27 April 2010

50 bucks is 50 bucks,
and economics is economics.



I recently asked my friends' little girl what she wanted to be when she grows up. She said she wanted to be President some day. I asked her, "If you were President what would be the first thing you would do?"

She replied, "I'd give food and houses to all the homeless people."

"Wow.what a worthy goal," I told her, "But you don't have to wait until you're President to do that. You can come over to my house and mow the lawn, pull weeds, and sweep my yard, and I'll pay you $50. Then I'll take you over to the grocery store where the homeless guy hangs out, and you can give him the $50 to use toward food and a new house."

She thought that over for a few seconds, then she looked me straight in the eye and asked, "Why doesn't the homeless guy come over and do the work, and you can just pay him the $50?"


26 April 2010

lost in translation. . .
somewhere between incommunicado
and oblivion


a guide to answering machine messages, part 1.

recorded outgoing message: "if you are a solicitor, please hang up. if not, please press 1 and leave a message."

translation: "we are screening the call. if you are selling something, we are just too wimpy to pick up the phone and say no to you."

22 April 2010

sniglet of the day

lava • sneeze

the first action of a lava lamp when turned on; typically the wax at the very bottom heats sufficiently to boil over and out from under the solid wax, but then it solidifies upon striking the cooler water at the top, and remains suspended in place until the whole contents are heated to the melting point.

21 April 2010

jäg saknar den tiden
hmmm! børk! børk! børk!




translation: i miss those days sometimes. ha.

i don't have a drinking problem.
i drink, i get drunk. . .no problem.


the effects of alcohol

6 beers

2 glasses of wine

2 bottles of wine -- shared, of course

too many margaritas

3 kamikazes

7 rum-and-cokes

1 large purple haze

3 martinis

1 bottle of tequila



thanks to hhodges for sharing

20 April 2010

why? i mean, really. . .what's the point?



need i say more?

best use of a radial prop engine since WWII



'nuf said.


best use of a V10 to date







dodge viper V10 under a 4-wheel motorcycle. 
prototype only. damn.

excuse me, but does this motorcycle make my butt look small enough?





too much time, too much money. . .

this is a beautiful polluter!




i dare you to show up at a convention of the green party on this thing.

24 cylinders. . .1 per lawnmower engine, 12 on a side, each with a pull cord starter!

imagine the time it must take to (a) fuel it up, (b) tune it up, and (c) change the oil. (never mind (d) start it!). my right arm is already tired!

a gas-powered lawn mower engine produces four times as much pollution as the engine in a typical car. do the math...24 engines times 4 (the pollution each engine's factor over 1 automobile engine) equals 96. . .this contraption emits 96 times the pollutants one car would...

sarah palin would love this thing. anyone remember "drill, baby, drill!"???

can you imagine the torque?





7 cylinders, radial airplane engine, longitudinal propshaft. rev the engine or accelerate too quickly, and the bike will try to lie down on one side.


bloody uncomfortable ride, too. imagine leaning to one side all the time to compensate for the torque. . .


my back muscles are aching already. 

19 April 2010

FIVE!!!!!!!



tiger woods could take a lesson from this guy.




". . .in golf, honesty is more important than victory. It's a tough lesson to learn, but here's hoping he gets accolades -- and, perhaps, some sponsorship deals -- that more than make up for the victory he surrendered."



15 April 2010

here's a whole new definition of speed.



fake race vehicle seized with nearly a ton of cocaine

just saying the name of the volcano in iceland causes seismic shifts


eyjafjallajokull.
try saying it 3 times quickly without stammering.



and i want to know. . .how does the ash know to stay inside the lines? 
i mean, how can it stay in eastern scotland and not west, 
or southern ireland and not north?

14 April 2010

oy!


there's a new miniature electronic device for people
who speak or understand Yiddish:

it's called the iVey


oy, part 1
oy, part 2



13 April 2010

golf is flog spelled backward

golf: a game where you yell "FORE,"
shoot a six. . .

. . .and write 5 on your scorecard!

08 April 2010

they are not stupid

i would have shared this on facebook or twitter, but i have no access.



OPINION: DECLARATIONS  |  APRIL 2, 2010

The Catholic Church's Catastrophe
The press and the pope deserve credit for confronting scandal.

By PEGGY NOONAN


There is an interesting and very modern thing that often happens when individuals join and rise within mighty and venerable institutions. They come to think of the institution as invulnerable—to think that there is nothing they can do to really damage it, that the big, strong, proud establishment they're part of can take any amount of abuse, that it doesn't require from its members an attitude of protectiveness because it's so strong, and has lasted so long. And so people become blithely damaging. It happened the past decade on Wall Street, where those who said they loved what the street stood for, what it symbolized in American life, took actions that in the end tore it down, tore it to pieces. They loved Wall Street and killed it. It happens with legislators in Washington who've grown to old and middle age in the most powerful country in the world, and who can't get it through their heads that the actions they've taken, most obviously in the area of spending, not only might deeply damage America but actually do it in. And it happened in the Catholic Church, where hundreds of priests and bishops thought they could do anything, any amount of damage to the church, and it would be fine. "Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it." That is Mathew 16:18, of course, Christ's great promise to his church. Catholics in the pews have been repeating it a lot lately as they—we—absorb the latest round of scandal stories. "The old church will survive." But we see more clearly than church leaders the damage the scandals have done. It is damage that will last at least a generation. It is an actual catastrophe, a rolling catastrophe that became public first in the United States, now in Europe. It has lowered the standing, reputation and authority of the church. This will have implications down the road. In both the U.S. and Europe, the scandal was dug up and made famous by the press. This has aroused resentment among church leaders, who this week accused journalists of spreading "gossip," of going into "attack mode" and showing "bias." 

But this is not true, or to the degree it is true, it is irrelevant. All sorts of people have all sorts of motives, but the fact is that the press—the journalistic establishment in the U.S. and Europe—has been the best friend of the Catholic Church on this issue. Let me repeat that: The press has been the best friend of the Catholic Church on the scandals because it exposed the story and made the church face it. The press forced the church to admit, confront and attempt to redress what had happened. The press forced them to confess. The press forced the church to change the old regime and begin to come to terms with the abusers. The church shouldn't be saying j'accuse but thank you. Without this pressure—without the famous 2002 Boston Globe Spotlight series with its monumental detailing of the sex abuse scandals in just one state, Massachusetts—the church would most likely have continued to do what it has done for half a century, which is look away, hush up, pay off and transfer. In fact, the press came late to the story. The mainstream media almost had to be dragged to it. It was there waiting to be told at least by the 1990s, but broadcast news shows and big newspapers weren't keen to go after it. It would take months or years to report and consume huge amounts of labor, time and money—endless digging through court records, locating victims and victimizers, getting people who don't want to talk to talk. And after all that, the payoff could be predicted: You'd get slammed by the church as biased, criticized by sincerely disbelieving churchgoers, and maybe get a boycott from a few million Catholics. No one wanted that. An irony: Non-Catholic members of the media were, in my observation, the least likely to want to go after the story, because they didn't want to look like they were Catholic-bashing. An irony within the irony: Some journalists didn't think to go after the story because they really didn't much like the Catholic Church. Because of this bias, they didn't see the story as a story. They thought this was how the church always operated. It didn't register with them that it was a scandal. They didn't know it was news. It was the Boston Globe that broke the dam, winning a justly deserved Pulitzer Prize for public service. 


Some blame the scandals on Pope Benedict XVI. But Joseph Ratzinger is the man who, weeks before his accession to the papacy five years ago, spoke blisteringly on Good Friday of the "filth" in the church. Days later on the streets of Rome, the Italian newspaper La Stampa reported, Cardinal Ratzinger bumped into a curial monsignor who chided him for his sharp words. The cardinal replied, "You weren't born yesterday, you understand what I'm talking about, you know what it means. We priests. We priests!" The most reliable commentary on Pope Benedict's role in the scandals came from John Allen of the National Catholic Reporter, who argues that once Benedict came to fully understand the scope of the crisis, in 2003, he made the church's first real progress toward coming to grips with it. 


As for his predecessor, John Paul the Great, about whom I wrote an admiring book which recounts some of the scandals—I spent a grim 2003 going through the depositions of Massachusetts clergy—one fact seems to me pre-eminent. For Pope John Paul II, the scandals would have been unimaginable—literally not imaginable. He had come of age in an era and place (Poland in the 1930s, '40s and '50s) of heroic priests. They were great men; they suffered. He had seen how the Nazis and later the communists had attempted to undermine the church and tear people away from it, sometimes through slander. They did this because the great force arrayed against them was the Catholic Church. John Paul, his mind, psyche and soul having been forged in that world, might well have seen the church's recent accusers as spreaders of slander. Because priests don't act like that, it's not imaginable. And he'd seen it before, only now it wasn't Nazism or communism attempting to kill the church with lies, but modernity and its soulless media. Only they weren't lies. There are three great groups of victims in this story. The first and most obvious, the children who were abused, who trusted, were preyed upon and bear the burden through life. The second group is the good priests and good nuns, the great leaders of the church in the day to day, who save the poor, teach the immigrant, and, literally, save lives. They have been stigmatized when they deserve to be lionized. And the third group is the Catholics in the pews—the heroic Catholics of America and now Europe, the hardy souls who in spite of what has been done to their church are still there, still making parish life possible, who hold high the flag, their faith unshaken. No one thanks those Catholics, sees their heroism, respects their patience and fidelity. The world thinks they're stupid. They are not stupid, and with their prayers they keep the world going, and the old church too.



Copyright 2009 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved
This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only. Distribution and use of this material are governed by our Subscriber Agreement and by copyright law. For non-personal use or to order multiple copies, please contact Dow Jones Reprints 







at 1-800-843-0008 or visit www.djreprints.com

07 April 2010

don't usually do this. . .but it's worth sharing



tell sarah palin: stop winking at violence

http://act.credoaction.com/campaign/stopwinking/



f
or more than a year, dating back before the 2008 election, sarah palin and other republican leaders have been "winking" at violent rhetoric from tea party extremists and other right-wing supporters. they have pretended to be "shocked" when accused of helping stoke such fires, and yet, they have stood by, and even endorsed rallies featuring signs such as, "obama's plan: white slavery," "the american taxpayers are the jews for obama's oven," and "guns tomorrow!"


and now, the chickens are coming home to roost, as these violent words metastasize into violent deeds. multiple members of congress have received death threats. others have had windows of offices smashed. at least one received a package of white powder.


sarah palin's reaction? shockingly, she's actually ramping up the rhetoric. not only did she tell her supporters, "don't retreat, instead-RELOAD," she even published a map with crosshairs over the districts of selected democrats who supported health-care reform.


enough is enough! please join me and send a letter to sarah palin demanding that she publicly pledge to stop winking at violent rhetoric, and to demand that her fellow republican leaders do the same.

05 April 2010

helluva game, boys. helluva game.

what a way to open the season with a sunday night game.
a real nailbiter, and playing the red sox in the first game
to boot.
i guess if you're going to lose to anyone in the first game,
it's best to lose to the sox.
hats off to the sox for giving us one dandy of a game.