Personal Musings category archive

Remember that Martin Luther King, Jr., was hated, reviled, investigated by the guvmint, called “Communist” (and worse), and murdered because he spoke against the established way of doing things.

The earthquake in Haiti has caused persons to open their hearts (except for Pat Robertson and Rush Limbaugh) and wallets to help, much as they did after the Pacifid sunami several years ago.

Before you give, you might want to check out the charities at Charity Watch dot org. You might be surprised at who gets rated highly and at who doesn’t.

Via TOTN.

There’s almost nothing worth watching on television anyway. Why watch it in 3-D?

Turn on the dishwasher and drown them out.

To read not one “year in review” article.

I expect kids to do stupid stuff to show off–showing off is inherently stupid and so are kids.

But when I see 40-year-old men wearing shorts in under-40-Fahrenheit weather, I despair of the older generation.

You snow it’s snowing hard when this happens.

In other news, I called my brother in Delaware on the telly phone to tell him about hard it’s been raining in Virginia Beach.

And I’m not sure Afghanistan does, at least not any more; it was quite one thing to look for a bad guy, quite another to occupy a country.

Shaun Mullen summarizes just war doctrine.

Anyone who thought that Obama was going to attempt to govern as a doctrinaire anything was not paying attention during the campaign.

Seems to me that a lot of frustrated (like myself) lefties have projected their own policy preferences onto Obama (unlike myself).

I heard Hamsher on the radio recently (I think on the Diane Rehm Show, but I can’t find the link). She seemed bitter that Obama has not accomplished everything he promised on the campaign single-handedly in ten months.

(With apologies to Leslie Gore, who’s still cute as a button.)

It’s my comment to the Booman’s post. Please read that first.

Now you may continue

To go looking for a fight in a spirit of love and brotherhood.

I have figured it out.

In fact, I figured it out long ago, but only just connected it to the wingnut fantasies of a War on Christmas. (Hell, if there’s a War on Christmas in these parts, Christmas won long ago.)

Some folks just ain’t happy unless they’re hatin’ on something or someone. Nothing to hate, they make something up.

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In Philadelphia, there has recent been a rash (that is, two) accidents in which bicyclers ran into pedestrians and the pedestrians died. At least one was a hit-and-run–the bicyclist is still unidentified.

Philadelphia City Council, which Mayor Green once called the “worst legislative body in the Free World” (it’s not; the Pennsylvania state legislature takes that honor), is considering requiring bikes to be registered, I guess so there will be little tiny license plates that no one can see the next time a biker is involved in a hit-and-run with a pedestrian.

Brendan finds this outrageous.

I find it silly.

Police are overwhelmed trying to keep track of dangerous, inconsiderate, selfish, and just plain stupid drivers of motor vehicles. Dangerous, inconsiderate, selfish, and just plain stupid bicyclists get scant enforcement attention. Registering bikes will not change that.

What will change it is ticketing bicyclists for traffic violations and putting points on their motor vehicle operators licenses for moving violations, such as running red lights and going the wrong way on one-way streets.

It is true that pedestrians often put themselves in harm’s way. It is also true that rude, inconsiderate, and stupid behavior by adult cyclists in their funny clothes seems to be the norm.

I can count on my right big toe the number of cyclists I have seen actually stop at a stop sign or a red light in the past month. There is a reservoir of ill will towards bicyclists amongst motorists (including amongst me), nurtured by cyclists who act as if they are exempt from the rules of the road.

If this very bad bill passes, cyclists can blame themselves.

Full disclosure: I have two bicycles on the back porch. (I haven’t been riding them often. The little hills in upper Delaware look a lot bigger from two wheels than from four.) I look forward to riding them in the flatter terrain of Virginia Beach.

But I always stop for stop signs and red lights, ride on the correct side of the road, and obey one-way street signs.

For 18 years I attended Catholic churches. (My ex was of Catholic upbringing and could not bring herself to abandon that aspect of her heritage, though she had no great brief for Catholic theology per se).

The Catholic Church hierarchy cannot be considered as a source of moral tutelage in any area and its attempts to lecture anyone on morality must be viewed as the most extreme hubris.

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From tearing my hair out every time a media outlet glibly refers to the Friday after Thanksgiving as “the biggest shopping day of the year,” as if that were revealed truth.

It’s not and never has been. Big, yes. Never the “biggest.”

If they can’t get that right from readily available statistics, why do we expect them to get complicated stuff, like noticing when a politician is out-and-out lying, right?

Aside: I did not hear the Friday after Thanksgiving called “Black Friday” until I moved to the Philadelphia area in 1983. Even 135 miles away in Washington, D. C., where I had lived for nine years, the term was unknown in that contest. Even in Philly, it had little to do directly with shopping.

It had to do with traffic. The Wikipedia article is pretty accurate.

And remember the story of the first American Thanksgiving.

No, not in Plymouth Colony. It didn’t exist yet. It just has a better PR department.

The first Thanksgiving occurred when Captain John Woodlief led the newly-arrived English colonists to a grassy slope along the James River and instructed them to drop to their knees and pray in thanks for a safe arrival to the New World. It was December 4, 1619, and 38 men from Berkeley Parish in England vowed:

“Wee ordaine that the day of our ships arrivall at the place assigned for plantacon in the land of Virginia shall be yearly and perpetually keept holy as a day of Thanksgiving to Almighty God.”

It started out with replacing the sprayer and hose assembly for the kitchen sink. The sprayer didn’t, and I had already ruled out the sprayer head.

I shut off the water, broad jumped on my back underneath the sink, and decided that I didn’t have the right tools to deal with the cramped quarters right now.

I turned the water back on, turned on the faucet, and nada. I disassembled the handle, adjusting collar, and cap of the faucet–water was getting to it, but not to the spout.

My guess is that whatever was causing the sprayer problem to begin with had, when I turned off the valves, decided to go west permanently (probably to somewhere near Denver).

I replaced the entire faucet. Getting the new one in took 15 minutes, not counting the 10 minute trip to the hardware store after I verified that it did, indeed, have eight inch centers.

Getting the old one off took two hours: one of the retaining nuts holding the faucet in place just would not budge. I ended up drilling the sonuvabitch off.

Also, the lead from the hot water line to the faucet would not come off the faucet; I had to replace it also (if I had finally gotten it off, it probably would have been too deformed to reuse anyhow). Whoever put it on in the first place apparently didn’t know that, with compression fittings, tight enough is tight enough.

Tomorrow, I will give thanks for plumbers, who are willing to make a career out of this sort of frustration. A competent plumber is worth the cost (for those who can afford one).

The New York Times seems to have put its “registered user” wall back up.

Once I did register several years ago, then they kept telling me that they didn’t know who I was whenever I tried to log in.

Not worth the trouble.

I have done without them before. I can do without them again.

There is no moral difference between the high school thug who shoots his classmate for dissing him and the wingnut who wants to bomb some country for every little fancied slight.

The subject was flood protection in that Hampton Roads, Va., area, but the phrase is universal; it refers to a large segment which cuts across the population (emphasis added):

Unfortunately, many of us – particularly card-carrying dwellers of CAVE, or Citizens Against Virtually Everything – have concluded that this is our fate.

For them, no challenge is too minor, no solution too small, no fix too cheap to be insurmountable.

They are the “No We Can’t” brigade.

The creators of the “Got Milk?” campaign are getting ready to make a big push to keep chocolate milk on kids’ minds and on school lunch menus, a plan that has some educators and obesity activists none too pleased.

The new ad campaign from the dairy industry emphasizes that sugary flavorings are ways to get kids to drink milk. Without them, some youngsters won’t drink regular milk and won’t get its nutrients, the ads say.

Left out of the discussion is that

• No other species drinks beverage milk past infancy and
• No other species drinks the milk of whole nother species.

We have an entire industry based on unnatural acts.

Well, we have several, but right now I’m talking about milk.

And if you mention cats, I’ll remind you that milk is not good for cats, no matter what your cat says.

The last couple of evenings, in search of silliness, we have watched a few reruns of AFV on the ABC Family Channel. Stupid pet tricks always amuse.

In those less than three hours, we have seen approximately three million, two hundred thirty-seven thousand, eight hundred forty-two point three six promos for this.

I have never seen it, will never see it, and can honestly say I have never disliked a movie more.

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