The Best Part of Blogging

Posted on March 15, 2006 by Phil Kadath

Is meeting the people on the other side of the ether.

I have met a good number of bloggers and blog readers over these nearly three years, usually at a firing range (which is where you meet some of the best people on the planet, BTW). I’m not much of a people person and have zero to no people skills, so getting to know folks of like opinions via this medium and then meeting up for an event of like interests, such as shooting, works perfectly for me and, besides the awesome explosions, one of the reasons why Boomershoot was and is so fun.

In fact, ove this last weekend, fellow blogger and former Seattlite, Raging Dave of Four Right Wing Wackos fame, along with the Raging Mrs. met up with Captain Jim of the Smoke on the Water Blog in San Antonio after the Raging Mrs. surgical experience (glad to hear everything went well, guys). They went to the range to worship at the altar of the The Church of the Holy High-Speed Projectile and then afterwards went out for some cigars and cajun food, and a good time was had by all.

If you scroll down the right hand column to the “Categories” section, you’ll find one marked “Blastorama”. I used to organize these meet-ups of Seattle-Metro area bloggers, blog readers and lurkers at local pistol and rifle ranges and called them “Blogger Blastoramas”. That is how I first met Raging Dave and the Mrs., Rivrdog, Mr. Completely, Headmistress SondraK and JR, Mollbot and more good local folks than I can remember.

I started getting really busy at work with 12 and 14 hour shifts and folks started moving further and further out of Seattle and the Blastoramas died away last year. But I’m back on a 8 to 10 hours shift schedule and am wanting to try and start them up again.

It has been almost a good two months since I have even been to a range, rifle or pistol, and I’ve got an itchy trigger finger that needs to be scratched and a brand spanking new Ruger MKII target pistol that has been in my possession since the first week of February and still hasn’t been shot yet.

This will not stand.

I have been organizing a gathering of a few of my co-workers for a range session this Saturday afternoon at Champion Arms in Kent. If you are local to the Seattle/Tacoma area and want to poke holes in paper for a couple hours with myself and few other good folks, leave a comment here or email me at randomnuclearstrikes – (at) – gmail – (dot) – com for time and directions.

Posted in Uncategorized | 4 Comments

Today’s Male Chauvinist Pig Post

Posted on March 15, 2006 by Phil Kadath

The Miami Herald reports on a University of Chicago study.

The No. 1 reason women make love: Intimacy

The report also goes on to site reasons such as: To get their partner to do something they want, To “Bond”, To get pregnant and “For fun”.

You can tell that this study was conducted by women. If the question of this study was brought up to men, it would have been laughed at and then shortly replied to with the following words, “Who Cares?”

Found by Allah who is posting at Alarming News

Posted in Academia and Other Nonsense | 4 Comments

Am I Missing Something Here

Posted on March 14, 2006 by Phil Kadath

As you can probably tell, my blog and news reading isn’t what it once was. I’m about two days behind everyone else on the planet due to the move, but things are looking up. I’m completely over and done with the old Casa and into the new Casa and am beginning to unpack and put the “non-essential items” away.

My schedule should be back on track by the end of the week with the weekend acting as a well-placed buffer. I have a ton of links that are and have gotten old and stale and I a bit rude for not linking to more folk’s special happenings during this. “Out of It” is also a phrase I would use to describe this sort of blog-limbo I’ve been in, having to read and re-read nearly everything to make sure I haven’t left a key point somwhere in the ether.

So if you could, plase tell me if I’m not seeing something in this post I found at the dKos.

The title of the post is

Exxon Mobil Chief Is Against U.S. Energy Independence

And here is the quoted text from this MarketWatch article

The U.S. government is doing a disservice to the American public by suggesting the country can become energy-independent, especially since the country has oil and gas resources that are off-limits to development, Exxon Mobil Corp.’s top executive said Tuesday.

There are potential sources of supply in the U.S. where federal law prohibits drilling, including parts of the Rocky Mountains, the eastern Gulf of Mexico, offshore California and the hotly-debated Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

 

Tillerson called it “irresponsible” for the government to withhold U.S. resources from its own people.

Now, I may be mistaken, but is just sounds to me as though the oil exec is talking about how the government repeats over and over that they want the US to be oil independant, but refuses to open up the currently “off-limits resources” that are known and readily available?

I see nothing in there where the guy says that we shouldn’t be oil independant or that we need to rely on foreign oil, do you?

Am I missing something or is Kos front-pager, SusanG an idiot?

Posted in Color me confused, Too Stupid to Live, Uncategorized | 9 Comments

Happy Steak and BJ Day!

Posted on March 14, 2006 by Alaska

For more on this new holiday, see here.

Hey, She Who Will Be Obeyed is who I found the link from, so that makes it okay.

No, it’s not safe for work if you hadn’t already figured that out.

I would not be surprised if the instigators of this holiday were also behind the popular “if men wrote advice columns” – the two share an underlying theme.

Steak I understand. As for the rest, I’m not sure how one takes the peanuts out of a PBJ, but that’s one of life’s mysteries, I guess.

Tangent: anybody else remember that one Snickers(TM)  TV commercial wherein a hot young woman takes a dreamy, gooey bite of her Snickers bar, grins, and giggles “It’s the peanuts” –except that she didn’t say “peanuts,” but rather a homonym?

That was a really cool ad…..

 

Posted in Kewel! | 4 Comments

No Speakee Da English. No Votee.

Posted on March 14, 2006 by Phil Kadath

The federal Voting Rights Act is set to expire in 2006, and with it, requirements that counties supply the voter with a ballot in whatever language they may speak.

As could be expected, Seattle and King County, where they “Count Any Vote”, liberals are up in arms at the prospect of losing the non-English speaking, and probably illegal, votes.

Local liberal (or maybe he’s a “Progressive”) blogger, Goldy at HorsesAss.Org declares that “English Only Ballots are Un-American”.

He uses as an example, his Great-Grandmother who he says “emigrated from Eastern Europe as a teen, worked hard all her life, raised a family, helped start and run a small retail shop that fed and clothed three generations… and mostly spoke Yiddish until her dying day”.

She ran a retail shop for upwards of 60 years, paying taxes and following the myriad of local, state and federal regulations, but she couldn’t vote in English?

I think that maybe Goldy is rose-tinting his memories of his “Bubbie” so that he can prove his point, which is truly sad. I mean, if you can’t come up with a good argument for the fact that English is the optimum local language, something that is necessary if one wants to get ahead in this country, and that having to vote only in English provides another incentive for a person to learn it before they become a citizen, instead of isolating a person in their ethnic community, then don’t make up tall tales about your relatives that can’t survive even a cursory examination.

Posted in Life in the Atomic Age, Useful Idiots | 2 Comments

The Old Switcheroo

Posted on March 14, 2006 by Phil Kadath

The real game of “Hide the Salami”, also known as a “Gender Reassignment”.

It was found out a couple weeks back that Washington State had spent some of their Medicaid funding on at least one sex change operation in 2004. Everyone was aghast and astounded that such an oversight could have been made.

The head of the Senate FInance Committee, Iowa Republican Senator, Charles Grassley, took one look at the story and ordered an investigation into how it happened, demanding that Barely Governor Gregiore explain. The Democrats in the State House saw what was coming down the pike and very publically put new rules in place to make sure that sex changes and penile and breast implants were never again paid for with taxpayer dollars.

But like typical politicians, when they could get a closed door session, they dropped the new rules.

Just because I’m posititve that no investigation will every happen and that Gregiore will never explain how come Ma and Pa Kettle in Two Dot, Montana had to pay so that someone who hated their penis so much that they had the state cut it off, I’ll just lay out a highly probable hypothetical scenario for Senator Grassley:

Some state paid head shrinker was diagnosing some dude’s “Depression” and decided that it was because dude was a dude. If dude was a dude-ette, he would be much happier. Since the dude’s headshrinker was being paid for with Medicaide dollars, both dude and the headshrinker were able to file the appropriate Medicaid paperwork to get the “Tallywhacking” accomplished.

Dude’s Social Security disability check, which he gets because he has been too mentally anguished over having a penis to work, paid for dude’s new wigs.

Posted in Color me confused | 2 Comments

The Rewriting of History

Posted on March 13, 2006 by Phil Kadath

Last week, The Baron du Toit wrote a very timely, for me anyway, post about the controlling of historical facts and supplied this saying from Orwell

He who controls the present, controls the past. He who controls the past, controls the future.

The reason this was so timely in my case is that my previous county of residence, King County (Home of the Crooked Election), has recently changed the namesake of the county from former U.S. Vice President William Rufus DeVane King to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

They are now about to change the logo of the county from the “Crown and Circle” in the upper left hand corner of their webpage to some sort of image of MLK.

The main reasons given for this is that former V.P. William King was a slave owner as well as being a rather esoteric historical personality and MLK was THE civil rights figurehead of the fifties and sixties.

I was thinking about reminding the people who though up this idiocy that the namesake of our entire state was also a slave owner, but didn’t want to have to worry about living in “The State of Kennedy” (or Carter, or Marx, or Lenin or, well, you get the idea).

I decided that I would rather remind the selected individuals that MLK was a multiple adulterer. Not exactly a personality trait that most consider admirable. King also prefered to judge people on their character, rather than the color of their skin, which would go directly against the Affirmative Action substitute program that the state has dropped on the universities when too many asian students filled up the roster at the Univeristy of Washington after Affirmative Action was made illegal by the overwhelmingly passed Citizen’s Initiative 200 a few years back. They call it the “Holistic Student Selection Process” or some such pap and doesn’t only use actual academic standards into account, instead, selected university staff members get to review how much “Adversity” the student has overcome.

I’m sure my letter found what is commonly called “The Round File” within the first paragraph.

I guess that my point here is that with the name and logo change almost complete, a part of Washington’s history, while not pretty, will be swept aside, while a new addition to the history of the state, viewed in rose tinted glasses will be glossed over and only partially told.

Maybe I should start calling it “A Brave, New State” ?

Posted in Academia and Other Nonsense, Evil walks the earth, Order of the imperial upraised middle finger. | 2 Comments

RNS Quote of the Day — Cooper/Heinlein Two-Fer

Posted on March 13, 2006 by Alaska

…Superficialities, of course, are rife. A young man should be computer literate, and moreover should know Hemingway from James Joyce. He should know how to drive a car well — such as is not covered in “Driver Ed.” He should know how to fly a light airplane. He should know how to shoot well. He should know elementary geography, both worldwide and local. He should have a cursory knowledge of both zoology and botany. He should know the fundamentals of agriculture and corporate economy. He should be well qualified in armed combat, boxing, wrestling, judo, or the equivalent. He should know how to manage a motorcycle. He should be comfortable in at least one foreign language, and more if appropriate to his background. He should be familiar with remedial medicine.

 –Jeff Cooper, Commentaries, October 2005.

There are lots of these “a man should be able to…” lists floating about the ‘net; probably the most famous is Heinlein’s, if only for its last line:

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently and die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

I score pretty well when matched up against Heinlein’s list. I have a ways to go to meet Cooper’s standards. For example:

a. Considering that Cooper was a race-car driver, I doubt I’m at the level where he’d say that I drive a car well.

b. Fly a light airplane? Not yet.

c. Shoot well? Again, not by Cooper’s standards, I don’t. (In an old essay, Cooper states that beginning shooters should not be allowed to plink until after they can keep all their shots in a ring the size of a teacup offhand with a handgun at 30 yards. I think the Analog Kid can do that consistently. I can’t, not yet.)

d. Fundamentals of agriculture? I’ve got ’em in my head, and I come from a line of farmers, but I haven’t farmed. I’d like to start a backyard garden this summer, though.

e. Well qualified in armed combat? Nope. (From the context, I wonder if he meant unarmed combat? Oh well, I haven’t trained in any of that either.)

f. Motorcycle? Not yet.

Well, I guess I have plenty of things to add to the self-improvement to-do list. It should take a couple years.

And no cracks about Cooper’s list being inapplicable because I’m showing signs of wear. A man of thirty-six is still considered young in some quarters!

Posted in Quote of the Day | 3 Comments

You can’t do that here

Posted on March 12, 2006 by Phil Kadath

The City of Seattle is considered to be a bastion of liberalism. Seattle is considered by most to also be a metropolitan center. While I agree with the first statement, I’m not so sure about the second, mostly because there are a number of things you just cannot do in this town.

One of the local columnists set about making a short list of these things:

7. Hail a cab. “Bingos,” or customers who hail cabs on the street rather than calling a dispatch service, have it hard here. Unless they’re at major intersection or in front of a hotel, where cabs tend to line up, they’re out of luck. Drivers picking up bingos anywhere except for designated passenger load zones, taxi zones and other unrestricted curb space can be ticketed.

8. Sit on a sidewalk downtown, in Pioneer Square, the International District and several other commercial zones between 7 a.m. and 9 p.m. You could get cited for such offenses.

You should hit this link and read the rest of them. A couple of them might surprise you. As for me, I’m used to it.

Posted in Life in the Atomic Age | Leave a comment

More New Friends

Posted on March 12, 2006 by Professor Booty

Once we got the Kid moved into his Tacoma home I made a new friend while visiting a colleague at Pacific Lutheran University.

Lute ladies arern’t much different from Catholic school girls in that, well, you all know the stories, I’m sure.

Now, some folks give the women of the South Puget Sound a bad wrap for not being socialites like their northern siblings. I find that that is definitely not the case. It is just that they have their own circles which that they travel in. But if it wasn’t for the geography, folks wouldn’t even know the difference.

Take Harmony, for example.

spankable94.jpg

I can’t see any reason why she wouldn’t fit in in the uppermost social circle in Seattle. She just doesn’t think they’re worth the drive.

Posted in Kewel! | Leave a comment