Yeah, I knew you knew that.

Moi aussi, aussi! Too, also, as well as, in addition to.

So, yeah, in other words, post the dang thing when yer dunn with it! (Please?)

FWIW, I strongly supported the letter writing effort, in my capacity as adult U.S. citizen, and I would be willing to be associated with such an effort.

Please add me to the PM list (if any). I also support it and would be fine with being associated with it if that's helpful.

Me also. Strange circumstances. Sorry to see it yanked. I can only imagine who/why.

I wanna see it. I haven't contributed cuz everybody else was doing a better job.

Me, too.

Me too, lah.

Me Whatever. I liked the discussion and am curious to see the final result. Although I WAS one upset by the Gretawire thing, this one not at all. Whole different horsie.

Ditto. Though truth be told I don't really know what we're talking about but I usually find I agree with w 4.

Except in matters of fashion, that is.

Why do people have so much shit?

I have anywhere between 150-200 people descending on my house this afternoon for a massive picnic. For days we’ve been cutting grass, pulling weeds, power washing painting, fixing this, breaking that, mostly ignoring all the shit that has been accumulating INSIDE the house in the mean time. “Stuff” piled up here and there all waiting to be moved someplace else. Sometimes I think my whole house is just one big shit shuffle factory!

Canning stuff
Potting stuff
Newspapers
Mail
Paint
Paint supplies
Pool supplies
New pool toys
Yard tools
Garden sprayers

Too much SHIT!

Wifehorn and I have entirely different philosophies on the subject, MsDaisy.

I believe that if something is broken and unrepairable OR if no one is ever going to use it again, then it's time to discard the item.


Wifehorn believes that if we paid money to acquire it, it can never, ever be thrown away.


When we lived in California, every so often on weekends I'd go clean out the garage, go through the necessary arguments about what to keep and what to toss, and make a serious amount of useful space on the shelves. By Wednesday of the following week, Wifehorn would fill that space with boxes of her shit.

Upon moving to N. Carolina, I told her, "See that line down the middle of the garage? That's my half, and that's your half." She agreed. Whereupon, I began work organizing my half ... the tools, the workbench, a lot of shelving and storage areas ... and when I was finished, I brought my car into the garage and called my parents, who were visiting, to see what I had accomplished.

Wifehorn's instant comment was, "I think we need to switch whose half is whose."

Not one chance in a million, babydoll.


'Course now, I have a lot of room on the shelves when I need it, because I learned to use "placeholders".

Placeholders are empty cardboard boxes, sealed and labeled with phony contents, that fill at least 25% of the shelf space. When I need some room, I just take down a placeholder and voila! I haz shelf space!

Lordy there was a really big ship moored off the Malibu Pier. You could see it easily from the mountains near where I live. It was much bigger than the Russian billionaire's yacht, A.

So I had to go down and investimigate.

Looks like Malibu is being occupied by the U.S. Navy:

My secret intelligence sources (code names "Wiki" & "Google") tell me that is the destroyer USS John Paul Jones.

The guys in the foreground are testing the new model landing crafts that are going to be introduced after the Republicans' budget cuts.

Yes, the ship is the USS John Paul Jones. I'm waiting for Sarah Palin to tell us about the ship's namesake, a sailor born in Britain who eventually went to work for the commie Empress Catherine II of Russia as Павел Джонз (Pavel Djones). Obviously someone who can't be trusted, with all that runnin around and shootin cannons and stuff, and spendin all that time outside these great United States of America.

Newt Gingrich is in L.A. today. Will that perhaps attract Sarah's bus?

Is he "ringin' those bells"?

Boy can I relate. Sometimes I long for the days when almost everything I owned would fit in a 75 Toyota Corolla - 2 door mind you.


Any idea why the Navy is parked so close to Malibu?



I've watched the video of Palin's explanation of Paul Revere's ride over and over and am in tears laughing every time I see it. I could watch it 72 times and still laugh my ass off. "ringin' those bells and firing those warning shots" One of the funniest goddam things I have ever seen. Even more priceless was the look on Chris Wallace's face when she doubled down on the stupid and claimed she was correct on FoxNewsSunday last week.

My ex was a waste not, want not kind of guy. Never threw away any piece of paper he ever owned, so much so that it took me months to clear out all his shit when he moved.

I collect doo-dads and probably have way too much clothing (who really needs 300 pairs of shoes) but am an excellent culler (is that a verb) otherwise.

Only if Callista permits it.

Aside: I attended the same high school that she graduated from. Yes, her old boss was a classmate of mine.

My aside -- Newt and I shared a mentor. His name was Pete Jensen, and he was the grand old man of Computer Science at Georgia Tech. He also taught Craig Mundie (of Microsoft), Gil Amelio (who pretty much put the nails in Apple's coffin before Steve Jobs' messianic return), and many other now-heavyweights in the computer industry. He took me under his wing after he retired and I was working with a group where he was on the board.

Newt didn't go to Georgia Tech (nor did I, although I did a lot of consulting for various entities there), but when he decided he wanted to be a technocrat, Newt went to Pete and asked for him to tutor him in technology matters, and to be someone Newt could come to to stay up to speed.

Pete once told me, "he's a nice boy and I like him personally, but you can't trust him as far as you could throw him." Nevertheless, he turned to Newt for help in getting some grant money to expand a computer-delivered adult literacy project we'd done with a small non-profit "rehabilitation technologies center" run out of Georgia Tech.

Newt helped us out all right. He used our completed project as the prototype to sell it and (as I soon discovered) had one of his staff upload all the videos he wanted to use to sell various positions to our servers (the pre-YouTube days), using our servers and bandwidth without permission. When I called his office on it, "nobody here knows anything about that" so I took them down -- and then got a message through GaTech that "if you want the speaker's help on this project, you need to accommodate him" -- in other words, "nice project you have there ... be a shame if anything happened to it."

Well, something did. Newt got the money, and then another GATech Department stepped in and said "Ours -- we're going to use it to study the idea of teaching people how to read using computer software." For $10 million they were going to study how to do what we'd already done and and demonstrated (and delivered to real students) for less than $100k.

Pete went to Newt to ask for help, and got nowhere. By then. he was leaving the House and didn't care at all. I remember Pete coming back and saying that Newt didn't have an intellectually-honest bone in his body. The money was grabbed, the project to actually do it never happened, all the people involved in the center that had done the prototype with me were fired (as "troublemakers") or reassigned, and the center was ultimately shut down.

I just love the schadenfreud of watching Newt stick it to himself.

I can't say I've ever liked Gnewt. He has always been about himself. Considering when Callista graduated from high school, she would not have even been in grade school when I was a high school senior. I knew ex-Congressman Gunderson from school but I knew nothing else about him. When you have graduation classes of less than 50 students, everyone knows everyone. As I look back I cannot imagine him as a congressman. He was a Republican back when Republicans weren't so inclined to be nutjobs. Nutjob-ism started in that era, though. And Gnewt was one of the fathers of the nutjob party.

I hear you. I've got packers and movers scheduled to show up in 10 days, and I'm trying to get everything squared away before then so that the pack-out isn't a complete shitty disaster. I might make it. But it's gonna be close.

So there I was in my garden, container of cricket poop in one hand, muddy gloves on, mud streaks on my face, in my gardening clothes in all their glory, when out of the tiny recording studio next to the house walks Jim Ward - mook to Stephanie Miller and voice guy extraordinaire! He's working on a project with my next door neighbor.

I stammered that I was a fan and offered first a muddy glove, then a grubby hand. He took it graciously. we chatted. He's a cat person.

My day is complete.

I didn't see Commodore Fitzpatrick or Admiral Kerchner anywhere on board. The pier is the famous Malibu Pier.

And for those who haven't guessed it, it's Navy Days in Malibu. I invited the boys over to FEMA Camp 17, but for some reason they weren't interested.