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.

First Recording

Tonight our son, a lad quite fascinated with remotes, got a hold of our TV remote, rather than his remote that controls nothing, and not only turned on the TV, but also recorded 8 minutes of the NBC Nightly News. Good times!

Stonehenge Cracked

Wally Wallington (wow) a retired construction worker believes that he has cracked the mystery behind how Stonehenge was constructed. Using only technology from the time period he seems to have devised a method capable of such an engineering feat.

Moral Equivalency or Why PETA Members Cannot Think

The fallacy of moral equivalency occurs when a person or group fails to understand the existence of distinctions between types of entities. For example, PETA protested at the Westminster Dog Show in KKK attire. Their claim was that the selective breeding of dogs was morally equivalent to the "master race" theories of the Ku Klux Klan. The fallacy comes into play here as the members of PETA fail to understand, once again, the distinctions between humanity and canines. While it is noble to protest the abuse or mistreatment of dogs, if does damage to their cause, when PETA demostrates their inability to think clearly and protests at an event where the dogs in question receive better pampered treatment than most of us receive ourselves. What might have begun as a nobly intended organization, has once again demonstrated moral and intellectual bankrupcy. Just like you cannot cry "Meat is Murder" without redering our food equivalent with our children, you cannot have equal moral distain for the KKK and the Westminster Kennel Club.

Cut from the Super Bowl

The ad below was apparently set to be aired during the Super Bowl, until NBC decided not to air it due to its "political content." I am not sure why if the makers of the ad had the money to air it during the Super Bowl, they are not seeking donations to help get it aired elsewhere, but the ad itself is rather interesting.

New Skills

Recently our son has been working on waving. I say working because though he has the motion down rather good, the context for using a wave is sometimes off. Some of the time he seems to wave more at his friend the ceiling fan then his parents. When he does wave at us, like the first night that I came home to see him wave hello to me, it is heart meltingly special.

Now the interesting additional twist to his work on waving, is that while working out the motion with his left hand, he seems to have inadvertently taught himself how to snap. Yes, that's right, he will be nine months in a week and he has already figured out snapping his fingers. Now, really he just snaps while trying to wave, but I'll take it. Waving or snapping it is awful cute!

Driving It Into the Ground

Today, I was listening to Rocket to Russia by the Ramones. Track 13 is Surfin'Bird. Naturally I was then lead to recall The Family Guy driving the original song into the ground as only they can. So here you go, enjoy.

Two Prayers - One God - Maybe?

Here you will find two prayers offered on the occasion of the inauguration of Barack Obama. Listen carefully to see if the God that these two men pray to is in fact the one and same God that their Christian traditions claim to worship. The first is offered by Gene Robinson, openly gay Episcopal bishop. The second is Rick Warren, mega-church evangelical pastor and author.

A Spot of Political Humor

Odd Commercial - Thanks Skittles

Used into oblivion

Watching TV the other day, I noticed a commercial for P Diddy's line of "Ultra Premium Vodka." That got me to thinking. Are there really, say three levels of vodka quality: Regular (for lack of a better term), Premium, and Ultra Premium. Why not Super Ultra Premium? Or what about Mega Super Ultra Premium? Where I ended up in my thinking was that what I was seeing was evidence that advertising destroys words.

If calling your product "premium" improves sales, hey call it "premium." If everyone calls their product "premium" however the word starts to loose the cache that it once had (i.e. the meaning of the word has been destroyed). Thus you need to find other ways to distriguish your product from the glut of other "premium" products on the market. Enter "ultra premium." It's like Disney calling their latest animated film an "instant classic." The words no longer have meaning.

What I don't think the ad wizards behind this get, is that every time they up the ante, they lower our expectations with regard to their claims. The more you promise, the less we buy it. They find ways to scream louder and louder for our dollars, only to find that we turned them off a half hour ago.

Try just selling me a good product. Don't talk to me about more taste, whatever that is? And don't try to string together enough adjectives that you think I will finally want a bottle of Extreme Mega Super Ultra Premium Vodka.

More Lessons in Not Getting It

While checking my yahoo e-mail account for the latest random "See my pix" spam, I ran across the following new item: "Obama's choice of evangelical pastor draws ire." It seems that Obama has selected Rick Warren to deliver the invocation at the inauguration. "But the Human Rights Campaign, the nation's largest gay rights organization, said Warren's opposition to gay marriage is a sign of intolerance."

So let me understand this, the Human Rights Campaign is intolerant of Rick Warren's intolerance, right? Now no one in the media is going to make this connection. Intolerance only works in one direct anyway, right? Since those who believe the homosexuality is a sin are already branded as intolerant it is therefore fair game to be intolerant toward them. The only flaw in this logic is that the very groups making a major issue out of the toleration of others are the ones themselves who seem least capable of demonstrating any tolerance of others. And Christians are the ones called hypocrites. Hey pot, what color are ya?

Proof of Freedom in Iraq

Since the shoe throwing at President Bush, I have been thinking that what this shows is that Iraq has a much greater level of freedom than in the recent past. What do you think would have been the reaction of Saddam had this been done to him?

Random Fact from History

December 11, 1792 Josef Mohr, German Roman Catholic priest and hymnist who wrote the words to "Silent Night" was born in Salzburg, Austria.

A Black President as Envisioned by Richard Pryor

Found this and just had to. Enjoy!

Out of Gas

I have come to expect that about once a week my car will be out of gas. That is predictable, that is expected. What I did not expect was that my running out of gas would coincide with the gas station I stopped at to get gas running out of gas. I pulled into the station, pulled out my credit card, swiped the card, selected the grade of gas, pumped exactly 1.172 gallons, and then watched as the pump just stopped. I pressed the help button only to have the display tell me to go inside to see the cashier (not sure why I needed a button to tell me that). The cashier assumed that it was an issue with the pump or that I really didn't need that much gas, but after assuring him that I indeed was on empty, he charged $20 to my card and sent me out to try again. On the way out I ran into a guy who was also having no luck getting gas. Undaunted I returned to the pump to verify that indeed nothing was to be forth coming, so I returned to the cashier to inquire if indeed they actually had any gas. Nope, they did not. So tell me this, if I driving a car have a light that tells me when I am about to run out of gas, would it not make sense for there to be some light or other way of letting gas station employees know that they have run out of gas. It would only make sense to me that they would. The upside is that 1.172 gallons was the first gas I have been able to get for $1.999 in a long time. The downside is that the remaining 12 gallons we a dime per gallon more costly.

Soothed by Sir Paul

Last night before my wife got home from work, I was entertaining our son watching a Genesis concert from their recent Turn It On Again Tour. As the concert ended, I sat him up only to get my hand slimmed by his drool. I failed to have a burp cloth within reach so I had to lay him back down to get it. As I did so, he immediately began to cry. Yet this crying did not last. Just as he started the Genesis tour credits ended and a video of Paul McCartney's recent song "Ever Present Past" came on. My son, lying on the ground with his head toward the TV, strained to look up and watch Sir Paul perform. Problem solved, he was soothed by Sir Paul.