Still Alive

Wow. It feels like I haven't blogged in six months, but the last post is actually dated early March. Feels like much longer.

School is out for me until late June. Now I must catch up with the (physical) mess I've made of my personal life. (That is, my house is a mess. A mess.)

And to check in with my favorite bloggers...

Bust in One Area, Boom in Another

The limping economy has slowed down some enterprises but caused demand for other services.

Like vasectomies:

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

But some things never change. Despite their acknowledgment that they can't afford more children, both men interviewed for the story actually said that a vasectomy wasn't for them.

52% of those polled are crazy...

I realize that the "Obama's not really a citizen" meme is one that's just not going to die. There are those crazies -- and this article gives them the benign-sounding name "The Birthers" -- that will insist to their graves that the man was not really born in Hawaii or that he renounced his citizenship when he was five (or whatever the story is), etc.

There will always be those crazies.

What I didn't realize was how large their numbers are. Following the referenced story was this poll question: Do you have any doubt about Obama's eligibility to be president because of his birth status?

Despite the fact (as stated in the article) that

officials in Hawaii declared last October that there was no doubt Obama was born in the state. Officials verified that the health department holds the commander in chief's original birth certificate

52% of those who took the poll said...

yes.

Rhetorical Question

How does it smell when your vinegar goes bad? :)

Or

Of all the interesting words in the English language, I get a coordinating conjunction....yet I get unexpected results.








Here's the meme, lifted from Vikki:

Grab the nearest book - no matter what it is. Textbook, novel, pop-up book, building code study guide, whatever.

Turn to page 25.
Read the 10th word on that page, or the following if that one is blank.
Type that word into Google Image search.
Post the third image.

Link back to this post.

Feel free to self-tag.

Surprise! John McCain Says That Obama's Had a Bad Beginning

Interviewed by CNN's John King, John McCain says:

“It was a bad beginning,” McCain said Sunday of the legislative process that resulted in the $787 billion stimulus bill recently passed by Congress. “It was a bad beginning because it wasn’t what we promised the American people, what President Obama promised the American people – that we would sit down together.”

While McCain said he appreciated the fact that Obama came to Capitol Hill to speak with House Republicans about the stimulus bill. But, “that’s not how you negotiate a result.” Instead, “you sit down in a room with competing proposals” and “almost all of our proposals went down on a party-line vote”

“I hope the next time we will sit down together and conduct truly bipartisan negotiations. This was not a bipartisan bill.”

This is not a sarcastic post. The surprise is not that John McCain said this; that's no surprise at all. The surprise is that the comments that follow this article are overwhelmingly critical of McCain's comments.

At almost all "news" sources (and this includes CNN), on almost any topic, the comments are truly cringe-worthy. I sometimes read the first few, but any more than that are detrimental to my mental health. And they're frequently not even on topic. For instance, even the most innocuous article that mentions the name "Obama" tends to inspire a lot of non-sequitur comments, often along the lines of liberal media bias, stolen election--ACORN!, not a citizen, fat Michelle (fat Michelle?).

This time around, while there are a few of those kind of comments, the rest are overwhelmingly on point, and many are well-argued. And almost all boil down to "get-over-it-McCain."

Jamie from Philly's comment is my favorite:

In the past few decades, history has shown us that Republicans will do whatever they can to disrupt a Democratic president, often at the expense of the American people. This is not generally true of Democrats when a Republican is in charge. Other than the few moderates who actually care about their constituents, Republicans are all about forcing a win for their team, rather than safeguarding the rights of the American people.

It's nice to see a comments thread that doesn't devolve into ugliness and silliness but instead offers reasoned argument. More of this, please.

But Is It Big Enough?

I will very soon buy an external hard drive on which to store my photos, videos, and music. My new computer is rather full, which is quite silly. My old computer has a lot in it too.

Time to transfer the fun stuff elsewhere.

I was looking on walmart.com at the options. Western Digital sells a 1TB drive for $118.88. Since this is the first time I'd heard that term, and even though I assumed it was one step up from a GB, I wanted to know what it is.

It is, it turns out, a terabyte. And 10 of them will hold the print collection of the Library of Congress.

That's nice. But will it hold all my stuff?