Day: October 25, 2006

Well, PC Magazine’s sticking it’s nose in the air again. I dunno… where do they think their major readership is from?

Dialling in Dual Phones is a decent enough article, but the title just about gave me a rash. Who do they think they are giving the term a British spelling? An American invented the rotary dial, from whence the term “dialing” came into general usage… especially “dialing in” referring to phone usage, so using the British spelling of “dialing” is doubly irritating.

Yeh, yeh: picky, picky, picky. So? When in America, spell as Americans do.

Oh, and don’t try speaking Spanish to me, either. I’m trying to forget whatever I learned in my years of Spanish classes and living on the Texas/Mexico border. Let ’em all speak and write American English if they wanna be here. Yeh, not even Brit English, as long as they’re writing for a mostly American audience.

Snooty writers…

*heh*

On my way to a busy day mostly away from access to twc, so if y’all trackback or comment here and your tbs/comments don’t show right away, just hang in there; I’ll be back to pull things from my moderation queue later.

Meanwhile, a quick lil cat health tip.

Our largest (most, urm, “assertive”) cat had a weight problem. She’d bully the other cats away from the food bowls and scarf things down until her “sufficiency had been surrensified” as my ole pa used to put it “back in the day.”

Soooo… after long time working at various solutions: bowls of cat food in widely separated places only helped a little. The other cats seem to “snack” at their food, so she’d go raid those bowls between scarfs of her own; putting down less food simply penalized the other two. What to do?

After multiple experiments, I think I may have finally hit on a solution. I found a food (a combo of two foods) the other two like but that she does not. Oh, when she’s truly hungry enough, she’ll eat it, but otherwise, she turns her nose up at it, while the other two eat to their hearts’ content.

Big girl has lost weight and stabilized at a more healthy configuration. The other two seem fine.

Now, when I serve them their food, I can do it all in one handy (for me) location. Big girl simply looks at me with disgust and walks away after a few sniffs and/or, grudging nibbles… but she does come back later when she’s really hungry.

I wonder how that would work with people? Purina Monkey Chow? An “All you can eat” diet. Complete nutrition but too disgusting for even chubbos to want to eat…

I wonder what Stuck On Stupid thinks of the idea…

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See Chaotic Synaptic Activity’s crosspost here for more detailed analysis of some of the presenting problems/opportunities of the Iraq War, and then… and then there are my lil semi-incoherent ramblings…

It seems to me that the Iraq War presents us with a set of unique advantages we did NOT have in Vietnam :

• The tribal, religious and cultural divides (Advantage? Yes, but only if someone in the feddle gummint with real influence has both the brains and the balls to take advantage of these factors)
• A growing awareness of the lies of the Mass Media Podpeoples’ Hivemind culture among more and more Americans
• The simple fact that a partitioned Iraq would create more problems for Islamic terrorists while at the same time going a long way toward providing a potential for some sort of peaceful resolution to the area… at least for the Kurds (leaving aside for the moment the problem of Turkey–a real but handleable problem for the Kurds, who, after all are still Saracens at heart. *heh*).

The problem with these factors is that there is literally no one in the feddle gummint who is in a position to use them AND has the simple intellectual horsepower to recognize them AND the balls to take advantage of them and run with them.

Paul Bremmer set the stage for a very real potential for American failure by disbanding the Iraqi Army (90%+ of whom were not rabid Baathists), ignoring (insulting) tribal leaders and playing proconsul. Of course, the fact that he did so with the full knowledge and support of the Bush administration compounded his sins.

But all we need is for one voice in the feddle gummint–one voice with real influence–to stand up and call the emperor’s butt-naked behind what it is. Could you say steamroll? I think public opinion could really burgeon in favor of a partitioned Iraq if all the facts were clearly explained.

“OK, kids. Since you can’t play nicely together, go to your separate rooms. No soup for you.”

Then, if they wanna keep on fighting, they can play Kilkenny Cats until the cows come home and it’s not be a threat to us.

“We tried to help, but these folks are just too backward and savage for a civilized solution.”

Until this last weekend, I was pretty much stumped as to how, in this age of access to incredible amounts of information, without even laving your home or office, a significant number of people in this country could continually claim the US Government was behind the 9/11 attacks.

I have long held that the images coming out of Hollywood have had an undercurrent of an effect on many parts of society, particularly with the tend to show all adults as either stupid, ignorant, or corrupt (or any combination of those) and only children were capable of seeing the real danger, finding the real criminals, or knowing the truth. That has sent a subliminal message that anoyone of authority can’t be trusted, and, we see the results in the legal system.

This past Saturday, I was channel surfing and the last 30 minutes of “The X-Files” movie was on. I settled back on the couch and then a “BFO” (Blinding flash of the obvious) hit me. I didn’t know for how long, but I knew that series had been aroound a long time. I just looked it up: Begun in 1993, and ran through 2002. The movie was out in 1998.

The popularity of this series, which showed not just the US, but a world shadow organization, was cooperating with the aliens, and doing what ever they needed to do to keep this alliance a secret.

From Wikipedia:

The X-Files was one of the network’s first major hits, and its main characters and slogans (“The Truth Is Out There,” “Trust No One,” “Deny Everything,” “I Want to Believe”) became pop culture touchstones, simultaneously tapping into and inspiring a plethora of conspiracy theories, paranoia about the U.S. government, and belief in the existence of extraterrestrial life.

The “Generation C” types have grown up with a well done fictional series, and have failed to discern between truth and fiction.

I think this may help explain the vast numbers of our citizens who believe the Government is behind all of the GWoT, because, we all know….The truth is out there.

Originally posted at: Chaotic Synaptic Activity