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

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. 

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."

yahoo! sports blog

scaramouche, scaramouche, will you do the fandango?

click the pic

here's a whole new definition of speed.

fake race vehicle seized with nearly a ton of cocaine

nytimes.com

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?

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

nyt.com

golf is flog spelled backward

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

. . .and write 5 on your scorecard!

You starvelling, you eel-skin, you dried neat's-tongue, you bull's-pizzle, you stock-fish--O for breath to utter what is like thee!-you tailor's-yard, you sheath, you bow-case, you vile standing tuck!

if you want to be insulted in the style of the bard, click the button.

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

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

tell sarah palin: stop winking at violence

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

for 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.

hail mary full of net. . .NOT!

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.

in celebration of easter, we give you. . .

oh, the good old days. . .

maundy thursday and april fools. . .

at wordpress. fun blog post.

one, two, three strikes, you're out at the old ball game!

it's pinstripe season!

 

sunday, april 4 -- 8:05 p.m. EDT



the lyrics are here

if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and is called a duck. . .

stupid tourist du jour

overheard by a friend of my daughter while vacationing in hawaii:

"go throw your trash in the mahalo."

too much time on his hands? too much money to burn?

'nuf said.

beam me up, scotty

my youngest and i went to visit the oregon museum of science and industry on the weekend, and the treat of the trip was a visit to the visit to the uss blueback, a post-world-war-II submarine which has seen action in the likes of the hunt for red october, and hawaii-Five-0 (season 1, episode 4). 

anna's favorite part of the tour of the blueback was getting to see the battery officer (see below).

my favorite moment was when anna sat at the controls in the engine room (the tour guide said this is where commander scott would be found if he worked in a submarine.) and as instructed, she kept her hands off the dials, buttons, levers, switches and knobs. she didn't want to send a distress signal to COMSUBPAC.

beam me up, anna!

sign me up. now. please.

you're skating on thin ice, mister.

yes, that's a zamboni which fell through the ice.

KEYSTONE RESORT — A Zamboni took a dip Tuesday night in Keystone Lake, North America's largest groomed skating pond.

Read more here.

-- denver post --

would you be a little, um, more specific?

Sometimes, Area Woman Just Feels...

MARCH 20, 2010 | ISSUE 46•11

The way things have been lately…with all that she has going on…
Slota can't even tell anymore if, oh, never mind.

BELMONT, NH—Stating that she wasn't in the best place right now, and that things have been sort of you know, Belmont resident Megan Slota announced Thursday that sometimes she just feels….

Due to a general sense of…well, it's hard to explain, the 28-year-old dental hygienist reported that she just needed to work some stuff out, and that she would probably be a little I don't know for a couple weeks or so.

"It's not anybody's fault, honestly," said Slota, standing in her kitchen and holding a mug of tea with both hands. "Sometimes I just get like this where it's like I'm not, I guess, whatever. We don't have to get into it right now."

Added Slota, "I'm really, like, argh, I don't know."

After that thing with Dave on Thursday, people were concerned that Slota was in a weird place, which she initially denied. But Slota later admitted that she was just taking some time to figure things out and needed a little space, but it's not like she wanted people to leave her alone or anything like that.

"I had a really good talk with Debra," Slota said. "She's such a good friend. It's good to know I have someone like her. It's just a crazy time right now. And I've been really busy with work, too, so that hasn't helped."

While admitting that it must suck to have to deal with her lately, Slota said that she appreciates everyone's patience while she sorts all of this stuff out. Sources close to the sort of spacey, sort of—oh gosh, what would you even call it—distracted woman confirm that it's always the same this time of year, because of her dad.

"I worry about Megan," longtime friend Alex Polson said. "Times like this, she can get a little strange. Not strange strange, but still kind of strange where you're like, 'Huh?' But you know what? She's tough. She'll get through all this and be back to her old self in no time."

Though she's been kind of blah lately, especially at the family thing where she had to be on her best behavior, friends and coworkers have been understanding about what's going on with her, and want to let her know they're there if she needs help moving, or needs someone to go shopping with her, or just wants to hang out and not talk about the thing that happened with Samantha last week.

"You know, it's like when you're just," Slota said. "You feel one way but then you're also sort of, I don't know, maybe it's just one of those things. And you don't want to force it, right? I feel like you just have to accept it sometimes, I guess."

"It is what it is," she added.

Regardless of the thing that's, oh, whatever, it'll pass eventually, Slota maintained that she's forging ahead and taking things one day at a time.

Dr. Andrei Robinson, author of the book It's, Well, I'm Not Sure How To Describe It, Really, says that Slota's condition is not uncommon. 

"As a therapist, I'm seeing more and more patients with problems and conditions related to Ms. Slota's," Dr. Robinson said. "But ultimately, there's not a lot I can do for them. It's just another facet of this, whatever it is. You can't understand the, you know, well, anything, really. It's all too much sometimes, but it's her deal. She's got to work through it. We've all been there, right?"

"I don't know," Dr. Robinson added. "Does that make sense?"

-- the onion --

an invisible car came out of nowhere, struck me, and vanished!, part deux

NY police cite driver error
in Toyota Prius case
DETROIT--Mon Mar 22, 2010 5:40pm EDT


(Reuters) - Police in New York on Monday said it appears a March 9 crash of a Toyota Motor Corp Prius was a case of driver error and not unintended acceleration.


"The vehicle accelerator in this case was depressed 100 percent at the time of collision. There is absolutely no indication of any brake application," said Capt. Anthony Marraccini, acting chief of the Harrison Police Department, during a Monday afternoon press conference in Harrison, New York.


Marraccini was asked if the incident was caused by driver error. "I believe that this is what this case is telling us," Marraccini said of the data police investigators gathered.


This determination agrees with a preliminary finding reached last week by federal investigators from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA).


Toyota, the world's No. 1 automaker, has been under fire for the last two months amid the recall of more than 8 million vehicles around the world due to concerns about unintended acceleration.


Last Tuesday, Toyota announced that its investigators could not find evidence to support a driver's claim of unintended acceleration of a speeding Prius near San Diego on March 8. However, the California Highway Patrol last Wednesday stood by its initial report that it appeared that a 61-year-old man whose 2008 Prius sped down a San Diego County freeway on March 8 was stomping heavily on the brake pedal.


No charges have been filed in the case in California, and none are expected in the New York case, police said.


On March 9, a 56-year-old woman driving a 2005 Prius hybrid forward out of a driveway in Harrison was injured when the Prius speeded out of the driveway, across a busy street, and into a stone wall. The car reached a top speed of 35 miles per hour during a short drive that ended when the Prius struck a stone wall across a busy street from the driveway at 27 mph, Marraccini said.


Marraccini said he believes that Toyota Prius cars are safe. "Quite honestly, I would have no reservations about putting my own family" in a Toyota Prius, Marraccini said.


Toyota cooperated fully in the investigation, Marraccini said.


(Reporting by Bernie Woodall, editing by Matthew Lewis)

rats

we have nothing to fear but fear itself

OP-ED COLUMNIST

Fear Strikes Out

By PAUL KRUGMAN

Published: March 22, 2010

In the debate leading up to the victory for health care reform, President Obama urged lawmakers to do what is right, while opponents relied on fear and cynicism.

read more >>

where's jimmy cagney when you need him. . .

you dirty rat.

well, not so dirty after all.

anna, my youngest, has the privilege of taking care of her class' pet rats for spring break. she proudly brought home this HUGE cage with two rats in it on friday afternoon.

about every 2 hours, she wants to play with the rats. cocoa and madame cheese, in case you wonder, are their names. cute little buggers, they. like to scamper up and down your arms, they do. curious little creatures--they run to the end of your outrstretched fingertips, sniff the air in wonder at what's out there, and then amscray back to the shoulders as though something out there scared them witless.

she's playing with the rats now, as i write this. maybe i should go supervise. (that's code for play with the rats too--after all, my wife was supervising earlier, and you should have heard the screams of delight coming from both of them. oh, they were screams of delight, all right. i know what my wife sounds like when she is frightened by spiders and other nonesuch household pets, and these were not the same screams.)

you dirty rat.

ach du lieber!

children's nursery rymes are so damned depressing!

------------------------------------------------

Ach, du lieber Augustin, Augustin, Augustin
Ach, du lieber Augustin, alles ist hin.
Geld ist weg, Mäd´l ist weg,
Alles hin, Augustin.
Ach, du lieber Augustin,
Alles ist hin.

Rock ist weg, Stock ist weg,
Augustin liegt im Dreck,
Ach, du lieber Augustin,
Alles ist hin.

Und selbst das reiche Wien,
Hin ist's wie Augustin;
Weint mit mir im gleichen Sinn,
Alles ist hin!

Jeder Tag war ein Fest,
Und was jetzt? Pest, die Pest!
Nur ein groß' Leichenfest,
Das ist der Rest.

Ach, du lieber Augustin, Augustin, Augustin
Leg' nur ins Grab dich hin!
Ach, du lieber Augustin,
Alles ist hin!

--------------------------------------

Oh, dear Augustin, Augustin, Augustin
Oh, dear Augustin, everything is gone.
Money is gone, Girls are gone,
All is gone, Augustin.
Oh, dear Augustin
Everything is gone.

Rock is gone, cane is gone,
Augustine's in the dirt,
Oh, dear Augustin,
Everything is gone.

And even the rich Vienna
Gone is that Augustine's;
Weep with me in the same sense
Everything is gone!

Each day was a feast,
So now what? Plague, the plague!
Just a big 'funeral feast,
This is the Rest

Oh, dear Augustin, Augustin, Augustin
To only the grave you go!
Oh, dear Augustin,
Everything is gone!

this is what happens when two italian guys named jacuzzi and zamboni get together

london, ontario

pour me a pint o' your best, part deux