Monthly Archives: June 2006

We All Knew Political Consultants Were Sleazy, But…

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CNN.com – Man behind anti-Clinton ad convicted – Jun 28, 2006

EDINBURG, Texas (AP) — A political consultant whose company was behind a television ad accusing the Clinton-Gore administration of giving away nuclear technology was convicted of child molestation charges. A jury deliberated almost two days before convicting Carey Lee Cramer, 44, of aggravated
sexual assault of a child, two counts of indecency with a child by contact and one count of indecency with a child by exposure. He was cleared of nine other charges Tuesday.

Oh, ho ho ho ho. How very delicious: a Rethugnican political consultant getting hard time for child sexual abuse. He’s not going to be very popular in prison.

Obama: Democrats Must Court Evangelicals

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Obama: Democrats Must Court Evangelicals | Chicago Tribune

Obama ROCKS. Right on. RIGHT on:

WASHINGTON — Sen. Barack Obama chastised fellow Democrats on Wednesday for failing to “acknowledge the power of faith in the lives of the American people,” and said the party must compete for the support of evangelicals and other churchgoing Americans.
“Not every mention of God in public is a breach to the wall of separation. Context matters,” the Illinois Democrat said in remarks to a conference of Call to Renewal, a faith-based movement to overcome poverty.
“It is doubtful that children reciting the Pledge of Allegiance feel oppressed or brainwashed as a consequence of muttering the phrase `under God,'” he said. “Having voluntary student prayer groups using school property to meet should not be a threat, any more than its use by the High School Republicans should threaten Democrats.”

He reserves special scorn for the type of politician that visits historically black churches during election season, who claps off-rhythm to the gospel choir, saying “Nothing is more transparent than inauthentic expressions of faith…”

It’s A Four – Season Backyard Zamboni!

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Vt. man creates the backyard Zamboni – Yahoo! News

Recently, a customer in California wanted one of his ride-on ice mowers with a Bambini pull-behind resurfacer to create a 10,000-square-foot skating surface for her children. But the client also wanted to remove snow from the outdoor pond. Renzello, who had been thinking about putting his inventions into one machine,
said he had the answer. He combined all the technologies into the Bambini Revolution. It will clear snow, scrape ice smooth and leave a layer of water on the ice to bring it to a glassy finish. The scraper blade smooths the bumps from ice and pipes release heated water that bonds to the existing ice, leaving a smooth skating surface as it hardens. Renzello delivered his first unit this weekend to his California customer.

He’d really have the perfect 4-season backyard grooming machine if it had a poop-scooping attachment.

Be Still!

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Father Jake pointed out a helpful sermon when he visited a friend’s parish after General Convention’s painful close: the rh[ ] factor: Blowing the “still”

The British Navy has a strange custom. If there’s a sudden disaster aboard shipo, the “still” is blown. It’s a whistle that calls the crew to a moment of silence in a time of crisis. When the still is blown, people aboard know that it means. “Prepare to do the wise thing.” They tell us that this moment of calm has helped avert many a catastrophe.
The General Convention ended just four days ago but we’re already hearing warnings about deadly storms brewing all around us. We’ve heard most of it before, but now some of the actions we’re seeing feel like those waves crashing over the boat threatening the demise of life as we have known it. I am pleased with probably 95% of the work of our General Convention. But there is that nagging 5% that breaks my heart, deeply wounds me.
Maybe what our church has done is “blown the ‘still'” in a time of crisis. Called for the calm on the ship. Prepared to do the wise thing. The wise thing is not a particular outcome. The wise thing is creating a calmer place so we can better hear God speak from the storm.
You can only claim this power when you know the value of stillness and practice it, when you do not give in to the panic and fear but hear the words of Jesus spoken with authority:
Be still!

Do not be afraid!

I am with you always!

I could have used this advise several times over the last few weeks, and so could a lot of people on both sides of the fence in Columbus.

Up A Blind Alley

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You know, it’s a little bit funny, as the family joke has it. David and Ginny should never attempt an “easy home installation” without having a backup plan that doesn’t include having to find obsure little details on home-repair troubleshooting websites. Or needing a time out.

Still, we eventually succeeded – at least, David figured it out while I lent immoral support.

David attempted to install some double-wide blinds in the bedroom while I was away this morning. I returned to find him stumped, because one bracket was too tight, causing all the other brackets to fail to engage. Thus, the miniblinds we’d bought weren’t much use.

At first, we struggled. Then, we seemed to succeed, but the blind on the side with the too-tight bracket wouldn’t come down. This was when David decided a trip away from the house was a good idea, while I talked to someone at Home Despot, who correctly diagnosed the bracket problem, which was that we had the bracket too close to a mechanism. This was also the cause of the not-coming-down problem.

However, we couldn’t get the headrail OFF to unscrew the bracket and reposition it.

I checked the www.levolor.com website while he went off to Menards to cool off and to find a very,very flat wrench of the right size. The one he came back with was just a smitch too wide, but David got it to work eventuually. After a lengthy removal process, David sent me downstairs.

“Call me when you’re ready to reinstall the headrail,” I said.

He called me back fairly quickly. Aha! the blinds were up and could be raised or lowered. Also aha! The twister-wand thing twirled uselessly, so they couldn’t be closed or opened.

Rats. BUT, I’d seen something of this nature in the levolor.com website FAQ.

However, the fix on the Levolor.com site wasn’t the correct one; I had to go to a third-party retailer’s site to get the right “fix.” Which was “the blinds have internal rods which engage interior gear-joints, and sometimes the rods shift in transit and must be re-inserted back into the joints.”

Levolor Riviera and Mark I Repairs and Adjustments

Now, WHY couldn’t Levolor.com have

1. Cautioned against installing brackets too close to the inner works of the blinds, and

2. Shipped the blinds with little styrofoam spacers to prevent the rods from shifting OR mentioned this problem in their FAQ?

Durrrrrrrr. Seems like a no-brainer now, but at the time, this series of problems was mighty, mighty frustrating. Now the only people who are frustrated are the neighborhood pervs (not that we have any, they are purely imaginary).

21st Century Soda Fountain

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Here is a nice, but boring, image of a pretty fountain. It’s not as elaborate as the one at the Bellagio Las Vegas, but it’s in a nice setting.

victoria030

See? Nice, but static.

Now, try this on for size: 101 two-liter bottles of Diet Coke. 523 Mentos. It’s a little bit art, it’s a little bit science, it’s a hell of a mess when they’re done. Do not attempt this without safety glasses and lab coats.

Soda-Fountain.jpg

EepyBird.com – Extreme Diet Coke and Mentos Experiment

via AKMA: 2 Degrees of Eepybird

Murph Burphday Memories

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Flickr

I may have to crop this photo down a little. The light that day was good for photographing people outdoors – Mom’s hair looked nice in it.

She was always particular about her hair – it was a luxuriant auburn halo when she was young. I haven’t seen any photos of her with long hair yet – and I looked at almost everything she had while I was helping my sisters clear out the house a little week before last.

This photo was taken at her 90th birthday celebration at my sister Timmy’s house last September. Her cake was inscribed “Murpheola,” Pop’s nickname for her. Lots of people knew her as “Murph.”


Via: Flickr Title: MurphBday065 By: GinnyRED57
Originally uploaded: 8 Sep ’05, 11.15pm CDT PST

That’s my mom in blue, looking at family photos. The lady in the middle is Olivette, an "over the back fence" neighbor of ours when I was a kid… they moved away 20 or 25 years ago. That’s the kind of neighborhood Mom had. The boy is one of Olivette’s grandsons.

Keep The Story Alive: RFK JR and the Stolen Election of 2004

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This story came out while I was off in Utah, dealing with the family crisis (or not dealing, depending on whichever day it was). Since then, I’ve seen a few “mainline” news citations in Bloglines. The Seattle P-I wonders if this will be this year’s version of the infamous Downing Street Memo; a story that was so not “nothing new” that bloggers had to remind journalists to use their own noses and smell a hot lead.

Just doing my bit to keep this one alive and smelly, too.

Rolling Stone : Was the 2004 Election Stolen?

Like many Americans, I spent the evening of the 2004 election watching the returns on television and wondering how the exit polls, which predicted an overwhelming victory for John Kerry, had gotten it so wrong. By midnight, the official tallies showed a decisive lead for George Bush — and the next day, lacking enough legal evidence to contest the results, Kerry conceded. Republicans derided anyone who expressed doubts about Bush’s victory as nut cases in ”tinfoil hats,” while the national media, with few exceptions, did little to question the validity of the election. The Washington Post immediately dismissed allegations of fraud as ”conspiracy theories,”(1) and The New York Times declared that ”there is no evidence of vote theft or errors on a large scale.”(2)

But despite the media blackout, indications continued to emerge that something deeply troubling had taken place in 2004. Nearly half of the 6 million American voters living abroad(3) never received their ballots — or received them too late to vote(4) — after the Pentagon unaccountably shut down a state-of-the-art Web site used to file overseas registrations.(5) A consulting firm called Sproul & Associates, which was hired by the Republican National Committee to register voters in six battleground states,(6) was discovered shredding Democratic registrations.(7) In New Mexico, which was decided by 5,988 votes,(8) malfunctioning machines mysteriously failed to properly register a presidential vote on more than 20,000 ballots.(9) Nationwide, according to the federal commission charged with implementing election reforms, as many as 1 million ballots were spoiled by faulty voting equipment — roughly one for every 100 cast.(10)

The numbers refer to the extensive footnotes in the article – there are about 200. Read it and weep.