Carl Crawford All-Star MVP

He didn't score or drive in a run, but the one thing he did saved the game.

I'm going to a Rays game on Aug 1, with the trade deadline being the day before I hope I get to see him in a Rays uniform.

Is it just me, or was the Obamalove a little over the top last night. Usually when someone is interviewed in the booth, the announcers make an attempt to still call the game. McCarver and Buck ingnored the entire bottom of the second to fawn over his lordship.

Another Florida Republican Who Won't Get My Vote

Attorney General (and GOP Goober candidate) Bill McCollum pandering to black voters early:

Attorney General Bill McCollum is suing audience research company Arbitron Inc., claiming it didn't sufficiently include minorities while preparing Miami area radio station ratings.

The lawsuit filed Tuesday seeks to block the company from releasing the Miami radio audience ratings this month, saying the flawed methodology could hurt stations - particularly those with minority audiences - as they compete for advertising dollars.

The suit is similar to lawsuits filed by other states, including New York and Maryland.
Arbitron didn't immediately return a call seeking comment.

Minority radio stations are bent because the PPM records the stations you actually listen to instead of lying about it in the books you fill out. Bill is learning the lesson of Charlie Crist, to pander to the left because ignorant Bible-thumpers like me have nowhere else to go.

We'll see about that. I'm getting sick of this Pferdkaese.

Profiles in Courage

Senate candidate Charlie Crist takes a tough, principled stance:

Gov. Charlie Crist said today he doesn’t have a position on whether Judge Sonia Sotomayor should be confirmed as a Supreme Court justice, but may have a firm opinion as the hearings progress.

When asked in a press conference, Crist said, “I’m interested to watch the hearings. They had a good first day of them yesterday. That will continue through Thursday as I understand it and maybe by Thursday I’ll have formed a good opinion.”

Translation: His polling on Sotomayor will be done on Thursday.

And these people wonder why I'm not longer a Republican.

Posting by me will be light. My new broadband has conked out and they can't get to me till next Tuesday.

Hells yeah

Pudd'nhead Wilson stands justified: "When angry, count four. When very angry, swear."

Bad language could be good for you, a new study shows. For the first time, psychologists have found that swearing may serve an important function in relieving pain.

Basically, when we (for example) smack our bare toe against the coffee table, the amygdala, our fight-or-flight response center, fires up; one of the byproducts of this may be a well-timed cuss, which can actually help relieve a lot of the stressful emotion involved.

Psychologist Steven Pinker of Harvard University, whose book The Stuff of Thought (Viking Adult, 2007) includes a detailed analysis of swearing, compared the situation with what happens in the brain of a cat that somebody accidentally sits on. "I suspect that swearing taps into a defensive reflex in which an animal that is suddenly injured or confined erupts in a furious struggle, accompanied by an angry vocalization, to startle and intimidate an attacker," he says.

The reasonable counter-argument is that we are people, not cats, and we ought to know better. The larger part of me agrees with this statement. We are supposed to be in charge of our instincts, and our will is meant to order our passions to serve one goal - the definition of integrity. To lose control of them is to lose our integrity for the moment. It's probably a bad idea to simply let the cusses fly at every opportunity. (In other words, this doesn't qualify as clinical therapy just yet, no matter how good it may feel.)

In extreme cases, the hotline to the brain's emotional system can make swearing harmful, as when road rage escalates into physical violence. But when the hammer slips, some well-chosen swearwords might help dull the pain. There is a catch, though: The more we swear, the less emotionally potent the words become, Stephens cautions. And without emotion, all that is left of a swearword is the word itself, unlikely to soothe anyone's pain.

Yeah, like I said...

BTW- they won't let me put an exclam next to SCIENCE. I'm trying the double exclam (‼) but it's not standard ASCII, so we'll see...

One thing I wouldn't do

I like B16. As a non-Catholic I have some doctrinal differences with Pope Benedict but he's one of the good guys. And I would be thrilled to have the chance to meet him. Though if I did meet him I wouldn't tell whoppers to his face.

Obama told the pope of his commitment to reduce the number of abortions and of his attention and respect for the positions of the Catholic Church," Vatican spokesman Father Federico Lombardi told reporters after he was briefed by the pope.

Obama supports abortion rights and says his policy is to change economic and social conditions so as to put more women in situations where they do not feel they have to have an abortion.

I heard a talk show host say that B16's IQ is in the 180s, so I'm sure he figured out that there wasn't a whole lot of vertitas coming from the Obamessiah.

Then, it's not every day that a pope meets someone more Catholic than he.

The St Pete Times called me today..

..asking me if I wanted to subscribe.

Considering my current state of mind, how do you think that conversation went?

On a totally unrelated subject, I wore a shoe on my left foot for the first time since May 23rd.

Quote of the Day

"If you have to say, at a funeral, that there wasn't anything strange about the deceased, there was definitely something strange about the deceased."

Thanks to National Review's The Corner:

'There was nothing strange about your daddy.'

As we witness the Downfall of American Civilization that is the Michael Jackson memorial service, it is worth remembering that the Democratic Party treated Al Sharpton as a legitimate presidential candidate from January 2003 to March 2004.

UPDATE: A reader sends in this comment from Amelie Gillette of the Onion AV Club: "If you have to say, at a funeral, that there wasn't anything strange about the deceased, there was definitely something strange about the deceased."

This is not a Sarah Palin post

Let's suppose I had a daughter who just graduated from college. Let's suppose imaginary daughter calls me for fatherly advice.

"Dad, I got two job offers today. One is to work for NBC. The other is to dance on a pole at the Mons Venus. Which should I take?"

I would have to say, "I don't know sweetheart. They're both pretty sleazy operations."

There are no words acceptable to the readers of this blog that can describe my contempt for the majority of media outlets.

Kilt 'im a b'ar when he war onluh three

This is one of the rare times when I can wholeheartedly cheer for the home team at Madison Square Garden.

One of the NYPD's newest officers made his first arrest Thursday just minutes after graduating from the Police Academy in a ceremony at Madison Square Garden.

Officer Dariel Firpo, 23, was leaving the midtown Manhattan ceremony when he saw a 79-year-old man being robbed of his wallet and thrown to the ground by a mugger, police said. The mugger tried to run away, but Firpo caught him without incident...

For those not familiar with the venue, Madison Square Garden, "The World's Most Famous Arena," is like many less-popular arenas: it has a giant marquee advertising upcoming events. Unlike many arenas, however, it is also located above Penn Station, one of the world's busiest railway stations, and is heavily-patrolled by New York's Finest on the outside and the Transit Police on the inside. What kind of doofus tries to mug a guy in this location on this particular day?

The man Firpo arrested, Jeffrey Grant, was being charged with robbery. Grant, 47, has 48 previous arrests and was just released last week from Sing Sing Correctional Facility in Ossining, N.Y., after serving time for a robbery conviction, police said.

OK, then.

Your kid is probably on the ball...

...but kids in Arizona are dumber than a box of hammers.

You know those groan-inducing spots on late-night television when the typical person-on-the-street can't identify the vice president?

That's akin to what happened to the state's education system Tuesday, with the issuance of a new report that found only 3.5 percent of traditional public high school students would be able to pass a U.S. citizenship test— bombing out on questions such as who was America's first president, who wrote the Declaration of Independence and what do we call the first 10 amendments to the Constitution.

Later in this article is the teacher's union hack trying to spin this:

But John Wright, the head of the state teachers union, the Arizona Education Association, dismissed the report as a "gotcha piece of writing."

"I think there's already an ongoing discussion of standards and assessment, but it is not informed by this kind of survey," he said, adding that for all of its shock value, he didn't find it very analytical.

I'll cut them some slack on Question # 6 because it's out West and I spend many childhood summer days in this body of water, but only 58.8% of the kids Mr. Wright's union members teach know that the body of water on the East Coast of the USA is the Atlantic Ocean! Come on!

We hold these truths to be self-evident

John Adams was of the opinion that on July 2 every year, the American people would celebrate the momentous occasion of their Declaration of Independence from Great Britain with fireworks, parades, and other festivities.

He thus became the first American president - far before his election or even the existence of the office - to misjudge the power of oratory. The Declaration was such a tremendous document that we celebrate the date of its adoption, July 4, rather than the formal act of separation that the Continental Congress ratified two days prior, on this date 233 years ago. Even the title of the post comes from Jefferson's soaring pen, rather than the actual event of the Colonies declaring their separation from England.

Adams was no mean orator himself, of course. He and Jefferson were also great friends, despite a long break caused in large part by their differing political theories and the practical tensions that resulted. [Sheila (who else?) has a comprehensive overview; just click her obsession links: the Founding Fathers and Alexander Hamilton.] The break is perfectly understandable. They took such questions as how to govern very seriously indeed. They had to. In their case it wasn't a question of arguing about a small pet program or the best method to appropriate the funds to build a bridge somewhere, it was literal life and death for millions, and the very power of self-determination for the rest. And they saw themselves as not just acting on their own behalf, but on ours, all these years later; and in a small way on the behalf of people all over the world, as an example of how it could truly be done, as a pattern of liberty.

To that extent they have succeeded perhaps far beyond their own hopes. (Adams once said that all democracies are short-lived and eventually murder themselves.) If hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue, then every dictator and would-be tyrant in the world bows in homage to the might of the ideas laid out in the United States Constitution: every last one of them clings to many of the external trappings of representative democracy even when they, like Mao's ubiquitous portraits, are paper-thin coverings. Ahmadinejad and Chavez and Castro are all "elected" presidents, and so was Saddam and the latest example, Honduran president Manuel Zelaya.

Even during that long break Adams and Jefferson remained committed to their country and the liberty of its citizens. That committment drove them apart, but provided a common ground on which they both stood. In Adams' words: "Swim or sink, live or die, survive or perish, [I am] with my country. You may depend upon it." And Jefferson shared that desire.

This is a very long-winded way to point out this wonderful post from Ms. Sister at the Coalition. I can think of nothing further apart than Adams' statement above and the distressing sentiment Ms. Sister deplores, where people finally feel comfortable to display their flag only when their side is on top - the sentiment so ably described by Michelle Obama after her husband was nominated by his party to run for President: "For the first time in my adult life, I am proud of my country." I have no doubt she told the truth, but I can't possibly ascribe the word "love" to any such sentiment - it's boggling to imagine a love of country (or pride in it) depending wholly on whether or not it wants your husband to run it.

To be entirely honest, I'm sick of having to defend one Administration or deplore another. I must not let any such thing get in the way of being an American and doing whatever little I can to make it happier and healthier. One more time, Mr. Adams, if you please:

I think instead of opposing systematically any administration, running down their characters and opposing all their measures, right or wrong, we ought to support every administration as far as we can in justice.

(Source of the Adams quotes? Of course!)

If President Obama ever does manage to do the right thing by liberty in general or America in particular I will be very happy indeed. In the end I want America to be free. That should be the ultimate aim of every Administration and every officeholder. Given that freedom, we can handle the pursuit of happiness quite well on our own.

I don't know what offends me more

The fact that these clowns in DC voted on a bill none of them read, or Nancy Pelosi trying to wrap Jesus around this mess.

Most evangelicals know the difference between "Catholics" like San Fran Nan and Catholics like the Nightfly. And that's because we have people like San Fran Nan sitting in our own churches, who were raised in the church and are into the evangelical culture but wouldn't know the Lord's salvation if it jumped up and bit them auf ihrem Po. Many, like many "Catholics", have bowed the knee to their new Messiah in the White House.

50-year-old guys...

...are dropping like flies.

Michael Jackson, Billy Mays.

I'll try to blog as much as I can to let you guys know I'm still around.

Exorcism, It's not just a Catholic thing

Non-Catholics do it, too.

A Connecticut church has outraged gay rights advocates by posting a video of members performing an apparent exorcism of a teen's "homosexual demons."

The 20-minute video was posted on YouTube before it was taken down.

Gay youth advocate Robin McHaelen (mih-KAY'-lehn) says the video appears to show abuse. She says she plans to report it to the Connecticut Department of Children and Families.

The boy confirms he is 16 but otherwise has declined to comment.

The Rev. Patricia McKinney of Manifested Glory Ministries in Bridgeport says he is 18 and came to the church on his own seeking help.

She denies the church is prejudiced and says it took care of the youth.

There is nothing in Scripture to support an exorcism for this. Some people believe that their bad behavior is because of demon possession. This is a copout for those who do not want to take responsibility for their struggles with sin. There is no demon of gayness. I was not possessed by the demon of winoism; I was a drunk. If you are a married guy and your eye and or other body parts wander (like to Argentina) you don't have the demon of whorism. You're just the governor of South Carolina.

If you are doing things, or thinking about doing things that you know are wrong, well you belong to a very large club. As a member in good standing I greet you. Which is why this verse is in the Bible:

"If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness." 1 John 1:9

Face it, God knows. And you know God knows. And He knows you know He knows. And you know He knows you know He knows. Ya know? So let's peel off the layers and have an honest conversation with the One who knows.

Two days @ the VA hospital

I was in the renal clinic of the VA hospital Monday morning. The kidneys are improving, which means I won't be hitting any of you up for one in the near future. Of course, the doc said I was fat (as if it took a medical degree to figure that out) and I need to deal with that. And I think I am working on it. The pants I am wearing now have a waistline I haven't seen in ten years. (Sorry guys, I'm not giving up the waistline inches.)

I had an appointment later that morning to have the stitches taken out of my foot, but I got a call from my boss. He was installing a central air system, and the building inspector for Temple Terrace was not satisfied with our permit paperwork and I had to deliver the proper documents by 2pm or the full weight of the Reich would be brought down on my employer. So, I rescheduled the foot doctor for Tuesday and rushed to work to obey the orders of my government masters.

But here is the biggest accomplishment. The clinic I go to has two waiting areas. In the past, both TVs had CNN. About a month ago I called the Patient Advocate to lobby about getting one of those TVs switched to FNC. Compared to the real needs of patients this was a petty request. But if I was going to watch a news network that pandered I may as well watch one that pandered to me. Monday morning one of the TVs was on FOX. I was victorious!

This doesn't surprise me

Pastor Steve H called me up to express shock over this.

Should this his surprise you? Barb and these other senators could be making 3-5 times their salary in the private sector without having to leave their home town.

Why do they give up this payday to fly across the country? Why is Larry Craig forced to look for love in the men's room of the Minneapolis Airport while flying between DC and Idaho when he could make more money and never have to go farther than Brokeback Mountain in nearby Wyoming?

Chuckie Schumer could be making millions as a corporate lawyer in NYC instead of toiling for less than $200K per year in DC.

All of the above, if the chose the private sector, would be living in anonimity. No Wikipedia pages, no "The Honorable Senator Foghorn Leghorn", no press conferences, no fawning media.

Strom Thurmond didn't leave until he was 100 years old. Robert Byrd is 90 and in a wheelchair and won't give it up. Ted Stevens has been in DC longer than I have been alive and it took an indictment to get him to go.

They are addicted to the power.

Dress Code...

...for Brooksville, Florida city employees.

A Florida city has written common sense into its employee dress code: Wear underwear to work.

The Brooksville city council recently approved a revised dress code as part of its effort to update existing policies.

The revision instructs employees to observe "strict personal hygiene," including the use of deodorant. It lists "the observable lack of undergarments and exposed undergarments" as "unacceptable attire."

It also prohibits clothing with foul language or messages promoting drug use, "sexually provocative" garments, halter tops and piercings anywhere except the ears.

Repeat offenders can be fired.

The city council approved the dress code 4-1. Mayor Joe Bernadini opposed the revision, saying the underwear edict "takes away freedom of choice."

My question is: For how many city employees would the must wear underwear to work rule be a deal breaker?

Andy Warhol was almost right

In the future, everybody will be on Facebook.

My pastor's on Facebook. My coblogger's on Facebook. Half the Internet is on the Internet again - on Facebook. Now I'm on Facebook. Half of us know jack-all about what to do there, but there we are.

I fear it will be one more in a long line of things I wind up neglecting and then feeling guilt about.

Facebook!

(small update - it's stupid, but I seriously feel bad for my story characters who only kind of exist... if I shirk on posting, well, at least all my blogfriends have actual lives to fall back on. But my poor characters got nothin' but me, and I'm indifferent to their needs, and they lead unfulfilled lives dreaming of all the things they could be doing and seeing, if only I got off my lazy ass and put a pen in my hand. [Although, I never write standing up, so ironically I have to get ON my lazy ass after getting a pen. Yeah, I'm sure they're just cracking up about that one: "He's not lazy enough to save us from limbo! Our fate is a wry symbol of modern living, hurrah!" I'm sure THAT makes it ALL BETTER.] So yeah, now Facebook gets in the way of their hopes, purpose, and very existence, and I'm a terrible terrible person.)

New Jersey and infomercial products

...perfect together.

NEWTON--A Snuggie-wearing thief who allegedly attempted to break into the Main Street Grocery on Friday night was thwarted when witnesses spied him stacking crates to gain access through a window, police said.

You can stay warm while answering the phone! Great for home, camping out, even at the stadium! But not so much while trying to visit a business after-hours.

Police responded to the area at 11:30 p.m. after receiving reports from a nearby home of several people, including a man wearing dark clothing described as a trench coat, who were attempting to burglarize the closed Main Street store.

Grammarian's note - it is the report that had several people in it, not the nearby home. Police responded when someone reported that several people were trying to break into the store. Thank you; carry on.

Brandon Ryzner-Meredith, 18, of Newton, was found in the area, wearing a dark blue "Snuggie" blanket and a hooded sweatshirt, said Detective Lt. Michael Richards. A Snuggie is a blanket with sleeves that is heavily advertised and satirized on TV.

For those of you scoring at home: that's a guy wearing a Snuggie, busted during a smash-and-grab by Cosmo Kramer. You can take things from there.

Ryzner-Meredith was taken into custody and charged with criminal mischief, criminal attempt of burglary, possession of burglar's tools, and appearing in public in a versatile fleece bathrobe, police said. He was released, pending a Superior Court appearance.

Three Newton teens, who allegedly had fled the area due to extreme embarassment, were found by police over the next few days. Police tracked the youths due to their inability to control sputtering gales of laughter. Taken into evidence was a Flip video file of Ryzner-Meredith attempting to explain that the Snuggie was not really his, that some buddy asked him to hold it for a minute. They charged two 15-year-old boys and a 17-year-old boy in the attempted burglary, but agreed that the defendant looked like a total doofus, and called the video "key evidence AND comedy gold."

I may have supplied a few key details that were absent from the last two paragraphs.

You thought wrong, kiddo

You know... five years ago, if I had to make a list of impossible things that would never happen, you performing a coup de grace, by pulling a Michael Hutchense on yourself, would have been right at the top of the list. But I'd be wrong, wouldn't I?

In this case, yes, we all were. There's little else can be said, either - except two things. First and most obviously, that it's a terrible and sad end for anyone. Second, that it's likely enough that Mr. Carradine had company, with said company fleeing the scene before his discovery. We may never know for sure. This is Bangkok, after all. Can't be too careful with your company.