ree-diss-trih-BYOOT-ive

Why the hell can't our idiot President get it through his head that he is mispronouncing this word?

Why is there not ONE single staffer who knows how to pronounce it correctly?

The answer is, of course, that there IS a staffer who knows he's pronouncing it wrong, but they can't tell him so.

Thirty years ago Connie Chung got in front of us as a new anchorwoman and the most highly paid news anchor in the country, and talked about this composer named "Moe Zart".

Okay, how many people don't know the correct pronunciation of "Mozart"? If you don't know, shame on you, but it's roughly equivalent to "Mote-zart". (If you're under 30 there's a good chance you don't know, and the shame is on your culture and your school teachers.) Back then, the answer to the number of people who didn't know how to pronounce the name was "precious few", and Chung was making a fool of herself.

Bewildered, I asked some friends in "The Industry" (Hollywood) why no one corrected her. They told me it is not kosher for anyone on a production crew to correct The Star. So she'd prefer to look like an imbecile rather than suffer the indignation of having someone pull her aside and whisper in her ear the correction of her error? Evidently so.

And this apparently is what's going on with Obama. It's not wise to correct the king. You could get executed if you call out, "The Emperor has no clothes!"

Note that he mispronounces a lot of words. For instance, all the derivatives of "redistribute", Obama pronounces as "ree-dis-trih-BYOOT" which is just ignorant. Then there was "Marine corpse-men".

I'm sick to death of being told that because this idiot went to Harvard, we're obliged to consider him a brilliant genius. Now suppose he had gone to Yale Business School and made all the same flubs...

The double standard is kind of scary.

Why don't you know yourself any better than that?

A friend of mine once told me, early on in our friendship, "I love food. I'll eat anything." After I met him face to face and started dealing with him on a daily basis, it didn't take too long for me to realize ... he's one of the most finicky eaters I had ever met. There were hundreds of foods on his "I will never eat that shit" list, even more on his "I tried that and it makes me sick just to think of eating it" and still more on his "Don't even bother trying to get me to eat that" list.

His mother later told me that of her three finicky children, he was far and away the most finicky of them.

How in the world do you get so out of touch with yourself that you can't even understand that you don't tolerate new foods and will tell a new friend "I will eat anything"? That statement is about 165 degrees from the actual situation.

I know, self-image has a lot to do with it. He believes that it's cool and suave to be a univeralist eater, therefore he thinks of himself as a universalist eater. But so badly in contrast to the truth?

The same fellow told me, around the same early stage of our acquaintance, that he was interested in knowing everything. I thought that was cool. I'm curious about so much, that I love learning things, reading up on how to do physical things, and trying them. Or else I'm curious about history. I love European history, and if you stuck a book in my hand about almost any kind of history, and suggested it (especially if you tell me you read it too and loved it), I'd put it in the stack of eager reading. Mind you, there are twenty other books in that stack so I might not get to it right away. But I'd want to. And probably would at least read parts of the book.

But this friend arrived in my life "eager to learn about everything under the sun" and immediately started telling me he wasn't interested in this, that, another thing, something else, and millions of other things. No, he had no interest in old houses, no he had no interest in historical sites, no, he had no interest in visiting museums, no he had no interest in going to the zoo. As it turns out, he was only interested in the sorts of documentaries that show up on crappy documentary networks like The History Channel, NatGeo, or in "pop" shows like "Mythbusters" and, God help us, "Ghost Hunters". I have determined that to be interested in Ghost Hunters, you have to have performed a one-hour lobotomy on yourself, similar to the one received by people who give a crap about "Top Model" or who slavishly follow the latest "Twilight" release.

So he got interested in Facebook when he met a girl who is slavish about her Facebook page. He had had a page for a while and ignored it for the most part. Now he can't stay away from it. He has traded playing World of Warcraft for staring at FB pages day and night. This is not an improvement, whatever his mom may say. These are people he doesn't give a shit about, but because they're stupid and vacuous and shallow and have to spread tentacles of social networkiness to feed their own reason for existing, he feels "connected". Well, he's connected to empty people and empty lives, but it's what his mom has been praying for over the last fifteen years--that her son would turn into a "normal" little redneck and quit isolating himself. Trust me, he's not the slightest bit less isolated than he was a year ago.

So he started feeding his FB site. He fed it information that wasn't any more true than that assertion that he'd "eat anything" or that he was "interested in knowing everything."

Mind you, he has a very very commodious brain. He could have put all sorts of subjects in there and become an expert on any of them. It took him till the age of 25 to feel any curiosity over anything. But the truth is, once he absorbed that feeling of curiosity, and indulged himself in it JUST long enough to pat himself on the back for being such a well-informed fellow, then he dumped any attempt to actually learn any of those fascinating subjects. And over the months, he's been slapping me pretty hard in the jaw whenever any of these subjects come up. "Oh, look," I'll say, "beautiful pictures of the Bay of Naples!" He'll ignore me and not even look. "Ooo!" I ejaculate, "This is a movie that came out a dozen years ago, it's about this amazing medieval battle in France. Six thousand English faced off against at least sixty thousand French, and won." You'd think anyone who was interested in knowing "everything" would turn around and look, but Facebook won out.

The truth is, he met a girl. She's mean-sprited, bitches about her family all the time, bitches about everything around her all the time, threatens other women with bodily harm if they come too close to the puppet she's taken over. She orders him around like a caged dog. She went to Transylvania University for one semester and dropped out before finals, but she has "College: Transylvania University" in her credentials on her "Info" page. She claims to like walks in the rain. She actually refuses to walk where her hair might get wet. She has aspirations to speak in lines of great poetic images, but her great images are trite to the point of being risible. She claims to be a great reader, then the titles she puts under "favorite books" are trash genre literature. If they had been great genre lit (good mysteries, good syfy, good historicals) then fine, but it's "teenage girl" crap, every title ending with the word "series".

But she sells herself well. Really well. And never stops selling herself to her new boyfriend. "I'm too kind" she says. Half an hour later, "I'm too good to people I know" and he believes her, no matter how badly her words vary from the truth. We've seen what she really is--bitchy, mean, complaining constantly, accusing, jealous, ready to fly into a rage at any moment. He's afraid of her temper. I told him once, "Good thing SHE didn't see you do that," and his eyes popped out and he nodded, "Yeah, no kidding." But he'll tell you, she's the sweetest girl on earth, and fully believe that. How can she be the sweetest girl on earth when you're that afraid of her?

"I'm a sweet moonbeam" she extolled herself. I strongly doubt it. If you're so sweet, why do you get on MSNMessenger for hours at a time complaining about what crap your parents and sisters are? When does your mouth stop bitching? Oh, wait, I'm forgetting the Y factor--the boy you trapped and enslaved. He thinks he's saving you from your evil family. That increases his importance, you know, so keep up the bullshit, honey, you're only fooling one person on this planet.

Meanwhile, back to his list of interests. He says he likes "running". He told me when he got dropped off the bus back when he was in high school (graduation date, seven and a half years ago), he ran home. Less than a quarter of a mile, mostly uphill. And that's the only time I've ever heard of him running anywhere. He likes parkour. What he means is, he likes looking at parkour videos and he likes going to the parkour page to have an excuse not to crack open an actual book and read it, or get himself down to the parkour place and do the jumps and handstands the other little boys are doing.

He likes travel. Excuse me while I cry. The guy who fought against going three miles from the house likes travel. Sigh.

When he grows up, he wants to major in business and start a company that will flourish on defense contracts. His company will develop weapons for peace and he will be a billionaire. And yet he can't talk to people, he hates any kind of confrontation, he won't delegate responsibility, he can't assert himself to save his soul. Every other person poses a threat to him. Even his mother, a control freak that knows no bounds, looks at her son and sees a namby-pamby person with no people skills. And he refuses to study up on the subject of communication.

He loves Iron Man 2. That's his hero, Tony Stark. He wants to be Tony Stark. And he saw his dombitch as Penny. He sent her a picture of Tony and Penny with their foreheads together, almost kissing, and asked her to put it up as her FB avatar. She did, then took it down the next day, because she couldn't live without a photo of her own ugly face up there. (Back near the beginning of their acquaintance, he showed me her photo album. Two hundred damn pictures, almost exclusively her own face and nothing but her own face. Yes, many of them were in the "fat broad" angle, shooting down from above so as to minimize the fat, since she had been fat in the recent past but had lost the weight. Needless to say she couldn't part with even one picture of herself. The rest of the lot had her posed with her head turned, chin angled toward her uplifted shoulder, glaring at the lens through her eyebrow; it's the "I'm too much woman for you to handle" pose. And seeing almost two hundred of those (often in series, she obviously held up the cell phone and took five pics in a row and was so enamored of all five poses she couldn't live without any of them), I wanted to vomit. The only FB photo album I've ever seen with that much conceit came from a professional model whose job it was to promote herself furiously. And even the model limits herself to about two hundred photos of herself.

This is why he picked a domineering bitch who would tell him what to do for the rest of his life. They had known each other less than a week when she was already telling him she didn't like his having another woman around him and gave him the silent treatment until he agreed to do her will. A week after that she demanded "in a relationship" as his FB status. By that time she was already cybering him and demanding his tongue be used on her body parts, his fingers placed in various orifices. Not good enough, she told him to bring condoms to their dates at the movie theatre, so that they could fuck if they ever got the theatre to themselves again. And after just two months, she demanded they get married, and ordered him to change his FB status to "engaged."

This poor, weak guy who hooked up with one of the nastier women in Laurel county is planning to be a CEO. I think he'd be smarter planning on being stuck in the mail room, and let the bitch be the CEO.

Ellen DeGeneres's new ad: "Some fashion models look so mad!"

I saw a new (new to me, of course, but that doesn't mean it hasn't been around a while, I don't watch the ads much) ad with Ellen Degeneres as the spokeswoman for Cover Girl and Olay makeups.

"Some fashion models look so mad!" she began. I'm so glad someone besides me noticed. They slump down the runway and they're supposed to show this angry attitude. "I dare you!" it says. I'm not sure what nitwit decided this chip-on-my-shoulder attitude made the dresses more appealing, but it's been the style for over twenty years. But then, so has a lot of other crap.

Ms Degeneres, you earned a Good Point in my book.

Track Lighting is trash

I hate track lighting.

Yes, I know it's popular and in big demand, but then so have a lot of things been in demand in spite of the fact that the design stank. Take for instance the flat roof. The people who were busy building them knew perfectly well that they trapped water, began to sag from the weight of the trapped water, and began to leak within just a few years of completing the house. BUT the flat roof said "Hey, I'm new, modern, exciting, the latest fashion! YOU WANT ME!!!!" and that's how a stupid damned fashion gets disseminated and perpetrated.

Take for example the Euro sink. An ugly basin with a raised collar edge, dropped into a hole in a counter and sitting there above the surface. You spill water, you PICK IT UP, rather than just wiping it into the sink with your hand and then drying it with a towel. There is no other way to get water and other bathroom debris into that damned thing. Toothpaste spatter? Wipe it UP, not wipe it in. Well, perhaps there was a benefit in that your diamond engagement ring was less likely to get accidentally knocked in. What about wet spills in the kitchen? Pick them up, presumably with a dry-ish dish cloth. A few peelings from the cucumbers flipped over thataway? Pick them up, you can't just push them sideways into the garbage disposal. Yes, there was a minor advantage in that the new euro sink you installed could add an inch of basin depth without your having to lower the plumbing under the sink instead. And then there's that precious advantage of being in fashion. Mustn't ignore that, because to the weak-minded, that's all that matters.

Granite countertops are another example. Hideously expensive, sickeningly impractical, capable of being deliciously pretty or hideously ugly, the granite countertop is never questioned as the height of what every homeowner should want in their kitchen. Never mind that they chip your best china, break glasses just because you were inattentive for a moment when you set the glass down, are flat as a pancake and allow any and all of your spills to flow onto the floor or worse, onto your belly. You're forced to use a cutting board for even the most minor of jobs or you'll dull your knives. The granite chips, forcing you to get it repaired. most people can't afford both the countertop and the backsplash so they have a tile backsplash installed (it looks so much better anyway) and they may as well have had an entire tile countertop (with the front edge raised as in days of yore) installed in the first place. But no, that offends the fashionable eye. It's dated.

So, back to the track lighting. Remember the kitchen with a huge lighting area that spread from one side of the ceiling to the other? Garish, unsubtle, bright, greenish-white, usually from an ugly home-made aluminum frame and cheap plastic "suspended ceiling" panels. But fluorescent light had its advantages. Almost no dark areas in the kitchen was probably the best one. Because the bulbs used so little electricity, the lighting could cover the whole room. Shadows were never an issue except around the stove where your range hood had an extra light for you to see better.

Whose brilliant idea was it to put spotlights over some of the counters in your kitchen? I'm sure it works, mostly, but any area that doesn't have a spotlight on it, you have to move your work into a brighter area. Of course, if they're incandescent lights, the lighted area is a more pleasant color than that glaring fluorescent green-white yutz we used to have back in the Seventies. On the other hand, a kitchen with some good areas and some weaker areas isn't a good kitchen, sorry. But that's what's POPULAR and impracticality be damned. So over the last three decades, we've gotten used to it, and anything brighter is "ugly". Find me a better option, please. Maybe a strip of light (quasi-fluorescent) with a nice golden candlelight color (NOT AMBER!) and not as glaringly strong as it used to be?

Fads. You can take 'em and stuff 'em. But that's another post altogether.

Decibels

It's not pronounced "decibles" (deh sih buls).

This unit of measurement of the volume of the sound you're listening to was coined (or invented, if you will) by a fellow named "Bel", pronounced "bell". His name deserves not to be turned into a schwa.

DESSIH BELL mkay?

If you can't accept my (very solid) authority on this, here is the dictionary.com link for the word, which includes the pronunciation, which just happens to be correct:

K, Jerry Brown should not be governor

I used to like Jerry Brown. He may have been flighty and seemed like an airhead (hence the nickname "Governor Moonbeam") but he did a good job as governor, or so I thought. Yes, he left office with a surplus. I thought that was a good thing, but what does it mean? It means the government was taking money out of your pocket and mine, money that it didn't need and wasn't even intending to spend. Wtf?

There should have been a tax cut, which is to say, the people should have got back the money that had been taken from them. But people didn't seem to miss it, and no one griped, so they kept the money and used it to jack up the allowed government expenses and size in the next year or so.

Meh. What started this rant was the name-calling he pulled in his debate earlier. Says it all, you know? He's a liberal, and like most liberals, he can't defend what he believes, nor support his beliefs with solid arguments. He becomes angry that this articulate woman has arguments that threaten his beliefs (since his politics and his beliefs are one) and since he cannot articulate bettre than to fling accusations, he starts calling her names. It is a truth universally acknowledged by liberals that a person in possession of conservative beliefs must be possessed by a devil. As demons, they deserve to be trashed so that no one will ever listen to their ideas.

Sarge couldn't be adopted--he bit two shelter employees--so he's going to a no-kill shelter in Utah

Well, first off, I feel very sorry for poor Sarge.

Second, I feel really sad for the people that Sarge has attacked and will attack in the future.

Third, Sarge is a dog. Yes, that's a "sentient being" but please grow out of your Disney cartoon simplicity and realize that a duck, a mouse, a dog, are not human beings. I know they have feelings, and yes, at some very low level they even are self-aware. Precious doggies keep us company, warm our hearts, rescue people, and even one doggie was caught rescuing another doggie from the freeway.

But doggies are not people.

This one is going to cost money to store at a shelter (or some no-kill rescue) for the rest of his life. That means resources. Somewhere else there is a really sweet, non-biting dog that's starving for food. That dog would be a good place to spend Sarge's upkeep after Sarge is dead and doesn't need it any more. And don't forget the children across the world who are starving, or whose villages could use electricity or clean water. It infuriates me that some nitwit has found his or her fulfillment in life in the feeding and care of A VICIOUS DOG, when that money and time would be so much better spent on some worthier cause.

Shoot the damn dog, and buy a water reservoir for some village where the children hike five miles each way every day to get the family some water instead of going to school.

"I wanted her to have whatever she wanted. It's her day."

So goes the common saying about weddings: it's her day, her chance to shine. Well, these days it's the common saying, anyway.

When did a wedding become the chance for a bride to get out on a stage and have everyone coddle her? Isn't that what a quinceaneros is about? or maybe an eighteenth birthday? But the wedding?

Once upon a time the wedding was a social event. No, I don't mean the newspapers made a huge fuss over the socially prominent people and their big party. It was something the whole village sponsored, took part in, and in fact performed. The girls on one side, the boys on the other, both sides decking out the bride and groom in their finest (not their sexiest) uniting attire, which could mean special jewelry, special paint, special hairdo, special clothing. There was special music and special food, followed by special dancing.

The women, both married, older, wiser women, and younger, unmarried, giggly, silly girls would prepare the bride for the union. The men had rituals as well, guy rituals, and they didn't involve trying to turn the groom into a last-minute whore with a dozen other women straddling his lap, his last chance to have sex (and father babies out of wedlock) before his lifetime of imprisonment with the woman on the other side of the village.

Finally the big moment comes. The bride AND THE GROOM are brought together before one of the elders, a priest or shaman or chief, though usually it's a spiritual leader of some kind. The families stand around and beam. This is a VILLAGE event as the families are being built up, the village is being built up, and a new social unit is created and the old social units, the families of the bride and groom and the extended families (generally that means the whole village) is built up and improved in a dozen new ways.

IT IS NOT A GODDAMN PERFORMANCE FOR EVERYONE TO APPLAUD THE DAMN THIRD-RATE CHICK WHO'LL NEVER BE IMPORTANT IN HER LIFE AGAIN. It also isn't a chance for a twenty-four-year-old slut to show off to everyone how she's had sex with this guy she's been living with the last four years, and expose as much skin as possible to everyone in her village. Get back to that old-fashioned dress, the one that said "this event is so important I've put as much lace and tulle and satin into this thing as I could possibly think where to sew it in." It is NOT a statement of "Hey, I'm hawt in bed and we're going to go there as fast as possible."

There was a wedding chapel in Las Vegas (yes, that says almost everything you need to know) that offered one option, a performance that would bring the groom and groomsmen out to stand in front of the congregation (I use the loosest sense of the word). Then as the music swelled, the lights would dim and a bank of spotlights would blare against a white wall. Slowly the wall would turn as the rotating platform that held it also turned, and there would stand revealed in all her bridely glory ... the bride. Then after enjoying a minute or two of thunderous applause, Miss Bride would move forward to step down off the rotating platform. One, two steps down, then her walk up the aisle. Her first step into this aisle would trigger an electric eye, and a new set of flood lights would come on. Three more steps, a new electric eye, more flood lights. And so it went up the aisle, new lights at each reveal.

The groom? He's irrelevant.

This event has now become the time when fat, stupid, ugly, empty-headed American bimbos of both sexes will get their one and only chance to be important and stand in the middle of the village and be applauded. Tomorrow she'll go back to being the insignificant nothing that she's always been, so she'd better make the most of this day.

And that's why Daddy has to shell out fifty thousand dollars on his princess.

Soft tyranny

Nancy Pelosi wants to know who's "funding" the opposition for a mosque.

Sorry, gang, but Pelosi has a history of lying for distraction. Remember "the TEA parties are not grass roots, they're astroturf"? Coming from a member of the Democratic Party, which funds everything to do with democrat issues and hasn't seen a real grass roots issue in fifty years, that's pretty funny.

What issue is she talking about, though? All those riots in the streets? All those demonstrations with the professionally printed signs with hate slogans on them? I guess Nan thought she wasn't watching an SEIU-led demonstration the last time she was watching an SEIU-led demonstration. We say a person like this is "in denial."

That might be Pelosi's excuse, but I don't believe it. I think she knows perfectly well which demonstrations were organized from above and which demonstrations were organized by word of mouth and talk show hosts, and is simply saying about the one what she should be saying about the other. We call this "LYING".

Just don't lose sight of this, though: Nancy Pelosi is telling you that any demonstration organized from above is invalid, phony, is artificial, and you must not listen to them.

Think on that the next time you see a demonstration or protest.

Learning tolerance?

Okay, when I was a kid I was in the highly-gifted program in El Cajon. We were taken out of various schools and sent to a central classroom at Chase Ave. School where we were supposed to get an "enriched" education that would make the best of our excessive brainpower and hopefully turn out some thirty exceptionally educated persons per year.

This program and similar programs across the country, such as tracking or acceleration, were vehemently opposed by our political Left wing as promoting inequality and elitism as far as the education we got, but far more important was the social deprivation we were supposedly suffering from: we wouldn't get to know kids who "weren't like us" so we could never learn to get along with them and tolerate their "differentness".

And so, programs that catered to the higher intellects of kids were phased out in the late sixties and seventies. The exceptionally brilliant kids with IQs as high as 205, who could have handled algebra at age 7 and chemistry at age 9 were forced to sit and NOT learn at the same pace as the kid sitting next to him, the kid who didn't like to read, refused to learn to write, and hated math and science.

In the nineties the fad of "tasking groups" (or whichever of a dozen other asinine names you could apply to them) swooped into our schools. Teachers no longer taught because they had been taught not to in education college. "Children learn best when they learn on their own. They don't listen to teachers and never learn from them. Their best teacher is a same-age peer who already knows the subject, but they still learn best when they discover for themselves."

The supposed result of the tasking group was to split the room up into groups of four or five and let them work on a "task" (that's newspeak for "assignment") and discover the answer as a team. A leader would evolve, supposedly a different leader for each task, depending on who knew the material. This leader would assign kids in his tasking group to tackle different parts of the task. Kids would look in the materials the classroom contained, such as the World Book Encyclopedia, gather information which they would pass on to each other, and the pieces would be connected and the task would be completed.

What actually happened was the smartest kid in every group got stuck with the job of solving the problem alone, giving out the completed answer to the other kids, and the work would be avoided in an incredibly boring manner, but at least there would be the hope of getting out of doing the work and sticking that bright kid with presenting to the teacher the group's final result.

From what I've learned from kids who went through school in the nineties, they didn't learn to "tolerate" their less-intelligent fellows. They learned to hate them. How stupid is this?

What is wrong with this generation

Okay, I know the older generation has been bemoaning that topic since Aristotle's time. The kids don't know anything, they're lazy, they're immoral, they're insolent to their elders.

Well, what generation grows up polite, obedient, considerate, and intelligent if they're not trained to be? The answer is, none.

But this generation is special. Its parents, my generation, were reared under the guidance of that demon from hell, Dr. Spock. "Just leave the kids alone" was Spock's favorite saying. Not leaving the children alone would cover such objectionable parent-type activities as teaching them manners, teaching them to read, teaching them any kind of intellectual discipline or moral discipline or even self-control.

So my parents didn't give us regular chores to do and never heard of "No TV until you've done your chores and your homework." I was, however, taught to say "Please" and "Thank you" and not to hurt the animals for the fun of it. On the other hand, it would seem that many in my generation were not taught that a crap-ass who hurts other PEOPLE for the fun of it is a disgusting, shameful creature.

When this generation grew up and reproduced, we had very little to pass down to our babies. We were even taught that it was immoral to pass down anything to our kids, because kids are so brilliant and parents are such garbage. Which is pretty funny, considering that we were just the aged version of the first generation who were taught that WE were so brilliant and our parents were garbage. How did we lose all that brilliance and turn to trash just because twenty years had passed?

So our children grew up thinking they were the most brilliant generation ever to happen; even more brilliant than the brilliant generation who came before them.

Okay, so every generation has thought that they were the most brilliant generation ever. What's different about this one?

In past generations, when the kids announced "We're brilliant, we're wonderful, we're thinking these thoughts and holding these values for the first time in history and all the generations who came before us were stupid," they got laughed at. Laughed at by the very elders they were ridiculing, told they should just hold on for five or ten years and they'd see how stupid they'd been. "Just you wait, you young whipper-snapper, you'll see how silly you sound." And it wasn't long before their eyes were opened and they realized the old parents weren't so stupid after all.

But THIS generation has nothing laughing at their self-important, narcissistic stupidity. In fact, the entire culture supports their nonsense. Movies aimed at the 16-to-25 crowd, popular music, MTV, sitcoms, commercials, teenager-angst shows, games, pop literature like "Twilight" and "Harry Potter", all shout, "You're the most wonderful thing ever to happen! Your parents don't know anything! Old people have NOTHING to offer!"

Even in our schools, my generation is hard at work pumping them so full of "self-esteem" and putting them into "tasking groups" where they reinvent all the errors of the past and enshrine them in projects and papers that are glowingly approved by teacher regardless of the lack of intellectual content. They are told that the most important thing on earth is their own feelings, which is also the only subject they have to write about. Said one high school teacher, "I can't expect them to write a simple thesis and support it with arguments. But they sure can emote about it!"

So it took a bunch of conservatives to force AI to speak out against stoning?

No one made any noise but a few religious-right types. Until recently it never even showed on that bastion of wild, right-wing insanity, FOX News. No leftwing papers, no liberal press, none of our wonderful "women's rights" groups, and no self-styled human rights groups ever even turned over a piece of paper or pushed a dollar across a desk in opposition to stoning women to death. (Men are stoned, too, but we seem to have lost sight of that fact.)

But finally, a right-wing movie named "The Stoning of Soraya M" has awakened a few slumbering people. FOX interviewed the producer, I believe, and a few others who know what stoning-torture is all about. More people, conservatives generally, got involved. We heard the spokeswoman on a few talk shows, and her presentation moved hearts. Finally we can admit that Iran is a barbaric country, stoning is deliberately designed to be torture while killing, and this practice has no place in the modern world. That's why it's okay in the Middle East.

Quincy charging drivers for accident site cleanup

Okay, we pay taxes. Isn't this stuff corporately shared by all of us?

Let's charge the householder every time there's a fire. Whenever there's a mugging let's charge the muggee. Let's charge parents who have children for their children's education.

On the other hand, I have long advocated that we need to charge people who engage in risky behavior for the helicopter that flies into some out of reach location and taxis them to the hospital, because they chose to go mountain climbing during a blizzard, fell, and broke both legs.

I say if you're going to stick your head into a lion's mouth, you should be prepared to pay for the funeral. But here we have plain old shared risk. Anyone can have a car accident. Anyone can have their house catch on fire, even people who are careful.

Headline: New plan to grade teachers' performance to save money

This refers to something that's up in LAUSD, where recently they spent over a million dollars in legal struggles to try to fire seven extremely inadequate teachers. I'd guess at least half those teachers had molested (seduced) their students. Maybe even all of them.

Jonathon Hoenig is telling us that only 25% of kids who take the ACT are actually prepared to do college work. We used to prepare kids for college work by the time they were fourteen; why can't we do it now?

...

I think I need to start up my "education" blog. I'm ready to scream about this stuff. Your children are getting a fifth-grade education while you're paying for twelve (thirteen, if they go to kindergarten, and now Obama wants to cram them into pre-school starting at age 3, so it will be fifteen years) of schooling. Compare this to the kids in Paraguay who are just as well educated at age 11 (the age many of them drop out of school) as ours are at 18.

Headline: The Biggest Rip-Off in America is College Tuition

Apparently if you go to one of those big-ticket colleges, those with the $56,000 annual tuition and estimated $70,000 in living expenses, your ROI (return on investment) will be negative. That is to say, that in spite of the popular perception that "four years of college will get you so much better an income that it's a worthwhile investment", the truth is that if you spend your head off on these colleges you'll actually lose money.

Said one commentator on the panel: "That's because the internet allows people to learn what they need to know in order to do what they want to do."

Well, it has been the case for thirty years that going to Harvard, Princeton, or Yale isn't a guarantee that you'll become educated. Quite the contrary, these schools are so obsessed with "innovative" curriculum they'll actually interfere with your education and make you stupid. Why would any college offer a course in "Video games as gender territory"? This is not scholarship in any way other than that you can say it feeds more dissertations, which in turn unleashes more uncritical, unthinking people onto the scholastic world where they shout from their bully pulpit that only morons would not see how important their field of study was.

Emperor's new clothes much?

Health care limits our choices

Wow. All across the country "health care panels" have swooped down on agencies that administer care, and told them they can't use such and so drug or treatment because it's "too expensive".

The quality of care is going to go down, plain and simple. That is the main reason so many of us oppose the imposition of a national health care bill. If you were stupid enough to buy into the "everyone has to have health insurance" baloney thirty years ago, you were part of a movement to give control of your medical decisions over to someone who wasn't either you or your doctor, in the name of getting something for free, or so you thought. Your health insurance didn't come out of your pocket, but your employer certainly had to figure into your salary the money he was paying as your "salary plus benefits". You thought it was free so you loved it.

What you didn't see, and probably never even thought about, was that instead of your expenses being between you and your doctor and the fee he needed to live on and the supplies he (or you) had to buy to administer any treatment, your money was going to pay for twenty unrelated people and their bosses and their stockholders to handle your paperwork and push the money around from desk to desk before it ever got to your doctor, and thus the price of health insurance (and thus the perceived price of heath care) soared. Yes, soared. It wasn't just the MRIs and ultrasounds and trial lawyers and hospitals billing ten dollars for an aspirin. You personally, and all the other people rushing to jump onto the health insurance bandwagon, were inflating our medical care horribly.

So in about twenty years' time we went from a nation who spent like $300 a year (for a family of four) for annual doctors' visits and the occasional "Doctor, Johnny has a cold, can you stop by on your way home?" to "Your family's premiums are going to cost six thousand dollars a year." Yet we were still getting the three hundred dollar a year treatment.

Then, in the 1992 presidential campaign, Bill Clinton needed a meme to remind Americans that we need democrats to "fix" our lives and campaigned on "ohhhhh, cry cry, so many millions of people in this country need health insurance." From there the demand for universal health care soared, since people had completely lost sight of the fact it's coming out of our damn pockets, and started believing what children believe, that everything that's "given" to them was free.

But that takes me back to better schools and a better-educated public. So I'll stop here.

News Item: "Schools sitting on bailout money to save teachers' jobs"

Yeah, well, that's because they think the most important place to spend money is on teachers, more teachers, administrators, bureaucrats, and educrats.

The salient point is that the schools were claiming "we need money NOW or the school will collapse." Meanwhile, they're still making parents (who have already paid their taxes and therefore have already paid into the school's support) to send toilet paper and other supplies, bring cakes for bake sales, staff a booth for the annual (or quarterly) "carnival" fund raiser, and on and on.

We should be proud to be at war with these people

I heard a teaser for a radio program today. I don't know the host but I heard his voice: "The Taliban stoned this couple to death. We should be proud to be at war with these people."

Amen, brother!

What the hell is the matter with our left wing, that they go insane over a lethal injection execution, during which the condemned person feels a pinprick, or, as in one case, several pinpricks; but they have no problem with leaders in the Middle East torturing someone to death. Yes, stoning is torture. Oh, wait, I forgot--an action can be called torture only if a white American does it, and no leftist EVER EVER EVER protests anything some bastard from the Third World does.

Double standards much?

How come when Bruce Biden called Barack Obama "the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean...", he wasn't called an ignorant fool at the very least, nor was he called a racist as you know any Republican would have been, had they said the same ignorant, stereotyping foolishness.

Yes, I want to vomit.

Jefferson Starship's 40th anniversary tour

Oh, please, Grace, give it up. You're an ancient old fart whose politics were au courant forty years ago, but they're just dinosaur bones now. You still believe the same "radical chic" crap you bought into back then. Those of us who have brains actually figured it out and dropped the Marxist trash we used to spout; as far as I know, you didn't.

Now, if you're making the tour to keep yourself alive in the memories of ancient leftist geezers everywhere, don't bother, we haven't forgotten you. I even still have your albums, and a turntable to play them on. There are others who never had your albums but share your mp3s on the internet or watch your videos on YouTube. You'll live on--as an attractive young hippie chick, not as a wrinkled old Marxist nitwit who has outlived the stupid philosophy she used to push in her songs--as long as those old videos survive.

Wanna do yourself a favor? Rewrite the words to "Lather" or "We Can Be Together" and bring them into the world of common sense. We don't want a revolution. I figured out that America wasn't such a crappy place after all--and never had been, not even in those nasty old 'Fifties--shortly after the time you released that album, but like a million other hippies and former hippies, I dumped the Marxist garbage while you kept on with it.

Please, get a clue.

More leftist lies

You know about this argument that's going on, where they want to build that mosque two blocks from Ground Zero, and Obama wants to plough through all opposition to it on the grounds that they have freedom of religion and we have to be tolerant?

Well, there's been a group who want to rebuild their Greek Orthodox church in the same environs, and have been told to go blow for years.

One, where is their freedom of religion, that our government can tell them what they can and can't build in that area? and

Two, who is being the intolerant party, if it isn't the government? aren't we supposed to demonstrate our tolerance to the Greek Orthodox? Or is that kind of intolerance okay with our left? and

Three, how about tolerance for the views of thousands of families who lost members or loved ones in the attack?

No one is restricting their freedom to practice their religion. This particular bunch already has a mosque twenty blocks away. But they have a hundred ten million dollars from Saudi Arabia to spend, and their mission is to show America who's boss.

IT ISN'T A RELIGIOUS FREEDOM ISSUE, IT'S A ZONING RESTRICTIONS ISSUE, AND GOVERNMENT HAS THE RIGHT TO TELL THEM "NOT THERE".

"Rosetta Stone revolutionized the teaching of languages"

Well, sorta. Unlike your high school Spanish One textbook, Rosetta Stone shows you pictures and you speak the word, or they speak the word and you pick out the picture.

"The Learnables" did it first, though.

Sadly, both these methods are painfully, sickeningly slow, and most people don't stick with them. I tried to get my kids to learn French. They sat through about four minutes of "Un (pause seven seconds) Deux (seven seconds) Trois (seven seconds)..." and that was the end of that.

You're being bilked

Three hundred seventy-seven million dollars.

That's how much money the NEA collected, $355 million of it from teachers' pockets. That doesn't include the dues that the AFT collected.

And then our members of Congress voted in an $8,000,000,000 bailout for them.

My sympathy to the teachers. It would be nice if they actually ever saw one drop of that money. It will soak into the education industry like water on the desert sand--it will vanish into the sand and never be seen again, nothing will change, nothing will improve, and they'll be back asking for more, with tears in their eyes and stories about charming and wishful little minority children (see beautiful photos of same, which will be attached to their story) who just aren't getting taught because the schools just don't have enough money.

I said "my sympathy to the teachers" but it only goes so far. While I want to see them make a living while teaching, I am sick up to here with their phony professionalism and their phony colleges of education and their phony post-graduate degrees and their week-long workshops on how to blame the kids for not learning. And by that I mean their phony issues of dyslexia, dyscalculae, ADHD, parents are bad, kids need a full breakfast, lunch, and dinner or they can't learn, twenty student limit, parents are fools, it's anything and everything but us.

Truck race, eight die

I don't have all the facts, but like Obama, I have an opinion.

Less of an opinion, of course; it's more of a prediction.

The spectators were supposed to keep back fifty feet from passing trucks. They didn't. And the race organizers didn't force them to stay back. They got so close, in fact, that it looks on the videos as if they could touch the trucks as they raced by. Knowing people, I would assert that that was exactly what they were trying to do. Cool, look how close I am. The wind from a passing truck is tugging at my clothes.

I have never believed that the so-called "responsible party" was anyone but the people who took action that was flagrantly stupid and outside of common sense.

The butane barbecue lighter tells you to be sure to point it away from your face when starting it.

The rotary lawn mower tells you not to use it to trim the hedge.

and the organizers of this race didn't build a monkey cage to keep a bunch of ignorant fools from getting their moronic bodies underneath the wheels of a truck zooming past at sixty miles an hour.

Boo hoo.

So what's my prediction? That the organizers of the race are going to be held responsible for the idiocy of these people.

"More well"

English uses "well" to modify many adjectives. Well known, well ordered, well educated.

So after we've said someone is well known or well educated, what do we say about someone who is more famous or more knowledgeable?

For some stupid reason, we turn to "more well, more well."

It's not. The comparative of "well" is not "more well", it's "better". The friend is better known, better educated, better ordered.

We have a deafness toward language or phrases we're not familiar with. Thus, in the minds of the unlearned and unread, who have never had the pleasure of learning language they didn't pick up on the street or in their living rooms, the ear hears the word "alien" and thinks of a green, bug-eyed monster rather than "someone who is not a resident of my country," which was the original meaning of the word. Or "black holes" is an insult to African-American women, because someone who has no clue what a black hole is has heard "black ho's".

It's a pity, though, that some of these illiterate and uneducated people have huge political clout, along with a bully pulpit from which they get heard. They scream and they howl and the Old Stream Media (which is populated by the Journolist.com Four Hundred--modern products of our unbelievably bad education system), agree with their complaint, pick it up, and give it a loud voice across the nation.

It's a pity. I like our language and I love its suppleness, and I hate to see it deformed.

When in Godsnaam are they going to start teaching actors CPR

It's pretty sickening watching some actor beat on the chest of some poor patient whose only crime is to have a heart attack. What's more, they're usually standing or kneeling at the person's side with their arms outstretched. So often they're pounding on the chest as well.

It's awful.

Grammar!

I'm so sick of hearing sentences like, "Since what happened between he and I..." (from "Psych", the comedy-detective show).

If you don't know what's wrong with that sentence, sue your local and state Boards of Education, then pray someone funds you to take it all the way to the Supreme Court. Our tax dollars should not fund frauds with graduate degrees.

My crappy father

Not too long ago I heard a fellow on a radio program talking about how he brought home a dozen roses for his daughter on the occasion of some very important event in her life.

I found tears streaming down my cheeks (even though I was driving my car) because it reminded me how my father never bothered to spend more than a cursory fifteen minutes with his daughter, about three times a year.

Fathers, please, take care of your daughters. Your sons, too, but your relationship with your daughter is very important. You need to treat her as a very special, very important, very much loved person who deserves the world. My father was so busy making himself rich "for the family" (by which he meant it was his fondest wish to be rich and a huge spendthrift, and had rationalized himself into believing that all we wanted was the same thing he wanted--to be very rich) that he couldn't be bothered with his own children. My brother grew up to be an arrogant bastard who thought he was entitled to walk on everyone he knew (not because he was spoilt but because he saw that in his father) and I grew up feeling unloved and unwanted.

I'm not going to go into details. Just remember that neglecting your children is bad. Don't do it.

"You can't furnish a place without a book case. People would laugh."

Husband of the nightclub songstress, explaining to Jane Wyman: "She bought a bookcase for the apartment, and I haven't read a single book."

Nightclub singstress, adding: "You can't furnish a place without a book case. People would laugh."

These memorable lines are from a 1956 movie, "Miracle in the Rain". This speaks volumes about 1956, and by contrast, volumes about 2010.

What happened to America?

Bathroom sinks

How the hell did free-standing basins become all the rage?

I know where they came from. Some MAN needed something new to push on the gullible American public. Like shoulder pads in women's dresses, or clubby heels in their shoes, or changing the acceptable paint colors in houses, or changing the shape of cars so that trim, neat lines turn into "this bar of soap has been used too many times" lines (that is, cars now look like bars of soap, so you had to dump your old car with its straight lines and get a melted-bar-of-soap car), or taking kitchen appliances with their shining black faces, sharp and crisp as they were, and replacing them with brushed stainless steel (and its attendant constant coat of fingerprints), so too we had to get rid of the nasty old fashioned (?!) countertop with sunken basins.

So first came that idiotic Euro sink. (I was in Europe at the time, and never saw a single high-rimmed sink there). Oh, boy, look at that, modernity! Only the big fat ridge kept you from pushing water and stray whiskers and anything else that got caught on the counter straight into the sink. Admittedly it wasn't often you needed to do it, but it sure made it easy to clean such a counter. So damn stupid.

Then came the free-standing basin. No countertop at all. No place to stand a bottle of liquid soap, no place to lay a stack of guest towels when you have your friends over for lunch, no place for your toothbrush cup to stand, not even a fluffy little decoration. Gone, too, the cabinet underneath, that provided valuable space to stash cleaning items, the hotcurler box, the ultrasound jewelry cleaner, spare light bulbs, air freshener. Those all have to go in another cabinet. Bye-bye, several extra cubic feet of space. Gone the drawers where you kept your spare towels, your hair brush, your electric razor. Where do those all live now? Certainly not on the rim of the stupidest household item ever invented, the freestanding basin.

Now we have our counters back, but the "chic" place to have this counter (always granite, hideously expensive) is on a table which is allowed a shallow drawer or two for toothpaste and hairbrush. On top of this fiercely expensive counter stand two bowls, outrageously expensive things of various shapes, colors, materials, and styles. Very up to date, very chic, very impractical. For one, if you slosh water over the side, you get to pick up that water. No wiping it over the side into that nasty old sunken basin. For another, from what I've seen, many of them have an unreachable dirt trap underneath, so that you can't mop up water underneath the bowl if it has gotten right to the center and your fingers can't reach. Many people will never figure out to use a towel like dental floss to get the wet out from under the bowl, or won't do it three times a day. Thus there will be mildew and other nasty crap under there. Always.

Well, MEN ... male designers ... I don't care if you're gay, that certainly doesn't make you women, and you don't have these practical considerations. You're interested in cutting edges, advancing design, and making a name for yourselves.

I don't buy it.

Awesome link 1

"THIS BEGS THE QUESTION..."

NO IT DOESN'T

There it is on the TV again. It's a news program and the stupid anchor is misusing this phrase.

Don't people learn anything any more?

"Begging the question" is a logical fallacy pretty similar to "circular reasoning".

It is NOT synonymous to "This question is begging to be asked."

NOT NOT NOT NOT NOT NOT NOT.

If you don't know this, you'd better get a clue and look it up. wikipedia.com has a good and brief section about informal fallacies.



Look it up there, learn to use the phrase correctly, and stop looking like an idiot.

Monk

There's something seriously wrong with how the writers (or is it the producers?) present him. I have a disorder similar to Monk's, in that I don't like germs and I don't like the germs I imagine on other people's hands. I don't like to shake hands with people, I don't like to touch doorknobs. I can't stand pushing a grocery cart and will actually pull my sleeves down to cover the handlebar and keep from getting my hands on it. I use the paper towels in public restrooms to pull the door open. I'll even use sections of toilet paper to slide the latch. More likely, though, I won't even use the restroom at all; I'll hold it till I get home. I use my sleeves to open any public door. I keep handi-wipes in my car to clean my hands in case I pump gas or have to make a call from a public phone. (I don't have a cell phone.) And on it goes.

In most ways I'm not half as bad as Monk. I will shake hands with people without displaying any revulsion. I just keep feeling the *ahem* cooties till I can wash my hands, no matter how much later. If I have to touch a doorknob with my bare hands, I will, but I'll use a handiwipe as soon as I can. I don't worry about alcohol and I don't use scrub brushes or dishwashing detergent; simple soap or just a rinse in plain water are generally enough.

(You may laugh at this but you should know: I used to get four or five colds a year. Since I started not sharing germs with people, I get one cold every four or five years. Is it worth it? I would say so.)

But Monk doesn't seem to have any problems with doorknobs or grocery carts or picking up someone else's briefcase, all of which ought to be covered with germs.

I'll add to this later. But Monk is very inconsistent in his fussinesses.

"Women's advocacy groups" make me sick

You have never heard one syllable from NOW about the way women are treated in much of the Muslim world. Their silence makes me want to puke.

There was this one time in high school ...

So the gym teacher asked me to write down names, I forget why I was making this list for her but girls from the rest of the class would come to me, give me their names, and I would write them down. One at a time. I'm good at spelling (also good at typoing so I do use spelling checker) and didn't have any trouble getting through the names. Until Donna came up.

Donna was one of those girls from the "Popular crowd". I didn't have a clique, which in retrospect I suppose made me garbage in her eyes, as if I cared. She never deigned to speak to me anyway, and I didn't exactly sit around crying about it. "Donna" she said. I started writing it down. "D ... O ... N ... N ..."

"No," she sneered and snarled at me, in some of the most burning hatred I had ever heard from another female. "NOT d-o-n-n-a, stupid, D A W N A!!!!"

OOoooh, feel the burn! Shame on me!!! What a pathetic piece of scum I was, for not knowing the bitch spelled her named "DEE AY DUBBLE-YOO EN AY !!!!!

Dawna, whatever your last name is, FUCK YOU.

I'll guess that she went on to college and spent the rest of her life spitting on every female who wasn't in her sorority.

My lovely children, I apologise to you

When my first child was a toddler of nine months of age, there was an article in our newspaper that graphically described how a wee bairn of just nine months of age ran out to the ice cream truck, toddling along behind his brothers and sisters who had run out faster than he could. When he got to the street he fell down, unbeknownst to the ice cream man. The truck was already in reverse, coming back to serve the kids who had come out of their home shouting and hollering. Only now they were shouting to stop the truck. This, the driver expected, and continued backing the truck till he ran over the toddler.

Father described to the reporter how he picked up the corpse of his son, covered in blood and limp and lifeless.

I cried. I imagined myself picking up my wonderful, precious, irreplaceable little baby, who had just started walking too, and I cried more. I saw the father hugging his dead son, weeping and helpless to reverse the event, helpless to bring his son back to life, and I cried all the more. I cried all night and continued to sniffle and cry most of the next day, I so empathised with that man, and I cried for his son and his wife as well.

Later when the boys were a little older, the ice cream truck would come through our neighborhood and I wouldn't allow the kids to run out and get an ice cream. I pictured death and destruction around the thing, and I forgot what a joy it was to capture the ice cream truck and buy a simple ice cream off him. I didn't want to support the poor guy who made his living driving the thing around listening to the same obnoxious song blaring over his speaker day after day.

And I believe I deprived my kids of one of the little joys of childhood, and I am heartily sorry for such foolishness. Of course, they probably don't realize how much reinforcement I had from their father's keeping us on such a stingy, miserably tight allowance, since there was usually plenty of spare change lying around the house (though there wouldn't have been any if we had spent it on ice cream), but that was the sort of blind mindset I had. "Steve doesn't want me to spend money, therefore I can't." Never mind that Steve was spending every penny we had taking himself and his friends out to restaurants every chance he got, and putting the expenses on charge cards. Had we paid those things off for once and for all and not charged them back up again, we could have lived much better than we did, without the hysterical "Don't spend a penny!" mentality.

Well, this was part of that insanity. I'm sorry you kids had to pay for it.

The Power of Oprah!

Evidently there are people who slavishly follow Oprah and do everything she recommends. This woman is admitting that when O said you need to meditate X hours a day and she was only meditating X/2 hours per day, she stepped up the hours she meditated. She buys the books O recommends, she buys the items on the "Ten Things Every Woman Must Have in Her Closet".

I'm mentioning this to you so that you can check out the feet of the women you meet. If you see a woman with leopard print flats on her feet, run the other way.

There is something magnificently wrong with such a woman--like maybe the ability to think. And this is sickening.

What's even more sickening is that CNBCW (that's "CNBC for women") is actually taking this subject seriously and has devoted a whole hour to it. How soon do you think we will see an hour on "Critical thinking for women" or "How to have a good communicative relationship with business partners for women"?

Queen Elizabeth's hat

She is in New York today, and she's wearing a hat worthy of a queen. It's shimmery like satin, with some things sticking out of the band, mostly flowers, but the shape of the crown of her hat suggests to me something in the "industrial" vein of the arts decroatifs era, though it could really be something else and I'm just missing the correct visual interpretation. Regardless, I just love it!

Prayer: O God, please let this woman's idiot son predecease her.

Oh em gee

"Will someone please show me the Nobel Prizes in Math or Science from the Muslim world?"

I have been waiting for someone with a big voice to bring this out. Finally, someone has.

In school they told us that the Arabs had preserved all the great knowledge from ancient times, and that all the wisdom and learning that had gone on during the "Dark Ages" in Europe had taken place among the wise and educated Arab world.

Other than the fact that Arabs had kept some manuscripts preserved in libraries in the Middle East, and hadn't made any attempt to preserve these manuscripts at all by copying them and sending out the copies to other libraries in case of fire (notice how many manuscripts were destroyed in the fire at the library in Alexandria), the Arabs did nothing. No, there was no new learning, no research, no philosophy, not during the Middle Ages, not during the Renaissance, not ever. They had some old books they had no regard for. They had the Koran. The two were incompatible and they loved only one of those--sadly, the wrong one.

Some of you people have been taught all your lives that in order to appear "intellectual", Christianity is to be trashed, and Islam is to be tolerated mainly because it isn't Christianity. You're idiots.

There is a Pensacola woman talking to reporters

She's got a nice big camera trained on her stupid face. She's very pretty and there's a kid in the shot with her, possibly her own child.

She's bemoaning what's happening to her beaches. "This is just awful," she declares. Why? prompts the reporter. "Because our beaches are being ruined forever," she wails. "They'll never be the same again."

How ignorant can you be? How can you be so stupid as not to know that nature repairs itself? How can you be so anthropocentric as to think otherwise? What is education giving these people any more? You have to know that environmentalism is a huge part of our curriculum nowadays. Are the teachers feeding the children anything but hysterics? Where is the awe and love for the gigantic majesty and power of nature?

This is the same woman--the same mindset, the same ignorance, the same tiny world with narrow horizons--that Al Gore can sell his global warming hysteria to when he stands on a beach toe-deep in salt water, and lectures us that "twenty years ago the water stopped there"--pointing fifty feet away--"and today it's washing against their back patio"--with a dramatic wave to the luxury houses behind him. Then follows a lecture about how the oceans are rising thanks to global warming.

But only in that one spot. Ten miles north of where he and the youthful press crew stand, the beach is exactly as it has been for decades.

None of the youthful reporters attending this latest of Gore's hysteria events has the knowledge to ask him about "beach erosion, much?" or to point out that the other beaches along the same coast don't seem to have the same rising ocean; perhaps the continental shelf is floating, and thus rising along with the rising oceans?

None have enough education to know the difference between a hundred years and a hundred thousand years, because, like Gore, they have tiny little worlds with tiny little horizons and are incapable of seeing the big picture because for them there IS no big picture. The books they were forced to read in school were all current. No one has ever read about life in the Middle Ages, or under the Roman Empire. None of them have ever seen a movie about any time outside their very own.

I think it's because their teachers are just as ignorant as their students.

But this has turned into a rant about the education system and the serious lack thereof. The woman on TV crying about her beaches being "ruined forever" is ignorant, but she is ignorant by choice, and that's what bothers me.

Okay, how ignorant can today's kids be?

Can our miserable, lousy, rotten school system educate them any worse?

Could we teach them that they don't know anything? Maybe cool it on the self-esteem long enough for them to learn that they aren't God?

They never doubt all the garbage they think they know. And whom did they learn this garbage from? From other kids. When they were twelve, their only mentors were other twelve year olds, since their parents no longer rear them but expect the schools to do that job. What these parents don't realise is that the schools abrogated that job three generations ago. "There's no such thing as right and wrong," declared my generation, completely unintelligent enough to understand that sentence refutes itself. Watch, I'll show you:

Stupid hippie: "There is no such thing as truth."
Me: "Is that statements true?"

You think about it for a bit.

How come everyone at Princeton-Plainsboro hates Dr. House?

Is there something about him that is so preciously adorable that WE can love the guy so much, but no one in the series can see for themselves?

Do we think we're special, and that's why we love him--because thinking he's pretty special makes us similarly special?

I remember watching "Blazing Saddles" once, and we got to the part where the cranky old racist white woman gives him a wink and a nudge and entreats him not to mind that she was so racist before. We're supposed to roll our eyes and think to ourselves, "O, God, I'm so glad I'm not that woman, so glad I'm not a stupid, un-self aware racist. Thank you Lord for making me a better person than her." And that's why we like that movie so much--it makes us feel superior.

Yet I don't see any of this conspiratorial "wink, wink, nudge, nudge" attitude underlying "House, M.D.". Yet I sometimes want to smack everyone in the show.

Why are they always trying to "cure" him? Am I the only person who objects to this? He is who he is, and I don't ask him to be what I want him to be. Sure, he'd cheer up his patients if he were kinder to them. So what? If they want bedside manner, they have the other doctors and a hospital full of nurses to cheer them up. Probably they even have family who come to see them.

So lay off the brilliant Dr. House. Let him see his patients as puzzles needing to be solved. He's fine the way he is.

Well, a lot of things tick me off.

And a lot of things thrill me no end.

I'm just blowing off steam about the miserable and rotten things people do, or about the wonderful and sweet things people do.

It's very unlikely you will be interested in anything I say. But thank you for dropping in.