Category: Blogroll

I gripe all the time; it’s the nature of someone who’s naturally curmudgeonly, moderately intelligent, observant and besieged by stupidity, incompetence and outright malice at every turn. (Blog buds excepted from that litany of woes :-))

So, it’s only right that I would make special note of someone who goes the second (and third) mile offering help when needed.

Some of y’all may recall that shortly before the winter storm, power (and other services) outage here in America’s Third World Countyâ„¢, Lovely Daughter’s laptop “died”. Well, not so much died as seemed for all the world as though no power whatsoever were getti9ng to the thing. Battery down to zilch. No could boot. Comes down to looking likie a common problem with these (and many) notebooks: the CD adapter jack.

So, looked around the web. Found replacement jacks purporting to be the right jacks. Found ONE guy who was willing to go beyond just selling me one, offering a mini-tutorial on its proper installation (including pics of the actual implementation of an idea I’d had to lessen the chance of a recurrence of the problem).

Not only that, but he’s gone another “extra mile” offering help in getting the case open non-destructively. (Sony did NOT make it easy at all, at all… *sigh*).

If you need help with your laptop, here’s the go-to guy, IMO:

The Laptop Doctor I do believe he does more than just jack repairs, although that certainly should keep him busy. 🙂

Kudos, Doc.

Update: Paypal just sent me a notice (well, I just read it; it’s been in my inbox for a short bit) that Doc’s already sent the part. This is the kind of guy you want to do business with, folks.

Showing absolutely NO mercy whatsoever. StikNstein lays ICE policy bare.

”We know we probably should have tipped them off like we did at the Swift raid, but we just didn’t have time. It seems to get harder every day to not arrest these guys. When they just walk up to you and tell you they’re illegal, it’s tough to follow proper procedure and look the other way.”

Besides, He added, “If we’d been at the border like the National Guard, there’d be plenty of avenues of retreat…..You all know how hard it is to get away when you’re in a 7-11 parking lot…..they had us cornered.”

It’s so full of truth, it’s irrelevant whether it’s factual or not. Or at least, so the CBS “News” Ethical Guidelines and the Reuters “News” Policy would seem to indicate… Seriously, though, it’s hard to discriminate between fact and fiction here… is it satire or is it reality? You decide.

🙂

Keep “stiking” it to ’em.

h.t., TRY

Another “not-a-recipe” recipe from the kitchen of third world county central. You can easily modify this to be a made-from-scratch recipe.

Crunch time: needed a quick meal that didn’t seem like a quick meal… Had to use stuff on hand…

2-4 cooked boneless chicken breasts (I had three on hand), cubed.
one 24-oz can of hominy, including the liquids
one 20-oz can of pinto beans (yeh, I know cooking my own is better–and I prefer it, but not when it’s crunch time and I need a meal fast)
one 6-oz can tomato paste (it’s what I had–a can or two of chopped tomatoes would probably have been better)
one handful (yes, that’s a measured amount :-)) chili powder
one handful FRESHLY-GROUND cumin (only took a few seconds in an electric coffee grinder)

Pop all that (and any water you might want to add to please your eye) in a medium pot and bring it to boil, back off to simmer for a bit, and in much less than 30 minutes, a filling meal.

First night: a hominy soup. Next night, it’s stew. 🙂

Heck, some corn chips or cornbread (30 minutes is enough to make some cornmeal muffins) and it’s a filling meal. I added some sliced jalapeños to mine and Wonder Woman ate hers as it came out of the pot.

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Unrelated sidebar: I’ve not gotten around to buying raw beans and roasting my own coffee, yet, but I have stumbled across a way to “freshen” already roasted coffee beans a tad. I juat pop ’em in the microwave (along with a small glass of water, a separate container) for one or two 30-second bursts. It seems to bring out the oils a tad so whenI grind ’em in my hand-cranked burr grinder, the coffee at least seems to have a fuller aroma and the taste of the brewed joe is a little richer, it seems to me.

Before I forget this, too, I’ll just post this as an early “Friday-Saturday-Sunday” linkfest. Link to this post and track back. More below the post.

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With my head totally storm-blasted and still digging out from a week and a half of limited-to-no-access and chores, projects and work I had to let slide, I’ve let some other, more recent, things slide and slide and…

Thirteen Things I Forgot to Do Today… until now

1. Look up a repair manual for Lovely Daughter’s lil Sony Vaio notebook (cos I’m having a DEVIL of a time getting the thing apart enough to work on it!). OK, doi9ng that now.

2. Call our homeowner’s insurance agent… again (about the damage to property–yeh, yeh, I know: can’t let it go too long *sigh*). OK, tomorrow. If I remember to check my todos on my Palm.

3. Change the cat litter. Yeh, today was the day for a complete changeout and it’s gotta be done before I go to bed…

4. ALMOST (does that count?) forgot to post today’s Linkfest Haven Deluxe post. Almost. *whew!*

5. Morning supplements/meds. Right. Something I know better than to forget, but how can a guy remember to take his ginko biloba unless he’s already taken it?

6. Log on to my Mitchell’s online book for my car to look up a wiring diagram. Have to do that tomorrow… (Said that yesterday.)

7. (Re-)Set up the downstairs leg of the network (subnet an entirely new leg with it’s own router/firewall separate from the rest of the network. Not just for fun).

8. Clean off deck.

9. Get the mail. (I forgot to pick up the mail! *sheesh!*)

10. Give “The Boys” (son’s dogs) “Fourth Meal”. Oh, well, they can live without that one all right.

11. I forget what number eleven is. Oh, yeh. See #2. I forgot (and how the HECK did I do THAT?!?!?) to check my todo list on my Palm. *profound sigh* No wonder I forgot so many things today.

12. The bedding. I forgot to wash it last weekend (when we didn’t have power but a local laundromat did) and have meant to pop it in every a.m. since our power was restored… but haven’t. *sigh*

13. Do my Thursday Thirteen.

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TB-ed to the Thursday Thirteen Hub.

Oh, and if you have a linkfest/open trackback post to promote OR if you simply want to promote a post via the linkfests/open trackback posts others are offering, GO TO LINKFEST HAVEN DELUXE! Just CLICK the link above or the graphic immediately below.

If you want to host your own linkfests but have not yet done so, check out the Open Trackbacks Alliance. The FAQ there is very helpful in understanding linkfests/open trackbacks.

Scientists can’t get sloth to move

Who’d-a thunk it? (Urm, people who don’t know the meaning of the word “sloth”? *heh*)

h.t. Chaos Manor

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Trackposted to Renaissance Blogger, The Random Yak, stikNstein… has no mercy, and High Desert Wanderer, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.

Ann Coulter. Gotta love her.

As long as we have revived the practice of celebrating multicultural milestones (briefly suspended when Condoleezza Rice became the first black female to be secretary of state), let us pause to note that Mrs. Clinton, if elected, would be the first woman to become president after her husband had sex with an intern in the Oval Office.

A vote for Billary will be a vote for once again supplanting Congress as the Best Lil Whorehouse in D.C. with the one previously run by Bill at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

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Trackposted to Pirate’s Cove, basil’s blog, and Right Voices, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe, and at The Trouble With Angels, cos I forgot to tb Diane’s OTA yesterday…

Go here. Now.

Regular readers here already know I’m no fan of the way the war in Iraq has been managed to date (nor any great fan of announced plans). But. I would never embrace the Democrap alternatives (“Run away! Run away!”) which amount to nothing less than endorsing utter and complete defeat.

Hugh Hewitt and TTLB have joined forces to push a pledge:

If the United States Senate passes a resolution, non-binding or otherwise, that criticizes the commitment of additional troops to Iraq that General Petraeus has asked for and that the president has pledged, and if the Senate does so after the testimony of General Petraeus on January 23 that such a resolution will be an encouragement to the enemy, I will not contribute to any Republican senator who voted for the resolution. Further, if any Republican senator who votes for such a resolution is a candidate for re-election in 2008, I will not contribute to the National Republican Senatorial Committee unless the Chairman of that Committee, Senator Ensign, commits in writing that none of the funds of the NRSC will go to support the re-election of any senator supporting the non-binding resolution.

The pledge calls “a resolution… that criticizes the commitment of additional troops to Iraq” an “encouragement to the enemy,” but let’s not mince words here. The correct phrase is “aid and comfort to the enemy.”

Of course, none dare call it treason because such “aid and comfort” to the enemies of the United States has formed the successful basis of many “career” politicians’ *spit* lives (notably including Jean Fraud Kerry *gag-spit*).

Just call me “None” would you?

Go, sign the pledge. The Iraq War is not the single most important front in the War for the Soul of the West (I’d say that place goes to the war for the soul of Americans too complacent to actually give a damn about preserving their own lives, liberties and property, but who am I to make that call, eh? :-)), but it is an extremely important front right now.

Now, if only Hugh and TTLB would come up with a pledge aimed at honest border conrol…

Thanks, Layla, for the tipoff. I seem to have missed more than I had thought during the twc power outage.

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Trackposted to The Pink Flamingo, Perri Nelson’s Website, The HILL Chronicles, Dumb Ox Daily News, and Big Dog’s Weblog, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.

Just a passing observation…

The administration’s stated goal in Iraq is to help the Iraqis who want to live in peace with each other do so, and thus create a strong presence for quelling Islamic terrorism in the region.

Let’s ignore for a moment the simple fact that rthe fundamental savagery and barbarism of Islam itself is the problem, and that “peaceful” Saudi Arabia is the primary source of funds and breeding ground for Wahabbist terrorism and simply focus on making one country out of a region peopled by tribes and religious factions that have been at each others’ throats for longer than there has even been Islam to divide them.

What the Administration’s goal is like, more than anything else, is making an omelet. In order to get the eggs to all play nicely together (and incorporate any non-eggish elements), ya have to break the eggs. Not just some of them; all of them. And then you must mix them together really well in order to make of the disparate eggs, ONE ingredient: “egg”.

That requires an iron chef wielding a steel whisk with no regard for the feelings and desires of the “eggs” for holding onto their generational grudges and blood feuds. (The only thing that has brought “peace” to this savage region in its long, long history: a ruler with a fist–and heel–of iron.)

And that is something we as a people are simply not ready to impose.

The most viable alternative I can see to making an omelet out of the disparate people groups making up Iraq would be to arm rthe Kurds to the teeth so they can defend their own lands and then let the factions in the rest of notional “Iraq” fight it out to settle their territorial boundaries, according to their own lights. Something along these lines:

There once were two cats of Kilkenny,
Each thought there was one cat too many,
So they fought and they fit,
And they scratched and they bit,
Till, excepting their nails
And the tips of their tails,
Insteads of two cats, there weren’t any.

Then we can say, in all honesty, “See? Without an adult to maintain peace there, normally savage Muslims will just keep killing each other until there are hardly any left… ”

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Trackposted to Outside the Beltway, Is It Just Me?, The Random Yak, stikNstein… has no mercy, Big Dog’s Weblog, Stuck On Stupid, Thought Alarm, Dumb Ox Daily News, and Sujet- Celebrities, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.

I had a call to complete last night and missed much of the President’s address, so I chose to simply read it this morning, absent all the silly interruptions for applause, etc. And, given that, it was much easier to skip the *cough* “analysis* newsreaders and clownish pundits placed on it afterwards, as well.

Still, gee, the guy managed to cover a laundry list, didn’t he? I imagine the Democraps and other Leftist fifth columnists for jihad and Reconquista stuck their figurative fingers in their ears and blabbed “na-na-na-na-” when Bush rehearsed the economy’s good news and the dirty lil not-so-secret earmarks graft that Democrappic congresscritters have no more genuine desire to eliminate than their Republican’t “colleagues” do. And I can easily imagine what the ear-plugging “na-na-ers” had to say in response to

Continue reading “State of the Union”

Still short shrift here at twc as I try to get back on a blogging schedule while managing a “regular” life and doing cleanup and repair from the ice storm. Meanwhile, here’s a short post (below) and an open trackbacks invitation. Link to this post and track back.

If you have a linkfest/open trackback post to promote OR if you simply want to promote a post via the linkfests/open trackback posts others are offering, GO TO LINKFEST HAVEN DELUXE! Just CLICK the link above or the graphic immediately below.

If you want to host your own linkfests but have not yet done so, check out the Open Trackbacks Alliance. The FAQ there is very helpful in understanding linkfests/open trackbacks.

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Sure, I understand that Loony Left Moonbats are entitled to their opinions (no matter how stupid), but THIS sort of thing just pi$$es me off.

“Army Sgt. Jason Hess, stationed in Taji, Iraq, with the 1st Cavalry Division…” in an email to Discountmats.com:

“Do you ship to APO (military) addresses? I’m in the 1st Cavalry Division stationed in Iraq and we are trying to order some mats but we are looking for ships to APO first.”

Well, apparently not, since the reply he got was:

“SGT Hess,

We do not ship to APO addresses, and even if we did, we would NEVER ship to Iraq. If you were sensible, you and your troops would pull out of Iraq.

Bargain Suppliers
Discount-Mats.com”

*Oh, “RCOB”? What I see when I read this sort of excrement: a red curtain of blood, descending over my eyes as I fight to prevent myself from embracing my berserker heritage…