Other Trophies, Mounted

I got tired of these old games just cluttering the shelves in my desk, so I decided to mount them on the wall:


Old handheld games mounted on the wall

Click for full size

I put some adhesive-backed Velcro on the back of the games and the loop side of the Velcro on the wall (with a couple of staples to help the adhesive). Now, when I want to play, I can just reach up and grab one for a dose of 1980 electronic blip goodness, and when I’m not playing, they display rather nicely.

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Book Report: City by Clifford D. Simak (1952)

This is a very interesting book.

It’s a collection of connected short stories that take place over the course of 20,000 years as mankind travels to other planets in the solar system, advances in technology, and slowly loses its civilization until the dogs and then the ants take over.

That is, cheap land (hydroponics replaces farming, which leads to cheap land), cheap transportation, and a benevolent central government make it so all mankind, or at least the ones in America and Europe, can live on lots of land. Cities (including the city in the lead short story that leads to the name of the book) break down as there are fewer people to fund services that no one really uses any more, but the local governments insist upon providing. Then, agoraphobia sets in as man grows very accustomed to his surroundings and does not want to leave his homestead for anything. This leads to a surgeon who specializes in Martian anatomy failing to help a friend, a Martian philosopher who has discovered a philosophy that could advance mankind hundreds of thousands of years. Then, a descendent of the fellow learns how to build a star drive, and another descendent advances dogs to speaking and learning.

The book has a frame story as a scholarly tract relaying myths and legends of man. A dog scholar, way in the future, discusses each story and outlines the controversies between other dog scholars who might or might not believe the stories or true or that the race of man existed at all.

The book is a quick enough read, and it really looks into a number of themes of race (human) versus individuals and the programming of the race (in the book, man is unperfectable in that he will always be warlike and future non-human civilizations must be protected from his influence). However, it’s not that straight man is bad, since other animal races, when raised, retain some bloodlust and desire to hunt. So it’s a very thought-provoking book, and although you can somewhat figure out what Simak thinks, the author leaves you room to ponder.

That’s old school science fiction.

I understand a later edition of the book has an additional epilog added. I’ll have to hunt that one down so I can find out what that means. The book I read was the old edition.

I’ve read some Simak before even though I can’t find any reports on the book the blog here. I don’t mind reading another if I find it at a book fair or even on my own shelves.

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Conspiracy Theory Du Jour

You know when they started changing the way American money looks after like 50 years of quarters and dollar bills to make them look more like foreign monies?

They were planning to devalue the currency even then.

Think about it, man. Suddenly, you’re looking at your pile of change on your dresser and you can’t tell your fifty different US quarters from Canadian money or your nickels from other silver coins, and suddenly your big, colorful five dollar bills have a 3-d image of Lincoln on them. You start thinking, this isn’t the money I grew up with. This isn’t real money at all.

Then, BAM! It ain’t.

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It’s A Retail Operation, People

The conservative blogs are spilling some pixels on an operation known, charmingly, as F*ck Tea.

Last summer, Democrats argued that the tea party movement was the AstroTurf creation of corporate groups. Now that the grass-roots conservative resurgence has emerged as a clear force on the right, the left is making a different case: that tea parties are simply the enemy.

To that end, the Agenda Project, a new, progressive group with roots in New York’s fundraising scene and a goal of strengthening the progressive movement, has launched the “F*ck Tea” project, which is aimed, the group’s founder Erica Payne wrote in an e-mail this morning, “to dismiss the tea party and promote the progressive cause.”

“”We will be launching new products in the next several months to help people all over the country F*ck Tea,” Payne told POLITICO. “Products like a Glenn Beck Bowl Buddy (Beck B Scrubbin) and others are perfect holiday gifts or just a great way to say, ‘I love you and our country’ to your spouse, friend or family.”

This is not a political movement. It’s a retail operation aimed at people with a political point of view, like a Harriet Carter for the hipnorats, although probably not as successful.

I find it encouraging for two reasons.

  • It’s encouraging to see the leftwingers engaging in some good old-fashioned capitalism.
  • It’s becoming obvious that the politically connected on the other side are not going to take the wind out of the sails of the Tea Party movement, but at least they can part some of their peeps from their money.

But I have to hand it to the people behind it. They know how to get the word out to the very people they want to court: trigger the opposition.

(Link seen on Trog. See also Ed Driscoll and Hot Air.)

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Book Report: Great Presidential Wit by Bob Dole (2001)

This book collects some humorous anecdotes and quips from each president, ranked by how humorous the presidents were (according to Bob Dole, I guess) as well as the Al Gore and George W. Bush, who were running for President in the year in which the book was written.

Only a few of the anecdotes are truly examples of the President’s wit, and most of those come from recent presidents whose every utterance and quip lies either in archival television footage or in Presidential library complexes. Other anecdotes include amusing anecdotes about the President or the President’s family or insults and barbs directed at the President.

That said, it gives a little historical insight into the conditions of each President and his times and tribulations that everyone could probably use now and then. However, the arrangement of the Presidents not in historical order makes this a little more tricky to put into historical context. It also provides perspective into how vile politics has been throughout history. Somehow, in our current self-flagellating ways, we have forgotten this in a quest to be the worst ever at everything.

And as every one of these books leads to Jeopardy!, reading this book let me question the answer “This US President’s son died as a pilot in World War I.” So I got to impress my wife anyway.

A good little read.

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A Shortage Of Ingredients

As the Facebooker amongst you know, I’ve baked a lot of zucchini bread. I had eight zucchini plants in my garden, and they produced a bumper crop of summer squash. I discovered that you can more easily give away a dessert bread than a summer squash. So I went onto the Internet and got a recipe for chocolate zucchini bread.


Zucchini bread recipe
Click for full size

However, as it gets to the middle of August, I’ve found that I’m running really low on one of the ingredients.


Zucchini bread recipe needs psychics
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There just aren’t that many psychics around these parts. I’m going to have to start substituting in some dog whisperers or something.

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Book Report: The Salvage Sisters’ Guide to Finding Style in the Street and Inspiration in the Attic by Kathleen Hackett and Mary Ann Young (2005)

Now this is what Junk Beautiful book should have been. It relies on the writing of two sisters, both of whom must have married well since they have lots of houses and cottages amongst them to decorate with repurposed materials.

The projects outlined in the book don’t end up looking like jetsam that rolled onto the beach. The authors of this book add some fabric, upholstery, or Heaven forfend paint to make things look better and to fit in.

However, it’s still as much an interior design book as it is a project book. But it’s an easy couple of nights browsing. It’s saying something, but I read more of the accompanying text with this book than I do most.

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Richard Grieco Film, Interrupted

So the other night, I was sitting down for my once-every-sixteen-years viewing of the Richard Grieco film (If Looks Could Kill) when the telephone rang.

It was a student at Marquette University, calling to check my phone number, address, and whatnot and to see if I’d simply overlooked sending them a check.

She asked for my current address, having established logically that my phone number was still correct. Then she asked me the best part of the Marquette experience for my lo those 20 years ago. I’m sure I said something curtly. I was a commuter, essentially, since I lived in my father’s basement for the duration, so my job was way off campus on the Northwest Side and most of my friends where on the Northwest side (either people who worked in the grocery store where I plied my trade at the time or a guy who lived two doors down from my father, whom I’d gotten to know during summertime visits to Milwaukee).

My distance from Marquette as well as my upbringing that differed from the suburban put a lot of distance between me and the school as An Experience. By the time I had spent enough time with any of them to make anything like friends, I was a senior and off to live the life of a wage slave in Missouri while the rest of them prepared for a life in the Academy and the gossamer feel-good shawl of Progressivist thought.

The best part of Marquette University, I realized after the phone call, was the library. In those slightly pre-Internet days, the Memorial Library had books on everything I wanted to read. I spent a lot of time as a freshman blowing off Biology and Sociology to read Black Like Me, then a collection of Langston Hughes to see what the title of Black Like Me was from, then serious scholarly studies of Ed McBain, and some Existentialism for fun. That, coupled with the big Swedish mechanic who lived next door, had a library in his basement, and asked me if I’d read this or read that and how could I be an English major without reading them? made me who I am educationally today more than the Marquette University community and its $11,000 a year ticket ever did.

So I cut short the connect-and-make-them-feel-a-part questions with a declaration that I wasn’t going to contribute. She said okay, and then I asked how much Marquette cost.

$30,000 a year, she said. Without emphasis, because this is the milieu in which she swims.

“It sucks to be you,” I said.

She giggled and said, yeah, but that’s why scholarships are so important and that the tuition was only 3/4 the cost of educating a student.

“Someone’s getting overpaid. You could get a couple tutors and have them spend 40 hours a week with you for that,” I said. And I rang off shortly thereafter. Ringing off happens when you read a lot of British literature, and by British literature I mean “Agatha Christie” and “Alistair MacLean.” See, Marquette wasn’t influential in making me sound like the hoity-toity affected Anglophile.

After I did, I kind of felt bad for her. She was a junior, working the phones to work off part of her $30,000 a year. At some point, $120,000 is too much for what a college degree buys you. It took me fifty hours a week of working while I was going to college and ten years’ worth of student loan repayment (coupled with a good marriage which allowed me to be DINK to pay those loans off in only 10 years). And I left school only $20,000 in the hole with an English/Philosophy degree. For the first couple of years after I graduated, I made somewhere in the middle teens in income, sometimes working two jobs for that amount. I cannot in my mind justify spending what amounts to a middle manager’s salary to go to school. I cannot imagine coming out of school with $60,000 in debt and stacking produce, if I was lucky to have any job in 2010.

Instapundit talks a lot about the higher education bubble about to burst. It’s going to happen, and I feel really bad for the last people in the scheme like this poor kid, calling hard-hearted Hannahs like me for a pittance against her pitiable annual costs.

Oh, and without segue, I’d like to point out I’m a little miffed what college costs have done to my personal puff narrative. Working fifty hours a week while in school to cover the shortfall between my remaining grants and loans, begging the bursar to let me register for the next semester when I was a couple hundred behind in my monthly schedule (he laughed even then, commenting about how much other students owed), and paying off $20,000 in debt. Kids these days are going to look at my hardships and say, “You pansy, you had it easy.” And then they’ll get into grad school to get the Master’s Degree they’ll need to work in outcalling sales in 2020.

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Also Required: Photos of Your Children To Prove They Were Not Kidnapped

Greenfield and other cities impose strict new rules on resale shops :

Moms come into New to You Kids in Greenfield every week to sell their babies’ outgrown rompers to the small resale shop. But the business says it will have to close if it has to comply with a new city ordinance requiring it to take each mom’s picture and send that, along with detailed descriptions of the items she sells, to a police database every day.

The Greenfield ordinance also imposes transaction fees on resale stores that could amount to tens of thousands of dollars annually – a big burden for small retailers.

This also applies to bookstores, apparently:

Half-Price Books, a national resale chain that has a store a few doors down from Reinhardt’s in the Greenfield Fashion Center, will consider getting out of its lease, district manager Joe Desch said.

Half-Price also is thinking about filing a lawsuit against Greenfield on First Amendment grounds, because the new ordinance, which takes effect next summer, will require the bookstore to send police a daily list of customers who sell books to them, with identification and titles sold.

No word on if the book sellers need to provide a book report for their new mommy, the government.

(Link seen on the Twitterverse.)

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The 2010 Dryer Affair

We’ve had the RCA dryer before we were a we; my beautiful wife bought a Radio Corporation of America (!) dryer when she was my beautiful girlfriend in Columbia. It moved with her to St. Louis, it moved in with us in Sycamore Hills, it moved with use to Casinoport, it moved with us to Old Trees, and then it moved with us to Nogglestead. It had travelled very well and has voted for Democrats in five different Congressional Districts.

But a couple weeks ago, it started making metal-on-metal noises when running. We had to replace our three-year-old washer (bought new when we moved into Old Trees) when it’s agitator passed from this life to the next. A repairman who came to check its pulse said that modern washers and dryers have a lifespan of about seven years. So when the dryer started making noise, I warned that we were going to have to spend money on it before long.

A couple times in the recent past, I’ve opened the dryer to find it full of dry clothes and the timer set to the start time. Sometimes, we loaded the dryer and saved its run for naptime or children’s bedtime to introduce some white noise while they slept. We’ve been doing this since Old Trees, when the dryer lie between their bedrooms and the rest of the house. We hoped the white noise woud mak the noises we made elsewhere. At any rate, I found the dryer had not run and assumed I had failed to start it.

However, one day, I started it at naptime, and it stopped post-haste. I tried it again, and it started again and stopped. I wondered what could cause it. A clogged dryer vent? I went to the south side of the house, where a vent opens right next to our air conditioner (I’d joked with the home inspector, “May the best appliance win!” because warm air blowing out on a running air conditioner makes the air cooling less efficient, but the joke is less funny when you explain it even if the explanation lies in the same set of parentheses as the joke itself). I went out and opened the vent to take a look in, and the vent cover, one of the little louvred vinyl jobs, opened on a 2 inch PVC pipe. That’s odd, I thought.

And then something dark appeared out of my nowhere and hit my knuckle, causing a great disturbance in my pain-free morning. What was that, I wondered? Biting horsefly? Spider? The rest of the hive of wasps that had been hiving in my air conditioner’s casing came out to answer my challenge. So as my middle finger swelled (all the easier to see when displayed, bonus!), I got a can of waspicide and went the whole Anakin on them (I killed them. I killed them all. They’re dead, every single one of them. And not just the men, but the women and the children, too. They’re like animals, and I slaughtered them like animals. I HATE THEM!). After which time, using the dryer-starting talents of my wife, I deduced that the vent was blocked since no air was coming out of it when she turned it on.

I paced a bit and determined that since we were going to get a new dryer anyway, we should just go and get one that afternoon for delivery the next day. I cannot even dramatically recreate my thinking for you; I was not utterly convinced that the vent was the cause. So we dropped $600 as though we were still DINKs (I even bought the extended warranty given how well our last washer did).

The next morning, the appliance guys came along, put the new one in, and loaded the old one in their truck. I realize I have enough land these days to expose plenty of appliances and derelict automobiles to the elements, but I’m starting slowly to easily acclimate my suburban and sophisticated spouse to the practice. After the appliance guys hooked it up (yeah, I let them do it. One fewer man point for me), I started it and let it run for a couple minutes. The appliance guys left, and I started in on the drifts of laundry that had accumulated in the two days.

When a load finished and was wetted for the drying, I turned on the new dryer and…. it stopped.

Dammit, I thought, it is the vent.

So I checked the vent from the interior. It looked like standard ducting and wasn’t really coated with much lint even though it was a couple of ninety degree turns coming out of the laundry alcove. I went to the utility room in the basement and tried to find the duct that carried the venting from the dryer alcove to the exterior and didn’t see it. What I did see, on the other hand, is that the built-in vacuum was right where the dryer duct should come out and…. Oh. That would explain it.

So I didn’t know where the dryer vent came out and I was at a loss for action. After some thoughtful pacing, I called a company that could clean out dryer vents. That should fix it for me.

Fortunately, the dryer vent company spokesman worked me into his schedule at the same time as my wife was loading the children up to go meet her mother for lunch for my wife’s birthday. The dryer vent guy located the vent in the sill board immediately underneath my deck. So it’s been blowing hot, wet air on the underside of my deck for the entirety of the deck’s existence. Awesome.

My wife finished her child loading and left. The dryer vent guy tapped on the back door with a mournful look on his face. “I can’t clean your vent,” he announced. “It’s not metal ducting, it’s plastic that’s deteriorated. I can show you if you want.”

I looked. It was plastic venting hose stretched under the finished ceiling in my den. Breaking down.

This is the inside of your walls on cheap.

Swell. This isn’t the first time I’ve seen plastic where metal should be on really important functions in the dream home.

The dryer vent guy, who works for an HVAC company, said they could probably tear out 20′ of my ceiling and replace the ducting for $300-500. Of course, they’re not carpenters, so they wouldn’t replace the ceiling or match its paint, natch.

I said, you know, I can just get an interior vent.

You know, those have drawbacks. Humidity and it’s very dirty, he said.

We lived with one of those in Old Trees for three years since that particular rehabber didn’t bother to vent it at all, much like he didn’t bother to install any phone jacks or even hook the telephone line onto the correct interior set of plugs at the exterior phone box ($125 for AT&T to come, diagnose, unplug, and plug in correctly in a manner of 10 minutes). He also charged me $50 for coming out, climbing a ladder, and pointing a flashlight into my dryer vent.

And took fifteen minutes to write up the invoice. I’d thought I could make it to the restaurant to eat with the family, so I called and discovered they weren’t there yet. I was planning to join them, I told the restaurant, could my party call me when they arrived? So I changed clothes and whatnot and realized that I could only get to the restaurant 30 minutes after they sat down, probably, and they hadn’t called, so I assumed they didn’t get the message after all.

So I raced into Republic to buy an interior vent and raced home to beat them back. I did, and I beat the rain, which is good because the old pick-up’s windshield wipers manage to miss the portion of the windshield directly in line of sight for the driver. I put the interior vent on easily–lots of experience with them, you know–and turned the dryer on. I wandered off and….

The dryer stopped, of course.

I was through pacing at this point. I was onto gibbering.

And then my wife called from the restaurant. Of course they’d gotten the first part of the message but not the second. Still, an hour later, they had ordered and had eaten. My beautiful wife ordered something for me, too, and brought it home. Which is good, because at that point I could not have verbally communicated to a server that I needed a glass of water.

The next stop: calling an electrician. The next morning, one arrived and examined the outlet. Then he examined the outlet more closely. Apparently, a loose connection within it was causing it to lose power when it warmed up or when the dryer vibrated it apart. Either way, $100 and a new outlet later, and the dryer works.

Actually, that makes it sound so simple. The actual arithmetic is: One wasp sting and swollen finger, $600 for a new dryer, $50 for a $500 dryer vent replacement, $14 for an interior vent, 20 minutes cleaning up after the interior vent blew lint all over for a couple minutes, $100 and a new outlet, 1500 words on the blog and lots of long retellings with hand gestures, and new innumerable fears about what other dangerous and hidden shortcuts were taken in the course of building this house later, and I can dry laundry now.

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What’s The Over/Under On The Overlap?

So, how many people like this who’ve got their knickers in a twist about a proposed bicycle ban on public roads:

Today the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported on the ongoing efforts of St. Charles County Councilman Joe Brazil (R-Defiance) to get bikes banned from rural Southwestern St. Charles country roads – seems he listens closely to those folks who resent having to share the road with bicyclists. As a person who frequently commuted to work by bicycle when I lived in the San Francisco Bay area – where, incidentally, droves of bicycles regularly share narrow, curving mountain roads with cars with few accidents – I could easily visualize the type of folks who might complain.

I have vivid memories of elderly people on deserted streets who, despite having acres of space in which to pass me as I hugged the side of the street, instead reduced their speed to a crawl and made exasperated faces and gestures as they followed me slowly along the street. Or the teen-age girls who yelled obscenities at me as I followed prescribed procedure for making a left-hand turn in traffic. This didn’t happen too often in Palo Alto, and the perpetrators were not people whom one would accord much credibility. In retrospect, however, their rather irrational sense of entitlement suggests that they might have been just the type of folks who would be at home at a Tea Party – which could explain our Republican pol’s concern for their druthers rather than those of bike riders.

are the same sorts of people who are all a-flutter to tell other people who own businesses that they cannot allow smoking on their private property?

Yeah, I’m going with 89% myself.

You could even make the same sorts of public health trumps private property rights arguments. Bikers hit by cars cost the public money! Emergency services aren’t cheap!

Ah, well, as some might very well misquote, “Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”

Just for the record, I favor the rights of the property holder in both cases. However, the urbane busybodies of the world who want to dictate what you can do with your property want unfettered access to their property to make you do it.

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The Money Acted Alone, On Its Own Initiative

Nearly $82 million will help expand high-speed Internet service in rural Missouri.

Well, that’s right neighborly of that money, at loose ends since it left the military, to volunteer for community service like that.

Oh, wait.

The federal government has approved nearly $82 million to expand high-speed Internet access in rural Missouri.

The Missouri money is part of $1.2 billion of Internet grants announced Wednesday by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Well, it’s right neighborly of foreign bondholders and domestic institutions that buy t-bills to throw this money away in an endeavor that will not only cost a billion now, but will cost money on upkeep that the ISPs will not be able to cover with subscriber fees.

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Book Report: Wicked Prey by John Sandford (2009)

John Sandford is getting there, but unlike Ed McBain, he doesn’t have 50 years of good will built up.

The there is pissing me off with the ragging on Republicans and conservatives. It took him only until page 12 to identify that the hardened criminal in charge of the enterprise was a self-identified conservative; if this book were published in 2010 instead of 2009, he’d probably identify with the Teabaggers. Twelve pages later, George W. Bush is mentioned by name in a less than flattering light. On page 35, someone is told he looks like a Republican as an insult. Seriously, Sandford, knock it off.

The stories in the book (and now that he’s a serious hardback author, they must weigh in at 400 pages. Remember when only Stephen King did that?) revolve around a group of crackerjack criminals in town to rob people and hotels at the Republican National Convention and about a criminal getting out of prison, paraplegic, and blaming Davenport, so of course he’s going to get revenge. The two stores touch at points, made to do so to validate the decision to pad out the book with the second, but really, it’s two shorter novels in one. Cut aways to the other story pass for building suspense, I guess.

Finally, one comes to a head and then Davenport solves the other with a little help from a dream or a hint from the semiconscious mind. Sandford must have realized he’d achieved the proper weight to cost $30 in hardback. Then it ends with some dangling ends that Sandford can bring back another time, a la the hitwoman Rinker.

I’m being a little harsher on the book than it deserves, perhaps, but Sandford did his best to put me in an ill and opposing mood at the beginning of the book. By about page 50, the book drops off with the political “Rightwing nuts!” stuff and gets down to the plot. Which makes me wonder why he bothered to put it in at all and risk alienating 47% or more of the population. To establish his Minnesota Democrat bona fides? Brother, Al Franken is your senator. It’s worse than when my state elected a dead man, for crying out loud.

He’s really down to my last nerve on the political stuff and the gratuitous swearing. All the characters drop f-bombs in random spots and use it as people’s middle name throughout this book and the series. Come on, I gave up the mad swearing when I had kids, and I didn’t do it professionally for any part of my life. Grow up, Sandford. Grow up.

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A Thank You Note To Losing Candidates

I spent last evening at an election results watching party for a couple of candidates that ended up on the short side of the count in their respective races down here in Greene County. At the end of the evening, when it became apparent that the number of remaining ballots were fewer than the number of votes needed to take the lead, the closer of the candidates dismissed us with what sounded like a concession speech even though the race was close enough to go to a recount.

In the speech, he thanked everyone there for their support in his campaign, whether in financial donations or in knocking on doors when the temperature hovered in the middle 90s. He said he couldn’t do it without us.

Well, be that as it may, we could not have done it without him.

It takes a lot more to be a candidate than to support a candidate. He had to work his day job and then do the full time job of being a candidate at night and on the weekends. He forewent vacations, private time with his family, and frankly relaxation time that I take for granted and get cranky if I don’t get every night.

He didn’t have to travel far as his district was small, but some do. This year’s Senate primary had a baker’s half dozen candidates, some of whom bothered to travel throughout the state at their own expense sometimes to try to gather support and to get their messages out.

So candidates put their lives on hold for six months, or a year, or sometimes more, with the hopes of having to travel somewhere away from their families to serve in government. They’d trade their current full time job for a fuller time job as an elected official, and although I’m often cynical, I don’t really believe that these guys, on our team at least, go into it to make millions or to become famous. State legislative offices or county government only brings a wealth of headaches if you’re doing it right. Instead, they do it because they feel something akin to a calling, a desire to do it the right way, or at least to do better than the current crop running the country.

No, sir and ma’am, thank you. You took all the risk, all the burden, and sometimes awaken on the first Wednesday in office with nothing but some debt and another day at your regular job to show for it. Supporting a candidate is helpful, but running for office is the hard work.

(Cross-posted at 24thState.com.)

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Book Report: 100 Crafts Under $10 by Better Homes and Gardens (2003)

This book is a collection of quick, cheap crafts you can make. The end result crafts are better than what you get out of the Trash to Treasure series, but I think the book relies on some creative accounting, namely pro-rating, to bring each craft under ten dollars. Each individual craft comes with an itemized bill and they do all come under $10, but sometimes the bill indicates that $3.98 for two colors of spray paint. I’ve just priced spray paint, so I know that two cans of spray paint cost more than that.

The crafts are simple, and many of them resemble the sort of thing you’d see on the television program Creative Juice. Some of them are very similar indeed. That means that I’ll take some ideas from it, but probably not as many as I would from watching a season of the aforementioned program. Maybe it’s the way I soak up ideas, but things I flip past in a book don’t stick with me quite as well as the things I see on television in 7 minute segments.

Which makes me question the whole enterprise of reading these things.

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A Fusion Of Photoblogging And Country Music

The Denver Post photoblog has two series of color photographs: America 1939-1945 and Russia Early 1900s.

That reminds me of this song:

Hindrocket (I’m such an old-timer I still call him that) asks at Powerline, Why Does the Past Seem So Far Away? and answers:

In part, because we so often see it in black and white. But the world has, for some thousands of years at least, looked much as it does now.

He’s right, of course. And now that video is so widely distributed and replayed, it’s why 2010 looks a lot like 1985 with less moussed hair and more cell phones.

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