Category Archives: social

Pat Tillman; New Camera

Posted on by — No Comments ↓

Well, I had hoped to finish the little story regarding the Sherlock Holmes video game today, I may, or not, depending on my endurance. There are actually a couple of things that I really want to comment on today, so I will jump right to it.

• I am linking to the story here, though I had heard about it on the radio as soon as I got to work this morning. It is the story about the death of Pat Tillman. If you do not follow American football, you likely have never heard of him, but I tell you that he was probably twice the person you will ever be. Especially if you, like me, are just sitting here typing at your computer keyboard.

By all accounts Tillman was a bit too small to make it in college football, but he made it, and even won the Pac10 defensive player of the year award his senior(I think) season. Despite that accolade, he was not selected until the seventh round of the NFL draft. -I should mention that he played college football for the Arizona State Sundevils, and was drafted by the Arizona Cardinals, that is why I really feel the need to talk about this, as it is so very close to home- He had to fight his way through training camp, and eventually was given a starting position. He broke the rookie record for tackles in his first (obviously) season. He put every bit of himself into every game, even though he was playing for a losing team.

Shortly after the attacks on 9/11, he made a decision that shocked the world -the sports world at the very least- by walking away from a multi-million dollar contract, to join the army. I am not entirely sure what his official title was, but I do know that he was in the ‘special forces’ which is a position that you must volunteer for due to the high risk factor. Also I am not sure when he was actually sent to Afghanastan, or what exactly his unit was doing there. I am quite sure that I could find all of that information if I were so inclined, the thing is that I am just not.

When the story about Tillman leaving the NFL to join the army first hit the news (I think that was in early 2002), I remember thinking that it was some sort of a publicity stunt. I remember thinking that there was no way anyone would walk away from, not so much the money, but the dream of so many children to play in the NFL. I remember thinking that once he started boot camp he would quickly change his mind. I remember all that, yet now I remember that I have not thought about him at all in the last couple of years. The reason that I haven’t thought about him in the last couple of years is that he has declined every request for an interview since he made his decision. He went out of his way to avoid publicity, he didn’t want it to be a big deal that he was making the choice to serve his country.

I have typed this line about a dozen times and then deleted it. I don’t think that there is anything that someone in my position can say about someone in his position. There is one thing that I can say, he was twice the man that I will ever be. I have always though that we were all just ‘Dust in the Wind’, yet now I feel that some of us (myself included) are actually dust that gets stuck in the boots of people like Pat Tillman, and I know that his is a name I will never forget.

• I was talking about a new digital camera back on April 20. Well I got it in the mail today, very quick shipping in my estimation. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect, what after my first digital camera purchase. This one seems to be, better..

This is the first image ever snapped from my new camera. This was right after I put the batteries into it and set the time. I was a bit curious about the shutter speed, as that was one of the many downfalls of my previous digital camera. It seemed to work pretty well. You should certainly click on the thumbnail to see it full size, and keep in mind that I saved it at almost half of the original size, else it would have been a couple of Megs. I think that the single most impressing thing is that the fan that you see in the photo was actually spinning at the time, but it seems to be off. Well, not only that, but also the fact that the box that the camera came in is like eight or ten inches from the camera, while the t.v. is about ten feet away, and even the t.v. is clear enough to read the station id in the bottom right. Keeping in mind that the picture looks twice as good with the full file size, I just have to say that this camera is simply amazing, and it is last year’s model.

One of the things that I really love about the camera, which may be possible on all cameras for all I know, is that you don’t have to install the software for it. What I mean is that you can simply install all of the drivers for it and then it will let you access the camera from an explorer window, as if it were a hard drive. The only problem with that is you don’t get to see the photo previews and thus have to click them one by one to open them into your photo program. I really don’t have enough information to form an opinion on this little beauty yet, but I gotta say that for 80 bucks after shipping it seems to be well worth it…Remind me of that in a week or two when I am calling it a sham piece of shit.

At any rate, this new camera will likely mean that lots of photos will ensue in the immediate future. Whether they are good or bad will certainly be all your own opinion, they will likely be of our dogs, our house (which is over 100 years old) and the decorating scheme that I spoke about without photographic evidence a long time ago.

Check back often as I am likely to be ‘snap happy’ for quite some time.

Websites>Children; Sex Ed

Posted on by — No Comments ↓

I got an email today from someone that I have never heard of, and have no idea how they happened upon my site. This person told me that I should stop with the bashing of MSN customer support. That is a valid argument, probably the best argument that I have gotten since I started doing this site all those weeks ago. I respect his POV and appreciate his email. Thing is that the MSN customer support is just so rich a subject that I could go on and on about it for days, if I was so inclined. They seem to have the guys that get turned down for jobs at McDonalds working there. If anyone really wants me to stop my bitching about their inept service, that person better work for them, and be in a position to hire people who have ever actually done anything to a pc other than love the monitor in a disturbing fashion…Show me just one case where MSN customer support has fixed a problem (not counting incorrect passwords) and I will quit my bitching.

Nice to know that someone happened upon my site though. Unless, of course, my regular reader actually sent them a link. I am relatively sure that I didn’t send them a link, so it must have been just a chance occurance.

• There is something that I was thinking about today that I found just a bit amusing, if not disturbing. I started to keep an actual journal when I was in the sixth grade (that would be a diary to the ladies), but gave it up after it had been found and, consequently, read by one of my brothers. I just quit keeping the journal altogether, even though it was probably not nearly as personal as some of the stuff that I post here. Why is this? I have two working theories, I am not sure which one is closer to the truth, I am not sure if either one is even close to the truth to be honest.

My first theory is that I was at that age where things start to happen for young people. Hair started appearing on my fingers, toes and elsewhere. I do not remember a word of what I actually wrote in that journal, but I could surmise that I would have written about changes that my body was going through. As I think back on it, I think that would be an interesting read for a lot of kids (more on that in a moment).

My second theory is that I would like to be remembered, long after I have died and gone into the dirt that christians call heaven. Words that you speak can often be misquoted or just ignored, words that you write down are there. Words that you write down are there forever (depending on the source of the media that you are using). What I write here could easily outlive me if I could get a relative to preserve it all on a disk. The thing is that I think a lot of people are doing the same thing.

Lots of wealthy people choose not to have children, yet have their memoirs printed. I am certainly not wealthy, I look at it kind of backwards. If I can not offer my child the absolute best, I would rather not have a child. I don’t mean toy cars and the such, I mean that if I know that I will not be able to provide the best education for a child I would rather have that child not be born. I certainly could not foot the 30,000 dollar a year charge for an ivy league college, but I would expect that my child would be capable of that level of success. Sure there are sholarships that would cover some of the cost, but the out-of-pocket cost would still be pretty high. One could only mortgage their home so many times…

Myself, as your average blue-collar worker, could not provide the correct environment for a child to thrive. I could surely provide an environment where a child could survive, yet I would feel extremely bad if the time came when he/she got accepted into an ivy league college and I had to say that we couldn’t afford it. My lack of education would then go against my child. Forcing them to work low wage jobs all his/her life, would it be better to have or not have that child? I thought that the whole point of having children was to make sure that they have it ‘better than you did’. I am sure that there would be no lack of love (site my dogs, for example), but education is everything for a child. I know that I can not afford to send a child to the best schools, and I think that is why I type here each day.

This site will likely be my legacy. The thing that is spoken of, in hushed words, from one family member to another. They never had any children, people will say, that must have been a sad existance. I don’t suppose I will really mind if I am remembered that way, I just don’t want to bring a new life into this world that can only hope to be remembered the same. I strongly believe that the goals that you have for your child/children should be to do better than you ever did, if that is not possible please use a condom…

• When I was in the sixth grade they started doing sex ed. I really think that the teachers were more uncomfortable than the class. When the movies played one of the teachers would go to the bathroom, while the other just sat reading the paper. When it ended he would look up and say, “any questions?”. Even if you had questions you would not ask them from this guy.

Totally on a side note, the latter of the teachers was later arrested and charged for molesting children in the third grade class while he was a substitute teacher at a different school. You just have to love the grammar school system here, don’t you?

I really can’t remember exactly what those videos showed, what I can remember is that it set everything to a certain age. Say you wake up on your sixteenth birthday, that means that you will have full pubic hair, even if you have never had a sign of it before. Men will have chest hair at eighteen, again, even if you had never had any sign of it before. The male penis is able to function for reproductive purposes at the age of thirteen. I assume that all of these things must happen on that particular birthday, as the video did not describe any ‘gray area’ that could explain anomolies in their system.

The thing is that I got hair on my chest before I got hair on my love-sack. A friend of mine, name of Mike W* had a full beard by the time the puberty bug got down to his cajones. Sure, it is not an exact science, so don’t try to make it so exact in the ‘self help’ videos about puberty. That just goes to make us al self-concious and really hate the guy who made the video in the first place.

Of course it is me being bitter, and I think I am really getting good at it. YMMV, but the facts will remain the same.

Car; Politics

Posted on by — No Comments ↓

Today is my wife’s birthday, Happy Birthday! She just turned way younger than me. There will be a time when I am like 104 (well I smoke, so let’s be honest, 64) and she will declare that I am still just robbing the cradle, since she is eternally 25. Why is it that most men will lie about their age to add years while women do the same to subtract years? That will be tomorrow on “springer”.

• I wanted to help out my mom, so I gave her our old car, it was an ’86 Chevy Nova, it still runs, but won’t drive because of some problem with the engine that can not be fixed even by the manufacturer. I gave that to her since 1) the tires were the same size as the tires on one of here cars. 2) they had the same bolt pattern. 3) it has been sitting here for like a year or more just looking for someone to pick it up.

I have never in my life given away a car that you could turn the key to start, until now. This car still starts, idles, the air-conditioning works pretty good (though you have to keep your foot a bit on the gas pedal to make it do it while idling). The only problem with the car is that the second you try to use the gas pedal to accelerate it dies. It doesn’t actually die, it just starts to spew out really nasty smoke, and it won’t move. If you let it run for about ten minutes (long enough to get the engine up to operating temperature) the idle goes to a normal idle level and you can drive it, but with the thickest dark-blue smoke that you have ever seen billowing out behind it.

I did tell her that she might not get anything more than the tires and the battery from the car, and I think I was pretty much right. Those are probably the only parts of that car that can be swapped over to whatever decent car that they have. I could also be wrong, though, as my mother lives right next door to a pretty good mechanic who could make that car live again. I would like to see that happen, as my wife spent like 900 dollars on it, then spent over 2,000 dollars to replace the shocks, struts, CV joints, alternator, radiator, brake master cylinder. Hell, there were so many parts that she had to replace that the old Nova might as well been brand new. Actually, if they were to replace the rack and pinion, everything would be brand new, except the engine, and that is where the problem is.

I don’t know how much the price of a toyota motor has gone up in the last 10-12 years, but you used to be able to get a complete one for about 700 dollars. If that is still the case, my Mom will have gotten a car that she can drive for the next ‘indefinite term’ absolutely free. Yes, I would love to be able to just buy her a Ferrari, but we both have to scrimp and scrape to get what we have.

We all have something in common here, right, you pay taxes, I pay taxes. Why don’t we start to take charge of what our tax dollars pay for? That would seem, what, almost Democratic. The people in the U.S. should be able to vote for every measure that goes through the house or senate, because it(the fact the the average person is not represented in any way) is being exploited. The ‘house of representatives’ is at least a pretty good view of that area’s take on something. Then we have to send it to the senate. Hundreds of thousands of votes being weighed by two guys (per region) before they cast their vote. How is/could that be the voice of the people?

I know that this has all worked in the past, and that it was actually to the advantage of some former presidents. I just want to know why. The system of checks and measures is there only to keep the president from abusing his power. When the president does, invariably, abuse his power, you have to again start talking about why he had the power in the first place. Dead discussion.

Addiction; My dad

Posted on by — No Comments ↓

I had intentions of actually doing something useful with my time today, but as it turns out, Diablo was a lot tougher than I have ever given him credit for. The other thing that is strange about this game is that it is like a time warp. You can sit down one minute, stand up about four minutes later, and find that you have just pissed away six hours on it. I suppose that the mindset that a serious gamer has when he tries to do ‘just one more’ quest is very similar to the way that the alcoholic needs ‘just one more’ drink. They are both addictions, they both must be sated to make the user happy, and they both ruin families and leave shattered homes in their wake. Though I would like to think that your average Diablo player doesn’t abuse his wife or children as the average alcoholic does.

I could certainly never be a mouth-piece for either side in the addiction category, since I seem to be addicted to both video games and alcohol, but it is certainly an issue that someone should try to tackle at some point. Is it really worse to drink your life away in the real world, or spend your life manipulating pixels to your own end? Each action will result in you dying too early, each will also result in the lack of people that you know (I am not counting on-line contacts there), both addictions are extremely unhealthy, but only one has counselors in place to handle it.

Any addiction is a bad thing. Relying on any substance/stimulus to give you pleasure is always going to result in an addiction. Regardless of what that thing may be you will just want more and more. Eventually the addiction will consume you, and you will die wondering where the hell your life went. If there is any sort of an afterlife, you will look at the time that you spent doing this or that, and wish that you had spent it with your friends and family. At some point it will hit you that you were never able to make time to see your Aunt in Cleveland all those years, yet, somehow you were able to clear your schedule to make it to her funeral. She had been asking you to visit for years, but with work, and your time on-line, you just never found a chance to make it up to her place. That is a shitty position to be in, ehh?

My father taught me a lot and most of it was wrong. One thing that he told me, that I will never forget, is that, “It is better to regret something that you haven’t done than to regret something that you have.” I had really believed that all my life, but I don’t think that I do anymore.

Case 1:

I was sixteen, and I was watching my father die. He had been at home for two days after being released from the hospital, and he was in bad shape. The Hospital had released him to the jail because he had a warrant for his arrest (never found out what that was for, but it was probably a ‘DUI’). The jail would not hold him because he was in a condition where he needed medical attention, so the jail released him to go get medical attention. He ended up at home. He had a punctured lung, which happened to make it past the hospital that day, two broken legs, one broken arm and a broken pelvis. He was casted from head to toe.

This man, the man who started my life, the man who would not walk out the door without cologne, he was going poo in a coffee can (that I had to empty) for those last two days. I knew that he was in a bad way, I wanted to call an ambulance, but he forbid it. I pleaded for him to let me call an ambulance. He would not let me.

Just barely sixteen years old, I watched my father die, knowing that I could have prevented it if I had just disobeyed him and called for medical attention even an hour sooner. There was no one else there, I was the only one that could have done it. God damn it, I let him die…

I think about that damn near every day, it was my fault. I basically made the decision to let him die as opposed to having him be mad at me for calling the ambulance that could save his life. When the ambulance did arrive, he was unresponsive and I didn’t even stay in the room to see if they could revive him, I started calling the relatives to let them know that he had died. I did that while they were still working on him, I knew that he was dead. He made a noise three or four minutes before the ambulance got there that I have never heard in my life, it has never been replicated in a film, it was just a noise that I knew was his last breath. I certainly hope that I will never hear that noise again, as that will mean that I am next to yet another person who is dying. My only hope is that if I do hear that noise again, I will be able to help the person.

Possibly, that is why I think that is better to regret something that you have done, at least you didn’t kill your father.

Global Warming; Recycling

Posted on by — No Comments ↓

Well, it seems that I don’t really have a lot that I am planning to post here today. I have one thing from the news that absolutely requires bitching and a couple of personal notes and that is about it. So I will just jump right into the one news item.

But first, there is one other thing that I took from the layout over there at Blackchampagne and that is the color change for items that are quoted. I have always put quotes into block quotes, since that is the entire purpose of them, but having read a lot of other blogs since I started doing this site I have found that a different color is a good idea. There are a lot of people who use blockquotes when they are quoting something that they had previously written as well as things that they had taken from other articles. Honestly it gets a bit confusing, especially if you are just trying to skim a dozen pages to look for anything worth reading. Of course that is kind of a moot point here, as I have never written anything intersting, and have never felt the need to quote myself in the first place, but the separate color at least should keep anyone from thinking that I was the author of that content.

That digression aside, the news article that I was speaking of can be found Here. It is about rising levels of Carbon Dioxide in the atmosphere. I am not sure why it is really news at all, I mean take the following pieces of the story for instance;

The reason for the faster buildup of the most important “greenhouse gas” will require further analysis, the U.S. government experts say.

Well, it turns out that it really doesn’t require any further analysis as they seem to answer the question of why with the remainder of the article. Like this next paragraph that was either the next one, or the one after;

Carbon dioxide, mostly from burning of coal, gasoline and other fossil fuels, traps heat that otherwise would radiate into space. Global temperatures increased by about 1 degree Fahrenheit (0.6 degrees Celsius) during the 20th century, and international panels of scientists sponsored by world governments have concluded that most of the warming probably was due to greenhouse gases.

I altered that paragraph only because I wanted to make the part that is causing the problem in bold text. So, wouldn’t it seem like a fairly safe assumption to think that the reason for the increase in the levels of carbon dioxide could be attributed to the burning of fossil fuels? Of course industry is blamed for the majority of this, with huge stacks on power plants billowing out black smoke every minute, every day, but anyone who drives an automobile is spewing out the very same stuff. So, it would seem that there would just need to be a bit of legislation passed to limit the amount of the stuff that any person/company can spit out, right?

The 1997 Kyoto Protocol (news – web sites) would oblige ratifying countries to reduce carbon dioxide emissions according to set schedules, to minimize potential global warming. The pact has not taken effect, however.
The United States, the world’s biggest carbon dioxide emitter, signed the agreement but did not ratify it, and the Bush administration has since withdrawn U.S. support, calling instead for voluntary emission reductions by U.S. industry and more scientific research into climate change.

We’re number one! We’re number one! Why is it that the only remaining “Superpower” on the globe can only seem to be number one in things like obesity, war and pollution? I am a bit surprised that the current administration isn’t more concerned about this, what with the tax breaks that they are giving to government employees who buy the gas-guzzling SUVs as opposed to giving tax breaks to the ones who buy the hybrid vehicles with less than 10% of the emissions of those SUVs. Okay, maybe I am not really all that surprised at all.

I do wonder, though, when the Hydrogen powered vehicles, which have been in testing for quite some time, and have only liquid water as emission, actually come to market if anyone will want to buy them. Here is a link to a pretty good argument for hydrogen powered vehicles, and to be fair, here is the best one that I could find against Hydrogen powered vehicles though the black background with white text makes it a painful read (so painful in fact that I was not able to finish it, and that person did seem to get into a pretty good discussion of fuel economy in gas powered vehicles. Maybe it is a good read?).

The whole point of this, I think, is just to mention that both my wife and myself drive little foreign cars, Kia Sephias to be exact. The cars get amazing gas mileage, 300 miles per ten gallon tank while mixing heavy traffic and freeway, and even while running the air conditioning. The average SUV doesn’t get that kind of gas mileage on an empty freeway, even if you shut off the motor while going downhill. But, America is the land of excess and there is a reason why we are the world leaders in consumption of fast food and fossil fuels, thus making us the leaders in attacking other countries to secure oil for our future use.

Recycling!

This was the other thing that I really wanted to get into today. It seems really odd to me that recycling is not as big as it should be here (arizona) as it is in many other U.S. states.

A lot of states, Oregon, California, Massachusetts and Vermont just to name a few, have made the recycling of aluminum cans and other containers mandatory. It is not mandatory to recycle the cans, but you are charged a fee for every can that you buy at the store (a nickel in most states) that you get back when you return the cans. Simple and straight-forward, you would not just stand in your kitchen throwing nickels into the trash, would you? That is a nickel that you paid, like you were just renting the can for however long it took you to drink the fluid in it. I guess it is more like a ransom in that way, you are holding the can hostage and they are willing to pay you one nickel for each can that you set free. That is some pretty good incentive, since you had to pay the money before they let you use the can.

Here in Arizona they just don’t really give a shit. Well, to a point.

When I first moved here I really felt guilty about throwing away soda cans. It felt almost like I was breaking the law or something, but time has passed and I have realized that there is a reason that people dig through the dumpsters every night looking for soda and beer cans. Them is good money.

You have, as I see it, three options for your cans here in AZ. 1) Throw them away. 2) Put them into a recycling bin (which the town I live in does not have, even though its major draw is tourists since the town has the oldest continuously operating courthouse in the state and half of the houses are on the historic register at over 100 years old). 3) Recycle them. This is, of course the best option, but one that is hard to do in practice.

See, the thing is people will pay you for these cans. The prices vary between about thirty and fourty cents per pound, but that is money that you did not pay out in the form of a deposit. Yet, you can not take the cans back to the place that you bought them, nor to any actual store. You have to take your cans to a place like a scrapyard, like an automobile junkyard, where they deal in scrap metals. These places are invariably open weird hours and subject to the whims of the owners, but they are the only option down here.

I drink a lot of beer. I drink a lot of cheap, canned beer. I end up with a lot of cans. At some point my wife realized that if we could use my alcohol consumption for a good cause it would be a wonderful thing. She bought a separate trash can for me to throw the empty cans into, and thus her plan went into action. The bags, with normal cans, just fill up so quickly that it was hard for either of us to get to anywhere where we could sell them before the next bag was already full.

She bought me one of those ‘can crushers’ that are just insanely cheap on ebay. Since the people who buy scrap aluminum down here just don’t care about product labels (since it is scrap aluminum, not them paying you back the nickel per can deposit) they prefer them crushed, so it all worked out good.

So you see, we are helping to save the planet with the beer that I consume. And, we are getting some cash back also. That cash is currently at 27 dollars, which will fund our next dinner at the restaurant that I bitched about a couple of days ago. I would like to make that fund large enough to eat at a really nice restaurant, but let’s be honest, the beer (that I would have to drink )would cost much more than the bill at the restaurant, and I do only have the one liver. But, money for selling cans, why aren’t people other than hobos doing this?

My game; news

Posted on by — No Comments ↓

The first thing that I want to mention here is that the little game that I made, which can be viewed or played on my site Here. Is still also available on the internet at the JavaBoutique. As a result of that I still get emails a couple of times a week from people who want the source code to the game. Mostly they are college students that need to create some java thing for their computer science course and want to see how I was able to achieve the end result that I did. It is a bit flattering on the one hand, but on the other hand, it just sucks. More on that in a moment.

Something that I remembered while I was typing the previous paragraph was that there was one particular person who requested the source code for the game, and used it for a really great cause (if they were telling me the truth). This company (I can’t remember the name) said that they had seen my game and thought that the layout would be perfect for a new device that they were installing in Hospital waiting rooms. It was, I guess, a small touch-screen computer that supposedly would let people play various games or watch local television channels, but it was all opereated by touch-screen. The person who emailed me said that they had chosen my game for the sole reason that the way the game is played would make it easy to alter the source code to work with a touch screen instead of a mouse click. I am not sure if they ever did use the game for the purpose that they said they were going to, hell, I am not even sure if that wasn’t just an elaborate story to get me to send them the code so they could alter it just enough to claim that it was their own. Anyway, I would like to believe that there is a kid in a hospital waiting room somewhere right now playing it while waiting for his mom to come back from life threatening surgery. As I have previously stated, simple goals.

The majority of the people who request the code are students in computer science, or similar classes. I can only theorize that they go out looking for these little applets and assume that whoever programmed them must have been schooled in Java Programming. Nothing could be further from the truth, in my case. Not only have I never been schooled in Java, I have never been schooled in anything. The truth is that one of my friends was starting to learn the basics of java programming and in a juvenile type of ‘I can do it too’ mindset, I started to program java. I bought a book called, “Teach yourself Java 1.2 in 21 Days”. Lies! Here it is what six years later and though I can make a java applet, and for the most part I can make them do what I want, I would hardly say that I have actually learned how to do it. With the exception of the very first applet that I ever wrote, every one of my programs has pieces cut and pasted from previous ones that I have done. There is always modification to be done, of course, but I am not really sure if I were to sit in front of a blank computer screen if I would be able to even make a java applet simply display the word “Hello”.

When these people do request the source code I always send it to them, but I spend so long explaining that this should only be used as an example of how not to program java that it really kind of depresses me. I actually have the following phrase at the top of the source code;

This was programmed by a novice at java who was mostly drunk while doing the programming. I do not guarantee that implementing this code will not kill you, someone else, or even make the world explode. Thanks.

Hardly a glowing recommendation. Don’t take my word for it, you can actually view the source code of the applet Here if you really want to. I just did to make sure that my link worked and I gotta tell you, I am a bit amazed that the applet works at all. If anyone ever happens upon that little game and finds that some portion of it doesn’t work, let me know. I am quite curious to know if the game would actually load and play in a newer version of Netscape or AOL as I do not have either of those.

After that little bit of self-castrating, I think I will move on to happier things.

Or not.

There is just not a lot of happy stuff going on in the world, well at least the U.S. part of the world, right now. It is now pretty clear that no one supports the purported “War on Terror” that we are fighting. Fighting terror by fiercly guarding oil fields in the middle east seems to be a bit of a stretch of the word ‘fighting’, and also seems to be letting the terrorists run amok. Now that other countries are being attacked, and as such being forced into defensive measures, they are not wanting to send out their military personnel to be slaughtered like the 500+ American soldiers who have been killed since Iraq’s leadership fell.

We all know, of course, that Iraq was not involved in the 9/11 attacks, and the fact that the Bush administration decided to attack Iraq as opposed to finishing the job in Afghanistan has likely swayed the opinions of the rest of the world to think that we are a bunch of bullies. The sad truth is that I feel that exact sentiment. There are a lot of wonderful stories, and links, on the new blog called Political Animal which is written by the former CalPundit BlogMaster.

I do not like to write about politics on this site because I do not feel that I am well enough informed to make reasonable assumptions/decisions about it all. There is normally a huge difference between what the actual news is and what the American public can see on the television. Yet, it seems, myself and a lot of other people in the U.S. have given up on the televison or print news for any actual info, we now rely on the internet. The internet just doesn’t seem to give a damn where you are, or who you are, and it lets you read actual information without trying to spin facts to get higher ratings. Again, I hate to write about politics, but in a survey (I just asked people who came into the store today) most (like nine out of ten) of the people who were wearing dress clothes (suits or nice dresses) said that they would vote for ‘anyone other than Bush’ in the next election. I am not sure that the vote will actually go that way, since a lot of the elderly people just never leave their house except to vote, and they like a familiar name to vote for, even if that familiar name wants to make them homeless.

One other thing that I have to put here, just because it makes me sick. I am not linking to a news article since it really doesn’t deserve it.

Paris Hilton was thrown from a horse while filming the new season of a show, and may have been injured. She was air-lifted to the nearest hospital, probably not hurt, but as a precaution. This would likely have never been news, were it not for the last line of the news entry;

Hilton also made headlines recently when a graphic video of her having sex with her boyfriend surfaced on the Internet.

Can I get transferred to a country where showing a nipple on T.V. doesn’t shut down the entire media for a month, and amatuer porn isn’t the only thing anyone ever wants to write about?

Feedback-PC Vs. Mac; Childhood

Posted on by — No Comments ↓

Well the most unfortunate thing happened this morning, I woke up to find that Viacom and Echostar had reached an agreement and my channels were back on the air. I suppose that should have me rejoicing since I can now watch South Park, but the thing is I had another lengthy bitch that I was going to get into yesterday about the issue and now that the issue is resolved it would be a bit pointless to write about it. Fear not, I have more, even less interesting things to talk about today!

First, there was a sign on the bulletin board at my local post office that I found pretty amusing. It said, “New construction company looking for someone who can read a tape measure and not show up for work drunk or high” There were of course phone numbers hanging from the bottom of it, and several had already been plucked off. I noticed that they weren’t even saying how much the job paid, I guess that one must assume that the type of people who would apply to an ad like that would probably be happy with minimum wage, or an amount close to it. I am happy to say that for the first time in my life I actually think that I may be a bit over-qualified for that job.

Yesterdays very short musings resulted in two emails, this time with a bit of an argument regearding the Microsoft security alert that I bitched about yesterday, the first one said;

Hey. I was just reading your website and caught your quote about Windows vs Mac when it comes to security issues. I just wanted to share with you an opinion that I have become very comfortable in believing. If you think about it, the ratio of Windows users to Mac users has got to be an ungodly large number. The hackers know this as well as anyone else. When you get a guy sitting behind his desk making a malicious program, most likely the main thing on his mind is to harm the most number of people, and would therefore not even bother writing a virus for other platforms. You always hear news of MS finding this or that security issue because they most likely have a huge team working solely on security, where as the Mac guys are probably sitting back in their chairs laughing at the pains that having a monopoly brings.

Just when I logged into my email to cut and paste that line, I had received the second email, which said, in part;

There just aren’t enough OS X users around to make a statement if a virus is released. We’re only 5% of the market.
Having said that, my friend who works in Mac support for a major university says that OS X is incredibly stable and most importantly, safe. According to her, it would take years to hack through some of the encryption codes the OS uses.

I read both of those and I really think it is a bit funny at the approach each person is using at presenting the same argument. The first email is obviously from a Windows user, and his angle seems to be that no one cares about Macintosh, but they would be just as easy to hack if someone put their mind to it. That may or may not be true but the fact is that you just NEVER hear about any problems with the security on Mac machines. I mean any type of security even like stolen credit card numbers and bank info and all of those type of things seem to only happen on Windows based systems.

After reading the second email, which is from an OS X user, it seems that the mac users concede that their is such a small base of users that even if their security ever failed it wouldn’t make headlines. I am not sure if that was really what the emailer was trying to get at, but that is kind of what I got to after having read both emails. The thing is that there is nothing further from the truth than that.

I strongly believe that if a single OS X system anywhere on the face of the earth encountered security issues, Microsoft would be on it like maggots to rotting flesh. Macintosh has been a thorn in the side of Microsoft for decades and the thought of them not attacking mac if even one person ever had security issues is ludicrous. It would be in every Microsoft commercial and ad campaign from here until the end of time. If you are thinking, no, Microsoft would not attack them for something like that, since they have had so many problems of their own…Sober up…

Do you remember a couple of years ago when Macintosh starting doing those commercials where real people told the story of why they switched from Windows based PCs? Microsoft immediately started hiring actors and giving them false stories to read about why the switched from Mac back to the PC. I can’t find any articles about it right now, but I seem to remember that they got in a lot of trouble for not specifying that the people in the commercials were actors and not actual Mac users. Now if a company will openly break the law when faced with someone else talking about the shortcomings of their product, I would bet my nuts that they would take every advantage of the shortcomings of their competitor’s product. The mere fact that they have not yet been able to do so is, I think, the best advertising the Mac has ever had.

One other thing of note to put up here. I was looking through my site stats today and noticed that I have a referral from a googlebot and two search strings that led to people clicking my site. Woo-hoo google has finally found me! I feel a bit sorry for the people who searched for “comedy central is gone” and “nail gun movie -massacre” as I probably didn’t have quite the information that they were looking for on my site. But, you see, that is why I chose to name the site shadowtwin.com even though donnieburgess.com was available. I really didn’t think anyone would click on a link to donnieburgess.com since it looks like it is probably just a personal page, where shadowtwin.com could really be anything. Except animal porn.

A thought occured to me today as I was again thinking about children. More specifically I was thinking about everyone and their sister asking my wife and myself why we don’t want to have children. I had long thought that it was just some internal drive that some people have and some don’t. I don’t mean like libido, but some sort of maternal/paternal thing that some people just have more than others. I had often noticed that more affluent couples seem to have less(if any) children than poorer couples in the same area and had surmised that more money meant more joy, so they did not need children to brighten up their lives. I don’t really think that I believe that anymore.

The next series of thoughts involved a child’s upbringing contributing to whether or not they would, in turn, want to have children. I really believe that far too many people are having children because they are not happy about the way they were brought up. Like when you were a kid, and at some point you said, “when I have kids I won’t treat them like this.” to your parents -come on, you know you did- some people just seem to take that to the next level and have children so they can spoil them just to piss off their parents.

Sometime while thinking about upbringing, I think I found the reason that I don’t want to have children. Life -much like shit- happens. Most of the time you don’t have control over your current situation, it is more in the reverse, your situation has control over you. If you are buying a house, buying a car basically being a consumer, you are bound to your job as if it was your own skin. If you lose that job for whatever reason, you have to find other work. If other work is far away from your current location you really don’t have a choice, you would have to sell your house and relocate. That is why I don’t want to have children.

I really hated my childhood after about the third grade, and by no small coincidence that was when I started moving around a lot. I am sure that many people have had to experience being the new kid in school and were able to overcome it. That never really happened for me. I was always the new kid, over and over, new friends that I would lose in a couple of months, learning from different school books, it was just horrible. Here I will do my best to list my scholastic career:

1st grade: Riverside elementary
2nd grade: Fir Grove elementary
3rd grade: Fir Grove elementary
4th grade: Eastwood elementary, Benson elementary, Tombstone elementary, Benson elementary, Cochise elementary
5th grade: Cochise elementary
6th grade: Rose elementary
7th grade: Riddle middle school, Fremont middle school
8th grade: Fremont middle school, Winston middle school
9th grade: Douglas High
10th grade: Douglas High
11th grade: Douglas High, Roseburg High
12th grade: Roseburg high, Douglas High, Roseburg High

With the exception of the last two years, all of the different schools that I attened were due to moving about with my mother or father. Of course the grammar school years are when you are supposed to be developing all of your social skills, and I was doing quite well with it, right until the fourth grade. When it all went to hell. If there is anyone still reading this, I will break down why the moves were made from school to school to the best of my recollection -and, as per what my parents told me at the time.-

Riverside closed down after my first year there, it was quite close to a very busy street and a river, and the parents had a vote and it was closed. Half of the kids went to Fir Grove, half of them went to Rose, varying by region. My parents divorced while I was in the third grade and my mother drove me to Fir Grove for the remainder of the year, but we moved very close to Eastwood over the summer break, so that is where I started school the next year. After about two months of school at Eastwood, I got a note that I was supposed to go to the office and I was in horrible fear about what I had done, but it turned out that I had been pulled out of the school by my mother and we were moving to Arizona.

We found a house in a place called Dragoon and it had bus service to Benson, but the house was condemned after we had lived there for a month or so and we moved to Tombstone. Only about six weeks in Tombstone I think, and the house that had been condemned in Dragoon was repaired to where we were able to move back in, so back to Benson. Benson quit sending a bus to dragoon since they were only picking up 3 kids and it was a forty-minute round trip, so the parents started car-pooling us to Cochise. I spent a few months and then an entire year at cochise, but 1st-8th grade there were only 52 kids in the whole school, so not a lot of friends to be had.

I spent my entire 6th grade year with my father and went to Rose, some of the friends that I had had in the first grade still went there, but we knew each other only in name, and it was not quite what I had hoped it would be.

Seventh grade was spent with my mother in Riddle, I don’t remember exactly why we started going to Freemont from there (yes I do, it was because Freemont had a free lunch program and Riddle didn’t) so I spent the last six weeks or so there. Eighth grade started with Freemont, but I went back to live with dad which put me in Winston, where I graduated with my class and spent the first two and a half years at Douglas high with them. That was when it was my fault that I moved so much.

I didn’t actually move after that, it was just that I was working full time after my dad died, and I was missing too much school. If I missed more than 12 days in a semester I would not get credit, but Roseburg High and Douglas High are only about 15 miles apart, so if I got close to the 12 days per semester I would transfer to the other school which would give me a clean slate.

That is something that I would not want to put a child through. If I were wealthy enough that I would never have to worry about something like that, I would surely have a different opinion about children. But I am not, and I don’t.

Abortion; Columbine

Posted on by — No Comments ↓

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.

Howard Stern

Posted on by — No Comments ↓

Well, it seems that I must break form again, as I saw yet another news item that just riles me up. whether or not anyone is reading this (or ever will) just seems to take a back seat to my desire to bitch about it. It is another issue that I am sure I would not be comfortable talking about with a random stranger on the street, yet somehow comfortable to do here, with an entire world of potential strangers to read it – yet let me say my piece first – Also, how many days in a row does one need to break from before it is the form, and by not breaking form that is breaking form?

I am reading the story through yahoo news, I will put a link to it here, but it will be gone in just a few days, so likely it is a dead link if you are looking at the page. The link.

WASHINGTON – The nation’s largest radio station chain announced Wednesday it was suspending shock jock Howard Stern’s radio show after issuing new rules to limit indecency and address criticism of what airs on TV and radio.
Clear Channel Radio said it suspended broadcast of Stern’s show after assessing the content of his show Tuesday.

“Clear Channel drew a line in the sand today with regard to protecting our listeners from indecent content and Howard Stern’s show blew right through it,” John Hogan, president and CEO of Clear Channel Radio, said in a news release. “It was vulgar, offensive, and insulting, not just to women and African Americans but to anyone with a sense of common decency.”

Yes, and shit smells a bit like shit too, doesn’t it? If you do not live in a third world country, I would think that would really be basic knowledge (the show being vulgar and offensive, I mean). In fact, I think that may actually be what he is going for with his show. I mean look at the guy FFS he is obviously not out to tell a wonderful tale about Winnie the Pooh in the 100 acre wood. He looks to be more of the Sociopath type. Though I do not think he has enough charisma to be that sort of a person, he certainly has gained an audience large enough to believe that he can.

Congress is considering increasing the maximum fine for indecency from $27,500 to $275,000, a move that the Federal Communications Commission endorsed even before the tumult over singer Janet Jackson’s exposed breast during the nationally televised Super Bowl halftime show.
“In the history of broadcast indecency, there have been these moments where it makes headlines,” said Jeremy Lipschultz, a professor of communication at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. “In the short term, broadcasters become much more careful. You’re going to see people playing it safe. The long-term problem is the same one we’ve had, which is it’s very difficult in the end to precisely define what is indecent or not. ”

Under FCC rules and federal law, radio stations and over-the-air television channels cannot air material containing references to sexual and excretory functions between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m., when children may be tuning in. The rules do not apply to cable and satellite channels and satellite radio.

So there is proof of ‘Freedom of speech, and expression’ in action. You can say whatever the hell you want to as long as you are absolutely alone at the time. No one can see, or hear, what you are doing or else you might be found to be in violation of FCC terms. I Love this country.

Like everything else in life, you have a choice. If you don’t want to Hear about women wearing g-strings and being provocative. Don’t. I stressed the word hear in the last sentence for the single reason that it is something that was heard. When my little virgin ears learned about sex, it was in about 1980 and I heard it from an eight year old kid at school (which is, I think, where most of us do learn about it). Do we assume that the kids today will simply quit telling stories if they had not seen a VERY UNAPPEALING portion of Janet Jackson’s breast? How did it happen that kids sneaking into dad’s bedroom to look at the playboy magazines has turned into this battle over what is decent to talk about on the radio?

If the point that you are going for is for children to never have sex, you should just go ahead and kill yourself now, that is never going to happen. Children (from any species) realize that they have genitals and a strange desire to do things they had never previously done at exactly the point when their body is able to produce a healthy child. The age at which that is happening is getting smaller and smaller due to medical procedures that can support the infants who would have previously died due to being too small (or the mother that had to have a C-section to make the birth happen).

My wife and myself are 27 and 29 (respectively) and do not desire to have a child for a lot of reasons. She has to see a doctor, with a happy hand, once a year to meet these ends, she makes that sacrifice to keep us from having a child. We are both very stable in work and just not in desire of the kind of responsibility that comes with a child.

The people that actually have the children, though, seem to never spend a second with them and try to blame t.v. and the radio for their shortcomings as parents….Way to make a stand…. Sure he/she (the child) saw something happen on t.v. and as such will never want to live in a t.v., but the odds that he got his idea to actually beat his wife probably came from home, as well as the idea that he wanted to do drugs, smoke, all that kind of stuff.

If you really feel that Howard Stern is the beginning in the descent into the lungs of hell, you really need to get some medication…Also, since it is just a radio show, you could monitor what your children are listening to, but, that would require actually paying attention to your children then, wouldn’t it. I guess that is why people don’t want this stuff on the air, because they collectively just don’t care enough aboout their own children to make sure that they are safe. I know that my parents were with me every damn second (well, sometimes mom had to pee, but beyond that.)

You should blame yourself if your child is a hellion, Howard Stern’s radio show had nothing to do with it. If you believe that his show was a contributing factor, you are in such deep denial that you should be put to death, for the sake of your children.

As an addendum, I really hate Howard Stern, as such I just do not listen to his show. How hard is that?

Gay marriage; Dinner with relatives

Posted on by — No Comments ↓

In a fashion that is quite unlike me, I am going to do a news item here today, I am then going to comment on it, and it is also political. I hope I don’t sound like the uneducated oaf that I really am.

The article can be found Here. The center of it appears to be about gay marriage, but the actuality of that I think may be far different.

Bush’s call for a gay-marriage amendment came as the president sought to regain his footing after he was thrown on the defensive about issues ranging from his Vietnam-era military record to missing weapons of mass destruction in Iraq (news – web sites ).
“After more than two centuries of American jurisprudence and millennia of human experience, a few judges and local authorities are presuming to change the most fundamental institution of civilization,” the president said.

Answering Bush, Kerry said, “All Americans should be concerned when a president who is in political trouble tries to tamper with the Constitution of the United States at the start of his re-election campaign.”

“I believe the best way to protect gays and lesbians is through civil unions,” Kerry said. “I believe the issue of marriage should be left to the states”

What Bush said is just absolute crap. I mean honestly, if one must ‘Ammend’ the constitution to say that it is illegal for gay people to marry, that means that the constitution must be ‘changed’ to make that into a law. As for the part about “after more than two centuries of American jurisprudence” (which is a word he obviusly had to look up), exactly what ‘jurisprudence’ is he talking about? To my knowledge there have not been a lot of cases in court over the last two-hundred years that involved gay marriages. Even if there had been, I don’t really see how he could be trying to use that as a point today. I mean if you want to go back over the ‘jurisprudence’ of this country, you must also keep in mind that the people in Salem killed a lot of innocent people based on the testimony of three children who were being spoken to by spirits. Had the courts used that as a precedent, I think that the ‘Son of Sam’ would not have gone to prison for his killings, since he was being spoken to by the spirits also.

The judicial system, much like religion, place way to much on what has happened before, regardless of the validity of it. After all, it did take an ‘ammendment’ to abolish slavery. If they had just gone by what was written in the constitution we would all still either own, or work on a plantation in the South. Were they correct in adding this ‘ammendment’? Hell yes. Should there have been a need to? It seems so. The problem is that humans are keenly aware of now, but not so aware of the future. When those guys were hanging out drinking ale and talking about how the nation would be when they were in charge I am sure that they missed a few details along the way. But, homosexuality is as old as the constitution for sure, and probably goes back to the beginning of human history -to the time long before man actually understood how to conceive, and as such were likely just looking for any warm spot to put it.- And yes, that means that homosexuality pre-dates the bible, and that being the case I am not sure how one could use any biblical or judicial means to try to battle the sanctity or legality of it.

What comes into mind now is the religious nuts who will say that GOD made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve. As per my previous statement, that is utter bullshit. Without going into an atheist lecture, I will just say that human life pre-dates the bible’s EDEN by at least 50,000 years. So if GOD did make adam and eve and put them there, he was putting them onto a happily populated planet that likely already had rampant homosexuality and did not see a thing wrong with it. Fast-Forward to the time of the Greeks, there was a lot of homosexuality there, though no marriage, just like a teacher/student relationship with benefits (for the teacher at least), and this was still the status quo. In fact, the more I think about it the HOMOPHOBIA (I mean sanctity of marriage) didn’t really come into being until well after the founding of the United States. If it was that big an issue when they wrote the constitution, don’t you think they would have thrown something in there about it? We are talking about the same people who said that the control of the militia over land, water and sky would be in their control(two hundred years before flight was even thought about). Yet, butt bashing somehow didn’t make it on there.

I have gone way off topic here. My point is that you should not try to use ancient documents to try to validate your point of view (I used to enjoy mentioning to christians that the bible states that in order to atone for your sins you must spill the blood of a sheep on an altar unto god. – they are quick to point out that when the blood of Jesus was spilled it was for all of our sins- but what if I was taking that book as literal, and I hadn’t gotten that far in the book yet? Boy, I would have been embarassed.

The reason that I quoted four paragraphs from that initial article is that I am now scared for the direction of our country. We all know that Bush is so right-wing that he has to have some tether to keep him from falling off, but when the leading Democrats are opposing same sex marriages what the hell are you supposed to do? This year will be the third time I have cast a vote for the President, and the first one didn’t really count. The last two elections I did a sort of “lesser of two evils” approach to my selection, and it worked wonderfully, except the elected president is still living on a ranch somewhere while we have a Kook in the white house.

The Gay Marriage issue just hit at the wrong time. I am sure that if this was not an election year the republicans would have gotten something slipped through congres to make it just go away. Now, the Democrats have to not want gay marriage also, and that is unfortunate. I try to believe that an elected leader would be more likely to do what is right for the majority of the country, the sad fact is that the majority of the country does not vote. The people who do vote are the very rich, very right- wing conservatives that I would as soon kill as look at. Thus we end up with tax breaks for the very, very rich, while at the same time raising taxes for the ‘rich but not quite as rich’, then giving a tax break to the welfare families…and tripling the deficit. As much as I hate Clinton, and also keeping in mind that he was in office during the technology boom, we had a budget surplus while he was in office, but we weren’t just running around the world looking for countries to declare war on while he was in office either. -countries that the U.S. could destroy, then give huge contracts to Bush’s oil field buddies to repair at a 500% inflated cost- ‘Hiel Bush’

Well, not a lot really happened today. I woke up, went to work, and busted my ass to try to get close enough to done with all of my work that I would be able to get off at 4 so that I could make it to dinner with some of my relatives. That all went as planned, thankfully.

I mentioned in yesterday’s update that these are people that I have not seen in at least fourteen years, and one of them could not even remember me from my father’s/her brother’s funeral. It was not icy at all though. We, my family, seem to be blessed with a really great sense of humor, so after it had all been silent for a minute or so someone just started to speak. It was an anecdote from long in the past, and involving my father, and happened long before I was born, but after that, it was like it was just yesterday that we had all done this last.

The dinner really went quite well, I even ended up with like three magazines about the London Bridge (the original one that they moved to Lake Havasu), and as it turns out the guy who moved that bridge over here is a Great Uncle of mine. So where is my paycheck?…

At any rate, I have spoken to these Aunts of mine only on rare occasions since my dad died. I had not seen either of them since 1990, but it was like we had never been apart (with the possible exception of the fact that the last time I saw them I barely had pubic hair, now I have gray hair, one gained a lot of weight, one lost a lot of weight, okay so you could tell by appearances that it had been that long, but the minds still work the same.)

What really surprised me was how well my mother was getting along with them. These are my Father’s siblings, yet they still had the stories to tell -which no one else at the table got- and they laughed like teen-agers. I found that surprising only because it had been more like 20 years (not counting dad’s funeral) since they had seen each other.

My wife was able to get involved by poking a bit of fun at me, which I don’t mind, and it got her into a conversation where it would have been her around damn near a dozen people that she didn’t know. I have long said you have to pick one that has both the mind and the wit – I actually believe that what I said was that you have to make sure she has the mind at the top and the elevator to get it there- at any rate, my relatives were hugging her at the end of the night.

If I had the kind of charisma that I could walk into a room and people would just gather around me, I might use that power to an evil end. Actually, I would definitely use that power to an evil end, I would just have to go on-line and see what ends are available for that particular power. If the powers don’t have x-ray vision I might not even care.

As it turns out, one of the relatives lives in Mesa (which is only about 45 minutes from here) and we were getting along quite well, to the point that he was setting up jokes and I was knocking them down. If he is this close, I am sure that we could -combined- sucker some of the other 5 aunts/uncles down here to at least say hello. I guess I will find out on the 6th of May, as yet another Uncle will be in the area and he wants to spend a day with me and the other guy in question. I want to get my brother (who is a year older and another 45 minutes away) to come up for what is turning into a boy’s day out kind of thing. The Uncle (who is really only a few years older than I am) is trying to make us go play golf, which I have never done and who knows I might like it.

The dinner went well for all involved. Unless my wife is just lying to make me happy, but, as previously stated, she knows how to get into a conversation, then take it over, then start issuing sub-conversations for you to work on as a group. Well, she didn’t do that, but if it had gone on longer, she likely would have started assigning tasks. That’s my woman.