Great Quote

"I love Vegetarians. That's all I eat." Ted Nugent

All Star Balloting

OK just have to get on this soap box. Not to worry, this should be brief. To date Manny Ramirez has received 858,353 votes for the MLB All Star Game. This places him 5th in voting for Outfielders. What further message is this to our kids? Dope up and not only succeed, but get honored for your troubles. Fantastic message, thanks Major League Baseball.

Destructive Use of Language

I am a firm believer that the way in which one uses the English language has an impact. When a society loses the clear definition of a term, conceptual understanding related to that term is sacrificed. The recent news about Judge Sotomayor's comments with regard to her being more qualified to make judicial judgments based on her race and gender has been described as "reverse racism." Adding the term "reverse" implies that racism is something white people do, but not something done to white people. This is utter foolishness. Racism is racism is racism. Regardless of the races involved the intentional denigration of one race in favor of another is racism. Calling this "reverse racism" is dangerous because it divides these kinds of comments into categories that can be used to establish justification for dismissing so called "reverse racism" as something other than true racism. I was pleased to see that Sotomayor repudiated her statement, but the lasting damage from the media mismanagement in covering this, I fear will be longer lasting.

The Quarter I cannot discard

Last week, while at lunch, someone put a quarter in my that I have not fully been able to discard so... here is a brief rant to the subject.

I was chatting with a Red Sox fan, yeah, I don't know why either, when the question of the name of the Angels as the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim came up. He questioned whether, I as a fan objected to the name change or found it as obserd as he did. Now, I grant that the "of Anaheim" bit is nutty, but the team has merely reverted back to its original name. Besides (hear the quarter drop now) there are plenty of teams with similar name issues that you don't hear much about. Here are the examples that came to my mind (feel free to add any I miss):

1. New York Giants/Jets - Play in New Jersey
2. Golden State Warriors - Not ever the actual name of a locality
3. New England Patriots - What Boston not enough for you or Massachusets for that matter (Why not just let Jerry Jones do what we all know he would love to do and rename the Cowboys the "Cowboys of America")
4. Any team named after a state - Need I explain?
5. Any team named after a non-thing - What is a Wild, a Magic, or Heat?

OK I feel better now. Time to move on.

Obama's 100 Days

Since the media is having so much fun extolling the virtues of President Obama and his first 100 days in office, I thought I might review just the past few days to see just what we are not looking at in order to examine the grand fiction that is his first 100 days.
$328,835 spent on a flight by Air Force One over New York. The President claims his did not know and has ordered and investigation. There seem to be two potential issues. 1) He did know and has lied now that it back fired. 2) He really did not know and thus we have a President who can lose track of Air Force One. Neither is a good option.

Then there is tonight, on the news President Obama referring to his administration not recommending closing the Mexican border due to swine flu as akin to closing the barn door after horses have gotten out. Thus since we alreay have cases in the US there is no point in preventing more. What? How does that make sense? How about this analogy? Well since you have already hit me with your car, why don't you just back up and try again.

All this is ignoring the 180 on many social issues, homeland security, and international relations issues that have marked the first 100 days, and some how NBC runs with the idea that Obama's first 100 days have hurt the GOP. I am not long sure what planet I am on.

What's in this mush?

Have you ever taken the time to read the ingredients on a jar of baby food? Yesterday while out to dinner, my wife pulled out a jar of what on the front label claimed to be ham, pineapple, and rice. Odd combination in my mind, and apparently in the mind of both my wife and her parents also at dinner with us. So we read the ingredients. Apples, water, ham...wait, what? Apples? Further down the list we found peach puree. What do apples and peach puree have to do with ham, pineapple, and rice? One could only assume that the original combination was just as odd as I thought, and perhaps was a bit nasty tasting. At any rate it was interesting to discover that the largest ingredient was not even listed on the front label.

Useless Media Words

Listen to political coverage these days and you will hear a pair of trendy words that in fact bear no meaning. "Unity" and "bipartisan" lack any substantive meaning in today's political rhetoric. At least their meaning is not revealing in an honest way. I have come to believe that bipartisan, when referenced by the media, is a call for conservatives to knuckle under and just go along with a liberal/progressive agenda. Similarly, unity is intended to convey the need for America to come together, forsaking all prior ideologies and adopt a liberal agenda. In both cases, I fail to see any true unity or bipartisan considerations. Unity is not adopted by force of will and bipartisan politics do not come at the expense of alternative views.

For more thoughts on Obama's notion of unity read here.