Does eating 5 pumpkin chocolate chip cookies count towards my fruit & fiber daily requirements? If the chocolate chips are made of milk chocolate, do they count towards my dairy needs? Are pumpkin chocolate chip cookies good food to keep around if the end of the world comes (hypothetically speaking, of course)?

To the dude counting his quarters in the beer aisle, making the weighty decision over Budweiser or generic beer:

Dude, if you have to count your quarters before deciding which 24-pack of beer to buy, then, just maybe, you shouldn’t be buying beer.

Just a thought.

... and I feel fine.

When the Pope died on April 2 it didn’t come as a surprise to me. I’d been listening to Art Bell the night before and the guest prophesied, not just a guess or prediction, but a prophecy, that the old man would recover and go into exile. It was then I knew for sure that the Pope would very soon breathe his last. If only the Vatican would have listened to Art Bell.

A few nights ago the guest (with Geroge Nori this time) predicted the Pacific North West (Washington) would erupt in a ball of fire in 2005/2006. As would Yellowstone. Bambi, Thumper, and many of their friends would perish too.

Tonight it’s Major Ed Dames predicting “It’s the end of the world as we know it” in November/December of this year [cue depressing German classical music here]. Deadly solar flares and meteors are going to take us out. He recommends we move underground and stay near sources of melting glaciers (I knew globabl warming would come in handy one day).

Okaaay.

Is there a website that keeps track of predictions made on Art Bell (Coast to Coast)? It sure would be useful to check the statistical accuracy of these guys before I start digging a hole for myself.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go to the store and start building my year’s supply of frozen dinners and breakfast cereal.

Vicious, vicious, vicious.

Man Upset With Penile Surgery Mails Bomb

STEVENS, Pa.—A man allegedly unhappy with penile-enlargement surgery he underwent mailed explosives to a Chicago plastic surgeon, according to a federal grand jury indictment.

Blake R. Steidler, 24, allegedly made an explosive device that included a model-rocket engine igniter inside a jewelry box, the federal indictment said.

Steidler drove to North Bloomfield, Ohio, on Feb. 10 and mailed the box, but then drive home to Lancaster County, called 911, and turned himself in, according to the indictment.

Sometimes it’s better to just accept what the good Lord gave ya and leave it at that.

[Quick editorial note—a guy turns himself in for making a bomb and the newspaper falls all over itself to report “allegedly”. Why?]

Rich Lowry has a nice little piece on why grief counseling isn’t for everyone.

That’s a good start. Let’s go further.

In most situations, although not all, therapy only feeds into the self-interested martyr complex of America. Where value is assigned by membership in a victimized group, it pays to be fucked up. Whether it was mommy and daddy, the drug addiction, or the bad choices a person makes because they’re “just too giving.”

Read the Rest...

1. Whew. I was worried. Especially about number 10.

2. Well, since you asked.

• 1988 - A Honda motorcycle of unremembered vintage. I crashed it spectacularly and painfully.
• 1989 - Dodge Aries K or unremembered vintage. Nasty car that turned me away from Chrysler products forever. It died a flaming death when a wiring harness caught fire and took some of the rest of the car with it. This was after the ongoing carb and engine problems.
• 1989-1990 - ‘77 AMC Hornet. It was ugly, it was a big hunk of metal, and it had perpetual small problems like the time the accelerator got stuck fully open in rush hour traffic. I still hold a warm place in my heart for the little beast, though.
• 1990-1993 - ‘84 (?) Pontiac Sunbird. It was surprisingly good, surviving being stolen, being vandalized by an ex-girlfriend, and being chased and hit by a drunk redneck in an old, full-sized SUV. Some of my best memories were in that poor, abused little guy.
• 1993 - ‘77 (?) Toyota Corona. This was stop-gap car that my girlfriend (soon to be wife) talked me into buying while I saved money for a down payment on a new car. It was a great choice. The car was solid from the first day I had it, had already turned the odometer twice, and still ran like a charm. The radio sucked, the back seat was a joke, it wasn’t pretty, and it was great for the short time I had it.
• 1994 - 1994 Mazda B-4000 Extended Cab. Great truck (essentially a re-badged Ford Ranger), great service from Mazda, and one of my favorite cars. I wish I still had it, in fact.
• 1996 - 1996 Mazda 626 LS. This is my other favorite car (and the reason that my next car might well be a Mazda). It was quick enough, rode beautifully, was attractive in a bland sort of way, was made well, and had a sunroof. The only reason it left me was the anger I felt when it couldn’t drive it’s way out of my parking lot during a pretty bad snow storm that same year. I traded it in foolishly and have regretted the decision ever since.
• 1997 - 2002 - 1996 Ford Explorer. My relationship with the Ford was a love/hate thing. It had electrical problems when I first got it that kept it in the shop for a few weeks (weeks) out of the first couple months that I had it. After that, it ran well with only one significant problem over the five years of ownershop. The interior wasn’t as rugged as it should have been, but it wasn’t a bad vehicle, on the whole. It was turned in because the lease expired and the lease had been in my ex-wife’s name.
• 2002 - Current. 1997 Chevy Malibu. It was a welcome hand-me-down when I needed a helping hand. It wasn’t a gift in the sense that I still had to pay for the car, but it was a gift in the sense that it made my life easier than going out and buying another new car. I keep it, although it has almost 170,000 miles, because I don’t want to add a new car payment to my bills until I really and truly have to. Not a bad car, but it is definitely showing the miles

And how are you doing today?

PS-- In case you were wondering, the new toaster oven in the break room works exceptionally well. I mean, that cinnamon-sugar sprinkling on the bagel was warmed to a freakin’ molten glow when I tried to pull it out. And you know how that cinnamon-sugar sprinkling is when it’s warmed to a molten glow: it creates a molecular bond with skin so that it can wreak its molten glowy badness in the most painful possible way.

Ouch.

You learn the most interesting things about bloggers when you read their “about me” page.

I was once asked “Who did your b_ _bs?” in a Las Vegas Airport elevator.

“God,” I replied.

“I am gonna pray harder,” she said.

Can you guess who it is? [To the person who made me smile this afternoon: No fair fessing up until after dinner]

Update: Our mystery blogger has signed in. Check out the comments to see who it is, then go check out her website. (You did figure it was a female blogger and not somebody like McGehee, right? I mean, I hope this wasn’t a spoiler.)

Ignore, for a moment, the plight of the man who doesn’t want to be a father. While his girlfriend/wife/girl he met in the bar all have the legal opportunity to bail out of their parental duties (and here in Denver, for a few days after a child is born, it is even legal to abandon the infant if the abandonment happens at one of the state sanctioned “please do something about this nuisance so that I don’t have to actually deal with my own responsibilities and actions, thanks a bunch” stations) while the dad has little to nothing to say about the blessed event. But, hey, we’re leaving that to the side, right?

Now, what about the state labeled father who is nothing of the sort? That is, he isn’t the father, but the state still gets to hold him partially financially responsible for the life of a child.

Well, those guys get really screwed according to Matt Welch’s article in Reason that should have your blood bubbling gently in your veins.

What Pierce didn’t realize, and what nearly 10 million American men have discovered to their chagrin since the welfare reform legislation of 1996, is that when the government accuses you of fathering a child, no matter how flimsy the evidence, you are one month away from having your life wrecked. Federal law gives a man just 30 days to file a written challenge; if he doesn’t, he is presumed guilty. And once that steamroller of justice starts rolling, dozens of statutory lubricants help make it extremely difficult, and prohibitively expensive, to stop—even, in most cases, if there’s conclusive DNA proof that the man is not the child’s father.

This stacked deck against accused dads has provoked a backlash movement, triggering “paternity fraud” legislation and related legal challenges in more than a dozen states. Combined with advances in genetic technology, this conflict may end up changing the way we define parenthood. For now, the system aimed at catching “deadbeat dads” illustrates how a noble-sounding effort to help children and taxpayers can trample the rights of innocent people.

Here’s how it works: When an accused “obligor” fails, for whatever reason, to send his response on time, the court automatically issues a “default judgment” declaring him the legal father. It does not matter if he was on vacation, was confused, or (as often happens) didn’t even receive the summons, or if he simply treated the complaint’s deadlines with the same lack of urgency people routinely exhibit toward jury duty summonses—he’s now the dad. “In California, you don’t even have to have proof of service of the summons!” says Rod Wright, a recently retired Democratic state senator from Los Angeles who tried and failed to get several paternity-related reform bills, including a proof-of-service requirement, past former Gov. Gray Davis’ veto. “They only are obligated to send it to the last known address.”

Because, yeah, legal parental obligations that could potentially result in decades of obligations should be decided with little in the way of actual proof.

Read the story.

In a free market the key to success is to find a hole and fill it. It sucks that holes like this exist, and need filling:

A device capable of detecting concealed explosives and landmines with more sensitivity than a trained dog has been developed.

The new detector, which works at a distance, could potentially be used to identify suicide bombers or find explosive booby-traps, the researchers suggest.

Why do hate crimes against whites not count as hate crimes to people who keep track of such things? For precisely the same reason that those very same people believe that the only people who can be racist are white.

Of course, that ignores the question of whether there should be such a thing as hate crimes. If I beat someone to a bloody, crying pulp, I guaranty that I am doing it out of something closer to hate than love whether I noticed their skin color or not. Is it truly a worse crime if my reason is racially, sexually, or religiously motivated instead of merely because of my deeply ingrained need to punish people for bad parking lot behavior? Tell that to the bloody, crying pulp.

That doesn’t change the hypocrisy of enforcing hate crimes only when the crime is perpetrated against someone in a protected class, though. If the law is on the books, it should be applied equally. Simple, no?

Read the story.

Whoever gets tossed tonight (I think Bo is going, but I’m not sure), I have to say this: I get a kick out of Bo. He’s a little cocky, he’s got a good voice, and he puts on a good show.

Unfortunately, he picked the wrong time to be timid. The last two weeks were bad for him and his appeal is already a little limited compared to the teeny-bopper favorites. His performance tonight would’ve kept him out of the bottom three for the week, though.

I predict that he’ll be gone at the end of the night, I hope that I’m wrong, and I’d like to note that I haven’t hit a single one of my predictions yet.

For whatever it’s worth.

Update: My goodness, but Nadia is beautiful.

Spoilers below the fold.

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Making anagrams for somebody’s name is always fun. There are some who would even say that an anagram can give insight into somebody’s true nature. Let’s see what John Kerry’s name would say about him:

honk jerry
horn jerky
jerk horny

I guess you could say that his name has a certain je nais se qua, so to speak. Remy Logan, of course, has much good hidden inside the letters:

amen glory (we’ll ignore “mongrel ya” and “longer yam")

Let’s see what zombyboy’s mixed-up name has to say about him:

my bozo by
my boozy b
my booby z

Hmm. Perhaps this wasn’t such a good idea, afterall.

Update: Added the link to what inspired all this.

How does Wall Street react when Apple performs well?

Consider this, comparing this quarter in 2004 to this quarter in 2005:

1. Profit per share jumps from six cents to thirty-four cents.
2. Profit jumps from $46 million to $290 million.
3. Revenue jumps 70%--from $1.91 billion to $3.24 billion.
4. The company ships 43% more computers (1,070,000) and over 558% more iPods (over five million shipped).
5. There are significant new products (both hardware and software) ready for third quarter release.
6. Third quarter guidance is extremely good, and Apple has a recent history of understating when estimating future performance.

The performance--based on revenue, profit, and profit per share--was better than analysts expected, and guidance for third quarter was in line with analyst expectations. So, how does Wall street treat such good news?

By seeing the stock dump nearly 4% in after hours trading.

Of course, the stock tripled last year, split, and has risen 30% so far this year. The after hours trading in a situation like this always sees some people sell to reap the rewards of their profit. Still, it’s one of the oddities of the market that strong company performance is sometimes greeted with a noticeable loss in stock value (if only for a few days).

Now, don’t you wish you had put a few thousand dollars into Apple at the beginning of 2004? I know I do…

Jaques Chirac is starting to remind me uncomfortably of Jimmy Carter. He seems to have a warm space in his heart for authoritarian regimes. Of course, he does his appeasing with cool, French arrogance rather than the down-south, disingenuous awe-shucks air of the slyly self-righteous Carter. The result is the same, though: dictators coddled and abetted by men who would happily remove all diplomatic pressure.

French President Jacques Chirac has been pushing the EU to drop its refusal to consider letting Iran enrich uranium, despite U.S. and European fears Iran could use enrichment technology for weapons, EU diplomats say.

Sharing U.S. suspicions that Iran may have atom bomb ambitions, the European Union’s three biggest powers—France, Britain and Germany—have demanded Iran give up its nuclear fuel programme in exchange for economic and political benefits.

The reasons, of course, are different. Chirac turns a blind eye for the sake of French business interests or for the simple joy of opposing the United States (believing that the world needs a contrarian counterbalance to all American political positions). Carter did it for--well, actually, it’s hard to tell precisely why Carter cozies up to the leaders of such bulwarks of liberty as North Korea and Cuba. I’m fairly sure that his explanation would probably center around being a good Christian, although I would hazard to guess that it’s at least as focused on the naive belief that a handshake and a good ol’ boy smile are good enough to disarm (literally and metaphorically) even the worst dictator.

Because, really, don’t the Mullahs in Iran just want the same things that we want?

Hint: it is naive to believe that every culture is focused on the same goals either personally or politically, or even that they maintain, “underneath it all,” the same set of values. That simply ain’t true.

The Robert Mugabes of the world--who hold the boot to the neck of their citizens; who think nothing of threatening citizens with loss of life, sustenance, or livelihood; who believe that their power must be maintained even as their countries spiral toward self-destruction--do not have the same system of values that your typical Westerner holds as natural and obvious. Loosening diplomatic pressure without concessions simply loosens the internal pressures that might otherwise have forced political change.

Chirac and Carter, now that’s an intellectual pairing that makes an unfortunate kind of sense.

Read the story.

(H/T to the Roth Report.)

"Will America ever be Christian again?” is the teaser over at World Net Daily. I’d respond, but it’s sort of like back when you were in junior high school and the older kids would come around asking the younger kids “if there was a [insert term here that the Brits use to refer to cigarettes] on your back, would you beat him off?” Or, how about, “Did you ever stop beating your wife?” In other words, the question itself is just so wrong.

Talk about our individual heritages all you want, talk about the faith and beliefs of the Founding Fathers all you want, talk about the roots of our culture and form of government all you want. But please, don’t invent history. Leave that to the Democrats.

It is true, we are not now a “Christian” nation. Guess what, we never have been. The purpose and orginal meaning of the First Amendment, “Congress shall make no law regarding the establishment of religion”, was that the United States of America would never be anything but a Nation. Not a Christian nation, or a Catholic, or Jewish, Muslim, Bhuddist, or anything but your plain old vanilla variety secular nation.

This type of idiot journalism just discredits what would be otherwise valid points.

The first computer that I owned had a gargantuan half-gig internal hard drive. When that was filled up with graphics files while I went to school to learn my trade, I bought an external hard drive to give me a little freedom. I can still remember wondering how long it would take me to fill up that big ol’ hard drive.

That hard drive, a one gig SCSI drive, was probably a touch bigger than the Apple Mini, cost nearly $400, and would probably have broken my foot if I were to accidentally drop the thing on my foot.

The flash-memory based, $149, pack-of-chewing-gum sized Apple Shuffle holds the same amount of data as that big old hard drive. And if I want something more, well my choices include the new Kanguru Zipper Pro portable.

The US$199.95 drive measures 2.4 x 4.1 x 0.4 inches, weighs 40 grams and offers a “swivel plug” that gets the USB 2.0 interface out of the way when it’s not in use. The 20GB mechanism operates at 4200 RPM and doesn’t require an external power supply if used with a powered USB port. The device ships with a cable, neckstrap and documentation.

I’ll be 35 this year. I wonder just how old that is in computer years?

Read the story.

I just want to go on record now as saying -- I WILL NOT VOTE FOR NEWT GINGRICH FOR PRESIDENT in 2008.

Former Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) will spend two days in New Hampshire next week to meet editorial boards and conservative activists, convincing several of his former House colleagues that he will run for the presidency in 2008.

Newt Gingrich started a lot of good things back in the 90s. And he also did a lot of stupid, idiotic things and betrayed the trust of the American people. I have not forgiven him, and probably never will. Even if I do, I won’t forget what he did. What I am most upset about is that while he was (wrongly) pusruing Clinton on sex charges, Newt was boinking his own secretary on Capitol Hill while his wife lay dying in a hospital. He made a mockery of everything he had touted. There is also the issue of his demagoguery, management abilities, etc., etc.

I will vote Hillary before I vote for Newt. I will vote for Algore before I vote for Newt. I will vote for John Kerry ... Oh God, please not that.

Senator Barbara Boxer, (D, land of fruits and nuts), is upset that the news media is not covering the Senate debate about debates in the Senate over judges using the time-tested Democrat formula of fear:

called on newspaper editors today to provide more coverage of the so-called “nuclear option” being considered by the Republican leadership of the U.S. Senate, which would eliminate filibusters on judicial appointments, arguing that newspapers have as much to lose as the Democrats do if this traditional minority power is eliminated.

Read the Rest...