Just Stay Home

Walking down the street at 2:00 pm near the school is a little like walking through a maze.  There are a million cars around the neighborhood, all jockeying for the best parking places, so the carnivores can swoop in and get their children from the best possible position while talking on their smart phones and putting on their make-up.  At the same time.  It seems like they are desperate enough try anything to get a better parking place while texting, which makes it important to not trust them or their driving skills.

It is because of these nut jobs that the streets around my neighborhood are not safe.

Because they don’t care about anything but the parking spot, and secondly their children.  Get in their way and your life is forfeit.  Even if you are crossing at a corner.  One of them damn near got me today, walking across the street.  I look in one direction, to my left, up the hill.  There is nothing coming down the hill.  I can see the traffic at the top of the hill driving both left and right, a white semi crossing  the intersection going west.  I look in the other direction, to my right, down the hill.  The stop light 2 blocks away, the closest light to me, is red, and there is no traffic coming.  A black dodge ram is the only car I can see at the light.

I walk across the street, having no one coming in any direction.  After a few steps I hear a car coming towards me from behind.  Now, dear reader, you and I both know what a car engine sounds like when the driver is slowing down.  The car behind me made no such noise.  And the driver hit the horn, like I am somehow holding up this person from their important business.

Not these sunglasses, these are nice

I don’t need to win this battle.  Cars weigh in excess of 1 ton.  I weigh 165 pounds, after a filling meal and a frosty beverage.  So I  jog across the street, not easy with sore hamstrings and feet, tired after running for an hour and a half.  I can feel the breeze of the car, which I find out after this loon turns is a black SUV, driven by someone who wears those sunglasses.  You know the ones, the ones that say “I hate my life.  I want to be a Kardashian, even if those bitches look like raccoons in love with botox!”

Nut job never tried to even slow down.  And the driver yells at me as she passes “MOVE IT ASSHOLE” with a phone in her hand held up to her ear on top it.  Sounded vaguely like Phyllis Diller.

My reaction is to bark out “LEARN TO DRIVE, JACKASS.”  I would say I can’t believe someone would drive like that that close to a school, but I’ve seen these derps before, and the behavior, while stupid, is in fact par for the course.  Wouldn’t slow down, driving while talking on the phone, clear disregard for a pedestrian who has the right of way.

It was worth a laugh.  A block later she pulled her car into a parking spot, across the street from the school where all the 8 years are waiting for their loving mothers, AKA bat shit crazy shitty drivers, to pick them up.  And hopefully not kill them in an accident on the way home.

Moral of the story:  Never walk near cars around schoolsDon’t cross the street, everRun after dark, the crazy people are home at that pointDon’t let mom drive, she’s insaneJust stay home.

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That’s it from here, America.  G’night.

Well, The Pic Is Nice, At Least

Pic of the day:  North America from satellite.

If you lived here, you’d be home by now.

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If the government can round up someone and never be required to explain why, then it’s no longer the United States of America as you and I always understood it. Our enemies have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. They have made us become like them.

Garrison Keillor

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The Patriot act, amongst other pieces of legislation makes it possible to be searched without your having done anything.  Surveillance can be ordered based on the books you read and the web sites you visit, without you ever having done anything wrong.

Fisa codifies the Presidents right to wiretap warrantlessly. It has been used to store in an NSA database nearly two trillion calls, both foreign and domestic, in their database.  No doubt both you and I, dear reader, are in that database.

Other laws have similar hazards attached to them, and are entirely legal.

Our conception of freedom, of who and what we are as a nation has not been under attack for years.  It has been a delusion, a lie we told ourselves unwittingly, about what we are.  And now that CISPA is on the horizon, there will be more unnecessary attacks upon our idea of what freedom is.

And they have tried twice with similar legislation.  And if CISPA fails, due to public backlash, or no support in the Senate, or the Presidents veto, it matters not.  Some other similar abuse of freedom will eventually get through the halls of congress in the name of progress and slowly strangle yet another part of the dream of what We The People think we should be.

Garrison Keillor, in the quote above is right in one respect.  We are no longer the U.S. of A. that we understood ourselves to be. But I’m not sure we ever really were.   The other problem with his statement is that he attributes this to “enemies.”  No enemies are involved.  Every abuse visited upon the freedom of the American people has been visited on the American people by the American people, for the betterment of the American people.

We have seen the enemy, and they is us, apparently.

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All that said, life in America isn’t all that bad. The people are still nice.  The food is still decent.  The jokes are still funny.  The customer service still sucks. The beer is still cold.  The sports are still fun.   Marketing and Advertising are still evil.  Technology is still too expensive.  It’s gotten invasive to a startling extent though, where it wasn’t before.

You just have to be aware that every word you say on-line and on your phone is public information.  And not only is it public, it may be used against you at anytime by your government, who loves you and wants to protect you.  From who, I dunno.  Seems to me that those who wish to help us do us the most harm with their invasive use of technology, but that’s just me.

The place ain’t too bad, though.  A bit run down in comparison to what it was when I was a child, but it’s to be expected.  No nation stays number one forever.

Just ask Rome.

Or the Byzantines.

Or the Monguls.

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That’s it from here, America.  G’night.

Why Is It…

Pic of the day:  Le bassin aux nymphéas ou Les nymphéas à Giverny, by Claude Monet

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Why is it that the world is not trying to arm the rebels in Syria?  Or at the very least find some way of protecting them?  To be honest the U.N. is trying, but how much power to actually affect that change can they have at this point?  With member of the big 7  in the U.N. calling the rebels “barbarous” it seems unlikely that they’ll be able to do anything fruitful anytime soon.  I would ponder, along with many others I am certain, funneling weapons to the rebels covertly, but America has a less than bright and shining record with covert actions turning against us over the last 60 years.  Or do you think Iran, amongst other nations, got to be who they are without our unwanted and covert help?

Why is it that every single time Mitt Romney talks about unemployment, he skews the numbers to the point where they have little to do with anything that matters?  He says that the President has let down workers under 25, because they are unemployed at twice the rate of the American people, while failing to point out that this has been the case for over 10 years?  Or that women have suffered greatly under the President, when unemployment for women is 7/10th of one percent lower than the national average and 1.2% lower than unemployment for men?

Why is it that America is called the land of the free? With the amount of strictures our freedoms have come under over the last quarter century, Russia may be more free than we are.  I don’t know for certain, though.  I love my country, I just question things about it that many people think is taboo.  Just because we are in some ways better off, does not make us more free than any other democratic  or even non-democratic country.  If we as a people take it for granted that we are “the land of the free” how long can it stay that way, unguarded?

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I watched the White House correspondents dinner tonight.  Pretty damn funny, The President killed on stage, the dig on Sarah Palin was damn funny, and the Romney humor wasn’t too bad, I liked the shot he took at the do-nothing House too.  Kimmel had some really good material, best bit was “The difference between Rush Limbaugh’s audience and Bill Maher’s audience?  Maher’s audience knows he’s being an asshole.” He had plenty of good material.

Not gonna talk about Kimmel seeming stiff and rushed out there on the dais. Maybe he wanted to seem that way, to cover his as just in case his jokes sucked and the Jake Tapper is a shitty joke writer references stopped working.

If you wanna watch the viddy of it, and it is worth it, it’s funny stuff, head over to C-span.org.  They’ll have it there.  It’s worth the watch.  Come to think of it, there is not much going on politically this weekend, C-span will probably re-air it a boatload of times.

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I missed most of the Rangers/Capitals game, in large part because I was busy running my ass off in the park.  9.5 miles at a 7:13 pace kept me from thinking about hockey, or much anything else when the game was going on.  Missed a damn good game as well.  But to be honest, hockey fan though I am, I wanted to get out and run, and that time was about the only time I actually could.  It’s not like the Rangers needed me there to watch them win to win.

I can always catch the edited highlights later.  Ya, not as exciting as the real thing happening live in front of you, but I don’t mind so much.  Plus, that 7:13 was a boatload of fun, ran my ass off.  It was well worth it.  Nearly 8.5 MPH for over an hour on these beat up, tired legs is a major accomplishment.  Might not sound like much to you, but there were people half my age in the park who couldn’t keep up with me.  That always feels nice.

Why is it that I don’t mind missing important sporting events, but can’t think of missing a good run?

Oh, yeah, I have those things.  You know.  Priorities.

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That’s it from here, America.  G’night.

Wildly Inaccurate Second Round 2012 NHL Playoff Predictions

Pic of the day:  First Stanley cup.  A pic of the Montreal Hockey club  after winning the first ever Stanley cup in 1893.

Hmmm…. Deja Vu…

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A few times a year I put on my prognosticators hat and try to figure out what will happen in the NHL playoffs before they actually happen.  Silly me.  Only occasionally do I get it right, and when I do it’s usually more about dumb luck than anything else, something I have in common with everyone else who does this crap.

Reading that statement, you might think that I either have no confidence in my picks and picking ability (which could be further implied by the title of my picks columns in general) or am jaded enough to not care.  Not true.  I have plenty of confidence in my picks, but confidence doesn’t make the picks right, any more than having an opinion about politics makes it automatically right just because you have it.   I’m plenty confident, I just get it wrong a fair bit.  Nothing to be ashamed of.

And while I’m jaded I care about my picks, even if they SUCK.

Even if they are amazingly wrong.  Before I get to the second round crapfest, lets review what I picked in the first round and how that turned out.

My Eastern conference picks were sub-par, and that is being nice about it.  The only pick that I nailed was my pick of the New York Rangers beating Ottawa in 7.  And even there I was wrong.  I said that Callahan and Gaborik would have to do well in order to not lose.  Gaborik was a non factor throughout the series.  I picked the Bruins to win in 5 games, and they lost in 7.   I don’t think anyone foresaw Braden Holtby holding the B’s at bay, or the Bruins underachieving quite as much as they did.  I had the Devils winning in 5.  They won in 7 and the Panthers were much stronger against them than I gave them credit for, so I’m calling that a miss.  And I picked the Penguins in 5.  With the porous goal-tending the Pens put up, I could have beaten the Pens this series.

My Western conference picks were just as bad as my Eastern conference counterparts.  I picked the Canucks in 7, and they lost in 5. Roberto Luongo sucked so hard that he didn’t see a second worth of time after he got his ass handed to him by the Kings the second time in a row.  The only pick I got right was the Blues winning in 5, with the Blues holding the Sharks to 1 goal or less for 3 games.  And I picked the Blackhawks in 5 and the Red Wings in 7.  I’m not sure I could have gotten those picks more wrong.

2 of 8 on the picks.  Wow.  Those picks just plain Sucked.  Out.  Loud.  Which brings us to the…

NEXT ROUND OF WILDLY INACCURATE NHL PICKS.

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Eastern Conference picks: 

1) New York Rangers  vs.  7)  Washington Capitals.  The Capitals scored 16 goals against the Bruins.  Most of the time the Caps had a very hard time scoring.  The reason they won was Braden Holtby and the defense in front of him held down the Bruins, not their own offense.  The Rangers won much the same way.  It was King Henrik and the D in front that gave the Rangers the win vs. Ottawa, especially when the chips were down and they had to win 2 in a row, including game 6 on the road.  All things here point to a low scoring long grind of a series. Sounds like more of the same for both teams.  Home ice will be kingmaker here.  Rangers in 7.

5) Philadelphia Flyers vs 6)  New Jersey Devils.  The Flyers scored at what could only be called an unprecedented pace.  The Devils, like the Rangers, had to come back to win 2 in a row.  I don’t know that the Flyers can keep up the offensive pace against the Devils.  Claude Giroux and Danny Briere are good, but I don’t know that these two can continue at an over a point a night pace.  I don’t see the Flyers being able to multiple players put up hat tricks on the same night against Marty Brodeur.   Devils in 6.

Western Conference picks:

2) St. Louis Blues vs. 8)  Los Angeles Kings.  The Kings pulled off the upset on the ‘Nucks.  The Blues are not the ‘Nucks.  They have better goal-tending.  They have a better defense.  The Kings are not a joke though.  They proved they have offense against Roberto Luongo and the two headed ‘Nucks goal tending tandem.  And Jonathan Quick is one of the best goaltenders around, and proved it against the ‘Nucks. On top of that the Blues O is limited, half of their goal scoring in round one was from 2 people.  That’s a problem the Kings’ll be able to exploit.  Kings in 6.

3) Phoenix Coyotes vs.  4) Nashville Predators. Both teams played up to their opponents and beat them down.  The Coyotes had a slight edge offensively, and the Preds had a slight goal-tending edge in round one (though the ‘Yotes had 1 shutout and the Preds none)  These teams are nearly mirror-images of each other in a variety of ways, offensively and defensively.  I’m leaning towards the better playoff offense here.  Radim Vrbata needs to shine here for this pick to work though.  He got shut down by the Hawks, and he needs to step up for the Coyotes to win in 7.  Which they will.

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That’s it from here, America.  G’night.

On The Margins

Pic of the day:  Bridge in Argenteuil, by Claude Monet

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If you are bored and disgusted by politics and don’t bother to vote, you are in effect voting for the entrenched establishments of the two major parties, who please rest assured are not dumb, and who are keenly aware that it is in their interests to keep you disgusted and bored and cynical and to give you every possible psychological reason to stay at home doing one-hitters and watching MTV on primary day. By all means stay home if you want, but don’t bullshit yourself that you’re not voting. In reality, there is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard’s vote.

David Foster Wallace;  Up, Simba

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Newt Gingrich is out of the running for the Republican nomination for President.  Which means it’s Romney vs.  Paul at this point.  Meaning the General election is now set.  Romney vs. Obama.  Ron Paul only has any chance to make any noise as a third party candidate.  And anyone who has even three brain cells in his head knows that Ron was taken out as a viable Presidential candidate when his old racist writings from years ago came to light.

Only the white supremacists will vote for him now.  Ron Paul has been marginalized, and by his own words and actions no less.

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A Marine corps sergeant stated publicly that he would not follow all the orders given by the President.  Several times.  On facebook.  This is a violation of the Marine Corps code of conduct.  He will be getting an “other than honorable discharge” from the corp as a result.

Good.  I don’t mind that he felt that he could not follow the orders of the President.  Don’t know anyone that would.  The thing I mind here is the fact that this story is getting play at all.  119 articles on google news for this story.  Why? It give the press a reason to mention The President, the Tea Party (the offending sergeant is a member of said organization,)  and gives a news hungry public news to chew on, even if it is pure fluff.

Fluff.

Who seriously gives a shit about a whiny, unprofessional, self-important piece of shit like this guy?

I was going to link to a story with this, I was going to give his name, but realized that would only be adding fuel to the fire.

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That’s it from here, America.  G’night.