Author: David

Over-educated Curmudgeon, Bit-Bucket Tuner and Budding Brewmeister.
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No Bell Piece Prize

Ya have to keep an eye on Perri, cos he comes up with the best stuff… which, of course, every now and then I just have to steal.

OLD BUTCH

John was in the fertilized egg business. He had several hundred young layers (hens), called ‘pullets,’ and ten roosters to fertilize the eggs. He kept records, and any rooster not performing went into the soup pot and was replaced. This took a lot of time, so he bought some tiny bells and attached them to his roosters.

Each bell had a different tone, so he could tell from a distance,which rooster was performing. Now, he could sit on the porch and fill out an efficiency report by just listening to the bells.

John’s favorite rooster, old Butch, was a very fine specimen, but this particular morning he noticed old Butch’s bell hadn’t rung at all! When he went to investigate, he saw the other roosters were busy chasing pullets, bells-a-ringing, but the pullets, hearing the roosters coming, could run for cover. To John’s amazement, old Butch had his bell in his beak, so it couldn’t ring. He’d sneak up on a pullet, do his job and walk on to the next one.

John was so proud of old Butch, he entered him in the Renfrew County Fair and he became an overnight sensation among the judges. The result was the judges not only awarded old Butch the No Bell Piece Prize, but they also awarded him the Pullet Surprise as well.

Clearly old Butch was a politician in the making. Who else but a politician could figure out how to win two of the most highly coveted awards on our planet by being the best at sneaking up on the populace and screwing them when they weren’t paying attention.

Vote carefully next year, the bells are not always audible.

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Windows Secrets–Such Jolly Jokers

Because I’m now a part time Windows user (but I mostly support Windows users), I find the Windows Secrets website and newsletter invaluable in staying current with some cool features and rare “gotchas” that populate the Windows world. And it’s nice to know that Brian Livingston (who happens to be the author of the book that gave me my first real introduction to Windows… after I’d been using it for a while already *heh*) still has his sense of humor after some hardware failures took the Windows Secrets website down for 48 hours this week:

If you’re a subscriber, you remain a subscriber. If your paid sub expires on Dec. 31, you’re darn tootin’ it still does. If you purchased a lifetime subscription … well, we can’t tell you the end of your lifetime, but we didn’t know that before the crash, anyway. [emphasis added]

Jolly joker.

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Ironic? Yes, but Justice, Too

Health Care Speechwriter for Edwards, Obama & Clinton Without Insurance Now

“What makes this a double blow is that my experience contradicts so much of what I wrote for political leaders over the last decade. That’s a terrible feeling, too. I typed line after line that said everything Massachusetts did would make health insurance more affordable. If I had a dollar for every time I typed, ‘universal coverage will lower premiums,’ I could pay for my own health care at Massachusetts’s rates.”

Sometimes, life really is fair. This time the lying (or, perhaps just stupid) propagandist gets spattered with the rotten fruits of the lie. Fitting, just, fair.

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“Crap n Trade” Madness

[Senator from Taxachussetts, Jean Fraud s]KERRY: IF YOU ENJOYED THIS YEAR’S RECESSION, JUST WAIT FOR CAP AND TRADE

“Let me emphasize something very strongly as we begin this discussion. The United States has already this year alone achieved a 6 percent reduction in emissions simply because of the downturn in the economy, so we are effectively saying we need …to go another 14 percent.”–Fumduck Senator from Taxachussetts, Jean Fraud sKerry

This scumbag doesn’t care who his desired policies would harm. He just wants to be on the idiotic “CO2 is bad” bandwagon. Fine, Jean Fraud. Let’s ban idiot politicians from emitting CO2. Just stop breathing, bub. That’d do the trick. Idiot.

So, not only do we have a Presidential Pretender in Training Wheels going around telling everyone it’s all America’s fault, now we also have a Once Presidential Wannabe idiot telling us we need to pay for his and his co-conspirators’ delusions, as well.

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A “Kipling Tuesday” Repeat

One would think the logic of the lil ditty below would be manifest in how we treat with those who finance or otherwise enable terrorism–the default behavior of devout Muslim savages–but, sadly, that’s not the case…

The Grave of the Hundred Head
–Rudyard Kipling

There’s a widow in sleepy Chester
Who weeps for her only son;
There’s a grave on the Pabeng River,
A grave that the Burmans shun,
And there’s Subadar Prag Tewarri
Who tells how the work was done.

A Snider squibbed in the jungle,
Somebody laughed and fled,
And the men of the First Shikaris
Picked up their Subaltern dead,
With a big blue mark in his forehead
And the back blown out of his head.

Subadar Prag Tewarri,
Jemadar Hira Lal,
Took command of the party,
Twenty rifles in all,
Marched them down to the river
As the day was beginning to fall.

They buried the boy by the river,
A blanket over his face–
They wept for their dead Lieutenant,
The men of an alien race–
They made a samadh in his honor,
A mark for his resting-place.

For they swore by the Holy Water,
They swore by the salt they ate,
That the soul of Lieutenant Eshmitt Sahib
Should go to his God in state;
With fifty file of Burman
To open him Heaven’s gate.

The men of the First Shikaris
Marched till the break of day,
Till they came to the rebel village,
The village of Pabengmay–
A jingal covered the clearing,
Calthrops hampered the way.

Subadar Prag Tewarri,
Bidding them load with ball,
Halted a dozen rifles
Under the village wall;
Sent out a flanking-party
With Jemadar Hira Lal.

The men of the First Shikaris
Shouted and smote and slew,
Turning the grinning jingal
On to the howling crew.
The Jemadar’s flanking-party
Butchered the folk who flew.

Long was the morn of slaughter,
Long was the list of slain,
Five score heads were taken,
Five score heads and twain;
And the men of the First Shikaris
Went back to their grave again,

Each man bearing a basket
Red as his palms that day,
Red as the blazing village–
The village of Pabengmay,
And the “drip-drip-drip” from the baskets
Reddened the grass by the way.

They made a pile of their trophies
High as a tall man’s chin,
Head upon head distorted,
Set in a sightless grin,
Anger and pain and terror
Stamped on the smoke-scorched skin.

Subadar Prag Tewarri
Put the head of the Boh
On the top of the mound of triumph,
The head of his son below,
With the sword and the peacock-banner
That the world might behold and know.

Thus the samadh was perfect,
Thus was the lesson plain
Of the wrath of the First Shikaris–
The price of a white man slain;
And the men of the First Shikaris
Went back into camp again.

Then a silence came to the river,
A hush fell over the shore,
And Bohs that were brave departed,
And Sniders squibbed no more;
For the Burmans said
That a kullah’s head
Must be paid for with heads five score.

There’s a widow in sleepy Chester
Who weeps for her only son;
There’s a grave on the Pabeng River,
A grave that the Burmans shun,
And there’s Subadar Prag Tewarri
Who tells how the work was done.

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Fickle?

Warning: Moderate to partly cloudy compgeekiness ahead.

I-ubuntu-my-desktop

…but I still intend to buy a full install copy of Windows 7 for one computer and upgrade another one here at twc central. Fickle? Nah. IMO, Win7 is about as good as Ubuntu 9.04–better in one regard: media center functions–and I suspect I’ll get a more than a few calls on support for it from friends and family and nodding acquaintances–ships passing in the night, etc.–though primarily from folks who don’t really need support at all, just a little friendly tutoring to feel comfortable, as it is a little easier to figure out any differences between Win7 and previous Windows versions than between any Windows version’s way of doing things and Ubuntu’s way of doing things.

Of course, media setups for Ubuntu are still kinda geeky, an issue that is still holding back adoption among average users. And media center setup? Fugettaboutit. The first three steps in setting up an Ubuntu (or any Linux distro) media center that is also intended for use as a desktop: “Tear hair out. Let regrow. Tear out again.” *heh* It can be done, but it’s a bloody mess. For almost all other uses, choosing between Windows 7, OSX, Ubuntu (and a few other easy-to-use Linux distros) and PCBSD is simply a matter of personal taste, IMO, as each has advantages and disadvantages and each has apps that are “good enough” for average users available in plenty.

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Snoots On the Line

snoot, n., a really extreme usage fanatic 1

Just today, I stumbled upon a site that tickles my English appreciation bone: Language Log (Also found here, I now see). It’ll take some time to work through the archives, but I do know where my “reading breaks” (breaks from reading books and news, that is) will be for a while. A sample:

…snoots are never scholars. At least, their snootish outpourings are never based on scholarly investigation and analysis, even if they have some scholarly credentials in other aspects of their intellectual life. The reason is simple: scholarship subordinates the self, at least temporarily, to an investigation of external fact, while the snootish posture immediately asserts the primacy of the self’s linguistic judgments. Snoots routinely invoke both the authority of tradition and the dictates of logic, but these are ex post facto rhetorical justifications, not the conclusions of a dispassionate analysis.

Oh. *sigh-smile* That excerpt has just about everything to satisfy the anti-post-literate age curmudgeon in me. *heh* I don’t even care that it issues a vague, gentle, completely unintentional indictment of some of my semi-private musings on this blog. This stuff is just really fun reading. (And I intended the amphibolous construction in that sentence. :-))

Oh, to-loo, to-lay! What frabjous fun, my beamish boys n girls!

🙂

Update: one of my very favorite bugaboos, “[just] semantics”, is dealt with briefly here.

“…As a rule of thumb, you should be suspicious whenever someone who’s not professionally involved in the study of semantic variation dismisses some difference as “(just) semantic(s)” or the like; it’s likely to be a dodge, or at least a stretching of the truth… “

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A Re-run of Why We’re In the Mess We’re In

This is just the tip of the iceberg, folks. Here’s why we not only have a person occupying the White House who has spent millions avoiding presenting any proof he’s qualified to serve and whose every act since assuming office has been detrimental to the U.S. but also why we have the faithless Congress and despicable courts and federal bureaucrappy we have. You don’t even have to read between the lines to get the picture.

Yep. an electorate that’s barely intelligent enough and well-informed enough to stumble into the voting booth without breaking both legs and decapitating themselves with a butterfly ballot.