Sunday, August 31, 2008
August 31, 2008
Friday, August 29, 2008
Today's Headline
McCain rejects Hillary, Goes for Younger Woman
Labels: headlines
Tuesday, August 26, 2008
LAVO
Knowing a guy who knows a guy is an important part of being in Las Vegas. One of those connections got me into the latest nightclub in town, Lavo, in the Palazzo, adjacent to the Venetian. The Palazzo is owned by the same, well, rich idiot who owns the Venetian, sort of the anti-Steve Wynn, if you will. Lavo made me wish I was twenty-five and out with my friends. Really. It's loud, it's got go-go dancers (no, I'm not kidding) and it's got a lot of exotic decor dealing with, well if you know any Latin, you'll know it's washing up. Sinks abound, and other watery stuff. There were a couple of actors posing as sort of Cleopatra and a feather waving slave, even. If you're of the night-clubbing age and in Las Vegas, you could do worse.
S.
S.
Labels: Reviews
CARS!
For the love of . . .
I'm through with Ford, I have to say. I have a Focus from '01 with 85,000 miles on it. A bit over a week ago the oil pressure light blinked on when I turned a corner. Oops! What could that be? It was time for an oil change (inspection was due anyway) so I had it changed, and the light went off until it got warmed up, when it started blinking on again.
So, I took it to the Ford dealer, where they fixed something electrical on the cooling fan, giving a reasonable explanation as to why that might make the oil pressure light blink. I'd told them I thought the oil pump might be going out, but anyway, they charged me over $400.00 to do what they did, and hey, it worked for about three miles. At which time they were closed. I drove home very very slowly and the next day had it back to Ford.
Hey hey, now it turns out we have a bad piston rod bearing, which is not a good thing to hear, and it needs a new motor. I took it home at a moderate pace. I put a can of good old STP in it, and that worked for about ten minutes, when apparently the failing bearing gave out completely, as the car now sounds like a pile of pots and pans being dropped down a staircase if you turn on the motor.
I have a Mitsubishi with 165,000 miles on it and no bad anything that I know of other than some ooze from the hydraulic clutch. I'm going to buy a not terribly used Mitsubishi or similar to replace the Ford which I shall strip of anything useful and sell for the scrap it is. 85,000 miles for a failure like that is a material defect, but as they didn't offer a warranty beyond 36,000 miles, and we only extended to 65,000 miles, we are out of luck. Well, not to put too fine a point on it, screw you, Ford Motor Company, it was nice while it lasted.
And the American auto companies wonder why people buy foreign cars. Sheesh!
I'm through with Ford, I have to say. I have a Focus from '01 with 85,000 miles on it. A bit over a week ago the oil pressure light blinked on when I turned a corner. Oops! What could that be? It was time for an oil change (inspection was due anyway) so I had it changed, and the light went off until it got warmed up, when it started blinking on again.
So, I took it to the Ford dealer, where they fixed something electrical on the cooling fan, giving a reasonable explanation as to why that might make the oil pressure light blink. I'd told them I thought the oil pump might be going out, but anyway, they charged me over $400.00 to do what they did, and hey, it worked for about three miles. At which time they were closed. I drove home very very slowly and the next day had it back to Ford.
Hey hey, now it turns out we have a bad piston rod bearing, which is not a good thing to hear, and it needs a new motor. I took it home at a moderate pace. I put a can of good old STP in it, and that worked for about ten minutes, when apparently the failing bearing gave out completely, as the car now sounds like a pile of pots and pans being dropped down a staircase if you turn on the motor.
I have a Mitsubishi with 165,000 miles on it and no bad anything that I know of other than some ooze from the hydraulic clutch. I'm going to buy a not terribly used Mitsubishi or similar to replace the Ford which I shall strip of anything useful and sell for the scrap it is. 85,000 miles for a failure like that is a material defect, but as they didn't offer a warranty beyond 36,000 miles, and we only extended to 65,000 miles, we are out of luck. Well, not to put too fine a point on it, screw you, Ford Motor Company, it was nice while it lasted.
And the American auto companies wonder why people buy foreign cars. Sheesh!
Labels: Reviews, Social Commentary
Tropic Thunder
Sorry for the lateness. See above.
I saw Tropic Thunder over the weekend, and it was the funniest damn film I've seen in a good long while. Try it, you'll like it!
I saw Tropic Thunder over the weekend, and it was the funniest damn film I've seen in a good long while. Try it, you'll like it!
Labels: Reviews
Sunday, August 17, 2008
It had to happen. You can find me on Facebook. The title link will take you to the site. Facebook is what My Space never quite achieved. The entertainment's here, though. ;-)
Labels: Info
The Campaign So Far
Well, okay then, I had intended, and tried a few times, to critique individual efforts as seen on TeeVee in Nevada. I can't do it like that. It's just too much.
First, both candidates are talking about the other candidate. No better way to lower yourself than to talk about your competition. Remember those funny Pepsi ads where the Coke delivery guy sneaked a Pepsi? Sure. Did they make you buy Pepsi? Didn't think so. Pepsi has more problems than simply making a joke about Coke could possibly cure.
(Coke and Pepsi are trademarked by their manufacturers. And don't you hate reading this legal BS?)
In my opinion, Obama's chief recommendation is that he's not a boomer. He's not an idealist at all, so far as I can tell, so that's one thing. One thing.
The problem I have with McCain is all that "leadership" hoo-hah. I mean, a lot of people flew missions over Vietnam and managed not to get shot down and imprisoned. Who would you rather have been following in 'Nam? The guy who got you imprisoned in a hell-hole for years or the guy who landed back at the base outside of Saigon? Leadership? Anybody can lead, I suppose. Hell, Bush led us quite decisively until everyone finally caught on to his lack of anything approaching the brains of a rutabaga. Was that a good thing? McCain led right to a North Vietnamese prison. He behaved wonderfully while there, but a leader?
On the other hand, what can Obama lead? Well, we don't know, and that's a problem.
So, instead of talking about anything substantive, these two quite honorable and likable guys are sniping at each other. Well, what can you do? The plan to get us out of this economic mess is apparently fairly simple, since Bill Clinton figured it out sixteen years ago. Maybe we should elect him again. There are worse things than eight years of peace and prosperity, as it turns out. Failing that, I haven't heard anything but hot air from either candidate concerning what should be done. Besides, as the recipient of criticism of Presidential policy always points out, Congress passes the laws in the first place.
The worst negatives about both candidates? McCain is too easy to tie to Bush, plain as that. And Obama? Well, crimony, folks, he's a black guy. PC or not, that's still a drawback on the public stage.
Well, I still think the black guy's gonna win over the old white dude. Conventions start directly. Stay tuned for the show.
Steve
First, both candidates are talking about the other candidate. No better way to lower yourself than to talk about your competition. Remember those funny Pepsi ads where the Coke delivery guy sneaked a Pepsi? Sure. Did they make you buy Pepsi? Didn't think so. Pepsi has more problems than simply making a joke about Coke could possibly cure.
(Coke and Pepsi are trademarked by their manufacturers. And don't you hate reading this legal BS?)
In my opinion, Obama's chief recommendation is that he's not a boomer. He's not an idealist at all, so far as I can tell, so that's one thing. One thing.
The problem I have with McCain is all that "leadership" hoo-hah. I mean, a lot of people flew missions over Vietnam and managed not to get shot down and imprisoned. Who would you rather have been following in 'Nam? The guy who got you imprisoned in a hell-hole for years or the guy who landed back at the base outside of Saigon? Leadership? Anybody can lead, I suppose. Hell, Bush led us quite decisively until everyone finally caught on to his lack of anything approaching the brains of a rutabaga. Was that a good thing? McCain led right to a North Vietnamese prison. He behaved wonderfully while there, but a leader?
On the other hand, what can Obama lead? Well, we don't know, and that's a problem.
So, instead of talking about anything substantive, these two quite honorable and likable guys are sniping at each other. Well, what can you do? The plan to get us out of this economic mess is apparently fairly simple, since Bill Clinton figured it out sixteen years ago. Maybe we should elect him again. There are worse things than eight years of peace and prosperity, as it turns out. Failing that, I haven't heard anything but hot air from either candidate concerning what should be done. Besides, as the recipient of criticism of Presidential policy always points out, Congress passes the laws in the first place.
The worst negatives about both candidates? McCain is too easy to tie to Bush, plain as that. And Obama? Well, crimony, folks, he's a black guy. PC or not, that's still a drawback on the public stage.
Well, I still think the black guy's gonna win over the old white dude. Conventions start directly. Stay tuned for the show.
Steve
Labels: Politics
Thursday, August 14, 2008
And Another One Aimed at Obama
There is a problem with this one in that I can't find it on the Internet. If I do, I'll come back and add a link here. Otherwise, this ad ran during the Olympics, so maybe you saw it. It ends with a feminine voice saying that "Obama will protect our families."
I mean, gag me with a spoon! From what? And how, for heaven's sake? The way we're protected from illegal drugs? The way being humiliated in airports keeps us safe from people using airplanes to blow up buildings? How?
Barak, give me a break, okay?
Steve
I mean, gag me with a spoon! From what? And how, for heaven's sake? The way we're protected from illegal drugs? The way being humiliated in airports keeps us safe from people using airplanes to blow up buildings? How?
Barak, give me a break, okay?
Steve
Sunday, August 10, 2008
Bagles (and Lox?)
We didn't realize it, but the dog I once wrote about for six weeks or more in terms of what she'd "destroyed this week" isn't a purebred basset after all. We do have a regular old basset hound named spike, and he's a good old boy, typical hound, likes to sleep and bark at the mailman, preferably at the same time. She's smaller, more stubborn, and about as willful as you could ask for. What she apparently is, is a mix of a basset and a beagle, which is a recognized cross known as a 'bagle hound." I'd never heard of bagle hounds, but apparently I've been living with one for years. Sweetest collection of evil tendencies I've ever known.
The lox thing? Just something to put in a headline. Sorry.
The lox thing? Just something to put in a headline. Sorry.
Labels: Social Commentary
Saturday, August 02, 2008
Mummy 3
If you liked the first two, you'll like this one. It even has a bit of that slo-mo kung-fu stuff in it.
Labels: Reviews
And the Race is On
The terrifically funny musical Avenue Q includes the song "Everybody's a Little Bit Racist (and that's OK)." That's among other things, which I may cover in a different post. I'm using it as my lead here because they are exactly right. Everyone is, and it's okay.
I once had a client (as a career counselor in a former life) who had been a Drill Instructor (DI) for the US Army, and later had gone on to be the guy who talks about what in corporate America is often referred to as "sensitivity training." The army didn't call it that. What he told me he said was "I'm prejudiced. So are you. You can't go through life without being prejudiced. What if you had to completely examine every situation before deciding what to do about it?" Good point, isn't it? He'd then point out that "We all have to work together in spite of our prejudices, and that's the important thing to remember." Yep, I couldn't put it better.
I was reminded of this topic by both last week's episode of Penn & Teller: Bullshit! on Showtime, and by the remark that McCain may or may not have made about Obama playing "the race card." Whatever that means, really.
Penn & Teller ranted in a very funny way for twenty-five minutes about the bogus nature of "Sensitivity Training." They included some statistics about companies that demonstrated reasonably well that the entire "sensitivity training" market is first, a racket and a scam, and second, a response to legal threats. In fact, companies are not required to be "sensitive" in any way whatsoever, but it covers corporate heinies, so it gets used. If you have Showtime, I'd recommend Bullshit! as a good time that spreads something akin to the truth in a world full of, well, you know.
The reported McCain comment illustrates a real problem with society since my generation took power. That is, we like to pretend that we're not racist, that everything was settled in those heady days of the sixties, and that the world is perfect. We really are a similar type of generation as those Puritans who kept "male cows," after all. And don't get me started on Victorian table leg covers! But now it's all Political Correctness that rules, and PC rule indicate that you should never, ever, not on your life, point out that any one person is different from any other person in terms of, most especially, race.
That is even more BS than what Penn & Teller talked about.
This may come as a shock, but even though, as a science teacher, I know that there is no genetic basis for any "race" amongst humans, there are some obvious differences that point to some culturally varied histories among whites, blacks, Latinos, and Asians. And, to not to shock you any further, most blacks know that they're black, most Latinos know that they're Latino, most Asians know that as well, and white folks generally are aware of that fact. There is, in simple terms, not a damned thing to hide or be ashamed of because you fit into one (or more) of those categories. It's handy when catching criminals, for instance, to be able to add those descriptors to the rest of your search terms.
Now, here are some facts that may shock because they really are facts. In a book apparently no longer available but which I had and read about fifteen years ago, titled I think Giftedness and Intelligence, the author, named Subnotik if I remember correctly, produced a large-scale review of the scientific literature concerning intelligence, beginning at the beginning of that century and continuing through the 1980s. Know what? African-Americans were shown to have, on average, lower intelligence than European Americans. That tidbit was quoted in a later book, The Bell Curve, in a way that got the authors in hot water with the PC crowd. I suppose that one can discover the details about the book under discussion here by looking in that book, but I've never read it. In the book I'm writing about, the fact about African-Americans and intelligence was not taken as a way to explain poverty, but rather the poverty of African Americans was put forth as the reason for the lower intelligence. That is, every single environmental factor mitigating against intelligence was present, during the twentieth century, in the majority of African-American households. And those factors, taken together, exactly explain the difference between African-American and European-American intelligence during that same period.
Okay, according to one major review of literature, black and white Americans are pretty much the same in terms of brain power. Now for the shocker. Asians score higher on intelligence tests than either of those groups. This is the same whether their great-grandparents came to California to build a railroad in 1868, or they still live in Asia today. Oddly, no literature purporting to extol the superiority of one race over another has ever quoted this tidbit.
The reason I put those last two paragraphs here is to illustrate how prejudice colors perception. When you read the first one I'll bet you went from "Oh, he's being a Liberal apologist," to "So what's their damned excuse now?" Right? And when you read about the Asians you were, if you're a white American, wondering where the studies have gone wrong. Weren't you?
I'm not here to answer questions about Asian brains. I'm here to talk about race in general. As I was saying above, we all know what race we belong to, don't we? There's no reason for anyone not affected by "PC-itis" not to mention that he's black, or Asian, or white, or Latino, or for all I care, Martian. I teach all sorts of kids, and I can tell you that they are not afraid to talk about it, although they rarely seem to care much: to them it's just the way people are.
Which of course is the real lesson people should absorb without the need for some debasing "sensitivity" class. That we're all different, that we all pre-judge people and situations, and that both of those things are, as they say on Avenue Q, okay. Barak Obama is a black dude. I'm about as pale a Caucasian as a person can get. It may not matter, but that's the way we are.
Got it?
Steve
I once had a client (as a career counselor in a former life) who had been a Drill Instructor (DI) for the US Army, and later had gone on to be the guy who talks about what in corporate America is often referred to as "sensitivity training." The army didn't call it that. What he told me he said was "I'm prejudiced. So are you. You can't go through life without being prejudiced. What if you had to completely examine every situation before deciding what to do about it?" Good point, isn't it? He'd then point out that "We all have to work together in spite of our prejudices, and that's the important thing to remember." Yep, I couldn't put it better.
I was reminded of this topic by both last week's episode of Penn & Teller: Bullshit! on Showtime, and by the remark that McCain may or may not have made about Obama playing "the race card." Whatever that means, really.
Penn & Teller ranted in a very funny way for twenty-five minutes about the bogus nature of "Sensitivity Training." They included some statistics about companies that demonstrated reasonably well that the entire "sensitivity training" market is first, a racket and a scam, and second, a response to legal threats. In fact, companies are not required to be "sensitive" in any way whatsoever, but it covers corporate heinies, so it gets used. If you have Showtime, I'd recommend Bullshit! as a good time that spreads something akin to the truth in a world full of, well, you know.
The reported McCain comment illustrates a real problem with society since my generation took power. That is, we like to pretend that we're not racist, that everything was settled in those heady days of the sixties, and that the world is perfect. We really are a similar type of generation as those Puritans who kept "male cows," after all. And don't get me started on Victorian table leg covers! But now it's all Political Correctness that rules, and PC rule indicate that you should never, ever, not on your life, point out that any one person is different from any other person in terms of, most especially, race.
That is even more BS than what Penn & Teller talked about.
This may come as a shock, but even though, as a science teacher, I know that there is no genetic basis for any "race" amongst humans, there are some obvious differences that point to some culturally varied histories among whites, blacks, Latinos, and Asians. And, to not to shock you any further, most blacks know that they're black, most Latinos know that they're Latino, most Asians know that as well, and white folks generally are aware of that fact. There is, in simple terms, not a damned thing to hide or be ashamed of because you fit into one (or more) of those categories. It's handy when catching criminals, for instance, to be able to add those descriptors to the rest of your search terms.
Now, here are some facts that may shock because they really are facts. In a book apparently no longer available but which I had and read about fifteen years ago, titled I think Giftedness and Intelligence, the author, named Subnotik if I remember correctly, produced a large-scale review of the scientific literature concerning intelligence, beginning at the beginning of that century and continuing through the 1980s. Know what? African-Americans were shown to have, on average, lower intelligence than European Americans. That tidbit was quoted in a later book, The Bell Curve, in a way that got the authors in hot water with the PC crowd. I suppose that one can discover the details about the book under discussion here by looking in that book, but I've never read it. In the book I'm writing about, the fact about African-Americans and intelligence was not taken as a way to explain poverty, but rather the poverty of African Americans was put forth as the reason for the lower intelligence. That is, every single environmental factor mitigating against intelligence was present, during the twentieth century, in the majority of African-American households. And those factors, taken together, exactly explain the difference between African-American and European-American intelligence during that same period.
Okay, according to one major review of literature, black and white Americans are pretty much the same in terms of brain power. Now for the shocker. Asians score higher on intelligence tests than either of those groups. This is the same whether their great-grandparents came to California to build a railroad in 1868, or they still live in Asia today. Oddly, no literature purporting to extol the superiority of one race over another has ever quoted this tidbit.
The reason I put those last two paragraphs here is to illustrate how prejudice colors perception. When you read the first one I'll bet you went from "Oh, he's being a Liberal apologist," to "So what's their damned excuse now?" Right? And when you read about the Asians you were, if you're a white American, wondering where the studies have gone wrong. Weren't you?
I'm not here to answer questions about Asian brains. I'm here to talk about race in general. As I was saying above, we all know what race we belong to, don't we? There's no reason for anyone not affected by "PC-itis" not to mention that he's black, or Asian, or white, or Latino, or for all I care, Martian. I teach all sorts of kids, and I can tell you that they are not afraid to talk about it, although they rarely seem to care much: to them it's just the way people are.
Which of course is the real lesson people should absorb without the need for some debasing "sensitivity" class. That we're all different, that we all pre-judge people and situations, and that both of those things are, as they say on Avenue Q, okay. Barak Obama is a black dude. I'm about as pale a Caucasian as a person can get. It may not matter, but that's the way we are.
Got it?
Steve
Labels: Social Commentary
