This is what class looks like.

Longtime online pal Marko Kloos is so classy, he even apologizes for being a little rude when he correctly identifies a rude individual.

Winning a Hugo, up to now, has always been very valuable for a science fiction writer.

If you're like many of us, you want to find a magical story that will divert you from the drudgery of reality, without having to wade through the crap. Just give me the good stuff. So, it's incredibly alluring to see that list posted up on the wall of your local book store with the Hugo winners by year. I've been guilty of having perused the list, found a title that I haven't yet read, and pulled it off the shelf and immediately gone to the cash register. It's that simple: I didn't have to read the slush pile.

I know that I'm not the only one. As do smart people like... well, like Marko Kloos.

Marko, however, found himself in a very weird situation. He had written a very compelling page-turner, which would have found itself in the running for a Hugo anyway-- but which was pushed to the short-list by an unsavory person.

Vox Day, AKA Theodore Beale, is not a person I would invite into my home. He is racist. He is misogynistic. He was expelled from the Science Fiction Writer's Association because of his attacks on fellow writers based upon their race and gender. He is bitter. The funny thing is, the man can write. If he weren't so obnoxious, he probably would have won something by now. But there are lines which you cannot cross without having some backlash, and he crossed them. He will never win an award in science fiction.

To make up for this, Beale/Day came up with a scheme: pack the nominations. Campaign on fairness! Your favorite writers have no chance to win, through no fault of their own! Though they have wrought the best stories, their only sin is that they are white males!  The P.C.-minded establishment wants a multicultural field of nominees, at the expense of Quality! Hell, it sounds good. We all just want the best writing. Who cares what color or gender the author is? We all hate reverse discrimination, because it's just another kind of discrimination, right?

When I saw that online pal and best-selling author Larry Correia was being labeled as a racist (!) and misogynist himself, I began to think, Yeah, I can understand why you'd get ticked about these things. Larry's a good man. Larry is not a racist. He may be a conservative, but he's not a woman-hater. Larry's writings depict strong woman characters, multiple cultures in his good guys... anyway, you get the picture.  So Larry's corner started up a little group called the Sad Puppies. And frankly, I was on board.

Then Vox Day starts up the Rabid Puppies. He endorses a group of authors for Hugo nominations, and they get short-listed. Marko Kloos was one of the authors.

For a few days, it was heady times at Castle Frostbite. Think about this: You're nominated for the Hugo --one of the most well-known awards in your profession*-- and word is that you've got a very good chance of winning it. Heinlein won that award. Asimov won that award. Clark. Le Guin. Dick. Niven. Haldeman. Gibson. Card. Those are the giants on whose shoulders you will get to stand. I'm not gonna lie: I'm giddy just knowing a guy who gets to have his name mentioned in the same lists as those people.

The same rocket ship badge that is on every paperback of Stranger In A Strange Land could be on your books.

But then comes the crashing reality, which is that people would associate your nomination with the unsavory person who put your name on a list that he advocated be nominated.

Some stains you can never wash clean of.

So Marko, faced with that situation, quit. He pulled his book Lines Of Departure out of the running.
He took his ball (which he was winning with), and went home to Castle Frostbite.

Drop the mic.

He'll write more. And we'll get to read it. But when he takes the awards, it will be on his terms, and not via some shady deal co-opted by a shady jerk.  Hey, Vox? Marko was never your kind of people.
______________________
*Though, apparently, not really as critically-judged as you might hope. "Hugo Award nominees and winners are chosen by supporting or attending members of the annual World Science Fiction Convention, or Worldcon..." LawDog writes on his disappointment about the process.

State Of The Union

I'm relatively sure that no one walks away with a new perspective after having watched the State Of The Union Address, so why bother watching it live? If you hate the President, you'll reiterate that. If you love him, you'll underscore that.


In the meantime, check out this interesting piece that charts that words used by past U.S. presidents in their State Of The Union addresses, entitled "Hindsight Is 20/20." The words that most used certainly indicate what was on the mind of the President at the time.

Stampede! Wiki Mini-Wander.

Check out this amazing list of human stampedes causing deaths in the 20th and 21st centuries. I remember when the 11 people crushed at the Who concert in Cincinnati was huge news, and WKRP In Cincinnatti did an episode about it. But that's nothing compared to other such events, which are surprisingly common.

This took me to the 2003 Great White* fire at The Station. I've watched the entirety of the video, and it's chilling. What's fascinating to me is the fallout of 100 people dead (mostly due to smoke inhalation because they couldn't escape in the stampede that packed the exits): The band, which employed the manager who placed the pyrotechnics, paid the families of the dead $1 million. The owners of the nightclub settled for  $813,000. JBL Speakers company paid $815,000. The foam companies paid $25 million. The state of Rhode Island and the City of Warwick, which apparently didn't properly enforce updated fire codes, paid $10 million. Okay. But the one that blows me away is that the television station that employed the cameraman that got the footage that told us what happened agreed to pay $30 million, because the cameraman supposedly got in the way of the exit and didn't help people get out.

I've watched the video, frustrated that people aren't helping to pull the crush of persons out of the exit. But this seems extreme.

The installers of the foam insulation haven't paid anything.


_______________________
*Edited

Why do they even make that an option?

My KitchenAid dishwasher is a pretty good dishwasher. I can say without a doubt that it is the best dishwashing machine that I've ever owned or had access to. Kinda knock the dried stuff loose on the dishes before loading it, put in one of those AWESOME Cascade Action Pack soap pods*, make sure the reservoir is topped with Dollar General brand rinse aid**, and my dishes come out shiny and clean and new-looking. I never have to re-run the dishes through in such instances.

That is, unless...

...Unless someone has selected the buttons to turn OFF the High Temp Scrub and Sani Rinse.  Then, your dishwasher is running with whatever hot water it gets IMMEDIATELY upon turning on the water valve (it doesn't let it run til it gets hot), with the soap, and that's it. Unless your dishwasher is way different from every one that I've ever seen, it has three things going for it, to get your dishes clean: Hot water, pressure, and soap. It has no scrubbing brushes. If it did, then it could do as well you do when handwashing. Truth is, your dishwasher can get that water a lot hotter than your hands could bear, if you'll let it. And therein is its efficacy.

In the bottom of your dishwasher is a heating element. If you select "High Temp Scrub" (as it's listed on my washer), it heats that element up while the washer is filling with the wash water for washing, and runs that heating element for the whole time that it washes, to get the water really really hot. Thus, it can get those dishes super uber clean. If you select Sani Rinse, then your washer will run the heating element during the whole time that your dishwasher is rinsing your dishes, to get that rinse water hot enough to sanitize. If you select "Heat Dry", then your washer will run the heating element for a while after the rinse water is drained away, to evaporate the rinse water faster.

So here's the problem: My wife NEVER turns on these options. She turns them all off. Why? Because she's a worrier. Wives will do that; they'll worry about getting screwed over again, like when they bought into that whole "I'll bet that he'll look distinguished as he ages, and will eventually grow out of this whole 'let's work for the public and make Jack for money' thing that he's got going on" philosophy. Oh, no. She won't be fooled again. Now, she's Miz Cautious. She's not running the risk of a repeat of that time those times when her Prized Tupperware got a little bit warped melted around the dish racks and had to be scraped and chipped loose. So now, regardless of the absence of such plastics. Regardless of the fact that any plastic stuff could be moved to the top rack and saved from the proximity to the heating element, my bride of 15 years turns the heating options to OFF when she runs the dishes. 

Which leads to Suck and Fail.

I have to admit: I do a lot more dishes than I used to, just to get the damned things run correctly. Maybe that was her plan all along.

_______________________________
*Worth every dime. We came across some packages marked down, but I'll get these from now on, even if I have to pay double. No more powder caking up, clogging up the spring-loaded door flap to the soap dispenser. I don't care if these things cost triple what I've been paying. It's a good product.

**I never used to use rinse aid, but I have to admit that it makes a difference, and the store brand seems to work just as well as Jet Dri or Crystal or whatever. A bottle usually lasts me several months. The reservoir takes about a month to drain.

Wednesday evening this and that.

--Steampunk Lego sets? Why had this not happened before. Unless they are fools, this will be made of win.

--Nancy Grace has always irritated me, even before I happened to be stuck in a doctor's office or something, and saw her try to corner Elizabeth Smart in a bullying manner. (Note Smart's semi-eye roll at 1:21, to a rather stupid question put up by Grace.)
But she's especially irritating as a commentator, when she does a split-screen interview with a woman who is in the same parking lot as herself. On-scene stand-ups are over-used in the news. There is NO POINT in sending a reporter out to stand in front of City Hall at 07:00, to tell you about the agenda that they're going to talk about, later that day. So now CNN is using three tools that irritate me at the same time: unnecessary stand-up remote broadcasts, unnecessary split-screen interviews to attempt to show that they're ALL OVER on the coverage of this salacious story, and of course, Nancy Grace.

--On a side note, that Jodi Arias chick is so bat-feces crazy guilty (she took the stand, for 18 days!!!), she'll be extremely lucky if she doesn't get the needle.

--I like that now-defunct Nickel Creek band.

--From F. Scott Fitzgerald's entry in Wikipedia:

"Among the attendants at a visitation held at a funeral home was Dorothy Parker, who reportedly cried and murmured 'the poor son-of-a-bitch,' a line from Jay Gatsby's funeral in Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby."

I would have expected more out of Dorothy Parker. But I'm planning on collecting crude statements by Marko Kloos, Cranky Professor, PhlegmFatale, and Larry Correia, so that I'll look literary when I cuss. Larry says that he can write me up a good funeral scene. I look forward to reading that. I'm thinking along the lines of a Valhalla send-off, delivered in the style of John Cleese at Graham Chapman's funeral.

--Phillip, a fine historian of firearms was giving a presentation of a Teddy Roosevelt double rifle at the end of the NRA Convention in Houston this weekend. This is something that they will do for accredited news media, to educate about some of the noteworthy pieces in the amazing NRA firearms collection. I went to the one last year in St. Louis. This time, just like last time, a security flunky came up to these officers of the National Rifle Association (the group that just spent million$ to lease the space), and tried to give them and the media the bum's rush. Phil politely let her have it with, uh, both barrels. (Figuratively speaking, of course.)  He took a breath, and continued with the demonstration. Well done, sir. One of my colleague web correspondents caught the action on video, here. Hopefully next year in Indy, we'll have this issue worked out.

--I didn't get to go to the NRA Convention. I'm still kinda pouty about that. But Dad got to go, and I'm glad about that.

--Lots of graduation notices, this May. Pricey.

NEVER read the comments.

Matt Inman at The Oatmeal writes about the troublesome nature of comments for a content-provider.

While I can't really comment much on how all these comments would affect my production, I can tell you that they really affect my pleasure in consuming online content. Inman nailed it here:

Screen capture used without permission. Taken from http://theoatmeal.com/comics/making_things  on 11/14/2012.

You know why newspapers and YouTube and other content hosting sites enable contents? Because it increases hits. MaryBeth471 writes about an Enya video: "It's so peaceful." Then Sk8terH8R comes on after her and responds to her comment: "Enya sux like a Dyson with a collapsed star inside! Slayer 4evR!!1!"  Then when ol' MaryBeth checks in again, she gets a little note that she has a response to her comment. She checks back in, and discovers to her dismay that her favorite soporific Irish Ambian Popstar has been maligned, and by someone who loves devil music, no less! This issue MUST be rectified! And she defends Enya. And comes back later to see if Sk8terH8R responded. And, because she did, our troll will come back. This is a big source of hits on YouTube and your favorite online news sites. Remember-- they don't care if it's a chimpanzee checking in daily; all they care about is making that hit meter roll over again and again.

This does nothing for your pure enjoyment of the thing. It will NOT show up your online opponent. He's a troll, delighted to get a rise out of anyone.

The most likely outcome for you is distress. Say NO to irritainment.

Micro climate.

I've always been impressed with how, even though the Official Weather Station for our area may report temperatures of, say, 39 degrees, I could have frost on my lawn. Or how when the weather station shows dry and still just a mile away, it's raining and gusting at my house.

Climate is what you expect. Weather is what you get. Micro climates personalize what you get on a regular basis. Maybe your house is near a creek, in the shadow of a hill and in the lee of the wind? You'll find that your house is dank in the cool months and muggy in the warm months, despite your local predictions of dry and fresh.  Maybe you live next to a major heat sink, like a large concrete parking lot and between large low brick and concrete structures? In such a case, your first impression out the front door will always be that a sweater or jacket is less necessary than the rest of the people in your zip code.

I also like to watch weather come through, and see the reactions by the weather stations. For example:


Click to embiggen.
 

Check out what's going on there. The two weather stations on the map on the right show vastly different temperatures despite their proximity. But also you'll note that the higher temperature station still shows a wind from the south, while the western one now shows a brisk wind from the northwest. On the bottom graph, you can see that the change in the wind brought some rain that ramped up quickly, and the top graph shows that the temperature and the dew point dropped rapidly in concert with the changing wind direction (fourth graph). All in minutes.

I have GOT to get a decent digital-compatible reporting weather station.
For I am a weather geek.

Ear Worm: CURSE YOU, PHLEGMMY!!!

Y'all might not know this, but the esteemed Phlegm Fatale has some vocal training. And you thought that she just studied punning.

The songs that stick in her head get sung, say, around the campfire at a certain southwestern blogmeet, and then, ta-dah!, it's stuck in your head, too.
__________________

This weekend has been work for me, but the good kind of work that I signed up for. I broke a felony case, and performed a LOT of interviews, and got confessions, and recovered stolen goods, and wrote case reports and probable cause affidavits, and catalogued evidence. Today, I was supposed to be off to go to the fair with my family (we went, but later in the day), but I had to drop off evidence at the lab, pick up warrants (the judge complimented me on my PC affidavits), and drop the warrants off with our dispatch department to input into the system.

While not in regular uniform, I was wearing a decent khaki twill shirt and slacks, with decent leather showing, and a badge, J-frame and ID completing the "investigator" outfit, as I ran these official errands. I felt pretty good about finishing up a good weekend's work, and didn't mind that I looked... well, maybe not sharp (no tie, and my creases weren't razor sharp), but pretty respectable, anyway.

So it was that, as I got out of my patrol car with a handful of warrants clutched in my fist at the sheriff's office, I noticed a woman checking me out. I wasn't smug as I noticed her eying me surreptitiously. After all, an attractive young lady such as herself was only human. How could she be expected to resist noticing... what was that sound?

It seemed to be... coming from my own mouth. What...? What could it be? I just kept listening to figure it out, even as I drew closer to the lovely lady standing, now slightly agape, next to the open door of her car in the parking lot.

"...easy 'cuz you're beautiful...." went the falsetto.  What was that? Then to my shock and horror, I heard my voice attempt the whistle, and I realized what had stuck in my head.

Because Phlegmmy had been singing it.

The hottie in the skirt hopped into her sports car and slammed the door.

I heard the door locks click.

I didn't feel as suave as I had exactly 10 seconds before.

I'll get you for this, Phlegmmy.

You want to fix the medical system? You want reform?

I've got a very simple law that we could pass that will go a LONG way toward medical healthcare reform.

Require that, within one business day, the healthcare provider give you a straightforward answer to this question:

"How much is this going to cost?"

Mom is in rehab for her new knee, which she had put in last week. The orthopedic surgeon called it one of the worst --if not the single worst-- knees that he's ever had to replace. He told me that Mom should have come in 10 years ago to get that knee swapped out. Mom's answer (she walked 150 yards in to the pre-op room, unassisted) is simply, "Yeah, but think of how far that replacement knees have advanced, in the last ten years." Good point.

Mom's a super star at rehab, and is actually being released early. This makes her cranky elder son very happy; we've been missing her next door. (Yes, I've been visiting daily, but it's not the same.) But when her family liaison person called me to ask me if I had any questions, I asked her, "What's the cost of this? How much are we saving daily by having her come home early? What is the average daily cost of her care?"

She didn't know, but turned me over to a person at their facility who could "better answer my questions." That lady didn't know, either. "We don't do any billing here," she told me. "That's done from the corporate offices in Pennsylvania."

But she went on to assure me that the bill was to be sent to Mom's insurance companies, who typically covered most of these things, before we'd ever get a bill.

"But somebody, somewhere, knows what this costs," I protested.

"No, we won't really know, until we bill the insurance companies, and see what they pay," she told me.

This is ridiculous.

The attitude that it doesn't matter, because there is insurance, is the reason why the costs are spiraling.

On the first of this month, I changed over from my old PPO to a new Health Savings Account*. Thus, when it's medically-oriented, I want to know what EVERYTHING costs.

I know what I make per hour. I know what the overhead is for my job. I could, after checking a few figures, answer the question "How much does it cost to run the police department in Matt G's little town for a single day?"

Why is this so hard?

________________________________
*I've got a $3000 deductible to fill each year, before my account turns into a classic PPO. My job kicks in $180 a month to a savings account that I pay out of.

Kel Tec

I'm a fan of Kel Tec.

Hear me out.

Back in the mid-to-late 1990's, when we were first beginning to see the first wave of states (including Texas) making concealed carry by its citizens an option, the choice in affordable, concealable, lightweight carry pistols in a decent caliber was pretty thin. If you wanted a gun that weighed about a pound or less, you pretty much had J-frame Airweight S&W revolvers firing 5 shots of .38 Spl. If you were willing to accept another several ounces to the package, you could get a Colt Officer's ACP, but you would blow your budget.

Then came Kel-Tec.

For under $200 in many shops, a citizen could buy a small 9mm pistol that weighed well under a pound, which would carry 11 shots. Double action only, the P11 was safe to carry, and it could be had with a nifty belt clip on it. It was at its time something of an innovation. The "frame," as I thought of it, was a plastic body that saved a lot of weight. The actual serial-numbered receiver was an aluminum insert that set in the plastic body. It was a marvel, in that it was at the time the lightest 9mm that I knew of.

I bought mine used for $125. (Which was actually a very good deal at the time.) It became my off-duty gun, and backup gun, worn clipped to the inside of my ballistic vest. I qualified with it every PD qualification for years. The only time that I ever had it malfunction was when I found some S&B ammo with particularly hard primers that it didn't care for. Easy fix: don't shoot that ammunition through that gun. It loved my department's duty hollowpoints. (Gold Dot).

When Kel-Tec offered their new P32, I was amazed again. How could a workable semi-auto be made that was under 3/4 of an inch thick, which weighed just 9 ounces? My father, who like me was a member of the KTOG site, vied to get one, and got a very early serial number. (Below 00150, if memory serves.) I shot it, and was only middlin' pleased. Later copies proved to be very reliable. Several of my friends and family got these tiny little guns that were actually smaller and lighter than previous .25 acp carry guns, and were happy.

About the time that I would have gotten one, though, Kel-Tec came out with their P3AT (pronounced "Pee Three Eighty"), which was almost precisely the same size and weight as its predecessor, the P32. (I believe that the P3AT is 1/32 of an inch wider.) I was so impressed with the lightweight, shockingly thin little .380, that I went out and bought one from Cheaper Than Dirt as soon as I got the scratch together, in the summer of 2004. I was glad that they had two in stock that night-- they were actually selling them as soon as they got them in, and with no haggling. For $260, I had my tiny gun. I got the little clip for it, and proceeded to carry it as my backup gun, wondering how I had ever put up with that thick brick of a P11 inside my vest. I had to be careful when I went to the jail, as I could actually forget that I had it on, when going in. (Jails are no-gun zones, even for cops.)

My P3AT ran fine on everything, except Winchester ammunition. Something about their rim thickness made it not run right in my gun. No problem-- there's a whole world of other ammo out there, and the rest of it ran fine in my pistol. I only had to deal with the fact that it came with terrible sights, and poor inherent accuracy. Head shots on silhouette targets were very chancy beyond 15 yards. Okay, okay: beyond 10 yards, it's hit or miss, and concentration is required to hit the head beyond 5 yards. I've been planning for the past few years to get a Crimson Trace laser for them, but Lord knows I don't ever leap into something too fast with guns.

The prices on these little plastic guns made them attractive to people on a budget, but they had something else going for them: real innovative concepts that allowed them to be lighter, thinner, more carriable than anything else in the market.

The problem was in the execution.

As I say, the accuracy of the first three Kel-Tec guns was marginal, at best. But at least mine were reliable. Well, mine were. But some people got some bad apples. The quality control was apparently not super-high. The good news was that Kel-Tec's customer service was pretty good. I had an ejector break on my P-11. I called up Kel-Tec customer service, and was sent a new one immediately, with no questions asked, and never even paid so much as postage.

My partner, who I had been hounding to carry some kind of gun off-duty, finally said that he would buy one of those cute little P3ATs, if I would find him one. I found a buddy who was selling his along with some accessories and ammo, and brokered the deal for him. His gun didn't work so well. We struggled with ammo combinations, and this last qualification, noted that it didn't eject well, and then didn't fire. I looked at it, and found that the extractor spring retention screw had backed out, which accounted for the problems with extraction. It also served as the firing pin retention screw, which accounted for the fact that the firing pin and its spring were gone. Not Present. Well, this was fixable. A call to Kel-Tec, and they again sent the parts free of charge. The lady with tech support cautioned us wisely: "Whenever you turn that retention screw, be sure to put some LocTite red on it before putting it back together!" Excellent advice. We found that the new package not only included a new firing pin and spring, but also a new screw, extractor, and extractor spring. I replaced them all on my partner's pistol, and qualified him on it at my range. The gun finally ran flawlessly.

While I would love for my partner to carry a more substantial gun off-duty, it took a gun this small, in a pocket holster, to get him to finally carry at all. As he's quite adept at irritating bad guys by putting them in prison, I am pleased to see him armed. So, interestingly enough, is his wife. As he is the sole income provider for their family of 5, and she is a full-time student, their budget is fixed. My partner can't afford fancy high-dollar alternatives. This is a good match for him.

Kel-Tec makes guns that gun snobs often sniff at. Their guns are plastic. They have a spotty record for running. They are inexpensive. But their customer service is superb. This is a large plus in my book. If you get one and it doesn't work, and they can't talk you through its fix, then send it Boca Raton, and see if they can fix it. You're not out too much money.

My online pal Oleg Volk does photography for Kel-Tec, and often has interesting stuff from them. At the last Blogorado, I shot his specimen of the then-BRAND-new PMR-30. It was a fascinating pistol: a lightweight semi-auto pistol in .22 WMRF that held thirty rounds. It seemed the ultimate backpack gun. Problem was, as we all passed it around and got it dirty shooting it, its functioning got to be unreliable. Maybe we shot it more than I thought, and the gun was just filthy. But it didn't seem to be. Maybe it was just too early of a copy. Maybe the bugs are worked out of the new ones. But I wouldn't just take that gun with me on a backpacking trip, and that's a shame; it was a really light, really accurate little flat-shooting pistol.

Oleg also brought an SU-16 rifle. It was light. It took AR-15/M16 magazines. It had an acceptable trigger. It was REALLY light. Good stuff, right? But it took me what felt like 30 seconds of "looking" with my index finger, to find the cross-bolt safety on the thing, as I looked through the sights on it. The ergonomics on the thing are just stupid. WHY would you put the cross bolt safety above and behind the trigger? I literally had to change my grip position to use it. Yes, I understand that it's nice to be different from the plethora of AR-15s on the market, but this is just dumb. I hope that Kel-Tec fixes it.

Now come the reports of Kel-Tec's first attempt at a shotgun: a dual-magazine tubed bullpup pump. The innovation, again, is there. It's got interesting features: Switch from one magazine to the other for different loads. Ambidextrous. Magazine cutoff. Sight mounting rail. Good stuff, right? Except for the flaws. It won't reset the trigger if you rack it while the trigger is still depressed. When Caleb asked Kel-Tec about this, they responded that this is just the civilian version, and that the military and police model will actually slam-fire when operated with the trigger depressed.

Um, what? As a firearms instructor for my department, I will NOT authorize a shotgun that goes "bang" without specially aiming and pulling the trigger. This isn't a good idea for police. Maybe military.

I don't know that George Kelgreen intended it to work this way, or if the marketing guys are just trying to make lemonade out of the lemons that their gun shows. ("It's not a flaw; it's a feature!") But I'm inclined to agree with my friend Tamara's assessment, that if Kel-Tec would just spend $25 more per gun, they'd really have something there.

Certainly, that's exactly what Ruger did, when they made an almost exact copy of the P3AT, and called it the LCP.

Proving his point, exactly.

I've always prided myself on being able to look at and try to understand the opposing viewpoint, even when I don't agree with it. Sometimes it's admittedly for irritainment, but often I'll review a viewpoint that I may believe is largely biased, in search of actual content. For the last 18 years, I've listened to a lot of National Psocialist Radio. I can't help it-- the stories are longer, the soundbites are longer, and sometimes the stuff in insightful. Other times while shouting at my windshield, I would have to call it incite-ful.

While Nina Totenberg and the rest can drive me nuts with their bias on occasions, I've generally been pretty impressed with one of their news commentators, Juan Williams. Don't misunderstand me-- I disagree with his views a lot. But I've respectfully disagreed with the man. He's not an idiot. He doesn't just parrot PC speech. But he's by no means on any particular wing of the political spectrum.

I was a bit surprised to learn that Fox News had him as a political contributor, but apparently, they hired him before they had decided to become The Voice Of The New Conservative. (Yes, I'm just as irritated at Fox as I am at NPR. Maybe more so, because Fox doesn't even hide that they're bending their broadcasts right, apparently in an attempt to straighten out the left-biased other reporting.)

It didn't surprise me at all that Juan Williams would be on as a guest on "The O'Reilly Factor." After all, Bill O'Reilly routinely takes on guests that he disagrees with, lets them say something that he finds discordant, and then talks over them, drowning them out to the glee of his followers. It's so common, it's hardly even an ambush anymore, as anyone that he interviews that has even seen his show knows that he's going to do it.

I suppose that Juan Williams thought that, given his other status as a paid commentator for Fox News, he would get a little professional courtesy out of Bill O'Reilly, and would be allowed to finish his point before being interrupted in a discussion about whether it was correct to generalize all Muslims as dangerous. Williams, who was making the point that it was wrong to make such sweeping generalizations, opened a comment with a disclosure of how he personally had a long way to go before he could drop his own stereotypes, citing an example of how he had felt uncomfortable on an airplane with several traditionally-dressed Muslim persons. He was then cut off, and that comment was left to hang, out of context.

Today, NPR has fired Juan Williams, saying remarks "were inconsistent with our editorial standards and practices, and undermined his credibility as a news analyst with NPR."

Apparently, the Council on American-Islamic Relations had complained.

I'm confused. The NRA has complained about how Nina Totenberg has shown blatant anti-2nd Amendment bias in her statements, but she hasn't been fired. (For that matter, the only time she has been fired was when she got caught plagiarizing, back in the '70s.) So you can rail against a constitutionally-guaranteed right on-air, but not candidly admit elsewhere (in a non-journalistic capacity) that you are overcoming personal biases that you find distasteful?

The meat of what Juan Williams was arguing with Bill O'Reilly about, at the time of the discussion at issue, was political correctness. And as Alan said to me this morning, "of course, NPR proves his point about paralyzing political correctness."

And so it goes.

You know there's something wrong when...

You know there's something wrong when the last Communist revolutionary holdout is talking like he is embracing capitalism and free market ideals more than "the leader of the free world."

Jeffrey Goldberg, a writer for the Atlantic Monthly magazine, wrote in a blog that he asked Castro, 84, if Cuba's model — Soviet-style communism — was still worth exporting to other countries and he replied, "The Cuban model doesn't even work for us anymore."
...
Goldberg said Julia Sweig, a Cuba expert at the Council on Foreign Relations think tank in Washington who accompanied him to Havana, believed Castro's words reflected an acknowledgment that "the state has too big a role in the economic life of the country."

This in contrast to our own ever-widening governmental net, fed by our own leader's plans to “spread the wealth around.”

Let's get one thing clear:

This is INCORRECT. I now question the judgment of the people that I work with, that one of them has done this.

No, no, NO!

I don't know how you're decorating YOUR house this season...

...but we're thinking outside of the box.


Yeah, this is my living room, and I must say, that I'm tickled pink with how small the hole in my living room floor actually is.

No, really.

Before you jackhammer your floor to fix a leak in your sewer pipe, I highly recommend hiring a plumber with a camera and leak-locating equipment to come out first. It was the best $250 we've ever spent.

We ought to have the patch on and the hole re-filled by this evening. Then I'll give it about a week for the concrete to cure before replacing the bamboo flooring.

Remember friends, don't forget to tip your snarker.

Friend Tamara is marooned 400 miles from home with near catastrophic brake problems and no money to speak of, and is making crazy talk about selling off guns.

I can't help but notice that she's got a little yellow Tip Jar button. I was impressed at how easy it was to use. For those of us who check into Tam's site for free every day and pay nothing, dropping a sawbuck or two is cheap, for the entertainment that we get.

You might help the lady out.

EDIT:

I noticed that the link to the little yellow tip jar button didn't work, probably because each click creates a discrete transaction number, which is how they keep things safe. Anyway, it's a yellow button to the top right (no, LabRat, your other left) of Tam's blog. Well, here-- it looks like this:

"I want you to LEAVE, now!"

I got told that again, this last shift. As a libertarian peace officer being told this by a person whom I know to be a resident of that location, my first consideration is whether I can accommodate this citizen's demand in good conscience. Does my duty entitle me to remain, when I have been told to leave? Does my duty actually require me to remain?

In this case, the report was of a family violence call, and I felt that my duty was to interview the family members individually, away from each other, before leaving. I separated them, to the irritation of the unctuous male. The female, alone and away from the male, lied to me said that everything was okay, and that they were just talking. I found no evidence of physical contact, and had no witness that was willing to give their name, and at this point withdrew. The male seemed surprised at my departure, because I had spoken rather firmly to him upon my arrival.

My backup officer told me later that the male (with whom I had conducted business before) had called me everything but Father Christmas, and had gone on about me being a dirty cop, who brought dishonor upon the badges of my peers.

[Sigh.] Another dissatisfied customer.

Haiku #13: Mother In-Law's Visit

She's here for four days

"Organizing" our whole house.

Bitch moved my coffee.

Sneaking out.

I've been dealing with kids sneaking out a lot, lately.

The simple act of sneaking out doesn't bother me very much. I did it all the time, as a teen. I never smoked dope or such, and usually wasn't very successful in amorous attempts. (Thwarted by loud dogs on one occasion, by a conscience that said she didn't seem enthusiastic and/or mature enough another.) But I probably should assume the worst, because frankly, most kids don't have even the basic impulse control that I had.

I'm finding that very young teenaged girls will go to amazing lengths to sneak out. They will meet up on cell phones. They will meet up on websites like Tagged.com (shudder). They will meet up on social networking sites like MySpace. They will bring home prepaid cell phones that their parents have no idea that they have. They will make arrangements at school, then carry them out after lights-out. They will walk. They will bicycle. They will steal the family car. The drive to expose your gametes to their opposite number is very, very strong, between the ages of 12 and 25.

I've caught teens lying on the grass behind a south-facing market, having sex without so much as a blanket or a coat, as a bitter 20 mph wind blew in a 30 degree norther. No condom, no fears, and neither could recall the others' last name.

Conversely, I've caught teens camping in tents that they erected in the back yard of their paramours for that "special" night with someone they'd just met.

I've caught teens feeling each other up on neighborhood playgrounds, in full view of the street. I've caught girls taking their date to the school dance around to a dark corner behind the school, where I found them on their knees and unzipping their dates' trousers as I rounded the corner.

I say this not out of amazement, or disgust with "how it's gotten to," but just in acknowledgement of how hard the task is, to rear kids that can make it to full adulthood without becoming parents or infected with a disease, first. The tools to meet others are very powerful, these days. Our ability to contain kids is much harder, with so many leaks in the security system.

I'm looking into the cost of wiring my house for an un-monitored alarm system, that will chime in the master bedroom whenever a window or exterior door is opened.

I'm also considering printing and framing select blown-up poster-sized photos of the most egregious examples of advanced venereal warts, and mounting them on my daughters' walls.

As usual,

The 2 dozen roses and pound of hand-made chocolates from a specialty store got nowhere near as much response as the house-cleaning did.

Well, hell, flowers don't look good in a cluttered kitchen.

Somebody hand me a tournequit.

And perhaps some Quick Clot.

I'm hemorrhaging money.

I expected, when I bought this house, to have to repair the foundation.
I expected to have to work on the air conditioner.
I expected the repair of the holes in the walls and ceiling (courtesy of the previous residents who were foreclosed on).
I expected the roof repair.
I expected the replacement of every square inch of flooring and counter top.

But now come the plumbing problems. I replaced the clean-out yesterday. I busted a hole through the floor in the kitchen yesterday, and am trying to dig out a sewer leak, exploring where I'm pretty sure the leak will be, instead of paying $580 to use the leak-finder service.

My hand is getting writer's cramp, writing all these checks until the money dries up.

Bah.