April, 2008 archive
Drumbeats 0
Phillies vs. Pirates 0
The Phillies were ahead, 6-0.
Now it’s Phillies 6, Pirates 5 (which turned out to be the final score) in the bottom of the eighth.
But, whatever the outcome, it is undeniable that the Pirates have the dumbest looking uniforms on the planet.
DVD Players in Automobiles 3
(Prompted by a commercial I just saw.)
What the hell kind of kids are we raising if we sedate them with movies on long drives, rather than letting the little bastards darlings fight it out like God intended? Siblings are supposed to hate each other. It makes the love they feel for each other when they grow up so much more precious.
How will they learn to deal with adversity when they don’t even learn to deal with their brothers and sisters?
Dammit. My parents knew enough to point to the center seam in the seat covers (okay, so seat covers don’t have seams any more–there’s always masking tape) and say, “Stay on your side.” And my brother and I still haven’t killed each other.
Yet.
Christalmighty, I drove 31 days and 7100 miles about the country in a van filled with three kids and with no DVD player and, you know what? we made it home.
(We didn’t like each other any more, but we made it home with no fatalities.)
Generation of wusses.
Not the kids.
The parents.
Who have to sedate their kids with Disney rather than deal with them.
A Poem, Not by Henry Gibson 0
Remember Henry Gibson? Well, he didn’t write this.
If you can keep running when all about you
Are afraid of losing and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself alone when your party doubts you
And trusts another far more, too,
If you can wait for superdelegates to turn,
Lying will help, there’s no harm in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give a damn about haters,
But don’t hesitate to feign hurt, and sometimes cry:If you can bowl–and not make the blue collar your master,
If you can do shots–and not lose your game;
If you can sit down with both Russert and Blitzer
And charm those two jagoffs to advance your aims;
If you can bear to hear your name cursed
By the best in the the party you claim to love,
And watch that party become rent and broken,
And laugh as you focus on rising above:If you can talk with crowds, yet remember CEOs own you,
Or sit on Wal-Mart’s board, yet charm union bigs
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If you can screw them all just for the top gig,
If you can destroy the progressive movement
With a rank selfishness borne of certainty,
Yours is the donkey and what’s left of its carcass,
And–which is all that matters–you’ll be the nominee!
Seen on the Street 0
Read window decal seen on a car with Virginia tags exceeding the speed limit in Delaware:
Hillary.
Not Then.
Not Now.
NOT EVER.
Tom Hayden, one of my heroes (no, I’m not kidding), on herself (emphasis added):
To take just one example, the imagined association between Barack Obama and Bill Ayers will suffice. Hillary is blind to her own roots in the sixties. In one college speech she spoke of ecstatic transcendence; in another, she said, “Our social indictment has broadened. Where once we exposed the quality of life in the world of the South and the ghettos, now we condemn the quality of work in factories and corporations. Where once we assaulted the exploitation of man, now we decry the destruction of nature as well. How much long can we let corporations run us?”
She was in Chicago for three nights during the 1968 street confrontations. She chaired the 1970 Yale law school meeting where students voted to join a national student strike again an “unconscionable expansion of a war that should never have been waged.” She was involved in the New Haven defense of Bobby Seale during his murder trial in 1970, as the lead scheduler of student monitors. She surely agreed with Yale president Kingman Brewster that a black revolutionary couldn’t get a fair trial in America. She wrote that abused children were citizens with the same rights as their parents.
Most significantly in terms of her recent attacks on Barack, after Yale law school, Hillary went to work for the left-wing Bay Area law firm of Treuhaft, Walker and Burnstein, which specialized in Black Panthers and West Coast labor leaders prosecuted for being communists. Two of the firm’s partners, according to Treuhaft, were communists and the two others “tolerated communists”. Then she went on to Washington to help impeach Richard Nixon, whose career was built on smearing and destroying the careers of people through vague insinuations about their backgrounds and associates. (All these citations can be found in Carl Bernstein’s sympathetic 2007 Clinton biography, A Woman in Charge.)
All these were honorable words and associations in my mind, but doesn’t she see how the Hillary of today would accuse the Hillary of the sixties of associating with black revolutionaries who fought gun battles with police officers, and defending pro-communist lawyers who backed communists? Doesn’t the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, whom Hillary attacks today, represent the very essence of the black radicals Hillary was associating with in those days? And isn’t the Hillary of today becoming the same kind of guilt-by-association insinuator as the Richard Nixon she worked to impeach?
It is as if Hillary Clinton is engaged in a toxic transmission onto Barack Obama of every outrageous insult and accusation ever inflicted on her by the American right over the decades. She is running against what she might have become. Too much politics dries the soul of the idealist.
More here from the BooMan.
Stray Thought 0
Why do hotdogs come in 10 packs and hotdog buns come in eight packs?
Aside: The best hotdog in the country.
Bushonomics 1
Also, the median price of a new home fell compared with March 2007 by the largest amount in nearly four decades.
16 1/2 years ago.
Oh, yeah.
A Bush was president then.
Tradition.
Decision Tree 0
Over at DelawareLiberal.
Why Ethanol from Corn Is a Fraud 8
Today’s Radio Times:
Go to the website and search the archives for April 24, 2008, or listen here (Real Audio).
Are You a Balloon 1
Become a balloon here.
Nightmares 1
Last night, I woke up dreaming I was a friend of John McCain.
It could have been worse. In the dream, I was telling him that, however much I liked him, I still couldn’t vote for him.
It’s Capitalism–Everything’s for Sale 0
From the Demon Princess:
image courtesy MoronCowboy.
The lies do get tiresoms.
Why do you put up with them?
Another Reason To Hate Micro$oft 0
If you go to the Window$ Update site with a real browser, such as Opera, the ultimate Internet experience, the website refuses to work for you until you fire up the World’s Worst Internet Browser(tm).
Bushonomics 0
The national average price for regular gasoline is up 23 percent from a year ago, according to AAA, the automobile club.
Some analysts expect it to approach $4 a gallon this summer, when demand is at a peak.
On my way home from the jobsite today, I passed a local Shell station–the one where I refill my propane tank–advertising $3.36.
They had a line. Actually, three lines.
No DL for Me and I Love My Cell Phone 0
No DL for Me
I had to work late at the jobsite, then I had to come home and work some more.
And tomorrow I have to walk into a classroom and be dynamic.
But it’s all billable.
I Love My Cell Phone
My client told me I should be able just to jack into the network and be on the internet, even though I could not log into the company network (which I have no desire to do anyway).
The network port appeared to be dead. Of course, a wise IT Department will turn off unused ports. It’s just good security.
So I fired up the good ole “Internet Connection Sharing” on my cell phone, jacked the computer into the cell, and, badda bing! I was on line. I did have to move the phone around a bit to find the sweet spot for the connection in the cubicle inside the big steel building, but, once I did, it worked just great okay. Not as fast as a T1 line, but not as slow as dialup.
