Hot Sellers in Nigeria

JC T-Shirts: They could be hot sellers in Nigeria!

That’s what I assume from this e-mail I received:

    Hello,
    We want to order some product from your store to our store in lagos,Nigeria.First of all,we will like to know maybe you shipp via (USPS GLOBAL EXPRESS 4-5 DAYS DELIVERY SERVICE).And the method of payment will be made by major credit card. Kindly respond to this enquiry as soon as possible.Looking forward to hearing from you soon.
    Best regards.

Accept a credit card payment and drop ship to Nigeria? What could possibly go wrong?

But you, gentle reader, can still order any of these snazzy designs through Cafe Press:



Visualize World Hegemony
Visualize World Hegemony


Cog in the Machine
Cog in the Machine

Tao Sharks
Tao Sharks

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Post-Dispatch Finds Big Government ‘Republicans’

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch has dug deeply and found some ‘Republicans’ incensed about Governor Blunt’s government cuts:

Malinda Terreri, a homemaker from Ballwin, contends that Gov. Matt Blunt is ill-informed and pursuing “a path of political suicide.”

Rajesh Shah, a Creve Coeur physician, accuses the governor of displaying “a lack of maturity” and “playing the ‘class’ card” for political gain.

Both are Republicans who said they voted for Blunt in the fall. They might not do so again.

Blunt angered them and thousands of other parents when the cost-cutting measures he outlined with his State of the State address included eliminating the state’s First Steps early childhood program.

What kind of parents/Republicans are they?

The media-savvy parents have held a news conference, packed a Jefferson City hearing room, appeared on television and flooded the phone lines and computers of the governor and legislators with hundreds of calls and e-mails protesting the plan.

Terreri, the mother of a 3-year-old boy with autism, quickly set up an Internet site – savefirststeps.com. The site has collected more than 40,000 signatures on a petition to preserve the program, and also features a forum where backers regularly post their irritation with the governor’s proposal.

The kind directly benefitting from the program they want to save and who are savvy enough to hold a news conference, get some fawning coverage from the socialist St. Louis daily, and collect 40,000 clicks on an Internet petition–which are not signatures, dear Post-Dispatch.

Too bad these people don’t have the energy to pursue non-coercive charitable solutions to their problems, but that’s much harder, since it requires constant effort, whereas getting a government program requires only an investment to get the program started and then to infrequently fight program cuts.

Although I have to say, it surprises me to see the Post-Dispatch coming down on the side of the upper middle class or lower upper class, but they’re taking government handouts, so they’re okay:

Shah, the father of an autistic son, replied that the wealthy pay plenty of taxes and have just as much right to First Steps as they do to drive the state’s public highways and attend public schools. “To suggest that the very wealthy should not receive these services is inconsistent with the Republican message,” Shah said.

I’m not sure that’s the Republican message.

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Thanks for Checking In

Former TV critic for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch Eric Mink says:

Happy birthday, Kim Jong Il!

I think he goes on to say that Bush has failed on North Korea policy or something. I couldn’t stomach much past his picture.

Those who cannot do television criticism, edit the Op-Eds. According to the Post-Dispatch, anyway.

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Clarity in Statistical Reporting

A story in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports:

David Laslo, director of Metropolitan Information and Data Analysis Services at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, presented his study at a meeting Thursday at UMSL.

His research showed that St. Louis County’s population loss spiked in 1998, but has been on a general upward swing since, although it dipped in 2002 and 2003.

Graph that in your mind. And then send a copy to me care of this blog, would you? I get vertigo when I try to figure out what that professional journalist means.

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Today’s Trivia

From an AP article entitled “WWF Warns on Man-Made Arctic Toxins” that apparently seeks to outlaw everything Gaia doesn’t like:

Only a tiny fraction of the estimated 30,000 to 70,000 chemicals made worldwide are banned, even though many more may be harmful, the report said.

In related trivia:

  • Of the hundreds of thousands of plants grown in American homes, only a tiny fraction is pot, but many more would stink up your house if you dried them and lit them on fire.
  • Of the millions of cars on American roads, only a tiny percentage will be in accidents, although any of them can be lethal if accelerated to their top speeds and run into unyielding objects.
  • Of the gazillions of gallons of water in the world, only a small amount causes death by inhalation, but all of it is potentially lethal unless you’re Kevin Costner’s character in Waterworld.
  • Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine.

Subtitle this piece Subsets for Effect.

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Book Report: L.A. Requiem by Robert Crais (1999)

It’s a tough series. I liked the first books, but somewhere my enjoyment peaked, and I’ve enjoyed succeeding novels less. L.A. Requiem continues the trend. Not only does it have personal life melodrama for the detective, but it also features combinations of point-of-view and narrators that rather detract from the story. Elvis Cole tells the majority of the book in first person, but the book also cuts away to flashbacks in the third person starring Joe Pike and other third person views into what the perpetrator’s doing. I understand Crais did this to add suspense, but I think we could have gotten along without it.

The book centers around the death of Joe Pike’s former flame and involves a revenge murder framed on Pike. There’s some element of foreshadowing in the book, not really helped by the narrative changes, and although the perpetrator was introduced early as a minor character, the climax rather blindsided me. Also, the denouement of the piece lasted several wordy pages and featured a couple of deus ex maquina things I could have lived without.

I only have two non-Elvis Cole books and two Elvis Cole novels (including one released yesterday) to read yet, and I have this sinking feeling that once I’m done, I’ll be glad I’m done. And I probably won’t read them again.

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Red Herring

Does Michelle Malkin oppose competition? It’s hard to discern her stance from the sentences in her post entitled The Impact of Immigration of Wages in Arkansas, wherein she frames a link to a Wall Street Journal article. Malkin comments:

The news side of the Wall Street Journal has conceded that immigration depresses wages among blue-collar workers.

That’s not a bug, that’s a feature. Competition among workers drives manufacturing costs down and should inspire the best of those employees to aspire to something better–instead of annual or union-driven raises to do the same thing over and over. The competition keeps costs down and makes for cheaper manufactured goods and for easier expansion for business owners. Regardless of from whence the workers come.

I cannot espouse an argument against immigration based on its economic impact to lowering prices. Sorry.

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Taxing Behavior


States Mull Taxing Drivers By Mile
:

It’s [a hybrid car] great for Just but bad for the roads he’s driving on, because he also pays a lot less in gasoline taxes which fund highway projects and road repairs. As more and more hybrids hit the road, cash-strapped states are warning of rough roads ahead.

Officials in car-clogged California are so worried they may be considering a replacement for the gas tax altogether, replacing it with something called “tax by the mile.”

Seeing tax dollars dwindling, neighboring Oregon has already started road testing the idea.

Keep that in mind whenever your government wants to tax a behavior, such as using gas, smoking, drinking, or using a telephone. When that behavior changes, the spending remains, so the government will have to finally demonstrate some creativity–not in cutting spending, but in taxing something else for money to waste.

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When the Irony-Impaired Illiterates Attack!

A comment on my beautiful wife’s blog:

Dude i dont know who you are but to sit and make evry post about peta is probably the dumbest thing you could do ecpecially since you arnt posting about other animal rights groups like SHARK, ASPCA and so on. DO you not hav anything better to do than blog about something you clearly no nothing about? I am vegan and at the same time I respect peoples opinions they give me bc they are smart educated people and I always have time to listen to their opinions. I would never belive the things you post and write bc there is nothing you can back it up with. You just copy and paste things on your blog making it as though you know what your talking about. Grow up stop judging peoples lifestyles especially poeple you dont know. Dont judge a lifestyle you know nothing about either. You need to learn that everyone deserves respect for wanting to make a difference in the world and make some change.

You blog is as pathetic as it gets…

The troll mandates for you…. The troll then says….
Dont judge a lifestyle you know nothing about either. You just copy and paste things on your blog making it as though you know what your talking about.
I respect peoples opinions they give me bc they are smart educated people and I always have time to listen to their opinions. Grow up stop judging peoples lifestyles especially poeple you dont know.
You need to learn that everyone deserves respect for wanting to make a difference in the world and make some change. You blog is as pathetic as it gets…

All this, and the troll was undereducated in the mysterious ways of English. Fortunately, gentle reader, I know you are smarter, better spoken, and have a better grasp of logic. Just in case, though, I do not have comments enabled to spare me my illusions.

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Book Report: Two Classical Comedies edited by Peter D. Arnott (1958)

I bought this book for a quarter at some long ago yard sale, so I beat the price of the Amazon resellers and I didn’t have to pay for shipping. Neener neener neener.

The book includes two classical comedies: The Birds by Aristophanes and The Brothers Menaechmus by Plautus. The first playwright was Greek and the second Roman; the book was designed to give the layman, or perhaps the student, an introduction to the comedies of both civilizations.

The Birds, oddly enough, does not appear to have been the source material for Alfred Hitchcock’s movie of the same title–or any other Alfred Hitchcock piece for that matter. Two Athenians lead the birds as they assert their authority over gods and men. They speak highly, in verse, and I don’t appreciate much of the esoterica, even with footnotes. As the older play, oddly enough, it would work more as a modernist play; the characters wear masks, and the action is more absurd. If I didn’t know an ancient Greek had written it, I would have guessed it was written by a French academic or someone who came through an English program today.

The Brothers Menaechmus deals with the mistaken identity that ensues when a long lost twin brother appears and inadvertently intercedes in a squabble between his brother, the brother’s wife, the brother’s mistress, and a parasite who lives off of the brother’s largesse. The structure more clearly represents the Shakespearean and later comedies of relationships and errors, where the action is more realistic and less stylized. Ergo, I could relate to it much better and enjoyed it more. Also, it’s not the source material for The Brothers Karamazov and it’s 970+ pages shorter–and that comparison alone makes any book better.

Still, although I was educating myself in the classics but not in the classical languages, I read uncredited translations, so my experience is filtered through the translator’s interpretation and vocabulary, but the 1958 copyright date might indicate that the translation preceded the abominable trend of using too much contemporary idiom, which might make a translated work more accessible to the decade’s hepcats, but really makes the book useless as a long term backlister–or cheap pickup at a garage sale.

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Answering the Rhetorical

Dear Rhetorical Question Answerer:
When did Motley Crue become classic rock?
                                    Bowling for Soup

Dear Bowling for Soup,
Motley Crue began its transition from vital music makers to the classic rock and oldies market when they released Decade of Decadence in 1991. Any time a musical group releases a greatest hits collection, it gambles. The very name greatest hits indicates that there will be no further hits as good, and a retrospective look at the band also makes the casual fan wonder if the band is done. Even if the album includes new material, its target audience is the cult fan who wants to own everything the band puts out and the people who, years later, decide they want to own a collection of the band’s songs.

Looking over Motley Crue’s discography, it proves true enough. Between Dr. Feelgood and the two releases in 1994, two complete high school classes matriculated without new Crue, and you could only hear them on album rock stations and other retrospective-looking outlets.

So to answer your question, BfS, the best date we can give is 1991.

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Ask Not, "How Stupid Can Your Government Be?"

Lasers warn pilots of restricted airspace:

The U.S. military is planning a final demonstration Friday night of a ground-based laser system designed to warn pilots who have flown into restricted airspace over the nation’s capital.

During the demonstration of the Visual Warning System, a test aircraft will be illuminated with alternating red and green laser lights, said Michael Kucharek, spokesman for the North American Aerospace Defense Command.

“It’s an attention-getter, but it’s not blinding,” Kucharek said. “It’s not a distraction. So pilots can still focus on flying the aircraft without endangering anyone or themselves.”

After warning pilots and law enforcement to watch out for terrorists using lasers to blind pilots and crash jets, the military is going to use lasers to literally light up plane cockpits like a Christmas tree when they enter restricted airspace.

Not a distraction? Whose lives are you betting?

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Apostrophe Abuse Continues

I first saw this new form of apostrophe abuse on a late night car dealer’s ad (Yes, George Weber, you’re the offender). However, I see that even CNN is doing it now:

CNN abuses the apostrophe

The new abuse: putting 05′ to indicate 2005. You schnucking cretins, don’t you understand the apostrophe represents what was removed? It ought to be ’05, to signify that you, like John Donne and William Shakespeare, have removed something where the apostrophe is.

Oh, but no. Now, in addition to being the tick mark to indicate feet instead of inches, according to the new rules, you can sprinkle an apostrophe any where you want to indicate something in the expression has been truncated. Because readers love puzzles, and maybe they’ll click the link or go to the automobile showroom to find out just what the illiterate meant.

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It’s Not Overexuberant Government, It’s Marketing

The cover story from the latest issue of Integrated Solutions frightened me, since it told me about how the state of Washington was earning money: Imaging Success Is No Accident: The Washington State Department of Transportation improves access to collision reports and earns $4 million in additional revenue with a document capture solution.

However, I skimmed to the end of the article and discovered how the state of Washington is "earning" that money:

Due to the increased efficiency of this document management system, WSDOT is no longer in danger of losing federal funding. The system also is helping the agency raise extra revenue. WSDOT estimates it is now collecting between $3 and $4 million annually for damage to state-owned property that it was previously unable to obtain. “It used to take a long time to get the paper reports for a specific accident,” says Stanley. “By the time we tracked down who was responsible, the insurance case was closed.”

They’re recovering damages from insurance companies for state property, probably non-vehicular, damaged in auto accidents. So losing less money is really earning money.

Unfortunately, although I don’t think whomever came up with that turn of phrase–whether a puffing state employee or the writer who was looking for a marketable spin for his piece–meant to engage in Newspeak, but when it’s inadvertent, it’s much more disheartening.

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