High Tech Red Neck

According to Slate’s Red or Blue–Which Are You? quiz, I am:

It’s time to get out of the sun. You’re looking a little red.

As if a little red, in this case, is bad.

I think the quiz was targeted to people who have lived in Wisconsin and Missouri and attended a Jesuit university. Jeez.

Some other commentators brag that they’re purple. That’s like saying your proud of your grey morals. As El Guapo indicated last night in a feeble blue defense of Farenheit 9/11, “There are two sides to every store.”

“Yeah,” our hero responded. “Right and wrong.”

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Brian Digs Up The Dirt on Michael Moore

So there I was at the happy hour, enjoying a refreshing Sierra Mist with some former coworkers because the bloody establishment stopped carrying Guinness on draught. I had purchased a copy of Michael Moore Is A Big Fat Stupid White Man as part of an intervention program for El Guapo, who apparently saw some value in something in Farenheit 9/11 besides the previews beforehand. So the book was lying on the table, which is quite unlike any of Michael Moore’s books, which lie anywhere they are, when a former x2 coworker (with whom I had worked at two different companies–hey, it’s a not what you know but who you know) joined us. She sat at the table, spotted the picture of the Macy’s parade-sized director, and made the noise and shudder with which we conservatives are familiar.

“I hate him,” she said.

The group at the table made agreeing noises, except for El Guapo, whose intervention is still in early stages.

No, she insisted, she hated him. Although we knew she was from Michigan, we did not know she was from Davison, Michigan, and that she graduated in 1973 from Davison High School–a year after Michael Moore was lifted by his parents’ bootstraps into graduation in that suburban school.

He had anger management problems even then, she informed us. She mentioned he played clarinet, although was third or fourth chair, and that he didn’t have a girlfriend in high school. There you have it: the MfBJN exclusive revelation. Michael Moore is an outcast band geek with no girlfriend gone bad.

I know, you’re thinking the same thing we all are: If only my former x2 coworker had made the ultimate sacrifice in 1971 and had gone out with that creepy Mikey guy, and maybe even, you know, kissed him, perhaps the world would have been spared his slothful wrath.

But friends, some sacrifices are too horrible to contemplate, much less ask.

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Another One That Previously Eluded My Attention

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the latest felony that has come to my attention courtesy of a news spot on the radio and confirmed by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:

The suspect, Dennis A. Hobson, 43, was charged with first-degree murder and armed criminal action in the death of Maxine Cheeks, 55. Police say Hobson led them to her badly beaten body on a vacant lot off South 14th Street near Soulard Street.

Hobson’s son, Antoine M. Ward, 26, of the 3000 block of Walton Place, was arrested Wednesday. He was charged with abandonment of a corpse, a felony.

Abandoning a corpse is apparently a felony. Because sometimes accessory after the fact just won’t do it. My goodness, why aren’t all murderers charged with this secondary crime that often succeeds the first?

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No Irony to See Here

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, in a story about government-mandated nonsmoking restaurants, cites a number of restaurant figures who say that the whole industry will be non-smoking in the near future because patrons want it.

The restauranteurs interviewed have restaurants with both smoking and non-smoking sections, so they’re not in a hurry to do what their patrons want, are they?

Instead, they wait for government to strip them of their property rights, and then they do what they say the public wanted all along.

If I had to guess, I would say that these quotables are mouthing the story line to get the name of their establishments listed in the paper. But I’m just cynical.

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LeMond….Le Monde….Coincidence?

Poor form, old boy, criticizing a countryman in a foreign paper:

The French newspaper Le Monde, which has previously leveled doping accusations at Armstrong, on Thursday ran an interview with three-time Tour winner Greg LeMond, who suggested he doubts his fellow American is drug free.

“Lance is ready to do anything to keep his secret,” LeMond was quoted as saying. “I don’t know how he can continue to convince everybody of his innocence.”

I don’t know if Lance is mainlining schucking Cheetah urine, but I can smell some amount of pungent envy trickling down someone’s leg, Greg.

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It Wasn’t Me

As previous co-workers can attest, I have always been, well, let’s just say “open to the [negative] possibilities” about the fiscal and marketplace health of my employers.

This reputation means I must firmly refute that this internal MCI memo refers to me at all:

It has come to my attention, that there is a small group of employees who are extremely negative in the work environment (and vocally so), about the future of a) MCI; and b) their current job status in Ashburn. I’m not sure what’s driving the doubt or the negative commentary, but I can tell you that it is unprofessional and I ask that you direct your concerns to me, directly, versus continuing the disruptive commentary with other colleagues.

Let me say unequivocally that I have never been to Ashburn.

And in case you’re wondering, my current employer’s position in the marketplace is non-existent and his fiscal position is tenuous, at best.

It’s less satisfying when you’re self-employed, though. Also, I have no coworkers with which to kvetch.

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Please Let Me Break This To Heather, Privately

Friends, I ask you to let me break this news to my beautiful wife when she returns from Buffalo tomorrow. I don’t want her to hear it on the news, and I don’t want someone else to mention it in an offhand e-mail or phone conversation. I know what it will mean to her, and I want to tell her in a safe place for her, where she’s surrounded by cats.

When we saw Spiderman 2 last week, I got out all of my comic books, four boxes’ worth, and showed them to her, and she showed me her smaller collection, which included a bunch of DC stuff and one fairly complete set of a single Marvel title. Dazzler. That mutant chick must have served as some role model for my wife as she grew up, and undoubtedly Heather will feel some deep connection to Dazzler, perhaps even a sense of protectiveness to Dazzler and what Dazzler meant to her.

So I just want to be there to comfort my beautiful wife, to hold her if she needs it, and to have some Puffs with lotion nearby, when I tell her that Jessica Simpson will play Dazzler in the next X-Men movie.

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The Former Television Critic Weighs In

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, which by the way does not include me as a columnist, has former television critic Eric Mink dissing the Bush Administration in a serious column. I guess Mink grew up and turned off the television and started reading the Post-Dispatch for news insights:

Late last week, yet another august body – this time the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence – issued yet another massive report again confirming that the U.S. intelligence establishment got just about everything wrong when it came to Saddam Hussein’s nonexistent biological, chemical and nuclear weapons.

But buried deep in the Senate report – little noticed and even less remarked upon – is something important that the committee credits the intelligence community for getting right. And it puts the torch to whatever flimsy tissue of credibility the Bush administration had left:

With respect to contacts between Iraq and al-Qaida during the 1990s, the committee found that the CIA “reasonably assessed . . . that these contacts did not add up to an established formal relationship.”

Got that? Without a mutual protection pact treaty, it didn’t exist, and Eric Mink is there to analyze it.

Wait a minute, Eric Mink, former television critic, is now the commentary editor for the Post-Dispatch editorial page? Muhahhahahaha! You cannot make this stuff up.

Of course, my chances of being a paid columnist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch will greatly diminish the next time Mink googles himself. To a slightly lower nil than they were before the search.

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Weird Cinematic Musing

Intermittent Pseudo-Bachelorhood, Day 2, wherein our hero watches Beat the Devil (1953) because it’s got Humphrey Bogart in it and he got it as a Christmas gift from his wonderful mother-in-law (hi, ML!). Upon reviewing this black and white piece filmed in Italy, which modern DVD technicians have not spent any time at all restoring, our hero muses that only 11 years passed between John Huston blowing a lot of budget in Europe on froo froo drinks for Truman Capote, the screenwriter, and another seminal film shot in Italia: A Fistful of Dollars.

I mean, jeez, man, the shift from black and white to color was huge, man, but that’s not all that changed. I mean, look at story pacing and film making conventions and see how they change in that decade and a tenth.

By way of comparison, look at how slowly things evolve after that. For example, the differences between Dirty Harry (1971) and The Dead Pool (1988). Minor. Between Dirty Harry and any of the others in its ilk. Sure, more stuff explodes now, and studios spend more money on fake-looking CGI, but you know, you could watch something from the 1960s and something from 2003 and not feel too out of place.

Crap, I think I had a point when I started this post. I forget it now. Perhaps it was merely to confirm to our hero’s wonderful mother-in-law that her Christmas gifts are going to good use–filling those awful, empty hours until her daughter returns.

Oh, yeah, and memo to Hollywood. Explain this to me: Beat the Devil is available on DVD, and The African Queen is not. What are you people doing out there? Hello?

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Venting the Venom

Hey, check out Thomas Sowell’s latest column, wherein he takes on the notorious extraneous bells and whistles software industry:

One of the maddening things about some computer programs and computerized products is their making you fight your way through a maze of complications to do simple things. Whether you want to play chess, take a picture, or do some other obvious and straightforward thing, you must first deal with a zillion options to do things you have no interest in doing.

The fact that there are innumerable features built into any product — whether computerized or not — does not automatically mean that you have to deal with the features you don’t want.

That’s because too much software is designed by developers, many of whom think vi was a pretty good interface.

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Best Columnist in St. Louis

The best columnist in St. Louis is David Nicklaus, business columnist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Check out the wisdom from his latest column taking on light rail groupies:

With what’s spent on the trains, Castelazo and Garrett figure that taxpayers could buy a Toyota Prius for each needy MetroLink rider and have $49 million a year left over.

It’s good to see someone in the Post-Dispatch examining the actual return on the copious public wealth redistribution the paper favors as a matter-of-course.

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Political Musings from Pseudo-Bachelorhood, Part XIII

Alternate Title: Embrace Your Mythology, America!

So let me get this straight, again: In The Magnificent Seven, Americans ride in to save a Mexican villiage from bandits, who happen to also be Mexican, and they ride out with fewer than the advertised seven. What propoganda! Forty-some years later, “sophisticated” Americans would appreciate no such venture.

Meanwhile, leftists diminish the sacrifice contained within this American myth by saying that:

  • White men oppressed red men
    Of course, ignore the fact that some white men and one partially brown man (Bernardo) saved brown men (and women and children) from oppression from other brown men.

  • Americans fight for their own interests
    Well, these seven Americans got twenty dollars, a low sum by the standards indicated within the film, to protect oppressed Mexican farmers.

  • Americans always win, and their heroes never run out of bullets.
    I know it’s out of fashion, but let’s run the numbers through this little bit of reality we call arithematic. Seven gunslingers, including those portraued by Charles Bronson, Robert Vaughn, James Coburn, Steve McQueen, and Yul Brenner ride in. Three ride almost out, but one decides he likes a Mexican babe and stays. Frankly, a less than fifty percent survival ratio is pretty low, even for realism circa the late 1800s that a Western embraces. Particularly that 22.2% returns to America, after defending the foreigners.

Pah, you all can guess what point I am trying to make. I am no Edith Hamilton or Joseph Campbell, but I understand the power of the stories we tell each other about our common heritage, and brothers, Abu Ghraib ain’t it.

P.S. In the arithematic of American mythology, the The Dirty Dozen (-11) and The Magnificent Seven (-4) do not yield the same actor in the role of survivor. Just in case you damn kids watched one, I wanted to inspire you to watch the other.

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Political Musings from Pseudo-Bachelorhood, Part XII

Alternate Title: When Was Hollywood Ever the Friend of Capitalism?

So let me get this straight: In This Gun For Hire, which “introduces” Alan Ladd and co-stars Veronica Lake, the “good guy” is an product of child abuse, and the “bad guy” is an old white guy who’s selling poison gas chemicals to the Japanese.

Hey, I appreciate the film as a story, but the theme indicates that Hollywood was not always in favor of capitalism. Remember that heyday of propoganda around World War II? A by-product of the future history, wherein the box office victors, which is to say the American people select those movies which represented John Wayne and company whipping the Axis, represent the remembered movies, and other films which presented a “nuanced” vision of America find themselves, 52 years later, represented by a single copy in Best Buy snapped up by an Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake fan. Undoubtedly, this Best Buy store sighed in relief and ordered an extra copy of The Transporter to cover the shelf space.

P.S. Note to studios: Alan Ladd. Veronica Lake. Raymond Chandler. For the love of all that is holy, release The Blue Dahlia on DVD.

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Not ACCOUNT DELETATION!

From today’s junk e-mail:

                          Dear U.S. Bank valued member,
       Due to concerns, for the safety and integrity of the Internet Banking community we have
issued this warning message.
 
       It has come to our attention that your account information needs to be updated due to
inactive accounts, frauds and spoof reports. If you could please take 5-10 minutes out of
your online experience and renew your records you will not run into any future problems
with the online service. However, failure to update your records will result in account
deletation. 
 
       Once you have updated your account records your online banking account will not be
interrupted and will continue as normal.
 
             Please follow the link below and renew your account information.

                                                              
                                                 U.S. Bank Internet Banking

Ladies and gentlemen, good grammar and good knowledge of proper English are a stalwart defense against junk e-mail.

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Scenes of Intermittent Pseudo-Bachelorhood, Part XII

Wherein our hero copes with life in a large household while his wife enjoys business-related adventures in Buffalo, New York.

“Crap! I can’t get the garlic bread residue off of this cookie sheet! Wait a minute….Heather will never miss one cookie sheet….”

Join us for our thrilling next adventure, when our hero tries to find a new cookie sheet with which to replace the new contents of his garbage can. Where do you buy cookie sheets? Like, Best Buy is all out of them…..

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I Hope They Got a Good Price on That Print Job

A hearty, hey, yer knuckleheads to the folks at the Home Handyman Club of America, whose membership I am abandoning since it managed to lose my subscription renewal a couple years ago, and then promptly sent me books I refused and for which they continued to bill me.

As a new example of its genius, it has sent me a professionally-printed envelope that instructs those suckers seeking to renew to enclose the invoice so that the club address appears in the window on the other side. The problem? It’s not printed on a window envelope. All the better for our recycling bin.

Man, I am glad I never had these handy fellows over to help me do anything to my house.

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Real World Experience Apparently Worthless

Meanwhile, back in the San Francisco Chronicle, David Lazurus reads the grounds in his coffee cup to undercover conspiracy! in the nomination of Francis Harvey as Secretary of the Army:

President Bush was widely reported last week to be on the verge of nominating local boy Francis Harvey to serve as secretary of the Army. So let’s meet the man who may soon be the newest player in the top ranks of the military-industrial complex.

Harvey, a Los Gatos resident, sits on the board of Bridge Bank of Silicon Valley and is a member of the board of regents of Santa Clara University. But it’s a safe bet that neither of these gigs placed him in the running for the Army’s senior civilian post.

More likely, it was Harvey’s ties to the defense industry and the influential Carlyle Group that won him the Bush administration’s favor.

Okay, let me summarize how this left coaster knocks Harvey:

  • Harvey is former chief operating officer for a division of Westinghouse Electric, a leading defense contractor.
  • Harvey sits on the board of a couple companies affiliated with the Carlyle Group, an investment company.
  • Because the Carlyle Group has had as its “advisers and leaders” (which could mean that among the numerous firms funded or invested in by the company, an investment company for crying out loud) numerous other, well, leaders, it is obviously the American Illuminati Clubhouse.
  • Harvey serves as vice chairman of Maryland’s Duratek, which specializes in the handling and disposing of radioactive materials. Oddly enough, the Departments of Defense and Energy do business with firms that handle and dispose of radioactive materials. The Department of Education does not–and that in itself must insinuate something!
  • Harvey is a board member of Carlyle-owned Kuhlman Electric, a maker of transformers. Even though it has no defense contracts, it’s Carlyle-owned and therefore must do something bad, of which Harvey is undoubtedly the mastermind, or in which he is implicitly explicitly complicit.

So what does it all mean? That if Harvey is confirmed, he will favor his friends and companies for which he’s worked? How will Haliburton stand for it?

I guess the messages we can take away from this column, and those of its wide stripe, are that the only people qualified to run the government are not people who have real world experience managing organizations in relevant fields; oh, but no, the only people qualified for appointment are people who have hidden in academia or in newsrooms for most of their adult lives. These people have integrity, and presumably no friends to help.

Also, the second message is that any appointment from the business world would not throw himself into a new, govern-mental position with the same enthusiasm for maximizing resources and utility that made him or her successful in business and worthy of appointment; oh, but no, once they’re on the government payroll, it’s all about sucking the teat, unlike academics, intellectuals, or integrous media or entertainment icons.

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Activists Are Standing By

This column in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch indicates that Missouri currently does not have seatbelt laws for pets:

On Illinois and Missouri’s state highways, though, that’s perfectly legal, police say. Not for a dog to drive with no hands, but for one to roam free in a vehicle. There are no laws against it, and a lot of pet owners let it happen.

In a 2002 survey by the American Animal Hospital Association, 74 percent of 1,200 pet owners in Canada and the United States said they don’t use pet restraints while on the road.

The association, though, said that could cause trouble. It urges owners to use harnesses, seat belt attachments, or carriers.

“They help protect pets in case of a collision, and they keep pets from running loose and distracting the driver,” the association’s Web site says.

Undoubtedly, though, a crack team of activists are, well, acting to ensure this travesty will not continue, and that eventually drivers will not be allowed to have any unsecured item floating around the cabin of the car. Fast food wrappers, CD cases, pets, and loose change–by 2013, legislators will mandate that you need to lock all of these down as though you were piloting the space shuttle through re-entry every time you go down to the U-Gas for a lotto ticket and a fill-up.

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Let the Cacaphony Begin!

Let this story in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch with the headline 3-year-old wounds grandmother with gun lead to a bevy of batties in the belfry rattling their sightless bodies in favor of more gun control legislation because of this stupid, preventable accident.

Because they need a break from their machination mastications that take place in favor of banning cars whenever some SUV-armored pinhead on eating while on a cell phone plows into a Honda and shuts down I-270 for hours.

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