Category: Uncategorized

It’s not exactly “A Tale of Two Cities”

More like, Daze of Our Lives” *sigh*

Ya know, I sometimes have to “make the rounds” here in town to find out just what I’m “up to” now, It’s soooo good to know that the town gossips have a much better idea of what I do than I do.

Just one of the “advantages” of living in America’s Third World Countyâ„¢.

(No, I’m not going to tell you what the lastest rumor[s] about me is[are]. Put your ear to the ground and it’ll jump right in if you’re anywhere near America’s Third World Countyâ„¢.)

Of course, it’d be an exercise in redundant futility to track down the source(s) of such rumors. They are abviously too senseless to be beaten any more senseless, so there’d be no joy gained.

*heh*

Finding cool things

Checked my stats this a.m. Found a visitor who’d checked out my post “Shooting Aroind a Blind Corner” by googling “shooting around corner.” Just under my post was a listing for this. “Army Technology – CORNER SHOTâ„¢ – ‘Makes Tight Corners an Advantageâ„¢‘” Yep. A frame for a handgun that includes a color camera yielding the ability to… shoot around a corner.

Fun thing about the internet. Can find the coolest things…

My thanks to the visitor from the Netherlands for indirectly steering me to this cool thing.

OK, Stop me if you’ve heard this one…

Passing through the room. Noise on TV. Yeh, it’s the congressional hearing on steroid use in major league baseball. (Aside: this is what Congress has descended to? Hearings on baseball? Trivializing themselves–as if it were possible to make Congress any more of a joke… ) What caught my eye/ear was some guy harranguing baseball players for being bad examples, cos his son died of steroid use.

Come again? The baseball players’ purported steroid use was the cause of his son’s death? Where was dad when the son was using steroids? I’d say a closer cause of his son’s death from steroid use was bad parenting. Misplacing his own guilt now is just a follow-through from misplacing responsibility for raising his own son.

Now, I could be wrong; I stopped listening after a RCOB descended over my eyes… All I heard (and saw captioned below his image as “son died from steroid use”) was this guy blaming someone else for his son’s use of steroids, for his son’s death. What a whiny baby. Dads like this who don’t give a damn about their kids (well, not enough of a “damn” to actually be a dad) while they are alive have no right to point the finger at others for their own failure as a parent.

Of course, if I have it wrong, if this “father” was actively involved and being a proactive parent, and major league baseball players slipped into his home in the dead of night and secretly injected his son with steroids without the “father’s” knowledge, then I’d certainly apologize to him for my remarks.

…besides the (CODE WORDS! *heh*) Thousands Standing Around

then this lil post at Victory Soap just might be the thing to help you Just Say No to flying.

*heh*

Thank you, thank you. Please, no applause.

Well this is a first. Really. No kidding. I checked my stats (aren’t stats addictive? Maybe it’ll wear off) and found several visits resulting from google searches for I hate Intuit—so naturally I had to investigate.

Yep. I’m number 1. What an honor. (Please notice the irony.) My first (known) number one page ranking in google. For my lil post, “I Hate Intuit.”

Still, it’s an appropriate ranking because I do hate Intuit. nasty buggers. See the post if you haven’t already to know why. Apparently, there are a lot of people on the web who’ve remarked similarly… Probably a drop in the bucket. Most who’d like to say so are probably still mired in Intuit’s lousy so-called “tech support” trying to get help with Turbotax bugs.

Underground SA

I’ve been getting a goodly number of hits from Saudi Arabia resulting from folks (guys, I would assume) searching for a phrase in Arabic (found in “No shoot, Sherlock”) that translates “filthy whore.” (I used the term in a fictitious quote of one of the Iraqi “room mates” of the supposedly kidnapped Italian commie “journalist.”)

Hmmmm… A yahoo search for a term that indicates some guys in Saudi are looking for porn (something that’s supposedly a SEVERE no-no in S.A.). Searches for the same Arabic term are also showing up from Egypt, Sudan, Kuwait, the UAE, Israel (?!?), Holland, Sweden and… Illinois. *sigh*

Well, at least they’re not finding what they’re looking for here.

And… the searches from the Arabic countries indicate a possible ripe field for, um, missions. (Not being good little Muslim boys, now are we? Eh? *heh*)

And so it goes…

“Sign zee papers, old man!”**

Glenn Reynolds notes, in his latest Tech Central column, that

“… if you haven’t been convicted of some felony or other, it’s probably because no prosecutor has tried to put you away, not because you haven’t committed one, whether you realized it at the time or not.”

Indeed. We have reached the point where the only thing standing [between] a citizen (like maybe a pushy, perhaps even obnoxious, broad, say, Martha Stewart?) with rights and a convicted felon whose rights have been stripped, modified or severely curtailed is the time, personal taste and/or whim of a prosecutor.

That means that, in essence, what we think of as rights are really only priviledges temporarily granted by a government that can strip us of those rights any time it truly wishes to do so.

And nearly as bad as “felony inflation” as laws seem to grow like vicious and rabid tribbles, is the actions of judges who issue new law (usually, it seems, after reading tea leaves and goat entrails) by fiat, as Thomas Sowell notes in the first of three recent articles dealing with trouble on the bench:

“While people in various countries in the Middle East are beginning to stir as they see democracy start to take root in Iraq, our own political system is moving steadily in the opposite direction, toward rule by unelected judicial ayatollahs, acting like the ayatollahs in Iran.”

Welcome to the Imperium.

**(My thx to Cheech n Chong for the perfect image of the new order: “Sign zee papers old man!”… “But I cannot sign the papers”…much intervening dialog… “Why not?” “Because you have cut off all my fingers!”)

I’ve reached that awkward age…

…where I can no longer read a book, watch TV, listen to the stereo and carry on a conversation simultaneously. And I don’t have anyone to play chess with at the same time, now, either.

Ah, well. I suppose it has something to do with leaving adolescence behind me, now that I’m in my 50s.

Completely Stupid Idea

One of the many reasons I strongly dislike CSI and its cousin TV shows can be found, illustrated and explained in moderate depth for a layman’s understanding, here .

“Chris Enzler from Cognitech says, ‘you won’t get a perfect picture, that’s Hollywood. You will get a good picture, but you can only reconstruct so much. You almost never get a nice tape – some videotapes have been recorded over 100 times. Banks and other stores try to be cheap, and too many people expect stuff from the movies or CSI.’

Chris gave several examples of Hollywood magic that doesn’t work in real life. One example is from a recent CSI episode, where the video investigator rotated a car in 3D to read the license plate, from a 2D video. In other shows you see the investigators enhance a single pixel to a full screen, with perfect clarity, which is obviously impossible.”

Of course, all the other reasons I avoided the show(s) after the first couple of episodes I watched in order to give it a fair viewing are moot since Rathergate. Since Rathergate, I’ve sworn off ALL CBS programming, including local programming from our CBS affiliate.

Haven’t missed a thing.

Of course, CSI is now in syndication on other channels, but that just makes narrowing down my viewing options (which sometimes narrow down to nothing, which is itself no loss) easier.

Now, if only someone could get through to NBC that cloning ever dumber versions of Law & Order is a waste of otherwise valuable programming time… “SVU” was bad enough, but “Criminal Intent” with weird boy Onofrio gave me a rash. I dread discovering what the new version-that-should-not-be-named might turn out to be like…

Nah. No dread. More TLC and History Channel. That’ll do the trick.

As long as I keep wearing the noose…

Every now and then I restate my intention to more fully articulate my views on the War for Civilization. It includes, of course, the war against Islamic jihadism; the carefully considered rape of Western Civilization by ill-intentioned pseudo-intellectuals, mass media podpeople and loony left moonbats; the collapse of education and the disappearance of a literate society, etc.

But not yet.

In the meantime, here’s some material for the nearly literate (as I hope one day to be) to grab hold of and fly with: MIT’s listing of “Opencourseware”–free course material from MIT. Yep. Free. Here.

(Thanks to George Laiacona III for sending the link to Jerry Pournelle and to Dr. Pournelle for posting it. I can see my blogging tapering off a little just from time spent browsing the courses… Wow. Neat stuff!)

Now, admittedly, the offerings are really “just” highly detailed course outlines, detailing, for example, subjects covered in each class session and assignments, etc. But surely that’s enough to allow a reasonably intelligent person to glean one heck of a lot of knowledge in a subject. I just scanned ” Developing Musical Structures” and it looks like something I could get my teeth into. Foundations of Western Culture I: Homer to Dante; Foundations of Western Culture II; and Foundations of Western Culture II: Renaissance to Modernity, look like well-structured reviews of western civ, with perhaps a little more depth tha n expected, given that they are intro lit courses. (As an aside, it was a trip for me to visit—via phone—with my 13/14(?)-year-old nephew a couple of weeks ago about his venture into reading Greek tragedy. Between his daily readings and the family round-table readings in the evening, it looked like Oedipus would get a pretty in-depth examination… Something many college grads will not have done either in high school or college.)

But the stuff that’s available! Wow! Great site.

More, please.

Oh, and don’t miss the CD/DVD images of 600 (CD) or 9,400!(DVD) books available at http://www.gutenberg.org/cdproject/