2006 archive

. . . is only a game, dammit:

James Walter Quick, 42, has been charged with murder in the shooting of Richard Allen Johnson, 43, authorities said. Johnson died from a single shot to the chest, according to a preliminary autopsy Sunday.

The two had bet $20 on the game, with Quick betting on game-winner South Carolina and Johnson for Clemson, Lexington County Sheriff James Metts said. They drank beer all afternoon and watched the game Saturday at Johnson’s home, and began arguing about the bet after the game.

A mayoral election looms in Philadelphia, and the comments area of a local blog has become a battleground:

The Web site is called Young Philly Politics, but for much of the last month it has been the setting for an online food fight between some old Philadelphia politicians.

In one corner: City Councilman Jim Kenney, who began blogging on the liberal Web site last month.

In the other: Kenney foes, including cement masons’ union leader Mike Fera and several anonymous posters who the site’s founder says logged on via the Internet address of the city’s electricians’ union.

Note that John Dougherty, of the Philly IBEW, is rumored to fancy himself as mayor, or, at least, as a power broker.

Now, I do not live in Philly.

Then, I did not live in Philly, either.

But I have lived in the Greater Philadelphia Co-Prosperity Sphere since 1983 and worked in Center City for 12 years (Q. How do you know someone is not from Philadelphia? A. He says “downtown”) and have come really to like Philly–it is a great city, and, as I was telling Phillybits a while ago, I’m much more oriented to Philadelphia than to Wilmington.

(Ask me what cities I love: Washington, D. C.; Boston; Chicago.)

So, where was I headed? Oh! it must say something about the import of the internet that a blog has become a site for mayoral hopefuls to slug it out with each other.

What does it say?

I don’t know, but something. Especially when it makes The Paper.

Headline in today’s Local Rag in a story about fall and winter women’s fashions:

Rise of the Dress.

Me: (Obvious straight line ignored.)

From the Local Rag, excellent reporting, fascinating reading: International police work takes down an internet pharmacy supplier.

Here.

A number of the supporters of the Iraq War suggested that the effort would pay for itself. For a long list of quotations, with citations, go here

Looks like they were right, though not in the way they intended (emphasis added):

The Iraq insurgency has become financially self-sustaining, raising tens of millions of dollars a year from oil smuggling, kidnapping, counterfeiting, corrupt charities and other crimes, The New York Times reported in Sunday editions.

According to a classified United States government report, a copy of which was obtained by the newspaper, groups responsible for many of the insurgent and terrorist attacks are raising an estimated $70 million to $200 million a year from illegal activities.

These folks should never have been allowed to play with guns.

Hot shopping in the Philadelphia area:

A small fire yesterday on the second level of the Willow Grove Park mall in Abington forced the evacuation of at least 6,000 shoppers and employees during one of the busiest shopping days of the year.

The two-alarm fire erupted about 3 p.m. in a dressing room of a clothing store called Forever 21, said Ken Clark, Abington’s fire marshal. The store, which sells “club fashions” to a young crowd, is next to Gap Kids and across from Ann Taylor.

In other news, I decorated my Christmas tree yesterday. It’s not very symmetrical, but it’s a real tree (and the tallest Christmas tree in the neighborhood). Two hours on a ladder reminds me I’m getting old.

I guess they didn’t see this.

The family that was celebrating Thanksgiving had permission from their neighbors, who were out of town, to either use the carport or use the vacant house, Chief Deputy State Fire Marshal Randall Lee said. Because of the inclement weather, a member of the family set up the turkey fryer under the neighbor’s carport, then went back inside while it warmed up.

“They left it on too long, and it’s just like leaving a pot on a stove,” in that it will burn down or boil over, Lee said.

The family heard the explosion, looked outside and saw the neighbors’ carport on fire.

Must listen: today’s Radio Times, Part 1:

Tune in for a rebroadcast of Marty’s interview with journalist LAWRENCE WRIGHT author of the book “Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11.”

Mr. Wright posits, among other things, that one of the goals of the 9/11 attack was to suck the United States into a war in Afghanistan, where Al Qaeda envisioned that the US would be slowly bled the death as the Soviet Union had been in the 1980s. Of course, Afghanistan turned into the cakewalk that Ken Adelman so misguidedly thought Iraq was going to be (a prediction he would no doubt recant had it not been witnessed by so many persons).

So then the US went into Iraq, no threat to the US, based on a fanciful froth of lies, and, guess what? is slowly bleeding to death, the way the Soviet Union did in Afghanistan.

Listen here.

I read about this column and couldn’t figure out to deal with someone who is living so far in the past (kind of like those folks who characterize political opponents as “Commies”).

Susie says it well.

Addendum, 11/26/06:

Karen points out the third link was a repeat of the first one. I’ve pointed it to Susie’s blog, but it seems to be down right now, so I can’t link to the specific post yet.

(Later) Fixed.

It’s been a particularly interesting week in the local rag. Some interesting reading that I’ve been saving up:

Ethical investing in Norway.

Fear of flying; love of Thanksgiving.

Thanksgiving honored; Thanksgiving dishonored.

Wired.

It wasn’t the Pilgrims.

(Remember the Pilgrims*? They were the folks who settled in New England because they couldn’t find Virginia–which was probably just as well. Their brand of theocracy probably would not have gone well with the Virginians, who were basically in it for the money. However, there seem to be some who would attempt to re-establish their theocracy today.)

In the English-speaking heritage of the United States of America, it was the Virginia colonists.

But even they have a shaky claim to being the absolute first.

Oh, and have a nice Thanksgiving, those who celebrate it.

_________________
*This is a great link!

I was never a big fan of John F. Kennedy. Where and when I grew up, under Jim Crow in the rural south, he was not popular. There was a fear that he might (gasp!) support the Civil Rights Movement.

After I grew up and my views changed and matured, I realized that, except for the Cuban missile crisis, he was pretty ineffective as a president in getting things done; it was his successor who enacted most of his programs.

Yes, he was an inspiring (and grammatical) speaker: charming, witty, with a sense of humor about events and about himself (things our current crop of politicians could use more of), but his legislative record was spotty, at best, with the exception of inaugurating U. S. efforts to put men on the moon in ten years.

Yet, his death was one of the significant corner-turning events in 20th century United States history.

Attytood points out that the memory is starting to fade:

Today marks a landmark that we never thought we’d live long enough to see here at Attytood. It is the 43rd anniversary of the seminal political event of our early childhood, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. And for the first time we are aware of, neither of our hometown newspapers, the Daily News or Inquirer, has a single word about the momentous events that happened on this date in 1963 — even as, ironically, both run long reviews about the new flick about the 1968 killing of brother Bobby.

Addendum, 11/23/2006

Some thoughts on parallels between then and now.

From Buzzwhack, “dotsam”:

The Internet’s wasteland of abandoned Web sites, Hotmail accounts, blogs, wikis, MySpace pages, etc., that their creators have ignored for months/years — but are still accessible on the Web.

Struck me, because what’s left of my old website–a redirection page–is still out there, and I left AOL at least two years ago.

Keith Olbermann lessons not learned:

The primary one — which should be as obvious to you as the latest opinion poll showing that only 31 percent of this country agrees with your tragic Iraq policy– is that if you try to pursue a war for which the nation has lost its stomach, you and it are finished. Ask Lyndon Johnson.

The second most important lesson of Vietnam, Mr. Bush: if you don’t have a stable local government to work with, you can keep sending in Americans until hell freezes over and it will not matter. Ask South Vietnam’s President Diem, or President Thieu.

The third vital lesson of Vietnam, Mr. Bush: don’t pretend it’s something it’s not. For decades we were warned that if we didn’t stop “communist aggression” in Vietnam, communist agitators would infiltrate and devour the small nations of the world, and make their insidious way, stealthily, to our doorstep.

The war machine of 1968 had this “Domino Theory.”

Your war machine of 2006 has this nonsense about Iraq as “the central front in the war on terror.”

The fourth pivotal lesson of Vietnam, Mr. Bush: if the same idiots who told Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon to stay there for the sake of “Peace With Honor,” are now telling you to stay in Iraq, they’re probably just as wrong now, as they were then… Dr. Kissinger.

And the fifth crucial lesson of Vietnam, Mr. Bush, which somebody should’ve told you about, long before you plunged this country into Iraq — is that, if you lie us into a war — your war, and your presidency, will be consigned to the scrapheap of history.

John McCain:

Yesterday, on ABC News, he basically stated that it would be fine with him if the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and thereby erased the 33-year-old federal right to an abortion. McCain said: “I do believe that it’s very likely or possible that the Supreme Court should — could overturn Roe v. Wade, which would then return these decisions to the states, which I support….I do believe that we would be better off by having Roe v. Wade return to the states. And I don’t believe the Supreme Court should be legislating in the way that they did on Roe v. Wade.”

Oh really? Here’s what McCain told the San Francisco Chronicle in 1999: “Certainly in the short term, or even the long term, I would not support repeal of Roe v. Wade, which would then force X number of women in America to (undergo) illegal and dangerous operations.” He then reiterated this argument on CNN: “We all know, and it’s obvious, that if we repeal Roe v. Wade tomorrow, thousands of young American women would be performing illegal and dangerous operations.”

What makes a blog run.

There are three basic elements, not counting the hardware:

A webserver program.

Blogging software, which in turn may require some other support software, such as PHP.

A database engine.

What happens when the first two are working and the last one is not?

You connect to the webserver, but the blogging sofware doesn’t know what to do. It’s pretty ugly (and, of course, a little big).

Click here to find out. (Image opens in a new window).

(I was following this cheesy link when this happened.)

My back porch looks out over an open space surrounding an abandoned quarry from which Delaware blue rock was mined (hence the name of the baseball team).

This morning, as I was having my morning smoke (Don’t say it! I know!), I saw two foxes. They were playing with each other, just like a pair of dogs. They played and played, until I got my camera, found out the card was full, cleaned up the card, pointed . . . and then they disappeared into the quarry.

But, if you look real close, you may be able to see them here, courtesy of Google:

I’m moving from the W-2 world to the 1099 world. My job ended (quite to my surprise, I must say–long sad story) at the end of October. But I was lucky enough to pick up a consulting gig that will start next week sometime.

Frankly, I think it’s going to work out quite nicely. I will be doing what I trained to do and what I did for years, doing it at a higher hourly rate, and be off the nine to five grind.

All I have to do is impress my client.

This does account for the hiatus in blogging. I’ve been taking care of other business.