I’ve had to correct the setup of my Flickr account so that I can email a picture and a few paragraphs to my flickr account and they will post it on my blog for me. For my first trick, here’s a picture of a fat man in a Buddha shirt. I’ll try to start using my flickr account in conjunction with my phone to increase my blog posting frequency.
An amusing video and two jokes from my mother-in-law:
“I THINK YOU’RE THE FATHER OF ONE OF MY KIDS”
A guy goes to the supermarket and notices a beautiful blond woman wave at him and say hello.
He’s rather taken aback, because he can’t place where he knows her from. So he says, “Do you know me?” To which she replies, “I think you’re the father of one of my kids.”
Now his mind travels back to the only time he has ever been unfaithful to his wife and says, “My God, are you the stripper from my bachelor party that I laid on the pool table with all my buddies watching, while your partner whipped my butt with wet celery???”
She looks into his eyes and calmly says, “No, I’m your son’s math teacher.”
“Redneck Sensitivity”
Three Rednecks were working on a cell phone tower… Cooter, Jim Bob, and Bubba.
As they start their descent down the tower, Cooter slips, falls off the tower and is killed instantly. As the ambulance takes the body away, Jim Bob says, “Well, damn, someone should go and tell his wife.”
Bubba says, “OK, I’m pretty good at that sensitive stuff, I’ll do it.”
Two hours later, he comes back carrying a case of Budweiser.
Jim Bob says, “Where did you get that beer, Bubba?”
“Cooter’s wife gave it to me,” Bubba replies.
“That’s unbelievable; you told the lady her husband was dead and She gave you beer?”
“Well, not exactly”, Bubba says. “When she answered the door, I said To, ‘You must be Cooter’s widow’.” She said, “You must be mistaken, I’m not a widow.”… then I Said “I’ll bet you a case of Budweiser you are.”
Rednecks Are Good At Sensitive Stuff
I caught this video on youtube today, and got a great laugh out of it. I especially like the first “victim” who appears to be nearly oblivious.
Hola. Long time no see. I’ve been having difficulty making time to write. It’s not that I don’t have time, I just haven’t used it appropriately. I spend way too much time surfing the web and watching TV. I shouldn’t really complain much about the web surfing, but the TV watching kind of gets out of hand. I frequently stay up until 2:00 a.m. watching shit that I wouldn’t watch during the day. During the day, I would just read a book or go for a drive or something instead, but late at night, I watch bad TV. I can’t explain it. Don’t even have a very good theory as of yet.
Anyway, I’m sitting here in my suit while Michelle is getting ready to go out. Tonight is Transamerica Life Insurance’s 100th Anniversary dinner party at the Westin Crown Center. I can’t honestly say that I’m looking forward to it, but at least I was able to talk her out of making me wear a tuxedo. I won’t even get to drink. I’ve got to be the one to drive home, and even if we had rented a room, I just can’t force myself to pay $7 for a bottle of beer. The prices for the cash bar were printed up on an info sheet in advance of the party, and they are uniformly ridiculous. Who the hell do they think they are? You can buy that same stuff at a grocery store or liquor store for less than a tenth of the price. It certainly isn’t the service, because every hotel bartender I’ve ever seen was obviously not at the top of their profession serving whiskey sours in plastic glasses.
Boy, I’m just working myself into a lather about this thing. What kind of fucking company thinks their employees want to hang out at a hotel ballroom with their fellow employees in their most uncomfortable clothes eating rubber chicken and drinking overpriced cocktails? That sounds more like the third circle of hell to me. I’m really having an attitude problem lately. I’m sick to death of going out in public and fighting crowds of people for parking spaces, seats in restaurants, the short line at the checkout, etc. Why can’t I just stay home and enjoy my hobbies or do some work? Maybe it’s my impending 40th birthday – I’m getting prematurely middle-aged.
Anyway…
I see the pope has gotten himself in trouble with the Muslims. Go Pope! Those stupid shits need to stop rioting every time somebody calls their religion violent and irrational unless they in fact agree with us and are trying to help us prove our point. My reading of history shows that much of Europe had this same sort of problem for several hundred years of the middle ages. What’s it going to take to get the Islamic world to start recognizing freedom of conscience? Maybe they need to have some sort of Protestant Reformation like we in the West did.
Importance of Being Earnest, originally uploaded by tdouthat.
I’m sitting in the small gym at Truman High School watching Jill’s basketball practice. This is her first practice with her new team, the Blazers. It’s a big program in Independence with about 22 teams in different age divisions. Most of the teams play in AAU tournaments and some play in local leagues. I’ve only been watching for about 30 minutes but this is a whole new level for me. I’ve never been involved in a competition program before. Practices are run completely different and the kids are completely different. Everyone is much more serious, and I don’t mean that in a bad way. It’s refreshing to see this many people being earnest.
Michelle and I like to laugh at the Horatio Caine character in CSI:Miami because he is so cheesy and earnest, but I also secretly envy the attitude. It’s hard to not be sarcastic, cynical, and ironic all the time. It takes a lot of emotional energy to actually care about what goes on around you, but I’m starting to get the sneaking suspicion that maybe people who give a crap are happier, healthier people. Maybe not everything is a joke and an opportunity to screw around.
Jill has more skills than I knew about. At her practices with her winter league IYAA team, she was so busy clowning and mouthing off, that I never noticed that she is actually a pretty good player.
This little discussion reminds me of an article I found a few months ago about
playing to win. It talks about the extra depth that brings to a video gaming experience, but I think you could apply it to any competitive endeavor.
Well, that’s enough for one night. Maybe now that I’ve switched from using Blogger to WordPress I’ll post more often. (Heck, maybe I could become an earnest blogger who competes for readers with other blogs.)
Office Space
Originally uploaded by tdouthat.
The Religious Right is winning the culture war. Mostly because they are the only ones fighting in it. I just watched the latest episode of Frontline on pbs.org. The title is “The Last Abortion Clinic”. It’s about the pro-life movement’s attempts to close down the last abortion clinic in the state of Mississippi.
Now, despite being a dues-paying member of Planned Parenthood, I’m no big fan of abortion. I consider it a tragedy and a failure of our education and healthcare systems that so many women end up having unwanted pregnancies. And I don’t intend to write in defense of abortion. My problem is that there are no moderates addressing the issue. The right-wing thumps their Bibles, screams bloody murder, and gets pro-life candidates elected to office, and the left-wing does all their fighting in the courts going on-and-on about women’s rights. But the elected officials get to decide who the judges are, so you can see how this is going to work out. Abortion will get outlawed soon, but in the meantime a great deal of damage is being done to our public institutions.
The agenda of the pro-life activists is much broader than just getting abortion outlawed and they are getting more politically savvy and making progress on many fronts. These people are just one portion of the Christian Conservatives who are fighting against birth control, AIDS education, evolution, and separation of church and state. They are getting abstinence-only sex education taught in the schools. They are interfering with public health measures like condom distribution and needle exchange that would slow the spread of AIDS. They are getting the Kansas Board of Education to redefine science in the state education standards so that it no longer just applies to natural phenomena. They claim discrimination if they’re asked not to lead the entire audience in prayer at government events or to not put up the Ten Commandments in government buildings, and in many places they just go ahead and do it anyway.
They are just going to win more and more of these fights as time goes on because they are just going to keep getting elected to public office. They have ready-made political organizations behind them in their church congregations. The moderates just don’t stand a chance against that because politically moderate people just don’t go to church much anymore. I hear statistics occassionally about the large percentage of the population that goes to church regularly, but either I live in a neighborhood that is oddly skewed towards the godless-heathen persuasion, or a lot of people are lying to the pollsters. I would tend to believe the latter.
I hate to say it, but people who are less-than-enthusiastically religious should probably consider going to church more often. If not, then you may have to cede the public square and the right to make decisions about public policy to those who are more enthusiastic about their dogma.
Short post tonight: I just found three interesting things on the net tonight that I felt like sharing.
First, an interview with my favorite author, Neal Stephenson at Salon.com provided an interesting quote on the nature of programming: “I think there are common threads between writing and programming. That’s a really easy statement for people to misunderstand and twist around so I’m a little leery of making it. All I’m saying is that the thing you’re making — the novel or the computer program — has got a very complicated and finely wrought hierarchical structure to it. The structure has to work right or the whole thing fails. But the only way you can work on it is by hitting one character at a time. You’re building this thing one character at a time while having to maintain the whole structure in your head. That description applies equally well to programming and novel writing even though they’re very different activities.”
Second, an article from National Review Online on the nature of stupidity and laziness. It starts out with a Jonathan Swift “A Modest Proposal” sort of feel to it that provoked some thought. It declines near the end, but I thought it was worth a read.
Third, an amusing quote from Lance Armstrong: “If there was a god, I’d still have both nuts.”
Home Repair
Originally uploaded by tdouthat. Good morning. It’s Saturday. I got up about half an hour ago, and I’ve done several of my usual morning chores. I didn’t bother with the showering since I’m going to be painting the living room in a little bit. We started having… Actually we had our first family meeting last Sunday and I hope it is the first of regular weekly meetings. We set up days for each one of the four of us to cook one dinner a week, and we talked about the work that needs to be done around the house. The decision was made that the first project for us to work on would be to finish painting the living room and foyer. Jill has a soccer game at 3:00 so I probably won’t get a heck of a lot done before then, but at least I will have started on it.
During the family meetings we also talked about the fact that we need to save some money so that we can buy new siding for the house. I’m supposed to report back every week on how much I’ve paid off the credit cards so we know when we’re getting close to the point where we can run up some more debt to pay for the siding. What would be really nice would be if I could pay off the credit cards, and at the same time, save the money to pay for the siding, but that isn’t terribly likely. The siding is starting to look visibly shitty even from a block away. When I turn the corner from Indian onto Belmont, I can see the patches of rot at the bottom of the hardboard on the northeast side of the house. Board and batten siding is supposed to be inexpensive and easy to maintain, but the fuckers that built this house bought an odd size that you can only get from Sutherland’s lumber around here. Plus you then have to have a table saw to cut the damn thing to size, a ladder to get up on the side of the house, and help from at least one other person in order to hold the thing in place while you nail it up, and then you half to put the batten back on and caulk around the nail holes and seams before you paint it. Does any of that sound easy to maintain to you? Here’s what would be easy: It takes one person with a screw gun ten minutes to take down the existing piece of siding and put up the new one. You’d probably still need a ladder to get up high.
Speaking of ladders, why don’t they make them with a weight limit of more than 225 pounds. Is that some sort of standard weight limit? My 296.5 pound ass is scared to death to get up on one of those rickety little bitches out of fear that it will collapse under me when I get to the top. I need to buy a heavy duty extension ladder, but the ones that will hold my weight are ridiculously expensive. I don’t know how I’m ever going to be able to paint the ceiling and upper walls in our foyer. I hate to think it, but I may have to rent scaffolding from Home Depot in order to get it done. These stupid home designers just don’t think about the people who are going to own these houses and about how they are going to have to maintain them. I guess the same could be said of programmers and the systems they write. 11:23
The hotel bar
Originally uploaded by tdouthat. Hey y’all. There was nothing good on TV upstairs in the hotel room, I didn’t feel like reading, and I’m not ready for bed, so here I am at a bar called Chaddick’s in the Plano, Texas Marriott. The place kind of reminds me of the hotel bar in “Lost in Translation”. I feel like Bill Murray in that I’m sitting here lonely watching all these other groups of people socializing. (There is even a bit of the language barrier thing. The Guatemalan bartender is talking to the lady a few stools down in Spanish telling her how to get to a bar in Dallas. The bars in Plano close at midnight, but Dallas bars close at 2:00.)
The television is playing Best Damn Sports Show Period on Fox Sports but the sound is turned off so its just a bunch of talking heads making funny faces. I wish that they had Comedy Central on the TV in the room, but they only have about 25 channels from the satellite.
I would go swimming but the pool closed at 11:00. It’s a nice pool up on the roof, with a whirlpool too.
I guess I’ll just finish my beer and go back upstairs and read some more of “Altered Carbon”, a science fiction book that Amazon.com recommended for people who like Neal Stephenson. I’ve read all the books that Neal Stephenson has written so far, so I figured I would try something similar to his stuff.
There is apparently some sort of big soccer tournament in town. There are about a half dozen women soccer players sitting next to me trying to figure out where to party tonight. I feel bad about stereotyping but about half of them look like lesbians to me.
There is an old guy (60?) next to me drinking a Dewars and water. Yuck. Give it to me straight up or don’t bother.
A British guy is getting loaded with some friends over at a table. He has on a Homer Simpson t-shirt that extols the virtues of alcohol.
There are an oddly large number of foreigners in this city. I’m guessing that it is related to the large number of corporate headquarters and technology companies in Plano.
Too much information… One of the soccer chicks is talking about the slurping sound that a breast pump makes.
Time to pay and go.
