Category Archives: political

Garfield; Dog in heat; Social security

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Normally I wouldn’t waste my time bashing a comic strip. Particularly not Garfield, since I really don’t ever read the comic. But, while in my daily surfing routine (internet that is), I happened to see a link to the latest Garfield comic, so I decided to check it out. It wasn’t even slightly humorous.

Just for fun I decided to take a peek at all of the Garfield comics from the month of January to see if there was anything there worth reading/viewing. Unfortunately, Flux’s bitch about Garfield, on BlackChampagne.com was 100% accurate: The comic strip isn’t even trying any more.

Here I offer up as evidence three strips which I gleaned from the internet. Their sole purpose to show you that I did indeed subject myself to all of the comics for the month. Well, that and proof that the strip isn’t even trying.



Note how in the first strip there appear to be 3 identical frames, the only change being Jon’s mouth? Then compare the Garfield from the first strip with the one in the third strip, do you think he looks a bit similar as well? Also the Jon from the second strip bears a pretty striking resemblance to the Jon from the third strip, and not just because it is the same guy.

There is toy that both my wife and I remember fondly, it was available in the late ’70’s to early ’80’s, I can not seem to find a link to the toy since I can’t remember the manufacturer, or the name of the toy. It is similar to This. The idea is that you have a background ‘board’ (which is a scene from your favorite show; Scooby doo, the Smurfs, you name it) and then you have decals that you can stick on it. You can make millions of different scenes, but the characters are always going to look exactly the same. When I got the G.I. Joe version of the peel and stick thing, it actually made it so that you could position the arms and legs (since the decals were separate from the torso). Now I am beginning to believe that Jim Davis might have died some time ago, and some jack-ass with an old Garfield peel and stick toy is ruining the strip. At least I wish that I was believing that, unfortunately I seem to be believing that Davis just enjoys the paycheck so much that he quit caring about quality at least 15 years ago.

As luck would have it, I did just find the type of book that I was looking for. All you have to do is do a google search for reusable sticker book. Who would have thought the answer would be so simple. No wonder someone was able to find an old Garfield sticker book and take over the strip.

• In other news, our smaller puppy (Zelda) has been in heat for the last week or so. She has the swollen parts to prove it! Our larger puppy (Warlock) seemed to finally sense this only moments ago, as he mounted up and started humping her. He doesn’t have any balls though, which leaves me a bit curious as to why is even trying to give it a go. Only slightly curious. And he has declined repeated requests to be interviewed about the subject, his stock response has been a simple bark.

• The idea of making Social Security a private fund has been on my mind since it was announced. The reason for that (it being on my mind) is that if it were in private accounts it would be in the stock market and based on an individual’s own decisions. If the Technology Boom that happened in the late ’90s, and the subsequent, catastrophic drop of tech stocks a few years ago, can make any point at all, it is this: Your average investor is really dumb.

Even during the technology boom there were people that were afraid to jump on, knowing that it could come crashing down at any second -which was true. Problem is that those investors watched as the other guys got in on the ground floor and made millions. That made your average investor want to get into the market when it was already terribly overpriced, leaving many the average investor broke; Most of the more intelligent investors would have gotten out long before the average guy tried to get in. Which leads pretty nicely into this piece that I saw on the Washington Monthly today.

I try not to be at all political around here. But the thought of tax breaks for the rich will lead directly to tax hikes for the middle class, and that is something that I find fundamentally wrong. I hate taxes myself (I do have to pay a fair share for my capital gains and dividends every year), possibly more than the very wealthy, but I can not see giving tax breaks to the highest earners when you know it will lead to tax hikes for the low/middle earners. If you follow along that scenario, eventually the low/middle earners will all be in poverty while the uppper class is in luxury. That will always result in a dictatorship.

Isn’t it funny how the U.S. administration seems to be trying to force us back a couple of centuries every time they pass a bill?

Gotta go. I have a brother who is gay. I don’t want this post to get intercep……

The Incredibles; Support our Troops; Evolution Vs. Creationism

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Once again I have taken a week off from posting. Again no real reson why. Laziness would probably be the most realistic reason. Either that or just a lack of anything to write about.

I had intentions of getting something typed out on Sunday, however, the wife and I decided to go see a movie before her free passes expired. The movie that we went to see was The Incredibles, which I had been wanting to see ever since it hit theatres, while she went only grudgingly even with free passes.

The thing that amazed me the most about the movie was the size of the audience. The movie was released on Nov. 5, 2004, we went to see it on jan. 16, 2005, two and a half months after release, to find the theatre at about 85% capacity. It was showing in a pretty small theatre (as most older movies do), and only had three showings that day, so maybe I shouldn’t have been quite that surprised. I honestly thought that there would be my wife, myself and about another three people there, hah. And I really thought that there wouldn’t be any children at all, which I based on parents getting sick of their children’s constant begging to see it within the first month after release. Again I was way off. We were among about four couples that were there, every other group had multiple children. Expecting the audience to be small, we didn’t arrive until just a couple of minutes before showtime, which meant that we were in the second row, staring up for two hours to watch it.

Why are the theatres designed that way in the first place? They could make it a bit wider and add a couple of seats to each upper row, maybe even move all of the upper seating closer to the screen (at the same height of course) and add an extra row in the back. I have never had a problem watching a movie from an aisle seat, and the back row is just about the best view in the house. I guess there are reasons why they have them set up the way they do, I just will never understand them.

How was the movie? It was everything that I had expected (of course I had read a lot of reviews going in), and far better than the wife was expecting. It was certainly the most entertaining cgi film that I have ever seen, of course I have only seen a few of them. The characters in this movie were so much more realistic than what you normally see in animated films. There are many layers to each of them. For the majority of the movie I found myself almost forgetting that they were super-heroes, right up until one of them got mad and used his/her powers in anger. The visual quality was amazing, the story was pretty good (though it seemed to try a bit too hard to be dramatic) and the dialogue really carried it. Simply put, The Incrdibles has set the bar pretty high for cgi films; It’s no longer about cutesy little fish and worn out fart jokes.

• While on the way to the movie, I noticed yet another “support our troops” sticker on the back of a car. I didn’t realize until recently that almost all of those ribbons are actually magnets (I had assumed that they were stickers). Seeing this one had reminded me of the mission that I have undertaken in my local area. The thing about those little decals is that they are supposed to be displayed vertically (at least they are done that way traditionally), yet some people put them on their cars in such a manner that it looks like a Jesus Fish. Normally I wouldn’t get upset about this type of thing, but in light of the war in Iraq being based on the delusions of the religious nut that leads our country, it pisses me off. It makes me think that they put it that way on purpose, which makes me think that they probably voted to reelect Bush. Which is sick, sad and wrong.

So I decided to set the world right. When I get to work, as well as when I leave, I walk through the parking lot and take the liberty of putting their ribbons on the car properly. I only change the ones that are very obviously meant to look like the Jesus Fish. There are some that are halfway between, but it looks like the people just put them that way so that you could read what was written on it horizontaly, those I let go. I am sure that this really won’t make a damn bit of difference to the world as a whole, but it sure does make me feel better. I did find that there are limitations to my desire to straighten out the ribbons though. For instance, in the parking lot of the movie theatre I saw one that needed to be changed, I left it alone. It is one thing to do this in the tiny little town that I live in, quite another to do it in the Metro-Phoenix area. That is to say that I really don’t think it is something I am prepared to die for.

• On sort of a similar topic, that being delusional religious people, I had a conversation with a guy named Rick the other day about eggs.

All my life I have believed that the question “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?” was a pretty obvious gauge of religious belief. That is what the question is about, isn’t it? The way I see it, if you believe that the chicken came first that is saying that the chicken was created by someone/something. While if you believe that the egg came first, that would lend itself to the belief that the egg was the offspring of pre-existing animals that either cross-bred, or two animals of the same species that had a genetically mutated offspring. That would lend itself to the theory of evolution. Much like everything else in life, I never thought that anyone could believe that the question meant anything else (I always seem to think that everyone shares my views, right until they tell me they don’t). Rick, on the other hand, said that it was not anything like that. He said that the question was meant to be retorical, one of those meditiation thoughts along the lines of “If a tree falls in the forest, and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?”

I have tried to find evidence of my presumption that the question was an argument for or against evolution, but have had no success. If you happen to know how/why this question came about, please shoot me an email, I am really curious about it. Even if you don’t know how/why the question came about, but you have always believed that the fundamental reason for the question was evolution, let me know that also. I am really curious on this one.

That’s about all I have for now. Tune in next time to see photos of the craziest bitch on the net (if Zelda is willing to pose, that is).

Commercial law, Games, and Bad Santa

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I decided to take a week off of updating this page, and for no damn reason whatsoever. This should lead to one of two responses; either you are angry that I didn’t mention I would be taking the time off, or you didn’t even notice. Most likely the latter I suspect.

Fear not, nothing terrible has happened to myself or my family. I don’t have intentions of shutting down the page. I just didn’t feel like typing much over the last week. Not to mention that I didn’t find much of use in the news. I instead spent my computer time like I always did before I started this site, I played a lot of video games. And not even very good ones!

• Here is one of those things that I could not believe when I saw it, but when I clicked through to read the article I found out that it is true. Congress is sitting on legislation that would make it illegal to fast-forward through commercials on shows that you have recorded. How true that is, or how likely the legislation is to pass, remains a mystery.

While reading through the article linked to above, and having read a couple of other articles about the issue, it seems like what they are actually trying to get rid off is peer to peer file sharing software. How that has anything to do with fast forwarding through a commercial is beyond me. The thing is that this is just exactly how a lot of really stupid laws get passed. It starts with a fairly decent idea like banning peer to peer movie sharing software. Then someone in the advertising lobby says, “And while we are at it let’s make it illegal to fast forward through the commercials if they record the movie from tv.” Everyone laughs, but no one reads the fine print. Next thing you know you are in prison for skipping a kotex commercial.

Democracy in action. How sad is that.

• So I finally got around to buying Roller Coaster Tycoon. That is something that I had been thinking aobut doing since it came out, at which point I was pretty seriously into SimCity. So five or six years later, I actually boosted the nine bucks for the game. The first thing I gotta say is what a difference half a decade can make in system requirements. I have every one of the major requirements beat by 500%. Even the so-called ‘optimal’ ones. So, at the very least I don’t have to screw around with the choppy gameplay I would have had I bought it when it first came out.

As for the game itself, it is pretty fun. It is certainly not the type of game that you want to sit there and play. You really just want to get the park set up fairly well and then let it run in the background while you are off surfing porn sites and what not. Check back in once in a while to build new attractions as funds become available. That’s about it. Much like any simulation type game, you really have to have a taste for it in the first place. The type of micro management that you have to do is all a bit tedious, sometimes borderline boring. But it is fun to be able to quadruple the price of umbrellas when the weather forecast shows rain. It is good to be the king.

There are two things about the game that really annoy me. The first is that it is called Roller Coaster Tycoon, while it seems (at least early on) that roller coasters are far from the meat of succeeding in your objectives. They have some prefabricated coasters that you can put up, which cost a ton of money, that can attract a crowd. That is great for just getting started, but I want to build some really monsterous ones. Which I did. And while it costs me about 350 dollars an hour to operate it, it routinely goes through the course empty, almost all of the park goers say that it is too intense for them. Honestly now, most good theme parks are built around one very intense roller coaster. Some people will travel thousands of miles just to try out the next big one. Why is it that no one wants to ride the monster that I built? Oh well, it was a lesson learned.

The other annoying thing about it is that there are four different angles that you can view the park from. Depending on which view you have it on it will make it look like your coaster is a complete circuit, while if you rotate the view it turns out that you are off on the height or distance of a couple of sections of the track. This really only happens after you build one freestyle only to find out that one of the hills is too steep to make it up, thus forcing you to cut the section, tone it down, and try to reconnect later. I spent a good half an hour fucking with that problem yesterday, quite annoying. It is possible that this was all covered in the instruction booklet, however the game didn’t actually come with one, only a blurry version of it in .pdf format, which is quite the annoyance in and of itself.

These problems were likely solved in the second roller coaster tycoon game, who knows maybe I will buy that one in another five or six years.

• My wife and I took the time to watch the movie Bad Santa over the weekend. I found it pretty amusing. It was sort of the type of low brow humor I was expecting, while it did have moments that were damn near touching. The funniest part of the movie though was when Billie Bob Thorntons character said that the north pole was like the suburbs. When asked which one, he replied “Apache Junction”. You would really have to live in the Phoenix area to understand just how funny that is. A.J. is the butt of every joke ever made about rednecks, hispanics and indians. Of course it is deservedly so, there is nowhere else in the valley that has so few teeth, and so many non-functioning cars, per capita.

As far as Billie Bob, I don’t know that I had ever seen a movie with him in it. At least if I did he left so little impression on me that I am blanking it. I only knew who he was because of his previous relationship with Angelina Jolie. I can say this much for Billy Bob, he sure does play a convincing drunk. Whether that is the skill of a finely hones actor, or the easiest role of his life since it was not an act at all…Who knows?

Funny thing about my wife renting the movie was that the other movie she wanted to rent was not available that day. The other movie was ‘Elf’. I am just guessing here, but those two movies seem to be on opposite sides of the holiday film universe. Of course it could be that watching Elf after Bad Santa would negate some of the horrible Christmas thoughts that I now have in my head, but I guess I will never know.

I am pretty sure that the only reason that she was looking to rent Elf was that it has Will Ferrell in it. I like Will Ferrell as much as the next guy, but I am afraid that he is going down the same road that Jim Carey did early in his career. They put them in movies to get butts in the seats, then just make them basically do the same comedy routine that we have already seen hundreds of times. Then it just starts to get tired and boring. Hopefully this won’t be the case with Ferrell, or if it is he will overcome it as well as Carey did. Of course I don’t really care, so this is kind of moot anyway.

Well that is about it for today.

Mad Cow inaction, Survivor, CD’s

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Government News

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

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

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

…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Diablo and Republicans (you never see them in the same place at the same time)

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After my last post, Diablo happened. I got stuck, once again, in that neverending cycle of ‘just one more waypoint’, but then I have the area cleared so might as well do whatever act related quest is necessary, etc. That consumed most of my day on Monday. Tuesday brought about election day, and with that I found myself watching the news all night just waiting for them to say that they had grossly miscalculated the votes and that Bush was actually way behind in voting. Of course several hours of that didn’t yield any results, nor did it result in my typing anything here for you to read. Wednesday was just a late day at work, as that was the day of our bi-weekly grocery delivery. That leaves me here on Thursday wondering how it is that I have not updated this page since Sunday. Time sucks.

A question that I asked my wife last night, that I am really curious to know the answer to, is “What point is there in having a democracy if the majority of the people vote for the wrong person?” I know that the question is based on some pretty faulty logic, but in reality I think that it is a lot more true than it appears. This year’s elections have made it so that all three branches of government are being ruled by Republicans. Not just any Republicans in many cases, but the evangelical, second-coming-of-Christ type Republicans. I am sure that I am being a bit cynical here, but, isn’t that sort of like having a dictatorship? Well, I guess it does differ from a dictatorship in the fact that 51% of the people voted for it. Why this happened truly escapes me, makes me sick to my stomach, and further pisses me off since I have been paying money into Social Security since I was 16. While I have only been paying it for fourteen years, I will still be pissed when Dubya gets something through congress to do away with it completely. I also know that they (Republicans) are not actually trying to do away with Social Security, only change the way it is managed (like a forced retirement plan for people who don’t ever save money).

Here it is in all its pixelated glory. My breakdown of why I really, really, really hate the Republican agenda. Really rich people pay more taxes than poor people, which makes sense if you do it all by percentages. Really poor people pay no taxes, then get government assistance programs to send a bit more money to them, since they are so poor that they can’t afford a house, car, food and other necessities. The very wealthy people feel that they are being taxed too much for the sake of supporting the poor. The poor think that they aren’t getting enough assistance since life didn’t give them a fair roll of the dice. The solution, in the Republican’s eyes, is to decrease taxes on the very rich, and decrease government assistance programs to the very poor. That is where the problems all start. The rich (current administration included) don’t want to give any money to the poor, don’t want to take back tax cuts made for the very rich, and don’t care to hear any proposal whereby the poor can make it up to, at least, poverty level. So taxes must be raised, but on whom? Well, the middle class of course. So it pushes on, the poor staying poor, the middle class getting closer and closer to poverty, while the upper class roll around in their collective piles of money.

This might have made me sound like a freak, might even have worked itself into a full blown Manifesto, were it not for the fact that the day Dubya cut taxes on the wealthy last year, my state and federal taxes went up. I am all for a smaller government, I mean, hell, if we were to take away the wages of all of the Senators and House Representitives we might be able to work things out. How many millions of dollars did each candidate spend on the campaign trail this year? Imagine if that money was just sent to underfunded projects across the country, we might have been able to do some good.

With luck, I might be back to normal form tomorrow (be it good or bad). That is all for today.

Osama Bin Laden

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

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

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

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

Homosexuality

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So, you know how I Often say that I don’t really have anything to talk about? That is certainly not true today. Whether I run out of steam before I get to the bulk of the bitching, though, remains to be seen.

• On the work front, I agreed to leave work an hour earlier than usual to go pick up a part for the bosses van, a part which I am sure they will ask me to install tomorrow. The unfortunate part of this transaction was that I said I would do it just for the money I paid for the gas to get there. Due to some unfortunate planning, I was driving directly into the setting sun, with a dirty windshield and the nearest ‘squeegie’ far enough behind me that I didn’t want to go back to wash the damn window. I did spray the window with the cleaner that is in your little ‘window squirter thing’ and turn on the wipers, only to find that one of the wipers had crumbled to dust, and the other one was only barely alive. I eventually had to pull over and use a rag from the trunk to try to clean the window enough that I could see at all. Even with the outside of the window cleaned up, I was still driving almost half blind, since the inside of the windshield has had a weird film over it ever since the car over-heated a couple of years ago (which made me run the heater to try to circulate whatever water was in the car). I guess what I really need to do is hit the damn thing with a bit of windex before I go volunteering for jobs that require me to drive into the sun. Perhaps I will do that this weekend.

• The real story today is going to be all about homosexuality.

I happen to have a brother that is gay. He is not being gay as a way to get back at his parents, he is not looking for attention, he is just plain gay. I, more than most, have developed a sort of tolerance towards homosexuality because of it. I mean it is pretty difficult to go out ‘gay bashing’ when you know that you have a family member who is just the same.

I have often thought that his being homosexual was a choice, but my wife emailed me This article from CNN that is making me finally think a little bit differently. Of course you could find a study somewhere to back up literally anything, but the odds that CNN is going to be posting incorrect information, on purpose, is pretty laughable.

One study does not a fact make, I understand that. What I do understand is that I have a brother that happens to be homosexual. That brother is still my brother. This same brother is trying to marry his partner, yet it is not allowed under state and federal laws. They are not trying to marry as a mockery of the “man/woman” union, they are trying to marry so that one spouse can be included on the other spouse’s health insurance. Why is it that that is not possible?

I understand that there are staunch beliefs, on both sides of the coin, about this type of marriage, but, who does it really hurt?

If two gay men do marry, there is no way that they can ever procreate. Convoluted laws will make it damn near impossible for them to ever adopt a child, they will be just “life partners”. Isn’t that the whole point of marriage? You pick the one person that you want to spend the rest of your life with? Why is it so wrong that one of the partners can’t pump out children?

I find it humorous to hear anyone talking about homosexuals trying to ‘bastardize’ the ‘sacred union’ of marriage. I bet, if you actually run the statistics on that, there will be very few homosexuals that ever divorce. Why? The homosexual people seem to be looking for the right person as opposed to settling for the person that is ‘close enough’.

A lot of hetrosexuals make tons of mistakes along the way (while looking for their perfect mate), that is because they are doing their best to just snatch up someone, anyone, before they are too old and no one wants them anymore. I think that the homosexuals kind of have it better in that respect. They have been looking their entire lives, have been shunned by society, and just want to find that one person that makes them happy.

Homosexuality is not a crime, it is not even a ‘condition’, it is what that person is. Loving another person of the same sex should not carry the taboo that it currently does, there are homosexuals that are brave enough to admit it everywhere, even children of those in the oval office.

Here I must actually site a particular quote from Dick Cheney, while being questioned about the homosexuality of his own daughter:

Cheneys Criticize Kerry’s Remarks on Daughter
“You saw a man who will say and do anything in order to get elected,” Mr. Cheney said. “And I am not speaking just as a father here, though I am a pretty angry father, but as a citizen.” The vice president went on to describe the Massachusetts senator as too vacillating to be commander in chief and unwilling to support American troops at war.

You see how he just avoided the question, then made it a question of homeland security? That worked for the first four years, not gonna work for the next four, at least I hope.

Why using the absolute, stone-solid FACT that the Cheney’s daughter is gay is ‘doing anything to get elected’ really escapes me. I think the fact that you do your best to hide it really says more about personal character…

It really must suck for Cheney, to be so opposed to homosexuals, having one as a child, then to find out that you aren’t even gonna be the veep any more. I bet we will see his ‘true colors’ shining through pretty soon…Mark my words…

Commercials; Government; Writing

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Today’s post brings good and bad news. The good news is that I don’t have any desire to talk about John Saul, or books at all for that matter, today. The bad news is that I did yesterday, and while I completely forgot to post it, I am just gonna throw it on the bottom of this page since I have all but run out of issues to tackle.

Let that be a lesson to all of you who are thinking about starting your own website, especially if you are palanning to try to put up news with your own opinion or snark, don’t start in an election year! For the first six or eight months that I was doing this site I could easily find some news item to go off about, yet now it is all politics. Actually it really isn’t so much about politics as it is about which candidate says what about the other, and which one made the most weird faces in the last debate. Is that what politics has come to?

I was watching some show on TVLand the other day, possibly MacGyver, and they showed an old commercial (That is one of the things that TvLand is famous for, they air old commercials for lots of products, I can remember seeing a Parkay margarine commercial from the ’70s and a Shake-n-Bake commercial from around the same era. They are really pretty nostalgic to look back at.), when an old, black and white commercial came on the screen. The only thing in the entire commercial was a picture of rain falling on a random street, with a voice-over saying something like, “It may rain this November Eleventh. If it rains, get wet. It is that important.” (again that is not actually a quote but the best I can recall and I can’t find that commercial anywhere on their website, or anywhere else on the internet for that matter). The screen then flashed up a ‘Vote for ___’ logo. I don’t remember the exact candidate, nor do I know the year the commercial was released, so it is difficult for me to try to find the damn thing. At any rate, I think you will see the point here. Political advertising used to be about spreading the name of the political candidate, now it seems to be about conveying the worst ‘half-truths’ about the opponent.

I am certainly not a political pundit, but I do know a bit or two about us grunts that actually work for a living. Not a damn one of ‘us grunts’ really care what the presidential candidates were doing in the early ’70s. ‘Us grunts’ would like to see the war in Iraq ended with the fewest possible casualties on all sides, but that is not all that we think about. ‘Us grunts’ are also a bit concerned about a couple of policies. You see, most of ‘us grunts’ weren’t born horribly rich (George W.), most of ‘us grunts’ didn’t marry horribly rich (John Kerry), most of ‘us grunts’ don’t give a damn about taxes for the richest 1% of the population, hell most of ‘us grunts’ don’t give a damn about taxes on the top 20% of the population. ‘Us grunts’ are looking for a bit of substance in the presidential claims about policies that actually involve ‘us grunts’.

Health Care is a really big ‘for instance’. ‘Us grunts’ don’t really have a lot of options; Making too much money to get free health care, yet not making quite enough money to actually afford the care that we do have. Despite that, laws are being passed to keep us from trying to obtain medicine at lower prices, ‘us grunts’ don’t care for that at all.

Another thing that ‘us grunts’ just can’t seem to understand is why buying a huge, gas-guzzling SUV can get you a tax break. It seems like the price of gas has been going up awfully fast lately, ‘us grunts’ are looking for the most fuel effecient automobile that our meager income can buy. Of course ‘us grunts’ might be able to afford those huge, gas-guzzling SUV’s were it not for the fact that minimum wage is at its lowest point in thirty years (adjusted for inflation), yet I doubt that ‘us grunts’ would buy them anyway… Why waste a precious resource that is already nearly drained?

I would really, really like to care about which candidate has better hair, which candidate did what in the ’70s, which candidate’s daughters have been arrested on the most drug charges, but I just can’t. There is more at stake here than just a figure-head for our country. There are lobbyists, albeit on both sides of the coin, that are willing to give millions or billions of dollars to whoever comes out of this thing as the leader. I have had almost four years to watch what one of them did with that power, now I would like to see anyone else in his position, to see what that power might bring. Damn me for being partisan.

PostScript: I know that the term ‘us grunts’ is not grammatically correct, but nothing else I ever write is either. I used the term ‘us grunts’ only because it starts with two letters that are important to me.

First off, and much to the great relief of everyone here I’m sure, I am not written off of the christmas card list of the friend who sent me the John Saul novel that I have been bitching about so much. In fact, said friend also has his own copy of the novel and was not able to make it through the first few chapters before he realized that he had basically read it in other Saul books. That means, at the very least, that anyone who reads and is also capable of retaining knowledge will know that Saul just keeps recycling the same story. The only explanation for this (why people still buy the books I mean) is that I think a lot of the readers are adolescent and just looking for a quick read with an easy to follow story.

My mother also read this book, my copy in fact, while my wife and I were on vacation, and she thought that it was pretty good, yet, it also seemed oddly familiar. I am now beginning to think that the way Saul is able to have continued success (31 novels worth) is that there is absolutely nothing remarkable about anything he has written. You certainly can’t walk away from the book with a fear of any one person or thing, within a couple of days you wouldn’t be able to name any of the main characters even if threatened with torture. I guess I should just call his work ‘disposable fiction’. Then again, all of the Saul that I personally own is in hardcover, and while I never paid cover price for any of it it is still far too expensive to simply throw away, yet that is what your mind tries to do with it.

If anyone other than John Saul were to send a John Saul novel to a publisher in the hopes of getting it printed they would likely be laughed right out the door. Mind you, that could be said for a lot of authors today. In fact if you start looking at the novels that are called ‘classic’, there are very few authors that have more than one in that category.

Interesting thought, that. Perhaps all of the authors that we consider great today only ever had one good novel, while the rest was mindless dribble, or at least very derivitive of their initial work. That is an unimaginable idea however, since most of the great authors of the past never made a single cent off of their work. I suppose that it would be really great to know that your story has outlasted you, but they never knew; It takes a century or so to see if the story can transcend to that status.

I seem to remember that Edgar Allan Poe (take this test, its fun) died penniless, in a gutter, none of his work ever made him a penny. Yet, some of Poe’s stories are required reading a hundred and fifty years later. On that same note, I somehow doubt that any John Saul will be ‘required reading’ in the year 2154, I could be wrong. (if you happen to be in the year 2154, and are reading this, and John Saul is required reading, please shoot me an email so that I will know that I was in error.)

When I was in my teens, even into my early twenties, I thought that my writing was going to change the world. Of course I have since sobered to the reality that I am likely never going to get a single word put to print before I die. I am not capable of writing with correct grammar, nor do my ideas do more than stem off of the fiction that I have read. The few, truly original, ideas that I have had work well in my head but do not seem to do well when put to paper (computer screen in this case). I do enjoy writing, my friends and family enjoy reading what I have written, yet I don’t seem to have that ‘it’ that is going to make me rise above every other guy in the world who tries to write anything. My ‘fan base’ could be counted on one hand, my grammar is horrible, at this point I am just hoping that someone within the family tries to get the hundreds of short stories in my file cabinet put onto paper someday. The one thing that I do have is really screwed up dreams, that is where the short stories come from. I never have a dream long enough to work itself into a novel though, and that means that what I write is just as forgettable as every other book you have read in the last few years.

As if that is not enough, I just went to the bathroom to find out that I have been wearing my underwear inside-out all day! Life Sucks!

Christmas lights; John Kerry, Concert tickets

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Yes, as the date clearly states, we are now officially in October. All site-related musings aside, time still seems to be moving at rather a rapid pace. The decorative Christmas lights that I put up on the house last year, and have been thinking of taking down every weekend, now seem to be less of a nuisance, as it now seems that I am just horribly well prepared, as opposed to horribly lazy, as they seemed just yesterday. The local radio stations are already talking about ‘shopping days before Christmas’, completely disreagarding the fact that it is still so unbearably hot that no one really ever leaves the house, unless forced. Of course that is sort of a trade off that one must make to live where I do; We have unusually warm winters, extremely hot summers, and the other two seasons seem to last about three days each. That is not an exaggeration either, last year there was one day that we were running the cooler (in the store) and the next morning it was the heater. So I am going to go ahead and blame the rapid passage of time on having only two seasons, regardless of the fact that winter goes about two months, while summer lasts the other ten.

Attempting to use the weather where you live as an excuse (like I just did) is a pretty poor argument. Everyone, everywhere, has different atmospheric conditions that they have to tolerate. While I really wish I would have made it to take care of the weeds in front of the house (and I mean once and for all, as opposed to using a weedeater every third weekend), at least I have the house, with the weeds in front of it, to bitch about. Practically half of the state of Florida is in ruins, and I am bitching about it being to hot to shoot a bit of RoundUp on them. I suppose that is why there are benfits and drawbacks to living in any environment. And those weeds had better watch out, I may just get off my lazy duff and take care of them next year!

• Now that the small talk about the weather is out of the way… I want to mention briefly that I may have completely underestimated John Kerry’s performance in the first presidential debate. All of the surveys that have been released so far show Kerry winning the debate handily. I would agree with that point, Kerry did win the thing, hands down, in my eyes, but I was actually disappointed in both his, and President Bush’s, handling of the questions. The entire debate seemed to be more of a press conference, each man responded to the question that they were given, but neither were ever allowed to actually ask direct questions of the other.

I may not be much of a pundit on politics, but I do know how to debate. When you do not allow the persons in the debate to ask each other specific questions related to the subject, the persons are not debating -they are ranting- much as I am now. The key to finding out someone’s stance on anything is to not listen to the stuff that they have prepared and memorized over time, you need to see what they say when they don’t have any more notes. While neither candidiate came in with notes, they surely knew the points that they wanted to make, and had likely practiced saying them in front of a mirror. I am not even sure that what I witnessed last night could be called a debate, at least not in the literal term of the word. Bush did his best to spin everything into his (obviously pre-rehearsed) ‘War on Terror’ shtick, while Kerry did his best to have good hair and answer questions that were never asked.

Am I the only person in the whole of the ‘United States of America’ that wants to see what the actual people, the ones that we are actually going to vote for on the second of November, actually think? I sure hope that there are a lot more people like me, people who are disappointed by the fact that the debate was no more than a staged media circus. Even though I really want Kerry to win this election (or even Nader, hell anyone but Bush) I still think that the people are getting the short end of the stick when the debate is all but staged. What the American people need is factual information, not rhetoric. Yet, It seems that facts are no longer the driving factor when we are letting the ‘Leader of the free world’ send our children to war.

• Now to really make you all drool.

It is hard to have a bad day, even though mine was horrible, when you come home to find the following email:

If I bought tickets to this would you be able to work early on Saturday or get the day off so you could go??

The link is now dead, but the concert in question is Megadeth at the Dodge Theatre (in the Phoenix area). If you know anything about me at all, hell, even you know nothing about me at all, you should know that I kind of Worship Megadeth. There is no force in the world strong enough to keep me from making it to see a new Megadeth show, well, I guess death would qualify, but I don’t think that death is really a force. You should all now just bow before me and hope/pray that your wife will ever be so cool as to offer you treats to such an event. Of course not all wives are built the same, so when I am watching Megadeth, you might be trimming hedges…which I would do, that is I would do it if I actually had a hedge to trim.
Not all wives are built the same, choose accordingly.