If I were ever to have a Neon car, I’d want it painted a bright, “neon yellow.” And since we name our cars, I’d have to name it…
Leon Deon Neon Neon.
(My dad suggested Old Yeller, but I don’t think I’d wanna go there.)
Four &^%*#$ Things… :-)
Well, some time ago Mel tagged me with the pseudo-meme-ish tag game “Four Things”. I promised her I’d get A Round Toit Real Soon Now. I didn’t put as much into it as Diane did (fine job, D!)
Four things about four eleven (or however many; I lost track after “many”) things:
Four Jobs You’ve Had In Your Life
Two different categories shown here, of many: the weird and the “to be avoided at all costs”.
1. First wage-slave job: pocket presser (on an assembly line for jeans). $1.15/hour. (Weird)
2. Taught chess at a “Y”. Not bad $$ for a college kid in t 19*cough-cough*s. Paid per kid, so was better per hour rate than I’d have gotten elsewhere at the time. (Weird)
3. Sold insurance. hated every damned day of going to work. Hated. It. (TBAAAC)
4. Taught *shudder* public school. Band. (TBAAAC)
Four Movies You Could Watch Over And Over
1. Bean
2. LOTR
3. _____
4. _____
(Not a big fan of movies. Where’s the book?)
Four Places You’ve Lived
(these are not in chronological order)
1. El Paso, Tx
2. Phoenix AZ
3. KCMO
4. Ardmore, OK
Four TV Shows You Love Can Stand To Watch
1. Smallville—can’t wait to see how the writers are going to screw up the “Superman mythos” each week. And John Glover is perfect as Mephistopheles Lionel Luthor.
2. House—that acerbic bastard just makes me smile.
3. Sherlock Holmes—the Jeremy Brent version. I don’t care if Brent is dead and the show is only shown every now and then in reruns. The BEST Sherlock Holmes depiction, ever, outside the books themselves. OK, this one I do “love.”
4. Dr. Who, the Tom Baker era. Corny, camp, just plain fun old sci-fi. Of course the Doctor is coming to the Sci Fi Channel in March, but it’s the “newest” Dr. Who, I think, so it may have less cheesy production values (part of the Tom Baker-and-earlier era charm), but I may watch it anyway.
Four Places You’ve Been On Vacation
1. Disneyland/SoCal, yadayada.
2. Camping “tour” of kivas/cliff dwellings in CO/NM
3. Bahamas
4. Sulphur, OK “camping” (if you can call it that).
Four Blogs You Visit Daily
(or try to–heh)
1. Diane’s Stuff/The English Guy
2. Cathouse Chat
3. Chaos Manor
4. Big Lizards/All Things Beautiful
(Yeh, I cheated a bit. There are MANY more I try to visit every day… the ones above are very rarely NOT visited daily.)
Four Of Your Favourite Foods
1. Coffee. It is TOO food!
2. Enchiladas, MY way.
3. Ice Cream
4. “Wasabi” peas
Four Places You’d Rather Be
1. Wherever my Wonder Woman is.
2. In the deer woods (lined up on a buck… )
3. Nowhere else
4. Nowhere else
Four Albums You Can’t Live Without
1. Nothing really to give ya here. Too much music listened to/played/sung. S’all in my head, anyway.
2. Ahhh, throw in several Beethoven, Mozart, Sibelius, Handel, albums, etc.
3. Various cuts from several PPM albums, maybe.
4. What? I have to choose between Wynton Marsallis, Benny Goodman, Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington? Not gonna choose.
Four Vehicles You’ve Owned
1. 1953 Chevy Bel-Air Sedan—classic two-toned job. Made the mistake of letting someone else drive it while I was touring one summer…
2. 1965 Rambler American—a cream puff. Died in a head-on. (Doof didn’t know which side of the double lines to drive on.)
3. 1972 Jaguar XJ-12—a luxurious money pit. Only dependable parts were the GM parts. Lucas Electrics? Feh! Stromberg-Carlson carbs (4 of the damned things)? Double Quadruple feh!
4. 1976 Toyota Corolla—my “baby Japanese Mercedes.” 260,000 miles, and I sold it cos I was just tired of it. Kicked myself a few times for that.
All gone, now, of course…
Four People To Be Tagged
*sigh*
1. Romeocat, Cathouse Chat
2. Nancy, Soliloguy
3. Christine, BTW
4. Lyn, Bloggin’ Outloud
Give the ACLU a dope slap
I just got this email from John Stephenson. Let’s get with it, folks!
Yesterday we announced that we would be joining Debbie Schlussel, blogger/investigative writer/lawyer as the primary intervening party against the ACLU in their case challenging the NSA. We now have more details. Every person that wants to be involved will need to email her with their address, and othe info. She will send them an affidavit to sign. No cost to anyone. As nice as it is for her to do this all for free, we have set up our donation button in an attempt to raise the $250 it will cost to file the affidavit. It would be greatly appreciated if some of you could send some readers. Perhaps we can find some generous donors for this worthy cause. Thanks, Jay Please share…
Praticing my dope slap (“air whiffs” only 🙂 at Conservative Cat
Stop. Look. Listen.
Woody has a translation of bin Laden’s real message posted.
Space travel, “atomic style”
You have to check this out!
The concept’s been around for a while: throw a buncha atomic bombs out the back end and let ’em push… This puppy’s “do-able” in a much nearer time frame than a test bed for a “warp drive” that’s in research now. (Only real barrier? Whiny crybabies scared of the boogyman “A-Bomb”.)
Mars, anyone?
The cat’s outa the cradle over at Adam’s Blog and bombshells are dropping (what a waste of thrust!) at TMH’s Bacon Bits.
Edu-rant/0PEN P0ST
Note the 0PEN P0ST info below the edu-rant.
Found this (just a snippet here) over at Jerry Pournelle’s Chaos Manor. Fits well with Fred Reeed’s rant posted the other day as “Enstupiated” Americans.
At one time you could study to be an American, and if you adopted the American Way, which was never narrowly defined but we sort of knew what the American Way of Life was, your origin did not matter a bit. You spoke English, you adhered to Judao-Christian ethics, you vaguely recognized the sovereignty of God and the notion of Divine Providence and some notion that there was a power higher than the will of the people, but mostly the local will of the people and consent of the governed prevailed. Courts decided cases on as narrow grounds as possible precisely to avoid setting out vast and vague rules that enhanced the power of the bureaucracy. But that was long ago.
But, you see, we can no longer require that immigrants learn this stuff, because we no longer know it. Heck, college grads nowadays mostly can’t even read or reason through exceptionally simple documents (now labeled “complex reading” in order to make the idiot grads feel better about being stupid, no doubt). From an AP story, “Study: Most College Students Lack Skills”
Nearing a diploma, most college students cannot handle many complex but common tasks, from understanding credit card offers to comparing the cost per ounce of food.Those are the sobering findings of a study of literacy on college campuses, the first to target the skills of students as they approach the start of their careers.More than 50 percent of students at four-year schools and more than 75 percent at two-year colleges lacked the skills to perform complex literacy tasks.That means they could not interpret a table about exercise and blood pressure, understand the arguments of newspaper editorials, compare credit card offers with different interest rates and annual fees or summarize results of a survey about parental involvement in school.
Well, duh. Anyone who can and does read knows by now that you have, at best, a 50-50 chance of having an intelligent conversation with recent college grads. NONE of those “complex literary tasks” listed above are. Complex, that is. Not. One.
But this is no surprise, is it? After all, all the national adult literacy surveys of ther past 15 or so years have shown that America is becoming an illiterate nation. And that 50+% of college grads who can’t handle reading and understanding simple documents? I’ll bet you at least 90% of pubschool (prisons for kids) administrators are grouped in that class. And how many of those illiterate dunces are “teaching” in our nation’s classrooms?
No wonder, given the assault on Western Civilization mounted by Loony Left Moonbats, Mass Media Podpeople (“disinformation for sub- and illiterate sheeple”) and their ilk, that people who can’t read and comprehend, don’t. And so, it’s even less wonder that most American’s have no idea what the Founders and Framers were up to; have less idea what a wonderous thing was handed to us in the Amwerican State Papers and other founding documents and acts of those early Americans.
It’s not just history, folks, it’s a wealth of cultural memes and other gifts that are simply not at all available to people glued to their TVs or listening to cRap “music” (or darned near anything “pop-cultural”).
Illiterate college grads? Heck, illiterate college profs. Kris, at Anywhere But Here, cites one example. Why do I call a grad class English prof who had no idea what the story the class was assigned (by her) was patterne after “illiterate”? Read the post at Kris’ place.
I have a ton of those myself. My fav is of the head on an English department at a well-respected East Coast university who asked me once if my citation in an (online) argument of “sound and fury, signifying nothing” were a reference to Faulkner. Seriously. This head of a well-respected English department had never read Macbeth.
Let that soak in: head of English department. Had. Never. Read. Macbeth. Or any other Shakespearean work, it turned out…
Second-greatest influence on the English language, and the self-made idiot had never read a word of his work.
Once, simply saying, “Once more unto the breach…” brought a meme into play. Not just the words from Henry V,
Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more,
Or close the wall up with our English dead!
In peace there’s nothing so becomes a man
As modest stillness and humility;
But when the blast of war blows in our ears,
Then imitate the action of the tiger:
Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood…
“Henry V” (5.3.44-51)
But also the history of the conflict behind the play and what importance it had for our own culture and system of government.
You can bet your bottom dollar the Founders knew-and understood-the impact Henry had on England, and what his reign meant in terms of an Englishman’s (by extension, all Americans) rights and duties… as well as the proper rights and duties of a reigning monarch.
And I know my grandfather knew, for he explained much of my foundational knowledge of such things to me when I was a child.
But people who cannot read, who cannot follow a line of reasoning, will fall prey to anyone who tickles their ears. Exactly like most of our contrymen today.
As I said before, this is an 0PEN P0ST, all weekend long. Link to this post and trackback. TMH tells you how:
Kindly add a reciprocal link to this post. (What’s a trackback? Bad Example explains.) If your blog software can’t send trackbacks you can use Wizbang’s Standalone Trackback Pinger. If you have trouble, please leave a comment…
See for more linkfests, as well as the Open Trackback Alliance
TP-ed at TMH’s Bacon Bits (and others as time permits later).
Expressing “Solidarity” with N’awlins Blacks: $20
Chapping the gizzards of your pseudo-liberal friends: priceless.
Via Worldnet Daily
Laughing myself silly (yeh, I know, I know: a superfluous redundancy) at TMH’s Bacon Bits
“Neca eos omnes. Deus suos agnoscet.”
curmudgeonly rant/ON
In 1209, Arnaud-Amaury, the Abbot of Citeaux, won his place in history with a memorable quote. Referring to the people of Beziers in Southern France, he issued the edict, “Kill them all; God will know his own.”
Barbarous, eh? Unconscionable, right? But still historically atypical of Christianity, even of a Roman Catholicism once drunk on the Inquisition.
But the strange thing is that this philosophy has always been (recall Mohamed’s slaughter and enslavement of the Jews of Medina after he accepted their surrender with promises of fair treatment?) and still is a central theological tenet of Islam: submit or die.
I propose we begin considering applying moral equivalency to Islam. Say, not in effect but in fact, to Muslims, “You believe you have the right to kill people who refuse to believe as you do? Fine. Submit or die. Renounce Islam or die.”
Start with Saudi Arabia (and all the other little kleptocratic regimes in the penninsula). Send a company of marines in to kick over the “royal” House of Saud (made so by the Brits after WWI, ya know, when they kicked the Hashemites out of their control of Mecca and handed them Jordan as a sop). Make radioactive glass parking lots out of Mecca and Medina. Then build a monument to the celebrants of 9/11 in the so-called “Palestinian authority”—another radioactive glass parking lot.
Then, making sure the demoncraps keep their stinking hands off our borders, GUARD OUR BORDERS well, catch and hang illegals attempting to enter from THE FENCE for carrion birdfeed and repeat: Submit or die.
Give ’em a little of their own.
Say to CAIR: renounce Islam or die.
Lock all mosques (wait until they are full, please) and deliver the ultimatum: submit or die. (Then, of course, raze the things to the ground, sow the earth with salt, pig manue and the rotting corpses of those who refused such a generous offer.
etc.
I think that’s simply just and fair. Offer them a taste (cram it down their throat, rub their noses in it, no matter how anatomically difficult that sequence of events may seem) of their own philosophical stance: submit or die.
curmudgeonly rant/OFF
[The opinions expressed above do not necessarily reflect my own. I’m in a temporary state of near apoplexy from the suit the ACLU et al are attempting to bring in order to make America even more defenseless against Islamic savage butchery than the Keystone Kops of Homeland Security, the goons of the “Thousands Standing Around” and the *sigh* “Border patrol” have done. Invoking the war cry of the Loony Left Moonbat Brigade (fair’s fair), my feelings and thoughts are all someone else’s fault. Blame “them”—whoever “they” are. The voices in my head, my depraved deprived upbringing, too much sugar, too little sugar, caffeine, no caffeine, violent TV/movies/games red dye number X—whatever boogyman du jour, flavor of the day excuse… Free will? Tell that to the Cat in my lap as I attempt to type this thing… Free will? There Is No Free Will. heh It is to laugh. I am her slave, her slave, I tell you!]
Ranting from a soapbox at Basil’s Picnic (at least ther ants are paying attention).
“Kill the innocent; save the guilty”
The battle cry of socialists, soi-disant* progressives and democraps might as well be, “Kill the innocent; save the guilty.”
Typically, those who shudder at the thought of wasting 9 months of a woman’s life “unwillingly” carrying a baby to term (whether she was willing to have the sexual congress that led to her pregnancy or not) and cry us a river over the death penalty applied to the latest scum-du-jour multiple murderer, want an innocent girl put to death.
Just read the whole thing, and follow the links.
[Thanks Woody, for highlighting this story.]
Flogged at TMH’s BaconBits’s (don’tcha love alla the apostrophes?) Bacon Break – Blonde Bombshell.
*You have no idea how many years it took me to exorcise an extra “s” I kept adding to this term… *sigh* 😉
Technorati : right to life
Stop the ACLU…
… v. the ACLU et al
From John Stephenson at Stop the ACLU:
Debbie Schlussel, blogger/investigative writer/lawyer, is extending an invitation to citizens interested in intervening in the ACLU’s NSA lawsuit. She practices in Eastern Michigan, where the suit was filed.
Also be sure to read Schlussel’s exposé of some of the shady plaintiffs in the ACLU’s suit.Stop The ACLU will be the first intervening party. Per email of Debbie:
Jay:
For sure. I will make you and/or Stop the ACLU the first intervening party (It will be Stop the ACLU et
al vs. . . . .). But I gotta work on this over the weekend. I’ll get back to you on this.
Want in? Check the post at Stop the ACLU for more info.
This was a production of Stop The ACLU Blogburst. If you would like to join us, please email Jay at Jay@stoptheaclu.com or Gribbit at GribbitR@gmail.com. You will be added to our mailing list and blogroll. Over 115 blogs already on-board.