Steve's Live From Las Vegas

This is the subject line of an email I found in my Junk Mail folder. Like I said, Huh?

“Connect with the cuttest fuckeable singles 100% free and flirt them immediately”

I’m not sure how to pronounce that, let alone do I know what it all means. Suggestions?

There were no restrictions mentioned or published on the Weird Al Yankovic concert we attended last night. So, without further ado, here is a video of one of his songs. The actual song begins about 30 seconds or so in. Enjoy!

If I was gonna update my funny page, I might put this there. Be that as it may . . .

1. There are no aliens or alien spacecraft at Area 51. There are some odd looking people on the periphery looking in with night vision goggles and stuff, but no aliens. Unless they’re Mexicans. Holy cats! Undocumented Mexicans spying on our top-secret aircraft testing range! Alert the FBI!

2. The President was born in Hawaii. I don’t know what else to tell you. Hey, he’s not my favorite President either, but he’s at least as legitimate as W. Bush in his first term. He didn’t even call in the Supreme Court. Or wait, is that what he’s up to with Kagen? Stacking the court for the next election? That has to be it! He’s never denied that it’s true! Call Glen Beck, I have a new one for him to research!

Judges make law all the time, and they have been since before there was even an England, much less a USA. It’s called “common law,” even when it isn’t common sense. Yes, we are in the grips of a system designed from the beginning to thwart the will of a majority of the people. There’s nothing to be done, except maybe contact those aliens in Nevada about emigrating. Maybe they’re from that vacation planet from Star Trek? Hey, it could happen! And our government is keeping that from us, just to stop us from leaving for a better place. Don’t take that lying down, get up to Area 51 today and demand some action!

3. Also, it’s true that somebody accused of a crime has more rights than the victim. This goes all the way back to when King John got cornered by his nobles at Runnymeade. Funny name, Runnymeade. Would you want your meade to be thick and gooey? Ish! Anyhow, all the way back then, King John the only of that name had to give the accused special rights. This, of course, is a travesty of justice. Do you know that Lizzie Borden died an officially innocent woman? Can you believe it? There are countries where justice is swift and sure. For a list of the best of them, check out a map of the Middle East. Unfortunately, our free government trips to Iraq just ended today, but it’ll be worth your travel expenses to see justice served, finally. Try the baklava.

I could go on, but I’d rather go back to complaining all the time. Maybe it doesn’t solve anything, but hey, it worked out well for Rush, didn’t it?

Steve

Way back in 2002 I posted an article on my funny pages titled What My Dog Destroyed This Week. I followed that up with updates on the same page over a period of weeks, until finally I just gave up trying to keep track of the specifics. She’s been an energetic and loving friend for years, now.

The sad news is that she started sometimes getting lost in the house. We’ll hear her plaintively barking from upstairs, for example, but when we call her name she runs down happily and is overjoyed to see us. One day she was looking out onto the patio along with her dog, Spike. The patio door is directly across from the doggie door into the yard. Spike turned and ran out the doggie door and was playing with us outside. Buffy stayed inside, begging to be let out. Only when I went around to the doggie door and called to her through it did she realize what was happening. Also she sleeps a lot, drinks a lot (which is a problem as she grew up in a kennel, you don’t need to know more) and sometimes gets confused.

Those are all symptoms of Canine Cognitive Disorder, which is basically Alzheimer’s in dogs. This is very sad, no joke.

Some dogs get so weird that they have to be put down. I’m not sure I could do that to Buffy. Another animal, yes, and I’ve done it, but she’s pretty special. So, she’s on some fancy pills that might help her, although we won’t know for a few weeks. She also gets indulged at doors now, even if she should know better. Or, put another way, if you thought we spoiled her before, you ain’t seen nothin! Ah, well. She’s still a great dog, and we love her dearly.

I’m going to close with a recent photo. You can see how much she’s changed, right?

Well, she's cuter. That's a change.
photo by Tami Cowden

I’ve liked this video since I first saw it. The ArcSoft downloader I got with a video recorder last year can’t grab this one. So, I’m embedding it here, since I can do that. This is really just to give me an easy-access copy, but it is one of the better parody videos I’ve seen. Enjoy!

I saw this last weekend. I didn’t rush right back and review it because it’s been out all summer. But, you know those ads that call it the “best movie of the summer?” They’re right.

First, I must state, for my own protection from the DEA and others, that I do not indulge in, sell, handle, or have the least bit of anything to do with illegal drugs. Not even pot, which is so easy to get that it isn’t funny, even in a buttoned-down city like Las Vegas.

My tush covered, I’d like to consider the Arizona immigration situation. I mentioned it here a while back but at that time I didn’t know that the event that touched off the current brouhaha was when they found the murdered body of a borderland rancher. Authorities are pretty sure that the rancher was killed by someone working for a drug cartel in Northern Mexico who was in the country illegally. Here you had an illegal killing somebody, which is, naturally enough, intolerable. No wonder the people of Arizona rose up and demanded action. They weren’t thinking at all!

The murderer, if the authorities are right, was not an illegal immigrant. In fact, unless your heart bleeds for the American hit man who didn’t get the job, the murder had absolutely no effect on employment in Arizona, except for any employees the rancher may have been paying. Then, okay, they may (or may not) be out of work now. The real problem in Arizona, the crime along the border and the violence, are not because of people sneaking in to the country to find work. No, that murderer has a job, probably one that pays quite well, in Mexico. Why would he want to move to a country where he’s more likely to get caught? The murder of the rancher in Southern Arizona can be credited to the incredibly ineffective War on Drugs that’s been going on now for decades.

Leaving aside the logical oddness of fighting a war against inanimate material, consider that drug use remains widespread in this country in spite of several decades of billion-dollars per year efforts to stem the tide of illegal substances. Part of the problem is simply that a lot of drugs are simply weeds. Pot certainly is, and it grows in all fifty states, in the wild, with no help whatsoever. Give a bunch of pot plants some loving attention and you get a fine and lush crop of drug-laden weeds, for not much investment. Opium, and heroin, and codeine, are all made from the juice of a flower seed pod. They grow a lot of them in Afghanistan, but you could grow them right here in Nevada if you really wanted to. The flowers are pretty white poppies, even, and would compliment many a city garden if they were legal. And cocaine is made from the leaves of a plant that grows wild in the Andes mountains. The locals chew the leaves to help them through arduous mountain treks. Methamphetamine, okay that’s not a weed. But it can be made from common household chemicals plus a common decongestant. The supply, I’m saying, is virtually impossible to cut off for any of these drugs. Virtually anyone can whip them up if they have a mind to.

The law of supply and demand would therefore say that these things are dirt cheap, right? And so they are. The coca farmer in Columbia is lucky to get by on what he receives for his crop. The same is true of the poppy farmer in Afghanistan. And as anyone who has grown his own pot can tell you, it’s easy and cheap to get a buzz that way. So why are these things so expensive on the street? Because they are illegal! The only reason there is a lot of money in these drugs is because to buy them you must pay your supplier for risking his freedom, often his very life, to provide you with the product. Cocaine isn’t expensive. Getting cocaine in your hands in America is. Ditto with Heroin, Pot, and even Meth when you come right down to it.

Since these drugs are so expensive, there is a lot of competition to sell them. Since the sales are illegal, there is a lot of reason for the sellers and suppliers to be as vigilant as possible about their ability to keep selling. Since the profit margin is so high, the business of transporting and selling illegal drugs attracts adrenaline junkies and career criminals, because let’s face it, no ordinary person would go into that risky a line of work. Those are the people who shoot ranchers in Southern Arizona, or anyone else they consider to be a threat. Those are the people now waging a war along the US/Mexico border. They are not illegal immigrants stealing American jobs. They are purveyors of a very lucrative product protecting their sales territory.

I do not advocate drug abuse. I’m not really sure why pot is illegal, to be honest, but I wouldn’t smoke it if it were legal and free. Of course, if it were legal, it would be close to free. There are problems with recreational use of any drug, especially ethanol by the way, but none of the problems associated with using the drugs comes close to the problems we cause by making these things illegal. Here’s a quick comparison of the overall situation if drugs were legal, versus how it is now.

Okay, call me crazy, but the problems of the drugs themselves would remain if they became legal. Where we’d save literally billions of dollars every year would be by not paying obscene amounts of taxpayer money to enforce laws that simply do not work, as evidenced by the continued drug abuse problem in America today.

If the folks in Arizona were thinking, they’d see that their problems aren’t with illegal immigrants, but with illegal drugs.The solution is neither likely to make anyone mad (other than people you don’t really care about) and actually saves a bundle of money for Arizona, and for the rest of us as well. It’s simple: if this is a War on Drugs, the only reasonable thing to do is surrender. Anything else is just crazy. Like maybe we’re smoking something, you know?

Here’s a link to an article from NPR on how humans evolved into endurance runners rather than being extra fast or extra strong. Very interesting, if you run. Maybe even if you don’t. Just click here.

Nicholas Cage has saved worse movies than this one, a lot worse ones. This was fun to watch, even if it was sort of lite. And, yes, Fantasia lovers, that famous scene is honored, right down to the music. Mickey does not appear, however.

I know that some of my readers will just say, “well, duh!”, but I want to report how I got my old laptop back to fighting trim. It was getting so slow as to make me cry about it, but now it’s as good as new. In effect I added roughly 3GB of memory. How? Easy.

Windows uses something called “paging” to treat a disk drive like it was memory. That’s what slows down computers when more and more stuff gets piled on. A disk takes a lot longer to access than memory, so really what’s happening is that you’re waiting for the dratted disk to operate. Very frustrating.

Now consider those popular flash memory drives, or thumb drives some call them. For ten bucks I got a 4GB one. They are really memory, but Windows treats them like a disk.

Back to paging. Windows uses a file, called “pagefile.sys” to store the temporary stuff that goes into memory. You can tell Windows where to put that file. In fact, even if you use all hard disks, it’s better to have pagefile.sys on some disk that Windows doesn’t live on. But, what if you put it on the virtual disk drive of the flash memory? Now you have Windows thinking it’s using a disk drive, but really it’s using memory!

Shazaam!

To say my computer is running faster is a severe understatement. The old thing only holds 2GB of physical memory inside, but you can plug in as much as you want through the USB port. So now it has 5GB of memory, and it acts like it.

So, if you have an old, tired Windows box that could use extra memory, just move your page file to a flash drive instead of a hard drive. You’ll be amazed.

How can you tell if your computer would benefit?

Watch your hard drive activity light. Is it on almost all the time? Does it flash at odd moments even when you’re not doing anything with your computer? If so, you probably are experiencing “excessive paging.”

How can you move your page file (pagefile.sys?)

You could look it up on the Internet, or just write me and I’ll either send you the directions, or send you a link to a web site where they have good directions. Do tell me which version of Windows you’re using.

I won’t charge you a dime, either. How’s that for an Internet Special?