Open Trackbacks – Page 4 – third world county

May 28, 2008

Of “Snips and Snails and… ” Locusts

Olde Phartes can be “little boys” too. *heh*

Tuesday was eaten by the less creative side of ADHD. Details, details, details. Oh. Well. Wednesday is another day, eh?

What have we in the public square today?

An ex-presidential press secretary demonstrates that if one associates with Mass Media Podpeople long enough, one almost inevitably, in a nowadays not-so-remarkable display of reverse peristalsis, begins to spew shit. Dog bites man. *yawn*

The Hildebeast–SHOCK!–actually knows the chronology of the 1968 presidential race (or at least some of it). What an amazing, “newsworthy” thing! Again: dog-man-yawn. Of course, she does still have a tin ear for off-the-cuff remarks.

Meanwhile, Michelle Obamamama is just hunky dory with Barry Hussein Obama-Winfrey going out to the gas station while black. (Again, as someone who’s witnessed “up close and personal”–as in, “standing between the participants” *heh*–black on black gunfire, dog-man-yawn.)

Juan Mexicain reneges on border control before amnesty (not that that was a decent stance to begin with). Dog-man-yawn… What?!?! You thought he was at least an “honorable man”? He’s a 100%, dyed-in-the-wool politician *spit*, dummie.

Scratch that: he’s a He’s a 100%, dyed-in-the-wool American politician *spit*, dummie. Here’s some REAL news from the world of politics, grownup style; “Man bites dog” news! *heh* Czech President Vaclav Klaus has thrown down the gauntlet to Algore and his lying loonies:

Czech President Vaclav Klaus said Tuesday he is ready to debate Al Gore about global warming, as he presented the English version of his latest book that argues environmentalism poses a threat to basic human freedoms.

Well, dress me up as flabbergasted and fry me in lard. A politician with balls and brains. Let’s amend the constitution to allow intelligent, principled people to run for president. Yeh, the amendment will be required, because we’ll apparently have to import them from Czechoslovakia.

I can just see that Cowardly Liar (or Lying Cowardly Dog) agreeing to debate a grownup on his lies. Not. (“Cowardly Liar”? Well, the liar part’s a given, just on the public record. Cowardly though? What else would you call someone who will not allow any questions he hasn’t approved in advance and who refuses to allow actual recordings of his speeches? In my book that makes him an intellectual chickenshit.)

Future News: Newsflash! Gore ducks debate!

Nah, the Mass Media Podpeople Hivemind would never report that.

THIS is an open trackbacks post. 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.

May 26, 2008May 26, 2008

Memorial Day Curmudgeonry

What?!? Curmudgeonry on Memorial Day?!?

Yep.

Memorial Day, originally called Decoration Day, is a day of remembrance for those who have died in our nation’s service.

And so it ought to be ever. But. Along with all the very suitable observances in honor of “those who have died in our nation’s service,” what has happened in our ever more debased society is that folks have more and more taken this observance as an opportunity for lesser “observances” of various kinds:

just another holiday for attending (or simply couch-potatoing) sports events, barbequeues, ordinary recreation

religious observances that illegitimately conflate the worship of God and “worship” of country (*yech*)

remembrance of any old family member or whatever who’s passed away (not in service to country)

No, most of those things aren’t necessarily bad things to do (well, sitting on ones kiester watching someone else accomplish something–no matter how worthless the accomplishment, couch potato style–is just a waste of time any time one does it). But NONE of those serve to honor our country’s fallen, and all do dishonor to those who gave their lives to preserve our liberties by the cheapening of Memorial Day, as long as those things are the focus of the holiday.

(OK, one of those things is just wrong in and of itself–far, far worse than laying couch potato. I’ll let you infer which I choose.)

Ah, but it’s all in the life of the Common Man: everything reduced not just to the lowest common denominator but reduced to the lowest denominator, period, as with everything else in our society: music, (graphic and performance) art, so-called literature, politics, public discourse (lower than low, that is, the Mass Media Podpeople Hivemind sets the agenda and controls the ~~dialogue~~ monologue).

*pfui*

Instead of any of those lesser “observances” above, consider Moina Michael‘s observation in response to John McRae’s “In FLanders Fields,”

We Shall Keep the Faith

by Moina Michael, November 1918

Oh! you who sleep in Flanders Fields,
Sleep sweet – to rise anew!
We caught the torch you threw
And holding high, we keep the Faith
With All who died.

We cherish, too, the poppy red
That grows on fields where valor led;
It seems to signal to the skies
That blood of heroes never dies,
But lends a lustre to the red
Of the flower that blooms above the dead
In Flanders Fields.

And now the Torch and Poppy Red
We wear in honor of our dead.
Fear not that ye have died for naught;
We’ll teach the lesson that ye wrought
In Flanders Fields.

And buy a poppy (“make a donation” :-)) from the VFW member selling them at WallyWorld or wherever while you’re out and about.

And wear it.

It’s the least you can do.

But further,

In Flanders Fields

by John McCrae, May 1915

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep,
though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

Yes, I added the emphasis to McRae’s words. Heed them well, especially in this election year. The “foe” with whom we must “quarrel” nowadays may look and sound a bit different than in McRae’s 1915 or Michael’s 1918, but at least they’re easy to spot: they’re all running for office.

THIS is an open trackbacks post. Link to THIS post and track back. 🙂

May 21, 2008

Vital Signs

Some signs that the electorate is too stupid for the job it has:

Sitcoms. Slick cons making money off shows so stupid they have to have laugh tracks to tell the idiots who watch them when they’re “funny”. And those same idiots can vote.

Nightly “News” programs. People still watch these transparent propaganda things? Yes, they do. In a sane society, those who watch nightly “news” programs from the Mass Media Podpeople’s Hivemind would have their ballots sent straight to the crapper.

Contemporary so-called “music” and other entertainment. Heck, just the fact that the new Indiana Jones movie is blockbuster news (even I, avoiding TV bubblehad “news” like the plague, haven’t been able to escape the blitz) is enough to convince a sane person that our society has gone round the bend.

Congress. That this organ is filled with liars, poltroons, idiots, scumbags and creeps is evidence that the electorate is too stupid or corrupt (or both) to do its job properly.

Examples abound: our society is full to the brim with “people” (maybe they’re just minor podpeople performing the scut work for the Mass Media Podpeople’s Hivemind, who knows?) who are dumber than a bag of hammers… and still get to vote.

We are doomed. Doomed, I say.

THIS is an open trackbacks post. Link to THIS post and track back. 🙂

May 19, 2008

Monday, Monday… Every other day…..

…every other day,
Every other day of the week is fine, yeah…

*heh*

Meanwhile, gratefully taking a break from Monday (and a break from Dhimmicraps, Repugnican’ts and other evils) to jot a post.

A cardinal principle to remember when purchasing anything: price is not cost. Sometimes (often, in fact), a lower price will mean a higher cost down the road. Sometimes, not all that far down the road.

Example: I haven’t mentioned before how much I despise a certain vintage* of eMachine “computers” have I?

Just a mild warning: if you happen to have allowed yourself to be sucked into buying one of the eMachine cheapo pieces of crap

1. Never trust ANY important data to one
2. Replace the power supply FIRST THING, as soon as you get it out of the box, before turning the *&%^#* thing on. Just sayin’
3. Get some real surge suppression between the thing and any electricity, cos the MOBOS aren’t much better than the power supplies.

Today, I had to tell another person who brought their eMachine to me that it’d cost about what it originally cost him simply to repair the thing… cos the cheapo power supply failed and tooik the motherboard out with it.

If you already have one of the things (shame on you for buying strictly on price!), back up your data and start putting money back to buy a new computer. Or build one from parts.**

*“certain vintage” to mean… darned near ALL of the *&%^#* things. *heh* Of course, this is only one guy’s opinion, but… based on at least some experience over the years.

**June micro-mini-project for America’s Third World County Central: build my first completely new computer in several years from parts. I’ve tended in recent years to take discards and upgrade them to make them useful for my personal use. Nice computers, but I need to do some consolidating, streamlining of my office: just too many boxes and monitors jamming things up. So, my next computer is just awaiting assembly time.

AM2 motherboard (choice is now down to one of two).
Athlon 64X2 (dual core) 5600+ (nice sweet spot)
4GB Crucial memory (my preferred brand)
500GB Seagate HDD
Plextor DVDRW
512MB PCIex vidcard
Nice steel case and good (but not best, which would be PC Power and Cooling) 500W power supply

And a few other goodies, including an external Seagate to match my onboard storage.

To run the thing: testing out several flavors of Linux this month to see which I prefer. So far, even with stiff competition from Linux Mint and PCLOS, Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron is still looking pretty good to me. Run the 64-bit version on the 64-bit Athlon based comp; VirtualBox (or VMWare–still testing these) to allow running Win98 (for my music transcription software), WinXP and maybe even PCBSD 1.5 in virtual machines inside the Linux OS.

That’d give me most of the computers I really need to run right there in one box, without the need to use the clumsy KVM switch I now use for several boxes.

Heck, maybe I’ll even switch out my 61-key MIDI keyboard for a smaller controller so I can save even more desktop space to spread my other mess out on. *heh* I like this one (even though I have this one sitting in a box somewhere *heh*)

Well, back to the salt mines.

Riiiiiight… (Cue Moody Blues: “Lazy day… “)

THIS is an open trackbacks post. Link to THIS post and track back. 🙂

May 16, 2008

The Sound of Music

The sound of music today is… not so musical.

The manufactured sounds of contemporary rock, hip-hop, country and etc., are stale, boring, and often completely UNmusical. So-called “artists” who can neither find nor maintain pitch (admittedly those who pass as “country music singers” nowadays usually have a BIG edge over most in other genres in at least finding pitches) seem to dominate the manufactured music market.

Of course they do. Most people nowadays can’t hear thunder. Data point: anyone reading this who can discern pitches need only think back to the first few weeks of any season of American Idol. Think of all the completely clueless, tone-deaf aspirants who auditioned. They are among the best of the population in general.

Yes, most people in our society today are tone deaf. And I lay the “blame”–such as it is–at the feet of lazy generations of folks who have let the radio (and the technologies that followed it) make their music for them, instead of making their own music. You see, true tone deafness is extremely rare, but most folks nowadays have never bothered to learn to sing, play an instrument or even whistle a tune. Oh, as American Idol evidences, many folks think they can sing, but obviously cannot.

Heck, I spent more than a few years teaching music (both vocal and instrumental) in various settings and venues. Even kids who self-select to be in band or orchestra far, far more often than not came to the classes–in fifth or sixth grade… and even more sadly after several years of “instruction” by others–with only the vaguest idea of pitch differentiation. And I have heard “award-winning” high school bands that have never been introduced to that old Chinese gentleman, Tun-ing.

Go to a church, once one of the cultural bastions of vocal/choral music, and simply listen (if you’re one of the minority of those who can differentiate pitches). Horrible. Listless voices. Tuneless congregational singing. A far cry from the days of my youth (and even then it was not rare to find pockets of poor singing. The slide into musical illiteracy has been long).

My dad belongs to a church that has such congregational singing. It tries to make up for it by having a “praise band” and singers up front to “lead” the singing. Interesting thing: most of the instrumentalists in the band are in their 60s, 70s and even, like my dad, 80s. They come from generations when making their own music was still a common thing. (In his youth, for example, my dad and a bunch of his buddies bought a HUGE repertoire of charts of the swing music that was then popular and drove all over their home state playing gigs. As a real band, not some five-piece small ensemble that passes for bands nowadays.)

The musical illiteracy and lack of tone perception that is rampant nowadays is appalling.

For those few who can sing along without having some mindless drone from an electronic crutch, let me offer these chilling (yes, chilling) words from The Sound of Music:

When you know the notes to sing
You can sing most any thing.

Now, that’s a depressing thought in the face of American lack of musicality.

(Lest you think me some sort of pseudo-intellectual musical snob, academic/”serious” music nowadays is often worse thasn any of the pop genres. Heck, there’s more–much more–to appreciate in the musical wasteland of manufactured country, hip-hop, etc., than in the land of contemporary “serious” music. *sigh*)

THIS is an open trackbacks post. Link to THIS post and track back. 🙂

May 14, 2008May 14, 2008

Add These to Your “Prayer List”

Lovely Daughter sent me this link a couple of days ago, and I just now found it in a backlog of email. Among the quotes featured there I found this:

When the Reverend Edward Everett Hale was chaplain of the U.S. Senate, he was asked if he prayed for the Senators.

“No,” he said. “I look at the Senators and pray for the country.”

Amen.

Then, there’s this one, that ought to suggest “active prayers” (getting out and doing something about a problem) about the situation it portrays:

During one of his campaigns against President Eisenhower, Adlai Stevenson was approached by a supporter.

“Governor, every thinking person will be voting for you,” she told Stevenson.

“Madam, that’s not enough,” he replied. “I need a majority.”

(*sigh* One of the BIG reasons we have the Congress we have and probably THE reason we have the loons and poltroons we have running for president this year.)

THIS is an open trackbacks post. Link to THIS post and track back. 🙂

May 13, 2008May 13, 2008

Quote for the Day

Heck, this could be one of those comments that becomes a twc staple.

Reading in another pice of light reading for the past hour or so, a book from the Eric Flint-created Assiti Shards Series. That and the Belisarius Saga series are two of the most interesting “time travel/alternate reality” sets of books written in the past twenty of so years, IMO.

(All of them require some serious suspension-of-disbelief for the simple vast amount of distance in space required for any kind of time travel–especially the Assiti Shards books, as the Belisarius books feature an apparently different type of time travel–but the stories are generally interesting, especially if one is a history addict *heh*)

At any rate, Time Spike (Eric Flint with Marilyn Kosmatka) features a conversation in chapter 17 between a number of scientists and two odd men out (one’s a cop) that contains THE quote for today:

“We’re Ph.D.’s, don’t forget. Probably a bigger concentration of fruitcakes in academia than anywhere else.”

Preach on, brother!

*heh*

Oh, and another, from later in the book, is worth thinking on as well:

The ‘guv’mint’ is just something way over there, powerful and immense and unyielding to any personal leverage you might have. Sure, once every two or four years you get to vote, but that’s just so you can pick which big shot sits on top of the pile. You still don’t have any leverage yourself.

Sadly, all too true.

THIS is an open trackbacks post. Link to THIS post and track back. 🙂

May 9, 2008May 9, 2008

This weekend…

…is starting early for me. I’m going to be playing with Virtualbox, and I’m putting other things in… another box, for now. (Lovely Daughter’s dropping by Saturday, so that day’s out *heh*)

Meanwhile, THIS is an open trackbacks post, open all weekend long. Link to THIS post and track back. 🙂

May 6, 2008

When memory fails…

…there’s the web.

For some obscure reason (well, obscured from my knowledge), I thought about Tattoo today. No, not body disfiguring by savages or Ricardo Montalban’s one-time sidekick, Tattoo the bugle call. I was rocking along just fine until the third phrase (the first two are virtually the same) of this longest of standard bugle calls eluded my flagging memory, so…

Via google, I hied meself off to the definitive bugle call resource on the web, at the U.S. Army Band’s site. Aha! That’s how that third phrase goes, I realized. Nice that the site includes both an mp3 file and the “sheet music” for download/listening/viewing/printing.

Reason #1,546,432 why I love the web. (Yeh, for those of y’all who read my reason #1,546,328, I’ve found a few more since then :-))

THIS is an open trackbacks post. Link to THIS post and track back. 🙂

April 29, 2008

A Dilbertian Metacommentary

A CLICK ON Terms of Use at Dilbert.com yields a metacommentary on life, and all that…

The wonderful world of Dilbert, indeed.

THIS is an open trackbacks post. Link to THIS post and track back. 🙂

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.