Saturday, June 28, 2008

Is whitey still trying to keep my people down? Blanket-ass, PLEASE!!!

Oh, look! My red brethren and I get an insult I haven't heard before!

Too bad Arkansas State has already gone with the Red Wolves as their new mascot, 'cuz I might buy a shirt with the ASU Blanket-Asses on it! And every year, there could be a scrimmage between the Blanket-Asses and the Fighting Whities at Little Bighorn!

And it's even OK to use the term in Pawhuska.

Barrples and oranges.

A little more on Bob Barr.

If forced to choose between Bush and Clinton, he chooses Bubba.

President Clinton... I certainly had my problems with him. But what he did, in terms of perjury and obstruction was bad but it was not destructive of the very systemic foundations of our country.


What Barr isn't seeing is that Clinton had his party in control of Congress for only two years, whereas Bush had his party in control for six. Give Clinton six years of a Democratic Congress, and there'd have been Wacos and Elian raids all over the place.

It's not evidence of the intrinsic good of Clinton and the intrinsic bad of Bush, but rather of how much liberty dies when government can "get things done" without the intrinsic good of gridlock.

You almost had me, Bob.

I try to look at what candidates are doing, not what they're saying. So, I was disappointed to find my friend Mr. Hanna seemingly ready to drink the McCain Kool-Aid after he listened to Senator Palpatine talk.

I hear McCain saying all the right things, but then I look at what he's doing as a Senator to advance these issues. And I don't find much of anything.

But I shouldn't be surprised. I myself, after listening to a Bob Barr interview, was almost ready to drink the Barr-Aid. Barr's no longer in a position where he COULD do much of anything to advance his new-found libertarian ideology, even if he wanted to, so all we have to judge him on IS his words. He might sincerely regret his authoritarian past, and the only thing he can do about it is say he was wrong.

So I was ALMOST ready to give him the benefit of the doubt.

That is, until 5:02 - 5:22.



What's so hard to understand about the concept that the government should not be in the business of dictating the genders of the participants in a private contract?

Question.

Who is Charlotte Sometimes during the times when she is not Charlotte?

Wednesday, June 25, 2008

I nominate this ...

... for one of Kip's Sunday Cute YouTubers.

Unfortunately, I wasn't near the stereo.

Because if I was, the pollster that called my house yesterday would have gotten an earful of Uncle Fukka.

As soon as I found out it was a political pollster, I hung up.

Mostly because I surmised that given the heated campaign ad war between Missouri Republican gub-goob candidates Hulshof and Steelman, it was probably gonna ask who I was voting for in that race or in the general, and I hafta admit I don't know yet. Or if.

Who is this Andy Finkenstadt person?

More Evidence The Two Major Parties Stand For Nothing.

We've got the Republican nominee accepting Candidate Welfare, and Democrat going solely private-sector.

Remember when the Republicans expected you to pull yourself up by your OWN bootstraps, and it was the Democrats who wanted the government to force the public to buy your bootstraps FOR you?

I am reminded of the passages in Orwell's 1984, where "our" side, Oceania, is locked in a perpetual war, but randomly changes it's allegiances and oppositions with and to Eurasia and Eastasia.

Yellow is the New Black.

South Africans now classify the Chinese as "black."

Any commenter who makes reference to any case of the verb "to niggle" immediately forfeits all their Princess Points and gets demoted all the way back down, beyond even the title of Drag Princess, to Drag Chambermaid.

[H/T 2 The Colbert Report.]

Sudden Nonpact.

Turns out there probably wasn't any pact to get pregnant at all.

Sounds to me like a case of a certain principal who is a little too eager to get his or her name in the paper.

Good + Bad = Good?

Is it a good thing if Kid Rock takes the right position (it's okay to pirate his music) for the wrong reason (because he's rich)?

The right reason, of course, is that his music is primarily his intellectual property, and if he wants to let you steal it, that's all the reason you need.

Aw, who'm I kidding? Everybody here knows I bring this up only because it gives me an excuse to post this.

(Note to self -- turn it up to 11.)



(My apologies for not including the proper intro piece.)

Write this down; I'm giving Mrs. Kerry some free publicity.

Well, not really.

I'm posting this simply because the professional complainers have succeeded in getting it yanked.



Watch it. Then get three others to watch it, and get them each to get three others to watch it. In other words, watch it forward.

MoveOn's latest.



Apparently, she plans on giving Alex permanent brain damage so she will always be his guardian.

Because otherwise, once he turns 18, the decision on whether or not he enters the military will be his, not hers.

George Carlin, R.I.P.

Tuesday, June 24, 2008

Chirp . . . Chirp . . . Chirp . . . Chirp *SQUIRT* . . . Chirp . . . Chirp . . . Chirp.

Made a trip to the farmer’s market this morning. Bought three big ‘maters for $3.00. Not too economical, but at least they were tax-free, and with the salmonella problems lately, I didn’t mind paying a little more so I could have ‘maters on my evening turkey sammich.

Got home and sat in the kitchen, figuring out my electricity and water usage for yesterday and trying to extrapolate it out to see how much I’d use for the month. An annoying little bird perched on top of my garage chirped every 2.25 seconds for more than ten minutes straight.

I grabbed the squirty little water bottle that I use to piss off Patches when she makes annoying meow sounds too much, and pointed it at the feathered offender. It chirped again. I squirted.

The mesh from the window screen dispersed the stream into an ineffectual mess.

Two and a quarter seconds later, the bird chirped again.

“Go be annoying somewhere else,” I commanded it.

It did not comply. Two and a quarter seconds later, it chirped yet again.

I gave up and closed the window.

Sunday, June 22, 2008

This is the part where Tippi Hedren’s fan club come after me with pitchforks and torches.

But first, the backstory.

One of these days I’ll learn how to write one of these posts without a long, drawn-out explanation of the background and a bunch of tangents, but apparently today is not that day.

Where to start? I suppose the best place to begin is with the people in the rental next door.

A few months ago, the woman brought home a cat with four kittens that had been dumped at one of the local grocery stores. Two of the kittens disappeared almost immediately; I don’t know if she gave them away or what.

Then a few weeks later, one of the other two got run over.

And that left Mama Kitty and Spot. The neighbors said Spot’s name was Patches, but I had an indoor cat named Patches, so her name was Spot whenever she came over to my house.

I felt bad for Mama Kitty and Spot. Their owners seemed to feed all their animals out of one bowl, so Mama Kitty and Spot had to compete with a Basset Hound, a big black mixed-breed, and two or three Chihuahuas if they wanted anything to eat.

So I began feeding them table scraps in a pan on my front porch. I don’t feed my minpin table scraps because it makes messy things happen on the carpet, so rather than put it in the trash (where the cats would no doubt tear into it when I put the trash out by the road Tuesday mornings), I gave it to them.

Mama Kitty and Spot were very friendly to me, but Spot, even when she was only a few weeks old, absolutely LOATHED Tiny. She’d lay her ears back and growl and spit and hiss every time he came near her.

But that’s one of those irrelevant tangents.

I noticed in early spring that Mama Kitty began gaining weight and got all lemon-shaped. I knew that meant she was getting ready to extrude another batch of kittens, so I began feeding her even more.

I never got to see the kittens; when the time came, the neighbors took her in the house. The woman told me she had seven. After a week or so, they began letting Mama Kitty out for a little while each day, but the kittens never came with her.

But Spot stopped by every afternoon like clockwork.

I’d sit on a chair on the porch and she’d jump up in my lap and demand to be petted.

I noticed around the first of the month the neighbors began moving stuff out of the house. Through the grapevine I heard they were moving because their three kids had outgrown the house.

They hadn’t paid much attention to Spot since the kittens had been born, so I thought maybe they’d leave her behind when they moved, since they knew I’d take care of her.

But they didn’t.

About a week ago, they loaded her up in the van, and I don’t think they’ve been back since.

So that left me with a problem -- what to do with the table scraps.

I didn’t want to put them in the trash, because after a couple of days it would stink up the house and attract bugs. I knew there were a few tomcats that stopped by every few nights to steal Mama Kitty and Spot’s food, so I kept putting it out on the porch in the evenings, more out of habit than anything else.

And every morning, it would be gone.

The tomcats were sneaking in at night and eating it, I surmised.

But I surmised wrong.

This afternoon, I put out some sauerkraut and Crockpot baby-back ribs and a piece of grocery-store fried chicken from a few days ago that was probably still edible, but wasn’t all that appetizing when it was new.

I looked out a few minutes later to see a Blue Jay eating the sauerkraut.

And a little later still, I found a swarm of starlings and grackles (unpleasant, oily little birds, those) eating the ribs and fighting over the piece of chicken.

Because of me, the birds have acquired a taste for meat, including bird meat.

Can human meat be far behind?

And that is how I came to realize that I am in a prologue to Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, and that I am the cause of it all.

Tippi Hedren’s fans and relatives are gonna be pissed.

Friday, June 20, 2008

Happy Runniest Brain-Goo Day, all!

These long-ass days are about to kill me.

Winston Smith wept.

UK borough council bans the term "brainstorming" because it might be offensive to epileptics!

Instead, they suggest "thought shower" (offensive to the incontinent?) and "blue-sky thinking" (offensive to depressives?)

She's not fooling anybody.

Everyone knows that for deranged narcissist Hillary Clinton to get what she seems to believe she's entitled to (the Presidency in '12), Barack Obama has to lose in '08. And she knows we know this.

So why's she joining him on the campaign trail?

Because she has to LOOK like she's supporting him, while I'm sure she's got a team assembled in some secure, undisclosed War Room somewhere, coming up with ways to undercut his candidacy.

Remind me again how politics isn't all theater, and is really about substance.

That's Scenario 1, and believe it or not, it's the most gracious to the deranged narcissist.

Because Scenario 2, the only conceivable scenario in which she genuinely wants him to win, involves him putting her on the ticket, winning, and her giving him the Vince Foster treatment.

Eventually, I will get bored of posting these everyday. But not today. Here's a Four-Word Album Review of South Park: Bigger, Longer, & Uncut.

Annoy Telemarketers With It.

Speaking of feet . . .

... Ewwww!!!

Avert your eyes, Kevin Whited!

Now, for the rest of you...

There's a movie out there called "The Foot Fist Way."

Hmmm. I don't think that's one they covered in The Joy of Sex.

Look, we KNOW already . . .

. . . that lifting the offshore drilling ban (AND the ANWR ban) wouldn't immediately fix our energy crisis. It would take about a decade.

Doesn't that mean this should have been done a decade ago, when it was first seriously proposed?

Thursday, June 19, 2008

Adventures In Squishing The Goo Out Of Things.

I bought a buttload of cherries at the local farmer’s market the other day. That’s as good a place as any to start.

Not a literal buttload, mind you. Just a large amount, probably more than I could eat up before they turned bad.

But hey, they were tax-free and only cost three bucks. I envisioned everything from banana splits to flavoring my Coke Zeros with them.

One small problem.

When I got them home and washed them off and sampled a couple, I found out they were pie cherries, not sweet cherries. They were too tart to use for things like banana splits. In fact, they were so sour I commented to my mother that they were not cherries at all, but rather they were tiny little plums.

So they sat in my refrigerator a few days while I put on my Pondering Pants to ponder what to do with them.

Finally today, I decided to run them through the juicer, and add a couple of teaspoons of Splenda and have cherry juice.

The juicer is a wondrous thing, if a little wasteful. I had discovered how wasteful while juicing three apples. I got a cupful of apple juice and a double-handful-sized wad of apple pulp and seeds separated out and tossed over into it’s throw-away bin. The juice was good, even with the carrot I let the Government Health Police guilt me into juicing and adding to it, but I thought that’s a lot of waste just for a cup of apple juice.

I picked out the seeds and ate the pulp, thinking that if I had some bread dough and it wasn’t so hot, I could bake some apple bread with it.

At least it threw the seeds in the bin instead of grinding them up and mixing them in the juice, I noted to myself.

But I digress.

It took all but a cupful or so of the cherries to make a cup of juice. I added the couple of spoonfuls of Splenda and took a sip. It was still too sour; it took probably half an hour to force down the stuff, and as I got toward the bottom it got gritty.

It was only when I opened up the throwaway bin that I found that the thing had decided not to throw the cherry pits away whole like it had the apple seeds, but rather to grind them up into something a little coarser than the sand that gets in your crack at the beach.

And any flavors that were in the pits went into the juice. That’s why it was so tart.

Bastard machine.

I hope cherry pits aren’t hallucinogenic or poisonous. The giant, floating Ray Romano head hovering over my house, pulsating to the sounds of Siouxsie and the Banshees, assured me they weren’t, so maybe I'm safe.

Wednesday, June 18, 2008

So much for anonymity.

I have a prepaid cellphone.

I got it, partly because I like the convenience, but mostly because I like the idea of not giving my personal information to TracPhone.

My expiration date is in a couple of weeks. I usually refill it before it gets this close, but I'm thinking of not using it anymore.

A couple of days ago, I get this offer in the mail trying to get me to go ahead and buy a year's worth of minutes. At my home. With my home address on it. Addressed to "TracPhone Customer."

It seems they've kept track of the land-line number I called long ago to activate the phone, and used that number to get my address.

Bastards.

Why marry the miller . . .

. . . when you can get the cereal for free?

The bathroom has no windows.

So I have been struggling with how to save energy lighting it.

I'm not willing to go so far as trying to drop a deuce in the dark (Didn't Ronnie Milsap sing a song about that?) (And how do blind people or people in the dark know when they're done wiping?) but it seems a little silly to have to burn three lightbulbs (they all come on when you flip the switch) several times a day. That's a minimum of 120, and maybe up to 180, watts each time.

I *could* leave the door open and let the light from the windows on the sunporch illuminate me, but I'm just not one of those open-door poopers. Someone, somewhere, might be watching. And the last thing I need right now is a big-ass indecent-exposure production.

I tried a nightlight, but it barely put out enough light to FIND my way to the porcelain throne. And I tried candles, but I burned my fingers a couple of times, and in the summer, I don't want to create any more heat than I have to.

That's when I had the idea to dig out the old battery-powered fluorescent lantern. Nine watts.

So when the urge hits, like some eighteenth-century sharecropper headed toward the little house with the moon cutout on the door, I grab my lantern.

So far, my mother hasn't asked what I'm doing. If she does, I'll tell her I have to watch for rattlesnakes.

Hold out your hand and I'll give you a urine sample right here, boss.

Employers begin drug testing for smoking.

Four-Word Album Review: Jewel's "Perfectly Clear," the snippets I've listened to, anyway.

Even Worse Than Yoko.

Monday, June 16, 2008

Four Word Album Review: kd lang's Ingenue.

Rainy Thursday Coffeehouse Music.

One thing that bothers me . . .

. . . about the idea of "A rising tide lifts all boats" is that the way the Left wants to raise the tide is to smash the most successful boats into kindling, sell the kindling for money to buy bottled water, and pour the bottled water into the ocean.

Tim Russert, R.I.P.

Tim Russert passed away.

Of all the Sunday morning talking heads, Tim Russert didn't bother me as much as many.

Of course, I kinda liked him after in an interview with some right-wing zealot (I don't remember who,) he outed his son on national TV, but affirmed that he will always love him, no matter what.

(Now that I think about it, he may have been speaking hypothetically; I don't know.)

This exchange happened in a time when coming out to your parents was more likely to get you disowned and homeless than accepted.

But one thing I did like about him, was that when he played GOTCHA with a guest, it never seemed like he was trying to "get" the guest, but rather that he was trying to get at the truth.

And while I'm sure his Moynihan/Cuomo roots indoctrinated him into Leftism, he came across as a jovial Leftist, not an angry one.

If the Nobel Peace Prize meant anything . . .

. . . the Hypermiling guys would already have one.

Friday, June 13, 2008

Question.

What's with all the crane collapses lately?

On the rare occasions I drink beer, I now drink Shiner Bock exclusively.

So I don't much care what happens to Budweiser.

On the upside, if they ARE bought out by foreigners, maybe that vacuous, empty-eyed Kasey Kahne will have to move out of the country.

But on a related note, do you have to have a permit to buy the seeds you'd plant in a Ho Garden? Are they only legal in Nevada?

I used to want my basic cable to carry Fox News.

I even contacted them a few times suggesting that their customers would be better served by having A CNN channel and A Fox News channel instead of two CNNs, which are CNN and CNN Headline News.

Not anymore.

If my cable company DOES add Fox to it's basic lineup, I'm gonna block it.

Who said the following?

"Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are rights that belong to us as individuals. But our lives, our freedom, our happiness are best enjoyed, best protected, and best advanced when we do work together."

A. Karl Marx
B. Fidel Castro
C. Chairman Mao
D. Hillary Clinton

Answer here.

(Hint: The speech also included the desire for "an economy that lifts all of our people and ensures that our prosperity is broadly distributed and shared.")

Strike ends in total failure.

There is nowhere in (post) America where freedom can be resurrected.