Archive for
April, 2006
April 23rd, 2006
And so it continues. If it were innocent Americans being held indefinitely we’d be yelling and screaming and sending in troops. I guess we really are the bullies who don’t care what we do to anyone else.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Nearly 30 percent of the Guantanamo detainees have been cleared to leave the prison but remain jailed because the U.S. government has been unable to arrange for their return to their home countries, the Pentagon said on Friday. [“Nearly 30 percent at Guantanamo jail cleared to go” (Yahoo!News)]
Tags: Guantanamo Bay, detainees, innocent, Pentagon
April 23rd, 2006
“The incompetent with nothing to do can still make a mess of it.”
– Laurence J. Peters
Tags: incompetence, Quote of the Day
April 21st, 2006
Now here’s something that isn’t making headline news and should be. This will affect everyone if it makes it through and probably people either think no one will be able to enforce it or it’ll never happen in their life time. This is real Big Brother type stuff.
If you’ve ever been frustrated because you were using a library, campus, military, or work computer and couldn’t get to a website because it was blocked, imagine if your phone company or service provider could do that to you just because they want more money? Imagine that your service provider could charge you extra to go to ebay or Amazon.com or bloglines or cnn.com. Imagine that your service provider could decide whether or not you could read Air America’s site or Rush’s or Fox News or NPRs based on their politics not yours.
Just think about it.
Congress is pushing a law that would abandon “network neutrality.” Network neutrality prevents companies like AT&T, Verizon and Comcast from choosing which Web sites open most easily for you based on who pays them more. Your local library shouldn’t have to outbid Barnes & Noble for the right to work more properly on your computer.
If the public doesn’t speak up now, Congress will hand control of the Internet to companies that want to decide what you do, where you go and what you watch online. Politicians are already trading favors for campaign donations from these companies. They’re selling us out to people like AT&T’s CEO, who says “the Internet can’t be free.”
Internet freedom could soon be fenced in by the phone and cable companies. If Congress turns the Internet over to AT&T, everyone will be affected.
How does this affect you?
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Tags: COPE Act, Congress, net neutrality, blogs, iTunes, web hosting, politics, Internet
April 21st, 2006
It’s that time again.
- “Do you actually read Shakespeare or is he just sitting on your shelf because you think he makes you look intelligent?” the snooty man asked.
- If all hell was going to break loos at the office, couldn’t it have had the decency to wait until Monday rather than ruin a perfectly good Friday?
- Somedays it just wasn’t worth it to log on.
- It was really rather a long, boring story and this one is much more fun.
- Suri stretched one dew-covered wing as she wiped the sleep from one half-opened eye.
Tags: Friday Five 1rst Sentences, writing
April 21st, 2006
“If there were no God, there would be no Atheists.”
– G. K. Chesterton
Tags: Quote of the Day, God, atheisism, Faith
April 21st, 2006
Here are some amusing photos from my visit last Tuesday with Pugly. (Next Friday I get to bring him home!) The little black pug is his yet unnamed brother.
And don’t forget to check out the rest of today’s Friday Ark!
Tags: photo, Friday Ark, the puppy
April 20th, 2006
(Third time I’ve written this post…hope it takes this time.)
About 2 a.m. my eyes popped open, focusing on the ceiling in the light from the parking lot. I had this impending feeling of something just not right.
Then I realized what it was.
I suddenly knew that there was going to be a system malfunction and soon. I thoughtfully warned my bedmates, which sent all the kitties scattering to the corners of the world at high speed. Meanwhile, I was moving much slower and less steadier and with a kind of double vision that only one of my medicines
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Tags: wellness
April 20th, 2006
You may not have noticed it but in the last 12 hours or so, www.exit-23.net and it’s affiliatied subdomains, including www.nothingtastesasgood.com moved from www.lunarpages.com to www.asmallorange.com.
As I was making the move, LunarPages had the bad timing to send me an email offering cash incentive to recommend my friends to them. Trust me, when I call and cancel tomorrow or Friday once I am sure everything is fully moved, they’ll be hearing about what I’ll be saying to friends and clients about what I’ll be recommending.
Meanwhile, A small orange’s customer service was extremely helpful
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Tags: Lunarpages, a small orange, web hosting
April 19th, 2006
1. Coin his own nickname.
2. Use a wallet that is fastened with Velcro.
3. Rank his friends in order of best, second best, and so on.
4. Hacky sack.
5. Name his penis his name plus junior.
6. Hang art with tape.
7. Hang The Scream, unless he stole it from the Munch museum in Oslo.
8. Ask a policeman, “You ever shoot anybody with that thing?”
9. Ask a woman, “Hey, you got a license for that ass?”
10. Skip.
11. Take a camera to a nude beach.
12. Let his father do his taxes.
13. Tap on the glass.
14. Shout out a response to “Are you ready to rock?”
15.
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Tags: none
April 18th, 2006
BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) — Secretary of State Al Ater wants to know why the federal government agreed to pay for New York City’s municipal elections after Sept. 11, 2001, but refuses to pay for New Orleans’ elections after Hurricane Katrina.
FEMA recently turned down Louisiana’s request for the extra $3-4 million it will take to hold the April 22 New Orleans municipal elections, rescheduled in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.
But the agency shelled out $7.9 million after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks delayed New York City’s elections.
Ater said it’s a double standard.
“After the election, I’m going to dedicate my life
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Tags: vote, FEMA, Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans
April 18th, 2006
Carl Bernstein of Woodward & Bernstein/Watergate fame has written an excellent article for Vanity Fair comparing the Nixon administration and Watergate Scandal to the Bush administration and — well — all of their scandals and the question as to whether there should be an investigation into their secrets, lies, and mistruths. Check it out online.
Tags: Richard Nixon, George W. Bush, Carl Bernstein, Vanity Fair, Watergate
April 18th, 2006
Remeber a couple of weeks ago when I was having trouble with FW (Mr. Drama Queen himself) totally being all pissy and abusively talking down to me like I couldn’t do my job? He’d calmed down since then; I assume because the nice bossman chatted with him and told him to curb his Diva’tude. I mean, he’s still a Drama Queen, but at least he wasn’t acting like he was Elton John and I was Vanilla Ice or something anymore.
So anyway, one of the things I completely stopped doing was backing him or anyone up on the pager. You
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Tags: Karma
April 18th, 2006
The incompentance is just never ending. Thank God, for Houston’s Mayor Bill White!
A New Orleans house flattened but for a concrete staircase on a crumbling facade was among many storm-ravaged structures that federal officials deemed fit for occupancy by Katrina victims now living in Houston, Mayor Bill White said Friday.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency has notified about 8,900 heads of households in Houston, representing more than 20,000 Katrina evacuees, that they will be ineligible for the cash assistance intended to replace a massive city voucher program that has paid their rent.
A common reason was that the evacuees’ former homes
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Tags: FEMA, Hurricane Katrina, Houston, New Orleans, Bill White
April 18th, 2006
Well, my father’s pre-diabetes is now diabetes; he’s been put on medication but not insulin as of yet.
And yesterday, my mother stepped off the 8-foot drop in front of their property and managed to land on both of her feet and then fall right on her tail bone. She’s very lucky that all she broke was her ankle.
I’m really starting to get worried about both of them.
Tags: none
April 18th, 2006
Abu Bakker Qassim and A’del Abdu al-Hakim have been held in Guantanamo Bay since June 2002 after they were captured by bounty hunters in Pakistan in 2001. At the time they were fleeing China in search of religious and political sanctuary and in the chaos involving the “enemy combatant” round-up that led to anyone and everyone being handed over for American dollars, bounty hunters sold them to America and they were locked up.
Last year, the U.S. military determined that they were not in fact “enemy combatants.” You’d think then that everything would then be find and dandy for
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Tags: Abu Bakker Qassim, A'del Abdu al-Hakim, Guantanamo Bay, detainees, innocent, Freedoms
April 18th, 2006
OK I admit I was curious. This one seems kind of accurate, imho.
You Are an Excellent Cook
You’re a top cook, but you weren’t born that way. It’s taken a lot of practice, a lot of experimenting, and a lot of learning.
It’s likely that you have what it takes to be a top chef, should you have the desire…
Tags: blogthings
April 17th, 2006
Well, while my personal mental crisis was going on, Sunny and her friend Queer Eye came over Saturday to begin the assault on the living room. (I did take before pictures which I’ll post here in a few days in another photo-spective.)
Just so you know, I had begun the assult on the living room back in December when I came back from New Mexico. I started with the bookshelves and purged books from the monstrocity bookcase and a long window-high retro-shelf and a third bookshelf I have in the room. I then gave the retro-shelf to KH for her daughter,
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Tags: personal organizer, Clean Sweep, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy
April 17th, 2006
I know I’ve been quiet a couple of days. The truth is that there’s been some more arguing on the phone and in IMs and a couple of emails. Mostly it’s been one-sided so-called “Tough Love” coming from N2; at least that’s what she calls it.
I feel kind of beat up and sore and raw right now. It’s all been rather eye-openning.
Imagine finding out that the things your most afraid your friends will think about you are actually the things they think about you. But they “love you anyway” or they wouldn’t be talking to you about it. Quite frankly,
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Tags: friendship, dysfunctional drama, wellness, depression, anxiety
April 14th, 2006
To: N2
From: N
Could you at least acknowledge either way that you’re at least getting these emails, that you’re alive, etc? Tell me to shut up and go away if that’s what you want but don’t leave me just sitting here wondering what’s going on.
Talk to me.
To: N
From: N2
Talk to you? About what? Your very unfair and kind of insulting temper tantrum on me yesterday?
We’re still friends, don’t worry.. but I need to cool down still…so give me some time. 
To: N2
From: N
I’ll give you time, yes, but please take into account this perspective (as [SQ] would point out), your
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Tags: friendship, dysfunctional drama, PBeM
