Toxoplasma gandhi

I read about a parasite that supposedly causes people to like cats, and was thinking about how some people inexplicably exalt others in spite of all evidence that they shouldn't, and my subconscious couldn't help itself.

Pinterest

Was anybody else's first thought "beer" the first time they saw the name "Pinterest"?

“Chess is mental torture” - Garry Kasparov, who beat me to it

“There just isn't enough televised Chess ” - David Letterman

“We don’t really know how the game was invented, though there are
suspicions. As soon as we discover the culprits, we’ll let you know”
- Bruce Pandolfini

I play chess when somebody, usually one of my children, begs asks me to.  If chess is life, then I think of it as life in a straight jacket.

My favorite middle child went 3-0-1 in his chess tournament yesterday.  Yay Wolfie!  Don't get a big head.  Now go do your chores.  Love you!

Happy Repeal Day!

80th anniversary of the 21st Amendment.  I'll drink to that!

Like a good neighbor

Surfing brought me to this article from Britain, describing a murder-suicide of a father and his two small boys.  Here's a snippet:

Miss Dodman was woken at about 5am by a loud thud on her bedroom wall, which was next to the boys’ room.
She said: “I could hear the older boy screaming, ‘what are you doing to me?’ It was exceptionally clear and he must have done it four or five times.”
She said there were a series of little bangs on the wall and screams which sounded like the older boy “flailing about”.
Miss Dodman said: “The little boy, who was scared, was crying – I don’t know how to describe it. The older boy’s scream was very loud.
“I just can’t really describe it, my stomach just clenched and I thought that’s not right.”
Miss Dodman said she thought the screaming had gone on for about an hour in the early hours of August 30 last year before she fell asleep.

HUH!?!?  That last sentence really threw me.  I had to read it twice more to be sure.  RTWT.

Add it the the Anti-Hero of the Year list along with the seven witnesses of this, and the several men who watched this happen.  The examples are endless.

Just... wow.

You can never go back

After finishing the Battlestar Galactica/Caprica series, I just had to go wach the original.  It was really cool when I was 7.  Now it just hurts.  I had to make myself laugh at the second season so I wouldn't keep thinking "Make it stooooooooop!"  But I have this problem that makes me finish seasons.  I did see a bunch of cool references along the way, and they really screwed things up for another show that used to be cool.  I recognized a voice on the Halloween episode... and now KITT has the voice of Norman the Clown.

Lloyd Bridges cannot go from Steve McCroskey to Commander Cain.  I kept expecting an auto-pilot to inflate on the bridge of the Pegasus.

Shots

I just realized that a blog is a great place to keep track of the shots I invent.  I have for many years been thinking of alcoholic drinks, mostly as puns and such, cuz why not.  But I don't bother making them and I forget.  So here goes...

My first (that I actually bothered to make) recipe:

Canadian Mistress
1/2 Canadian Mist (or any whisky/-ey, really, it's a pun)
1/2 maple syrup (and whenever I say maple syrup I mean 100% real)
Serve warm.  It helps to nuke the syrup in the shot glass before pouring in the whisky.
It's like a Beaver Tail/Canadian Dancer, but way sweeter, with greater effect.

I like to loudly order Buttery Nipples at bars cuz it embarrasses my better half.

Goddamnit is my copilot

I need something that will help me navigate my vehicle in unfamiliar places with nothing but winding roads and trees everywhere.  Have they invented that yet?

Why, I didn't know that! (sip)

Shock! TEA-Party Members Aren't Knuckle-Dragging Ignoramuses!

Via Smallest Minority.

Poor kid, spilled his chocolate shake all over his shirt

Via SMBC, another very wrongness.  Which is why I'm still laughing.  And why I keep going back.

Intolerance

As is usual, one thing lead to another while web surfing and I'm on the Wikipedia page for XIT Ranch.  It mentions that low cattle prices, rustlers and wolves helped lead to the ranch being unsuccessful and sold off after ~3 decades.  The article also mentions another ranch (J A) that is still successful after ~130 years.  Then the article shows the ranch rules:

The XIT Ranch had a number of rules including the following:

• No employee was allowed to carry any weapons for offense or self-defense.
• Gambling or card playing of any description was strictly prohibited.
• No liquor or intoxicating beverages were allowed to employees during their time of service.
• No employees were allowed to hunt wild game on any of the XIT horses.
• Employees were not allowed to own any of the horses or cattle on the ranch.

Which wolves were they talking about?  The WCTU?  Gun bigots?  Competition for employees?  Nope, couldn't see that failure coming.

Mock him mercilessly, and never stop

This is hilarious.  A tribute to His Highness's general, and thorough, incompetence and pettiness.  This time via the National Parks Service.

This warms my heart

‘Insolent’ Czechs look to coal for energy. (via Samizdata)

Burn, baby, burn!  I hope their recent efforts to increase nuclear power generation go smoothly. I'm thinking somewhere along their western border...

Tar and feathers would be a good start.

Autistic high school senior and other mentally handicapped students entrapped in drug sting.  Those cops, and the school district that still supports them, committed full blown child abuse.  My heart goes out to the victims.  I still have trouble believing that police actions which actively try to create criminals out of law abiding citizens are even legal.

Paul Krugman, future Obama Information Minister

Good news!  The Nobel prize-winning economist who never gets anything right just said that Obamacare is not failing.  Any Dems who still have faith in it should be soiling themselves.  I'll add "MSS" to his many deservedly insulting middle names.

Pi is dead! Long live Tau! Or maybe Eta...

OK, pi will never really die.  It's too ingrained in society.  But, as a practicing engineer, pi never really felt quite right.  It was annoying, but I didn't know how to explain it well other than "we work with radius, not diameter".  Then last night I found the Tau Manifesto, which articulated the issue quite nicely.

Don't worry folks.  There's always room for pi!  And who couldn't like Tau Day?  I mean, that's 2 pi!  June 28 at 3:19.  Dig in.

Golf funnies

Of course Tam can pull funny out of a hat with a hole in it.

And this classic. (thanks to DaveS, provider of 30-cal thereapy)

The sim of all fears

Tom Clancy --> The Sum of All Fears --> me googling the quote and mistyping it "sim of fears" --> which got me thinking about AGW

Why, you may take the most unethical businessman, the most fraudulent scientist or the most audacious politician, put them at a table together- what do you get? The sim of all fears.

Yes... ManBearPig.

I have been working in computer simulations since the late 90s, when ManBearPig was first captured in a grainy video taken on Bluff Creek and easily dismissed as fraudulent based on already existing data.  We have a saying in the sim world: Never trust the sim.  If it works, you missed something.

Oh, and you can always make it do what you want if you fudge enough of the inputs.

Tom Clancy (4/12/47 - 10/1/13)

His Wikipedia bio here.

Aaaaaand another one...

Heeeeere, kitty, kitty, kitty...

This is so full of win

This is a comment from an already excellent Samizdata article.  I pulled the following paragraph.  RTWT.

........
Now we in the west, having built a civilization that has fulfilled some of the biblical dreams of our ancestors thousands of years in the distant past, creating a land flowing with milk and honey, that has explored the earth to the bottom of the deepest oceans, and walked on another world, is being led to the edge of the same chasm by an ignorant, arrogant, and incompetent elite whose relentless march toward catastrophe is endlessly excused by the smug claim that it’s not the power they have that’s the problem, but the power that still eludes their grasp.
........

 Screw the Pledge.  It's stuff like this that should be memorized and recited every morning by gradeschoolers instead.  Also everything TheSmallestMinority has at the top of his blog.

Easy on the mushrooms!

6 Things Your Pee is Trying to Tell You

Custom Ruger 10/22? $300. Internet immortality? Priceless.

This is being advertised on NC Armslist as a "custom" Ruger 10/22.  I'd say I agree.  Assisted suicide?  Saw your shootin buddy messin with the missus?  Num3ers needs more props? (I don't remember which episode.)  I hope it was rested against the gun just to get the picture because the "stupid" magazine just refused to seat properly.

It depends on what the meaning of the word 'evil' is.

Don't be evil.

42!

I have reached another nerdy birthday number.  I would like to have been back in NM with family, but in NC with job is nothing to complain about.  On the schadenfreude bright side, my cousin Greg turned 40 today.  Happy birthday, old man!

My 5th day of work really made me feel like I was back into things cuz I couldn't get anything done with all the computer problems.  Progress!

To celebrate my birthday, I went off the diet just enough to have my first Dogfish Head Raison D'Etre.  Typical of DH, it is obviously made with love and help from God cuz it is reeeeeeally good.  Now I wish that I'd bought the 4 pack and not just one.  Heeeeey, I have family near the DH brewery/pub... only 6 hours away!

Clanks

If I haven't mentioned it, "Clankon warrior" is a take on clanks from one of my favorite webcomics, Girl Genius.

Finally!

What's 9/5/2013 minus 1/20/2012?  A long time to be unemployed.  The good news is I just started a 7 month contract.  The bad news is it's in NC, not NM, where the family is.  Still, yay!  The wife and I took a 1700-mile road trip to NC in the new-to-us car, and she flew back after I found a place to stay.  Thanks, darling!  I look forward to more.

I'm so sorry to all my intrepid readers for my almost 3 month absence.  Especially you, blogsrating.pw!  You never lost hope, and I shall never forget your loyalty. <sniff>

In the meantime, I've also added the Passenger and Schoolbus endorsements to my CDL Class A!

Back soon, I "promise"!

THIS pen is mightier than the sword

Hornady may have been the first to jump the zombie, but this gets honorable mention (via Tam).

Perry de Havilland gives NYT's David Brooks a proper fisking at Samizdata.

Brooks:
If you live a life unshaped by the mediating institutions of civil society, perhaps it makes sense to see the world a certain way: Life is not embedded in a series of gently gradated authoritative structures: family, neighborhood, religious group, state, nation and world. Instead, it’s just the solitary naked individual and the gigantic and menacing state.

PdH:
State… nation… are not ‘mediating institutions of civil society’, they are mediating political institutions and the observation these are materially different things is hardly a new one. They are violence backed imposers of laws, the means of collective coercion… and the process for deciding who gets the guns pointed at them is what we call ‘politics’, which is quite quite different to how elective things like ‘family’, ‘neighbourhood’, ‘religious group’ (unless it happens to be Islam) and ‘world’ work as these are collections of people you can invite to mind their own damn business and turn your back on them, with all the good and bad things that might come of that… or embrace them wholeheartedly, as you see fit and as they deserve, generally without the cops kicking down your door one way or the other.

It's short.  RTWT.

The Idiot Vote by Harry Stein

Stolen from Via Weekend Pundit, some potential reading material.

This post title intentionally left blank

The daughter is on a Gameboy and just got to the part of Zelda that says "It's dangerous to go alone!  Take this."  She laughs and says "If it's dangerous to go alone, why does he give him a sword?  Why doesn't he give him another person?"  In all these years, I never thought of that.

Sad news

My heart goes out to our longtime mentor/friend Gene Parson and his family.  The man who shot himself in Big R two days ago was his oldest brother.

Let it rain

The ground is still muddy from last nights downpour.  The lightning show was like nothing I had ever seen, and it was right over the town.  For about an hour, not two seconds went by without lightning, and usually it was like a string of firecrackers.  Them clouds must have been in a rolling boil.

The last three days of rain must be good for the several wildfires going on.  Nice time to do back burning (hint, hint).  Maybe in my grandchildren's lifetimes people will be able to go camping and cook over campfires again.  Legally, I mean (cough).

Mmmm, PETA Chips

I woke up with a major craving for PETA chips, and none in the cupboard.  I'll get extra cream cheese so I have some left over for what friend JohnZ calls "sex in a bowl": equal parts cream cheese and marshmallow cream, blend well, serve with strawberries, give to significant other just prior to delivering bad news (especially the kind that gets you in trouble).  ToriZ says it works.  I'll leave the subtle implications to the reader.

Cadbury egg yolk orange sun

Smoke from the Pecos and/or Mora forest fires has turned the town orange.  We can still see pretty far, but the smell isn't as nice as the mesquite-fueled blazes that gave us 100 yard visibility in ABQ a few years ago.

This is my shocked face.

Victims want their guns back?  (via Instapundit)

Just like the completely failed experiments with European collectivism, there is no need to continue trying to achieve British-style gun control in the US.  But that won't stop the control freaks.

How do some people blog everyday?

Started driving to Kat & Pat's goat ranch at 8am yesterday to work some more on the 50'x20'(!) deck, and ended up having to make an emergency trip to ABQ to exchange a bad 4"x6"x16' beam (can't finish the deck w/o it).  What the heck, since we were there anyway I got to fix the swamp cooler on our rental house and we picked up 100 bails of hay in Bosque Farms.  Finally got home at 2:30am today.

It's hard to go a day w/o internet.

Anyway, I finally got around to reading TSM's latest uberpost on gun control.  His uberposts have to be scheduled, cuz I can't stop in the middle and they're big.  He also has great stuff on education (or lack thereof).

Disloyalty

Non-recess appointments.  "Well, they went home, didn't they?"
Gunwalker. <crickets>
Bengazi. "Move along now, nothing to see."
2nd Amendment (and 1st, 4th, 6th, 10th, and maybe 5th). "It's for the chiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiildren!"
IRS auditing political enemies. "Probably some rogue IRS agents."

AP wiretaps.  "OH NO HE DI'N'T!"

Now the lamestream media is paying attention?  You'd think the Obama administration would know better than to go after its own friends.

I will relish the memory of having started my blog during the Obama scandal tsunami.  Of course, it's really been over four years of rising floodwaters.

Now to bathe, shave, and make a trip to the DMV to get my CDL Class A license.  I'll take a book so as not to waste time.

Blogger advice: If you don't want to cause subliminally-induced depression in readers, try not to say "Obama", "IRS" and "DMV" in the same post.

WIN!
FREE!
SEX!

Feel better now?

On the first day god actually got writer's block...

... so I don't feel so bad.  Finally started my own blog.  At least I wasn't shamed into it like for Facebook (I love you, too, dear sister).  I would have done this yesterday to commemorate my daughter's 14th birthday and Aron and me passing our CDL driving tests, but late to bed, interrupted sleep, up early, driving, testing, driving, shopping, dinner, party, and catching up on my favorite blogs ended with OMG I'm tired.  Having missed the intended date, I might have continued procrastinating, except now I'd like to honor the 10th blogiversary of The Smallest Minority, one of my three favorite blogs.  The other two are Instapundit and View From The Porch.  Samizdata looks like it will enter the list.  You might guess that I'm a wee bit libertarian.  My parents invite me to parties anyway.