[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkXI-MNSb8Q?fs=1&hl=en_US&rel=0&w=640&h=385]
I Need a Cold Shower After That
I love words. Specifically, I love the expert use of words. I like good writing. Sturgeon’s Law says that 90% of everything is crap, but with several million blogs out there, 10% yields a pretty significant quantity of not-crap.
Today I found a piece over at Four Right Wing Wackos entitled Sultry. Whoa. Read the whole thing, but here’s a taste to whet your appetite:
From the opening notes, she stopped walking, and damn near slithered up to the microphone, as if every joint in her body had just been given about two or three new directions they could bend. She didn’t take the microphone, she just touched it with her fingers and leaned into it, with this come-hither smile on her face that made every guy in the place damn near jump out of their suits.
Go. Read.
That’s good writing, Dave.
I’ll be in my bunk.
Mutually Exclusive
I found this bit of news today kinda interesting:
Crowd gets raucous at Oberstar-Cravaack forum
U.S. Rep. Jim Oberstar and challenger Chip Cravaack didn’t just face each other at Tuesday’s Minnesota 8th Congressional District candidate forum at the Duluth Entertainment Convention Center Auditorium, they faced angry mobs of their opponent’s supporters.
But that wasn’t the “kinda interesting” part. This was:
Oberstar said the health-reform package “that I proudly voted for” will guarantee coverage despite pre-existing conditions, guarantee coverage won’t be cut off, end caps on benefits and, eventually, reduce the cost of health insurance while covering more people.
Guaranteed coverage of pre-existing conditions. Guaranteed uncapped benefits. Guaranteed unlimited coverage. More people enrolled.
And it’ll cost less.
Either he’s stupid enough to believe that, or he thinks we’re stupid enough to.
But economics precludes it.
And they wonder why the TEA Party exists.
You CAN Find Anything on the Internet
You just have to wait long enough, and someone will post it.
My first car at age 16 was my dad’s hand-me-down. He’d bought it for something like $700 in 1974, put another couple-hundred in parts into it so it would run, and drove it until 1978 when he went down to the Ford dealership and placed an order for his very first brand-new automobile, an F-150 pickup truck.
That was the year I turned 16. Our insurance agent told him, “Don, you have a new driver in the house. The insurance company sees ‘new driver’ and ‘new vehicle’ and they put two-and-two together and come up with a 60% increase in your insurance premium. Put the old car in your son’s name and insure it for the minimum you can.” So he did. Which is how I, out of three children, was the only one who got a car from my parents.
Pissed my brother off.
But the car in question was no particular prize. It was a 1969 Simca 1118:
Only mine didn’t look that good. It was originally silver, but the sun had faded that right through to the gray primer underneath. The interior was sun-rotted so the front seatbacks got reupholstered with T-shirts stretched over them. I got some scrap carpet from a friend – brown shag, no less – and carpeted the floor with that. Door panels, too. No radio, so my dad had mounted a 12V-powered AM-FM under the dash and wired it into the harness.
Rear-engine, rear-wheel drive, 1118cc, water-cooled, 56Hp. Zero-to-sixty? Take a lunch and eat it when you get there.
But it was a car, and it took me anywhere I wanted to go.
I always wondered what that car would be like with an engine transplant out of a Honda CBX.
BRILLIANT!
I’ve used that particular adjective before, but it’s appropriate once again for this bit of artistry found at American Digest by way of the blog Serr8d’s Cutting Edge:
We’re all used to hearing that bad economic news is continuously occurring “unexpectedly,” but when an American city sits under a mushroom cloud in the not-too-distant future, we will be undoubtedly told that the weather there turned “unexpectedly warm,” and not to worry.
We’re in the best of hands.
And it was all George Bush’s fault.
Your Moment of Zen – Winter Approaches Edition
Click for the full-size image.
What We Believe, Part II
Bill Whittle strikes again:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0MESB6VZM4?fs=1&hl=en_US&rel=0&w=640&h=385]
I can’t wait for Part III.
GunUp Goes Live
At this year’s Gun Blogger Rendezvous, Dan Hall, founder and CEO of GunUp.com came out to tell us about his plan to build the biggest, bestest site on the intertubes for people interested in things firearm to go to. Their mission statement is short and concise:
Our mission is to provide prospective, new, and experienced gun enthusiasts with a one-stop destination to share, discuss, review, and compare guns with confidence.
That site has now gone live.
Sunday Movie Reviews
I’ve seen two movies in the last three days, RED and Secretariat. Both were excellent. RED is your typical anti-gun Hollyweird crowd making big bucks using weapons we can’t have in ways only governments permit to their agents, but it’s a load of fun as a summer (now fall) blowup movie. Catch it at a matinee. It’s great.
Secretariat is what we expect from a Disney film – wholesome family entertainment. But remember when I wrote a couple of days ago about Capitalism TV? This is a capitalist movie. Rich people are not treated as evil. The “Death Tax” plays a prominent (if understated) role. And risk – real risk – is portrayed as something worth taking, not avoiding at all costs. As the main character, “housewife” Penny Chenery Tweedy says,
This is about life being ahead of you, and you run at it.
It’s the will to win, if you can, and live with it if you can’t.
It shows us what we as a nation have sacrificed over the last thirty-odd years on the altar of “self-esteem” with the abhorrence of competition. It is a very “tea-party” movie about people who are not ashamed to be bold, successful, and who are willing to take risks.
Besides that, it’s a well written, well acted, and well made film I strongly recommend.
UPDATE: Eric S. Raymond also highly recommends RED. Good review.
Government /= Adulthood
Quite while back I quoted one Jeffery Gardener from an April 27, 2005 Albuquerque Journal column, “Save Us From Us”. In it Gardener said:
During the 1992 presidential debates, there was a moment of absurdity that so defied the laws of absurdity that even today when I recall it, I just shake my head.
It was during the town hall “debate” in Richmond, Va., between the first President Bush and contenders Bill Clinton and Ross Perot.
A grown man – a baby boomer – took the microphone from the moderator, Carol Simpson of ABC News, and said, in a fashion: You’re the president, so you’re like our father, and we’re your children.
See? My head’s shaking already. Where did that come from? Would a grown man have told a president something like that 100 years ago – or 50?
We’ve got our wires crossed, and our ability to accept responsibility for our lives – once so ingrained in our American nature that President Kennedy felt comfortable telling us to “ask not what your country can do for you” – has been short-circuited. We’ve slouched en masse into an almost-childlike outlook: You’re the president, so you’re like our father.
The fact that an adult – on national television, no less – would say this and later be interviewed as though he’d spoken some profound truth struck me then, as now, as more than a little absurd. It was alarming.
It’s still alarming.
In today’s USA Today was a letter from G. Bruce Hedlund of San Andreas, California. Mr. Hedlund said this:
Think of our country as a society made up of children and a government made up of adults. It is up to the adults to weigh all the options and provide services in the best interests of the children.
There is so much wrong with this I don’t even know where to start, but I will say that this attitude is responsible for the US receiving the government we’ve voted for.
On that note, I think I’m going to go get some dinner.