Category: Uncategorized

Caltech Girl has us all going back to school for Carnival of the Recipes #54

Ah, man! And all I wanna do is hang out at the pool eating Javascript Cookieâ„¢ Ice Cream Sandwiches!  Oh. Well.  At least if I have-ta go back to classes, she’s got some classy recipes to take with me, including Homemade Balsamic Vinaigrette, Freezer Coleslaw, Fried Tofu with Spicy Sauce (Tofu!?!?! Yeh, well, cos it’s from R’Cat, I guess I’ll give it a try… ).  Heck, if I’m gonna give tofu another chance, I’ll even try Army Wife’s Hummus recipe, I guess.

Tons of the good stuff! Just go!

I don’t know whether this is cool or annoying as all get-out…

And I know I need more coffee, anyway, cos I can’t recall where I ran across this annoyingly cool thingy-whopper:  Blogger for Word.

Yeh: a M$ Word plugin for editing/posting blogger posts. OK, confession time: I’m juuust lazy enough that I don’t write the code for my blogposts. And I HATE the stupid lil box blogger has in its crappy lil builtin wywsiwyg editor. So, I’ve been using Blogwriter, a not-quite-ready-for-primetime blog editor beta.  Oh, it doesn’t introduce as many errors as blogger’s builtin wywsiwyg editor does on its own, but between it and blogger, it does a good enough job of scrambling what I write to give me an excuse to use blogger’s builtin to edit the messy html a tad, about 50% of the time.

So, trying out this lil plugin for Word 2000.

And that’s my gripe with this plugin.  I had to actually install Word 2000 on this computer. Yeh, yeh, I know. Who cares? Well, I have a perfectly fine office suite in Open Office that I can use for everything else, so having to install an extra copy of Word 2000 I had sitting around was a pain.  Bloated MessySoft software… *grumble, grumble, gripe, complain*

Well, at least the lowest cersion of Word the thing will work with is Word 2000, which is bad enough but at least not as bad as having to install later versions.  I swear, M$ must think that “improving” software simply means adding code bloat through bling-bling addons.

*Sigh*

Here’s the installation file for the Blogger for Word plugin, if ya wanna try it out (and don’t mind—too much—having to have Word installed).

Oh, I see one thing that’s NOT gonna save me any time. I’ll still have to edit the posts manually to add “open in new window” to links. No biggie.

UPDATE: BTW, can edit the raw html easily using this plugin, cos when ya hit “publish” and chose the blog to publish to, etc., a window pops up with the editable html to edit/approve, whatever.  Makes it kinda easy.

Banning the “W” word

Believe it or don’t. The Yelm WA city council had banned speech about Wal-Mart in city council meetings.  Seems council members tired of hearing citizens views (one way or the other) about the possibility of a Wal-Mart being built in their town of around 5,000. The council apparently set a date for a meeting on the issue and has cut off all comment on it in council meetings—by council members or the public—until that date

Whatever. They’d never get away with that sort of high handedness here in America’s Third World Countyâ„¢.
    

Amazing.  No other words.

As far as I’m concerned, LTC Erik Kurilla of the Deuce-Four (Mosul, Iraq) IS Superman. Seriously.

Mosul.

Read The WHOLE Thing.

LTC Kurilla is wounded, but doing well. Pray for his swift recovery.

(Go ahead, make Michael Yon’s blog a regular stop. The stories he relates blow me away.)

(Trying to help Michelle Malkin out by promoting this post/story at Whizbang and Outside the Beltway, too.  *LOL*)

Edited to include the links to Malkin’s flog of the story and the Whizbang and OTB linkfests.

Drive-by posting.

Over at Random Rambling, Richard discovers he’s attending school with royalty. Riiiggghht…

NIF has a typical roundup of News, Interesting, Funny *and weird
:-).

The Weapon by Michael Z. Williamson is available from Baen Books in hardback or ebook. (Also available from Amazon.com.)

Kris has a couple of off-the-wall stories she’s linked to today.

Instapundit dethroned by Michelle Malkin.

Well, that’s all for now. Lots more good stuff on my blogroll.

If you can read this, it’s a miracle

About 1.3 million students nationwide drop out of school between eighth and 12th grades each year. They’re frustrated because they can’t read well enough to keep up, bored by their courses and teachers or just unmotivated to stay in school. The implications for the nation’s economic vitality are “far-reaching and devastating,” according to a Harvard University report. “High school dropouts are far more likely to be unemployed, in prison and living in poverty.”

The same verdict is reached in other recent studies by the Educational Testing Service (ETS) of Princeton, N.J., and the Manhattan Institute of New York City.

“This is a story of losing ground,” researcher Paul E. Barton says in the ETS report.

They can’t read. We know how to teach kids to read. My wife’s program does it using computers, and it works, for ages 4 to 74 and IQ from dull to genius; but the schools can’t teach them to read, because they have a bunch of crazy theories that teachers are required to learn. The theories don’t work, and lots of kids don’t learn to read.

Step #1 to growing a generation of students who can and do read: eliminate a;; the education bureaucrats and administrators. Step #2: eliminate universities’ schools or departments of education. Step#3: return schools to genuinely local control, taking the feds—and even the states!—out of the equation.

But it’ll never happen.

The only other viable alternative? Families who are willing to forgo the economic advantages of a two-income family and choose to teach their own at home. And that’s about as viable as getting families to give up mush-for-brains TV programming.

ACLU—All Criminal Lies Unleashed

Thursday’s Stop the ACLU blogburst almost makes me sick. Contemplating the darling of the Mass Media Podpeople’s Army and the Loony Left Moonbat Brigade, the ACLU, turns my stomach, because there is no truth, no beauty, no just and righteous cause that the ACLU will not twist into a lie.

Freedom of speech? No, no, says the ACLU: freedom of expression. The Founders and Framers had no idea what they were taking about when they intentionally excluded “expression” and intentionally included specific forms of expression (religious speech and activity, political speech and written political commentary). No, according to the ACLU—and the Warren Court, and those following via stare decisis—any old splash of paint (or urine or feces) or grunt or moan or scream is now protected “speech”. Why? Cos they say so.

And to the ACLU a special form of protected speech is advocating the rape of children by homosexual men. Truth.

Freedom of religion? No, no, says the ACLU. Freedom from religion. No public display of religious beliefs are acceptable—oh, unless they be public displays of religious beliefs by m,urdering Islamofascist savages (_1_, _2_), Rastafarians, or Voodoo. Nope, if the ACLU has its way, the only religious beliefs that will be found in the public arena will be “anything but”—anything but dat ole black evil, Christianity.

Government protecting its citizens fromreligiously-excused women-raping (_1_, _2_, _3_) and mutilating, murdering savage slavers? Nope. Can’t have a government that takes sensible steps to isolate members of a religious sect that advocate, plan and carry out acts of unspeakable violence in the name of their moon god. Better to eliminate the evil of school children singing Christmas carols in public.

Get this through your head: the ACLU as an organization hates you, will lie to you and is working toward YOUR destruction.

There, have I said it plainly enough?

Of course, the ACLU will lie about that, too.

This was a production of Stop The ACLU blogburst. Almost 100 blogs already on board. If you want to join us go to our portal and register. Its very simple. We will add you to the mailing list and send you the rest of the info at that point.

“It is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and hang them. Build your funeral pyre and beside it my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your national custom – then we shall follow ours.”–Sir Charles Napier, speaking of the Indian practice of suttee.

The permafrost melting scare seems to be evaporating.

Russian scientists at the Institute of Climatology and Ecology of the Russian Academy of Sciences and Russian Academy of Sciences’ Institute of the Cryosphere say scaremongering about permafrost melting is much ado about nothing.

From the August 22, 2005 posting of RIA Novosti, “This is just another scare story, this time about the Siberian swamps.”–Academician Vladimir Melnikov, Institute of the Cryosphere.

As Melnikov pointed out, “Both scientific findings and experience suggest that small lakes result from irregularities when laying oil and gas pipes and other engineering systems… [b]ut the scale on which new formations are appearing is small, and they do not pose any threat.”

Melnikov also pointed out that the naturally-occurring Siberian swamps’ methane deposits, far from posing a hazard actually bind CO2, thus drawing down a major greenhouse gas.

Institute of Climatology and Ecology of the Russian Academy of Sciences directorYuri Izrael notes that there has been no significant change in the permafrost boundries, and he adds that the sublimation of moisture from the natural swamps which formed the basis of the scaremongering actually serves to cool the atmosphere.

So, apparently we can chill out on this one.

Crossposted at Balanced Newsblog

h.t. Jerry Pournelle’s Chaos Manor Mail

Self-induced Liberalist Scotomata:the unkindest blind spots of all (with apologies to The Bard)…

An essential component allowing the creation and ongoing existence of the liberalist “reality-based (fantasy) community,” SLS (Self-induced Liberalist Scotomata) is a little understood mental disorder. In fact, as dominated by liberalist thinking as the DSM-IV is, you’ll not find it listed there, along with many other mental-emotional disorders such as pure human evil.

heh

If the Great Satan (G.W. Bush, to a liberalist) were to say the sky is blue, liberalists suffering from SLS would shout, shout and shout again that it was a lie, and besides it’s Bush’s fault.

There, now you can recognize SLS. Next, N-CHUA (Neo-Conservative Head Up… ) Syndrome.

(edited to remove a lotta blogger-induced crap in the html)