Category Archives: News

Dogs in the news

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Yesterday’s update was by far the largest one I have done to date. I didn’t think that was going to be the case, as I had no idea what to write about when I began it, that was why I just left the four paragraphs from the previous day on there. As it turns out I had a lot to write about, so much in fact that it bored my wife. I think it was probably because of the subject matter. Also I made reference to airplane parts without really describing what they were, but I figured if you had never built or flown an r.c. plane you likely were going to skip that section anyway.

I fear this update may go even longer since I really don’t have anything to write about today. Nothing in the news is worth posting about, well unless I really wanted to beat the dead horse that is the situation in Iraq and I am so not going there. If you want to know the truth about what the world thinks about the situation in Iraq (as opposed to the US Media blowing sunshine up your ass) just read a paper or website based anywhere except the US. We are pretty much universally hated at this point. Because I like to speculate, and love to look for worst case scenarios, imagine this; The US administration continues to fight in Iraq, despite the whole UN asking us to stand down. The US then invades North Korea, even as the UN advises against it. The UN then eliminates our position in the UN entirely. With us no longer having a say, the rest of the countries decide that we are a major threat and must be eliminated. The UN makes a unanimous decision to invade the US to free the rest of the world from the threat. The majority of our army is still deployed in north Korea and Iraq, so it is no problem for the world’s combined military to land in Canada and begin their attack from there, being as the US/Canadian border is the largest unprotected border in the world. Think about it, what country out there doesn’t have a bone to pick with the US? Our demise would be pretty swift. Hopefully, though, that will be the next video game coming to a store near you and not the truth about what could happen if we continue the path we are on.

• I got an email a few days ago regarding my dogs. I sent an email back in response but, just for fun I am going to post his email here. Unfortunately my exact response to his email is on my old computer and I have no intention of taking the time to plug it back in to quote myself. I remember what I was getting at, so I will write a new response, which may vary vastly from the one I sent him.

No offense intended, but out of curiosity, how do you read this type of article, or the dozens of others like it every year about the latest pit bull mauling/murder, and feel safe with your pets? Blog topic for a pit bull owner, eh?
http://www.thelouisvillechannel.com/news/3243296/detail.html

I mean sure, no one thinks their dogs will ever do that. But then again, that’s what the parents of that little girl thought too, until earlier this week. I’m never relaxed around any dog large enough to possibly do me severe physical harm, and that’s all dogs, not just the types that have been bred for hundreds of generations to be vicious, deadly fighting machines.

I will address his last point first. I know that dogs are basically wolves that have been tamed, and as such they already have it in their genes to kill. When dogs were domesticated, some of them were domesticated a bit less than others, like pit bulls. The thing is that your genes don’t necessarily mean that you are going to be like your ancestors. You are a product of your upbringing, just as a dog is a product of theirs. If you get a puppy and truly love and nurture the dog from birth I bet it is a lot less likely to be vicious than a dog that you buy as a puppy then stick on a ten foot chain in the yard and forget about until the day it either dies or kills.

As far as dogs in general, I am afraid of them also. I am deathly afraid of dogs like rottweilers. Unlike the mixed breed pit-bulls that I own, I have never seen a friendly rottweiler. Those dogs look like killers and are killers. They probably don’t get nearly as much publicity about killing children since any sensible parent would not own one of those dogs if they had children, or vice-versa.

The other thing about pit-bulls is that I think they get a really bum wrap. Both of our dogs are identified as ‘pit-bull mix’ which I think is code for ‘we got no idea’ at the local animal shelter. That way when the dog decides to eat your family they can say, “well we did tell you that it was a pit-bull”. That being whether the dog had any pit-bull in it or not. I say this based on the fact that I was trying to find a picture of a ‘pure bred’ pit-bull while trying to see if that was what our new puppy was, that was when I discovered that the pit-bull can look like a labrador, or a dalmation, or a greyhound, while it is in fact a ‘Bull Terrier’, I am not joking on this. The breed ‘pit bull’ is actually a ‘Bull Terrier”. I have found many images that closely resemble both of my mild-manored dogs.

I actually read a lot more about the “Pit Bull” than I had ever known, while I was at that site. It seems that the Pit Bull is getting even worse publicity than what I was thinking, as evidenced by This Report, which I will quote a bit of:

The odds of being struck by lightning are 1 in 600,000 in the USA. Comparatively speaking you are 6 times more likely to be struck by lightning than you are to be killed by a dog of any breed. When you further break down the odds of being attacked and killed by a Pit Bull the odds are in your favor -approximately 1 in 145,000,000. That’s million folks. In contrast, you are 4 times more likely to be killed by a cow in the USA than any breed of dog, much less a Pit Bull.
So why do some dogs attack?

The answer is quite simple really.

• Irresponsible pet owners.

• Irresponsible parents.

• Instigation by the “so called” victims themselves.

Although there are some bad dogs out there these are in the minority and the tendency is to blame the dogs and / or their owners without just cause.

Now, I am not necessarily trying to defend the pit bull, but after educating myslef on the subject I think that it is far more likely that the dogs involved in the vicious, mutilating attacks are of the rottweiler or doberman breed and mixed with the vicious ‘Bull Terrier’ (as a matter of fact, I can not find a single story at the AKC.org where a registered ‘Bull Terrier’ has ever killed anyone.). At the same time I do read/hear the news, and as such I doubt that I would ever have both a baby and a ‘pit bull’ in the house at the same time. I certainly love my dogs, but if there did happen to be an infant in my home the rules may have to change at least long enough to let the infant develop the ability to walk/run in case it did all go bad.

Howard Stern

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Well it is Thursday so I am back to this after taking a day off. That is kind of a difficult thing to get used to. I have only been doing this for a couple of months but I have gotten so used to writing at least a little bit every single day, regardless of how tired I am, that it just seems odd to not do it on wednesday. In fact yesterday I really had the urge to write a bit after watching the latest episode of South Park but I just didn’t, no real reason why or why not.

I will probably talk about the South Park thing a bit at the end, but for now I have to first give you the test that was promised Last Friday. Unfortunately I can’t ask how many gallons of water lake Mead holds because no one took the time to figure it out and send me the answer. I promised a test, though, so a test there shall be. It will be just a single question and if you get the answer wrong you will be taken behind the barn and shot to death. Here is the question:

There are 40 socks in a drawer. Twenty of them are blue, twenty of them are white. Without looking, what is the fewest number of socks that you could remove from the drawer to be sure that you had a matching pair?
A. 2
B. 3
C. 21
D. 40

I like to keep my tests simple. If you really feel the need, go ahead and email me your guess. Perhaps I will award a pretty gold star like my teachers used to. Or not, such an easy question probably doesn’t deserve such an award. I did at least keep my word and put a test up on thursday. Pity I don’t have the time/inclination to dig out my javascript dictionary and look up how to do radio buttons, as that would look a hell of a lot more professional. Oh well, you get what you pay for.

• It has been some time since I have put any news up here and I really feel the urge to do it again today. I am just sick and tired of the FCC trying to impose the moral view of the religious nuts on the rest of us. They of course pick really easy targets when they do, like Howard Stern. Back in the news again after an unprecidented fine is proposed against Clear Channel so they dropped him completely. It is not like Clear Channel carried him on many stations it appears that his show only ever aired on six of the stations, but still it just sickens me.

It is an AP story, but I read it Here. What I find the most disturbing is just how small the fine really is in comparison to how much money that station generates annually. No, strike that, what I find the most disturbing is that I am being forced to bitch about this, yet again, it is not like the show is being forced onto children in school. People who listen to the show have a thing called ‘Free Will’, I thought that Howard Stern had a thing called ‘Freedom of Speech’, guess I was reading a pamphlet from some country other than the good old U S of A. Stern had a quote in the article that I think was pretty dead on.

In a statement posted on his Web site, Stern characterized the fine as furtherance of a “witch hunt” against him by the Bush administration, which he says is punishing him for his criticism of the president.
“It is pretty shocking that governmental interference into our rights and free speech takes place in the U.S.,” he said. “It’s hard to reconcile this with the ‘land of the free’ and the ‘home of the brave.'”

To be fair, I suppose Stern has probably pissed off a lot of people with his show. People in high places. I don’t listen to his show at all, I find it to be a tad gross, but I have caught clips of it when he is bashing other radio personalities like Larry King. If he doesn’t care about pissing off people in his own business then I have no doubt that he probably does say things that would piss of the President and his cronies. The thing is that the president is not much different than about 99% of the religious kooks in the US so Stern would probably be getting this same treatment if he never said a word about politics.

This all really should be moot. Why is he not allowed to say what he wants to say? If he is not using profanity, or describing beating children, or raping women, what the hell is so wrong with it? I have listened to Larry King’s show a couple of times and have found what he is saying to be as offensive, if not more so, than Howard Stern. Then there is Rush Limbaugh, that guy can throw around hatred for black people, call the lower class the “scum he wipes from his shoes” and I am sure that he has said a lot worse things that I have just not heard about. Where are the fines for those guys?

So, is the FCC basically trying to say that it is absolutely fine to hate people based on their race and talk about it on national radio, but you can not talk about a vagina? I don’t get it. If I had children, I would like to think that I would rather have them hearing about sex than hearing about how to hate black people. After all everyone has sex at some point. While only some very small-minded people hold a grudge against people who have skin that is a different pigment than their own. The people who have a problem with the subjects discussed on the Howard Stern show are likely exactly the same people who preach abstinance instead of birth control, while they have a pregnant daughter, two sons in the KKK and absolutely zero base in reality.

Maybe Stern is right, what he is saying is not any worse than what some of the right wing radio kooks are preaching and he is getting the bulk of the fines for it. Almost half of the 4 million dollars in fines since 1990 imposed by the FCC (if the article is accurate).

The article goes on to say;

Stern’s nationally syndicated show features graphic sexual discussion and humor. It appears on more than 30 stations — most of them owned by Viacom Inc.’s Infinity Broadcasting unit — and draws millions of die-hard listeners.
Infinity spokesman Dana McClintock said the company has no plans to take any action against Stern.

Whether Infinity has cajones or is just making sure not to sour their cash cow is not really all that clear. At least they have not decided to take his show off the air, mostly because it would be all but suicide for them to do so. I doubt that people who listen to the Stern show would ever listen to that station again if they were to willingly cut his show. Again, this all should not be an issue anyway. We all have freedom of choice, if you don’t like it, don’t listen to it. That, I think, is how people like Limbaugh are able to get away with bitching about the plague that is ‘black people’. They believe it to be true, their listeners believe it to be true, and those who don’t want to hear it simply turn the dial. Yet, these Limbaugh-ites are exactly the same people that are making a big hubub about Stern talking about sex. The world is just going straight to hell.

To conclude, it is pretty clear that the FCC is only handing out viloations based on listener complaints, right?

Though the commission received no complaints from listeners to Infinity stations, it is looking into fining that company, too.

Your tax dollars in action. Fining people based on not having a complaint filed against them, but the possibility that maybe someone could have complained, but didn’t. I love this country (that was sarcasm, in this particular case).

Mad cows; Writing

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Well, I just wrote a quick email to the author over at BlackChampagne regarding his blog about a kid getting expelled for a story he wrote. I am just going to cut and paste that into the bottom of this update since it is better than anything I had planned to write about today anyway.

Not a lot to talk about today, the family is fine, thank you. I have not been to any news sites for the last couple of days (sometimes it is good to just turn off the world for a few days), and the only depressing thing in the local news is the visit of the President to the valley, that is unless you count death and rape as depressing. I think most of us are so hardened from watching so many movies that those only bother us if it happens to us, or someone we know. Of course I am just a tad cynical.

The reason that I find it depressing that the president is visiting my state is that the only reason he is doing it is for one of those “charity fundraising” events. Pay for a plate to watch him talk about how good he is. This is expected from politicians to be sure, but when that politician has a war chest so big that he is already slamming the opposition in televison ads, eight months before the election, it is just a terrible display of just how many backers (powerfull ones) he already has. But, that is political and I do not want to get into it so I will try to find a tangent.

Just did a quick check of news for some inspiration. The world is going to hell. More specifically, the U.S. part of the world is going to hell. The USDA is trying to keep companies from testing all of the cattle that they raise for mad cow disease. Their logic seems pretty sound, so few cattle have the disease that it is not necessary to check all of the cattle. Isn’t that just a bit backwards? Just to make a point, and I do not know the actual numbers, let’s say that one in eighty people has the HIV virus. Would it make more sense to check every 80th person or to check every person? If you roll a single six sided dice, for instance, the odds that it will fall on the number one are only 16.67%, if you are looking for the occurances of the number one would you check just once every six rolls? I mean really, WTF are they thinking? The U.S. is slaughtering some 37 million cattle a year, the USDA wants to test 270,000 and call it good enough? Then they only want to test the ones that they have to drag to slaughter, since they can’t walk, and do 20,000 random tests. Yeah, that should be a pretty accurate measure, random tests for .05% of the cattle that are slaughtered, how could there possibly any error? Hell, if you did a random test for HIV on just one out of 1850 people, that virus might not exist, right?

I’m rambling again, I am gonna call it a night.

The following is an email that I sent after reading this blog over at Blackchampagne. It might make more sense if you had read that first, no guarantee.

Just a quick note on the story about the kid getting expelled over a story. I also wrote some crap like that when I was young, like late teens. I read one of my old stories the other day while looking for one worth posting on my site -it seems that most of what I have written is far from the literary gold I thought it was when I wrote it- and found one that I had written first person about a serial killer. It was just sick.

I didn’t get into any sex or child rape or anything quite that unsavory, but it was very gory and graphic. Why I felt the need to make the killer cut open each body and force their right arm under their ribcage (putting their own hand on their heart, in theory) is something that did not do anything for the story, it was supposed to be his ‘trademark’, but looking back on it I know that my only intention was to make it shocking and gross. Unfortunately, it did not make it shocking, nor did it really make it gross, it just made me wonder what the hell was going through my head when I did it.

I really think that the reason that I did stuff like that when I was younger was either because I had never read anything like it, so I assumed that I was the first person that ever thought to try it, or that I didn’t have enough life experience to know how to write an interesting scene, so I used gore in the place of captivating descriptions. It was probably a little bit of both.

I guess that is why most people who did write a lot of short stories never go back to them later. Honestly someone like Stephen King probably wrote a lot of really horrible gory crap back when he was in high school, then found that it was just too poorly written to even try to salvage. I am much worse off, with a file cabinet full of probably a couple hundred ten or twenty page stories that have a good idea as the basis, but writing quality that would not even pass in a creative writing course. Out of all of them that I have read recently I can only find a few where I think the idea is good enough to even try to do a complete rewrite. And it would be a complete rewrite, I would not even have the story in front of me as I was doing it, since the idea is the only thing worth preserving, not a single word from the actual pages.

The only good that I have found in reading my old stories is that as the ink gets darker, the stories get better. They were mostly all done on a manual typewriter a long time ago and the ink is badly fading. I had thought that I would start to retype some of the oldest ones before they just faded away, but after reading them again I think it may be better to let them fade. It seems that they are so much better in my memory than they are on the paper that I could redo them if I really felt the urge, but there is no way that any of it could ever make it to a publisher so what would the point be.

On a side note, I remember having asked you about a problem that I was having opening some old stories that I had saved to disk but no paper copies of. I was finally able to open them using the “Quickview” program. The entire story would then appear as a single line of text that was Extremely long. All punctuation in them was either missing or just strange symbols, after a bit of experimentation I was able to just cut and paste each one into word pad and do a find and replace for the symbols. That resulted in almost coherent sentences, but as these were the oldest of the stories that I did on a computer they turned out to be just slightly better than the rest of the crap I was talking about. I almost wish that I would never have figured out how to open them, so that I could believe that they were some sort of literary masterpieces forever lost to the world, instead I see that they are more like literary slightly-polished turds. Depressing.

And finally a story from my time in high school. I had to do an essay, I am not sure if I chose the subject or if it was assigned (not that it matters) and the subject was mythology. Now Oregon is not exactly in the bible belt, but there are a lot of really white, really nervous people in charge of the schools up there that had a problem with which particular mythologies I was discussing. I chose to compare Christianity and Satanism. It took me a week or so to get my hands on a copy of the Satanic Bible, my school and local library refused to send upstate to borrow a copy and that led to me having to drive all the way to the University of Oregon to research it. That book is absolute crap, nothing like I thought it would be. I figured it would be much like the Christian bible but the other side of it, in reality it is just a guy telling a story, more or less.

My essay then focused on the practices and customs of Christianity. I left the title the same “Comparing Myths: Christianity vs. Satanism”. Just to be an ass (mostly because I was pissed off at the lengths I was forced to go to read the satanic bible) I started most sentences with, “In Christianity you must” followed by whatever ridiculous, cracker eating crap came next. I sure wish I still had a copy of that essay, it was one of the best that I have ever written, lots of details about what one MUST believe to say that they are Christian.

Because I had to compare the two mythologies, I had to put down something for Satanism, I did, the last line of the essay, “Satanists mustn’t.”

I thought I put together a pretty good essay, but it resulted in me being suspended from school for three days. They say it was because I didn’t follow the guidelines and actually ‘compare’ the two mythologies, I say that was impossible since they wouldn’t get the book for me to compare Satanism to anything (I never told them that I actually had read that book and it swayed me to do the essay the way I did).

It is really bizarre the way the schools handle such mundane things. But what can you do?

Donnie

Dinner; Mad cow

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Yesterday’s update was cut a bit short because I went out to dinner, that is a pretty rare event around our house. I would like to say that it is because I am xenophobic or agoraphobic but the plain and simple truth is that I am just a cheap-ass. On second thought, I think I am gonna go with a combination of xenophobia and agoraphobia, and -hopefully- seem to be a bit less of a jack-ass.

Aside from the monetary concerns involved with eating out, the other issue that I have with the process is the servers. At a restaurant where you have never been, you may expect that there could be shoddy service, while at one that you frequent you would expect better service, or else why would you frequent it in the first place? The place that we normally eat out is local, and in a town as small as mine when I say local I mean that it is owned by two people, one is my barber and the other is his wife, who frequents the grocery store I work at. Think happy thoughts about the “Mayberry” type small town for a second, than toss that mess right out the window.

I am on a first name basis with the owners of the establishment (there is no need to include the name of the place, since there is only one in the entire world) as well as the guy who runs it on a day to day basis. Perhaps because I know the people so well, I find it very difficult to complain about anything, even when that something is absolutely terrible service that I know they would not tolerate from my store, and would not expect me to tolerate from their business. That is where it all gets just a bit tricky where I live.

The servers where I live get paid shit wages. I don’t mean like minimum wage, I mean like last I knew they actually make about three dollars an hour plus tips (some restaurants do pay base minimum wage plus tips, but they are few and far between). I am not sure if there is a law in the state of Arizona that makes this possible, or if the tips that they earn put them above the minimum wage to make it legal, however it works, it works. I am not sure about you, but if I was making three dollars an hour, I would bust my ass to make sure that I made every customer feel like he/she was royalty. Most people don’t even tip ten percent, even less fifteen percent, and if the service is bad there would more likely be a penny under the upside-down cup full of water, which I have only done a couple of times.

There is a server at this restaurant that is just amazing, knows myself and my wife on a first name basis, has our drinks on the table before we order them, always has an ashtray on the table quickly (yes, I know it is going to kill me and I should quit, but until I do, when I sit in the smoking section and do not have an ashtray it really irritates me). This server is probably the best that I have ever seen in any restaurant ever, and he, yes HE is not a young man, he has been at it for a while, and knows that the level of service will dictate the level of tip. What other job is there where your efficiency can either triple or half your hourly wage on a day to day basis? This guy always gets my highest honor, that being a twenty percent tip. Some of the other servers in the same restaurant get much less, like a dollar. On a twenty dollar dinner that would be a 5 percent tip. Servers here (elsewhere also?) are required to report 10 percent of the total from the people they served as tips received, even if they didn’t make that much. So providing bad service to everyone that you wait on could result in you actually losing money for the night. That’s some kind of incentive, in my mind.

What I was trying to get at, a few paragraphs back, is that it is hard to find good servers down here. When the base wage is so low (it may have changed since the last numbers I have, but the three dollars an hour I spoke of was when federal minimum wage was five twenty-five) the only people that really apply to that position are usually teen-agers, except, frequently there will be illegal immigrants here (there are a lot of farms nearby that rely on them for cheap labor) that use false social security numbers to get jobs. I am quite sure that large corporations do extensive background checks on the people that apply, your average family owned business here really just doesn’t. Even when I got my job down here I did not have a single photo ID, I did have a social security card, but who was to say that that was actually me? That is the same angle they are using, and quite effectively.

At any rate, back to the dinner story. I just somehow managed to spend way too long explaing that the server that was waiting on us initially last night didn’t speak english. About ten minutes into the experience we decided to switch tables, to be closer to the door the servers go through, so that, in theory, they might notice that there were a couple of people there without the requisite placemats, silverware, salsa, chips, drinks, the sort of stuff that this place is usually really quick to get to you. I spent the next ten or so minutes trying to level our table, it was a really wobbly one, by the time they came around with the chips I had nearly acieved true level (though I didn’t have a level to check, so that is based solely on the fact that you could no longer put a nickel on one side of the table, push down on the other side of the table and watch the nickel fly into the street). The woman tried to take our drink order, ‘Coors Light’ and ‘Hard Lemonade’, she did not understand about the hard lemonade. She understood the lemonade part, but not the ‘hard’ part. She went and got a bottle of lemonade and brought it over to see if that was what my wife had ordered, which it wasn’t, when my wife said, “No.” that might have been the only time she understood a single word that either of us had spoken so far. She took the lemonade away…And never returned…

We now had the chips and salsa, but no drinks, we nibbled on the chips and salsa anyway, sure that the drinks would eventually arrive. Big mistake. You must understand that the salsa in this place is considered ‘mild’, where I live fresh salsa that is called ‘mild’ makes Pace Picante Sauce that is ‘Hot’ taste like tomato sauce. So, we were both now breathing fire, no drinks to be found, and my wife said that she would just do with some ice water if we ever saw the server again. I was a bit irritated about the whole state myself, so I went to server central (inside the place, as we were on the patio) and happened to run into the guy who ran the place on a day to day basis. I simply asked him for an ice water and an ashtray, as we had been waiting at least twenty minutes at that point for any kind of actual service. He asked me if there was a problem, I didn’t want to say anything, but I did mention that they had taken the drink order and the girl didn’t seem to understand. It turns out that they no longer carried any type of ‘hard lemonade’, but had just gotten in some new type of hard raspberry drink. I left there with a glass of ice water and an ashtray, and about twenty seconds after I got back to our table our drinks arrived, carried by a different server.

I don’t think that we ever saw that original server the rest of the night, but the service certainly improved. It only took about ten minutes (maybe fifteen) to get our food, after taking longer than that to get, well, anyone to come to our table. There was a mistake with her food order, but it was an addition, and it was not charged to us, so that doesn’t really matter. The one thing that I really found strange about the whole ordeal was that the guy who runs the place day to day had said that “your drinks are on me”, since they never brought us a bill I really couldn’t say for sure, but what I can say is that my wife asked if they charged her for the item in her meal that she did not get, and they hadn’t, but they did charge here for a ‘hard lemonade’ which was the source of the entire problem in the first place. The two beers that I drank, at least, were free.

I am not sure if I have ever written on this site that I am a butcher, if not there you go. I am not the one who slaughters the animals or anything, I am the one that takes the 20-60 pound crude cuts of beef/pork and makes them into the yummy little steak/roast size portions that you see in the local grocery store. The majority of the meat that I deal with is boneless, as it is a far more efficient way to handle it in a small time operation like the one I work in. The pieces of meat, though, are also whole, like a whole striploin (muscles on the lower back of a cow/pig that are on the inside of the rib-cage), I don’t want to go into to much detail, just to say that I know where each piece of said cow/pig came from. Since the day when it was discovered that there was at least a single case of bovine spongiform encephalopathy found in the U.S., when anyone asks me which type of ground beef I prefer, I will always say that I prefer the one that I make daily from cow muscle, where the one that is called “Extra Lean Quality Ground Beef” is the leaner type of beef, it is also the type that may be mechanically stirpped from the carcass, and far more likely to have neural matter from the slain beast in it. That would make it, in my mind, far more likely to be able to cause the same disease in humans.

Looking around online today, I found this article which does not really put my heart at ease. Read the whole thing for context, I am going to take a few quotes from it.

The government last year conducted mad cow tests on tissues from 20,543 animals, virtually all of them cattle that could not stand or walk and had to be dragged to slaughter. After the case in December, the department initially doubled the number of animals to be tested this year to 40,000.

Well it is good to see that we have taken a firm stance on this. We want to make sure that animals that very obviously have serious problems are tested before they go to slaughter. Maybe they just tested the whole puddle of DNA they got by having to drag the animals to slaughter, since they could not walk on their own. I feel so much safer now.

The department announced plans Monday to test more than 221,000 animals over a 12- to 18-month period beginning in June.
Included would be 201,000 animals considered to be at high risk of bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE, because they show symptoms of nervous system disorders such as twitching.

Random tests also will be conducted on about 20,000 older animals sent to slaughter even though they appear healthy. Those tests are aimed at sampling cattle old enough to have eaten feed produced before 1997, when the Food and Drug Administration banned the use of cattle tissue in feed for other cattle.

So they have raised the bar, a bit, now testing animals that are at “high risk” of the disease, to me that means that the animals have already been privately tested and have come out with clean bills of health, otherwise the american beef industry would be ruined. I may have the wrong take on this, though, as they are not saying whether these tests will be at random. I bet the 20,000 old cattle that they are willing to test, who were sent to slaughter, were checked by the american beef farmers also.

“We want to see the U.S. government introduce the same system for beef safety, or at least an equivalent system, that we have in Japan. We test all slaughter cattle, regardless of age — not some,” he said.
Nearly 50 countries imposed bans on American beef after the first U.S. case was confirmed. Poland has lifted its ban and Mexico has relaxed its prohibitions, but major importers like Japan and South Korea have said they will not allow American beef back in until all 35 million cattle slaughtered in the United States each year are tested.

Wait, seriously, if we slaughter 35 million cattle in the U.S. every year, we could certainly do better than to check 200,000 of them to make sure they aren’t going to kill people, right, right…..

The department expects to announce soon a new system of rapid tests that will make the increased surveillance possible. The rapid tests could be done at laboratories around the nation, as well as the department’s National Veterinary Services Laboratory in Ames, Iowa, currently the only facility that can do testing.
The testing could find one case of BSE in 10 million animals, he said. It would establish whether the United States has more cases of mad cow.

DeHaven has said it’s not necessary to test every animal because the department’s targeted surveillance program system would pick up one case of BSE in 10 million animals.

Those are the type of numbers that I like to hear. So we are slaughtering 35 million animals a year, but only one in 10 million of them will kill you if you eat it, therefore we don’t need any further tests. WTF? So what comes next, they have to put labels on the sides of the containers that your beef comes in that say “Caution: eating beef has been linked to the immediate death of thousands of people, but we just don’t give a fuck.” Great advertising there, eh?

Windows; million dollar bill

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I really had high hopes for today. I found a couple of news items that I really wanted to bitch about, and had a thought for what to put below. Then my father’s twin sister called me on the phone and it all went to hell.

I really wanted to bitch about several news items that I saw today, but I am not able to because of the time.

Well, I may be able enough to give it a go. So here is the first headline;

Microsoft Says Latest Software Flaw ‘Critical’

SEATTLE (Reuters) – Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq:MSFT – news) upgraded a recent security warning to “critical” after discovering new ways in which an attacker could run malicious software on a vulnerable computer, the world’s largest software maker said on Wednesday.

So when is the last time that you heard about a problem with the security on a macintosh system? Is that a rhetorical question or does the Imac team just handle it a lot better? I don’t really know myself, but, I think I may find it out soon.

Was she thinking that they would make change for this or what? I mean it is a Million Dollars. so they would check with their supervisors and give her back over 900,000 in cash? Not a good ruse to try at a Wal-Mart. It is not even a really clear copy of the bill in question, but I would think that even your average “Circle K” employee would notice that it was a bill that far exceeded the twenty bucks or so that they keep in their till. It does look like real american money, but that is what they are going for when they make the fake million dollar bills, isn’t it?

Should we kill the people who made that bill? No way, that is the ‘ignorance of the consumer’ in action. The people will find a way to sucker anyone in for any reason. If your ignorance plays a part then you are less of a person than I thought you were…

Comedy Central; Pictures

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Well it turns out that Flux over at Blackchampagne had a link to my site in his blog today. The good news is that it did make me have quite a spike in site traffic, the bad news is that there was not much worth reading on my post. Whether there is ever anything worth reading here could be debated till the end of time, so I won’t go there. It is the thought that counts.

I awoke this morning (I am using the term ‘morning’ very loosely here) and flipped on my television to find out that some jack-ass had taken comedy central off the air. There had been ads running on Comedy Central all week that said that Dish Network was going to quit carrying the channel, but I just assumed that was a ploy to get a bunch of people to call Dish Network and say “I want my Comedy Central!”. Well if that was the case I guess not enough people called, or Dish Network just didn’t seem to care, since it is certainly gone now. Other networks that were ripped from the lineup include Mtv, Vh1, Nickelodeon and a bunch of others. To put it bluntly, my “top 50” package is now more of a “top 35” due to this.

Wy wife called to ask if the stations were really gone, and I assured her that yup, we’re fucked. But, at least we still have our CBS affiliate, as they have removed CBS from the lineup in many major markets including New York and Los Angeles. So it could be worse, I guess.

Once home from work I really wanted to go see just what the whole fuss was about, and I found it in heaps. I went to Yahoo News and did a search for ‘Viacom’ (who own the stations in question) and found at least a dozen stories there that had been added within the last three hours. Every on of them was about Viacom and Echostar’s (the company that owns dish network) dispute. I read about ten of them, starting with the earliest post. It just sickened me. The following quotes are taken from this article

Viacom officials said EchoStar was fighting over what amounted to 6 cents more per customer per month.

I am not sure which side is telling a version of the story that is closer to the truth, but if I just take viacom’s claim and Dish Network’s claim and average them it still comes out to being an increase of like 30 cents. 30 cents for all of those channels on a monthly basis, a penny a day, hell I would pay that in a heartbeat if it would get Comedy Central back on.

I can certainly see where each side is coming from after having read all of the articles though. Viacom is constantly stressing the pennies per person per day thing, while Echostar is talking about Hundreds of millions of dollars over the next four years. I am pretty sure that they are using the exact same number but it sure seems a lot bigger when you say hundreds of millions of dollars. Don’t get me wrong, I bet that if everyone that subscribed to Dish Network would send my six cents per month I could easily retire and buy that new Ferrari Enzo I have had my eyes on.

I had been siding with Echostar on this, thinking that Viacom was really trying to be a mean old bully and beat us up for our milk money, then I saw this particular quote;

EchoStar said it planned to give $1 monthly credits to customers who lose CBS programming, and another $1 for those who subscribe to additional Viacom channels. Besides CBS, media conglomerate Viacom also owns MTV and the Paramount movie studio.

So what they are telling me is that I am going to get a dollar a month credit for losing 15 channels? One dollar off of my $34.98 bill for losing 15 channels? I mean what the fuck? There are probably a lot more than 15 channels, those are just the ones that are on the list we look through daily, and that is only one dollar? I am starting to think that both sides may just be mean old bullies trying to steal my milk money.

What burns me worst of all about this whole situation is that I only signed up for Dish Network for two reasons. The first reason was that it was about three dollars a month cheaper than my local cable, the second was that they had Comedy Central. Now what am I to do? If they do not bring back Comedy Central I may well just go back to local cable since I could then get high speed internet access in a package deal with the cable and save myself a bit of cash. In case you had not yet noticed, this whole thing just really has me pissed off.

I got yet another email today, that is like two in two days. I don’t know how I am going to deal with this constant barrage of email… Seriously, though, this one was from an old friend who was wanting to know if I had any pictures on the site since his wife has never seen myself or my wife. I feel quite obligated to throw a couple of pictures up here because, well, I don’t really know why. So here are a couple of pictures. As always click on them for a full size pic.

Here is one of me playing guitar. This picture is a bit dated, but I really don’t look that much different now, unless you want to count that strange third arm that recently grew out of my forehead. The problem is that while I am usually quite photogenic, that requires that I be near a camera while someone is clicking it, and for some reason that is something that I really try to avoid.

Here is yet another rather dated photo of me, maybe three or four years old. I am standing in front of the grand canyon if you were not able to guess. I really actually hate this picture because it makes me look like I have one of those little Fu-man-shu moustache type things. I am pretty sure that I hadn’t shaved that day, but still.

Here is one of my wife and myself at the wedding ceremony. For some reason the camera has made the color of my flesh look a lot more red than it actually is, but it did the same thing to the Pastor. This may have been one of the photos taken with the cheap disposable cameras that we left on all of the guests tables, I am not really sure. It certainly does look like I have been holding my breath for about three minutes though. This was the best photo I could find that really showed how beautiful my wife’s dress was. Of course you need to look at the full size shot to see that.

Well, that should be enough photos to sate you all for roughly the rest of your natural lives. I had never actually seen these shots side by side before, and I think that I really look just about the same in all of them. Sure I have more gray hair now than I did in the photos, but with just a bit of selective plucking or some “just for men gel” I could probably take a photo in a similar pose and be able to fool people into thinking that they were taken at the same time. If I am ever reduced to that, though, it will probably be at about the same time as I buy a convertible and start cruising for women twenty years my junior. Since I am quite happily married, and I really think that it would be sick and wrong to look for dates at a gradeschool, I will let that thought go for now, and hopefully the rest of my life.

Now on a side note. If any of you are reading this after having linked through from blackchampagne yesterday, I would really like to know your thoughts, good or bad, about my little site thing. What, if anything you like, what, if anything you hate kind of thing. I do enjoy email.

Odd news; Warlock

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Before I start to go into something else, I want to mention that when I read my update from yesterday I noticed that I had left out a detail I really wanted to include in my bitching about the movie ‘Signs’. The particular detail was about the fact that water is toxic to the aliens. The part that I forgot to mention was humidity -you know, the amount of water in the air-, so depending on what particular month the story supposedly happened there should have been enough moisture in the air to kill them on the spot. Then there is the issue with rain…but it is going way beyond what the small time/scale of the movie was going for, so we will assume that they just never thought it would rain. But, enough about that.

In other developements, I found that I have a site reader that I did not know I had. This person sent me an email with a request. Despite the request I am not going to quit doing these updates ;), The request was for more doggy pictures and stories, and the story of how I ended up two ‘vicious pit bulls’ is one that I think could be entertaining, or at least informative, so I will go into that below.

There is a very odd and short news thing that I have to put here today;

SYDNEY (Reuters) – An Australian handyman admitted he was stupid to shoot himself in the head with a nail gun in a misguided prank that left him with a nail lodged in his brain.Brad Shorten, a father of three from Victoria state, was enjoying a few beers with friends after working on his house when they began joking about industrial accidents.

Shorten, 33, picked up a nail gun that he thought was empty, pointed it at his head and pulled the trigger.

He later said he had turned off the gun’s compressor and taken out its nail cartridge but did not realize there was still enough pressure in the gun to fire a nail.

“My mates and I were talking about construction site accidents and taking your eye out with a nail gun, and I foolishly put the gun to my head and pulled the trigger,” Shorten told the Sunday Herald Sun newspaper.

“I did a very stupid thing,” he said.

The bizarre mishap left him with a 1.25-inch nail counter-sunk through his skull just behind his temple.

Royal Melbourne Hospital neurosurgeons removed the nail in a delicate four-hour operation even though Shorten, who was expected to make a full recovery, had offered to take the nail out with a pair of pliers.

Isn’t it funny that they were joking about this exact thing when some jack ass decides that holding a nail gun to his head and pulling the trigger would be a good idea? I think he should be put to death (or at the very least castrated) to keep his idiot gene from passing to another generation. I am all about protecting the children after all…

Puppies!

You know, some people think that canines are no longer ‘puppies’ when they hit the fifty pound mark, but I know the truth, as long as you have control over them they are still puppies. Sure one of my puppies has eclipsed the 50 pound mark and ran with it, but he is well behaved and as such Is still my ‘pup’, well technically that is my wife’s pup, but the idea stays the same. A well controlled dog, regardless of size, will always be your puppy.

Here is the story of how we got our first dog;

When my wife and I moved from a studio apartment to the house that we are now buying, we thought that (well she thought really) that a dog would be a good addition to the non-existent back yard. We kicked the idea around for at least a month, maybe six weeks, before we decided to go ahead and get a dog. Once the decision was made that we were going to get a dog, we went to an animal shelter in the Mesa/Phoenix area to try to find one. We chose to go to the shelter to find a pet for the simple fact that if they are not adopted they will be put to death sleep. It seemed more logical to us to take a pick of the dogs in the pound than to pay someone for a pure-bred.

We walked all up and down the aisles at this place. I was hoping to find a small dog and I am not sure what my wife was looking for. She ended up picking out this guy, who we named ‘Warlock’. He was the only dog in the entire place that was not barking or jumping, he was just laying there in his cell waiting for someone to let him out. He did drag my ass when I was trying to lead him to the car, but once there he just jumped into the back seat and layed down to sleep for the duration of the roughly one hour trip home. Once home, I broke out my cheap-ass digital camera and took the above shot of him (which really doesn’t do him justice).

We were initially worried that he would mess in the house, but that never happened. He has never made a poop or a pee inside the house, though he did once vomit, but he licked it up before we could clean it up.

He was not only house-trained, but he was also quick to learn commamds like ‘sit, stay, lay down, shake, My wife actually has him trained so that he will do a certain trick depending on how many fingers she is holding up. I think those are some damn good results from a dog that was on the “half price” rack at the pound. (at our pound they go on the ‘half price rack’ the day before they are to be executed euthanised).

The story of how we got Zelda will come sometime in the next few days, but, for now you should just appreciate your pets and thank the random fluxuations of time and space that they are still in your home.

Pain; News; FTP

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Well, I didn’t do an update yesterday. The most significant reason for that was that the pain that I thought was subsiding on Sunday came back in full-force on Monday. I am trying not to take the prescribed muscle realaxants, but I have had to take four or five over the last few days. I am not sure if it is actually an issue of building up a tolerence (as I often claim, fearing that if I need to use the pills when I am older and in desperate need they will not help me) or if it is simply a matter of pride. If it is, in fact, a matter of pride then I have to say that I have swallowed that pride, in a convenient pill form, happily a few times.

The pain has been subsiding a bit over the days though. I am now only in pain when I am standing, bending down or laying down. That means that as long as I am sitting I am not in pain, well in less pain anyway. The pain is still here as I again sit typing, but the pain is centralized to just the lower portion of my neck. When I stand the pain tends to spread and make my head and fingers start to throb, as is the same when I try to bend down. I have gotten pretty good at controlling my breathing to take deep breaths when my head begins to pound, and this makes that sensation go away pretty quickly, but feeling that pain for even one second is at least 3/4 of a second longer than I would like to feel it.

Laying down is a bit tricky also. The instructions given to me on the release form from the hospital say that I should lay on my back with a small pillow on each side of my head to keep my neck in line. The inherent problem with that is my neck is in the most pain when I lay flat on my back. That would be sort of like telling someone with a broken leg that instead of a cast, he should just hit the fracture with a big mallet every ten minutes or so. Just not going to happen. Anyway, if I lay on my right side one pillow is too much, where as if I lay on my left side I need two. Either way my neck still hurts, but while laying on my left side it seems to hurt a bit less. I have to move while I sleep though, as, if I lay in one position much longer than an hour my back begins to hurt. Yeah, cry me a river, I know. This will pass and I will look back on this and think that it didn’t really hurt that bad, then I will probably scoff at other people who think that something like this hurts, but I hope not.

This is the first day since the injury that I have actually felt able to do most of the things that I normally do. I mean that I am able to get up and move around, pick things up off of the floor, beat the dogs when necessary. The only time I really feel the pain is, well, not really clear. I went to the bathroom earlier and as I turned to sit it just hit me and a few seconds later it was gone. I had been standing opening my mail when the phone rang, I reached for the phone and it hit me. I am beginning to think that there may really be a god and that he is punishing me for my atheist ways, that or the human body is a very complex system that can not be understood or explained.

But enough about my pain in the neck.

There is a weird news story today that I just absolutely love, on a lot of levels. It is quite a short little story, so I will simply quote it all here;

WINNIPEG, Manitoba (Reuters) – For a 73-year-old Canadian man, 20 months in a smoke-free jail looked just too long, so instead he took 24 months in a prison where he can smoke cigarettes.
Angelo Foti was sentenced to 20 months for shooting and wounding a man in his backyard who was trying to repossess a snowmobile sold to Foti’s son, the Winnipeg Free Press reported Tuesday.

In court Monday, Angelo Foti was agitated when he realized the sentence would mean he would be in a provincial jail, where smoking is banned, the newspaper said.

Foti’s lawyer pleaded for a 24-month sentence instead, which means the man will go to a federal prison, where smoking is allowed.

In accepting the longer term, Foti, a dedicated pack-a-day man, ignored the wishes of this family.

“Dad, they’re just cigarettes — give them up. Quit smoking: you’ll be healthier,” his son Angelo Jr. said in court. “Just take the 20 months.”

I just love that story. The guy is 73 years old FFS, he is not likely to change his day to day behavior just since he is in jail. He has likely smoked since he was ten or twelve years old -since they only really started to care about the age restrictions on tobacco within the last decade or so. He just wants his smokes. The amazing part is that he is that old and still smoking. At his age, and being a smoker, either term 20 or 24 months could be a death sentence. He chooses to defy all logic by taking a longer sentence so that he can kill himself just a bit more.

Don’t get me wrong, I am a smoker myself, and I would love nothing more than to be able to quit. Being locked in a cell in a local jail for twenty months would likely be the spur that I needed to achieve that end. Perhaps I am just not seeing his point of view.

Now, why the hell is he in jail anyway? The article clearly states that “Angelo Foti was sentenced to 20 months for shooting and wounding a man in his backyard.” it does go on to explain that the man was trying to repossess a snowmobile, but it was not in Angelo’s name. I think that if someone is in your yard, trying to take a snowmobile -whether it is yours, your son’s, or even the neighbor’s bastard son’s step-sister’s, he is taking it from your private property-, he is fair game.

That article doesn’t mention whether the person announced that they were ‘repossessing’ the snowmobile, nor do I think it really matters. If that guy shows up in my back yard, he is gonna get shot again. And, knowing that I am going to go to jail for protecting my property I may just shoot to kill, as opposed to shooting to injure. -I do know that the story is out of Canada, but I thought that our judicial systems were pretty similar….Until now-

FTP Clients

When I began doing these updates I had no FTP client. I searched through download.com to find one. I was quite worried about having to put the username and password for the ftp server into a program that I was not sure about. There are literally thousands of these programs out there, and you don’t know which one/ones may be malicious. At first I took the high road and picked one of the most popular ones, which had a free trial period and some pretty cool features. Also if you lie about whether or not you are a student you can get a bare bones version of it for free. That program is at this website WS_FTP PRO LE

I did not pay any attention to how long was left on my trial period of that, since I am on like day 1,226 of my thirty day trial on other programs, but that one just quit working on the 30th day. I was forced to go back and try to find a freeware ftp client.

Here is the information for any of you who really need a freeware ftp client. I downloaded and installed more than a dozen freeware ftp clients, more than 90% of them had some sort of tracking software bundled in the installation files. This one client is the only one I found that does not freeze a windows 98 system AND does not have any tracking software (to my knowledge, none that I have been able to find anyway). It also has a very small file size. You can find it Right here. It takes a few minutes to get used to the interface, but that is a lot better than actually having to pay for an ftp client.

I am currently using this ftp client, if I find a better one I will let you know.

Abortion; Columbine

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I had every intention of doing an update yesterday (perhaps I should start calling it a blog?), and had found a few little news things to bitch at, and had even written them up. Then Survivor came on television, and I never got back to it. The thing about the ‘so-called’ reality shows like that is that you feel like you have to watch every minute or you will miss something, which may or may not be true, but they certainly do sucker us in. Why this kind of stuff is being called reality t.v. is still a mystery to me, I mean in reality no one really gets stuck on an island with a bunch of strangers who then have to do immunity and reward challenges. I mean reality t.v. would be like a half an hour of a couple folding clothes in a laundromat wouldn’t it?

As for the idea of doing news, when I began this site I really didn’t think I wanted to do anything like that as it has been done to death on lots of sites. But, those sites do add their own unique spin to the stories that make it a more enjoyable read (in my opinion), and while I am not a pundit on any matter, I do have some pretty strong opinions. Also, this has given me a reason to read a lot of news articles that I likely would not have read otherwise. I am still going to try to shy away from doing much as far as political type news, as I just do not have enough information about the majority of the issues to give myself a sturdy soapbox from which to bitch. If I do start any political bitching it will likely be about issues that every person in the U.S. likely has an opinion on, just to get my opinion out there.

Take this story for instance.

The two sides also argued over language in the bill that defines “unborn child” as “a member of the species homo sapiens, at any stage of development, who is carried in the womb.”
Critics said that under this definition even a fertilized egg would have the same rights as the born, setting the stage for future challenges to abortion rights.

I think that argument is all about semantics, so I don’t really see why there is such fuss over it. But, I am also the type of person to think that logic will always prevail, which is one of my greatest downfalls. Over the course of human history it seems that logic is more likely to be persecuted than to prevail…Ask Galileo about that one…

But those behind the bill noted that identical language was used in a 2000 bill that barred the execution of pregnant women. That bill passed the House 417-0 but didn’t move in the Senate.
The House has also twice before, in 1999 and 2001, passed unborn victims bills, but in both those cases as well the Senate, where abortion rights lawmakers hold greater sway, did not take up the legislation.

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., has pledged to bring up the bill soon, but it’s uncertain whether he has the votes to pass it.

Okay, so what I really want to know is how it is possible that any bill can make it through the house unanimously, and not go anywhere in the senate. I understand that in our democratic society we have a series of checks and measures to ensure that any legislation that becomes a law has been scrutinized by the house, senate and oval office. It went through the house unanimously! Why should there be a question on the mind of anyone in the senate whether there would be enough votes to pas it? These are our elected senators, aren’t they like sworn to hear the voice of the people that they represent or something?

The bill also states that an offense does not require proof that the assailant had knowledge that the victim was pregnant. Hart noted that murder is a leading cause of death among pregnant women and in many cases the attack is made with the intention to kill the unborn child.

I actually strongly agree with this part of the article. Being that I am pro-choice I believe that if a woman is carrying the child that she has made the decision to give birth to it. If that unborn child was killed in a purse-snatching I think whoever did it should be put to death. Not that I believe that believe that a fetus is an actual child, but I do believe that once a mother has made a decision to carry the child to term it should be considered much differently than the mother who chooses to abort a fetus. The emotional affect on the mother who was planning to give birth to a child is likely going to be exactly the same as if someone killed her newborn, in that way I think that the puishment should fit the crime.

A story about the massacre at Columbine that I am putting here only because I was so right about it.

In all, Salazar said, the sheriff’s office had at least 15 contacts with the two teens — from dispatch reports to official investigative reports — stemming from six separate incidents. But it made no conclusions about what investigators could have done differently.
The collection of evidence unveiled Thursday included 10,418 separate items — from the murder weapons and the black trenchcoats worn by the killers to bullet fragments and the chairs and tables where people died. A message board put up in a school window the day of the attack still says, in blue Magic Marker: “1 bleeding to death.” There were 13 body bags.

Authorities released two videos, one of the anxious scene in a park near the school the day of the shooting, the other the Harris and Klebold video.

“I don’t care what you say; if you ever touch him again, I will fricking kill you,” a wild-eyed Harris screams on the tape.

Some relatives say such videos were seen by school officials and that nothing was done.

“This raises more questions than it answers,” said Dawn Anna, whose daughter, Lauren Townsend, died at Columbine. “I would disagree that there was no negligence.”

Brooks Brown said he wanted to know what sheriff’s officials did with multiple warnings from his parents about Harris. He was stunned by the failure to execute the search warrant at the Harris home a year before the slayings.

“That’s basically telling me my friends died because of a clerical error,” he said.

I had posted a message on my angelfire web site the day after the Columbine Massacre (which they quickly deleted) that stated that I was pretty damn sure these kids would have been into petty crimes, and been making pipe bombs, possibly even torturing animals for years before this event. I made that statement based solely on my own adolescence and the fact that I had done all of those things. While I never brought myself to the point where I actually murdered anyone, I probably came a lot closer than I like to admit.

The things that I thought would be true about these two teens did turn out to be true. I am sure that anyone who happens upon this site will not really care that I was right about something, nor is that really the reason that I am posting about this particular story. Look at the eyes in that photo. There is something about those eyes, not the expression or anything, just the eyes, that just seems to be not quite human..

A very amusing story that I read after the previous articles. It is quite short, so I will simply quote the whole thing.

BERLIN (Reuters) – A German woman took her male neighbor to court for noise pollution after he repeatedly kept her awake through half the night and had at least one four-hour sex session, a court spokeswoman said Friday.
“Four hours of sex noises. What was I supposed to think? It was nothing but groaning and banging,” the woman told the judge, a Bild newspaper report said.

The woman told Berlin magistrates that her 25-year old neighbor Andreas G. was disturbing the peace by keeping her awake early in the morning.

Andreas said his 26-year old neighbor had complained in the past, calling at five in the afternoon, but that he had not felt obliged to respond. “I can have as much sex as loud as I want then,” he said.

The judge dropped the case on learning that the man had since moved out of the apartment.

I am not entirely sure just what the problem there is. If that man could actually have sex for four hours straight, I would think that his single neighbors would be knocking on his door looking for a little ‘Love you long time’ action. Perhaps the woman was mad after being turned down?

Bitching about the news items has turned out to be a lot more fun than I had ever thought it could be. Sure it takes away from me doing something more productive, but it is likely that if I ever develop a readership they will be more likely to send me an email about something that agree/disagree with. If I don’t have any of that sort of thing on here (the type of thing that one could agree or disagree with) I don’t have much hope of ever getting any feedback.

It occurs to me that this may be the reason why your average ‘blog’ is almost a cookie-cutter type now. People -like me- start with one intention, then in the interest of getting a few people to read the site things start to change. After a while the initial intent of the site must just get lost to the pursuit of readers. Whether or not that is true is yet to be seen (on my site anyway). I will get back to you when I have some evidence one way or the other.

For now I am going to play a bit more on the ClockTower 3 game.

Wal-Mart

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Currently, there is still no way that no one can access my site other than a direct request. That is, I am still not to be found through any web search available. I would have thought that the process would have been a bit quicker to get that all going. It does not upset me, as I do not really have a damn thing on here worth reading, I just would really like to see which ruse pulls the most traffic. At any rate, I soldier on. Why? I gots no idea.

I have said previously that I would not list any news on this site, but I am now going to officially break that promise to (me) the reader.

I have long hated Wal-Mart for their scheming business practices, and the fact that they pay their employees SHIT. They will move into a new area and spread like a virus, killing the local economy that used to be there. But, you ask, how can they kill an economy when they create new jobs? Simple math. Say that the new Wal-Mart opens up, and it is employing fifty people, sounds like a new job opportunity in that area, but when you figure in the fact that in the process they are closing a dozen or so ‘Ma and Pa’ type stores that each have many employees -who no longer have a job once ‘Wal-Mart’ hits town- ‘Wal-Mart’ is putting more people out of work than it is employing. At the same time they are driving down the wages that they have to pay their employees by only hiring High School Drop-Outs, who have no other option.

I am in the grocery business, and have been for about a decade, and I know enough to know about fair compensation vs. inflation. ‘Wal-Mart’ consistently does not give raises to their employees. ‘Wal-Mart’ ventures further into the “pseudo-slave” market by offering a health plan that will run out at 100,000 dollars -that may seem like a big coverage, but it is not enough to even cover a single heart bypass surgery… and if you had any other condition before that point that required surgery it would also take away from the total…The rest you would have to pay for on your own.

I thought that I was the extreme in this hatred for ‘Wal-Mart’, then I saw a feature in the Arizona Republic

There was one quote that I absolutely loved from that article, which was on the front page of the newspaper “It’s no different than what the Nazis did in World War II. It’s a blitzkrieg. They are doing economically what the Nazis did militaristically.”

Okay, I may not have actually equated ‘wal-mart’ with the Nazis. Though they may have been a close second. Inflation is, on average, 3% a year. If you give your employees less than that( as a raise ) , you are basically telling them to go elsewhere for work. Wal-Mart does this repeatedly, and not just to the grunts, they actually terminate employees just before they will be fully ‘vested’ in their retirement plans. Why isn’t that in the commercials about how happy they make communities?

The only prayer that we have is that someone, somewhere, sometime realizes that ‘Wal-Mart’ is certainly not in the best interest of the laborer/consumer, but in the best interest of ‘Wal-Mart’.

Take from this what you will. But, for the love of Christ (or whoever you choose as a diety), please do not shop at ‘wal-mart’.