreal Friday Press Conference

I wrote this up as a comment at Althouse.com, but it's unlikely to be read by many people there since it was an old thread, so I put it up here, where not many people are likely to read it either:

That press conference was surreal. Blago on the dais with a couple of American flags and a small gaggle of unfortunates, including a fellow in a wheelchair, telling his tale of standing like St. Blago against the besieging Saracen horde, doing great works for the little people despite the opposition of the Illinois legislature. Fox News' Shepard Smith was beside himself, talking over Blago's filibuster and demanding, "What about selling the Senate seat? What about shaking down a children's hospital? What about trying to get journalists fired?" And you know that to Shep and the media, the latter was probably the worst of the three.

Still, you have to admire Blago's chutzpah. He's certainly been entertaining, definitely the best side effect of the election of Barack Obama as President. And if he gets more kids to read classical literature, well that's just one more human service he's done along with helping poor women get mammograms and poor kids get organ transplants.

A question for the lawyers out there: If the Illinois Senate convicts Blago and removes him from office, does that mean that the Feds wouldn't be able to try him on the same charges due to double jeopardy? Is it possible that a clever lawyer could argue that and get him off scot-free on the federal charges?

One Might As Well Be Hanged For A Sheep As For A Lamb

This morning, while driving home from work, the talk radio host was talking about the proposed increases in fines for speeding and other traffic infractions here in Florida. It's going to become even more expensive to break the law, but as one person noted, if it's going to be that expensive, you might as well go all out. No sense in getting nailed for a piddly 10 or 15 miles per hour over the limit. If you're going to be handing over your bank account to the county for a traffic infraction, you might as well get your money's worth.

I was reminded of that when I read about this story in the morning newspaper:

2 leaders of polygamist group arrested in Canada

VANCOUVER, British Columbia (AP) — Two top leaders of a polygamous community in western Canada have been arrested and charged with practicing polygamy, British Columbia's attorney general said Wednesday.

Attorney General Wally Oppal said Winston Blackmore is charged with marrying 20 women, while James Oler is accused of marrying two women. Oppal, who said the charges carry a maximum penalty of five years in prison, said the case will be the first test of Canada's polygamy laws.

Again, if you're going to be a polygamist, you might as well go all out. With 20 wives, Mr. Blackmore can sleep with a different woman every night for almost three weeks. But Mr. Oler? How can he call himself a polygamist with only two wives? He's a bigamist! It's like he's hardly even trying!

And with 20 wives, I'd say that Mr. Blackmore is not just practicing polygamy; I'd say he's perfected it!

Last Night's Annoyance

Which was going into the break room at midnight and having someone tell me, "Look at the prices of the candy bars! They jumped from 85 cents to a dollar!" I looked and sure enough, what had been a ripoff had turned into blatant highway robbery. The yo-yos at the Division of Blind Services who stock the machines buy in bulk, and are probably making at least a 100% profit. I think the worst thing is that they didn't just go up by a nickel or a dime. No, the greedy SOBs jacked up the prices by a full fifteen cents in one jump. The last time they increased prices, which was not that long ago, they went from 75 cents to 85 cents. I've now decided that I'm not going to buy anything else from them from now on, from any of their machines, period. I'll stock up in bulk at the store and bring my own snacks. Let 'em get the money for their white canes and guide dogs from some other sucker, because I'm done with them.

Like A Country Song

You may have seen in the news that Governor Bill Richardson has withdrawn his name for consideration as Barack Obama's Secretary of Commerce, due to some possible shady dealing involving political favors for campaign contributions. Oops! Now he'll have to return to Sante Fe. It reminds me of a twist on a country song. Richardson's lament: "I shaved my beard for this?"

Spotted in the Mail

Last night, I spotted a brochure for a company named Heritage Auctions that was advertising a "Natural History Auction," including such items as the fossilized skull of a triceratops (7-1/2 feet long, 5 feet wide) and the skull of a saber-toothed cat. The first item is expected to bring $240-280,000 at auction, while the second is a relative bargain at an expected $40-50,000.

I showed the triceratops skull on the cover of the brochure to my partner on the machine and asked, "Where would you display it? What are you going to do, put it out in your formal garden with the bonsai?"

I told someone else about it, and he said, "Well, you could put it in your hunting lodge with the elk heads." I pointed out that it would make the elk heads look downright puny, and besides, people would say, "Well, I KNOW you didn't kill THAT one!"

Anyway, follow the link if you've got that kind of money burning a hole in your pocket and a nice big room in your house that needs a triceratops skull to complete the decor.

Quadrantid Update

I did, indeed, go out early Saturday morning and watch the meteor shower. I was out for about half an hour, from 3:30 to 4:00 a.m. The sky was mostly clear, and I saw about ten meteors during that time, as well as a couple of other flashes out of the corner of my eye that might have been something. It was cool but not cold, around 58 degrees or so. The only fly in the ointment, so to speak, was a stray mosquito who started buzzing around my head toward the end. I'm amazed that there are any of them left; we've had some cold weather (into the upper 30s and lower 40s a couple of times) that should have killed them all off until the rainy season hatches the eggs they laid. It didn't bite me, anyway, it just buzzed threateningly.

After about a half hour or so, I'd seen enough. It was starting to get cloudy around the edges, and I'd seen what I'd gone out to see. It wasn't as good as the Leonid meteor storms of 2001 and 2002, but it wasn't a total bust like the 2008 Leonids, when I went out and it was too cloudy to see anything.

Quadrantids Tonight (Maybe)

There's a meteor shower tonight or early tomorrow morning. If the weather permits, I'll probably go out to watch. Now, I know what you're thinking: Going outside in early January for a couple of hours in the early morning to look for shooting stars is crazy! It's got to be freezing out there! Except, of course, here in Florida, it isn't. It will be cool, but the low overnight is supposed to be in the upper 50s. Nothing that jeans and a hooded sweatshirt can't handle.

While I'm not worried about the temperature, the possibility of cloud cover may scrub the mission. I figure I'll take a look outside around 4 a.m. tomorrow. If it's cloudy, then I won't bother driving to my usual meteor-watching spot. If it's clear, though, then I'll head out and see if I'm lucky enough to spot any. They're predicting a pretty good show, perhaps up to 100 meteors an hour, and good viewing since the moon is only a crescent at this point. I'll keep my fingers crossed for clear weather tonight.

Happy New Year!

And so 2009 begins, as 2008 slinks away to die. Best part about 2009: No elections! Worst part about 2009: All those politicians that were elected in 2008 take office, or in the case of the many incumbents who infest the body politic like lice, remain in office. It should be entertaining, especially Blagofest '09.

Question: Are you reading and saying 2009 as "two-thousand-nine" or "twenty-oh-nine"? Some of the radio people are using the latter formulation. 2000 was definitely "two-thousand." Nobody called it "twenty-hundred." Kind of odd when you think about it, because 1900 was "nineteen-hundred" and 2100 will definitely be "twenty-one-hundred", even if most of us are unlikely to be around to say it. And for most of this decade, most of us have been using the "two-thousand-" phrase rather than the "twenty-oh-" phrase. From next year on, it's almost certain that everyone will just be saying "twenty-ten," "twenty-eleven," etc. But this decade has been an odd aberration in the way we refer to our years.

Chicago Chutzpah

I stayed up a little past my bedtime yesterday afternoon so that I could watch the 3 p.m. press conference from Chicago, featuring Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich (henceforth, "Blago"), who is being pursued by the Feds for allegedly planning to sell the appointment to replace President-Elect Barack Obama in the Senate to the highest bidder. And what was the press conference for? Why, to announce the man that Blago has chosen for that appointment: An African-American politician named Roland Burris. This was despite the fact that other members of the Illinois state government have said that they will not certify anyone appointed by Blago, and despite the fact that the Senate's Democrat caucus has said that they will not recognize a Blago appointee, because of the cloud that the Governor is currently under. Blago, however, is shameless, and proves that one need not be Jewish to have chutzpah.

And then, it got even weirder, when Rep. Bobby Rush (D-Illinois) who is a former Black Panther, played a race card the size of a tombstone, saying that since there were no African-Americans in the Senate with Obama moving up, that the other Senators wouldn't want to be the ones trying to keep another African-American man from joining the Senate. Don't be trying to "lynch" the appointee, you racist crackers!

I watched this and thought, "How sexist! If this is the designated 'reserved-for-African-Americans' Senate seat, then it is only appropriate that African-American women from Illinois should receive equal consideration!"

And I knew exactly which African-American woman from Illinois should be named to fill out the rest of Obama's term. Yes, they should replace one O (that's a LETTER O, not a ZERO!) with another: They should appoint the third-most popular woman in America (behind Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin), Oprah Winfrey.

Yes, Senator Oprah! It makes sense: She meets all three criteria: She's at least 30 years of age, a citizen for at least the past nine years, and a resident of the state that she would represent. And she's richer than Croesus, so when the time came for her to run for election to defend the seat, she would have plenty of financial resources to draw on.

Some might say, well, she has no political experience! But then again, neither does Caroline Kennedy, who is being seriously touted by some for the appointment to replace Senator Hillary Clinton in New York if she is confirmed by the Senate as Secretary of State. And indeed, Senator Clinton herself had no political experience when she became New York's Senator, other than being married to a President. Caroline Kennedy's experience consists solely of being the daughter of a President. Oprah? She's a friend of the incoming President. And in Chicago, it's all about who you know and whose palms you grease.

Monday Quick Hits

While watching the New York Yankees spend over $420 million on long-term contracts for three top free agents last week, all I could think was that it was a damn shame that the Steinbrenners didn't invest with Bernie Madoff.

Who had a worse weekend, the 0-16 Detroit Lions or Hamas in Gaza? I'm thinkin' Hamas...

I don't have much sympathy for the Palestinians in Gaza. If someone was firing a bunch of missiles at us, we'd kick their butts from here to next week. Frankly, the Israelis put up with it a hell of a lot longer than Americans would have. I think our response to the Israelis of "try not to kill civilians while you deal with the terrorists" is appropriate. As for the Hamas guys getting killed, sure hate it for 'em. Next time, don't start something you can't finish, nimrods.

I saw in the news that some bleeding hearts are whining about music being used to "torture" the detainees at Guantanamo Bay. Some of the music included the themes from "Barney" and "Sesame Street"! Oh, the humanity! If it was up to me, they'd get a steady diet of patriotic American music, 24/7: "The Star-Spangled Banner," "God Bless America," "America the Beautiful," "Stars and Stripes Forever," "My Country, 'Tis of Thee," etc. All in the public domain, so no whiny little artists would be bitching about their music being used for "torture." And if Lee Greenwood wanted to let them use "God Bless the U.S.A." and Toby Keith wanted to let them use "Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue," well, that would be just fine, too.

Merry Christmas To All

I hope that all of you have a joyous holiday with family and friends. For those of you who don't have to work tomorrow, enjoy your long weekend. Merry Christmas!

Christmas Eve in Florida

I'm getting ready to celebrate my twentieth Christmas in Florida. I've lived here longer than anywhere else. For about 364 days a year, I'm happy to live where there is no snow or ice. I see people struggling through it on television, and I remember how unpleasant winter can be. But on Christmas Eve, well, like the song says, I'm dreaming of a white Christmas, even though if we actually got one, it would be catastrophic to our local subtropical vegetation.

It actually has snowed here before, five times in the last 150 years. The last time there were reports of snow flurries was my first winter here, during the Great Christmas Freeze of '89. That was a cold, cold day. I had to work Christmas Day at the Division of Forestry, and the building was unheated. It got down to around 28 degrees, which killed off a lot of the palm trees. It also froze the water in the garden hose outside the building. I was bundled up like an Eskimo, wondering if it was typical for a Florida winter (it wasn't). This week will be more representative, with high temperatures in the low 80s.

While people in Florida do manage to decorate festively for the season, it just isn't what I grew up with. I don't know how many times we actually had a white Christmas growing up, but it seems like winters were always cold when I was a kid growing up in Missouri. If we didn't have snow around Christmas, there was always plenty in January and February. As someone who walked to school (uphill, both ways!) the cold temperatures and the snowy conditions were an indelible memory.

So for those of you with snow on the ground as Christmas approaches, enjoy the beauty of the season. I don't envy you, well, not very much. Maybe just a teeny little bit around midnight tonight.

Nazis For Christmas?

Several months ago, I wrote about the upcoming Tom Cruise movie Valkyrie, which opens on Christmas Day. There's now a veritable blitzkrieg of advertising for the movie, both on television and on the Web. If the movie bombs, it won't be for lack of trying to get people to see it.

I'm still skeptical about the movie's prospects. Sure, people like to see a good action-suspense movie, but do they want to see one where both the heroes and villains are wearing Nazi uniforms? And even more importantly, do they want to see a movie where they already know going in that the hero fails? It would be like going to see a Lord of the Rings movie where Frodo fails to destroy the Ring, Sauron wins and Middle Earth is destroyed.

It's not that Americans don't respect a good try in a lost cause, even if it is some other nation's hero making the doomed attempt; Scotland's William Wallace in Braveheart would be a perfect example of such a movie hero, and that was a box office hit. But will they show up to see a movie in which the protagonists and the antagonists were both enemies of the United States? I'm guessing that they won't.

Unintended Consequences

A while back, after the government bailed out financial firms like Goldman Sachs, it was announced that their CEO and six of their other top executives would forego receiving bonuses this year. Well, after running their company into the ground, most of us would say that they really didn't deserve bonuses, right? After all, a bonus should be earned by doing things that improve your company's profitability.

But now, we learn that there are some negative unintended consequences from those fat cats not getting even fatter: New York state is anticipating a tax shortfall of $178 million dollars that they would have received from the taxes on those bonuses that those executives didn't get. Which means, of course, that they'll have to raise taxes and fees on the rest of the people in New York to make up for the shortfall, at least if they want to keep their funding for various programs at the same level.

$178 million is a lot of coin, especially as the taxes from just seven guys' projected bonuses. How big would the bonuses have to be to have generated that much in taxes? We're talking about some serious ill-gotten gains. If they've been giving these guys this kind of money in bonuses every year, no wonder their companies have gone into the crapper.

Toothless Lions One Loss Away From Perfectly Imperfect

There are a number of bad teams in the NFL this year, teams that have only won two or three games. But they all look pretty good compared to the hapless Detroit Lions, who got clobbered by the New Orleans Saints today by a score of 42-7 to fall to a league-worst 0-15. If the Lions lose next week at Green Bay, a place where they have not won a game since 1991, they would become the first team in league history to finish a season at 0-16.

There have been winless teams in the NFL before, of course. The expansion 1960 Dallas Cowboys finished at 0-11-1, but they did at least manage a tie. The expansion 1976 Tampa Bay Buccaneers have been the yardstick for failure for the last three decades, finishing their first season at 0-14, and then losing the first 12 games of the 1977 season before winning the last two games that year to finish at 2-12. Note that both of those teams were expansion teams, however, so there is at least some excuse for their futility. The Lions have no such excuse. They're just a very, very bad football team. And since even most really bad teams manage to win at least one game in a season, they're a very unlucky team as well. Bad and unlucky is an unfortunate combination, and that's the 2008 Detroit Lions in a nutshell.

So can they manage to avoid the infamy of winlessness next week in Green Bay? Or will they become the new yardstick for failure? Stay tuned.

Busy Day

As Christmas gets closer, it gets busier and busier at the post office. Last night was the busiest night yet. We ran a ton of mail and barely finished everything up in time. It felt like I was running down a mountain, trying to stay ahead of an avalanche. Or perhaps it felt like the Running of the Bulls in Pamplona. I didn't get buried in snow or gored by a bull, but I sure felt wiped out by the end of the day. I'm ready to get past December 25th and see the volume drop a little bit once all of those Christmas cards are out of the system.

Thoughts on "Shoe Guy"

You probably saw the story about the Iraqi journalist who threw both of his shoes at President Bush during a press conference in Baghdad over the weekend. The president showed admirable reflexes, ducking both of the missiles. And you could tell the Iraqis are a nation of soccer players; they're used to kicking things, not throwing them. Sorry, Muntazer, but you throw like a girl. That's an insult in our culture, by the way. Shoes don't mean diddly-squat to us. Enjoy your stay in whichever Iraqi jail you end up, idiot!

Another Remake? Why?

Recycled from an e-mail to a friend, since I haven't posted anything lately:

You may have seen that they've remade The Day The Earth Stood Still, with Keanu Reeves as the alien Klaatu, and it opens Friday. This time, though, Klaatu's message is supposedly different: Instead of the anti-Cold War message of the original movie, this time he's going to tell us to stop destroying the planet. For some reason, I expect that he's going to get all Goracle-y on us: TDTESS meets An Inconvenient Truth. Feh! I usually dislike remakes on general principle. To me, it shows a lack of creativity and originality to just re-do something that someone has already done decades earlier. If it was good before, watch the original. If it wasn't good before, why remake something that sucked?

And no, I didn't think that the Will Smith version of I Am Legend was better than Charlton Heston's The Omega Man.

Were They Wearing Prada?

Greetings, my fellow Great Satans and Great Satanettes,

While I was surfing over at Drudge Report this morning, I found this odd story:

Iranian Police Detain 49 For `Satanic` Clothes

Police have arrested 49 people this week in a northern Iranian city during a crackdown on "satanic" clothes, IRNA news agency reported on Thursday.

...

"Police confronted rascals and thugs who appeared in public wearing satanic fashions and unsuitable clothing," Qaemshahr city police commander Mahmoud Rahmani told IRNA.

Rahmani also said that five barber shops were shut and 20 more warned for "promoting Western hairstyles".

So, do you dress like Satan? What are the signs? Is it that pentagram pendant with matching 666 earrings? Or lots of black leather? Maybe a studded dog collar?

Nope, all you have to do is dress like an American. The story continues:

It includes measures against men sporting spiky "Western" hairstyles or women wearing tight trousers and high boots.

Spiky hair? Tight trousers and high boots? I'll bet that blue jeans are on that 'satanic' list, too. It appears that you don't have to dress like a Goth or some kind of death metal fan to qualify as 'satanic.'

Well, mad mullahs, the Billy Joel song lyrics are still relevant: "I'd rather laugh with the sinners than cry with the saints, the sinners are much more fun..." You guys, not so much.

Aren't you glad that you don't live in a country where the authorities can decide what you can wear, and punish you if you fail to obey their edicts? Yeah, me too.

Only The Upper Lip Is Stiff

From Jolly Olde England, a story that made me laugh:

Lap dancing 'not sexual act' claims head of club organisation

In their evidence to committee, Warr and colleagues from the Lap Dancing Association claimed that their clubs should not be classified as sex encounter establishments because they were providing hospitality, not sexual services.

But Warr astonished the committed when he argued that sexual stimulation was not part of the clubs' attraction.

"One of the biggest problems we face is that not enough people understand the business blueprint of our clubs," he said.

"Actually, our premises are not sexually stimulating. It would be contrary to our business plan if they were."

At this point, Philip Davies, the Tory MP for Shipley who was questioning Warr, said he found that hard to believe.

"You are saying that the purpose of a lap dancing club is not to be sexually stimulating? Most people would find that a rather incredible claim," Davies said.

Warr replied: "Then you need to go to a club, because the purpose of a club is to provide entertainment. It's to provide alcohol, it's a place of leisure.

"All right, the entertainment may be in the form of nude or semi-nude performers, but it's not sexually stimulating."

Davies responded with even more astonishment.

"So if I did a straw poll of all the customers who came out a lap dancing club and said 'Did you find that in any way sexually stimulating?' I would find a big resounding fat zero? On that basis you would have a lot of dissatisfied customers."

Warr replied by asking: "How do you measure sexual stimulation. What is the definition of sexual stimulation?"

The article is even better when read with Monty Python voices. And that last sentence! How Clintonian! And wouldn't you think that the person in charge of the Lap Dancing Association should be a woman? Come on, ladies, empower yourselves!

Messed-Up World

The weekend's news confirms it. The poor man at the Long Island Wal-Mart who got trampled to death on Black Friday by a horde of greedy shoppers. The two men at the L.A. area Toys 'R Us whose wives got in an argument, so the husbands both pulled out guns and shot each other to death. And the story out of India that confirmed that the Israeli hostages had been tortured before being murdered by the Muslim terrorists. The Indian police were none too gentle with the terrorists, though. One was reportedly shot through both eyes, according to the story above. And the only reason that there was a live terrorist for them to grill (again, hopefully none too gently) was because he played dead, then came miraculously back to life when his body was being transported in an ambulance.

For me, the key difference between India and the United States is illustrated in the final paragraph of that story:

A senior National Security Guard officer, who had earlier explained the operation in detail to rediff.com, said the commandos went all out after they ascertained that there were no more hostages left. When asked if the commandos attempted to capture them alive at that stage, he replied: "Unko bachana kaun chahega (Who will want to save them)?"

In America, of course, there would be plenty of bleeding hearts who would want to save them, because they were just poor misinformed victims of oppression by Western civilization. Look at how they cry over the terrorists detained at Guantanamo Bay. The Indians are a little wiser: Dead terrorists have no legal rights, get no trials, don't need to be incarcerated. Dead terrorists no longer cause any problems, other than proper disposal of their bodies. When dealing with terrorists and other irregular military groups, it's best to just kill them all and not take any prisoners. They've already forfeited any claims to humanity anyway by their heinous deeds. The Indian commandos did the country a favor by saving the cost of nine trials. Nine out of ten ain't bad.

And with that, we kick off the festive Christmas season.