taco shop psychic

2003-01-17T16:03:00.000-08:00

273. Last post.

Update your bookmarks, Taco Shop Psychic has moved to http://tacoshop.no-clue.net. Toodles!

2003-01-16T21:41:00.000-08:00

272. Hecticity.

Been an interesting day.

Since this is rent week, I made sure that I had a fully stocked fridge full o' meat (other things too, but this is about meat) going into it from last week. Five pounds of bacon, five good steaks slowly marinating themselves, and four (huge) boneless pork ribs.

And now I'm trying to figure out what to do with it all. I've already started frying up all that bacon so it could be used as bacon bits.

Early this morning, I took girlfriend to the hospital. She has been complaining of abdominal pains for a few days and last night they were severe enough to wake her up -- as opposed to prevent her from falling asleep, which is what was going on before. So the doc says she probably has a duodenal ulcer, and her diet is now severely restricted, at least for the next couple of days.

But my meat will go bad by then, because all those packages are already open, and I have a crappy freezer. I'm not going to eat all that meat -- at least not in front of her, and I would feel bad cooking it when she could smell the juicy aromas. The pork is probably okay, I'll fry that up tonight and use it as stew meat. The beef is most likely out because I've already marinated it -- so I'm eating the remaining three steaks, it looks like. And I'm about to have five pounds of bacon bits.

On the good news front, I may have a job interview coming. I hope I didn't jinx myself saying this. I'm already feeling jinxed by jf for her Tuesday Too questions a few weeks ago where she asked about no health insurance! (Humor, jf, humor :) )

I also might be moving this blog. Or maybe I won't be. We'll all just have to wait and see on that -- but if I do move, I have some ideas for interesting changes I'd like to do, that I'm keeping under wraps. (Hint! sya is a big influence here! That'll confuse ya for sure -- you'll just have to wait to see what I mean.)

2003-01-16T07:37:00.000-08:00

271. Philosophies.

From: the Ethical Philosophy Selector, thanks to sya.

1. Aquinas (100%)
2. Mill (96%)
3. Sartre (91%)
4. Bentham (80%)
5. Rand (79%)
6. Plato (77%)
7. Aristotle (70%)
8. Augustine (62%)
9. Noddings (62%)
10. Cynics (58%)
11. Ockham (58%)
12. Hume (54%)
13. Kant (51%)
14. Epicureans (43%)
15. Hobbes (43%)
16. Nietzsche (38%)
17. Prescriptivism (37%)
18. Stoics (32%)
19. Spinoza (22%)

2003-01-14T22:15:00.000-08:00

270. Kathryn...

It was the Salt Lick and Dan McKlusky's, I'm pretty sure.

(For those feeling left out, my recommendation the next time you're stranded in Austin is to eat at Dan McKlusky's. The Salt Lick is okay, but I didn't think it was worth the drive out of town. I certainly don't think it was better than the finer barbecue establishments that the Seattle area has, believe it or not. If neither of those are your style, then I recommend that you drive up to the Big D and eat here instead.) Never eat here.

2003-01-14T17:45:00.000-08:00

269. It WAS Voodoo!

That Huffington woman is an evil voodoo witch! My van started working just fine today! No one fixed it, no one looked at it, and it ain't moved since I parked it there when it broke! Her evil spell wore off! Voooooooooooooodooooooooooooooooooo-oo! She just feels threatened because it's an ordained minister and she isn't! Hallelujah!

(If there is a Christian hell, I am so there, they've got my seat reserved. But it is freaky that the van started working like that, out of the blue. Karma, I tell ya. Or maybe Vanma. Hmmm... white van, Vanma White. I should have thought of that before...)

2003-01-14T14:49:00.000-08:00

268. Bloggin' Lovefest Day.

Today is Bloggin' Lovefest Day, which is something I should really take to heart. I've been angry (not really at anyone, just in general) and somewhat irritable to one or two or three or even four people I know, mostly in an indirect fashion through bad attempts at humor. Mayhaps even five.

I should take it to heart. But I'm not going to! Sorry guys, you're stuck with grumpy ol' me!

2003-01-14T10:12:00.000-08:00

267. Death penalty.

Mary has an interesting post over at her site currently regarding Illinois Governor Ryan's commutation of the death penalty for the entirety of Illinois' death row. I hated to disagree with her (as I am in the quandary of not only supporting the death penalty, but also Ryan's decision), but I felt I had to. I encourage everyone to go look at it, but please, if you feel compelled to leave a comment, don't do so purely out of spite or anger with either of our positions - I only mention that since emotions on this issue are likely to run very deep, and I don't want to give Mary any unnecessary headaches.

If you just think my position is idiotic however, feel free to try and tee off on me in my comments here.

2003-01-14T05:32:00.000-08:00

266. Tuesday Too.

I haven't done the Tuesday Too in awhile. Judging by the answers I'm going to leave today, I'm continuing this trend.

1.) Scientists have predicted the earth will be swallowed up by the sun in 7.5 billion years. Will humans still be around then? Have they already gone to another planet? Did they incinerate themselves eons before the sun ever sucked on the straw? Write 2 paragraphs on the last days.

I like ice cream. I mean, I'm sorry, but...

I'm sorry, but I really don't care about what happens 7.5 billion years hence. And if I wanted to write two paragraphs about anything, I'd have to get really worked up over it. What do you know about your great-grandparents? What did they do, how did they live? What were their personal triumphs and tragedies? I had the luxury of knowing my great-grandparents, and I cannot answer those questions about them. This tells me that in little more than three generations everything we do will be forgotten, even by our direct decendants. I think that's the scope we all need to keep in focus.

2.) What does the earth's tombstone say?

Can you imagine the hella-huge graveyard that must be in?

3.) Do something nice for mother earth today. What will you do?

A half-hour ago, I received a page telling me that there's a failure somewhere along the Tolt River water pipeline. I haven't the foggiest idea what that means, but it sounds bad. At the minimum, I shall wait to see if the powers that be need my help, and if so, I will go help. And if I am not needed, I will rest secure knowing that I was here, just in case.

2003-01-13T20:14:00.000-08:00

265. Meg and Jack White...

...never looked so furry! (Thanks to Becka.)

2003-01-13T19:50:00.000-08:00

264. Oh, I almost forgot...

I'm an official blowhard now.

2003-01-12T17:09:00.000-08:00

263. Genetically modified food

Jim Miller has an excellent rebuttal to a daft opinion piece here.

2003-01-12T05:19:00.000-08:00

262. Southern Wisconsin.

I have my brother in stitches over this. It all started when I was perusing the site of my much-hated (at least by me) Congressman, the Honorable (snicker, snort, ha!) James ('Baghdad Jim') McDermott. I discovered that Mr. McDermott has an article by the renowned hater of his country, Gore Vidal, on his website.

My brother casually looks over my shoulder as he's going to the fridge and says, "Who would want to line themselves up with that moron, anyway?" He meant Vidal, not McDermott. I wondered aloud about what exactly it was about Southern Wisconsin that made people go wacko like that.

Brother looked perplexed. I informed him that I believe that Mr. Vidal lives (part of the time, anyway) in Madison -- if I am incorrect, then he sure spends a lot of time there. Or, well he did up til the point where he decided that his papers were not being kept with the organization with which he would expect by the University of Wisconsin.

So my brother asks me, "What, is he your cause celebre'?"

"Well, there's always Dahmer. And Ed Gein. And the entire Clown College at Baraboo* (which I think is now defunct, but the Hall of Fame is in Milwaukee). And Orson Welles. And let's not forget the fact that our bible-thumping aunt lives in Waukesha."

So am I off the mark here, or is Southern Wisconsin the weirdest place east of say, Oregon? We're now wondering what sort of industrial spill happened that contaminated the water there.

*Baraboo is also supposedly the hometown for the five original Ringling Brothers.

2003-01-12T03:36:00.000-08:00

261. part four

My girlfriend has requested that I use my bully pulpit on this topic to point out the efforts of the American Humane Association with regards to the Tennessee matter.

2003-01-12T03:18:00.000-08:00

260. Meet Keith.

As with anyone that I catch leaving a comment here who has a blog of their own, Keith from Lawrenceville, Georgia, has been added to the blogroll.

Keith has a cat.

2003-01-12T02:24:00.000-08:00

259. Weird news from Oregon.

Baby formula thieves?

2003-01-11T19:18:00.000-08:00

258. Arianna Huffington is an evil witch and she voodoo'd my van!

My beloved gas-guzzling, smog-belching, earth-killing big white van broke down (oil pump, methinks) early this morning while I was on my way to a search mission. It took me most of four hours to nurse and limp the poor thing back the twenty miles back into Seattle, fetch my girlfriend's truck and turn back around for the search. I showed up, five hours late. The missing hikers showed up as well, but they were more fashionable than me, I guess. Oil's well that ends well or something.

Gotta fix my van.

If I sound grumpy in my comments, that's why. I'm not really as grumpy as I am tired or something. I'll have more in the morning, I hope.

2003-01-10T21:02:00.000-08:00

257. 82d Babykiller Division

Why, just look at this awful spectacle. (Found via IP.)

2003-01-09T18:58:00.000-08:00

256 General Patton, pt. 3

Having finally put together that all these friendly folks are trapsing through my blog are looking for something else besides my witty and charming commentary (snicker, ha), here is a link to the pertinent article in The Tennessean where you can view the clip of the Smoak's dog's demise (either PC or Mac) without paying a fee.

And gee, I must be daft. I see a dog, happy to be out of the car, running up to meet (oh, boy!) new humans!

2003-01-09T16:02:00.000-08:00

255. Another thing you don't see everyday

Is an American pundit making nice with Canada. Link from InstaPundit.

2003-01-09T09:39:00.000-08:00

254. Why public higher education sucks now...

Particulary in Washington State.

From the Post-Intelligencer. Pay particular attention to the words "top-notch" and realize that the English department has lost twelve professors in the last two years -- the same two years in which tuition increased at least 16 percent. Last year, they tried to even make the students pay a surcharge, separate from their tuition, for the electricity used on campus.

Thank you, Tim Eyman (for showing us what personal greed is really all about). Thank you, California (for your crappy energy deregulation). And thank you Rick Neuheisel (for four mediocre seasons, and many more to come).

2003-01-08T23:00:00.000-08:00

253. Update on shot dog story...

The video from the cameras in one/some of the police cars was released today. CNN says that it pretty much backs up the story of the Smoak family.

The newspaper in Asheville, North Carolina, -- which as far as I can tell is the closest to where the Smoaks live -- is running (an edited version of) my letter on the 13th.

And the policeman that shot the dog has been reassigned, but supposedly this is not a punishment.

Update to the update: InstaPundit now has picked up the story (never thought I'd ever type that, hard to beat a guy rightly called 'Insta'-anything) and he links to a guy that excoriates the local constabulary in Cookeville so badly it makes me look like a saint in comparison.

2003-01-08T09:25:00.000-08:00

252. Whoa!

Now there's a twist:

Another man cut his finger and wrote in blood "We oppose a pull-out of U.S. troops," while a group of women carried a banner proclaiming "We admire your dedication."

2003-01-07T08:47:00.000-08:00

251. Hate mail to Tennessee

I just sent this email to several official types in Tennessee, (in response to this thanks to Rachel Lucas):

To Whom It May Concern,

(and I think it should concern all of you)

I read with great dismay the accounts of the felony stop perpetrated against the Smoak family. I wanted to add my voice to the other voices of outrage and disgust that you must, quite rightly, be hearing from anyone else that encounters this tragic story.

To say that this was an egregious failure of Tennesseean and American justice has to be one of the grossest understatements I have ever contemplated.

Mr. Smoak should be commended for his restraint; had it been me in his position, I would have certainly been so utterly enraged I would have tried my best to -- at a minimum -- physically assault the officer that shot my dog and/or any of the other officers that placed my family in such needless danger and traumatization. It is another gross understatement to say that in this situtation, that action would have not gone over well. My hat is off to Mr. Smoak and the Smoak family for dealing with the situation with what seems to be proper reserve and tact.

Cookeville and Tennessee law enforcement as a whole should take a lesson from them.

Never have I been so happy to say that I am a "former" anything as I am today to say that I am a former resident of Tennessee. Indeed, were I a resident of Tennessee today, I would be seriously considering being a former resident of Tennessee tomorrow.

(my name)
Seattle, Washington

Here's a handy-dandy list of some email addresses in Tennessee:
email.safety@state.tn.us, [Tennessee Department of Public Safety and Highway Patrol]
mayor@cookeville-tn.org, [Mayor of Cookeville]
webmaster@cookevillepolice.com, [Cookeville Police Department]
sharon.curtis-flair@state.tn.us, [Tennessee Attorney General's office]
dsundquist@mail.state.tn.us [Governor of Tennessee]

2003-01-06T21:54:00.000-08:00

250. Standing corrected.

Just got done trading long, political emails with Jim Miller. I'm not going to post that exchange here (rude) but I will say that he defended his position well and did correct me on something.

T. Roosevelt was never a lawyer, despite what you might read on the Internet.

Sometimes I am wrong about things. Often I am right.

2003-01-05T16:53:00.000-08:00

249. An interesting article...

...for all sorts of reasons.

"Kenneth Parnell, 71, who was sent to prison for kidnapping Steven Stayner in the 1970s, told the home-care worker last week he would pay her if she could obtain a 4-year-old boy for him, said Clint Ojala, an investigator with the Alameda County District Attorney's Office."

So this runs through my head: "Stayner. Stayner. Where have I heard that name before?"

And then I read the last line of the article. Holy mackerel, can you imagine being in the shoes of Mr. and Mrs. Stayner, even for a day? They lost both of their kids, the same one twice, even. Definitely puts the rottenness of one's own life into perspective.

2003-01-05T12:47:00.000-08:00

248. Meet Dr. Duh.

If Dr. Duh is who my girlfriend says he is, he's quite an interesting character and someone I've had good arguments with in the past on other fora. If he's not, well it's a hell of a fresh young blog anyway. (You absolutely must click on each and every link in his posts, that is the best in-line tongue-in-cheek humor I've seen in awhile.)

2003-01-04T18:40:00.000-08:00

247. A rebuttal to some of the information in The Strange Case of John Edwards.

The Strange Case of John Edwards...

...isn't terribly strange, at least in my eyes.

I think you are correct in your assertion that there is no single course of study for political executives, but the kind of training you cite doesn't hold to much scrutiny when applied to the Presidency, (that of business degrees, MBAs, or officer training in and out of the service academies). Of the forty-two Presidents this country has had (counting Cleveland only once) only one -- the current one -- has had an MBA. Only three others (Kennedy, Reagan and the elder Bush) have had degrees in Economics, which could equally apply in the public as well as private sectors, one would think. Of the forty-two various Presidents, twenty-seven of them (J. Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, J.Q. Adams, Jackson, Van Buren, Tyler, Polk, Fillmore, Pierce, Buchanan, Lincoln, Hayes, Arthur, Harrison, Cleveland, McKinley, T. Roosevelt, Taft, Wilson, Coolidge, F. Roosevelt, Truman, Nixon, Ford and Clinton) had law degrees or were lawyers prior to entering politics.

While the recent trend certainly has shown an increase in degrees that one would expect to find in modern business climes, that does not hold true for military service. In the last century or so, only two Presidents have been in command of anything of real substance or size, that being Eisenhower and T. Roosevelt. A compelling argument might be made on Truman's behalf for ultimately reaching the position of Colonel in the reserves but he was just a junior officer in command of an artillery battery during the first World War. Aside from these three men, there are slim pickings, with regards to the Presidency and military command, since McKinley or maybe even Harrison.

Also, Truman might have been picked for endorsement for Vice-President by Roosevelt partly because of his stewardship of the Special Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program, but it's more likely that he was picked because he could get along with party officials better than Wallace. As far as that goes, Truman really seems to have been little more than a tool for Roosevelt to gain a fourth term.

Finally, regarding 'relevant education, experience or accomplishments' I must point out that this was relatively the same charge levelled at our current president during his campaign. His detractors made much of his MBA, since no president had ever had one before him. His detractors pointed out that the only real successful management experience he had was as managing partner for the group that purchased the Texas Rangers (a position he managed to secure somehow by only contributing $606,000 of the $86m price tag) and Governor of Texas. It is very debatable whether six years as a US Senator is somehow equitable to six years as the Governor of a large US State, since those backgrounds are so dissimilar. On the other hand, accruing fortune on the basis of one's own merits -- even if they are the merits of a trial lawyer -- I think would easily compete or even trump getting lucky once in business with a baseball franchise.

So far of all of the Democratic Presidential contenders, the only one that has the ability to defeat Bush is Edwards. Republicans are right to be afraid of him.

Chad
http://tacoshop.blogspot.com

2003-01-03T21:09:00.000-08:00

246. More geek humor...

If real life was like Asheron's Call
Ever wonder, well so did Terran. He writes:
I have created a small reconstruction of what I believe it would be like if
we lived life in the style of Asheron's call. I hope you like it. =)
Life, Build 1, (3/1/6,000,000,000 BC)
Welcome to life!

Alarm Clock casts Sleep Ineptitude Other VI on you
You say, "Zojack Snoozeth"
Alarm Clock resists your spell
You say, "Zojack Snoozeth"
The sound of you smashing Alarm Clock is followed by the Deafening Silence
of Snooze!
You cast Aquafresh III on Toothbrush
Toothbrush casts Minty Breath II on you
Reading Cookbook
You cannot understand this Scroll.
Floofy Chef's Hat cast Cooking Mastery I on you
You fail to make pancakes
You fail to make pancakes
You fail to make pancakes
Your Cooking Skill is now 19!
You make Pancakes
The Pancakes satisfy 8 points of your hunger
Attempting to Clean Kitchen
You are not trained in that skill
Picking up Keys
Equiping Office Attire
Using Keys with Car
That key doesn't fit this lock
That key doesn't fit this lock
You hear a Rumbling noise
Hot Babe on Sidewalk cast Feeblemind Other VI on you
Hot Babe on Sidewalk cast Bafflement Other VI on you
Telephone Pole bashes you for 72 points of Bludgeoning Damage!
EMS Nurse heals you for 22
EMS Nurse heals you for 34
EMS Nurse fails to heal you
EMS Nurse heals you for 16
Police Officer drains $180 of your Funds with Trafic Violation VI
Downloading Work 124/645
You combine the two Referendums into a larger Statement
You combine the two Statements into a larger Report
You combine the two Reports into a larger Presentation
You fail to give the presentation. Your boss snaps as a result.
Angry Boss casts Self Esteem Ineptitude Other VI on you
Angry Boss casts Unenployment Other V on you
Blistered by Angry Boss' rage, you're Fired!
You've lost your job, your 401k, and your Cubicle!
You sear Angry Boss for 1 point of shock with Middle Finger III!
+Security Officer has Teleported you
The Door is already Open!
The Beer restores 7 points of your desire to live
The Beer restores 7 points of your desire to live
The Beer restores 7 points of your desire to live
The Beer restores 7 points of your desire to live
The Beer restores 7 points of your desire to live
You're too drunk to do that!
Lost server connection

Life, Build 1, (3/1/6,000,000,000 BC)
Welcome to life!
Your Mutual Funds have gathered interest for you. Taking into account your
skills as a broker, you gain $1.30

The Bars are Locked
The Bars are Locked
Big Ugly Dude tried and failed to assess you!
Scary Hulk tried and failed to assess you!
Dude with Scars tried and failed to assess you!
You cry.
Police officer has granted you a respite after your moment of weakness. You
are temporarily no longer a prisoner.
Your telephone call has been used up
Wife tells you, "Hello?"
You tell Wife, "You're not going to believe this..."

2003-01-03T21:04:00.000-08:00

245. Tonight's dinner...

...was chicken fajitas. Did I use one of the 6,290 recipes I bought yesterday? No. I made it up.

Ingredients:
Three chicken breasts, skinless and boneless
Half of a medium white onion
Half of a red bell pepper
Half of a yellow bell pepper
Half of a green bell pepper
Half of an orange bell pepper
1 ear of corn
1.5 cups of water
Four teaspoons of garlic, minced
6 large tortillas
3 tablespoons of olive oil
Red and black ground pepper
1 lime

In a dutch oven, heat the oil on medium. After oil smears across the bottom of the pot, place chicken in the pot and liberally smear each piece of chicken with minced garlic. Coat the chicken with red and black ground pepper, continue to cook on medium.

Meanwhile, clean and slice bell peppers, onion and kernels off of the corn. Sometime in the middle of the slicing, turn the chicken over and recoat with the red and black ground pepper. At the end of the slicing, add the sliced vegetables and water, cover and simmer for 15 minutes. Uncover and let the bulk of the water steam off. Slice in half and squeeze the lime into the pot.

Serve with tortillas.

2003-01-03T19:03:00.000-08:00

244. The leet version of Hamlet.

Have some Hamlet. Warning -- this is not for children or the easily offended or even the hardly offended. It's just that offensive. But some people think it's funny.

2003-01-03T17:09:00.000-08:00

243. Now I got em, what do I do with 'em?

I bought a closeout piece of software yesterday. It's from 1999, and it's called MasterCooks 5.0 and it has since been discontinued by Sierra. I paid a little over six bucks for it. The box advertised that it had four complete Betty Crocker cookbooks in it, and since I only own four cookbooks, I figured it would be great to double that amount for six bucks.

I was wrong. It only featured those Betty Crocker cookbooks -- it contains a total of twenty-five cookbooks for a whopping 6,290 recipes. Unbelievable.

Now, if only I knew what to make for dinner...

2003-01-03T10:05:00.000-08:00

242. Somedays I really hate my name...

When I was a kid, no one else was named Chad. I hated my name. Later on, I grew to appreciate it's uniqueness until I started running into Chads all over the place. When I enlisted and checked into my first duty station, everyone got a good guffaw when they discovered that my first name was Chad since I would be working on things like paper tape punches, which of course make chad.

Then wham! I get hit with the 2000 election, Tom Green playing a dork (what else would Tom Green play? typecasting at it's finest there) named Chad in Charlie's Angels and now Michele is getting harassed by some jackass calling himself Chad -- or rather 'Hanging with Chad'.

That fucker. It makes me nervous to comment there anymore.

2003-01-01T21:34:00.000-08:00

241. Nuts About Soup.

This is my new favorite soup. I invented it.

Taco Shop Psychic's Tortilla Soup

You will need...

A pot (I used the three-quart cast iron dutch oven I got for X-mas)
Three taco-sized corn tortillas
Two chicken breasts
Half of a medium-sized Mayan onion
1 heaping teaspoon minced garlic
2 large limes
3 oz. dry cocktail sherry
3 oz. tequila
3 oz. olive oil
2 qts. chicken broth
1 ear of corn
2 tsp. corn starch
salt and pepper to taste
pinch of oregano
Monty Jack cheese to taste

What you do with that stuff...

Into the pot go the olive oil, the sherry, the tequila, salt, pepper and oregano. Heat this mixture up a bit on medium to medium-high heat, toss in the chicken. While that's busy frying, slice your limes in half, mince your garlic (if you need to, I buy it minced by the bottle) chop your onion and somehow get the corn kernels off of the cob. Somewhere in there, you should probably turn the chicken over. After you have all that stuff prepared, toss it in the pot (except for the limes, which you should just squeeze the juice out of into the pot), put the heat to medium-high if it's not there already, cover the pot and wait ten minutes or so.

After your kitchen starts smelling really good after those ten minutes, in goes the broth (why does it appear that broth is the root word of either brother or brothel?) and drop the heat to medium. Leave it uncovered until it boils and then cover it and wait a half an hour. Use this time to slice your tortillas into strips. At the end of your half-hour drop the tortillas into the mix and add the cornstarch. Stir until the corn starch mixes well with the soup. Pull the chicken breasts out and slice them, return them to the soup and serve with cheese.

Note: I used a boullion cube in the frying stage with the oil, sherry, tequila and spices. At the stage where I say to add broth, I just added water to the mixture.

2002-12-26T09:57:00.000-08:00

240 Parrots in the news...

MSNBC -- “You need to go for a ride with me and bring your stuff,” Muck once told a veterinarian, whom she took to see the parrot. “You need to shower before you come out.”

2002-12-25T14:54:00.000-08:00

239. Merry Christmas?

Hell no! Happy Dean Martin Death Day!

I so wish I could take credit for that, but alas, my clever friend Yousuf came up with that. I should mail Yousuf, I've not talked to him in awhile.

2002-12-24T04:34:00.000-08:00

238. So it's Christmas Eve...

...and someone is out there looking for the search term '"considered average" penis'. Of course, that brought them here.

Merry X-mas!

In other news, I have my computer. I have also 'upgraded' my girlfriend's machine to Windows XP, so the mysterious problems plaguing the network here in the house disappeared with that. I put the word 'upgrade' in quotes because that had to have been the worst OS install experience I have ever been through.

That is not a light statement. In the last ten years, I have personally installed operating systems of one flavor or another well over ten thousand times. That number -- if it's not hit six digits now probably isn't far from it. Installing operating systems -- especially Microsoft's -- is my job. And the XP upgrade was flat-out the worst.

I know the guy that used to be in charge of the Setup team in that division of Microsoft. In fact, he hired on at Veritas after I did. He was extremely good at what he did, and managing Setup for the current NT kernal-based OS is no small task. There were quite a few bugs in the code his team was responsible for -- Windows 2000's Setup was hardly bulletproof. That all being said, whomever replaced him just needs to be taken out and publicly flogged for incompetence.

So the computer I wound up with is a third-tier machine from this company, which I paid $309 for. It's one of the crappiest ATX motherboards I've seen yet, the Azza 361 BM/BS, but that can be worked around. It still burns me though that this board only has 8MB of video memory for it's onboard video card and no AGP slot with which to upgrade it's crappy video. That of course means that all of the video cards I have laying around the house that I could potentially shove in it to make it better are all worthless -- so if I want better video I have to buy a PCI video card.

It is fast though. It's running an AMD Athlon XP 1700+ with 256 Mb of RAM, 40 Gb Maxtor hard disk and a Creative 52x CD-ROM.

Time to go install the .NET framework so I can attempt to learn C#.

2002-12-20T10:20:00.000-08:00

237. Fun with numbers...

InstaPundit has a post regarding a post elsewhere about the math behind the incarceration of many, many Muslims in Southern California.

Specifically, Bigwig links to this article and through some arcane figuring on his part arrives at the number of arrested Muslims in Southern California at 116 per hundred thousand or .16%, while the national average of arrests is 3427.5 per hundred thousand.

Well, first things first -- 116/100k = .116% not .16%.

Second, from that article on Yahoo! I was unable to determine where Bigwig had gotten the number of 116. Extrapolated over six hundred thousand, 116 per 100,000 is 696. The Yahoo! article never quotes 700, but a LA Times article where the government lays out it's case does -- it estimates 500 to 700 were arrested and per 100k people, that's 83 to 116 respectively. I'm just hacking off remainders, btw.

That's all well and good, but the third thing here is that Bigwig is mixing yearly with daily stats. Using the 700 arrested in one day number, 116 arrests extrapolated over 365 days is 42,340 arrests, or 42.34%. Even the low government figure of 500 arrests on that day yields an extrapolated figure of 30,295 (30.295%). Now, I don't believe that one-third of all SoCal Muslims are arrested per annum, so that number is obviously bogus (especially considering the 600,000 Muslims we've been working with are actually 600,000 Iranians), but it shows how using flawed statistics can haunt you. A leftist with a calculator could have had a field day here.

2002-12-18T06:08:00.000-08:00

236. Catching up a bit...

Looks like I'm finally procuring a computer of my own to harangue you people with, rather than live on borrowed time in the middle of the night.

I either need to find a job during the month of January or Congress needs to get it's collective act together and extend UI benefits again.

I'm still working on a large essay regarding the political spectrum. I've done more political/historical reading in the last three weeks than I have in the years since I graduated high school.

Took my bro to the airport so that he could fly out on Asiana to Korea. Wes, you're fairly tuned into what's happening on the peninsula. Should you hear of a thin, bespectacled, long-haired American college student rampaging through the streets of Itaewon koshing Koreans in a drunken rage, let me know, would ya? Bet you wish you could send your brother to Korea...

2002-12-12T04:36:00.000-08:00

235. You think he wonders how he got busted?

Here's an interesting article. Here's the guy's webpage. Get a load of that boat!

2002-12-06T05:23:00.000-08:00

234. Belated Tuesday Too, 'Put the Led Away', and 'Why Are You?'

Tuesday Too..

By the way, if you've not read jf's entry for today, it really is quite something. I'll be thinking over that post for awhile -- but that's become somewhat customary with what she writes.

1.) Have you, a friend or relative ever been without health insurance? For how long? Did you/they suffer any consequences?

Since I left the military I have been without insurance more often that with it. I am currently without insurance. No consequences yet.

2.) Tell us what's really "under your bed"?

Literally: concrete floor. Figuratively: money issues, not finding job issues, (soon to be ex-)signifigant other issues, best friend issues.

3.) What's the message in your fortune cookie?

From the Meiwah Restaurant fortune cookie generator, "[v]olunteer activities begin to payoff". I sure hope so.

Put the Led Away.

Michele is getting a lot of grief over a post she made regarding Led Zeppelin.

Now as many of you know, I grew up in Frankfurt. As some of you know, I am very verbally-oriented. Several people will never go to IKEA with me again because of the penchant I have for playing wordgames with the names of the products at IKEA.

"If it's called a Not light, does that mean it's broken? Why are they selling defective merchandise?"

"Why call a light a 'Non' light? Shouldn't that be a 'Dark'?"

"Why am I at IKEA today? Because I lack a black Lack table." And on. And on. And on. The throw pillows are called 'Toss' there, and yes, I will toss them all over the store, at my shopping companions, the poor hapless clerks...

Anyhow, Frankfurt is just north of the town of Zeppelinheim. Zeppelinheim is, naturally, next to the Frankfurt Flughafen (airport) and that was co-located with Rhein-Main Air Base. When I went to RMAB for any reason, I would catch the S12 down to Zeppelinheim and walk. Invariably, everytime I saw a sign that read 'Zeppelinheim', my thoughts would run like this: "Zeppelinheim...Led Zeppelin...oh, uck"

Now granted, I was not prone to listen to the class of music that Led Zeppelin fell into at the time, but that changed as I aged. I still can't stand them. Every cover of every Zep tune I have ever heard has been better than the original in my opinion. I can agree that the music is catchy, but in my mind the lyrics are there for a reason. If you are going to put out a tune with lyrics, make them worthwhile. Led Zeppelin, Nirvana, Metallica -- all with catchy music, and lousy lyrics. Likewise, a song cannot be just lyrics. Cacophony generally sucks.

In my mind, artists that have really done a much better job at the whole musical alchemy process have been Pink Floyd, The Offspring and AC/DC. They're understandable. The tunes are catchy. Their music just works.

But all of that, naturally, is just my opinion.

Why Are You?

So in my research for this piece I'm assembling, something hit me early on about it. Let me ask you, are you left or right in your politics? What makes you left or right? What makes the left the left and the right the right? Do you know where that all comes from and why?

2002-12-02T14:04:00.000-08:00

233. Apologia.

Sorry for the lack of posting over the last few days. I had to run down to Portland this weekend and that took a good chunk out of me for Saturday and Sunday. I'm also researching a piece I'm writing that contrasts various classic political ideologies with each other and the modern notions of left and right political influences. Probably dull stuff to most of you, but I know at least one other person besides me who will be interested in it.

My girlfriend asked me yesterday, "You're an ex-Marine, so how come you're not the Green Lantern?" Too much Cartoon Network, methinks.

2002-11-28T03:16:00.000-08:00

232. Damn, now I feel guilty...

There seems to be an internet craze going on called de-linking. This is better than any blogopera I've personally been involved in, but it has left me with what I think is a hollow feeling of guilt. Here is one side of a current popular argument (everybody is linking to it -- well not everybody, but you get the idea) in the blogosphere and here is part of the other.

I got mad at one of the people I link to once, so I decided to delink them. Well, not mad per se, but disappointed. Something this person said was just stupid (in my mind) beyond the point of opinion. I decided however, that it wouldn't be fair to delink that person, no matter how stupid I thought the argument was.

So I delinked everybody. The ultimate in cocooning, fuck everybody else, whether they like me (or even think like me) or not. My rationale was that if I could no longer recommend that person to other people, then I could not recommend anyone, since my judgment was now suspect. I still regularly visited most of the people that I had linked -- I kept them in my favorites list.

Lately I threatened to drop Jim Miller from my blogroll. But I didn't knee-jerk it, and emailed Jim to make sure that I was understanding what he said correctly and why I thought it was wrong. He thought it over a bit, modified his post and was a gentleman about the whole thing -- more than I was, I'll admit.

On the other hand, I am not a gentleman, nor do I pretend to be. I call something stupid when I think it is stupid, unless I have a rare flash of tact. I was fully prepared to be wrong on the issue I had with Jim, and fully prepared to apologize for it. Hell, I've been wrong before, I'll be wrong again, and at least in the context of blogging, it's not fatal.

The bottom line is that the blog belongs to that silly woman, and she's fully entitled to delink whomever. But I think she's stupid and even more unbalanced than I am (if that's even possible) and you'll never see a link to her in my blogroll.

2002-11-27T02:45:00.000-08:00

231....

First of all, my late Tuesday Too:

1.) What's the longest time you've gone without posting an entry in your blog/journal? What was or is the reason behind your dry spell?

Oh, I have no idea. I think I went about three weeks or so because I got pissy about something.

2.) Are you "going over the river and through the woods" for thanksgiving, or is the gang coming to your place? Perhaps you have something to be particularly thankful for this year. What is it?

Nobody is coming to my place. I don't like having to come up with something to be thankful for because I'm a curmudgeonly bastard and I really have a hard time coming up with one. Like now. I guess I'll be thankful for the poor people that read my rants and screeds.

3.) All those bumper stickers that say, "I'd rather be...", what does yours say?

Employed.

Now that that's out of the way, a couple of things.

I think that the notion to check the trails of Saudi money to terror ties is a good one. I suspect, however, that Princess Haifa would not have given money to terrorists had she known they were terrorists.

I was listening to a poetry writer being interviewed on some show NPR carries on Sunday (which as I understand it is when their uber-liberal stuff that they contract out for airs) and I sure wish I knew who it was. She said that the potential war in Iraq "violates everything [she] ever learned about democracy". This led me to wonder what exactly she learned about democracy that was so different from what I learned about democracy.

I'm getting really pissed off about the whining on the left about the electoral college. Had the result gone the other way, with Bush winning the popular vote and Gore winning the electoral vote, these people I think would be awful damn smug. I think this shows their lack of morality -- if you wouldn't be upset that it could have screwed Bush, then you have no right to be upset that it did screw Gore. Be consistant.

I ran the van out of gas today. Damn, now that was a good time. It ran out of gas while I was on the way to the next gas station, (go figure) on the main drag running through this end of town. My brother and I pushed it a couple of blocks to the parking lot of an Ivar's (that's a popular local chowder house -- we don't have Long John Silver's up here because if they ever were here, old man Ivar Haglund ran 'em out of business). Since this made him late for work, we called a cab.

The cabbie was an interesting fellow, a Turk that had wanted to join the US Navy in '96 but was turned away for being too old. Really a bummer too, he seemed like a keen fellow. I told him that he could pursue that line of study -- if he was interested in that line of work as a civilian -- at the Seattle Central College Martime campus they have down there on the locks. Sure is better than driving a hack. He said that before me, he had made a total of seventy-five bucks for himself in the fifteen hours he had already worked that day.

My brother had mentioned to me that there is a disappearance in the common popular culture of anything having to do with the working class. He noticed it really by listening to eighties music such as the Stray Cats and Madhouse -- that these were really good examples of where the popular culture focused on the little guy. He has a point there, I think, and I have a much larger frame of reference to draw from in this regard. In my mind other examples of that era spring forth, such as Cyndi Lauper, Billy Joel (especially with "Uptown Girl") and Men at Work. He reckons that the focus has largely disappeared from the working class because in the urban centers of America, that class has largely become non-white. The rise of shows like Law & Order and (to a lesser extent) NYPD Blue kind of mirror this as the victims or criminals represented in these shows generally crept upscale with each new season.

I've got some ideas on what might be ailing the Democratic Party to some extent, but I'm going to gel my thoughts on this a bit before I post them.

2002-11-26T02:01:00.000-08:00

230. Miscellanea.

I have to commit this recipe down so I don't forget it. I made a new dish tonight, and I have no idea what the measurements of anything I put in it are, but it went something like this:

I started with three frozen boneless chicken breasts. I knew this would be a problem, so I opted for some stovetop skillet baking. I took my stainless steel skillet, poured some light olive oil in it. I spooned in something like three heaping teaspoons of minced garlic (I buy this by the one pound jar, love garlic) and then I tossed in a chicken boullion cube. This started to make a mess quick, so I poured in a cup (or so) of water right after I put in the hunk o' chicken -- all three breasts were still frozen together. This is when the stroke of genius hit -- I poured in some (no idea how much) yellow curry powder. I fryed this on real high -- in order to get past the frozen chicken. While this was going on under a lid, I started peeling three red potatoes. I sliced the potatoes very thin and tossed 'em in the skillet. I took half a large Mayan onion and sliced it and tossed it in the skillet too. I cooked all of this, making sure the chicken got to 180° for a minute or two before dropping the temp back to medium, for about an hour. I had to add a cup of water halfway through. I served this on a bed of pasta I cooked with another boullion cube. I seasoned the chicken liberally with red and black pepper. It was quite tasty.

2002-11-24T12:26:00.000-08:00

229. That's some blunder alright...

I might have to drop Jim Miller from my blogroll. He has written another post which contains something that seems supremely stupid. Granted, I did not hear this interview, so maybe I'm missing something, but if you can't call the Speaker of the House, which is a member of congress, a 'Congressman', then I sure would like to know why. After all, a 'Congressman' is traditionally a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, as is the Speaker of the House, if I recall correctly...

Update... I sent Jim an email on this (much, much nicer than what I wrote here, I'll admit) and he updated his post. I still don't get why there should be a distinction, however. It's a medieval lament -- like saying you can't call my never-been-married best friend by the title of 'Miss' because she has a doctorate.

2002-11-22T04:21:00.000-08:00

228. Damn, I'm Tired.

Just got done with a search mission. We didn't find the missing person. We did find an 18 year-old banging his 16 year-old girlfriend in the passenger seat of his rental car though. Too damn funny, more on this tomorrow sometime.

the full update... So there I was, in the middle of the Australian Outback with only a meat cleaver and a thimblefull of water...no wait, wrong story.

So last night, I responded to a page for a lost person. I went to the scene and helped set up shop. My mission last night was to shadow the duputy in charge, so wherever he went I went. He decided at one point that he needed to have a better look at a part of the search area. So we loaded up into his cruiser and set out. We went through the grounds of a school pretty thoroughly and we were almost ready to turn around when the deputy decided to check out a car that was in the parking lot at the back of the school. He shone his spotlight into the vehicle and what did we happen to spy but the back of the head of a guy face down in the fully reclined passenger seat. The back of his head moved into and out of view a couple of times and then he looked up at us and squinted at the light. He kept going though. He stopped when he saw the deputy getting out of the cruiser.

So the deputy goes and gets him out of the car (after the young man had located and redonned his trousers) and tells the object of the young man's affections to get dressed. He finds out that the young man is 18 and the young lady is 16. Sixteen is the legal age of consent in this state, but as she is a minor the deputy is obligated to take her home and inform her parents. He gets all their information, pulls the now fully-clothed girl out of the car and away from the young man to query her to confirm she's not actually a rape victim. He lets them get back in the car and then comes back to the cruiser to run the license plate. It comes back clean, and is owned by a major rental car company (I couldn't help but guffaw at this). So he calls the girl's parents.

The person that picked up the phone on the other end said that she was the girl's sister and that their parents were not home -- there had been an emergency at their grandmother's requiring the grandmother to go to the hospital in Everett, and the parents were there. The deputy acknowledged this and pressed 'end' on his cell phone. He tapped the cell phone antenna to his teeth, staring intently at the back of the girl's head as she sat in the car.

"Did you see that?" he asked. I confessed that I did not. As it turns out, that was the point. The cruiser was aimed at the center of their car, right off the passenger rear quarter. The girl's head hadn't moved an inch and was resting against the glass of the passenger-side window. Her hair was draped over her head in such a way that she could have been talking on a cell phone without betraying that to us, which is what the deputy figured she had done.

He went back to the car and told the young man that the young lady's family was undergoing a family emergency so it would be for the best if she went home. She tried to protest, but the deputy was having none of it. He instructed the young man to drive her home; we would follow. The young suitor asked if he was going to be required to stay around when they got there. The deputy responded in the negative, as since he was 18, he was free to go, and actually the only reason why the deputy wasn't transporting her was because there was no room in the cruiser (it was chock-full of search stuff).

The parents were very bleary-eyed when the deputy returned their daughter to them.

This incident opened my eyes to a couple of things, the most interesting of which is the role the car plays in the life of the average American youth. This was something I missed out on, as I wasn't eligible to get a license until I was 18, and by that point I had grown so accustomed to the Frankfurt transportation system, I felt I didn't need a car. This was the rule for most students in my school rather than the exception -- in my high school there were one thousand students and a total of three parking spaces for student-owned cars to park in. They were never full. When I was 18 and busy screwing my 16 year-old girlfriend, we had to be far more inventive as far as locations of assignations went.

The other thing is the cell-phone. Can you imagine the balls this girl had to lie to a cop like that? I'll bet you she's been busted before and has used that ploy successfully.

While we did not locate our missing person, he has been seen and positively identified in Seattle today, so that ended well as well.

2002-11-21T18:01:00.000-08:00

227 Spiffy cool.

Prospective cervical cancer vaccine covered here.

2002-11-21T01:38:00.000-08:00

226. "Lu Cat Food Company...How may I direct your call?"

One day when I was about seventeen I called my mother at work. Mom was paranoid about then, and she was worried that the government was listening to or taping her incoming phone calls (sounds wacko I know, but this kind of thing was pretty commonplace on our military bases in Cold War Germany) so she said she'd call me back.

So I hang up and wait. Phone rings.

"Joe's Bar and Grill! Howdy y'all, what ken I do fer ya?" This was not something I was given to do when I was a youngster, so I figured that would make it even funnier. It was so random of me.

"Was?!" was the response I got. Turned out it was a wrong number; some woman working at a financial services desk at a bank in Switzerland trying to dial a number for one of her clients -- also in Switzerland. She spoke enough English to communicate with me and we had a good laugh at what had happened. Damn bizarre tho.

2002-11-20T08:16:00.000-08:00

225. I hate it when that happens...

You know I had that very nice post in 223, and I completely didn't say what I wanted to say. The thing I was trying to convey was being 'anchored' to reality and mundanity all these years via these phone calls and emails to my best friend.

2002-11-20T01:36:00.000-08:00

224. This was going to be a rant.

Yesterday morning, the absentee ballot counting had the initiative to expand the monorail down by three votes. Count 'em: one, two, three. Today was the final day of counting, and with each day of absentee ballots since the election, the monorail's support had dwindled. I was extremely saddened by this, and was reminded of it when I went to Jim Miller's site and saw his dismissive post regarding the monorail.

So, for the last hour I have been getting my ducks lined up to put the rhetorical boot to the ass of the anti-monorailers. I got all my statistics to refute Jim's claim of cost-effectiveness all lined up and finally dropped over to the Times' website to check to see if they had an updated count. They did.

Screw you, Marge Simpson, we're getting a fucking monorail! Yes, it is going to be expensive to build. Yes, it's going to take time to have a real impact on the lives of the average commuter. I don't expect that it will ever reduce traffic density, but I suspect that it will not make matters worse.

I often talk here of my time in Frankfurt growing up. Granted, Frankfurt is a world away, in a socialist country, but there are a lot of striking similarities between there and here. Frankfurt is 650,000 people, with a greater metropolitan population of 3.1 million. Seattle is 540,000 people with a greater metropolitan population of 3.1 million. The population densities of the two cities are roughly analagous as well, with Frankfurt having 2,621 persons/sq. km. and Seattle having 2494 persons/sq. km. Traffic is somewhat similar as well, except I remember there being much more distinct rush hours in Frankfurt. Here in Seattle, the traffic starts at 5:30 AM and ends around 11 PM. I remember Frankfurt's streets being dead around 8PM, except downtown. But the absolute kicker is this: here is a picture of Frankfurt's current train system -- just the train system, not the buses.

This is Seattle's current train system.

Needless to say, you can get a bit further on Frankfurt's. In fact, Frankfurt's transportation system is so thorough, I was able to get most anywhere within the state of Hessen in a timely manner. When I turned legal to drive, I had absolutely no desire to get a driver's license. I was back in the States for a year before I bothered to get one, and even then, I got it only so I could move from Twentynine Palms to Camp Pendleton. The German state of Hessen is roughly the same size as King, Snohomish, Pierce, Kitsap and Thurston counties put together.

At some point in time we are simply going to need to have some sort of light-rail in place if we want this city to continue to remain viable, and it's not going to be cheaper if we wait. People aren't going to just up and flee Seattle anytime soon. It's good that we finally got our heads out of the sand about this, even if it was by the narrowest of margins.

2002-11-19T05:43:00.000-08:00

223.

I have been fighting for several hours on what to call this post. No luck.

I phoned my best friend the night before last from a payphone out on 15th. It was my second attempt; I had tried to call from a phone on Denny Way, but the mouthpiece was evidently broken. That avenue is a fairly busy one, three lanes in each direction, linking downtown Seattle --well, the tony Belltown neighborhood-- to Ballard and beyond that, Crown Hill. The phone itself was in a dilapidated red booth in the parking lot of a shuttered and abandoned Burger King. I suspect the lone car in the parking lot aside from my van was a homeless person, who at least had the shelter of a Chevrolet Caprice. While talking, a drunk girl -- she looked all of seventeen -- staggered by with her head down, concentrating on putting one foot in front of the other. When I drove home, I noticed in my rearview mirror a cop in a prowl car slowing down to pick her up as I passed her. She had no idea anything or anyone was there.

The whole experience is something that I used to go through on a regular basis. I've done the call the best friend thing from pay phones on three continents, always fighting traffic noise, or airport noise and watching the drunks go by. This of course, after going through the whole process of finding an empty phone that worked.

In Germany, I used to save up money -- I tried to get about one hundred Deutschemarks in five mark coins -- so I could call her. The phones could only hold so much in the kitty, so as it ran through a five mark piece and dropped it into the money box, I'd feed another in until I was out of coins. The kitty held 12 coins, I think. The phones had a digital display to tell you how much money you had left and would decrement the total by ten pfennigs as the alotted time for each ten pfennig block would click by, ker-klick, ker-klick, ker-klick, about as fast as you can read that aloud. It came out to about eight or ten bucks a minute, if I remember right.

After I enlisted, I was able to call her once from Parris Island. We were given the opportunity to make one phone call during boot camp. I seem to remember that the phones wouldn't let me call my folks in Frankfurt and my best friend wasn't home. I felt sorry for myself and extremely alone, even though I ought not to have. I was extremely jealous of the rest of my platoon who were able to talk to their friends and family. I was truly amazed when the drill instructors let me have a second opportunity at that phone call. I don't think that one got through either, but that wasn't so important as the fact that somebody understood.

In Twentynine Palms, finding a working and empty phone was the most difficult part. I would walk all over the base to try and find one. Eventually, I discovered a pay phone that was hardly ever used on the weekend, and that one worked well until they started to lock the fence that the phone was behind during non-duty hours. Calling my best friend was easier than calling home in Frankfurt, because invariably the phone would disconnect on an international call after the first six minutes.

Camp Pendleton had a different sort of thing. There, I was able to make use of a trailer that had a bunch of phones in it. I'd give my id and bankcard to the woman at the counter and she'd assign me a booth. After my phone call, she'd see how much time I'd used and deduct it from my bank account.

Japan was a bit different yet -- you purchased cards that you stuck in the phone. This was the first time I'd seen such a thing. Also, not all cards worked in all phones. You had to know whether you were dealing with the yellow-phone company, the green-phone company or the orange-phone company. No wonder cell phones have become so big there.

Since then, we've pretty much exclusively used the Internet to keep in touch, which is certainly easier. But it lacks the sheer quest involved that made communication such a cherished thing between us. I think I will always turn a little mushy every time I hear her say, "Hello?"...

2002-11-19T04:38:00.000-08:00

222. Tuesday Too.

Tuesday Too

1.) Chad has been writing/talking about alternative forms of government. What's your take on a "new government?"

A beneveolent monarchy with me as the ruler. Off with their heads! In all seriousness, I'd really not change anything (or much of anything) on the national level, but on the state level I either want the legislature set up like the national model or unicameral. Like I mentioned earlier, Washington state's Senate elects via the same districts that the state house does, which short-changes the smaller counties -- anything that isn't King, Pierce, Snohomish, Spokane or Clark.

2.) The last Harry Potter film ignited a "whirlwind of controversy." What's your opinion; is Harry Potter dangerous to children?

Snicker, ha, no. The evening news is more dangerous to kids than young Mr. Potter. Many religious texts are far more dangerous, I think.

3.) What do you think of this ("What would Jesus drive?")?

It's funny, when I clicked on that link, my gf had just awoke and was on her way to the bathroom. She instantly said he'd drive a Suburban. I think that's absolutely hilarious, considering she had no idea what the site was about.

On one hand, I really don't care too much about the whole issue. Any point I would take would be extremely hypocritical, since I drive something far 'worse' in this this regard than an SUV -- it's bigger, heavier and only has one passenger seat. Indeed, I enjoy knowing that my vehicle is bigger than any stock SUV, so I guess I'm a really bad man. On the other hand, I've got the six-cylinder!

As for me, I think he'd drive one of these or even better, one of these!

2002-11-19T02:11:00.000-08:00

221. Des asked me to take this quiz...

Congratulations, you're Seattle, the Emerald City.
What US city are you? Take the quiz by Girlwithagun.

There were two questions that for me could have been answered one of two ways, so I went back and changed them, and this is what I got.

Congratulations, you're New Orleans, the wild city.
What US city are you? Take the quiz by Girlwithagun.

I'm willing to bet someone is getting a good chuckle out of this...

2002-11-18T17:11:00.000-08:00

220.

I must be in tune with my powerful feminine side.

Or more men watch than Kinsley realizes.

2002-11-18T09:29:00.000-08:00

219. Work, damn you!

Gotta love blogspot.

2002-11-18T09:16:00.000-08:00

218. Disqualified.

If you go here, you will see Jim Miller's (and somewhat also Sam Nunn's) opinion on the original Gulf War vote and the presidency (or in Jim's case, any high office that makes foreign policy). To sum, "...opposing it should disqualify a person from the presidency, or, I would add, any other position making foreign policy".

Now, I supported that war. I support this one, if there's going to be one. But, Jim and Sam, that flat-out has to be one of the stupidest pieces of bullshit I have ever read. The notion that how a lawmaker voted, however detestable, should somehow automatically ultimately preclude them from making future foreign policy decisions is not a hallmark of American government, (thank-your-pocket-deity, if applicable). That is tantamount to saying that Sam Nunn should also not ever be president because he cannot seem to grasp the basic principles of your average high school government or civics class.

"It is bad enough to be wrong on such an easy question; it is even worse, once proved wrong, not to admit your error."

Indeed.

2002-11-17T08:32:00.000-08:00

217. Continuation of 213.

So back to my political rambling.

God, I feel so sorry for you people that actually take the time to read these posts.

So anyway, the conservatives have in recent years fed a drive to privatization of government, or rather a privatization of many government services. I suppose that this has been because the increasing costs of doing business have made government less and less productive per tax dollar spent, after adjustment for inflation. Or it's a desire to keep more money in their wallets. I've also heard that government should be run more like a business.

The problem is that government, run more like a business than government, can't be expected to accomplish much. The reason for this is what came and smacked me in the head -- there is no competition. So there is no compelling reason to think that a government run like a business will institute reform and serious self-assessment any more than a government run like a government. And isn't a monopoly supposed to be bad for these very reasons?

So, that's why I came up with my alternate form of government. Government via lowest bid to the people. But you know, I can't imagine it working well either. It's hard to believe that there would be any true competition between the two competing governments. More likely we would see some sort of collusion between the two, and that's just another form of a monopoly. In many respects it's a lot like what we have now.

In sum, government is not business, and should not be run like one. It should be run like government. In the cases of the universities (or other government agencies) the real remedies are to hold the people that run them accountable, not to attempt reform via knee-jerk tax cuts.

2002-11-17T00:09:00.000-08:00

216. SAR Pics

I be the one sitting on his ass in both pics. Michael B. Fearnehough is the fellow standing in the top pic.

2002-11-16T08:42:00.000-08:00

215. How Seattle Politics Really Work.

Check this story out. Now there's a mayor I'm not supporting in re-election.

I implore anyone who reads this site to not fly Alaska Airlines if they can at all avoid it. Alaska used to be a real good company from what I understand, but they really seem to have gone downhill. All you need to do is search for the term Alaska Airlines on the Seattle Times website to see why I'm suspicious of them.

2002-11-15T22:11:00.000-08:00

214. Note to self:

Line up your ducks before you run off your mouth.

Oh well, I may have been wrong(ish), but I'm at least honest about it!

A pyrrhic victory, at best.

2002-11-14T23:55:00.000-08:00

213. Something to prove that I'm still a Democrat.

I got to thinking about alternate forms of government, and I came up with one today. I have no idea what it would be called; technically it's still a representative democracy. But let me use my state as an example of how it would work.

Please note I am not trying to say this is a better way, just different.

Washington state elects their Senate and House from the same districts. Effectively, we currently are trebly-redundant with legislators -- two representatives and one senator are elected from each district. I have no idea why this is done this way. The national political model is obviously different, since the House of Representatives caters to larger states and the Senate to smaller ones. In Washington, this concept is squarely turned on it's head, as the major players politically are always King, Pierce, Snohomish, Spokane and Clark Counties -- basically anywhere smog checks on cars are done -- which are the respective counties for Seattle/Bellevue, Tacoma, Everett, Spokane and the Portland satellite city of Vancouver.

So, in my alternate reality form of government there would be two capitals: Oly and Spokane. Either go unicameral or elect one more senator from each district and make it bicameral -- because you're going to be needing four legislators from each district. Why? Becuase we're going to redundify the state government!

So let's say that you have all of the legislators that fill 'Position 1 seats' go to Olympia and all the 'Position 2' seats to Spokane. The nifty offshoot of this is that you have instantly redundant government in case of emergency. The other thing, the main thing, is that you now have truly competitive government. In addition to the ballot choices that people have to make regarding what legislators they want, they also now have to choose which government they want. The Spokane and Olympia governments would have to pitch a package to the people. I envision it something like this: "If you select the Spokanians, we will work at strengthening the I-90 corridor, more money for transportation, especially roads and we're going to do it for x amount of dollars!" The Olympians would say, "if you elect us, we will work at mass transit, the I-5 corridor and improving trade dialogue with China and the rest of the Far East for y amount of dollars!"

You're probably wondering how I came to get to this point of thinking. Or you're not, but I'm going to tell you anyway. You see, I laughed at a woman in the comments on her blog about something she said. It probably was not a nice thing to do. I mean, she seems like a nice enough lady, but I don't consider myself to be terribly politically correct and just as I feel that people's blogs are for them to rant/rave/whatever, if those people furnish commenting ability, I feel no compunction whatsoever in laughing at them if something they've said seems funny to me. Ultimately, at the end of the day, they have the power to ban me or delete my comments, but that's getting kind of sidetracked.

I've been chewing over a piece of something that Rachel's rant kind of enlightened for me. I had not really realized it before, and I've never heard anyone else talk about it, and it has something to do with the ideal conservative model for running government. Rachel was lamenting about how her tuition has risen steadily over the last four years, in addition to the tacking on of fees resulting in utlimately a product (her education) that was no better (at best) than it was four years ago. The reason I found this hilarious is that four years ago, Geo. W. Bush was her governor and was getting ready to run for president on what was largely an anti-tax platform. Remember what made him so qualified to do so? I did, and it was three billion dollars worth of state tax rollbacks under his leadership, the bulk of that being in 1999 with a $1.85 billion tax cut. Somehow, Rachel's ire didn't extend past the university that was raising all this money on the backs of students like Rachel. Quite clearly (at least to my eyes) the tax cut and Rachel's state university tuition are related. But that doesn't mean she isn't right.

The university (or any other state organization) is going to try to replace lost funding any way they can, which is what leads to user fees for government services. Recently, due to tax-cutting initiatives here in Washington state and the artificially enhanced energy crisis, the UW was going to try to tack on a fee for the use of electricity on campus. They were resoundingly and rightly told that this was tuition was for, but that doesn't obviate the need for the money. At the same time this was going on, our famous football coach, Mr. Rick Neuheisel, -- a man that hasn't seemed to find a recruiting violation he doesn't like -- was getting an extension on his million-dollar per year contract. Quite clearly then, tax cuts do not equal in practice what they aim to accomplish, which is government fiscal responsibility. If you can quantify it, the 'fiscal responsibility factor' out of necessity probably does rise, but as is evidenced by things like the Neuheisel contract does not reach a point of being 'responsible' by most any measure. Rather, it results in 'user fees', or worse yet, higher user fees.

Looking forward, it is easy to speculate that at some point the tax pendulum will swing the other way, and we will be genuinely spending too much of the people's money. I imagine however that most of these new user fees will not disappear when the pendulum goes all the way to the left, rather taxpayers wallets will likely be double-dipped.

More later. I'm off to bed.

2002-11-14T11:26:00.000-08:00

212. Too Cool.

I learned something new from Hestia today.

2002-11-14T06:18:00.000-08:00

211. Random News.

1. Microsoft also has video arcade games strewn throughout the hallways.

2. Good for King County. 'Initiative co-sponsor Tim Eyman was furious.
"The language of Initiative 776 is crystal clear," he said yesterday. "Clearly, the idea of representative government is lost on them."' And the last time you were elected to any office was exactly when, Mr. Lie-man?

2002-11-13T11:24:00.000-08:00

210. Utter Dweebery.

Reminder: When you choose to disagree with something someone says in the comments section of another person's blog, put your own name in the 'name' field of the comments box, not theirs. After all, stupidity such as this tends to deflate the power of your reason and intellect a bit.

Time to go back to bed.

2002-11-12T11:33:00.000-08:00

209. Interesting Poll Results...

Here.

Best quote: "Even a majority of Democrats in the survey say their party is too liberal."

Gee, ya think anyone that considers themselves to be the liberal elite (like Katha Pollitt or whatzername, the next House Minority Leader) are going to let this influence their attempts to take the party to the left?

The problem with the extremists (on either side) is that they are loud and can be difficult to ignore. They're still extremists, though.

2002-11-11T06:05:00.000-08:00

208. If, for some bizarre reason...

...any of my readers happen to be teenage girls (snicker-ha), I highly recommend you read this insightful piece by BeerMary. Simply a must read.

2002-11-11T05:40:00.000-08:00

207. Veteran's Day.

Today is the day we are supposed to reflect on the subject of the people that served in service of our country. Even though today is America's Veteran's Day, it couldn't hurt for people in other countries to thank a veteran if they happen to know one. I suspect most people do.

Yesterday was the USMC's birthday as well as the anniversary of the Fitzgerald sinking. I posted on the latter rather than the former because no-one else seemed to be covering it. Maybe they're saving their strength for the thirtieth anniversary, maybe they realize that this ship is just one of six thousand commercial vessels that have sunk in the five Great Lakes. Either way, last night, my brother and I toasted both the Corps and the Fitzgerald last night down at Hale's Ales.

Here are some of my favorite pieces of American military history:

Berlin Airlift: This was the USAF's finest hour, in my book.
Battle of Monte Cassino: A good illustration of the pitfalls of frustration.
Bataan Death March.
The First World War. The one we're starting to culturally forget.
Korean War Project. The other one we're starting to culturally forget.

And a good site for military families:

Sgt. Mom's.

2002-11-10T11:30:00.000-08:00

206. S.S. Edmund Fitzgerald

Today is the twenty-seventh anniversary of the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald. For eleven years, the Edmund Fitzgerald was the largest ship sailing on the Great Lakes. I had the opportunity to read the Marine Accident Report a few years ago, and a few things have always struck me about this incident. One of the estimations was that the ship went down in as little as ten seconds. Another interesting thing was that when the Arthur M. Anderson, the ship nearest the Edmund Fitzgerald's last known location, radioed for help there were three Norweigian ships that felt the waves were too harsh to attempt any rescue operations. Those ships play in the North Sea, which as I understand is regarded as some of the most treacherous water anywhere.

Quite a testament to the power of Lake Superior.

2002-11-09T10:13:00.000-08:00

205.

Arts & Letters Daily linked to a piece by Katha Pollitt of The Nation in their weekend edition where she takes Christopher Hitchens to task for leaving the staff of that magazine a few weeks ago. Much of it (IMO) is dull, bland and uninteresting stuff (unless, of course, you happen to be able to count either or both Hitchens and Pollitt as acquaintances, which I of course cannot) except for this paragraph here where she writes,

"As the polls, which show declining support for war, should suggest, many people oppose military action in Iraq who are not leftists. They are the troops at those big demonstrations--ordinary people from unions and high schools and churches, piling into buses with their handmade signs. Why? They're afraid of big casualties, American and Iraqi; they fear it will turn the whole region into a bloodbath; they fear Saddam Hussein will attack Israel, and Israel will strike back; they believe it will mean long-term occupation of Iraq, with terrible consequences for our own society; they fear it will backfire, increasing terrorism against the United States and fueling Islamic fundamentalism. They think it's a substitute for, and diversion from, the more difficult task of going after Al Qaeda. They oppose the whole concept of pre-emptive war, and see it as a violation of international law that will license other countries to do the same. They don't like the bellicose tone of the Bush Administration, distrust its constantly shifting rationales and apparent willingness to go it alone. They do not believe, as you apparently do, that the Administration cares about Iraqi democracy or the Kurds--who, by the way, are hardly united in welcoming the prospect of war."

As a bit of a mental excercise, I've decided to dissect this a bit.

a. Evidently the polls that show that a declining support for the war are not the same polls that people voted at a few days ago. Before September of last year, this country -- well, that segment of it who paid attention to such things -- was engaged in an often furious debate over substantive domestic issues such as drilling in ANWR, federal judgeships, the death penalty, gun control, the role of religion in schools, prescription drug coverage and the deregulated energy market of the westernmost states. These issues have neither been resolved nor have resolved themselves. There is no reason to believe that the GOP has come up with a winning silver bullet strategy on any of them. Aside from the failing economy and the war on terrorism, really nothing new has been presented in the grand national policy debate. This set of facts, coupled with the near-constant assertions from the left that war talk is one of the factors that decided the election would tend to belie this.

Let me put it another way. In the weeks before the election, we were treated to several nice protests across the country that assured us that this was what democracy looked like. Now that the Democrats have lost resoundingly, I have started seeing missives from the loudmouths on the left that they feel they are not represented in government. If I recall, there were more than a few remarks to that effect on that AngryDems site I linked to above.

I'm at a loss as to what to write here. Either a sarcastic, "this is what democracy looks like?" or a sarcastic, "this is what democracy looks like!". I guess you can take your pick. Let me remind you, I voted (almost) all Democratic this election, as I always do.

b. The anti-war left are not the only ones afraid of big casualties. The left cannot monopolize dread, no matter how much they seem to try.

c. If the murder of one million citizens by their own government does not already qualify as a regional bloodbath, then I am at a loss as to attempt to describe what does. As has been noted time and time again, this regional bloodbath is at least -- at the minimum -- partly our fault since we once supported Saddam.

d. If we take our ball and go home, does the Iraqi threat to Israel diminish? I cannot fathom this logic.

e. We blew up a car in Yemen this week. Has anyone heard of any Muslim leader denouncing this attack? Hmmm..., me either. So, I guess the question is, why should we fear more reprisals than we already have to deal with? We were not engaged against any Muslim enemies on any signifigant scale before September, 2001 -- save for the patrolling the no-fly zone -- but evidently we had something to worry about. Muslim terrorism is hardly a new thing for America, whether it's the assassination of Robert Kennedy or the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut or the attacks on September 11th. If we didn't attack Iraq, the terrorism wouldn't stop. If we stopped the sanctions against Iraq, the terrorism wouldn't stop. If we completely left the Middle East, the terrorism wouldn't stop. I therefore don't understand the logic of not invading Iraq to avoid further acts of terror. It simply does not wash.

f. The last I checked, the war on terrorism was called the 'War on Terrorism', not the war on al-Qaeda. Saddam Hussein encourages terrorism, funds terrorism and has his own terror camps -- and has had them as early as the Carter administration (according to Claire Sterling in her book The Terror Network, from 1981). Trying to limit the war on terrorism simply to al-Qaeda is a bit disingenuous, because that's not what it is, and it never has been that. Clearly any world leader who has the disposition and means to support terror on the scale that Saddam can needs to be handled somehow. Should we really just ignore him and leave him to his own devices?

g. Is this really a pre-emptive war? After eleven years of flouting a cease-fire? It really seems like a large lull that is overdue to expire. Put another way, if this potential action in Iraq is a pre-emptive war, then that means the sanctions have really meant nothing all these years -- because they were built upon UN resolutions that really meant nothing -- which was built on a cease-fire that really meant nothing. The cease-fire, if I remember right, was the end to a war in which we played a reactive, not a pre-emptive role.

Another way to look at it is to ask at what point after Desert Storm was Iraq suddenly in the clear? What's the statute of limitations on UN resolutions? The most interesting thing about this letter is the timely date it was posted -- the day before the US-brokered resolution unanimously passed the vote of the Security Council. Now, I cannot believe anyone expected Syria to vote in favor of it, but the timing of this letter suggests that Pollitt expected it to fail, thereby forcing the administration to go it (mostly) alone if it wanted to put its money where its mouth was. Now we have to wonder how a US-led war in Iraq can possibly be judged to be against international law -- although I have no doubt in my military mind that several people on the left in the coming days are going to suggest just that.

Which brings me to another point. I've been getting suspicious as I've been watching international politics over the last fourteen months that the left has been trying to bait the administration off on a Security Council red herring. I've started to suspect that the adamant demand that we take the case before the UN was made because no one -- not you, not me -- actually expected the council to approve it, much less without an abstention. It makes me wonder what roadblocks the left will attempt to throw in Bush's way -- if they even can at this point, being minority in both houses now.

h. And finally, the Kurds. You know what? This was the opportunity the Dems missed. If the Democrats had been able to realize that Bush had them between a rock and a hard place, they might have been able to co-opt the war issue and make big gains in these past elections, because it would have given them a message. I suspect that if they had played up the plight of the Kurds and other oppressed Iraqi peoples, they would have alienated their base and driven them on this issue closer to the center. They might have then been able to better deflect the Wellstone and McDermott fiascoes, since they would then have had a war message with which to build on. As it is now, if they continue to waffle on the war, then they are in danger of disaffecting the vast middle of the voter base and handing them to the Republicans or even Libertarians. It was a Democrat that committed us to the first world war, the second world war and Korea, all of which were to ostensibly save just peoples from oppression. It's not like they don't have history to build on in this regard.

2002-11-08T08:02:00.000-08:00

204. So who else...

was absolutely astounded by the Security Council today?

2002-11-07T15:27:00.000-08:00

203. Questions. Answers.

Ganked from Eden's So Anyway.

1. Are you an innie or an outie? Innie.
2. Have you ever worn bell-bottoms? Not to my knowledge. It could possibly have happened if my mother dressed me in some trendy hip baby clothes back in 1970, but seeing as my mother wasn't really the trendy, hip type, I rather doubt it.
3. Have you ever written a song? I made a tune with Acid once.
4. Can you make change for a dollar right now? No. I'm flat broke and have been for days.
5. Have you ever been in the opposite sex's public toilet? Yes. I used to have to help the lone woman in our platoon clean the women's head in our platoon offices, way back when I was in the Marine Corps. Up until this point, no one ever inspected the women's head because they were men. Since no one ever inspected it, and no one ever cleaned it, the first week I helped her get the place squared away it was rather nasty.
6. Have you ever smelled your own feet? I can often smell my own feet and make everyone else within ten yards smell my feet simply by removing my boots. Oddly, this is one of the reasons that compelled me to stop wearing socks.
7. Do you like ketchup on or beside your french fries? Besides.
8. Can you touch your tongue to your nose? No.
9. Have you ever been a boy/girl scout? Both. (Can't wait to see how many comments I get on this one.)
10. Have you ever broken a mirror? Yes.
11. Have you ever put your tongue on a frozen pole? Yes.
12. What is your biggest pet peeve? Stupidity, either in myself or others.
13. Do you slurp your drink after its gone? I paid for it, I'm getting all of it out of that glass.
14. Have you ever blown bubbles in your milk? Yes. For a time I blew bubbles in all my drinks. I was about six or so.
15. Would you rather eat a Big Mac or a Whopper? Big Mac.
16. Have you ever gone skinny-dipping? I was conned into this once, in a public hot tub with multiple other men and one single woman. It was her idea.
17. When you are at the grocery store, do you ask for paper or plastic? I tell the checker to use whichever is more convenient for them. It's catching on, I've started seeing other people return the same response.
18. True or False: You would rather eat steak than pizza. False. I can eat a lot more pizza than steak. Cheaper too.
19. Did you have a baby blanket? I believe I did, yes. My guess is that it was yellow.
20. Have you ever tried to cut your own hair? My junior year in high school I took sewing shears to my hair as an act of rebellion and to push people away. That sounds more antisocial than it was -- I was being hit upon heavily at the beginning of my junior year by a gaggle of the best-looking girls in school and I couldn't deal with it.
21. Have you ever sleepwalked? Once when I was about five, I did while I was feverish with strep. I urinated on a white chair, thinking I was at the toilet.
22. Have you ever had a birthday party at McDonalds? That was for rich kids.
23. Can you flip your eye-lids up? Possibly, but I've always been so disgusted by the practice that I've never tried.
24. Are you double jointed? I think most people are in some fashion, whether they know it or not.
25. If you could be any age, what age would you be? I really liked 18. I especially liked August, 1988.
26. Have you ever gotten gum stuck in your hair? No.
27. Have you ever thrown-up after a roller coaster ride? No.
28. What is your dream car? Ferrari 512 BB, the old Ferrari supercar from the eighties.
29. What is your favorite cartoon of all time? The Powerpuff Girls. Especially the one where they spoof the Beatles.
30. Would you go swimming in shallow waters where, one year earlier, a shark had attacked a child? I would not take that into consideration, no. That being said, I'm naturally not buoyant, so I don't swim anywhere there's a lifeguard, unless it's a public pool. It's embarrassing to be pulled out multiple times because they think I'm drowning, especially concerning I can outswim nine-tenths of all lifeguards I've ever met.
32. Have you ever eaten a dog biscuit?No.
33. If you were in a car sinking in a lake, which would you do first? Take off my seatbelt.
34. Have you ever ridden in an ambulance? Yes.
35. Can you pick something up with your toes? Yes. There's a decent possibility my toes are longer than your fingers.
36. How many remote controls do you have in your house? Cable box, mom's TV, gf's TV, gf's DVD player, PS2. If we have any more than that, they don't go to anything.
37. Have you ever fallen asleep in school? Yes.
38. How many times have you flown in an airplane in the last year? Zero.
39. How many foreign countries have you visited? I live within two hours of Canada, never been there. I lived within an hour of Mexico for four years, never went there either. I have been to Germany, France, Holland, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Somalia, Djibouti, and Egypt. Most of those were very briefly.
40. If you were out of shape, would you compete in a triathlon if you were somehow guaranteed to win a big, gaudy medal? What point is it if you were guaranteed winning?
41. Would you rather be rich and unhappy, or poor and happy? I'm happier poor. I still want to try and be rich and happy tho!
42. If you fell into quicksand, would you try to swim or try to float? Float.
43. There is no #43 Piffle.
44. Do you ask for directions when you are lost? More than occasionally, not quite often.
45. Have you ever had a Mexican jumping bean? No.
46. Are you more like Cinderella or Alice in Wonderland? I never read Alice.
47. Would you rather have an ant farm with no ants or a box of crayons with broken points? Crayons.
48. Do you prefer light or dark bread? Light.
49. Do you prefer scrambled or fried eggs? Scrambled eggs are fried.
50. Have you ever been in a car that ran out of gas? Several times. Twice in one day even.
51. Do you talk in your sleep? Every once in awhile.
52. Would you rather shovel snow or mow the lawn? Snow.
53. Would you rather be bitten by a poisonous snake or constricted by a python? I've been constricted by a python.
54. Have you ever played in the rain? Yes.
55. Which do you think is more dangerous: an angry bear or a hungry white shark? I'll say bear.
56. Would you climb a very high tree to save a kitten? Have you ever seen a cat skeleton in a tree? Have you ever seen a cat skeleton at the base of a tree? Me either.
57. Can you tell the difference between a crocodile and an alligator? No.
58. Do you drink Pepsi or Coke? Coke.
59. Whats your favorite number? 1.
60. If you were a car, would you be an SUV or a sports car? SUV.
61. Have you ever accidentally taken something from a hotel? No.
62. Would you blow your nose at the dinner table? I have in the past.
63. Have you ever slipped in the bathtub? Yep.
64. Do you use regular or deodorant soap? Deodorant.
65. Have you ever locked yourself out of the house? Yes.
66. Would you rather make your living as a singing cowboy or as one of the Simpsons voices? Simpson voice.
67. If you could invite any movie star to your home for dinner, who would it be?
68. Have you ever gotten a truck driver to honk his horn? Her horn. Yes.

69. Which would you rather live with: a huge nose or crossed eyes? A huge nose.

70. Would you hang out with someone your best friend didn't like? I believe I live with someone my best friend doesn't like.

71. Would you hang out with someone your best friend liked, but you didn't like? I've done this, but not with this current best friend.

72. Have you ever returned a gift? Never.

73. Would you give someone else a gift that had been given to you? Only if I had gotten good use of it myself. Some things should just be passed from one person to another.
74. If you could attend an Olympic Event, what would it be? Bobsled.
75. How many pairs of shoes do you own? Three.
76. If your grandmother gave you a gift that you already have, would you tell her? Possibly.
77. Do you sing in the car? Badly.
78. Would you rather jump into a Dumpster or into a vat of honey? Depends on what was in the dumpster.
79. What is your favorite breed of dog?I've become quite fond of the Basenji.
80. Would you donate money to feed starving animals in the winter? I do, regularly.
81. If you were a bicycle, would you be a stingray or a mountain bike? Moutain bike.
82. What is your least favorite fruit? As a general rule, I hate fruit.
83. What kind of fruit have you never had? As in the food? Can't think of any.
84. If you won a $5,000 shopping spree to any store, which store would you pick? Fred Meyer.
85. What brand sports apparel do you wear the most? Diadora.
86. Are/were you a good student? Hell no.
87. Among your friends, who could you arm wrestle and beat? Most of them.
88. If you had to choose, what branch of the military would you be in? You mean you don't have a choice now? ;) If I had been able to, I'd have joined NOAA.
89. Would you ever parachute out of a plane? If four engines went out on a two-engined plane, I'd consider it.
90. What do you think is your best feature? No idea.

91. If you were to win a Grammy, what kind of music would it be for? I don't think there's an electronica category.
92. What is your favorite season? Winter.
93. How many members do you have in your immediate family? I have two parents and one brother.
94. Which of the five senses is most important to you? Sight really is a miracle.
95. Would you be a more successful painter or singer? Painter.
96. There is no #96. I'll pick item C.
97. How many years will/did you end up going to college? Zero.
98. Have you ever had surgery? Yes, double hernia, face sewed back together after car accident, pinky repaired after I tried to cut it off with a folding knife.
99. Would you rather be a professional figure skater or professional football player? Skater.
100. What do you like to collect? Empty Diet Coke cans.

2002-11-06T09:35:00.000-08:00

202. An Interesting Quote...

"It is the soldier, not the reporter, who has given us the freedom of the
press. It is the soldier, not the poet, who has given us the freedom of
speech. It is the soldier, not the campus organizer, who gives us the
freedom to demonstrate. It is the soldier who salutes the flag, who serves
beneath the flag, and whose coffin is draped by the flag, who allows the
protester to burn the flag." ~Father Dennis Edward O'Brien, Sergeant, USMC

I came across this by cruising blogs that I'm not accustomed to visiting in this aftermath of the Democratic Party falling through last night's electoral floor.

This was part of a response in a series of emails between an Air Force Academy cadet and a professor in Chicago, which at one point was quite acrimonious.

2002-11-06T02:32:00.000-08:00

201. Don't Blame Me, I Voted For Ichiro!

Was that some election or what? So I wonder what's going to happen now that the country has lurched a bit to the right.

The Dems were really screwed going into yesterday, it's just that no one had any idea that they were screwed that badly. They really were caught between a rock and a hard place in this election, between the economy not being the issue with the voters that it ought to have been and their lack of foreign policy. I think the latter came about because they couldn't determine where their constituency was on the issue -- mostly because I seem to think the Dem constituency is sharply divided on it.

I was listening to NPR coverage of it most of the night, and I got a good chuckle from two callers they put through (not at the same time of course) -- one was arch-conservative and the other was arch-liberal. Sheila, the liberal, called in to complain that the Dems had no program. I suspect she meant platform, but hey, 'A' for effort. She loudly lamented that we now only had one party in this country.

Nah, bullshit. We do have two parties here, it's just that you couldn't bring yourself to agree with either of them, you twit. Maybe if you were not so busy trying to foist your untenable and unrealistic expectations of a liberal American utopia on the Dems, they would win more elections. The reasons people become disenfranchised and don't vote is because they are unreasonable and expect to find a candidate that exactly matches how they feel on an issue. American voters can get anything else tailored specifically to them, but they can't get exactly what they want in a candidate so they stick their lip out petulantly and don't vote.

The conservative caller was none other than Ben Stein, who repeatedly lamented that he could not fathom why the African-American vote overwhelmingly was Democratic. Ben, you may know quite a lot of trivia -- so much that your money on your show is seldom in danger -- but if you can't figure out that the last Republican politician to do anything substantial for Black America was Lincoln, well then on a scale of one to ten, I'd have to say you're about an idiot. Give or take.

At least one GOP official (in Georgia) credited part of their surge on the Democratic congressmen that went to Iraq. Go figure. Speaking of which, the last I looked, Baghdad Jimmy's neophyte, daft-looking and Republican challenger made off with 21% of the vote. That's quite amazing, I did not expect her to get out of single digits. I wrote in Ichiro Suzuki for this position, since I couldn't bring myself to vote for either of these knuckleheads and I never ever will cast a vote for a Green or Libertarian candidate.

It looks like the Monorail won, but so did I-776. I can't wait for the state to fall into the fucking ocean from too much traffic. All four Seattle City charter amendments passed, which I don't think is a good thing. The two incumbent judges on the state supreme court won re-election, which is bad and bad, respectively. I-790 won, but I don't think that this is going to be good for the taxpayers.

So, the state's going to hell, the country is going to hell (I'm dreading the rush we're going to get for conservative federal judge appointments), but we're finally going to extend the forty-year-old Monorail.

2002-11-05T05:16:00.000-08:00

200. Tuesday Too

Tuesday Too
1.) When was the last time you really had fun? What were you doing? Are you someone who can have fun alone?

I often have fun. Fun for me can be riding around in the van or walking around QFC debating politics with my brother. Playing video games is fun. SAR is fun, although it's guilt-inducing to admit you're having fun at the sometimes catastrophic expense of others. Fun can be easy to find, but on the other hand it can be elusive as well.

2.) Are you going to vote today, and do you know the major differences between the candidates? Does the balance in the senate and the house figure into your choice? Neither senator in Washington is up for election, so not there, and as I mentioned earlier, my representative is the morally malodorous Baghdad Jimmy McDermott, who owns the safest seat in the house. I am not going to vote for him today, and I hope to never have to again. I can surely see however, that it could be a real moral issue for me if his seat were not so secure.

3.) Is there something extraordinary going on that you've failed to notice?

Indubitably. I am observant, but not an oracle.

2002-11-05T02:37:00.000-08:00

199. A Public Service Announcement From My Girlfriend!

My gf ranted in another forum but wanted me to pass this all on to you so that you will not fall into the same trap.

"The Sick Things People Drink... (Or Who the FUCK comes up with this crap?!?)

Ok, I'm sick, we've established that.
I've got nyquil, I've got my holistic herbal teas et al.
So I go out, cruising the net looking for drink recipes.
Now what I had in mind was in the realm of toddies, or hot buttered rum, however, the only actual liquor I have sitting around, that lends itself to this sort of thing is brandy.

So armed with the knowledge of what I have available to me, I hit the net looking for some Hot Brandy toddies.
Let me tell you, I found a lot of great info, that I of course couldn't use, and some of the drink names out there, damn.

Fuzzy Asshole springs right to mind, a disgusting combination of hot, black coffee and hot peach schnapps.

What I finally found was a drink called a Hot Brandy Flip, a nice, simple toddy.

2 Ounces of Brandy
1 tsp simple syrup
1 egg

Combine ingredients in blender, then pour into a saucepan and heat.
Damn, that's so fucking easy! I thought to myself, and sure enough, it was.

The end result however is something that looks less than consumable...
An Irish coffee mug, full of what appears to be a semi liquid form, flamable custard.
Lovely.

Who the FUCK comes up with the shit? "

I'm the one who actually made it, and as I scrubbing the first abortive batch out of the pan, I couldn't help but wonder if this concoction wasn't the Flantasy Flan from Courage the Cowardly Dog.

Flantasy Flan!

Eat Flan-tasy Flan!

E a t F l a n t a s y F l a n! Flantasy Flan!

2002-11-04T11:16:00.000-08:00

198. Still More Things Simmering in My 'Crackpot'...

8. Tim Eyman is the devil, incarnate. How much you want to bet that despite being discovered to have been a fraud twice now, Tim Eyman's pet initiative, I-776, will pass.

For those of you that are not Washingtonians, Mr. Eyman is not an elected official. Were he that easy to get rid of! No, this man is Joe Average (or as average as you can be when you own a $400,000+ house and drive a Lexus) and he has taken it upon himself to send the message of our state's oppressive tax burden to Olympia. As he and his group of other self-serving, greedy fucks like to point out (with handy statistics from places like this) Washington State has the second-highest overall tax burden of any state in the union.

That's quite a statistic, isn't it?

What they neglect to mention is that if you just look at the state and local portion of those numbers, Washington's rank falls to 21. That means that the taxes that Eyman and his ilk are trying to cut are not what is causing us to be ranked second overall, those are clearly fedeal taxes. If you think about why that is, the answer should be obvious - individual federal taxes are tied to income and capital gains for the most part, and Washington doesn't have the former and can't tax the latter, as far as I know.

Further proof can be found on Forbes' list of the four hundred richest Americans. The only state with more capital represented on that list than Washington is California. California has roughly eight times Washington's population. The next state after Washington is New York, and the city itself has far more people than are in all of Washington state.

The net effect is that the tax reformers are shooting at the wrong targets. They're doing so largely as a result, I think, of getting handed a small number of large tax bills per year -- Washington tends to generate revenue from individuals from big-ticket purchases like houses and cars -- rather than have things like an income tax. There is not even an income tax on businesses in this state, which I was surprised to learn.

Now the anti-tax people are saying that local government is cutting services, such as road maintenance (always a problem in rainy environments), bus service, libraries, education, parks and recreation, etc., etc., out of spite to all the voters that voted for these initiatives. Somehow they have completely missed the point that a fair chunk of local munincipalities budgets are funded by statute -- in other words, there are large chunks of local budgets that you cannot underfund or someone (like the federal government) sues you.

It just pisses me off.

2002-11-03T05:27:00.000-08:00

197. Crackpot Chad, pt. 3

7. I may want Saddam to go, but George sucks too. There is a way to 'win' an anti-war argument these days. By 'win' I mean actually take a stance that faces moral reality, and not the fantasy land most people who blindly oppose American action in Iraq wish they could create. We need to be serious about Iraq. And by serious, I mean that if we do go to remove Saddam, we put in a government that works for it's people. We need to know beforehand what we are going to put in place, and we need to know that we're not building another Castro. In short, we need an Iraqi Karzai.

That being said, we need to not pull the bonehead stunts that we've pulled in Afghanistan. I'm not talking about the serious and too numerous bombing errors. I mean that we need to somehow come up with a national government that works and works in at least most of the country.

I guess what I'm getting to is the question of why are we arming warlords in Afghanistan? Is this really the right way to go about things? Didn't we learn something about this in Somalia?

So, even though I do support Saddam's ouster, I too have reservations. I really hope I'm just paranoid.

2002-11-02T02:20:00.000-08:00

196. Oh Happy Day! Oh What a Glorious and Beautiful Day!

I just sent this email off...

Thank you so much for bringing back Arts & Letters Daily! I understand you're now under the Chronicle of Higher Education and they must be thanked as well, but I'm not sure who there to send thanks to , so you guys get all the credit.

I've been an avid fan of aldaily since about three weeks after it went live and I was very upset to discover it was dormant. I just informed my brother of the news as well, and we are having a toast in your honor, as we did on 6 October.

It did not take long for me to miss your publication. Indeed, I must confess that I pilfered the list of links in your lefthand column and put them at the foot of my weblog so that in case aldaily was not able to return, such a handy reference would not be lost to the web community (by which I mostly mean myself).

I am going to go remove them now, as I promised to do if Arts & Letters Daily was resurrected.

Thank you ever so much!

Chad
tacoshop.blogspot.com

2002-11-01T04:56:00.000-08:00

195. Crackpot Interlude

When you first got on the Internet, what did you do? When I first got on, the only thing I could use was telnet and FTP. I had no real access to the web in 1995, and I spent hours online at work after everyone else had left.

If you have a masochistic desire to know what it is that I'm talking about, find the telnet client on your machine, it probably has one. In Windows, there is a client called telnet.exe. When you run it, there will be an option called Connect. Under the Connect menu there is a selection called Remote System -- select that. Port should be set to 'telnet' and Termtype to 'VT100'. Under hostname, use 'bbs.isca.uiowa.edu' and login as a Guest.

Tis a blast from the past for me. Maybe a few others as well...

2002-11-01T01:09:00.000-08:00

194. Crackpot Chad, cont'd

4. Music. Popular music went steadily downhill with the advent of grunge. I hate grunge. Since Cobain's death, music has done nothing but slowly improve, overall. The only thing that really is holding modern music back at this point is the predeliction for whiny rock.

5. Race relations. You reap what you sow. You know what's really stuck in my craw? Slavery reparations. Why? Because they aren't necessary. Or rather, they shouldn't have been. In my mind, that's effectively what affirmative action was about. Now with the continual reversal of affirmative action in a period that wasn't really quite ready for it, the drumbeat for reparations grows. Already some munincipalities (like Chicago) are caving in to the slavery reparations crowd. The sad thing is that it's just a panacea. If (when?) the reparations are paid out, nothing is going to come of it. There will be a small blip in the income of black people, but I'll wager that it's not going to really improve their lot any. Places like Seattle and Chicago and other screwy northern communities that you would expect should know better are still not going to be 'communities' in the truest sense because they will still be segregated. A big thank you goes out to the stupid fucking Libertarians (like Eugene Volokh, who claims to have helped written the initiative for this) who seem to think the playing field is equal for this travesty.

Let me put it another way. I regularly drop my brother off at school in the mornings. His entire collegiate career in this state has occurred since we repealed affirmative action in our universities. Can you guess how many African-American students I've seen in all the times since I've been on campus?

Fucking zero.

6. 'Baghdad Jimmy' McDermott. This man, (along with whatzisname Bonier of Michigan) are guilty of treason. At the least, they have done more against their country than John Walker Lindh ever did. Where's a damn firing squad when you really need one? The saddest thing is that his seat is the absolute safest in the House of Representatives. Gah!

More crackpot ideas later.

2002-10-31T12:01:00.000-08:00

193. Chad's Crackpot Ideas.

I've always felt a little out of step with society because of the things I believe in. Not a lot of people see the world quite in the terms that I do. Unlike over on So Anyway where I was not attempting to incite a riot with my opinions (read her Gen X vs. the world post) in my comment there, you can feel free to lob tomatoes, break store fronts and turn over cars on my site here.

1. Organized religion is the most evil scourge of this earth. I don't care if you're religious, that's fine. I don't need to be afflicted or infected, or whatever, with your religion, and really neither does anyone else. The only possible exceptions to this are religions that don't try to recruit new members through the use of "sinner, repent" scenarios.

2. War is never good. Often the alternative is worse. This is illustrated nicely in my next point.

3. Bomb Iraq now. Yesterday would be preferable. This is what I told my parents when they accused me of being a Bushie. There are three things we can do with Iraq now.

a. We can go to Baghdad and finish what we started. We are part of the problem when it comes to Saddam, after all we supported him and encouraged him (during the Carter administration) to attack Iran. We had the opportunity eleven years ago to fix this problem, but due to lack of stomach on the part of the rest of our coalition we were not able to finish the job. I've mentioned previously that I don't think there is going to be a war, and this is why. In 1991, we had a much larger military than we do today, and most of it was able to focus on Iraq. Today on the other hand, we have the smallest military since 1940, and we are operationally committed to three zones of conflict (Korea, Balkans, Afghanistan) than we were in 1991 (Korea). If we did not feel we had the wherewithal to remove Saddam on our own in 1991, I don't really see how we can do it now.

b. We can do nothing and keep the status quo. No-fly zones, sanctions, the works. The problem with this - from the left-wing peacenik perspective - is that we are slowly starving the people of Iraq. Ever see someone starve to death? I have. If you believe that the sanctions are causing the mass starvation that the uber-left was reporting a couple of years ago -- something like 500,000/year, but this has been refuted time and time again, I only mention that number because I continue to see it used -- than you cannot very well say that this is preferable to war. If those figures are true, even remotely, than the only difference between this and war is how the people die. This is the single reason why the anti-war argument fails to work, because in the end, the left is just as bloodthirsty as warmongers like me. One could even argue that it is moreso when you consider the amount of people that we fed in Afghanistan when we started operations there. I also remember the doom-and-gloom scenarios before we went to Afghanistan about how many people would die as a direct result of our military action and the actual number - including all the stupid mishaps we've made - is far less.

c. We can give up. Drop the sanctions, remove the troops from the region and just admit that we lost the war we thought we had won in 1991. I'm isolationist by nature, so this is actually an appealing solution in my eyes, but it is not terribly pragmatic. It also allows for Saddam to rebuild. I've seen someone suggest that we keep the sanctions in place but rebuild the infrastructure of the country. That idea is so horribly naive that it's stupid. Infrastructure is a key part of military logistics. Either rebuilding his infrastructure or allowing him to rebuild it gives him two of the four things he needs to wage a successful military campaign (the four things are logistics, materiel, personnel and communication - he would then only need to find materiel and personnel, and only one of those would be a problem) against his neighbors. It's not like this is a foreign thing to him -- especially seeing as one of our most liberal administrations fucking taught him how to do it -- and is even easier if he chooses to just finance and abet terrorism, which is also something not alien to him.

I've seen many talking heads -- like my traitorous congressman, the 'honorable' Mr. McDermott ask exactly what threat Saddam poses to the US. This is especially dumb. It's not like Saddam doesn't have contacts to the bulk of the Palestinian terror network, after all those checks he's writing have to get to the families of the intifada somehow. And it's not like Palestinian terrorists have not executed actions on American soil -- they've been doing it since 1968, albeit infrequently. And it's not a real disputed fact that he's trying to obtain a nuke. Put the three things together, and that's the obvious scenario. The less obvious scenario is the destabilization of the oil market, which could be bad, but not as bad as people would like you to think. Still, that's just two fairly obvious strategies I would expect Saddam to take if he had the means and opportunity.

I'll write more later.

2002-10-30T05:30:00.000-08:00

192. Blah.

I cut off all my hair, and naturally I got sick as a result. I've not been posting recently for various reasons, but mainly out of depression. I'm also afraid of pissing people off, since I seem to be increasingly in the minority with regards to my foreign policy perspective. Both of my parents (in Korea) yelled at me over the phone for supporting intervention in Iraq. The world has gone nuts.

The saddest part of that was that their biggest reason for not supporting any intervention in Iraq is that "Bush is a flaming asshole". That's a direct quote of my mother, by the way. Fine. He is. So what?

I'm absolutely loving the slogans the anti-war left have been using here in Seattle. By far my favorite is "war is terrorism". Somehow, they've managed to rationalize that war equals terrorism but the reverse isn't true. Here's a hint guys: if war is terrorism, then terrorism is war, and you've just justified the military action you were against this time last year. Fucking duh.

Another good one is "this is what democracy looks like". No, that's what a loud, vocal, and morally self-centered minority looks like.

So, I'm depressed and pissed off and probably won't be posting much in the next few weeks.

Bomb Iraq now.

2002-10-23T09:36:00.000-07:00

191. Tuesday Too, on Wednesday

Tuesday Too # 34
1.) What would you like the world to spend research money on (inner space, outer space, stem cell, you name it research), and why do you give it top priority?

Don't know, don't care. Honestly, I delayed my TT answers for a day so I could ponder this, and I came up with nothing. Maybe on why my cat is so whiny.

2.) Where's the beef, Carmine Miranda, or what's bugging you lately?

Craven anti-war protesters, the fact that I really have no choice (a daft-looking Republican or a Libertarian that perennially runs for every elected office) to vote for running against my traitor of a congressman, Jim McDermott, and that I-776 will likely pass. And that the I-776 people have blatantly cooked facts to support their cause.

3.) Elliott would like to know, do you type without looking at the keyboard; in other words, are you a hunt and peek (in his case that would be hunt and claw), or a "true typist?" I'm somewhere in the middle, but have almost graduated to 'true typist' status.

2002-10-22T00:41:00.000-07:00

190. Fifty Questions, via Desiree

1. Your name spelled backwards. 'dahC'. Or 'eman ruoY', take your pick.
2. Where were your parents born? Mom in Superior, Wisconsin; Dad in Eau Claire, Wisconsin.
3. What is the last thing you downloaded onto your computer? The beta for Earth and Beyond.
4. What's your favorite restaurant? Wing Dome.
5. Last time you swam in a pool? 1996.
6. Have you ever been in a school play? Yep. I graduated high school with honors in drama, if you can believe that.
7. How many kids do you want? Zero.
8. Type of music you dislike most? Gangster rap.
9. Are you registered to vote? Yes.
10. Do you have cable?Yes.
11. Have you ever ridden on a moped? Nope.
12. Ever prank call anybody? Nope.
13. Ever get a parking ticket? I am the King of Parking Tickets.
14. Would you go bungee jumping or sky diving? I used to tell people that I would consider jumping from a two-engine plane if four engines had gone out. You can guess my thoughts on bungee jumping.
15. Furthest place you ever traveled. From where? I've been as far east as Kuwait and as far west as Okinawa.
16. Do you have a garden? A dead one.
17. What's your favorite comic strip? Peanuts. Snoopy is God.
18. Do you really know all the words to your national anthem? Yep. Since I was seven.
19. Bath or Shower, morning or night? Yes.
20. Best movie you've seen in the past month? That would be Spirited Away, the only movie I've seen in the last month.
21. Favorite pizza topping? I can live with most anything not fungus or fruit.
22. Chips or popcorn? Popcorn.
23. What color lipstick do you usually wear? I haven't worn lipstick since that stuff in question 6.
24. Have you ever smoked peanut shells? What the hell are you people thinking? That's like shooting peanut butter.
25. Have you ever been in a beauty pageant? No, but I was once nominated for Marine of the Quarter which is sort of the same thing.
26. Orange Juice or apple? Orange.
27. Who was the last person you went out to dinner with and where did you dine? My brother, Gorditos.
28. Favorite type chocolate bar? Ritter Sport Vollmilch.
29. When was the last time you voted at the polls? Two elections ago, whenever that was. I missed this last primary round.
30. Last time you ate a homegrown tomato? Blech.
31. Have you ever won a trophy? Yep. Playing soccer (yes, soccer) in the service.
32. Are you a good cook? I am a phenomenal cook.
33. Do you know how to pump your own gas. I live in Washington, not Oregon.
34. Ever order an article from an infomercial? Nope.
35. Sprite or 7-up? Sprite.
36. Have you ever had to wear a uniform to work? Yes, I was in the military. I even had my name on my shirt.
37. Last thing you bought at a pharmacy? Alka-Seltzer Plus Cold Formula
38. Ever throw up in public? If 'public' includes immediate family members, yes.
39. Would you prefer being a millionaire or find true love? I'm done being a romantic. Give me the money.
40. Do you believe in love at first sight? Yes. But give me the money anyway.
41. Ever call a 1-900 number? No.
42. Can ex's be friends? Some, yes. Many, no.
43. Who was the last person you visited in a Hospital? My girlfriend's stepdad.
44. Did you have a lot of hair when you were a baby Um...as opposed to what or when?
45. What message is on your answering machine? Hi! You probably know what to do right now, and if you don't, you should probably just hang up.
46. What's your all time favorite Saturday Night Live Character? If we're talking performer, that would be Chevy Chase. If we're talking recurring character, that would about have to be Mr. Robinson.
47. What was the name of your first pet? We had a lab when I was two, I think he was called 'Blackie'.
48. What is in your purse? Um, no.
49. Favorite thing to do before bedtime? You really don't want to know that.
50. What is one thing you are grateful for today? Happy kitties.

2002-10-18T02:33:00.000-07:00

189. Truth Hates Delay.

I have added several links at the bottom of my page here, where my blogroll used to be. I lifted them directly from the Google archive page of Arts and Letters Daily, which until it's demise on the sixth, was the best e-zine ever. I started following aldaily almost immediately after it's launch, several years ago. Over time, the creator of the site sold to the publishing house that ran Lingua Franca and they declared bankruptcy earlier this year.

I used these links often, and I missed having them within easy reach at aldaily, so I've placed most of them here for all of our continued enjoyment. If a future owner of aldaily.com restarts the great service that it has been in the past, I will likely remove them.

2002-10-18T02:05:00.000-07:00

188. ...

Remember my bit about asbestos and Scooby-Doo? It turns out that back in the day, it was popular for theatres (as opposed to cinemas) advertised the use of asbestos in their halls as a safety precaution. Essentially, that big curtain (or one behind it) that raises before every performance is called a fire curtain. Deep in the recesses of my brain I knew that, and it only clicked into place when I found out that these fire curtains used to be made of asbestos. If a fire happened onstage, the curtain could be immediately dropped to protect the audience while they evacuated.

2002-10-15T23:46:00.000-07:00

187. Tuesday Too.

1.) I know we've been here before, but perhaps you got a different one now. What's your "must see" movie, and why should I see it?

Well, I know you've now seen The Third Man since you mentioned it to me at some point. I guess a must see movie would be Network if you've not seen that one.

2.) What have you been procrastinating on, that you've just got to do, or finish up?

Life, in general or in part.

3.) Are you wondering, what in the world is happening? Are you afraid to pump gas? Do you think the US media has focused too much on the Maryland sniper? Why, or why not?

No. No. I think that the people in Australia do, as they are dealing with their own terror tragedy and they aren't getting the reciprocity in our press that theirs gave September 11th. Wouldn't it be interesting if the shooter terrorizing the middle eastern seaboard of the US is of Middle Eastern decent, using our famously lax gun laws against us? I stopped being afraid of terrorism in Frankfurt. They're either going to get you, or they aren't. There are things you can do to minimize the risks you face on a daily basis, but they can only go so far if you're going to continue operating in modern society. The problem with terrorism of any stripe, is that Joe Average has a rough time rationalizing the death of their loved one when ultimately someone had something to do with it, whether it be pull the trigger of an assault rifle, fly a plane into a building, or (for the self-defeating anti-war crowd that makes a big deal of equating war with terrorism) drops a bomb from eight miles high. It seems that, in the public eye at least, it is easier to deal with the death of a loved one if they died climbing Mt. Rainier or of cancer or by falling off a boat into the frigid waters of Puget Sound. The key is to treat all these events the same. You can control an earthquake as much as you can a crazy man with a rifle from eight hundred meters.

2002-10-09T15:01:00.000-07:00

186. Final Serenity, Slightly Melodramatic.

Somewhere, there is a river that snakes through a valley between two far-off mountain ranges. The river runs through the woods and through lush green fields and through a number of towns and small cities. Somewhere along the way is a road that runs along the river. Even today, it is a quiet and serene road with a number of houses and tree nurseries that spring up here and there along the opposite side from the river.

At this point in the river, the fishermen come. They park their trucks along the side of the road and carry their rods, tackle and beer down to the river's edge and spend the day alone.

At some point along this road, at a part that isn't houses, nurseries, fishermen or long-closed and covered landfill -- a sign of the remoteness, despite being an easy drive for four million people -- is a patch of woods with a creek running through it. In that patch of woods are a group of people -- young men mostly -- searching. They have dogs and trackers and rakes, and they're all trying to find the elusive signs of what they seek, which has been lost to the world for nigh on twenty years.

At the landfill itself are a group of vehicles -- mostly the ones the searchers came in. There are other vehicles too. There are buses and recreational vehicles (that will never be used for recreation) and trucks with trailers and people with radios and there is one very quiet man in the middle of all this organizational chaos. He is, by the nature of what he does, why everyone else is there.

Everyone calls him 'Captain', but he seems to hate that. He'd rather be called by his given name, but he does not protest too much, as such are the vagaries of rank, promotion and a life given to serving the public. He's been searching for the things the people in the woods are now looking for for two decades, and the wear is apparent. His eyes are bright and sharp, but they appear haunted. He is slightly bowed. And he is unsurprised by anything.

Those people in the woods still search, many -- most of them whose mothers are contemporaries of the women they search the woods for. The people living near there have seen this before, if they've lived there for some time. Many of them are quieted and rattled by it, I'm sure. The fishermen fish. And the man still waits.

2002-09-28T01:49:00.000-07:00

185. Art!

First, I must apologize to Desiree. The piece I wrote in 184, especially the first line, when I reread it seems to come off more haughty than I wanted. I meant the first line of my post to be more of a statement of fact than say, a shot across an intellectual broadside. I probably should have edited it rather than apologize, but I'm inherently lazy.

I don't know if anyone took it that way, especially Desiree, but I thought it worth clarification.

It's a good defense, Desiree, and as we are two individuals equipped with emotions, intellect and opinion, I can fully appreciate it. While I cannot agree with it, it does make sense to me and that's an interesting thing to admit about any argument.

Later on in the dictionary.com entry for art, they quote the Princeton University WordNet definition as being 'the products of human creativity' which is about where I put my definition for art, hence the dispute. The reason I choose the more broad definition is because the more narrow aesthetic and beauty definition would (potentially) exclude much of what has been in the public consciousness for years as 'art'. Examples of this could/would include much of Dali and Picasso's bodies of work, as well as scores of Warhol pieces. A reasonable case could be made against Hammering Man or the architecture of the EMP. Assuredly, under the narrow definition, the Fremont Troll would not be considered art, as I cannot see how it can be considered either 'aesthetically pleasing' or 'fitting', or 'beautiful'.

Many plays would not be considered to be art. A good example of this could be The Vagina Monologues. Many books would (I would think) no longer be art, such as The Silence of the Lambs.

But then I can recognize that I may be viewed as a weirdo on the subject. After all, I think this is art too. There are plenty of people that disagree with me there too!

But thanks for bringing it to my attention, Des, I have enjoyed and continue to enjoy this discussion of our differences. And again, if I came off as haughty or mean in my last post, I am truly sorry for it.

2002-09-26T11:05:00.000-07:00

184. Art?

Desiree doesn't consider this to be art. It's something we've agreed to disagree on, as I think it's a fabulous piece.

I would probably agree that Rockefeller Center may not have been the best venue to show it in, however. I worked as a temp for two different offices within King County. One office was that of the Public Health Epidemiology office and the other was the office that performs land management duties. These two climates could not have been further apart.

The epidemiology office was in downtown Seattle, in a funky building called the Prefontaine, one of the oldest structures in Seattle (which comparatively speaking really isn't saying much since Seattle only dates from the late 19th century). The land management office was in far more staid and conservative Bellevue. While I was at land management, they moved their office to a nifty spiffy new building in Renton. The place was gorgeous.

King County has a huge collection of art. The second floor lobby of this new building received this huge floor-to-ceiling rather abstract painting of the Hindi creation myth, Vishnu, some other deity, milk sea and all that. A couple of people found the painting to be offensive because the deities were not clothed but like I said, it was abstract so it wasn't really so that you could tell. They covered the painting and tried to get whoever was in charge of such things to replace it with something else. They were refused.

So they called the media. You can pretty much figure out the rest.

Shortly thereafter, the city and county wound up owning a skyscraper, almost quite by accident. So when someone had the bright idea that they should just move as much local government into it as they could in order to save money, Epidemiology got new digs on the eighth floor of that building. I laughed my ass off the first time I came to visit my old friends in their new offices and saw that painting hanging there. I told my former boss about the controversy that work had caused in Renton and she looked at me like I was nuts.

But then, Epidemiology is completely staffed by doctors. The only people that did not hold a doctorate in that office when I worked there were the three admins and me. I was the only person in the section with no college degree whatsoever.

I think that statue is somewhat like that. I don't think Des is like the morons I worked with at land management, but I do think it is art, and some art has better places to be shown than others. I really feel for the guy that made the statue, as it must have really filled him with conflicting emotions. I think that were it me, I would be having problems with sorrow, pride and the guilt for allowing myself to feel pride at having created such a sad piece. If I was the sculptor, the controversy it's now enjoying would probably wear on me very quickly and cause me to flipflop between anger and would-be repentance. I wouldn't be surprised if in a few years we hear that the guy killed himself.

There are certainly other statues that evoke such emotion.

When I was in the service, my unit instituted lessons on military history. The class I gave was so somber and heavy, it pretty much killed the whole program. I gave it on the four battles of Monte Cassino.

I'm not going to bore you with details, but it took the allies six months to force the Germans from the area around the abbey at Monte Cassino. Things were muddled, and mistakes were made, and the USAAC even bombed the abbey because we thought the Germans were using it as a fortification and/or observation post (which they may have been, I've never seen a definative answer either way).

A lot of people died.

There are now cemeteries all over that part of Italy -- for the allies mostly. The allied cemeteries all have lofty proclamations etched somewhere within them about the liberation of Italy and the soldiers buried there and of valor and honor and duty and whatnot. The German cemetery does not of course have any of these things because those things are not for the losers of war. The only inscription is that 20,057 soldiers lie in the ground there. There is however, a statue of two parents, grieving.

Although the two statues are vastly different in nature, when I saw the picture of the one in New York, I was immediately reminded of the one in Cassino because the emotions it evokes are so similar in their power.

2002-09-24T07:11:00.000-07:00

183. Scooby-Doo and Asbestos.

You're quite likely wondering what those two things have to do with each other. I am too.

The television in my house is always turned to the Cartoon Network. Last night I was watching a Scooby-Doo show from 1972 where the guest star was Jerry Reed. I remember watching this as a youth and a question I had then about something I saw in the cartoon popped into my head last night when I watched it again.

The show is set in a Nashville music house that's going to be foreclosed on. Jerry Reed is giving a performance to save the theater. The bad guys don't want this to happen, kidnap Reed, the Mystery Machine arrives on the scene with kids and dog, hilarity ensues. Reed gives concert, saves venerable venue. Did you get all that?

So my question is --- why is the word 'ASBESTOS' written in a lovely curly-que script over the theater's proscenium arch?

I suspect I know the answer. Let's see if anyone can give me a better one.

2002-09-14T04:09:00.000-07:00

182. And Beyond.

I was going to write a piece about my view of people's views on the so-called impending war with Iraq (I'm more inclined to think that we're watching a huge political game of Chicken, so far I've not seen much to dissuade that opinion, although, like any of my predictions, I could be wrong), but I have to tell you that I'm getting a little sick of running my thick head into the same wall over and over and over and over and...

My brother says that by trying to assert a full American perspective into the debate that I'm doing a public service, but I think I just like to argue.

Speaking of my brother and arguing, you'll never guess what we did yesterday. We went to a sports store and had a major and very vocal blow-up in front of the shoe display. The topic was North Korea, and what's going to happen to it after Kim Jong-Il kicks the bucket. So you see, I don't just do it to people online here...

Lately however, instead of thinking about world problems I've been very escapist and playing a game in beta called Earth and Beyond. I really enjoy it and would recommend that those of you that are into such things, like Aurel, take a look at it.

2002-09-11T04:08:00.000-07:00

181. Have a Happy and Safe 'Holy Fucking Shit' Day.

Tuesday Too # 29
1.) Today in Maryland, and in 11 other states in this country we are having primary elections. Do you participate in the election process at the local level? Do you feel your vote counts? Did your feelings on this change after the last US presidential election?

Yes. Yes. No.

2.) On the eve of September 11th, is the United States in danger of losing her civil liberties? Is there some right you would refuse to give up even though it might present a security risk? Why is it so important?

I may not be the right guy to ask this question of.

Civil liberties weren't exactly something I enjoyed as an American until I got out of the military when I was twenty-six. So for twenty-six years I put up with the possibility someone -- or several someones -- was listening to every word I said, everywhere I went. I put up with restrictions on places I could go, people I could see and things I could do.

For instance, for most of my life if I had wanted to go to Berlin -- West Berlin, when it mattered -- I needed orders from my father's command. And they were something I could never get because my father had a high clearance. When they finally relaxed that regulation -- allowing dependents to travel, it did not mean that the sponsor (DoD-speak for the servicemember that the family in question belonged to) could, unless the military needed him in Berlin. Even after the wall fell, we still needed orders to go to Berlin.

You've probably all seen movies (like The Third Man) where people have to have papers on them at all times and can be hasseled for them at random, anytime, anywhere. Very probably you have never needed to be subjected to it, as I have.

In 1986, to get to my high school from the personnel gate on Miquelallee I had to go through an identification check and bag search at the gate, another ID check at the second street corner, and another ID check and bag search to get on school grounds, and that was all within about a city block of distance. To get to the other side of base and out the gate there (distance of about four blocks), I had to pass through four more security checkpoints. The police dogs in my high school were not searching for drugs, at least not all the time. Or even most of the time after we bombed Libya.

Even now, a decade after the Cold War, the things like this continue. My parents, living in Seoul and subject to the news (unless they get it off of the Net) that the government controls, had little idea what was going on in France with Le Pen and no coverage whatsoever on the murder of Pim Fortuyn in Holland.

I really think that the concern for our civil liberties, while on one hand justified, really borders on whining right now. We don't have a draft. We don't have rationing. We don't have shortages, even of oil. Remember what our countrymen had to go through in World War II, not only for the war effort, but to spread what we had around to our allies who were not in a position to sustain themselves in wartime. There is none of that now, and other than the occasional paranoid nutcase with too much time on his hands, too much pot lying around the house and a well-thumbed copy of 1984 to start rumors on the net such as "don't drink Coke products after Sept. 5th" and "don't forget to take your driver's license with you on the 11th so that you don't get arrested by the random police checkpoints that are going to be everywhere."

I guess what I'm trying to say is that every day there are Americans that have given up many of their civil liberties to protect the civil liberty that we worry about losing. How bizarre is that?

3.) Do you have a local issue you'd like to gripe/rant about? Go ahead spit it out?

My favorite one is local taxation. Washingtonians think that they are horribly taxed, but in reality the taxes are horribly applied. I often hear how we have the fifth-highest statewide tax burden in the country, when in reality we're twenty-first. When you look at it by tax burden per capita, we're twenty-sixth. The problem is that as citizens we have two or three really huge tax bills that account for the bulk of our taxes and therefore it is a lot less transparent than in other states.

In sum, I like elections, your civil liberites aren't in as in danger as you might think, and I'm not taxed enough.

2002-09-08T03:46:00.000-07:00

180. Tired.

My gf's birthday party was today at her mother's house. Her best friend came down and celebrated since her birthday is soon too. It was very nice seeing them again and my gf's best friend's husband (catch all that?) was on his best behavior. It was the first time I've spent time with the guy that I've not wanted to kill him. Or even hurt him.

The sad thing is that it's really not his fault. I'm just an non-understanding bastard in this case, and the realization of this should help me to be more tolerant, but no.

Tolerance is something to consider. There may be something to blog about there.

Anyway, I helped make dinner. I made tequila lime chicken and avgolemono soup. I got raves for both, but I think they both sucked. The soup was kind of doomed from the get-go it seemed. I managed to salvage it with salt and pepper though.

2002-09-03T06:41:00.000-07:00

179. Sigh.

I hate commenting systems. I had this huge comment for Aurel, Gert, Paul and Leno in my previous post and HaloScan ate it. The ultra-condensed version follows:

Aurel: good points. Thanks for the welcome back.

Gert: I was a bit overharsh. I'm not sure I should apologize, but I might. Your blogroll is yours, I figured you dropped me because of my feeling-sorry-for-myself-inspired hiatus. I figured that I really pissed you off tho, so I don't expect to be re-added (hence the Elite Banned -- I need a button for this, even if I am still welcome over there, it's just fitting).

Paul: Excellent point about WW II. Especially since I can use it to bolster my argument.

Leno: Because the world doesn't like it doesn't make it wrong. I don't think the Muslim world is as united as they would like people to think. If there is a war (and frankly I think there won't be) we will have the tacit support of probably at least four Muslim countries, two of them democratic(ish).

And now, without delay, here is the weirdest Twosday Tue yet.

Tuesday Too # 28
1.) What, is it Tuesday again?

Actually, it's also Wednesday.

Okay then, what is the day most likely to be if yesterday was Monday?

Tuesday. Also the day before the day before tomorrow.

2.) Now here's a real question for you. What is the most important/significant thing that you have on your plate today? And no I don't mean spinach or potatoes; I mean nuts and bolts.

I might continue cleaning the basement. I might lay in bed and be sick since I watched a ballgame in the rain last night. We'll see.

3.) Ask me anything you'd like to know, and I just might tell you, or I might not.

jf, are you more or less insane than me? This has bothered me for quite some time.

4.) Is the Tuesday Too person losing her mind?
Losing? No.

5.) Is this the end of the Tuesday Too?
If it is, I'll play Doors music for a memoriam. I hope it's not, however. Not sure where my Doors CD got off to.

In a couple of days when I have access to a computer again, I'll retype that comment here in my blog. Toodles!

2002-09-01T09:53:00.000-07:00

178. Gert's (and Europe's) Insipid Whining

This is a response to this post at Gert's. She has links to where the discussion started.

So, I went and took a day to think about this a bit. I find this argument to be mostly lacking in any real substance.

Let's start here: "The answer is simple. Saddam is a temporary phenomenon (tyrannies like his rarely survive the tyrant's death)"

Really? Name one. When has this ever worked? Find me a single solitary regime that did not survive a dictator's death if the dictator's death was not caused by some foreign or domestic intervention. I cannot think of one, myself. Should you come up with one, I can come up with (at least) one that didn't. The odds of the regime all of a sudden collapsing on it's own if Saddam dies of natural causes is iffy, at best. The whole point of a regime is for it to survive the death of it's leader if at all possible.

Second, regarding my use of language: I thought about it for a bit, and I don't see how your complaint here has merit, either. I don't think I used either 'insipid' or 'whining' wrong in my missive, as these complaints that we hear about America are hardly new, they weren't thought through the first time they were aired, and they aren't being thought through now. The piece by the New Statesman only confirms what I said when I said that Europe's whole goal is to accomplish nothing. That's hardly a stretch, however, because that's the default European foreign policy goal. Put another way, it's news when a world leader outside of Europe decides to do nothing about a problem, but in Europe it is simply business as usual. In place of action, it really seems that Europe's leaders (allegedly representative of it's population) would rather just complain loudly. This is old news; it is dull and trite, hence it is insipid. Believe you me, it was much nicer than what I really wanted to say about Europe (which is that you're a bunch of craven hypocrites who won't really stick up for what they believe in).

Further, I have to summarily reject this complaint from you on the basis that if there's anyone in blogland that knows how to cut someone with language, it is you. Go see your early July entry where you referred to the revolutionaries that broke from England and founded the US as 'terrorists' for an excellent example. If this isn't a fantastic example of the pot calling the kettle black, I'm not sure what is.

Third, I am no fan of Stuttering George. He quite probably is corrupt, and I am quite probably paying higher electricity prices as a direct result. This (among other reasons) is why I really would like to see him booted out of office in two years. However, if people continue to underestimate him and think him to have less substance than a sideshow freak, then they are only doing themselves a disservice. He became president without winning the popular vote, has weathered a couple of major money scandals without damage to his personal reputation (although his administration's popularity has slipped) and accomplished something that was widely regarded as impossible -- the taking of Afghanistan from the Taliban with the added (and also supposedly impossible) benefit of basing American troops in various *stan countries in South Central Asia. This is not the hallmark of a stupid individual.

And since we touched on the issue of corruption, how many scandals has Blair had to weather now because of his cronies in your party?

You're correct in your statement that democratic governments should demonstrate why it should take a specific course of action. The only problem is that the prospect of Saddam gaining access to weapons that it will use to subvert it's neighbors is sufficient for us, while it is not sufficient for you.

Saddam is a problem that needed to be fixed the first time, when my father and his unit were sitting forty miles from Baghdad. It wasn't then because of the coalition's (led be the European and the Arab states) determined lack of support for such a move.

Finally, in that post you indeed did not insinuate that the American population is stupid. But as a faithful reader of your blog and your posts highlighting the stupidity of various Americans, tell me what the hell else am I supposed to think that you think of us? It really seems that you take great glee in writing these things. Take a trip through your own archives if you cannot remember any instances of this. Look at the posts on other 'internationalist' blogs, and you see the same thing over and over and over, in perpetuity. Then go find an instance of an American doing the same thing in reverse. It doesn't happen much, does it? It certainly isn't because the stories aren't there for fodder.

I guess I've just become the inaugural member of 'Gert's Elite Banned', lol.

2002-08-24T02:01:00.000-07:00

177. Fin.

Well, after not being able to put together a computer -- something I've done too many times to count -- I decided to temporarily give up and use some of my pieces to upgrade my girlfriend's computer.

Naturally, I killed that one too.

So I borrowed three hundred bucks that I can't really afford to repay from her mother and replaced her machine, which is what I am typing on now. There are bits of computer splattered all over my kitchen, and the ones that I am able to still take back and get my money for will be returned.

I am very disheartened by all this, as I was just trying to do what it is that I supposedly am an expert at, and I have proven grossly incompetent. As a result, this is going to mark the beginning of an open-ended blogging hiatus (at the very least) for me whilst I go sort myself out.

I expect to return, but don't hold your breath waiting for me.

It's been fun, and please everyone take care of yourselves!

2002-08-20T04:48:00.000-07:00

176. The Exception.

So, back in 173, mentioned that there was an exception to the examples of rights I had given in my post. The reason its an exception is because it is the one right that gets treated differently by our law. You personally have the right to forego free speech (although on the surface that seems a difficult concept -- at least for me it did --, I find it ties in neatly with political correctness) self-incrimination, search and seizure, and whatnot. Just because you have these rights does not mean that you must use them.

The exception to me would seem to be the so-called right to life. For a moment, suspend the connotations that the anti-abortion movement has burdened that term with and just think about the right to life. You have a right to be here. I have a right to be here. It supposedly is the ultimate right.

But who gave it to us? The theological answer to that is that God gave us the right to life. Not being religious, I don't buy it. The reason that I don't buy it is that it then becomes a twisted farce when you compare the right to life a woman in America has versus the right to life a woman has in say, Nigeria. By the same token, the right to life of a black man -- a decendent of a people from Africa -- that kills a cop in Seattle does not have the same cachet as the right to life that an Algerian-born cop-killer would have in Marseilles, Frankfurt or The Hague.

Even if you are so devout in your faith as to reject my assertion that God does not bestow the right to life, you can view it differently. God gives the right to 'life' but does not give the right to 'live'. If the right to live exists on it's own or it is in fact just part of the right to life, either way if it exists, it is solely bestowed by society. Man should not be able to undo God's work or will. Either way, I'm going to refer to it from here on as the right to live, in attempt to avoid confusion.

So society (or in essence fallible man) also gives us the right to live. But (in America, at least -- potentially excluding Oregon) that right is not one that you can dispense with. I mean, you can, but you had better be successful, or you'd wind up like Abu Nidal ("Ow! I missed! Ow! I missed!") or face the music of the justice system. Admittedly, typically a person that attempts suicide and fails is seldom ever prosecuted, but the presence of the laws prohibiting it are telling that this is not the average right. Also the people that attempt to assist people that attempt to commit suicide tend to be very harshly dealt with, such as the doctors prescribing lethal doses of medicine for terminally ill patients.

And if society dictates the conditions necessary for the inviolable right to live, such as through death penalties and abortion, then it is no longer inviolable. Since it is not inviolable, it is not absolute. Since it is not absolute, then it is, like my earlier examples also not so much a right as it is a very weighty privilege.

The fact that it is a privilege as opposed to a right (for those that like to make the distinction) is also evidenced by its political expediency. The same segment of society that is pro-abortion is the same segment of society that tends to be against any military action anywhere and the death penalty. Likewise, the same segment of society that is anti-abortion tends to be pro-military and pro-death penalty. The fact that this disparity exists also shines light on the seemingly greater myth that there is indeed a right to live.

The conundrum follows that if there is no right to live then what ultimately is there? Why is there a 'right' to live? 'Because' is insufficient to my mind of scientific bent.

2002-08-19T20:41:00.000-07:00

175. I Could Spend Hours...

...at this site.

2002-08-19T18:16:00.000-07:00

174. Soup.

I just sent this recipe off to my best friend. She'll probably use less lemon in it.

For my avgolemono soup, you need:

8 c. H2O
4 chicken boullion cubes
(or substitute 8 c. chicken stock)
3 eggs
3 large lemons
some orzo (1 c. to 2 c.)

Boil H2O. Add boullion cubes. When cubes dissolve, add orzo. Boil for 10-20 mins, until orzo is al dente.

Meanwhile, break the three eggs into a blender. Blend them. Squeeze the juice of the lemons into the blender and discard the lemon pieces (or feed the pulp from them to the dog, like I did). Blend mixture. While the mix is blending, fish 1 c. worth of broth out of the pot and pour it into the blending mixture. Blend a bit more. Pour mixture into pot and stir well. Serve.

Bone apeteet.