Tag: miscellaneous

Painting, Not Posting

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Sorry about the lack of content. I’ve been painting the exterior of my house. It’s been nine years since I did it last, and the Arizona sun has beaten the hell out of the last coat. I’ve gotten quite a bit done, but it’ll take today and probably another weekend to finish up.

Ah, well.

At night I’ve either been reading or watching DVDs instead of writing. I strongly recommend the SciFi Channel’s mini-series The Lost Room. I got it from Netflix, and my wife and I thoroughly enjoyed it last night. (Why oh why must SciFi, er, SyFy mass-produce crap like Mansquito when it can do quality stuff like The Lost Room?)

I’m a bit over halfway done with Thomas Sowell’s Intellectuals and Society, and I just finished Eric Flint and Marilyn Kosmatka’s Time Spike, part of the 1632 universe. Quite good.

Here’s an Interesting Test

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Note that I didn’t say “good,” but “interesting.” It’s a test of your “moral politics.” Here’s the graph where they place your score:

Note that on this graph, at least, they put National Socialism right next to National Communism, and not on the other end of the spectrum.

Most of the questions really didn’t work for me. The choices were, well, insufficient. Still, the result was interesting. You?

You CAN Find Anything on the Internet

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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.

Sunday Movie Reviews

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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.

Hopenchange Fails Again

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I’m not sure how long it takes to bring a TV series from concept to the small screen, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s about 20 months if you really push.

I’m betting that NBC’s Outlaw was a brainstorm that occurred about the time someone realized that Obama was going to be President. Consider the premise: an ultra right-wing Supreme Court Justice, gambler, womanizer, picks up an ACLU lawyer one night after boozing and betting in Atlantic City, and in the morning he becomes a new man! (I’m surprised he didn’t come out of the closet, too!) He retires from the bench to open his own law practice to protect the “little guy” against capitalists, conservatives, all the evil exploiters of the downtrodden! (But I repeat myself.)

How could it miss?

Apparently they showed three episodes an then put it on hiatus.

Which is now permanent.

All together now, aaaaaawwwww!

UPDATE: Reader Sarah left an interesting comment which caused me to do a little research into the writing of the show. As far as I can tell, the creator, producer, and writer for the shows that aired is John Eisendrath. He was interviewed before the show premiered, and here is his explanation of the thoughts behind its creation:

I wanted to do this show because I do not have much faith in the legal system and I have seen innocent people be hurt by it. And I longed for [change] particularly by judges who knew they were doing something that would hurt innocent people but felt that they were bound by the law to hurt them because that was their job, to uphold the law.

I wanted to write a story about a judge who couldn’t do that anymore, who felt like he had a higher calling that went beyond (h)is obligation to following the law as a judge. But as a conservative, he knew that he couldn’t just make it up as he went along, so he left to do something in pursuit of that higher calling.

Yup, that’s one definition of conservatism. And a beautiful definition of why liberals love judicial activism: Don’t uphold the law, make it up as you go along!

MidwayUSA Discount Codes (repost)

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Another bump on this one. MidwayUSA is offering discounts to my readers through October 17:

To receive your Savings:

1. Place in-stock products in your shopping cart totaling:

$10 off $100 – Use Promotion Code 19310
$20 off $200 – Use Promotion Code 29310
$30 off $300 – Use Promotion Code 39310

Enter the promotion code in the box entitled “Promotion Code” on the shopping cart page.

2. You will see the discount on the Confirmation page before placing your order.

3. Remember, this promotion code is valid for orders placed on MidwayUSA.com.

4. Limited to in-stock products, one per Customer and one promotion code per retail order.

5. Excludes Gift Certificates and Nightforce products, Sale priced products and Clearance products.

6. Offer valid for retail Customers only.

7. Offer cannot be combined with Birthday or Special Pricing.

8. Hurry, offer ends at 11:59 PM CT October 17, 2010.