> > I've no idea what George Bush is doing, but he's not paying attention > > to the home front, for damn sure..Uh... what do you expect him to do, within the Constitutional limits of the powers of the Presidency? Immigration problems are the province of the Congress, not the President.
It's funny how Americans seem to be adopting the Fuhrerprinzip nowadays; the President stands up there as a simple target; why can't HE do something? He doesn't, because that's not his job, and it's not within his power. "They" (Congress, Senate) are supposed to do something, but most people don't even know who their Congressmen are.
> > Well, he could begin by enforcing the immigration laws instead of > > subverting them, and have the tweezer police and shoe inspectors sent to > > the borders to take care of business..Neither of those groups works for the President. He has no authority over them.
Congress is the one with the authority. They choose not to use it.
If you're incensed, write your Congressman instead of blaming the President.
Or you could vote for me for President-for-Life, and I'll promise the elimination of taxes on alcoholic beverages, get rid of those darned speed limits, mass executions of people I don't like on the (free!) Coliseum Channel, and plenty of targets for you to shoot at. And as an extra special bonus, I'll even have the Navy ship the now-useless Congress and Senate off to some deserted island, and we can place bets on how long until they start eating each other.
>> Sorry. Like I said study our system of Government. The President does >> *NOT* have that authority. Nor do you really want to start garnering >> such authority into the office if you stop and think about how someone, >> like Hillary, could abuse the power.*I*, of course, could handle the power just fine.
The Sudetenland has already been done, so I'd start by annexing British Columbia so the ethnic Americans of Alaska could be joined with the mainland... and Baja California is obviously part of California, just look at the name, willya...
- Dave "all the warheads are belong to ME!" Williams
> > Yet there was nothing done on those parts originally that used > > anything more complex that mills, lathes, and shapers! And of course > > some talented people running them!Back when I was working as a machinist I stocked up with 1800s-era machinery books from Linsday Publications. Looking back, I'm sure the shop foreman viewed me as a loose cannon. He freaked out one day when he came by and found I'd disassembled the tailstock turret on the big Warner & Swasey lathe I was running. Well, it was grunchy and didn't want to index right, and I couldn't make good parts with a defective machine, could I?
>> I had always thought the police acted cowardly at Columbine. They >> held back and didn't go straight in. I thought they were waiting >> for SWAT and/or more backup. The reserve cop mentioned before >> Columbine the SOP was to wait for negotiators cause these incidents >> were usually hostage situations where you wait, starve, and negotiate >> the bad guys out of the situation.The cops were probably doing exactly as they were trained. They're big on cover-your-ass and preserve-the-evidence and do-the-paperwork. Most anything past traffic tickets or stolen bicycles, most PDs divide the work into specialty squads, and the rank-and-file are supposed to do the minimum to contain the situation until the "experts" get there. There's also a big jurisdictional question; there are very few local schools any more; they're usually county or state property, assuming they don't have their own police, like the University of Arkansas. And hostage situations usually get notice from the FBI, which then assumes control.
Now imagine what's going to happen to the patrolman who takes out a shooter at a place like Columbine. "You murdered a child!" That's a career-ending situation nowadays.
It's not the cop on the street that has caused this mess; it's decades of court decisions and political legislation that have turned the police into scarecrows.
I'm not a fan of the police at all, but I can't fault them for standing back, considering society at large is willing to scream "off with their heads!" if they actually do anything.
>> Any idea how the transition to a commercial is detected? >> Inquiring minds want to know!Unh. Hmm.
Back in the '60s or '70s there was talk of putting a brief all-black image in the picture stream to let boxes know a commercial was coming. As I remember, this actually was in place briefly, though I don't remember any consumer devices that took advantage of it. Then the advertisers went bonkers at the thought of losing their captive audience, and the idea fell by the wayside.
I thought the whole thing was dead and buried... but nowadays most radio comes prepackaged from a very few centralized sources, and I'll bet a lot of TV comes that way too. There are national ads, but some percentage of ads are local, and there has to be some way for a local broadcaster to know when to insert his annoyances.
I haven't heard a thing about it, but now I'm wondering...
Since it didn't seem damaged, I put it outside under the back porch. First time I've seen a turtle around here, and I've lived here 20 years!
>> Hopefully...but I doubt it. I don't think the people attacking were >> attacking "in the name of Saddam". They just hate Americans, Saddam or >> not. It will probably give them more reason to attack now.Actually, I don't think they hate Americans in particular. Most of them hate everyone who's better off than they are, which is damned near everyone. Since the USA is the biggest and richest target, they probably hate us more than anyone else, but I'm sure there's plenty of hate to spread around.
When you have nothing tangible to show for yourself, you can fall back on either pride or hate. Hate is what the lazy and shiftless settle for.
> I also find it interesting that these same people are VERY selective > about the media they watch/hear. The only input they allow is the > mostly-far left - they wouldn't dare to expose themselves to anything > else.James Lileks (www.lileks.com) once wrote an article describing how, in the early days, people thought the internet would be a vast meeting house, where people could be exposed to new ideas. Instead, it has become fractionated, so you can find a spot where people all think exactly like you do, and you can all bask in your correctness and self-righteousness. He said it quite a bit more eloquently, though.
No matter which way you lean/swing/think/or whatever there is 'a site for you' somewhere. The same for newspapers, radio stations, TV stations, TV News, Internet News sites. You can find THE SPOT where everyone thinks as you do. And then sit in a circle and agree with each other and damn everyone else.
The problem with that is that makes for a VERY SMALL world for you to exist in.
> We now live in the age of Carnivore and Total Information Awareness. Does > anyone doubt that it will be long before the Gubmint finds new and > interesting uses for the information it's gathering? I certainly don't, > and this started me wondering about how the gathering is being done. Are > the Thought Police simply tapping major traffic hubs and gathering > everything that passes through them, or are they targeting more precisely?AOL's policy is to give any law enforcement agency who asks anything they want. The FBI has no problem leaning on smaller outfits to get what they want, whether they can actually legally force them to do so or not.
The mother-hub in Reston, VA moved 75% of the world's internet traffic for many years; it has always been directly connected to the NSA in Laurel, MD. The NSA's charter pretty much requires that it monitor traffic through all the other, newer hubs as well. Fortunately for us, even with a black budget that's indeterminately huge (the NSA does not account for their spending) there is so much traffic that they're always trying to catch up. Anything that wasn't "national security" went to the bit bucket. The NSA's "customers" were the President, the CIA, the DIA, and a handful of smaller intelligence agencies; to the best of my knowledge, their intercepts were never passed down to ordinary law enforcement, even the DEA or FBI. With the Homeland Gestapo, I'm sure the definition of "national security" will change, and the NSA won't be the informational black hole it has been before.
If it moves by radio or wire, you might as well assume the NSA has it. Unfortunately, there are other agencies who have been developing their own signal intelligence networks; the US Air Force, to my specific knowledge, and I'd be very surprised if they were the only ones. The FBI has been lobbying strongly for looser wiretap laws, limiting encryption (remember the Clipper chip?) and ready-to-tap cellular phones. The DEA has been lobbying for the same things, plus they have a laundry list of Constitutional rights they want voided if they think there might be drugs involved. Mostly, they want to be able to smash your door down and jack you up at gunpoint without going through all the hassle of actually getting a warrant, even from one of their rubber-stamp judges. Some of the larger PDs have meen monitoring cellular traffic for years, and have been using less-legal information gathering for "background".
Big Brother has *always* been watching; up till now, he just hasn't been saying a hell of a lot. This is going to change to some degree.
When I mentioned this to my pharmacist, she said I should ask for the "senior citizen" bottles, which are ordinary pill bottles. Of course, due to company policy, she couldn't fill my prescription with that kind of bottle at the time; it had to be approved by the DEA and God and corporate, apparently, but the *next* time I got a refill, I could get the old-type bottles.
"DaveWorld, where the little details of life tend to be a tedious pain in the ass."
> > I was told that Koni considers them to be race parts not covered by the > > lifetime warranty. Looking at their North American website I don't see > > an exclusion for the yellows:I had a $300+ pair of Koni front struts on the Capri, back in the mid'80s. They lasted just a few weeks before they started drooling oil. Koni absolutely refused to replace them under warranty; they claimed the place I had bought them from (Racer Walsh) was "not an authorized Koni dealer", so I could just stick them up my ass and call myself a Popsicle.
A) their products were crap, and B) I didn't like their attitude, and C) I got the shaft. So Koni is on my shit list forever.
I guess it's another of those "multimedia tie-ins" that are intended to reinforce ads from TV.
It has now been 22 years since I eliminated television from my life, and I've noticed several incomprehensible billboards over the years. It was six or seven years before I found out what a "Zima" was, for example... mostly, it's just ads for TV shows or celebrities(?) I've never heard of.
Last year there was a billboard with Winston Churchill on it, giving the famous V gesture, with "Never, ever give up" and some .org URL. I was curious enough to write it down and check when I got home, wondering what product they could possibly be trying to sell with an ad like that. It turned out to be some sort of public service organization.
- Dave "shaping my own reality" Williams
Last night I'm perusing a book called "The Ancient Near East - An Anthology of Texts and Pictures." Printed 1958.
One picture is of an Egyptian wall painting, dated 1890 BC. The caption says it's of a caravan coming back from Asia. There are heiroglyphics above the drawing of the caravan. And in the heiroglyphics... I got the magnifying glass out to be sure. At first I thought it was Alfred E. Neumann from Mad magazine, but it's not. It's a face full-on, which is very rare in Egyptian art, and it has a beret, tall pointed ears, and sunglasses. It looks like a hip leprechaun.
I'm sure an Egyptologist could explain that glyph away, but some days in Daveworld are stranger than others...
The movie had Albert Finney and Susan Dey, and a bad guy (I didn't record all the credits) who looked *amazingly* like porn star Ron Jeremy. Basically, it was about a company that had developed software for optimizing results for advertisements and political messages; they could put people in a trance just watching the stuff. After some failures at using cosmetic surgery to make "perfect" models, they threw more hardware at the problem and just generated all their actors via computer.
While we were watching, I pointed out to AB that the hardware was pure fiction when Michael Crichton wrote and directed "Looker" in 1980, but it was trivial now.
Just a moment ago, I saw a link on a mailing list, for the other half of the movie's plot: http://www.beautyanalysis.com/index2_mba.htm
On the voiceover at the end of the movie, the voice says, "The average American spends 50 minutes per day watching commercials, every day of his life." In 1980, probably. In 2004, more. *Much* more...
Then over to the DMV office, where it was very crowded - four people waiting. They had recently installed one of those pull-a-ticket boxes to handle the customer load. Just about everyone who walked in stared at the box in amazement.
Except for computers and air conditioning, it could just as easily have been 1945. Everything moves just a little bit slower and friendlier outside the capitol...
>> Then I started to read the crap about DRM for the PDF files that it >> appears all publications are now. >> 1- you must download a piece of software to use with Adobe Reader >> before you can read the file. >> 2- you can view it as often as you like ON ONLY THE COMPUTER IT WAS >> ORIGINALLY OPENED WITH! >> 3- it can be printed once and *ONLY ONCE*!"Welcome to DaveWorld, where nothing can go wrong... go wrong..."
A friend's Audi service manual is some kind of Windows-only thing that requires *three* key code numbers, one of which must be obtained from the vendor, before it can installed. I asked him what he was going to do when Windows wouldn't run the software any more, or the company went tits up. He just gave me a blank look. As far as he knows, all computers have always run Windows.
I have paper service manuals going back to 1907, and I can still read all of them just fine.
Update: the friend with the Audi manual bought a new computer and had to call the publisher for a new magic code to reinstall the computer. They said their software didn't support "Windows Vista" and they didn't plan to upgrade it.
The Audi probably won't last 30 years, but imagine if you had to find a functioning Commodore PET with the correct paper tape reader to access the service manual for your old pickup truck...
>> I've only been on a plane twice, about 10 years ago. Once to get to >> Toronto, one to get back to Winnipeg. I'll never take a plane again.I made the same decision some years ago. Made one employer quite angry when I wouldn't fly to a class in Colorado.
>> If I ever get into the unfortunate position of having to get on one, >> I am just going to strip naked and go through the metal detector.The local airport started getting silly with the metal detector thing maybe ten years ago. They walled off the concourse from the baggage area, and you had to pass through an additional detector to get to the concourse. Which was, incidentally, where the only bathrooms were. I was waiting for AB's flight to get in, and ran into one of the bored idiots with the wand. After depositing my glasses, wristwatch, the contents of my pockets, and my belt on the table, the stupid alarm *still* went off. By then, there were two other security geeks hovering around looking important. They wanted me to go off with them into another room for a "detail search." I loudly announced I wasn't going off into some room to be pawed by a bunch of faggots, we'd do it right out here where everyone could see. I had my pants down to my knees and my thumbs in my shorts when they decided they really didn't need to search me any further.
I *always* set the damned detectors off; I have a steel rod in my left leg. The city of Memphis seems to be infested with the damned things; I set one off at the Pyramid, and one at Lunati Cams, and another in an office building. Now I just ignore them and keep on walking.
>> If they charge me with something I'll sue for profiling.Take another look; profiling regulations and laws mostly specify you can't profile people who are not white. Therefore, if you're white, you're the only type that *can* be profiled.
Stand up and be proud, the profiling laws profile YOU!
It's sort of like the "deadbeat dad" laws, that have all sorts of teeth to sink into male parents, while totally ignoring the women who just take off without paying their fair share of the brat's upkeep. There are no deadbeat moms. "Nothing to see here, move along..."
[re: abandoning the mainland to Mao after 1945] >> And we betrayed the Chinese people. And screwed ourselves.Best as I can tell, it all resolves to Stilwell not properly kissing ass in DC, and his eventual replacement by government representatives more in keeping with the new State Department party line. There were others who understood China, its people, and its politics as well as Stilwell, but none of them had anything like the (modest) clout Stilwell had.
State made and implemented US policy toward China independent of the White House, same as it did in Vietnam. I'm not sure if it was because they were strong enough to push their own agenda, or if the White House simply had no agenda of their own at the time; mostly, the Far East is simply ignored, like South America. The USA's horizon has always been east, toward Europe.
US policy in 1930s/1940s China contains a great number of inexplicable "WTF?" points, not the least being our vocal support of Chiang on one side and shipping arms to Mao on the other.
Soviet actions, on the other hand, are simple and easily explained - Stalin expected Mao and his followers to toe the Moscow line, and the Soviet "helpers" he sent treated their Chinese counterparts like inferiors, which tends to piss people off.
The Chinese Communists took all the US and Soviet aid they could get,
gave each power the figurative finger, and booted them to hell out.
Which shows that, if nothing else, they were smart enough to realize
where their own best interests lay; something that has been beyond the
grasp of more than one government.
Basic foodstuffs break down, in preference and availability, to:
meat: beef, chicken, pork, fish
Preparation consists of grilling, frying, or boiling. Various
vegetables get margarine.
If in an institutional setting, add a cube of green Jell-O or a scoop
of coleslaw. (nobody knows why)
Sauces are generally added at the table, and consist of "steak sauce"
(generally some mixture of molasses and soy sauce), ketchup (thickened
sweet tomato sauce) or yellow mustard. Use of pepper, salt, or garlic
is rare, though onions are popular as a condiment, either cooked or raw.
Although a few Americans eat "American style" by preference or
unavoidable circumstances, modern Americans eat various fast food
products packaged in plastic boxes, TV dinners, pizza, or Mexican food.
Shortly after the Revolution the new American government decided to
pass a tax on whiskey to finance its operations. There were *lots* of
small distillers in Pennsylvania, and they mostly got real mad, saying
they'd just fought a war to free themselves from that kind of chicken
shit. So they told de gummit to stuff it. George Washington then
ordered troops in to crush what was then called the Whiskey Rebellion.
The "rebels", who now encompassed not only distillers, but farmers and
ordinary people who didn't like the idea of tax on their whiskey, were
slaughtered.
One of the things American-printed history books seldom mention is that
a good portion of Americans were quite happy with the status quo under
the Crown. The monarch was batshit crazy, but he was a long way off,
and the colonial governors, by and large, hadn't been all that bad.
During the Revolution and immediately after, somewhere around 25% of the
population looked around, decided they didn't want to deal with this
shit, and headed north. The population of Canada almost doubled at that
time. After the Whiskey Rebellion, Canada's population curve got
another spike.
"My father he made whisky;
The Whiskey Rebellion wasn't in the American history books I had in
school, btw.
There's a whole great big chunk of "the law" that I frankly don't give
a damn about. They only *thought* Timothy McVeigh was a bad-ass; wait
until I get finished clipping all the "DO NOT REMOVE" tags off the
mattresses. And it's 1:49 in the morning; if I were to make a run down
to the local 24-hour Wal-Mart, that's a curfew violation...
There's someone knocking on the door. I think they're from the
Ministry of Love...
Sometimes I wonder if there's someone out there with Otzi's member and
JFK's brain - that went missing from Bethesda during the autopsy -
trying to sew together some kind of Frankenstein monster...
"Heeee'res Johnny! Wanna boink?"
They put in a bunch of new lights here, and they all have
refrigerator-size stainless steel boxes on sturdy concrete slabs. No,
they aren't battery backups; the traffic lights go away when power goes out.
I guess "progress" is slower in Highway Department Time than in
Computer Time.
I quit watching broadcast TV in 1986. Max Headroom didn't debut until
1987. I had heard of it, and I vaguely remembered bits of a few weird
Coca-Cola ads that used Max Headroom, but that was all I knew.
The first two episodes were very much different than I had expected.
The series came from a British short film from 1985; watching it, it's
hard to believe the series ran for only half of 1987. Whoever put it
together, at least the first two episodes, was a hardcore science
fiction fan. Imagine "Lou Grant" meets "Bladerunner", with liberal
dashes of "Scanners" and "Videodrome, and maybe "Search."
It's very dark stuff; a future society basically gone to hell,
surveillance cameras everywhere, a fully networked society that spies on
everyone, something like GPS, two way televisions that can't be turned
off, hugely powerful broadcast media, and a handful of megacorps.
Frighteningly similar to, say, the USA in 2008, though we don't have
organleggers prowling the streets. Yet.
The sets and props are interesting, the storylines have been good,
characters are believable, and the technology... for 1987 it was almost
all fantasy, but like Max Smart's shoe phone, it's already here, other
than Max himself. And if you've watched Ananova.com, it's probably not
that far off.
I like it a *lot*, so far. Interestingly, everyone I've mentioned it
to, from AB to SF-reading/watching friends, hated it. AB watched the
first episode with me, and said it didn't match what she remembered;
apparently she mostly remembered the Coke ads. Why Coca-Cola would have
chosen Max Headroom as a mascot is hard to explain, other than that
Logitech was running ads showing pissing babies about that time. Maybe
it was avant-garde, but considering the deep noir ambience of the
series, it would be like Pepsi building an ad campaign around DeNiro's
character in "Taxi Driver."
I can understand why the series was canceled; it would probably be
hugely popular now, but I think the general populace of 1987, not being
nearly as SF-aware as nowadays, would have had a hard time following it.
According to a couple of the web pages I check, the series was
canceled in mid-season, halfway through fiming the 15th episode.
Winston Churchill was impressed, and had quite a lot about him in his
six-volume history of WWII. According to Churchill, Freyberg and his
Zeds were hot stuff; they led the point on over half of all actions in
Africa, took horrendous losses, and went back for more. Many of
Freyberg's smaller units were completely obliterated, choosing to die
instead of surrender. The Africa Korps then began withdrawing from the
Zeds instead of fighting whenever it was practical; unless there was
some strategic value in occuping the position where the Zeds were, the
potential loss in men and materiel made engaging the Zeds a bad
decision. This led Wavell, and later Alexander, to put the Zeds in the
forefront to clear the way for the Australian and Indian troops.
Churchill had the paperwork in progress to put Freyburg in Wavell's
place when the British officer corps had a collective shit fit. It was
okay to work under an American officer, but no native English officer
was going to serve under a "colonial" commander, even if they had to go
on strike in the middle of wartime. Churchill nearly had a stroke out
of sheer range, but he wound up having to back down and put Alexander in
instead.
Montgomery was promoted far beyond his abilities and required a lot of
hand-holding, both for his lack of competence and his problems with not
obeying orders. But the British propaganda machine had cranked up on
"Monty", as he took credit for the work of other generals, and they were
stuck with him. But "Monty" was a poor substitute for Freyberg, who
would certainly have done a much better job.
Replace "Democrat" with "National Socialist," and parts of it seem
queerly familiar...
I need to read up to see if there's more than one Joseph Kennedy in
the 1940s, because a bunch of stuff starts to link up if all the
references I've encountered are to the same man. O'Neill describes him
as violently (literally) anti-British since the 1920s, which, if it's
the same guy, would indicate why the Joe Kennedy who was ambassador to
Britain was contrary to the point that the Court of St. James asked that
he be recalled. O'Neill sees everything through the "party" filter; Joe
then veered off and created his own sub-party, nominally part of the
Democratic Party, but mostly independent of the existing power
structure, bankrolled it out of his own pocket, and then ran his sons
for political office, leapfrogging the normal processes of How Things
Are Done, Or Else.
From time to time there are links to technical papers off-site. Many
of them are to a site called "Technical F1", which apparently had some
heavy tech stuff at one time. Click on the URLs, and you're directed to
something called "Formula F1", which is a slickly commercialized fan site.
Yeah, well, I know how that works, popular sites get bought up by
marketers. Then there are a bunch of links to papers on MIRA's old web
site, which no longer exists. MIRA is the Motor Industry Research
group, sponsored by various businesses and the British government. They
now have a new web site, but it's just "pay us to do stuff", and all
technical content has been stripped.
Those are the two largest examples, but I've been finding links to a
lot of potentially-interesting stuff that doesn't seem to be there any
more, and despite the amount of archiving that has been done, searching
on the names of the papers or files hasn't returned anything except
other links to the original defunct URLs.
And people wonder why I say nothing is real unless it's backed up...
Powerhouse is mail order, so I won't get my parts until Friday. Even
with price matching, I can't beat their price+shipping locally.
At one time I would have felt a twinge about not supporting my local
stores, but as far as I'm concerned NAPA and Pep Boys aren't local;
they're just outlets for another national chain, like MacDonalds' or
Wal-Mart. And I'm getting the same manufacturer and part number, not
Chinese knock-offs.
I picked on NAPA and Pep specifically because their prices vary
without rhyme or reason. NAPA wants five bucks a pair for 5.0 Ford rod
bearings. But 240 Six and Slant Six bearings are less than balf the
price. Pep wants an insane $8.47 a *pair* for the same bearing... but
they sell 240 or SSix bearings for under $2. (I use a lot more 240
bearings than 5.0 bearings...)
I needed a flexplate for the Malibu back in February. NAPA wanted $65
for one; Advance had it for $23.
From time to time they'd stop, and the one guy would look around at
whatever desolate landscape was around - across most of the 'stans and
Mongolia, it looked a lot like the videos from the Mars rover - and he'd
say, "This looks a lot like Scotland."
We've picked it up as a general-use term; observing the bent, rusty
frame under his Oldsmobile, we said, "It looks a lot like Scotland."
The 917 was a fine race car, but it was larger and heavier than it had
to be, to comply with FIA rules. And yes, it made a lot of power, but
engines were basically unlimited in CanAm. Everyone likes to blame
Porsche, but it doesn't look to me like anyone ever really *tried* to
beat the 917; they just got mad, took their marbles, and went home in
ignominous defeat. Stuttgart must have some *bad-ass* engineers, to
outclass some of the best designers in the sport so badly at their own
game...
I was looking through a friend's CanAm picture book the other day, and
one thing that stuck out was how few cars actually ran - ten or a dozen
cars at a major race track isn't much of a field. Prize money was
minimal, and "sponsorship" hadn't turned the series into a for-profit
business venture like F1 or NASCAR or Indy. You had a few special cars
built by a handful of small constructors, some homebuilts, and not much
else. I think the series was just for fun, and when the Porsches came,
it wasn't fun any more, and there was nobody willing to put out the
money to stay competitive.
There are billboards in Little Rock that say "Spanking Is Child
Abuse." Right. No wonder we have feral children...
-- Dave "just doesn't get it" Williams
05/19/2008:
[in Denmark]
>> all sort of ethnic restaurants here but no (North)American ones ( I
>> don't think McDonalds, Burger King and KFC really qualify ). Lots of
>> Mexican, Chilean, though.
An American meal, as defined by 50 years of public education "health"
classes, consists of one meat and two vegetables. Some classes break
those down into specific "food groups" which can only be mixed and
matched by various arcane and inconsistent rules. These rules have the
force of law in the "balanced lunch" programs found in most public
schools. So if you went to school in America, that slop they ladled
onto your tray is "American food."
vegetables: nobody cares about vegetables anyway
05/20/2008:
>> Moonshining is still illegal!! Unlike wine or beer, the laws and
>> regulations governing distilled spirits contain no provision that
>> would allow someone to produce spirits in their home for personal
>> use.
The US Civil War wasn't the first "War of Secession."
my grandfather he did too;
we ain't paid no whisky tax;
since 1792."
>> "Moonshining is still illegal!"
I figure that, as a good American, I have the God-given right to do
whatever I can get away with... like various other of my activities,
they have to catch me first!
>> Very commendable--except that didn't stop the bastard from stepping
>> all over those poor farmers trying to do the same thing out in
>> Appalachia during the Whiskey Rebellion.
A bunch of those farmers were wondering exactly what they'd had a
Revolution *for.* "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss."
>> Your last point is noted. For the life of me, some (most) of these
>> damned laws we have are so beyond insane that we ought to break
>> them JUST BECAUSE. I'd rant more but I'm goddamned tired and I need
>> to go to bed...
I've always considered "civil disobedience" to be a dead-end form of
activism, but the US legal structure is collapsing under the weight of
stupid and unenforceable laws. Making my own alcohol may by a hideous
moral crime that undercuts the basic structure of the United States
economy (ie, I'm not going to pay tax on it), but I don't care. And
when nobody is around, I might not flip my turn signal on when driving.
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act enforcers probably have a death
squad looking for me. The V8 in my RX7 doesn't have all its
Federally-mandated smog controls, and the swap is illegal according to
the Fed anyway.
05/21/2008:
>> I also remember scientists discovered the famous "Iceman" found
>> in the Italian Alps in the late '90s was carrying his own medicines,
They named him "Otzi." Sometime when they were digging him up or
transporting him, someone stole his penis.
05/22/2008:
The Intel 4004 processor was designed with traffic light controllers
in mind. There's no reason a traffic light controller should be any
larger than a matchbox built into the light itself.
05/23/2008:
"The four building blocks of the universe are fire, water, gravel and
vinyl."
-- Dave Barry
05/24/2008:
Four episodes - 1, 2, 3, and 5 - of Max Headroom showed up on an
alt.binaries newsgroup a couple of days ago. I downloaded them, and so
far I've watched two.
> > Dave, I watched the entire run of the series but ignored the ads
> > based on it. The first few episodes were quite sharp and satirical but
> > it blanded down quickly, either from loss of inspiration/creativity or
> > from network/producer/advertiser pressure!
I wouldn't doubt it. And just in the two episodes I saw, there were
some things that would be difficult to get past the usual censorship
standards now, much less in 1987.
> > Good acting AIR!
I'm just trying not to drool when Amanda Pays is on the screen... I
did an imdb on her and it looks like she didn't age well, but she was a
stone fox then.
05/24/2008:
> > Regarding Freyberg, yes I know of him, but can't offer an opinion.
Freyberg? Look at it this way; Erwin Rommel was the most famous
general of that theater, and Freyberg made him dance like a puppet. You
could make a good case that Freyberg was the most effective combat
general of WWII, he certainly scored for "doing more with less."
05/25/2008:
Speaking of "dirty", I'm reading Tip O'Neill's autobiography right
now. Far from being boring as I expected, it has been riveting. I
thought I was politically savvy, but O'Neill is a new high in lows... he
brags about every dirty trick from voting the dead and repeated voting,
to locking opponents out of the auditorium in Congress during voting, to paying cash for
votes (with agonized plaints when blaming the exact same actions on his
opponents). Nepotism and patronage were not only expected but required
in his world, and everything from friendship to national security was
secondary to party affiliation.
05/26/2008:
While googling for "traction control" and "differential" I kept
getting hits to a web-forum-thing called Atlas F1 out of England. For
the last few days I've been stepping through the threaded archives,
since there's no other way to access them. It has generally been worth
the hassle since the signal to noise ratio is pretty high, as such
things go.
05/27/2008:
I hate to shop by phone, but here's a good reason -
(bearings for a 5.0 Ford)
Advance Pep Boys NAPA AutoZone O'Reilly Powerhouse
cam $21.48 $23.29 $25.49 $19.99 $22.99 $12.00
rod $2.44 $8.47 $5.00 $2.99 $4.13 $1.87
main $23.97 $32.06 $65.00 $21.99 $32.99 $16.00
Rod bearings are priced per pair, eight pair required.
05/28/2008:
My brother has a documentary called "Long Way Around" about two Brits
who rode motorcycles from England to New York, across the Ukraine,
various 'stans, Mongolia, Siberia, Alaska, Canada, and the USA.
05/29/2008
> > I always wondered where Can-Am would have been like if Porsche
> > hadn't shown up.
Porsche had already been running the 917 in Europe, and they'd built a
lot of them to satisfy homologation requirements. So I don't blame them
for flooding the market with them, or running them anywhere they could
be made legal. And I'd always wondered about the annual model thrash on
competitive racing cars; whatever's on the track is last year's model,
all the effort goes into next year's model. Porsche stayed with one
basic platform and developed the shit out of it, to where chassis setup
was cut and dried instead of a big mystery.
05/30/2008:
> > One lady not long ago was lamenting how she cannot get her kids to do
> > their homework because they are always watching TV was simply aghast at
> > the idea of removing the service from her home.
> > "I just couldn't do that"!
I saw an article a while back where some parents got in trouble with
the People's Republic of Kalifornia for that. It seemed the
child-welfare people consider that child abuse.
05/31/2008:
> > I think black gauge faces would have looked
> > better instead of the white ones he chose to install.
I never understood the white face gauge thing. They simply remind me
of my Mom's old Rambler station wagon. Same with the clear taillight
thing, or the slotted taillight cover thing before that, or batarang
antennas, or Superfly headlights, fake spare tire covers, vinyl tops,
nonfunctional air scoops, or the little basket handles on the back of so
many new cars. Someone once claimed they were "wings", but they were
about two feet wide and mounted in dead air...