Web Log Archive September 18th to October 1st, 2005
Saturday, October 1st, 2005 Happy Birthday, Brian!
Now
I ask: have you ever seen a happier-looking
woman?
Friday, September 30th, 2005
While sitting on my newest song---waiting for it to hatch---I spent some time last night recording an old Don McLean song that Charlie and I learned in 1980...for a wedding. Nothing polished. Posted here, if any of my buddies want to play or sing along.
"It gave you a feeling of well-being. When the sales figures came in, ...I realized how important it was."
...from the open one mouth, insert one foot Department
Thursday, September 29th, 2005
What has proven most difficult, along the path to my Enlightenment, has been to abandon the belief that getting what I want will make me happy.
A sad (and dramatic) resolution to a well-publicized mystery.
A near-triumphant resolution to a year-old mystery. Police were guided by a cigarette!
Wednesday, September 28th, 2005 Happy Birthday, Mari!
A more craven
display does not come to mind than yesterday's so-called Congressional
Committee's "inquiry" into the Federal
& States' Governments' response to Hurricane Katrina.
No, I don't mean the 'performance' of Michael
Brown, the ex-FEMA Director whom everyone loves to hate. I'm referring to
the mean-spirited and self-serving performance by Republican Congressman Christopher
Shays of Connecticut (and a few other toadies
on this whitewash Committee---which most Democrats wisely chose to boycott with
calls for an independent inquiry).
I found myself actually warming up to Mr. Brown as he bravely defended
himself against Mr. Shays' wicked and gratuitous
assaults on the ex-Director's very intentions
during the aftermath of the storm! This was the
proverbial 'cheap shot'! These Congress persons
know very well how limited is FEMA's authority! At one point, Brown was
even asked why he didn't 'go public' with
complaints about the evisceration
of his Agency's budget under Homeland Security (while funds were diverted
to support the Iraq war...Shays, of course,
didn't give voice to this last (Iraq War) reference)! As
if any FEMA Director would still be the FEMA Director if he once
displayed the temerity
to publicly challenge the President's list of priorities! The FEMA Director, as
with all Cabinet officers and near-Cabinet-level administrators serves at
the pleasure of the President! Yesterday's hearing was an ugly attempt to shift responsibility
from where it belongs (at Alfred's door) to a hapless slob who only got
the gig because he was somebody's college roommate and fishing buddy (and
a known yes-man to boot)! How many of us would turn down such an
opportunity were it offered? How many of us would declare ourselves unfit
for such a prestigious position?
Tuesday, September 27th, 2005
Sunday night taxi ride in the City. [Three-hundred-five thousand miles on the standard-issue Crown Victoria.]
After first right turn we are told, by
the cab driver, that he is not,
really,
a cab driver.
The prisons are full of innocent men.
Monday, September 26th, 2005 Olivia is 57 today...will her boyfriend call?
Much too late for my taste, of course, but the
worm has turned. And, as devastating as these two hurricanes have
been---and for all the well-deserved criticism of the government's mismanagement
of disaster aid, it still can't be doubted that both storms have helped
Alfred & Company by diverting our attention from the ever-deteriorating
situation in Iraq. Only the most delusional and deranged among us will any
longer defend our continued military presence there.
Asked in a television interview in January 2003 whether he should sell his HCA stock, [Frist] responded, "Well, I think really for our viewers it should be understood that I put this into a blind trust. So as far as I know, I own no HCA stock I have no control. It is illegal right now for me to know what the composition of those trusts are (sic). So I have no idea."
Sunday, September 25th, 2005
My
mom used to tell me, when I
made a face,
that it would serve me right if it
stayed that way!
Saturday, September 24th, 2005
Well how do ya like that?
With all this talk about
hurricanes, it's easy to overlook some very important stories!
"If I were to die in Iraq, I wouldn't want my parents to be like Cindy Sheehan," said Army National Guard Spc. Julie McManus, 20. "I'd be ashamed of them." Well...no, Julie. You'd be dead!
Friday, September 23rd, 2005
A dyslexic, agnostic insomniac, you ask? Well...that's a person who lies awake wondering if there really is a dog!
But...if yer
like me, you've lain awake many a night wondering: just what
are Mexican Jumping
Beans(?)!
I now have the answer!
They are moth larvae
trapped inside the seed capsule of a deciduous
shrub!
Thursday, September 22nd,
2005 Happy Birthday, Robin!
Word from NewPeep that she's fled Houston for a place a bit up north where "they're [only] expecting winds between 75-100 MPH"!
Wednesday, September 21st, 2005
I'm, like, totally down on Clowncast!
I mean, they are so lame! They've got this
turbo-stupid Spam filter called DumbMail
and yer spos'd to 'Report as Spam' any mail you
retrieve from their Web mail site that you say is Spam and yer spos'd to
'forward as attachment' (to their 'missed-Spam'
department) any Spam that makes it through to your Inbox (like in Outlook
Express). So, after I've spent the last three months bitching about how I can
report and/or forward the same piece of Spam until
my fingers fall off (and my mouse dies) and it will still
come through the filter(!)...this joker finally
answers my increasingly nasty emails with the newsflash that DumbMail does not
filter on content...but only on Subject and Sender information! And this
news on a day when Hey, Oh Hell is reveling
in its latest
victory against Spam!
Some folks probably don't understand how anyone can get so exercised about Spam
but, see, I've got four pretty active email accounts and, on a slow day,
I'll receive sixty-five pieces of Spam, most of which I can filter out
with the Outlook Express 'Message Rules'. But the
ten or twenty each day that I can't filter out with Outlook's palsied
rules are the ones that grate! When you see the same stupid messages (for Rolex
watches or food supplements or ED drugs) over and over...trust me, it wears ya
down!
So I poked around and found this free (!) program online
called 'K9'. Ya know, as in the dog?
So far, it's way cool (even at twice the price)!
"Honest people don't tell you they're honest!"
Tuesday, September 20th, 2005 Happy Birthday, Feather!
As I follow two grizzly stories coming in
today from Basra, Iraq, I wonder how and how much they will be carried by our mainstream
news outlets. The first
seems all the way to bizarre while the second
seems all too much within a pattern punctuated by the murder,
early last month (in Basra), of columnist Steven Vincent (Web
Log, Thursday, August 4th). "Days
earlier, Mr. Vincent had written an Op-Ed article for The Times in which he
criticized the British security forces in the city for failing to act against
the Shiite militias' growing power within the local police force."
British troops used tanks to break down the walls of a Basra police station
yesterday to free two of their own!
New York Times Reporter Fakher Haider was abducted and murdered (in Basra) on
Monday by men posing as Iraqi policemen. "On
Sunday, Mr. Haider filed reports about angry demonstrations that had broken out
after the arrest by British forces of two high-ranking members of the...militia
loyal to the renegade Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr."
In summary: The occupying forces are in open combat with the civil 'authorities'
while the local police carry out summary executions of journalists.
"Operation Iraqi Freedom"? "Noble Cause"?
Monday, September 19th, 2005
"The inclination to lower himself, to let himself be stolen from, lied to and exploited, could be the modesty of a God who walks among men." Fred
Life is good.
Quoted by my son, but without attribution: “You can either live your life, or you can read The New York Times!”
About twice a week, maybe, I buy a loaf of what they call 'Sweet
Baguette' from the Semifreddi's
line. It tastes so good that you just know
it's gotta cause cancer or (at least) gas! [To the chagrin
of those so cursed as to be within earshot,] I
call it 'bowel-stoppers', because an initiator
of peristalsis...it's
not!
It is a quite sensual treat to be enjoyed (as with all sensual treats) in
moderation.
And, just in case you're really bored, here's a set of grinners, courtesy of a pal whom I left in the lockup.
Sunday, September 18th, 2005 Thirty years ago today, Patty Hearst was captured in San Francisco
I'm surprised that the New York Times is even trying to charge for contemporaneous online content. Last week it was announced that the Op-Ed columns (by such brilliant writers as Frank Rich and Maureen Dowd) will no longer be available to those who don't sign up for Times Select, at a cost of $50 per year. To my knowledge, every such attempt (by anyone) to charge for such content has (so far) failed; 'failed', that is, in the sense that, after a time, the charges were removed and the content was, once again, made freely available. We'll see.