Pawprints From Space

Okay, I am confused. As we all know whenever the "n" word is used to refer to a person of African American persuasion all hell breaks loose. There is outrage, general pandemonium in the press and assorted brawling. And frankly I do not blame anyone for getting upset. The word long ago (say around the early 1800s) lost any claim to its original dictionary definition of any lazy person and became the premiere derogatory term for the African American population. So why is it that while Christmas shopping while standing in the shoe department I heard someone on the phone use the word? Not just anyone mind you but a tall, good-looking African American man all decked out in expensive faux ghetto wear (you know the over priced leather jacket with major brand logos on it, the $200 sneakers, jeans that were impeccable, a microseude shirt and a leather ballcap turned backwards of course). He was speaking into a high-tech cell phone and was apparently discussing his Christmas shopping m...

Recently our local paper had a funny bit on new business terms. Apparently the writer had spent some time online and came across some great new words. Of course he had the time to spend online while at work because he is also the paper's editor. Be that as it may - and it does conjure up some interesting arguments over why the boss gets to surf while at work and the staff doesn't these are pretty darned good. To whit: Blamestorming - a meeting to discuss failures and find a scapegoat Assmosia - the apparent absorption of success that comes from sucking up (aka kissing a**) Deja moo - (my personal favorite) the feeling that you've heard this bunch of bull before Mouse potato - a close cousin to the coach potato this is a person who spends hours and hours in front of a computer Percussive maintenance - the common practice of 'fixing' something by banging on it repeatedly Photox - improving the look of one's face in a photo through the use of graphic software Dope-...

Ah ha! I thought so. Your local government could be the cause of your high cable bill. Cities control the rights of cable franchises within their communities. They determine if a company can have a franchise there and charge customers fees etc and the company has to go to the city for permission to increase their fees. This is all old news to anyone who was in class with me in grad school in the communications department at Illinois State in the 1980s. Today though I see that the FCC is finally realizing that some communities are actually blocking competition in the cable arena. For example, in my community there is no competition unless you get satellite service for which you need a city permit to even put a mini Dish Network dish on your house. The "other" cable company only supplies service to those outside the city limits and then only if you don't live near a copse of trees which can block the signal. But if you live in a town a more 20 minutes down the highway where...

As of the end of business on Monday I will be on vacation. For two weeks. Until next year (January 2nd to be exact). I have no clue what to do. I haven't had two weeks together for about 10 years (at least as best I can recall). This is going to be weird. Of course there is plenty that can be done from cleaning (ick), to getting a jump on the next semester (yuk), from painting the bedroom (smelly) to getting a root canal - oh wait that I have to do. Could catch up on CNN. Could catch up on sleep. Could do both at the same time if Wolf Blitzer didn't yell so much. Well the holiday baking won't be so rushed at least. Stay tuned, two weeks without structure in my life could get very strange indeed. I sense a Monty Python marathon coming on...

It is December. We are in that limbo between the holidays of Thanksgiving and Christmas (or whatever winter festival your particular belief system recognizes) where people are expected to be cheerful and generous. They are neither. Traffic is awful and people have no patience when trying to navigate it. The rudeness is something to behold. A traffic cop could make a fortune in one afternoon. In the stores the holiday music is mostly ignored and rather serves to irritate rather than inspire goodwill. Patrons are shoved, pushed out of the way at sale racks, salesclerks are subject to all sorts of verbal abuse - the list is endless. Even shoplifting increases this time of year, as do home break-ins, car break-ins and purse snatching. One assumes the folks engaging in these latter activities are doing so to provide a nice holiday for their own loved ones which warps the whole spirit of the season even more. It becomes clear when you witness this behavior that the reason for the season has ...

Is it just me? I mean, has this occured to anyone else? The recent death of the Ex-KGB guy Litinenko in England from poisoning via Polonium 210 and all the news coverage of his ordeal while awful and horrific sparked a weird little giggle in the back of my head. I am a fan of the Looney Tunes character Marvin the Martian and I am sorry but the isotope Polonium 210 sounds WAY too much like Marvin's coveted Illudium Q-36. As in the power behind the Illudium Q-36 Explosive Space Modulator (with which he was going ot blow up the Earth because it blocked his view of Venus) and the focus of the race between Marvin and Duck Dodgers to Planet X the last known source of Illudium. This weird little giggle is either a case of too much caffeine or not enough.

I am about ready to throw the printer through the window. I have cleaned the print heads, I have aligned and I have even cleaned the rollers and installed new cartridges. All to no avail. I have ink blots the size of dimes on my printouts. These are papers that I have to turn in for grades you see so I am not happy. Not one little tiny bit. The printer is not old. It has not been used and abused. On the advice of trusted geeks and the paperwork that came with the thing I do not shut it off (ever) as the ink can get "cold" and be useless. Wonderful way to screw up a Sunday. Oh yeah.

Yes indeed as we all now know the Democrats have control of Congress and George Bush is eating a bit of crow these days. As the new Senator Brown from Ohio put it though (to paraphrase) if the Democrats go in seeking revenge they will lose. In my opinion, the country has asked for change. The Democrats have a mandate from the people to enact change. They can not afford to screw it up by throwing subpoenas at everything that moves and generally acting like the sheriff in a bad western seeking to gun down the bad guys and clean up the town at the point of his gun. You got elected. You have the power. Now play nice. And while you are at it get a dictionary that contains the word bipartisan.

Gotta love politics, it is just too funny. And you gotta love the folks in Tennessee for trying to have fun with it. Apparently there is this Senate race over there wherein the guys running the campaign are trying to be funny. And they are succeeding and of course the other party is extremely annoyed by this. The guy running is a Democrat currently serving in the House named Harold Ford Jr. Those "bad" Republicans have been running an ad featuring mock voters giving silly reasons to vote for him. Including such things as he "looks nice... isn't that enough?", "so he took money from porn movie producers... who hasn't" and closing with a pretty blonde who says she met him at a party and the Playboy mansion whereupon she winks at the camera and gushes "Harold, call me". C'mon guys isn't this more fun than the usual mud slinging? Sure it is a little muddy but instead of the sweet old lady saying how she doesn't trust Senator What...

With apologies to the Pop Tart whose song title I just paraphrased, the original Material Girl is back in the news: she did it again - she got a bunch of attention. Even my fave editorial guy is commenting. And he has a point (doesn't he always?). The woman went to Africa was moved by what she saw (you'd have to be frozen not to be) and is trying to adopt a child as a result. At least she is doing something. Never mind that adopting third world kids now seems to be a fashion statement, just ask Ms. Joile. This is one child who will get a chance to grow up. The rest of the world - the developed world - is pretty much ignoring the situation in various parts of Africa. It is a big continent ignoring it will not make it go away. Darfor isn't going to heal itself. The Sudan isn't going to heal itself. The desert is going to keep expanding (they have a tendency to do that). The snows on Killaminjaro are melting. And here we site, in the wealthiest nation on Earth. Pretty much...

Found this on the Web: In El Paso, Texas, two Border Patrol agents who shot a fleeing drug courier in the buttocks were found guilty March 9 of assault, weapons crimes, tampering with evidence, and deprivation of civil rights. Agents Ignacio Ramos and Jose Alonso Compean face at least 10 years in federal prison for shooting Osvaldo Andrade Davila, a Mexican citizen, as he fled back across the border when they interrupted his effort to carry a package of drugs into the US. Ramos and Compean also conspired to cover up the shooting by removing spent shell casings from the scene. The pair turned down a plea bargain for 18-month sentences. They have been suspended with pay since the February 2005 incident, and Border Patrol officials said they will now consider firing them. They shot him in the butt. Hardly a life threatening injury. Funny yes, life threatening no. As I understand it "policing your brass" that is cleaning up the spent shell casings is normal practice, hardly cover...

Don't have all the details yet, plan to do the research. Apparently two border patrol guys have been sentenced to 11 years in prison for - get this - doing their jobs. Seems they stopped an illegal guy running drugs in a van. Guy takes off running for the border to get back to Mexico (makes sense since once across they can't touch him). So in typical cop style one of them shoots at the guy. Wings him. Didn't think he'd actually hit the drug runner since he kept... running. The drug guy ends up pressing charges and our border patrol guys are tried and convicted (not sure of what, again gotta do the research) and have been sentenced to 11 years in jail. So? What is this? You can patrol the border but you can't actually shoot someone you catch with drugs? A van full of drugs mind you. We hear all this talk about border security. Apparently that is even more of a joke than we thought. Apparently the only news person talking about this is Lou Dobbs on CNN. Why isn't ...

Not too cold today but dark and rainy. Made for a depressing mess. Would much rather stay in bed on a day like this one. So would the cats apparently. There are two black cats in the household. Neither apparently understand that this is October. A month wherein they are to slink and skulk and otherwise make silly people nervous. Instead they snore and purr and look at you funny when you get up to start the day. What is wrong with you, human? Their gold-green eyes say. They know full when that when it is still dark one should not get up. Breakfast be damned. The bed is warm the comforter soft and they ain't budging. The long-haired calico on the other hand wants her breakfast, though it might have something to do with the fact that the human moved her head from the pillow and said calico was using the top of said head as her pillow. Nah, probably not.

I never thought of myself as a city girl. Being a nature nut I figured I was best cut out for the smaller towns - lots of trees, birds etc. Apparently not. After nearly 13 years in a town the size of less than 40,000 I find that I am fed up with small minds, closed minds and those who seem to have no mind at all. Of course you can find these people anywhere in the world but they tend to stand out in the smaller communities when you are not of a ... like mind. Take the issue of smoking for example. Several nonprofits in Ohio have banned together to gather signatures and get an initiative on the ballot to make the state smoke free. Never mind the smoker's rights cries I'm sure everyone expected that. It is the ranting and raving claiming that there is no link between smoking (and second hand smoke) and several kinds of cancer and heart disease - funny there is a ton of research to the contrary. Several claim that going smoke free as a state is just like stealing the property - no...

Ever notice how when the national evening news casts are crowing that gas prices have dropped and that this coming winter looks like it won't be as expensive for the average folk WHAM!! the prices at the gas pumps spike. You bet. NBC/CBS/ABC were all saying that hey gas prices were below $2 all over the country and within hours the price at the corner station went from $2.05 to $2.25. Wrong direction people! So today when the paper tells me that those of us who heat our homes with natural gas will see bills of around $119 or 12.5% less this winter, forgive me if I don't believe a word of it. They also say that the winter will be milder than average (more mild?). Uh-huh but didn't I also read today that the fields in Alaska are down again due to weather? OPEC wants to cut back on production 'cuz they aren't getting as much per barrel as they were last week etc, etc, etc. Oh yeah, I believe that my home heating costs will be better this year... sure I do. It is very i...

Okay gotta comment. Can't take it any more. While I am glad that the idiot resigned, glad that his transgressions have come to light I am annoyed that Congress can not punish him in any way. Because he resigned. He's out of office so they can't do anything. Nope, punishment is up to the civilian authorities. Really? Let's double check and make sure that the resignation also removed his right to the government health plan for the rest of his life, as well as any pension plan that they enjoy. I'll bet it doesn't. I'll bet he gets to keep that. If so, there is your punishment people - take those privileges away from him. Is it irony to discover that he is guilty of this kind of behavior when he served on the Congressional committee tasked with protecting children from online predators - people just like him? Or is it merely that he saw it as the ultimate cover? No one would suspect him because of his standing with that committee. Interesting, no? It is akin to ...

Remember that line from the movie Wall Street "Greed is good, greed works"? Yeah well Time Warner Cable must have made that the company motto. Here in Nowhere Ohio we do not have any competition to speak of for cable service. Not in the city limits at least. Outside the city there is another provider but they are pseudo satellite since no one has run coax cable out that far yet. Consequently Time Warner can do whatever the heck they want. To whit: recently the CW Network hit the air as a merger between UPN and the WB. Both of those stations were carried on our basic cable service. Not so the new CW. Nope. If you want the CW then you have to have digital cable. This means a digital capable TV set (or you can rent the adaptor from Time Warner of course) plus a higher cable bill. That is crap. That is the big bad cable company forcing the viewers to upgrade so that they can make more money. The local NBC affiliate owns the broadcast rights to the WB locally and thus when the CW ...

It is supposed to be nice this weekend and despite the fact that I haven't opened a textbook all week I intend to be outside working on what is left of the flowerbeds. Those poor, neglected weed-infested things. Good thing I have not only a green thumb but actually ten green fingers or else there would have been no flowers this year. It has truly been survival of the fittest out in the yard and sad to say most of the "fittest" have been the weeds. I have to do some clean up. There are 50 tulip bulbs to be planted. Typically Columbus Day weekend is the time when the tree colors are at their peak. They have barely gotten started around here. Those that have went straight passed red and gold and slammed into brown. Other domestic duties of the weekend include the annual airing of the rugs, hanging of the heavy drapes and generally getting ready for cooler weather. This is guaranteed to keep the warm weather around for at least a few more weeks.

The news programs are buzzing, Fox can hardly stand it, CNN can't shut up about it. Yes ladies and gentlemen Bill Clinton has a temper and some smarmy little news guy from Fox News (a network not known for fair play or even solid journalism) made him lose it. Slightly. I watched the interview. I didn't think it was that big of a deal. Parameters had been set before hand as is normal and then the news guy goes off script and hits ole Bill with the Osama bin Laden question. First if I were Clinton's press secretary I'd be upset that the weasel went off script. Second I thought Bill handled it pretty well all things considered. It is about time that someone stood up to these idiots and slammed them back. I feel the same way when a actor punches out a paparatzi for jumping outta the bushes and snapping shots of the wife and kids. Little suckers had it coming. So Bill Clinton has a temper. Fox News has no class. Get over it.

There are days when I actually wonder if I am too old for homework. Today is one of those days. Not that I am having trouble reading, or even that I find the material blah although it is economics so I'd have a legitimate excuse. Rather it is that I can't seem to focus. I simply do not care. And I'd much rather be catching up on all the sleep I am losing from having a very sick kitty who gets me up every couple of hours for one thing or another. I'm thinking most of the problem is related to the sleep issue. So no, maybe I'm not too old for homework but merely too tired to care. At least I do not have a paper due this week.