To be able to say "Noggle," you first must be able to say "Nah."
So it’s only taken me some what, two years, to notice this, but now that I have, it’s under there. Every day when I reboot, bam! It’s in my face:
Based on NT Technology. Windows NT Technology. Windows New Technology Technology.
Sure, it’s not as egregious as PIN Number on an ATM Machine, but come couldn’t you buy better with billions of dollars? I’m only fifty an hour, werd.
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Last year’s rookie sensation Pierre-Marc Bouchard on how long to nap on game day (last item):
90 minutes.
It’s always game day here at the Noggle household.
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Well, I’ve gotten a new membership in the Quality Paperback book club, so I can get cheap, household wall friendly copies of books that I might disagree with, violently.
First on the list: When You Ride Alone You Ride with Bin Laden by Bill Maher. Anyone else remember him with Geena Davis in Sara? No? His agent’s undoubtedly relieved.
Something about Maher’s political stands as the leading libertarian dished out by HBO bothers me. Some of his stances seem okay, but every time I would watch Politically Incorrect or Real Time with Bill Maher I am yoked into agreement with him just enough that I suffer a physiological response when he expresses something I heartily dispute. So it was good for me to get my hands on this book so I could isolate exactly where we differ.
Fortunately, I didn’t pick up a heavy tome. This book is a quick collection of musings coupled with posters designed for the War on Terror. One, Bill Maher is for the War on Terror, is for a strong response, and recognizes it’s a clash of civilizations. Not toeing the Libertarian isolationist party line, but that’s ok. I don’t either. The biggest thrust of this book is that we need to stiffen up, stop pretending to have security in our airports, and act like we’re at war. Okay, I dig the whole stop-partying-like-its-1999-already thing.
Maher also hits some of the themes of proper libertarian thought when he wants to legalize drugs, continue with free speech, and that the federak government should focus on its two proper roles, police and defense, but a little less on the policing, thanks.
But Maher jumps the libertarian rails when he invokes Barbie E’s Book of Shadows and raises the whole anti-capitalist raise-the-minimum-wage bit. He wants to cut subsidies (yes!) but dispense more foreign aid because we can (not to further our interests, but because it’s nice), and by “we” he means with your compulsory tax donation, friend. Hey, he gives 50% of his income seven figure income, you give 25% of your lower five, what’s not to like?
Also, amid the rallying cries of “Every citizen a soldier!” and “Vigilence is the eternal price of liberty!” (my interpretations, but his bits are entitled “Make Them Fight All of Us” and “Neighbors Looking Out for Neighbors”, I am not stretching it too much), but he’s in favor of gun control (he thinks Reagan could have rammed it through immediately after the assassination attempt). Every citizen a vigilent soldier with a cell phone to call the authorities! Hardly the militia that the forefathers envisioned which Maher almost wants.
I’d recommend the book when it gets remaindered. It’s got a good crystallization of Maher’s thoughts behind his glib comments (the crystals are 1-2 page miniature essays akin to Dennis Miller’s rants but not as clever and just a little more earnest). It’s also a quick read, being short pieces jammed between the sofa cushions of posters and pages containing quotes from the pieces.
Personally, the book has changed my life. I now remember to turn out the light when I leave a room to stop wasting energy. It’s a small part I can play to making the country more energy efficient and lowering my energy bills a small percentage. I’d forgotten its simple importance. I’ll be adamant about doing it until I forget again next week.
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Virginia Postrel points to the Gender Genie, which parses a long text string of your writing to guess your gender.
My piece:
Buzzword of the Day: Sanity Check
The Judgment:
Female Score: 574
Male Score: 1068
The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: male!
Heather’s piece: John Galt, Vomit, and Sundry Other Bodily Excretions
The Judgment:
Female Score: 1746
Male Score: 2005
The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: male!
I think a woman who writes and thinks like a man is sexxxxy!
Also, word to those who would impugn my masculinity by pointing out that my wife has a higher male score than me: note that my differential is greater than hers. I’m sure that’s somewhere in the fine print of the Gender Genie, but I am too busy knitting doilies to read that closely.
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(Apologies to Ravenwood whom I am channelling.)
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Ajax could take on this little punk of an ocicat with the sissy name of Tom Tom.
Ajax bears the name of a mighty Greek warrior, who only near the end of his career went nuts. Tom Tom, on the other hand, is named after a little hippie drum. Advantage : AJAX!
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Billy, the Native American Commando from Predator
Sonny Landham!
Why fight it? It’s inevitable, and apparently it’s not a joke site since it’s been reported in Kentucky media.
If he wins, I am putting on my tinfoil hat and watching the movie frame-by-frame to see what their ultimate plans are.
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A piece today in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel about the inner ring suburbs of Milwaukee working to improve their neighborhoods by squelching small entrepreneurs: Tapping out liquor licenses:
Corner taverns squeezed out as communities work to upgrade images, tax revenue.
A spokesecrat for West Milwaukee speaks ex cathedra about what the monolithic entity wants, says:
“The times that there are two or three bars on every block is passed,” said West Milwaukee Village President Ron Hayward. “West Milwaukee wants to upgrade its image.”
Got that, citizens? West Milwaukee, the organic entity, has determined that the time of small entrepreneurs running their own taverns is over. Instead, it’s time for West Milwaukee to look like Springfield, Missouri, and Chesterfield, Missouri, and most of the other suburbs in most other towns. Bring on the Applebees! Wait, sorry, I mean:
“What they’re deciding is what’s good for the neighborhood and what’s not,” said Weinzatl [owner of a building denied a liquor license renewal], 36. “When they didn’t have the tax revenue coming in, the Chili’s and Chipotle’s, we were all good enough for them. Now that they have all these opportunities, they’re going to squeeze out the little guy.”
Bring on the Chili’s! West Milwaukee wants to sacrifice its local character to the gods of suburban sameness to sucker in some traffic from Miller Park attendees who wouldn’t walk through the worn wooden doors of a corner tavern with the name of the owner above the door on a discolored Schlitz sign but who would be much happier to pull the jalapeño door handle just like they do once a week out in Sussex.
And the West Milwaukee citizens who would like to run their own businesses?
Melody Nordness, 45, a homemaker and homeowner who has lived in the village for 17 years, had hoped to lease Weinzatl’s space in her first crack as a small business owner. She wanted to create a corner tavern where neighbors could stop in for a beer while walking their dogs, chat about the village goings-on and just sit for a while, she said.
She had already paid for her license and started fixing up the place when she received a letter July 14 providing her with reasons for a denial.
Among the reasons:
“The Village of West Milwaukee Board has identified the need to change the culture of the community, to encourage redevelopment and reduce the property tax burden on homeowners.”
“One of the redevelopment goals identified by the Community Development Authority is to encourage restaurant uses in the village, in lieu of taverns that do not primarily serve food.”
While Nordness got her money back, she wanted the license.
“I was very upset for the fact that I have lived here 17 years, and we wanted to keep this bar/tavern a community-type business,” Nordness said. “We kept them afloat for 17 years, paying the highest taxes in the state of Wisconsin.”
Quiet, citizen! You forget your place. You serve the Government’s needs, not the other way around. Do you not understand that the Government is adjusting your culture as It sees fit to broaden Its tax base or improve Its image to Itself. Love It or leave It by moving to another community just like this one.
And be grateful that the Government has not taken your land for Its own vision of megastripmalldom. Yet.
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Mark Steyn, in the Chicago Sun-Times, says:
At Thursday’s Democratic Presidential debate, Jeff Greenfield asked the candidates why it was that only 34 percent of Americans identified themselves as Democrats — the lowest number since before the New Deal. ”You’re looking at the glass as half-empty, I look at it as half-full,” said former House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt, demonstrating the command of basic math that has made the federal budget what it is. The Democratic glass isn’t half-empty, it’s two-thirds empty.
Kinda proves Stingl’s Theorem, wot?
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Oh, man, now that the Packers choked up a 17 point lead to Kansas City, Cagey’s either going to be:
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As part of his weekendly series, Kim du Toit honors Veronica Lake.
The only movie I have seen with Veronica Lake is The Blue Dahlia (which I never finished watching, so don’t tell me if how it ends). She’s got the looks and she’s got the voice, and she’s the complete package. Unlike the sleaze stharlots of today, who run the complete spectrum from vapid to trashy, Veronica Lake’s the kind of woman you would enjoy talking to before and after.
Kinda like this sex symbol. Bangs over the eye and everything.
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So I am minding my company’s business (since I was on the clock, by terms of the employee licensing agreement I signed when I started, any business conducted on company property is company business, so you won’t catch me selling on eBay things and adding to the company’s revenue stream, werd), when I heard the most blatant buzzword since a couple of jobs ago when I heard a project manager say face time without a smirk on his face. This time, it was a project manager, too, who probably heard the phrase in a project management seminar or took it from a project management magazine, where it was nestled in between the ads for project management software.
This buzzword:
The context: “We’ll perform a sanity check.” I think he meant evaluate the position of the project vis-à-vis (Author’s note: This use of the italicized French term does not represent a “buzzword”; instead, it’s pretension. Please note and appreciate the difference. Thank you.) contractual obligations and customer considerations. However, because it’s the first time I ever heard of a “sanity check,” I can only guess this is what he meant.
From whence did this asylum-escapee of a buzzword originate? Never mind, perhaps the bedlam of the information technology field needs buzzwords and common cues from the world of psychology.
You want a sanity check? Here’s a schnucking sanity check:
Now, take a look at this, tell me what you see, and I can diagnose your particular sickness. What is it you see in this picture?
I’m not sure; let me call a meeting to discuss with others what I might see.
Whoa, that’s a cool new technology/specification that’s not mature yet! We should tear down the complete infrastructure and rebuild all applications and server components to use this new design
I see a series of lines and arcs that I can understand and describe in elaborate detail.
It’s a damn mess. A boondoggle. What am I supposed to do with that? There’s nothing about that that even resembles a picture. Tell me you’re not shipping that out in a frame, for crying out loud.
You know the worst part about “sanity check”? Not only is it a buzzword, but it’s an inappropriate buzzword because it assumes there’s some sanity to check.
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A grieving family has taken time from their grieving to sue not the drunk driver who paralyzed their daughter, but also the following parties:
Besides the NFL [and its commissioner Paul Tagliabue], defendants include Lanzaro, the Giants, the New Jersey Sports and Exposition Authority, Giants Stadium and Aramark, a company that sells concessions at the stadium.
Seems they missed a few people. I’d like to point out they should also include:
(Link seen on Drudge.)
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The St. Louis Post-Dispatch (literally, after the train has left the station), we have this tale of intoxicated airline woe:
Amelia Hernandez said she slipped some rum onto a New York-to-Dallas flight just to “calm her nerves.” But by the Midwest, she was singing and swearing and scaring the flight crew into an unscheduled landing at St. Louis just to boot her off.
She capped the day May 5 by thumping a Lambert Field police officer in the head and kicking a window out of a squad car.
Yes, well, that sounds pretty serious. Fortunately, someone in the government had a heart, and she got a plea bargain:
Hernandez pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court to a misdemeanor charge of drinking liquor in flight that was not served by a crew member, which many people might not realize is a crime.
With so many laws, it’s so easy to miss a few, unless you’re a prosecutor.
But to offer a some advice, I offer the following list of things which you might not realize are also against the law regarding air travel:
Cripes, I was going to try to be funny under the rubric of “If I weren’t laughing, I would be crying,” but I think I will just weep at the silly micromanaging laws passed by the picadores in the legislatures.
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Jim Stingl of the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel (literally, the Wisconsinite who defends diaries) offers this lead:
Fifty percent of American students are terrible at math. The remaining one-third are merely bad.
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Modern Drunkard, in conjunction with Quizilla, leads me to this insight:
You can take the quiz here.
(Link seen on VodkaPundit.)
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Sounds kinda like a crime of a sexual nature for which you would go to prison for many years in a number of states.
Sorry, Unca Orrin, but I kinda like that part of the Constitution. Makes it one generation harder for the Islamacists to get elected to the presidency.
And by the second generation, the damn kids are peircing things and rebelling against their parents. Or else we wouldn’t see the honor slaughter going on in England, wot?
(Link seen on Fark. They’re the subversive influence, not me.)
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So President Bush has gone a-crawling to the United Nations, and he’s gone a-begging to Turkey and Europe and Japan for money and troops to help stabilize Iraq and to help rotate out some of our troops and give them a chance to rest.
Why, oh why, would he want a rested and ready military force that’s not currently committed to patrolling the streets of a nation in the process of regentrification and recivilization?
Because he’s chicken, or trying to win an election, or maybe because he wants to be ready for the next target?
What a bunch of second-rate hawks. Maybe I am a neoneoconservative. Or just read too much Machiavelli and Sun Tzu in my formative years.
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Our saga so far:
What’s missing from this picture? Ah, yes, the Judicial Branch. Someone had to sue, but what do you know, it’s state legislators.
That’s right. They opposed the legislation, but they couldn’t vote it down. Then they couldn’t prevent its veto from being overridden. So now that their part in the grand scheme that is the American system of government is over, do they lose graciously to the will of the legislative majority? Of course not, they do an end-run around the system and do their part to help unbalance the system so that we have a totalitarian judgeocracy.
Face it, it would be easier to spot if they got together with members of the executive branch to subvert the republican form of government and have a Strong Leader issue fiats and maybe even dissolve that useless legislature anyway. Instead, these legislators want to overturn in the courts something they couldn’t stop in the legislature by any possible method.
I wouldn’t be so bothered if some citizens group or even HCI or its brethren filed the suit. But that the legislators, who probably would tell us how sad they are that The Children don’t understand civics and the working of the government, are doing it twists my leash most of all.
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The St. Louis Post-Dispatch also reports that Police are confused and fearful over new gun law.
Hypothetically speaking:
Suppose St. Louis police stop a car late at night in a high-crime neighborhood for a traffic violation. Suppose there’s a 21-year-old in the vehicle, along with three 20-year-olds. And suppose officers find four guns on the floor.
“What do the police do?” asked Mike Stelzer, an associate city counselor assigned to the St. Louis Police Department who offered the scenario.
I guess they write a ticket, tell the kids to drive safely, and go back to patrolling. I guess that’s not the answer they want, or that Mike Stelzer wants.
He knows what the cops would do today: Confiscate the weapons, arrest the occupants and figure it was a blow struck for public safety.
Well, yes, because that’s illegal today, having a gun in the car. Day after tomorrow, it’s not illegal. You see, the executive branch enforces the laws. It doesn’t make them (although with the all-you-can-charge salad bar on the books now, it can often pick them, can’t it?).
Here’s a pointer for you associate counselors, a little tidbit you remember. It might just help you get promoted to full city counselor: Police cannot arrest people for doing legal things. Police cannot just seize lawful property. Police should also avoid discharging their weapons unless their lives are endangered, and should also avoid discharging their clubs unless violently resisted by criminals. Of course, in the city of St. Louis, perhaps these things are not important to city counselors or police.
Police Chief Joe Mokwa worries about those kinds of details, and the larger question of whether the new law allowing the carrying of concealed weapons – and the automobile provision in particular – will erode progress made into cutting violence on city streets.
:: sigh :: Because once law-abiding citizens are armed, they’ll start committing crimes?
The whole gun thing wearies me. I guess that’s what our agitators, litiguous legislators, and our guardians, our “betters,” want. I am bored of writing about it now.
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