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November 28, 2004
What if you gave a party and no one came...
Looks Like Hollywood is having a bad year:
""The parade used to be huge — a million people would come and there were huge stars," said Michael Levine, author and publicist to the stars. "But today there's no sense of obligation to anyone except yourself and the immediate. It's a shame. The celebrities are missing a great opportunity.""
Sorry
I was trying to despam my comments and accidentally nuked my comments. Sorry to all of you who posted.
Pork... The other white meat.
Check out this clip from yesterdays Macon Telegraph. Look at the thumbs up/thumbs down section. I think it is hilarious that they condemn Washington's pork and then laud them for sending home plenty. This is why Washington is disfunctional.
November 26, 2004
Ways to help the troops
Here are some ways to help the troops this holiday season. Some good ones:
- Adopt a Platoon http://www.adoptaplatoon.org/
- AnySoldier http://www.anysoldier.us/index.cfm
- Books For Soldiers http://www.booksforsoldiers.com/
Top ten writing mistakes
November 25, 2004
More thanks..
I also wanted to give thanks for those willing to give their life for their country. May God bless them and their families.
Giving thanks
I just wanted to give thanks to the Lord for my family, having such great friends, having a job I like and can make a good living at, my health, and well.... everything.
Deo gratias!
Really odd crisp flavors
Some really neat crisp flavors. I keep looking for roast ox. I think my favorite is either the Marmite or the Walkers Roast Turkey with Paxo Sage & Onion Flavour Crisps.
A few neat sites
November 22, 2004
Installing knoppix to your hard disk
A cool howto on installing knoppix to your system. I always keep a copy of 3.6 in my bag. you never know when you might need it.
Updated:
Another article on knoppix. This one on how to remaster a knoppix cd.
Cornell note taking
A reminder why I am glad I graduated....
Actually this is a modified version of how I learned to take notes in high school. Not that I used it ;-)
Another backup document
A good tutorial on using rsync for backups.
November 18, 2004
Fun fact o the day.
From Boing Boing:
1-700-555-4141 is a toll-free number you can dial to find out who your long distance carrier is.
November 06, 2004
Reagan right again?
The afternoon nap is now hip?
The mythical man love month?
Instapundit catalogs the discussion about the mythical "values voter". The media never lets the truth get in the way of a good screed against the red states. It seems it was terrorism and not gay baiting that won it for the Republicans. Not that Jane Smiley will listen. She is convinced that we red state folks are too busy killing gays and beating our wives too realize we are at war. I actually hope this self-delusion continues. I don't like being vilified but the longer the Democrats walk away from the truth of their defeat the longer the Republicans will win.
Kerry lost because (outside of the blue enclaves) arrogant liberal candidates don't play. (note to Kerry: Maybe hiring your team from the losing presidential campaigns of the last 25 years was not a good idea either. Bob Shrum? oh fer.) Kerry was stiff and the more he tried to be a common man, the more awkward he was. "Can I get me a hunting license here?''
On top of that, Edwards was a serious liability.
November 05, 2004
This map says it all.
Here is a county-by-county map of the U.S. showing who won where. From looking at the map, you wouldn't know that almost half the population voted for Kerry. It shows very clearly how Kerry's base is in highly-populated urban areas and Bush's base is more in suburban and rural areas.
The party of intolerence and hate.
More raving lunacy. Man the left is full of sore losers. How arrogant these people are. What happened to diversity and inclusion? They are petty intellectual dictators. If you don't believe what they believe, you are stupid and dangerous. I understand and respect most views. I don't agree with the left, but I would never say or advocate the hate they are. I guess if you can't win in the "arena of ideas"....
From Opinion Journal's Best of the Web:
Pick up the New York Times 32 years later, and it's obvious that big-city liberals are as out of touch as ever. "Some New Yorkers, like Meredith Hackett, a 25-year-old barmaid in Brooklyn, said they didn't even know any people who had voted for President Bush," reports the paper's Joseph Berger in a Metro section story on New Yorkers who are "disconsolate" over President Bush's re-election:
"Everybody seems to hate us these days," said Zito Joseph, a 63-year-old retired psychiatrist. "None of the people who are likely to be hit by a terrorist attack voted for Bush. But the heartland people seemed to be saying, 'We're not affected by it if there would be another terrorist attack.' " . . .
"I'm saddened by what I feel is the obtuseness and shortsightedness of a good part of the country--the heartland," Dr. Joseph said. "This kind of redneck, shoot-from-the-hip mentality and a very concrete interpretation of religion is prevalent in Bush country--in the heartland."
"New Yorkers are more sophisticated and at a level of consciousness where we realize we have to think of globalization, of one mankind, that what's going to injure masses of people is not good for us," he said.
It's the same story in John Kerry's hometown, as the Boston Globe, a Times sister paper, reports:
Jessica Johnson, 59, of Cambridge, who said she had volunteered for Kerry, said she was filled with optimism on Election Day, telling herself: ''When Kerry gets into the White House, this stone, this weight on my chest, will be lifted."
''He could have made a great president," Johnson said. ''Many Americans have nothing between their ears. Americans are fat, lazy, and stupid. I don't like this country anymore."
Notwithstanding the state's history on the presidential stage, some Bay Staters seemed surprised by Kerry's defeat. ''He's local. It's too bad," said David Griffith, manager of Destination Boston, a Hub-themed T-shirt and sweatshirt emporium at Quincy Market. Displaying a shirt featuring photos of President Bush and his father with the words ''Dumb & Dumber," Griffith remarked in some bafflement: ''We sold hundreds of these, and yet he still pulled it off."
The Times also quotes Beverly Camhe, a film producer, who "explained the habits and beliefs of those dwelling in the heartland like an anthropologist":
"What's different about New York City is it tends to bring people together and so we can't ignore each others' dreams and values and it creates a much more inclusive consciousness," she said. "When you're in a more isolated environment, you're more susceptible to some ideology that's imposed on you."
As an example, Ms. Camhe offered the different attitudes New Yorkers may have about social issues like gay marriage.
"We live in this marvelous diversity where we actually have gay neighbors," she said. "They're not some vilified unknown. They're our neighbors."
But she said that a dichotomy of outlooks was bad for the country.
"If the heartland feels so alienated from us, then it behooves us to wrap our arms around the heartland," she said. "We need to bring our way of life, which is honoring diversity and having compassion for people with different lifestyles, on a trip around the country."
Angry Left blogger Eric Alterman sums up the attitude:
Let's face it. It's not Kerry's fault. It's not Nader's fault (this time). It's not the media's fault (though they do bear a heavy responsibility for much of what ails our political system). It's not "our" fault either. The problem is just this: Slightly more than half of the citizens of this country simply do not care about what those of us in the "reality-based community" say or believe about anything.
Who exactly is parochial here? Times columnist Thomas Friedman offers this observation:
This was not an election. This was station identification. I'd bet anything that if the election ballots hadn't had the names Bush and Kerry on them but simply asked instead, "Do you watch Fox TV or read The New York Times?" the Electoral College would have broken the exact same way.
We're guessing he's wrong about this; despite the Times' pretensions to being a national newspaper, it seems likely that Kerry states outside the Northeast have more Fox viewers than Times readers. But even so, Bush supporters are hardly lacking exposure to the liberal media: the broadcast networks, stories from news wires and syndicates (including the Times') in their local newspapers, Hollywood movies, etc. Red-state residents may disdain Kerry as much as blue-staters do Bush, but we'd venture to say the former have a better-informed view of the opposition.
Bush voters tend to see big-city liberals as arrogant elitists, and the above quotes make clear that they are substantially correct. If those liberals were as sophisticated and open-minded as they fancy themselves to be, they would make an effort to understand why most Americans disagree with them rather than simply dismissing them as idiots.
This sums it up
This article sums it up. It is so ironic that the most insular and narrowminded people are the ones accusing the rest of the country of being narrowminded and insular. It is like some wierd lefty cult. How many walking cliches are there out there. Here is my favorite excerpt:
Down the coast in Santa Monica, another place often referred to as a people's republic, the mood was no better. A man named Jerry Peace Activist Rubin sat in his stockings in his dark apartment, flummoxed and disoriented, taking condolence calls from well-wishers and rank-and-file left-wingers.
Mr. Rubin is the real-deal California liberal - part-time vegetarian, cat lover, sensitive to cigarette smoke. He says he has never owned a car, never had a credit card or a driver's license; he lists peace activist as his occupation.
Mr. Rubin had been convinced that after four years of the Bush presidency, the country would come around and see things as he and other far-left coasters see them.
Instead, he admitted with bitterness, the election appeared not to be a repudiation of Mr. Bush's foreign and economic policies, but rather values associated with hippies, gay activists, atheists and double-latte liberals who populate his city and many others on the lip of the Pacific Ocean.
"Maybe I'm on the wrong side of the culture war," Mr. Rubin said.
November 4, 2004
On the Avowed Left Coast, a Feeling of Being Left Out
By DEAN E. MURPHY
SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 3 - They were feeling the blues here on Wednesday, a city so deep in the blue that President Bush managed just 15 percent of the vote in an election he won nationally by more than 3.5 million votes.
While the American heartland found great comfort in the president's re-election, there was melancholy and stunned disbelief in San Francisco and other cities along the avowedly left West Coast.
"There is a sense of helplessness that we couldn't tip the election in any way," said Mayor Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, who helped to push gay marriage into the national spotlight. "We couldn't do it rhetorically or in an actual vote. You feel powerless."
Across the San Francisco Bay in Berkeley, the liberal First Congregational Church held an evening of prayer, meditation and reflection. The invitations said the intention was "either to celebrate or soberly reflect on how to best go forward from the election results."
In Portland, Ore., a city so staunchly liberal that it is sometimes called the People's Republic of Portland, the outcome of the presidential race was absorbed with the levity of a mass funeral.
Given the gravity of things, there was really only one thing that Wilder Schmaltz, a 25-year-old Portland artist who had refused to remove the anti-Bush button from his lapel, felt he could do. He called a friend and headed straight to the Red and Black Cafe, an all-organic, wheat-free, vegetarian coffee and food shop, which is run as a collective and is a popular hangout of the Socialist Party USA's candidate for president, Walt Brown.
"I figured that in this place we wouldn't run the risk of being around any cheering Republicans," Mr. Schmaltz said.
Upon entering the cafe, Mr. Schmaltz, who is Jewish, grabbed off the cafe's bookshelf "A Beggar in Jerusalem," by Elie Wiesel, and read it glumly over a bowl of vegetarian chili. "Something Jewish will do me good right now," he said.
At the next table, Tchula Z, 33, an artist and part-time barista at her sister's coffee shop, who uses only Z as a last name, said she woke up Wednesday, learned that Mr. Bush had won and "smoked a cigarette and freaked out."
She added, "You know, as Janis Joplin said, 'Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose.' I think people should start using that line again."
Her friend Tracy Conklin, 45, a freelance writer and photographer, was equally dark, concluding that there was no hope and only isolation for those on the left.
"I am prepared to keep my head down, possibly for the rest of my life, under a totalitarian regime," Mr. Conklin said.
If the gay weddings this year in San Francisco and Portland made the rest of the country think the West Coast had gone the way of Sodom and Gomorrah, the victory for Mr. Bush invoked in return another biblical reference, Armageddon.
"We have been getting calls all morning from people who are angry and devastated and want to know where we will be," said Raeanne Young, 20, a volunteer with Direct Action to Stop the War, a San Francisco advocacy group.
Some protesters did take to the streets, but many of the bleary-eyed dissenters looked like dazed zombies from "Night of the Living Dead," and more or less numb on the inside. Scores of them gathered in the light rain on the street outside the federal building in San Francisco, taking turns at a microphone to complain about things they had complained about before, including the USA Patriot Act, civilian casualties in Iraq and Vice President Dick Cheney's ties to the corporate world.
"It just made me cry," Terry Mitchell, 54, an audiologist in Oakland, said of Mr. Bush's re-election. "I am sad that America is asleep at the wheel."
For Ohioans living in on the West Coast, it was a particularly tough day. Jennifer Sloan, 29, was so incensed about Ohio's support of Mr. Bush that she had considered canceling her mother's visit. Ms. Sloan's mother was arriving in San Francisco on Wednesday from Alliance, Ohio, where she lives and where she voted for Mr. Bush.
"I am depressed, but I am also just really angry at the rest of the country's ignorance," Ms. Sloan said.
Down the coast in Santa Monica, another place often referred to as a people's republic, the mood was no better. A man named Jerry Peace Activist Rubin sat in his stockings in his dark apartment, flummoxed and disoriented, taking condolence calls from well-wishers and rank-and-file left-wingers.
Mr. Rubin is the real-deal California liberal - part-time vegetarian, cat lover, sensitive to cigarette smoke. He says he has never owned a car, never had a credit card or a driver's license; he lists peace activist as his occupation.
Mr. Rubin had been convinced that after four years of the Bush presidency, the country would come around and see things as he and other far-left coasters see them.
Instead, he admitted with bitterness, the election appeared not to be a repudiation of Mr. Bush's foreign and economic policies, but rather values associated with hippies, gay activists, atheists and double-latte liberals who populate his city and many others on the lip of the Pacific Ocean.
"Maybe I'm on the wrong side of the culture war," Mr. Rubin said.
Sarah Kershaw contributed reporting from Portland, Ore., for this article, and Charlie LeDuff from Santa Monica, Calif.
November 04, 2004
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