Category Archives: antiquated news stories

Mad Cow inaction, Survivor, CD’s

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The day/days since the last survivor have gone horribly bad. The best player got voted out tonight (which is likely open to discussion on a ton of sites.) I will say, instead, that ‘my guy’ got voted right out of there. Strongest player in the game, to be sure, most loyal guy, absolutely, just the next guy in the pecking order of the women. The absolution of what began all of those days ago.

I normally follow one or more of them through the whole endeavor, yet, when they voted out ‘Sarge’ tonight, I lost a lot of interest. Voting out the stronger players is just self-preservation, voting out the only guy who has helped/can help your game is just plain silly.

• This story, with a rather innocuous headline, Trade to Dominate Bush’s Farm Agenda , has me somewhere between angry and dumbfounded. The story is about the import/export of agricultural products, embargoes and other such dribble. One of the key things contained within it, though, is Mad Cow Disease.

I am not sure why this problem didn’t surface at all during the presidential elections, it certainly should have. I, as you likely know, am a butcher, and probably a bit more sensitive to the beef market than most people. I think it is pretty much common knowledge that there are over 20 countries that have banned the import of U.S. beef. It should be common knowledge that not only has the USDA not done anything to try to remedy the problem, but has in fact ordered at least one company to stop testing their own cattle for the disease. How this can possibly get us back into the international beef industry really escapes me. The only two possible reasons that I can see for this action is that either the USDA is afraid that really poor health standards over the last couple of decades have left a lot of the U.S. cattle with the disease, and they don’t want to make matters worse. The other option is that the USDA simply doesn’t give a fuck.

Now a fact that I didn’t know prior to reading the article is that the US imported more agricultural products last year than they exported. Not only that, the projected reports for 2004 are going to show that the defecit of export to import is likely to be in the billions. Knowing that fact, I am inclined to believe that the USDA is terrified to actually test the current cattle supply in the U.S.; knowing that sloppy standards have likely resulted in far more contamination than they let on to. The only reason that I assume that is that there is simply no way any agency would voluntarily let their product be banned, unless they had reason to believe that the truth is far worse than speculated.

Following on that same logic, and with the popularity of the Atkins Diet, I really believe that the standards of raising cattle in the U.S. have been altered enough to get rid of the disease in new cattle. However, the possibly infected supply of cattle must be exhausted before they dare to start testing them properly. In this scenario, this means that the USDA is knowingly feeding infected beef to the American people. In another couple of years they will start to test the cattle properly. Anyone who happens to die along the way will likely be swept under the rug so as not to cause another rush of fear in other countries. I know it sounds like a really bad conspiracy theory, but what other reason would there be for not allowing companies to test their own cattle, with their own money?

• Now for a random musing about the cost of cd’s.

This is a subject that I have been into a bunch of times before. While I am not going to try to find the pages where I went into it, I will just give you the basic idea of my previous arguments in a quick sentence or two. In 2002, I was able to buy 100 blank cd’s, jewel cases, labels and a program to print out the inserts for each cd. Net cost for each cd? Just under fifty cents, not counting the ink, which might have bumped it up to fifty-two cents. Now if that is how much I can do it for by myself, only buying 100 of everything, how much could it cost a company that buys their supplies by the millions? The second point was that you can buy a video game for the pc that has 5 discs in it, all with artwork on them, for about ten bucks once they are a couple of years old, note that the ten dollar price also has to pay the people who create/program the game, cover artists, etc. Also, it costs just as much to buy the latest music cd as it does to buy the latest hollywood blockbuster on dvd.

Today I found something, for the millionth time, that finally slapped me in the face about this whole issue. When is the last time that you were going through your mail to find that an old ‘LP’ fell out of it? How about an ‘8-track’? What about a ‘cassette tape’? That never happened, did it? The cd, however, is everywhere. It was falling out of one of the little pamphlets that I got in the mail today, there was a huge stand of them in the corner of the post office, even though the post office was closed, they were not stolen/missing/vandalized, no just sitting there. Of course these are all AOL cd’s so I guess it would be a bit tough to do anything with them, unless, of course, you were thirteen and really liked to watch what happens when you put one into the microwave (which is not all that spectacular, don’t try it). Is it really cheaper to send out cd’s (for AOL) than to pay for newspaper advertising, or just more effective?

The answers are all lost somewhere in time…Or at least in AOL Time/Warner…

Government News

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My erratic posting schedule continues, and for no damn reason I might add. Consider it a respite from the mundane garbage that I throw up here, or not, it is all up to you.

• The Presidential election went horribly to shit, as we all know, and now we are starting to see a bit of the aftermath. This first item is just a bit depressing, but at the same time it is someone with the cajones to do what so many of us want to:

Ground Zero Suicide Driven by Election
NEW YORK – A 25-year-old man from Georgia who was apparently distraught over President Bush (news – web sites)’s re-election shot and killed himself at ground zero. Andrew Veal’s body was found Saturday morning inside the off-limits site, said Steve Coleman, a spokesman for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. A shotgun was found nearby, but no suicide note was found, Coleman said.

…

“I’m absolutely sure it’s a protest,” Mary Anne Mauney, Veal’s supervisor at the lab, told The Daily News. “I don’t know what made him commit suicide, but where he did it was symbolic.”

Now that is just the type of ‘take action’ attitude we are looking for in this country, right? Of course it is difficult to try to blame an action as extreme as suicide on a political election, but haven’t most liberal people at least thought about it? Especially considering that:

Bush to Seek Gay-Marriage Ban in New Term -Aide
Rove said Bush would “absolutely” push the Republican-controlled Congress for a constitutional amendment, which he said was needed to avert the aims of “activist judges” who would permit gay marriages.

There is a lot more to that article than the little part that I slapped up here. The only reason that I chose that particular quote to slap up here is that it just seems so humorous to me, well it would be were it not an actual view that someone has…Especially when that someone is in charge of the country and likely capable of buying enough people off to suit his own agenda.

Honestly, aren’t the ‘activist judges’ trying to protect the rights of every man or woman when they make a ruling stating that same sex marriage is not against the law? I know that it really pisses off a lot of really homophobic people from the south, but that should not be the point. This country was (supposedly) built from the ‘melting pot’ of the entire world, yet, as little as twenty years ago marrying someone outside of your own race was still considered taboo (likely still is in some of the more Southern conservative states). That is pretty much how homosexuality is today.

Allowing homosexuals to marry is not going to hurt anyone. It is not going to make the ‘sanctity of marriage’ any less valuable. It is only going to allow a couple of people to have a piece of paper to prove their love for each other. It seems so simple a point that I get really irritated about it. How is it possible that the most powerful nation in the entire world can have such closed-minded beliefs? Oh, wait, that’s right, it is all about the bible (which, I assure you I have read cover to cover more than once. It is possibly the best pulp fiction of all time. Rife with incest, rape and murder just to name a few of its best qualities. If you have never read it, why not? Best novel ever!).

I don’t really know why I really start to rant when homosexuality is the issue, I think it might be because of the horrible hypocrisy of the church/state issue, i.e. Why is it that Priests can rape six year old boys and get little more than a slap on the wrist, while sex between two consenting adults, of the same sex, is considered a crime against God? What of the Priests who are not only gay, but gay pedophiles? They don’t love, or want to marry, any of the little six-year-olds that they molest and rape. Why aren’t there more of these priests being put on the stand to answer for their sins? Did the state and the church meld again?

Of course Bush was reelected based on his ‘war on terror’ schtick, and there is some pretty solid evidence of his sincerity right here:

Terror Financing Fines Fall After 9/11
The average penalty for a company doing business with Iran, Iraq (news – web sites), North Korea (news – web sites), Sudan or Libya dropped nearly threefold, from more than $50,000 in the five years before the 2001 attacks to about $18,700 afterward, according to a computer-assisted analysis of federal records.

Now that is the type of thing you would expect to see from a country dedicated to stopping the funding of terrorists, right? Hmm. I think there might have been at least a bit of misleading information being thrown about in the last election.

I have said it before and I will say it again, “Hell in a handbasket”.

• I am left to wonder one thing. Does the entire world only see the same headlines that I see? Being totally honest, I really hate the USA based on the headlines that I am seeing. Perhaps not as much as the rest of the world hates us, as I don’t have plans to kill innocent people based on it, but enough that I really wish that I was a citizen of some country that is not going to be the site of jihad for the forseeable future. And that is why I am a bad American, I like to look at things objectively and form my own opinion. Maybe I should just go watch Springer, intelligence and objectivity don’t seem to be as usefull as I thought they’d be.

Osama Bin Laden

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I must admit that I was a little bit disappointed that the Republicans didn’t have Osama in a freezer somewhere, with hopes of thawing him out just in time for the election. Yet I still think that it is quite timely that he happens to turn up just now. It would be damn near ‘un-American’ to say that I was pretty sure that he would either be caught, or killed right about the same time as the elections in the U.S. Thankfully, I have been proven wrong. It will take weeks to seriously authenticate the source of the latest video, and by then the election will be over and done with. Does that mean that the administration knew it was going to happen (honestly now, every liberal in America was expecting something like this), or is it just another in a string of ‘strange coincidences’ since dubya stumbled into office?

The thing about this latest ‘Bin Laden’ video is that it is just so timely. I am a tad surprised that neither of our presidential candidates had a good speech prepared for this eventuality. Perhaps he (Osama) aired his video a day early? I certainly do love the message, though, which is; ‘We control your safety, not your president’. You really have to understand that that is true before you can try to make a war against Islamic Terrorists. They would just as soon kill the ideals of American Society, as well as the people that represent it, as look at it. Any ‘Scare’ that they can get out of us is a victory to them.

Whether the latest tape was staged, taken out of context, or filmed a couple of years ago really doesn’t matter. What matters is that we (the american people) get out and cast a vote. Regardless of who is in office at this time next year, the terrorists will roam free. Regardless of who happens to win the election, the same will be true. Isn’t it about time that we get someone into office that doesn’t think whoopy cushions are funny?

I do apologize, all that I have on my mind is political, and I don’t want to descend that slope. Perhaps the Megadeth concert tomorrow will put me back in my place. Dead End

Shoe size; Sex pills

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My day at work yesterday involved unloading a truck. I must say that this process has been made much, much easier on me since the change in distributors sometime in July. I used to have to pick every case off of a roller and set it on the floor to the side, now I just have to check in the perishables, which are carted in by the driver, and actually count the rest of the stock. I had never realized just how much work it was to pick up the several hundred cases (ranging in weight from 5-80 pounds) and set them to the side until the point where I didn’t have to do it. Damn that used to be a lot of work.

The unfortunate side-effect of the new system is that If I happen to miss damage to any of the persihable items while checking them in, we can not return them, and can not get a credit for breakage. What this means to me, personally, is that I have to pay a lot more attention to the boxes that the items are shipped in; If the sides of the box appear to be smashed a little bit, it could be that the product inside the box is completely destroyed. Still, having to do less lifting and more careful examinations is something that I welcome, having had problems with my back for the last ten or twelve years.

Unfortunately for you, the reader, I have no intentions of talking about my lack of lifting over the last couple of months. I have more sinister motives. It is all about the shoes.

In my last update, I mentioned that if my new shoes performed perfectly it would be akin to me getting a Pulitzer Prize for the writing that I put into this site. The thing is that the shoes did perform flawlessly, yet I have not heard any mention of my little bitch site being in contention for said Pulitzer. I suppose that I am a humbled man. I am a humbled man who no longer has sore feet every fucking day though, so that should count for something.

What I really want to know is how can a man reach the age of 30 without anyone ever saying anything about the poor fitting shoes? Sure there is not a lot of opportunity for that kind of thing when you buy your shoes at warehouse outlets and the such, but when the guys are fitting you for a Tuxedo they measure everything. Come to think of it, those rented tux shoes didn’t hurt either. Perhaps I should have asked the guy what shoe size I actually was. Bleh. Now I know the problem and I will be able to address it in the future.

One more thing that I must say about the whole ‘shoe size’ issue is that the reason that I used to buy the oversized (so it seems) shoes was that they were the only ones that didn’t horribly hurt my toes even in the showroom (that seems to be based on the shoe getting a fraction wider for every size; assuming that the foot is just a bit wider for every inch longer it gets). The side-effect of that was that they did not bend where my foot bent, which led to further discomfort, well pain usually. If you are a poor/cheap person like me, and you have a lot of foot pain, have someone actually measure your damn feet before your next shoe purchase. The difference is not like night and day, but more like sunshine as opposed to the endless void of the nether realms of a black hole.

I still wish that I could have found a brand that I knew a little bit better, perhaps the better fit of the shoes will keep my feet from busting the seams quite as quickly? I better go ahead and bookmark this page for the inevitable letdown in a month or two.

• In a bit of non-shoe news, for a change, here is a story that I really enjoyed:

Sex Enhancement Pills Fall Short?

I had long thought that no one believed the commercials for those damn ‘penis enlargement’ pills. Well it turns out that enough people did, and enough people are mad about it, that they are going to try to sue the makers of the pill ‘Enzyte’. You see, the thing is, I have to watch at least a dozen commercials for that pill every day. Not once, ever, in the commercials does it actually say that it will make the little willy bigger. It does say that it will give you a “big new spring of confidence”, it also says that it will give you “a little well-deserved respect around the neighborhood”, what it does not say is that it will make your penis bigger.

I think that they go to great lengths to try to make you think that they are saying that it will make your penis bigger, but they never say anything of the sort. Other commercials say that it will give you a “big, new swing of confidence” as well as a “happy woman back at the ‘club-house’.” None of that actually says, or implies, actual penis growth. Sure, some men would think that it implies they will get a larger penis if they take the pill, but aren’t there thousands of people who buy ‘penis pumps’ in the hopes of getting a bit of ‘natural male enhancement’?

The very last line of the article that I linked to at the start pretty much says it all, and it said:

“Enzyte is more successful subtracting from the male wallet than it is adding to the male organ,” Schardt said.

I may not be the biggest horse in the stalls, but I would rather eat my own shit than to pop sugar pills in the hopes that little willy would grow.

It is like my Mother always told me (and no that was not from her personal experience), “It is not the size of the wand, but the magic within.” Come to think of it., That might not have been my Mom, might have been my friend’s mom (the same non-sexual rule still applying), at any rate, someone said that to me enough times that I still remember it. Of course the small wand might make me remember this particular quote all the more.

Now that I have told everyone that has an internet connection that I have both huge feet and a small member, I think I am gonna call it a night.

Tune in to the next post to see how I can turn very innocuous ideas into horrible things that you would rather not read. I am ready.

PC problems at work; Atkins diet

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Well first off, just in case anyone out there is interested. The problems with the PC communicating with the cash registers at work has been resolved. As I suspected the faulty part was actually the communications board within the Master register, well, one of the communications ports on the pc is also a bit buggy, but I have known that for years and know how to get around the problem.

The unfortunate part of this situation is that the repair guy from NCR was down here for unrelated problems. The scanner on one of the machines would not send information to the register. We had the same problem a couple of weeks prior(while the bosses were away) and I remedied the situation by removing the scanner from the system (just the little part with the laser, not the whole scanning system) and swapping it with the other register. When they both worked, I just swapped them back. When the problem happened again, the boss just called NCR to have them try to find a more permanent solution. After a couple of visits to the store, the guy ended up doing exactly what I did. Swapped the scanner units and then both of the machines were working again, here I must say that “I could have done that”.

The NCR guy then swapped out the communications port on the Master Register, which took some convincig to get him to do, and waited while I tested it out. Everything worked perfectly. NCR man made a beeline for the door. Within fifteen minutes of him leaving the scanner that he had fixed quit working entirely, no beep, no whirring mirrors, nothing. We tried unplugging it for a bit then trying it again and were met with a long speech by the scale which involved phrases like, “Stop. Check. Cannot stand mechanical vibration. Stop. Check. Code 6. Change Scale Board. Stop. Check. Change Low Cell. Stop. Check. Code 4. Recalibrate System. Stop. Check. …” The list went on for about a minute or so and I can’t remember the rest of it, but come on, that certainly wasn’t functioning correctly.

There was someone out there again today fucking with the scanner problem. I sure hope it is actually fixed, as this is getting progressively more boring to recount and likely not going to get me onto the best-seller lists for fascinating non-fiction.

In a previous post, I mentioned that I was going to ask the technician why it is that any power surge can completely disable the newer registers while the thirty year old ones can live through it and still function perfectly (the old registers are always kept powered on, which I find a bit humorous, since whoever sold the old registers to them told them that it is better to have them powered constantly, even when not in use. I have repeatedly tried to get them to leave their pc turned on all the time but they never will. I don’t honestly know if it is better for the PC to be left on all the time, but that is the way I have always done it and I don’t have Nearly as many problems with my machine as they do), I got the opportunity to posit that question yesterday. I don’t recall his precise quote so I will paraphrase, Well, the newer microprocessors are far more power-sensitive. That’s how they’ve made them so much smaller, they are using less metal to make connections and sometimes they can’t take the power of an electrical spike (he said spike, not me, I usually say surge, so spike is probably the correct term). Now to skip a bunch of the tech-babble, it came right down to him saying, “Well those old registers probably weigh forty or fifty pounds, these ones only weigh fifteen.”

Great. So by making everything smaller and lighter we are making it also less and less reliable. No wonder you can buy a digital camera for sixty bucks nowadays, they know you are gonna buy another one in a few months…

• Now for the Headline of the century!

Atkins Diet Weight Loss Doesn’t Last – Study

Dear Random Fluctuations of Time and Space, stop the world from spinning. I, for one, did a triple-take at this news. I mean limiting your body to taking in nothing but fat doesn’t lead to actual long-term weight loss? Next these ‘science geeks’ are probably going to try to tell us that the earth isn’t flat, or even the center of the universe…Such Rubbish…

I am sure that any human of sound mind (and therein lies the key) understands that eating only one type of the basic food groups is not a healthy, long-term solution for weight loss. My wife (who knows a few people on this said ‘diet’) and I have talked about this a few times. Our basic take on it is that no one is going to lose much weight, but a couple of pounds seems pretty good at the start. The couple of pounds at the start are just wringing some of the water out of you, if you stick to the diet for a couple of months, even a year, the health risks are going to far outweigh (pun definitely intended) the loss of body fat. The majority of the people who are getting into this, it is not a diet, it is a ‘low carb lifestyle’, are at the point where the metabolism starts to slow down in the late twenties/early thirties. Sure, it is possible that this low-carb diet could work for some of the people, it is not going to work for the majority of the people that try it though.

My theory, one which my wife shares, is that in about twenty or twenty-five years the people who are currently on the ‘Atkins diet’ are going to have their hearts start to explode like popcorn. While it is possible to lower your carb intake and lose weight (which I know after having gone from 205 lbs. to 165 lbs. in just a few months after switching my 12-pack a day habit from Coke to Diet Coke), it is certainly not a reasonable assumption that you will stay at the lower weight if you take in nothing but fat calories.

Hell, I am creeping ever closer to the weight that I was before the soda change a decade ago. I suppose I should start eating nothing but beef and cheese, yet, I think I am going to have enough problems in the future since I smoke, drink, and come from a family that is almost all diabetic.

I suppose that a really bad analogy could be, If you didn’t brush your teeth for the first thirty years of your life, then someone offered to sell you a tube of something that would make them look like they did when you were fifteen or so, and you bought it, expecting results. Your teeth are still going to be nasty and rotten. No ‘snake oil salesman’ can turn back the hands of time. Taking care of your body yesterday is the only way to make sure that you are how you want to be tomorrow. If you notice you have put on five pounds, limit portions on food, excercise more and marvel at the results.

The point where you know your heart is going to explode in your early fifties is when you ask for a cheeseburger without the bun.

Kobe lawsuit

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I am going to start off with the thick of it, if I get to any random thoughts I might post them below. Time will tell.

The news item in question today is Bryant Accuser Sues, Seeks Monetary Damages

I spent a hell of a long time going through my old posts looking for my mention of this case (which is all my fault, since my archives are about four months out of date.) and I did find it. I must say that it kind of tickled my little, tickly parts when I found that it was saying basically the same thing that I thought it had said. I will quote just one paragraph on this update, if you want to see the whole thing I wrote (which was all about Richard Simmons getting sued for slapping a burly Harley salesman), you can read it Here.

The part from this particular rant that I wanted you to see is the following paragraph, indented for ease of view;

The sad truth is that so many of the cases involving celebrities are utter bull-shit that it is hard to pick through them and find the one in a hundred that is real. Take the trial of Kobe Bryant for instance. Did he have sex with that girl, yes. Was it consentual sex? There are only two people in the entire world that know the truth. I personally believe that it was consentual when it happened, then the girl realized that if it was not consentual she would be able to file a civil suit against him and get a boat- load of money. I feel a little bit more strongly about this case (though I am not actively following it) than I do about others because the woman in question turned in the panties that she had been wearing that night, and they had sperm from three separate persons in them. I am not sure if that was allowed to be entered into evidence in the case, also I guess it would be possible to rape a slut, but that really seems to take away from the credibility when she is screaming rape.

That almost seems prophetic, considering this line in the news today that;

The case took a serious turn against the prosecution when the judge in the criminal case ruled last month that the woman’s sexual history just before and hours after she said Bryant raped her could be presented at the trial. The defense’s theory is that she had consensual sex just hours after she said Bryant raped her, which could explain injuries the prosecution said she sustained. The woman has denied the defense claim.

Well, I have only known one woman that was raped ( I mean actually raped, not like a “date-rape”, which is just a bad a crime, but often never spoken of ). The woman, that I personally knew, who was raped didn’t run out and have consensual sex with the next half-a-dozen guys that she saw. Instead, she cried into my arms for a good six hours afterwards, that was when her friends and myself persuaded her to go to the police. There might be a woman out there who is gonna go fuck anything that moves after she has been raped, but that is going to be a tough position to defend.

The girl in this case is going to have to fight a really uphill battle both in the criminal and civil courts. She is going to have to explain how she has the semen from 3 different men in her underwear. Now, I am certainly not a pundit when it comes to court proceedings, but when you have to sift through your own panties to find DNA from the guy that raped you I think your case is pretty feeble. How did the other semen get there? Was it consensual sex with everyone except Kobe? Why did she have sex with a couple of other guys on the way to the police to report rape?

Don’t get me wrong, if he raped her he should be prosecuted. The thing is that the accuser can’t even keep her story straight about the rape, while the accused knows just how it went down.

The most damning piece of evidence in the whole story is this:

Usually, crime victims wait until the end of a criminal trial before suing in civil court, unless the statute of limitations is running out. “That’s not the case here,” attorney and former Denver prosecutor Craig Silverman said.
The civil lawsuit could be used by the defense to buttress an argument that she was only interested in getting money from the multimillionaire basketball player.

That is totally what happened. If you want to sue someone for rape you should keep it in your pants for a day or two on either side of the accusation.

Bush Vs. Bono?

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I really strive to avoid ever putting anything political on this site. The main reason for that is that I feel I am well enough informed to make my own decision on issues, yet not so informed that I would want anyone to read this and take my opinion as a truth. I know that everyone who reads a blog-type-thing with any objectivity will take the opinions with a grain of salt, but I am not even sure my personal opinion is worth that grain.

There are, of course, times when even my small-minded understanding of politics can be dead-on and unarguable. One of those times happened today as I was doing a cursory search of the Yahoo news.

Just for fun, here is the news story that I found on Yahoo news:

Bush, Kerry Converge on Iowa Battleground

The first paragraph, which is usually listed along with the headline, said;

DAVENPORT, Iowa – President Bush (news – web sites) and Sen. John Kerry (news – web sites) clashed at close quarters along the banks of the Mississippi River on Wednesday, the Republican incumbent pledging to “spread ownership and opportunity” if re-elected while his Democratic challenger campaigned as a fiscal conservative able and eager to fix the economy.

That is all well and good. I only clicked through to the article because of the photo that was shown beside the headline (which I will get to in a moment). After reading the headline and the first paragraph, I would think that if they were going to show two photos in the story it would be one photo each of Kerry and Bush, right? Nope. Below are the two photos that were accompanying that article, in no particular order. See if you can guess who is who! (both photos are from the Associated Press, by the way, though I am not going to waste my time looking for the names of the actual photographers.)

If you guessed that this first photograph was George W. Bush holding a baby, you would be correct!

If you guessed that this photograph was of the other candidate, whats-his-name, you would be wrong. No, see, this is BONO. He is a member of the band U2 I think, and certainly not John Kerry. How did it happen that a prominent site like Yahoo accidentally put a picture of Dubya holding a baby right next to a picture of BONO? This could have been a simple mistake, of course, but for the next hour and a half the pictures remained the same. Though as I checked just now, there is a photo of Kerry on the top with the photo of BONO still the second photo.

Now, please look again at that photo of Bush. Doesn’t it look a little bit like Dubya is giving the evil-eye to a baby who has slapped his hand to his(Bush’s) forehead, possibly in the hopes of slapping the Devil out of him? I don’t know. What I do know is that putting the picture of Bush holding a baby up as the Republican point photo, then following it with a photo of BONO (regardless of how democratic he happens to be) is going to swing to the advantage of the Republicans…Unless, of course, people see that even the baby hates Bush and is trying to push him away.

There are people on the Republican side (damn near all of them) that express that the problem with the “war on terror” is all based on the fact that the media is very liberal (slang for democrat). Anyone with a single shred of intelligence understands that it is completely the opposite, but that myth still persists. That has led all of us in the ‘lunatic fringe’ (Republican slang for Democrat) to find our news from sources that are not owned and operated by corporations that are spending millions of dollars a year to keep Bush in office. Every national station has interest in either Bush himself or the interests that Bush & Co. are kicking back money to. I really used to think that the news I read on the internet was not biased…I guess I better rethink that one…

Rental repairs; Amusing news

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There has been nothing at all that I felt like bitching about for the last few days, not that my life doesn’t suck every bit as badly as it always has, just that I am tired of talking about it. Life sucks, I’m used to it.

I have been doing a bit of work on one of the Owner’s rental houses over the last couple of days as well. Just hanging blinds and some general maintenance kind of stuff, but it has been taking a hell of a lot longer than it had ever taken me in the past. The reasons for this are multiple, depending on the particular window. Some of them have old screws and such that have been painted and plastered over, thus requiring me to find new ways of making window dressings be centered when there is no way to hang them in a central location. Don’t get me wrong, I did hang eleven blinds in this house, with the help of my brother-in-law on the first five, two of them were vertical, tall blinds, the other nine were simple, horizontal(venetian) blinds. Of all of the blinds that I did install there is only one blind that I has to install totally off from center, and that blind is less than a half of an inch off from center, i.e. if you weren’t looking for it, you wouldn’t find it.

The most annoying part of this project has been that I have not ever actually had a key to unlock the door of this rental house. That meant that I had to actually “break in” to the house, which was a very simple task, I mean it doesn’t have a lock on the majority of the windows, and the ones that do have locks just have simple pins that can be pushed out with an ink pen. It is not a lot of fun to have to actually “break in” to a house that you are working on though. It seems kind of shady, but that was my only option, that or drive all the way back to get another key (which I found out later also didn’t work anyway). I need now only to put up a couple of replacement pieces of glass over the light fixtures in a couple of the rooms and that will be that. At least as far as what I am being paid for.

I suppose that I should let him know that none of the electrical outlets in the kitchen work, that all of the outlets througout the house are not secured to the walls, that there is no way an electrical inspector (or a building inspector for that matter) would let a house be rented or sold without ground fault circuit interruptors in the bathroom and near the kitchen sink. I might mention this all if the opportunity presents itself, but chances are the opportunity will never be there.

Enough about that though.

I read the news over there at yahoo today and found a story that I just loved. The headline is, “Priest, Nun Convicted After ‘Sex Act’ in Car”.

My first thought was ‘since when are priests attracted to women?’ My second thought was ‘Since when are women attracted to priests?’ I guess that I should be concerned that the sanctity of the priesthood is being challenged, but, come on, he is a guy. I bet when GOD ‘calls’ people to the priesthood he doesn’t mention that there will be certain things that you will feel inside your pants that you can only alleviate in one way, that way is forbidden. I suppose that it is no wonder the priests start looking at young boys as…well…warm spots really. I suppose there comes a point where even a priest will have desires. Why he can’t take care of that desire with a local prostitute is unknown to me.

I guess that the nuns are attracted to the money, the power, all of the stuff that goes along with being a priest, but then I saw this particular quote in that news artical:

Passers by alerted police at Lilongwe International Airport after the parked Toyota Corolla, which had tinted windows, began shaking in what police described as “a funny manner.”

Damn, it only takes a Toyota Corolla to land a NUN? I am at least one step up from there with my car, still I doubt I could land a NUN! Of course, I am not going to have the Papal authority to land a NUN in the first place, but neither does your average priest. As I previously stated, I find this surprising ONLY because there was a woman involved. Had it been another priest raping pre-teen males I would have just thought it was the status quo. When that priest starts treading on my turf (you know, hetrosexual women) that is the point where the Church has overstepped their boundaries! To be fair, I guess both Priests and Nuns aren’t allowed to have sex, so to put it in simpler terms, it is like Fucking your sister if you happen to be religious.

The problem then becomes that no rational man or woman would ever sign up to be involved in a religious cult if they knew that it would cost them the freedom to use their body as they see fit. I understand that there are those that would say that any sexual temptation that a new priest feels is “the devil’s try” but, that is every priest who has ever lived! Now they have taken to having sex with anything that wiggles. Is that really how you want your little priest to grow up? No! you want him to be molesting children for the next fifty years, right? That is the only advantage of the Priesthood after all.

Bleh. Done for now.

Space technology fails; Harry Potter game

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I just don’t know what the world is coming to, what when a site as prominent as mine can post the wrong date and leave it up for two days without anyone emailing to bitch about it. I would have expected more from you. Of course, the “you” in that statement is mostly me at this point, and I didn’t even notice the mistake until just now when I was adding the page to the daily archives. I will hold myself to a higher standard in the future, or not, depending on my mood.

• Something that I have been hoping to write about for a week now still has not seemed to happen. I am talking about that multi-billion dollar device that is now in orbit around Saturn, and the spectacular images I was expecting it to be sending back to earth. After a week in orbit this is the best it can do? I have seen better images of Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster. I was expecting images more like those that are being sent back by the Hubble Telescope, which, while beautiful, are hard as hell to find a hard link to, I have linked to a half a dozen so far but the links just never work when I try to click them. If you really want to see some unbelievable images of space just do a quick yahoo image search for Hubble Telescope, simply amazing.

Shouldn’t technology have advanced at least some since the ’60s when we first started shooting crap at the moon? How is it possible that something that was sent into space only six or seven years ago can be sending back images that look like they were done on a Spirograph? Sure they have to travel millions of miles and the such, but come on! If we were going to spend billions of dollars on the technology to get this thing all the way to Saturn, don’t you think we could have gone the extra couple of bucks to get a color camera? I could take a close-up photo of the grain pattern in a block of wood and come up with images as good or better than what is coming back from Saturn.

I am just a bit disappointed with the results so far, that’s all. Perhaps it will be like what happened with the initial launch of the Hubble Telescope and there will be some minor problem that can be repaired to make the images more vibrant. I sure do hope so, I have been waiting to see these images ever since I heard of the launch all those years ago. Not that I am a space-nerd so much, just that the images captured in space can be so far out of the ordinary that they really seem to be more a fine work of art than something happening randomly…The current photos are also art I guess, just art done by blind people with only one crayon.

• Today was the first day of the new grocery ditributor era at work. The truck showed up an hour and a half early, which is a major plus, as the old distributor always showed up late, or later, if at all. The only problem with that is that I was just stepping out of the shower when I got the call. I do hate to make their drivers wait. I got there as quickly as I could and the two of us had finished unloading the merchandise in about thirty minutes. That is about how long it always takes, unless the load was particularly large or small. It didn’t seem so different at all.

Then something strange happened.

The guy gets off of the truck, comes onto the landing, and starts helping me check in all of the perishable items one at a time. This was something that the other company Never did. The new company requires it. I love that all the way around. There was a mispick (just like it sounds, wrong item) in the frozen and a short (just like it sounds, not there) in the dairy, and he gave us an immediate credit for them. He went further to give us the immediate credit for a bag of dog food that was torn and a case of condensed milk that had been damaged. Wow.

Here is how that last paragraph would have gone down with the old company. The driver leaves the second the stuff is off the truck. I find the short in the dairy section and call it in. The boss finds the mispick in the frozen section and calls it in. We put the damaged dog food and condensed milk off to the side and call that in. I write down everything that is wrong on a piece of paper along with case costs and item codes. The next week we should have a credit for the short, but often didn’t and would have to call again. The mispick and damaged items would be returned, though no paperwork ever changed hands (which is why we had to keep a running tally of it all), and within three weeks or a month the store would get a credit for it.

Being a small business it is difficult to keep track of all of this in the first place, but even worse is having the money already paid and having to wait for them to issue a credit. It often took three or four phone calls over the course of a month to get the money back. The system protects them as well since a case of cheese can easily cost $70 and if it is there it will have been checked in by one of their guys and one of ours, hard to dispute that. When you factor in that it only took the two of us about five minutes to check in all the perishable items and find the mistakes I just don’t know why the other company never did it.

One thing that was a bit irritating about the new company is that they had some of the profit margins all out of whack on the invoices. I should mention that the old company did not even tell you the unit cost on the invoice, let alone a suggested retail price or profit margin, so this was a small inconvenience. One that is also easily overcome with the boss figuring out what he wants to sell it for and me typing upc’s into the computer and changing retails. I am going to consult the company tomorrow to see if they can send us shelf tags of the items that we change the retail on, if they can’t I can still print our old tags out for the items, but, I think it would look a bit tacky to have two sets of tags going.

I am sure that talk of this is monumentally boring so I will move on.

• I have mentioned my newfound interest in Harry Potter in a couple of recent posts. The wife bought the first PC game based on the novels about a week ago. I started to play it on Sunday and had reached the final battle on Monday. It is a kids game, so I wasn’t expecting much, which is why I was so sorely disappointed.

I am about to do battle with the final “boss” in the game and I am missing half of the things that can be found along the way. To be fair, to myself, there were a few places that I was pretty sure that I needed to go, but the linear gameplay makes it so that if you go the wrong way first you can never go back the other way. If I were to play it through again (I say again as if I have ever beaten it) I am sure that I would be able to find more of those damn little cards that you are supposed to be collecting.

The thing that I really hate about the game is Quidditch. I am not horrible at games like F-Zero, I can do pretty well in flying simulation type games, but this Quidditch just kicks my ass. I think the biggest reason for that is the controls are on the keyboard and my old pc joystick won’t connect to either of the computers that we currently have. If you had the speed up/slow down buttons as well as all four direction keys on one of those it would be pretty easy I think. Even after having set the motion keys to “WASD”, like the old pc games I used to play, it still took me a lot longer than I would like to admit to win the damn matches. Mind you, they won’t let the other guys win, they will just wait forever if you don’t win.

Beyond that, the game is pretty fun for what it is. It is cute in places, makes you think a little bit, and could probably be completed perfectly by any six year old in the entire world. Let those little bastards try the original PitFall with an old Atari controller and we will see how good they really are. Of course they are releasing all of those old games for the hand held gaming systems now, but I doubt that any of those kids will ever be able to top my best of flipping the counter 4 times on Asteroids before my mom made me stop to come and eat a sandwich.

Work stress; brief politics; brothels get approval stamps

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Today was one of the worst days I have had at work in recent memory. I had not even actually gotten around to looking at the normal things that I needed to check before I was being demeaned, bitched at, and otherwise told that I was the shit that gets scraped off of the bare feet of malnourished children in third-world countries…Basically, at least.

This was all related to the great shelf tagging adventure, of course. As I have written in the past, I was not going to do anything that was going to lose the store money, I think I may have been a tad dishonest with that statement though. I knowingly did things that were going to cost the store money, just very small amounts. Say there are three different types of La Victoria salsa, one is priced 1.89, one 2.39 and one 2.49 (due to being received at different times), the new tags all read 2.29, so I change them all to that price. That is losing us, on a case of 12, 2.40 on the most expensive one, 1.20 on the middle one, but is also gaining us 4.80 on the lowest priced one. The net of that would be 1.20 profit over leaving them all at their current price. I am not completely stupid after all.

There were a couple of cases when I did make notable changes in price for a store loss. Those were done mostly for simplicity on items that we did not have much of. One particular instance was a little jar of mayonaise, we had three on the shelf, the new price was 30 cents lower than the old price, but getting the new price into the register with all the other changes would save me a lot of time in the long run. An intentional 90 cent loss, knowing that the product would cost us less in the future, knowing that it would save me the time it would take to change the price later, it is 90 cents FFS.

Another instance of my failure was in the cake mix area. I did not change a single price with the cake mixes or frostings while we did the change, the reason was that we never buy them except when they are on a really big discount. So I left all of the prices the same and started hanging up special signs in front of the new shelf tags that had vastly higher prices –But– (there always is a but, isn’t there) I did not realize that they had made price changes in the actual cash register to some of those items, this means that the price I saw on the tag and the price it scans at do not match. Okay that seems a little fuzzy, even to me, so I will explain.

The POS (point of sale) software that we have in the backroom sets the prices and prints the tags for all of the items that we have on the shelf. The price of an item can be changed on the register itself, but you will not have a tag for the item, and the price will revert back to the previous backroom price if it ever goes on sale; i.e. The tag for Betty Crocker White cake says 1.59 on the tag, that is the price in the backroom, if you change it to 1.29 at the register it will remain 1.29 until it goes on sale. Once it goes on sale a file will be made in the backroom to transfer the sale price to the register, when the sale file is removed it will go back to the backroom/tag price.

Blah, I am boring myself as I type this, so I am sure the reading of it is probably not going all that well either. Let us never speak of this again…until tomorrow.

• I have been quite curious about the Fahrenheit 9/11 movie, even wanted to go see it, but I think I have changed my mind. Everything that I have read, from every blog I can think of, says that there is no information in it that has not been in the political blogosphere for a very long time. Damn me for not watching cable news and, therefore, thinking that Bush Dubya is the steely-eyed, strong-handed leader that he would want you to believe. I voted for this jack-ass, but I kind of lost faith in him when he was doing his best to read a book for pre-schoolers when the 9/11 attacks happened -mind you, he wasn’t doing it very well.-

I suppose that was all part of his strategery for the war on terror. Pretend to be an illiterate fool, then prove everyone wrong by actually being an illiterate fool…Well played.

Had I been the leader of the free world, I likely would have tried to make the world perceive me as a strong leader, a leader who was the voice of the people. But, then, I am not the President and that means that I don’t really need any scapegoats…Enough said…

• I saw a very brief mention of some country deciding that it needed to go ahead and put quality stamps on their brothels. I am not going to try to look the story up again since the fact that the countries that do have brothels almost invariably have less sex crimes than in the U.S.. I say almost invariably only because I do not have statistics for every country on earth and I don’t want to be telling lies.

Prostitution is called the “oldest profession” for a damn good reason, it is. Imagine 20,000 years ago, when man was first starting to hunt, make fire, become human as we know it. Man comes back with the bounty of his kill, woman tries to find something to trade for it, man would rather have a few seconds with woman than anything that she offers, woman puts up a red torch to let the clan know that her naughty parts are for sale to the man with the most meat (in trade, not the pants). Woman gets the best cuts in exchange for laying on her back and taking it.

Could it have happened differently? Yes. Is it likely? No.

Males have known, all through the ages, that females possess that which they are searching for. Not just the fact that the female has an ‘inny’ while the male has an ‘outy’, no it is deeper than that. The woman can have offspring, while the male can not. Of course no one in the days 20,000 years ago knew about impregnation, but that is not the point. I bet the woman’s crotch has been for sale longer than the most ancient artifacts prove.

I really think that it is a liberation of sorts to have the woman charge the man for sexual services. It is ‘prostitution’, but it is also of her own choice. That is executing total control of your own body, if you want to use the control of your own body for the sake of financial gain, it is at your own risk.

I really think that the only reason the Greeks started having anal sex with their young men was to circumvent the strangle-hold that prostitution had on their society. Had there been more reasonably priced hookers we might think of some of the Greek rulers as marketing genius.

Prostitution works to help stop sex crimes, prostitution also helps to stop the spread of disease (in coutries where it is regulated). Do we, as Americans, only look down on it since it seems so easy as a solution? Do we want to do everything in the most difficult way possible?

Time will tell.