You thought there was only one way to play guitar...

For the students of music...

Insult of the day...

"Just -- stop talking. You're like the Dalai Lama of fucking retards!"

Darwin Award Nominee...

Springtown teens use match to look in oil tank; 1 dies
Associated Press

SPRINGTOWN, Texas — One teenager was killed and another was injured today when a crude oil storage tank exploded as the pair used a lit match to try to look into the tank, authorities said.

Parker County Fire Marshal Shawn Scott said the two were exploring around a pair of tanks when the explosion occurred after the lid was raised and the lit match ignited vapors in the tank. The resulting fire spread to about four acres and a second tank.

The explosion occurred late this afternoon. Fire in the tanks was being fed by gas flowing into the tanks. Crews were working to shut off the gas, but the fire was expected to burn through the night, Scott said.

Parker County Judge Mark Riley said a shelter in place call went out for residents in about a two-mile area around the tanks. The warning was lifted a few hours later.

EnCana officials reported the tank that exploded held 4,000 to 5,000 gallons of crude oil. The tank that caught fire after the initial explosion did not have much oil in it, Scott said.

Why weren't these guys in school? And at what age do they teach the "fire and oil" don't mix axiom?

When I was a kid

I was blessed in the fact I never had to have braces, which meant I never had to sleep with an inordinate amount of metal and leather straps on my face.

That kind of medieval torture was spared me until my 41st year, when I was diagnosed with apnea and prescribed the "solution"...

On the plus side, I got 5 hours of good sleep last night (gonna take some time to get used to it) -- On the negative side it doesn't really enhance my romantic bedside image. I mean, does this really scream "Come and get it?"

Merry XMas to ME...

or so I would say if I was a member of the Contra Costa County Supervisors. They unanimously voted themselves a ... wait for it... SIXTY PERCENT pay raise up from $59,916 to $95,568 and a compensation package of more than $114,000.

How can someone in good conscience approve such a grotesque abuse of power? These are the same people who after three consecutive years of using emergency reserves to balance budgets, earlier this year started a partial hiring freeze and cut $20 million of programs, primarily from health and social services.

The Supervisors maintain they deserve the raise as this puts their salaries on par with other Bay Area counties.

I am sorry, were I in that district these people would be voted out immediately if not sooner. I know this is a move Congress (State or Federal) would pull, but it is a whole lot easier to get rid of a County Supervisor than it is a Congressman. When they accepted their positions, these Supervisors were aware of their salaries.

My philosophy is simple: You can give yourself as big a raise as you want -- AFTER all the other problems have been resolved and the money is "Leftover." If you throw the "but the other guys are making more" at me, you better have a proven track record you DESERVE the raise.

Consideration for others gets woman tossed from plane....

Flatulence forces emergency landing
American flight diverts to Nashville after woman lights match to mask gas

Updated: 7:44 p.m. PT Dec 5, 2006

AP; NASHVILLE, Tenn. - It is considered polite to light a match after passing gas. But not while on a plane.

An American Airlines flight was forced to make an emergency landing Monday morning after a passenger lit a match to disguise the scent of flatulence, authorities said.

The Dallas-bound flight was diverted to Nashville after several passengers reported smelling burning sulfur from the matches, said Lynne Lowrance, spokeswoman for the Nashville International Airport Authority. All 99 passengers and five crew members were taken off and screened while the plane was searched and luggage was screened.

The FBI questioned a passenger who admitted she struck the matches in an attempt to conceal a "body odor," Lowrance said. She had an unspecified medical condition, authorities said.

"It's humorous in a way, but you feel sorry for the individual, as well," she said. "It's unusual that someone would go to those measures to cover it up."

The flight took off again, but the woman was not allowed back on the plane. The woman, who was not identified, was not charged in the incident.

The woman was not allowed back on the plane? There were no charges filed, so she must not have been considered a threat... So was this a punishment (No "Oops, that won't happen again, I'm sorry.") or was there a general concern over potentially elevated methane levels on the plane? What's the scoop?

In other news: If you have been having trouble leaving comments on my blog (I knew I shouldn't have switched my blog over until the Beta was done) go ahead and try, because even if you get an error message, they do appear to be actually posting.

3 days until I get my sleep mask for my Apnea... a good night's sleep is in my near future!

A close personal friend of mine...

We even think alike!

Mass Hysteria!

OK... check this out:

This is just wrong on several levels --

1. Dudes, face it, in 3 months there will be PS3s as far as the eye can see. Does one really need one now that badly?
2. The current bid is almost $8,000 with 5 days left!!! Hasn't anyone learned yet the right way to bid on EBay? Wait to the last minute!
3. Shipping cost of $999? Right!
4. The part I circled -- There are 27 people who actually processed this and said "Hell YEAH! What a deal!"
5. These 27 people can't think of ANYTHING better that can be done with about $10K of expendable income?
6. The standard retail price of the PS3 (60GB) is $599, and that of the Wii is $250. So, The standard retail price of all the above is 9x$599 + 1x$499 +5x$250 = $7140 ($7693.35 with CA sales tax).
   

GOOOOOO Commerce! (Use Cheerleader yell).

Well said...

This was posted in the LA Times:

Jonah Goldberg: It's losing we hate, not war
November 30, 2006

Those who compare the lengths of WWII and Iraq ignore the real thing we don't like in far-flung wars.

ONE THOUSAND three hundred and forty seven days.

That's how long the United States was involved in combat in World War II, and Monday, the U.S. passed that "grim military milestone," as one TV anchor called it. This factoid has become a fixture of respectable talking points about the futility of the Iraq war. Newscasters and pundits note its gravity with sober foreboding and slight head-shaking.

The only thing they don't note is the grotesque stupidity of the comparison.

Let us start with the obvious. World War II may have lasted 1,347 days, but it cost the lives of 406,000 Americans and wounded 600,000 more. Losses among Allied civilians and military personnel stretched into the tens of millions. Whole cities were razed, populations displaced, economies shattered. The number of U.S. military deaths in Iraq remains much less than 1% of our WWII losses.

World War II ended when the United States dropped two atomic bombs on Japanese cities, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians. Were it not for those grave measures, the war might have lasted for another year or two and cost many more lives. So maybe those wielding the WWII yardstick as a cudgel would prefer we gave Sadr City and Tikrit the Hiroshima-Nagasaki treatment? That would surely root out even the most die-hard insurgents and shorten the war. The phase of the Iraq war that was comparable to World War II ended in less than three weeks. Remember "shock and awe"? As far as such things go, the conventional war put WWII to shame; the U.S. military victory was akin to defeating all of Italy in less than a month.

The current phase of the Iraq war — whether we call it post-occupation, reconstruction, civil war or whatever — is really a separate war. It's at once a Hobbesian nightmare in which chaos rules as well as a complex, multi-front battle between various regional factions and their proxies. But as insurgencies go, it hasn't lasted very long at all or cost very many American lives.

Of course, when people invoke the World War II analogy, what they really mean is that we've been in Iraq too long. Fair enough. But it's not clear that the chorus of tsk-tskers appreciate the implications of their complaint.

The man who probably deserves the most credit for the low number of American deaths in Iraq is Donald H. Rumsfeld. The outgoing Defense secretary decided from the outset that U.S. forces would have a "light footprint" and would opt for surgical efficiency over the kitchen-sink approach that characterized World War II. That approach, historian Paul Johnson writes, was of a piece with the "giganticist philosophy" of 1940s American capitalism. Leslie Groves, the Army engineer who directed the U.S. pursuit of the atomic bomb and who built the Pentagon, represented this mind-set. Groves was the anti-Rumsfeld. When he asked the Treasury Department for thousands of tons of silver for use in the Manhattan Project, he was rebuffed by some functionary, who said, "In the Treasury, we do not speak of tons of silver. Our unit is the troy ounce."

Groves got his silver because such bureaucratic stinginess was not the way of war then. But it is the way of war now, particularly under Rumsfeld, who has applied the lessons of 21st century micro-targeted capitalism.

Rumsfeld's way is better, at least on paper. All else being equal, it's better to have a long war with fewer casualties than a short war with more of them. That's why the World War II comparison is so frivolous: Days don't cost anything, lives do.

But it now seems that the light footprint hasn't made enough of an impression on Iraqi soil or Iraqi society. By trying to inflict as little collateral damage as possible, by trying to fight a war on the cheap, we inadvertently emboldened our enemies by what appeared to them to be a lack of U.S. will. And we seem to care desperately about what the enemy media think about us, something unimaginable in Churchill's and FDR's day.

Given the enormous scope of World War II, it was a remarkably short war. (Just think of the Hundred Years War by comparison.) It was understood that total victory — for one side or the other — was the only possible outcome. Defeat was total and surrender unambiguous. As a result, once it won militarily, the United States was able to bend exhausted and ruined Japan and Germany to its will, making them democracies. Even so, that post-combat phase took years.

Indeed, when partisans claim that the American people are fed up and want our troops home, they're deliberately muddying the waters. The American people have never objected to far-flung deployments of our troops. We've had soldiers stationed all over the world for decades.

What the American people don't like is losing — lives or wars. After all, you don't hear many people complaining that we still have troops in Japan and Germany more than 20,000 days later.

A thinking man's post...

It is pretty common knowledge among those who know me that my religious beliefs aren't the same as when I grew up. I found someone who manages to mirror my beliefs in a very articulate fashion. Listen to this NPR interview with Julia Sweeney (actress of SNL "Pat" fame). Her take is very insightful and humorous.

I might consider laying out my beliefs in my own words someday, but this is a good start.