LiberalCCW Political Article

Even with the title "LiberalCCW" this blog contains little outright political writing. Today, that is going to change! It's LiberalCCW's take on the candidates!

In no particular order:

1: Fred ThompsonFred's candidacy takes the form of a "presidential rubber suit" stretched over Fred, who moves the mouth and eyes. He looks like a real candidate, he sounds like a real candidate, but under it all, he will always just be an actor in a rubber suit.

2: Barack Obama:

Young, inexperienced, thin, good looking, but with attitude, drive and a good dose of the force, Obama is a top contender. Once in office, he will not turn to the dark side.

3: Ron Paul:



Ron Paul is not a Doctor from Texas, he is actually a Jedi Master. Ron Paul has served The Old Republic with honor for years. He would die for The Republic, and he has dedicated his life to preserving it and opposing the Empire. Paul has two shortcomings:

a: His policies are a bit squirrely.
b: He is as old as dirt.

4: Hillary ClintonHillary sees that she can grab [Emperor Voice] Absolute Powah! And I can guarantee the results will not be pretty. I will let you in on another little secret: Not all liberals like Hillary. I don't like her because of her rehashed '90s agenda, and because I fear that she will abuse the power of US law enforcement.

5. Mitt Romney:


Innocent looking and polite, Mitt looks shiny and presidential. However, the Republic has never had a 'droid President. Most fundamentalist humans think that 'droids core beliefs don't line up with traditional human beliefs, and fear that Mitt will be more loyal to his 'droid leaders than to the cause of the Republic.

6. Mike Huckabee:

Never EVER vote for anyone who while preaching one religion, promises to increase the troop levels, military funding and broaden the scope of an ongoing war against factions of another religion. I'm sayin' it now: It's baaaaad mojo.

7. Bill Richardson:
Bill Richardson is Liberal CCW's personal choice for US President in the 2008 Elections. He believes in citizens rights to bear arms, yet is against the two generations of war planned by the current U.S. leader. Unfortunately, Bill Richardson is so unattractive as to be unelectable, a pitiable truth in this era of televised presidential debates. I would suggest shaving Richardson's entire body in order to make him more attractive to female voters, but I fear that the resulting denuded Richardson would be even less attractive than the current hairy version, if such a thing were possible.

8. Alan Keyes:

It has been suggested that Alan Keys is the Republican answer to Barack Obama. I disagree. He is thin, good looking, has attitude and drive, but unlike Obama, Keys actually has experience, and a PhD. from Harvard to boot.

9. Rudy Giuliani:

Rudy Giuliani, otherwise know as "Darth Tyranus", or "the Other Sith Lord", has worked for the Dark Side of the Force for years. Like Hillary, he is from New York, and even though he acts like he is Republican, he is actually an undead New York Liberal wearing a black cape.

10. Dennis Kucinich:
Small, furry, cute, and dangerous to his foes if they get too close, Dennis Kucinich is resourceful and can put up a good fight for his size. Many a presidential debate has featured Kuchinch slashing away at the ankles of much larger candidates.


Now for two others, one who has conceded and one who has yet to announce his candidacy:


A. Tom Tancredo:
Mr. Tancredo's short campaign could have been likened to a mental event horizon: Good ideas, words and thoughts never came out of it. Long periods of intellectually void silence were interrupted by occasional loud political burps. No one wanted to see what was actually under all of that sand.


B. Al Gore:
Gore is seen here at the 2007 Nobel prize ceremony, accepting his Peace Prize for his work to bring attention to the pollution of his home planet's atmosphere. Gore is the most famous of the candidates, has excellent experience, and recycles all of his personal greenhouse emissions inside his stylish suit made of recyclable polylactic acid produced from cornstarch. The suit comes with an attractive matching helmet which reflects UV rays and organic sheepswool cape, approved by GAIA. Gore is working with scientists to find a way to announce his candidacy that actually absorbs carbon dioxide. As soon as they are finished, Gore will announce!

The Ways of The Thrifty

My father woke me up with a phone call at around 9:00 AM, to wish me a Merry Christmas. He had to fill me in on his day's activities.

You have to understand that my dad's activities revolve around one thing:

Thrift.

He planned on eating lunch with an older couple at the local retirement home. Let me check off the requirements:

1: Gift giving required: No..... Check
2: Close to home to save on gas: Yes.......Check
3: No entry fee or ticket cost: No.........Check
4: Free food:Yes.........Check

If my father had been invited to drive to Indianapolis to get the free Christmas lunch he would have performed the following calculation in less than a second, in his head, while on the phone with the lunch host:

Hmmm. Let's see, gas is $2.79 a gallon, Indianapolis is 177 miles away, the Miata gets 26 miles to the gallon, that 177/26=6.8 gallons. At $2.79, that's $18.99, rounded up to $19. I could go to Gropps for $12 plus a 20%...... no make that a 15% tip for $13.80 and Gropps is 12 miles away, 24 mile round trip, so that's......... hey, wait a cotton pickin' minute, the Indianapolis calculation is only for one way, let's see, thats 2x$19 is $38. No way Jose! Man, am I glad that I thought of that before I got to Kokomo!

And so, he begs off of the invite from the big city to dine closer to home.

Needles to say he is sharing free Christmas lunch 1.9 miles from his house. His calculation was simple: (2*1.9 Miles) / 26 Miles per gallon = 0.146 gallons. 0.146 gallons * $2.79/gallon = 40.7 cents! Oh Baby!!

If he's lucky he will get to carry some leftovers home and both he and the dog will eat tomorrow for free, so it's essentially the same thing as free money!

Free money is hard to come by in Amish country.

The Merry Christmas phone call ended when my dad reminded me that we were not on night and weekend minutes on the cellphone. Immediately my wheels began to spin:

600 minutes total, today is the 25th, so we have probably used about 200 minutes, this call has been 15 minutes, leaving 385 minutes until the 14th of January. That's 20 days away, leaving 19 minutes and 15 seconds of daytime talk per day. And we have to get through all of the family calls on New Years which is also on a weekday. Ouch, this could be costly!

But what I blurted in less than a second was: OKMerryChristmasloveyoulotscallyouafternine!!

Click.

Twenty minutes later, my mother, who has been trained for decades in The Ways of The Thrifty by my father called me (on a VOIP line). She gave me the rundown of my father's day, in much more detail. She said that his aunt had died and gave me details of the funeral. I am willing to bet, that after 7:00 PM (when HIS talk is cheap) my dad will call me and tell me about his aunt and the funeral.

Mouse Dentist: A Short Story for Children.

Our new pet mouse "Scooter" has serious dental problems. His upper and lower incisors are misaligned, with his lowers sticking out the front of the left side of his mouth, and his uppers growing back into his mouth. This leaves him unable to chew, which for a mouse is the primary pastime. The serious consequence of this misalignment is that his teeth grow continuously, and if left growing, the uppers would pierce his skull and kill him in a matter of weeks.

Enter the Mouse Dentist. Armed with a very small pair of fingernail clippers, the Dentist trims the lower incisors first, then with a clear working path, trims the uppers. The uppers don't grow parallel to each other, so this requires two snips. The hard work is actually performed by the Dental Assistant, who holds Scooter perfectly still and upside down for the duration of the dental visit. Mice don't like being upside down. Scooter tends to kick his back legs and squeak during his visit to the dentist.

Scooter has come to recognize the fingernail clippers and will try to turn and bury his face in his tummy when he sees them. The dentist however, is lightning fast. Since Scooter literally couldn't chew his way out of a wet brown paper bag, the Dentist has no fear for the safety of his fingers. After his dental visit, Scooter licks his lips for about ten minutes, as if he can't believe that his teeth are short again.

When his teeth are getting long again, Scooter runs around his cage with a cashew nut stuck on his lower incisors. This lets the Dentist know it is time for a follow up visit.

Sitemeter Feedback and Suggestions

To all of you searching for a solution to the tough goat meat problem, I suggest an hour or two in a pressure cooker. (The goat meat! Not you, silly.) It works wonders.

For the many searching google for Bipolar and CCW, please read my advice.

For the searchers for Fake Urine, And How To Use It, I suggest, respectfully that you get off of the dope. Really. You life will be much better. How degrading is it to walk into the Dr. Office wearing a bag containing someone else's urine between your legs? Apparently not as degrading as getting fired. If you are having trouble kicking the habit, try rehab. While I admit that rehab is degrading, rehab has to be less degrading than prison.

To all of you searching for Lance Armstrong's Hematocrit Level: I don't know what it is, was or will be. Ask Dr. Ferrari.

Conditions at Work

One coworker (worker 1) of mine runs to the window and makes amorous cat noises any time a cute girl walks by. We work at a University, so this happens every 7.5 seconds, on average, making him seem as if he has Tourettes syndrome. Another coworker (worker 2) has been acting loopy lately, as he has stopped making sense in his conversations (with other people) and has taken to listening to Buddy Holly tunes on his PC speakers......at full volume. It's like having a front seat at the Ed Sullivan show, with Ed filming live in a three story industrial pilot plant.

I imagine how it must seem to people walking by when they hear the roar of machinery mixed with overdriven speakers blasting "Peggy Sue.....Peggy Sue......My Peggy Sue....Hooo, Hooo, Hooo!" They look to see a man in his late 20's with his nose pressed pig-like against the glass, eyeing them with a lurid glare, the glass fogging rhythmically as he shouts "meeee-ooowww, grrrrrrr.........meeee-ooowwww!" at them.

Our bookkeeper is in his 70's and keeps forgetting how to enter overtime pay into the accounting system. Instead of asking someone to show him how to do it, he just doesn't enter overtime hours. This works the girl-ogling coworker into a foaming lather, and he and the bookkeeper get into shouting matches. For weeks now, the girl-ogler opens his paycheck, eyes it with one eye, while monitoring the window with the other, and emits a stream of expletives. I secretly wonder if he has ever gotten any of his overtime pay. He has been here for three years.

After one of these shouting matches over overtime pay, as coworker 1 was running to the window, and coworker 2 was trying out Richie Valens at 110 dB, I had the following conversation with a visiting scientist:

Me: "Well coworkers 1 and 2 are crazy".

Scientist: "How so"?

Me: "Watch 1 run to the window, and listen to the noises he is making. Look at worker 2 at the control panel for the machine, talking to himself, he has not made sense in a thing he said all day. I am afraid that when I go to check on him, I will find him sucking his thumb and listening to the Muppets singing "The 12 days of Christmas".

Scientist: "True, 1 does run to the window an awful lot".

Me: "And our bookeeper is senile".

Scientist: (Laughing) "I know that is true! If everyone here is so flawed, what is your problem"?

Me: (Telling absolute truth): "I have a tension headache".

Scary Sunday

Three things added up to scare me in the last 24 hours:

1. I went with friends to see "I am Legend" last night. It is the first Zombie movie I have ever seen. It is the scariest movie I have ever seen, and it is in the top five best movies I have ever seen. Whatever Will Smith got paid for his role, they should double it, and send him a check. I had nightmares all night that I was stumbling around a deserted Manhattan in the dark with an Surefire equipped M-4 and a dog.

2. Someone hit this blog from a google search for, and I quote: "gun permit and bipolar in tn". At this point, I am going to offer some unsolicited advice:

• If you are bipolar: DO NOT BUY A GUN, DO NOT APPLY FOR A GUN PERMIT!
• If you know someone who is applying for a gun (ccw) permit who is bipolar and trying to slip through cracks in the system: NOTIFY THE AUTHORITIES........TODAY!

3. Someone else hit the blog from GlaxoSmithKline in the UK with google search for: "Lance Armstrong Hematocrit".

Combine the out of control medical companies from 3 above with homicidal humans who cannot tell right from wrong from 2 above and you get the entire plot from "I am Legend" and the gist of my nightmares from last night.

Blogging, Criticism and Eternity

After reading a post on Tam's blog about verbal abuse in blog comments, I started thinking about this new communication medium: Andy Warhol was right about the 15 minutes of fame, and the future is now. When I read Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, I am reading Chaucer's impression of his 14th century English compatriots. Sanitized by Chaucer, packaged by a master so as to be just as human today as they were then.

One thing that Warhol did not foresee: Digital archiving of the written word. From Chaucer's time, flash forward around 600 years, and we don't need Chaucer's ribald, yet sanitized impression of the current breed of commoner, we get it straight from the commoners themselves. Imagine if we could read the writings of the common man of 1400. Would they be any more lucid or forward thinking than our trolling troglodytes of today?

Flash forward 600 years from today. December 14th 2608, mid afternoon. In a classroom on mars, high school students are studying the early 21st century, reading the views of the common citizen of the USA regarding the "War on Terror". They will read our blog postings, our comments on other blogs, our letters to the editor, all of it. Our racial slurs against our enemy, our hot blooded arguments and taunts, all there for all of humanity to read, our writings will live on as long as humanity does. Thanks to DARPA and Al Gore, we are all as Plato, our words carved into stone for all eternity, although some of us carve with bent chisels.

Now for the flip side, as mentioned above by Tam. Just as everyone can be a writer in this new medium, they can also be critics, and some are not aware that their words will outlive their grandchildren.

A day in the life...

This morning I woke up at 7:00. We drove our friend's car to my dentist appointment because the Chrysler transmission was in "limp mode" after coming home from our end of the semester celebration dinner. Apparently the Chrysler is in no mood to celebrate.

At the dentist, while accompanied by Bing Crosby Christmas tunes, the petite, blond hygienist went at my teeth with what can only be described as a death metal shred guitar technique. It seemed like she used a low E guitar string to floss. Afterwards I felt like I had fallen off of my bike and gotten road rash on my gums. My teeth however, are spotless!

We drove our friends car back home and we tried the Chrysler out in the parking lot, but when we put it in gear we only heard one thump. This indicates that it is in limp mode. Two thumps and you are good to go. No thumps mean the engine stalled when you shifted from park to drive. You can also see square boxes around the PND3L indicators on the dash when in limp mode... if the instrument cluster is working. As the instrument cluster was not working this morning, we relied on the one thump/two thump method. I grabbed a ratchet and 5/16" socket and disconnected the transmission control module (TCM) under the hood of the Chrysler to reset the fault code that causes the car to drive in limp mode, where 3000 RPM gets you about 30 MPH. After 10 seconds I reconnected the TCM, listened and when shifting into drive heard two thumps, and so, we drove in to work.

In the parking garage, I passed the car with the I Brake For Meteorites! bumper sticker. I have never seen the driver, but I am willing to bet that he is a nerd.

At work, at 10:35, the door was still locked. Friday at the University! No one else is here, except for Dr. Death, who is, at the moment I write this, still alive.

At my desk, I logged into the webserver for our new lab and was pleasantly rewarded with a log file that shows that the firewall I configured has kept the Chinese out. I rushed the server into production for my boss, and kept hearing a "tick........tick..........tick" from the hard disk as the machine updated the failed login logfile. Someone had been trying to brute force into the machine with computer generated usernames and passwords. From the logs, it appears that the attacks came from China. After messing around with it for a while I found a good configuration for the PF firewall, that allows all web traffic, and allows only me to administer the machine. I reinstalled OpenBSD 4.2 and set up PF with logging, and have to say that OpenBSD is the best OS that I have ever used for a server. I also use it on another computer for a desktop machine, and am typing this right now on it in Firefox.

In my Email Inbox, I see that I have won the Irish Lottery.

One interesting hit to this blog from yesterday was a BellSouth customer from Birmingham Alabama looking for "ccw Desert Eagle" on google. Problems in Birmingham must be worse than I thought. My sage advice: Dude, get a 1911, then you will be able to defend your family and people won't laugh at you behind your back.



(Me with Laurence welk voice): And now, I leave you with Slayer playing an interpretive number titled "Raining Blood". I wonder if the song writer from Slayer and I go to the same dentist office?

Dr. Death

Last week a researcher was running some tests with our equipment, and he had a machine he needed to hook up to it. All was well and good, until I saw that he had all of the power cables taped together with electrical tape. And the tape kept coming loose.

Things got worse when he plugged it in and hit the power button. He let out a squeak and jumped about six inches in the air, as it gave him a good jolt. Needless to say, I stayed away from Dr. Death's end of the apparatus. When he turned it off again, he let out another squeak and once again jumped a good six inches in the air. The rest of the day was punctuated with a series of these squeaks and jumps, visible and audible bookends to his experiments.

Let me break in right now and say that what I have heard is true: A common person, when shocked by electrical equipment, will never touch it again. A scientist when shocked by electrical equipment will touch it again within a few seconds to see if he/she is dealing with a persistent phenomenon.

The next day, Dr. Death had plugged in the offending piece of hardware and was was troubleshooting the problem. When he turned on the equipment, the breaker tripped and the coke machine and everything else along the wall turned off. For an hour, out of the corner of my eye, as I was working, I could see the coke machine turning on and off as Dr. Death troubleshot his equipment. All the while, I kept a wooden broom handle handy in case I had to pry him, smoking, from the object of his fascination.

I walked over to observe his work, he had the cover off of the device and was probing around with an unshielded screwdriver. There were black arc burns on the back panel, on the power switch, on some interior parts, and on the bottom of the case. He had shortcut several of the circuits, and many of the wires were wrapped in electrical tape, much like his power cords from yesterday.

"I found the problem". Said Dr. Death.

"What is it"? I asked.

"I melted the ground wire, and the hot, and now the case goes hot every time I plug it in".

I gave him the "well...duh" look.

"This situation is very dangerous, I am lucky that I did not get killed". He said, then laughed a good belly laugh.

Later that day I had to go ask Dr. Death a question, he was in his office.

"Take the broom handle with you". Said my coworker. "You might have to pry him off of something when you get there".

Captain Shameful

Our dog has worms, and he wonders why we don't let him on the couch with us anymore. He used to run into the bedroom to greet us in the morning, now he runs into my knee as I block the door to keep him out. We call him Captain Shameful.

He has been on the wormer two days, and seems to be about wormed out. He misses the companionship and company of a nap shared in front of the TV, but who wants to nap with a wormy dog?

The wormer cost $40 at PetSmart. The first dose put an end to several days of him dragging his posterior around and around on the carpet. At one point he was doing laps on the carpet like he was on a solo breakaway on the Champs-Élysées.

Dad: In light of Spike's visit at Thanksgiving, may I wholeheartedly suggest that you get your dog on wormer. It would not help your house sale AT ALL if your Realtor is giving her schpiel and Spike motors past doing the butt scratching boogie, leaving a trail of wrigglers on the carpet. You thought that the home finance crash was making your home hard to sell, imagine what Spike would do to your chances.

Thanksgiving Goat

This Thanksgiving, I toyed with the idea of a nontraditional meal, namely replacing the traditional bird with: Goat.

To test our goat's meat cooking abilities before the big day, we purchased goat ribs from the local halal market, and I unwrapped them for cooking later in the evening and I was surprised to find that raw goat meat has no detectable odor, something that cannot be said for live goat. I heated some butter in a pan set on medium-high heat and placed the ribs in the pan. Goat needs less heat than beef, so turned the burner down to medium. After five minutes, I flipped them and after ten minutes, they were done. I will admit that while odorless when raw, goat meat has a strong smell when cooking. Like amplified lamb.

Goat is good. The flavor is a cross between horse and lamb. The ribs are much fattier than horse, and are are much tastier than horse steak. Have lots of napkins ready to wipe the goat grease off of you lips. This is never a problem you have with horse, have you ever seen a fat horse?

When I lived in Europe, I survived on horse steaks. When eating horse, the only problem I encountered is large amounts of gristle. After a particularly stringy horse steak, I would end up with a little pile of horse gristle spitballs on my plate. I always thought that this horse gristle is probably from a work-horse or race-horse, or the pet pony of a 300 pound kid who rode the pony ever day, until she killed it. Now after the poor pony suffered for years under the obese child, the final insult is on my plate as a bad horse steak, rendered inedible due to the strain of carrying the fat kid. I always thought that they should have little stickers on the horse meat that rated the toughness of the meat.

Like the Fujita Scale for Tornadoes, below is the LiberalCCW Horse Meat Toughness Scale (LHTS):

Soft
Medium
Tough
Man 'O War
Amish Work Horse
Fat Kid's Pony

Back to the goat ribs, the were so good that I cooked seconds. The next day I kept thinking of the leftover uncooked goatsribs in the fridge. Mmmmmmm. When I got home, I cooked them up. Man, they were good.

Thanksgiving rolled around and we went to the halal market and I bought goat shoulder. Not ribs, I figured were were ready for the big time. We made a BBQ of shoulder and had it ready when the guests arrived.

The trouble started when I tried to stick a plastic fork into a chunk of goat meat and broke the tines off of the fork. I crossed my fingers that the plastic moldsman had had gone to work drunk and produced a bad batch of forks. I tried another fork and tried to get meat off of the bone. No luck.

Only by biting and chewing with extreme malice, could I get any goat meat from the bone. I was afraid that I would pull on the bone, and hear a snap and find the roots of my incisors sticking from the goat shoulder.

The goat was the consistency of Pykrete reinforced with Spectra, even worse in toughness than fat kid's pony, if such a thing were possible. Suitable for ballistic armor tough.

But it did taste good.

One of our guests, a Saudi, through a mouthful of goat said: "You know that you have to boil goat for 3 hours or it will be tough".

"How long did you cook it"? He asked.

"About twenty minutes". I replied.

"That explains it". He said, and continued his furious chewing.