Theresa Heinz-Kerry was quoted out of context by the New Yorker! Not in the let the children go nude line, but in the one where she called someone or other a scumbag. It turns out she didn’t say anything strange in that line. But in the article detailing the misrepresentation (linked above), she makes an even more bizarre statement:

“I believe there is a nobility in public service. I believe every citizen can be a public servant. And should be,” said Heinz Kerry.

Assuming we use terms in the same way, she said that everyone should be a government worker, and nobody should work in the private sector, lest they sully themselves amongst the peasantry.

Now how can someone as wealthy as Theresa Heinz-Kerry and wife of two US Senators not know where the government gets the money to pay its workers?

Cardinal right-hander Chris Carpenter left Saturday’s game in the fourth with pain in his arm. Fortunately, it looks like he’s OK and will miss a start for precautionary reasons, with Danny Haren likely filling in the rotation for him. There’s been some talk of Morris skipping a start too, since he’s been feeling sore lately. La Russa was saying on the pre-game show over the weekend that he’d make a bullpen start to give another starter a rest. He doesn’t want to start Ankiel because he wouldn’t make it five innings, so the only thing that could come of it would be that he’d get a loss, and that doesn’t do any good. But in such a situation, he’d be used in long relief, at least two innings, assuming he’s effective. Makes good sense to me, but the boys at ESPN are spinning it to seem like he’s getting a no-confidence vote.

They do have a story about his two innings on Sunday that’s quite a bit more encouraging. I was at that game, and we indeed gave him two standing ovations. On the second one, when he was walking to the dugout, he tipped his hat to the crowd.

Pretty cool.

I’m writing code all morning, and won’t be posting.

Had a nice weekend though, went to St. Louis and got to see my family. And yesterday’s baseball game. We lost to Arizona, but I got to see Ankiel pitch in person. From the very top row at Busch stadium.

Wish me luck, lots of work to do…

C’mon, they can’t even *breed*!

What pisses you off?

Created by ptocheia

Speechless.

You may have heard about this story. A three-year old girl is sitting on her dad’s shoulders when some union thugs came along and tore up their Bush-Cheney sign. Follow the link to see a picture showing one of the dipshits laughing at the tears of a little girl. Such a lowlife. The president of the IUPAT released a statement condemning the actions of the scumbag and making it clear that folks in the painters trade aren’t the sort that taunt children. They do poop in 5-gallon buckets though, so keep an eye out. Anyways, that’s the right thing to do, you make it clear when someone misrepresents you.

My turn. This old guy is a scumbag, a dipshit, a thug, a bully, and a flabby, flabby girly-man. I bet when he takes his belt off he lets loose a flabalanche.

Pit bulls are surprisingly friendly dogs. My mom’s best friend had one that thought he was a cat. Nice dog. My neighbor has one that’s blind in one eye. He’s always chained to a tree and doesn’t do much but run around the tree in one direction until he runs out of chain, then turns around and goes the other way, sorta like a tetherball. He’s also a friendly dog though, likes to be scratched behind his ear like most of them. My girlfriend’s neighbors have a pitbull, and he seems like a nice dog, real calm and doesn’t bark much. But I’m sure he’s gonna grow up to be a mean son of a bitch. I was over there grilling up some red meat the other day, and I saw one of the kids over the fence spear this dog right in the ribs with the butt of a shovel. And another time, I saw a kid punch him in the head because he wouldn’t play. This sort of thing infuriates me. What can you do though? One of these days, that dog is gonna take a big fat bite on one of those kids. And he’ll be deemed the bad guy.

When pit bulls go bad, they go real bad. And the only thing you can do is put them down as gently as possible.

Whenever I open up a new Konsole or start up slack to a command prompt, it gives me a cute quotation. I just opened one to verify that g++ is 3.3.4 and the quotation it gave me was this:

Art is a lie which makes us realize the truth.
– Picasso

So maybe now that CBS is out of the news business, they can start calling themselves artists. I’ll be maintaining that they’re just a bunch of hacks.

Apologies for lack of posting. Been busy at work and getting stuff squared away at home. I’ve got a big assignment due on Monday, and I’m trying to get my linux box working the way I want it before I get coding on it. I might have to stay home from work most of the day tomorrow to work on this. The brand-spankin’ new version of Libranet had some problems with the compiler and I couldn’t get the festival speech syntesis system working on it. I’ve got an older version that seemed to work fine on another machine I’d used, and am considering reverting to that. I’ve spent all day trying to install Slackware on this computer to see if that’ll work better. But I can’t get it to boot up after I install everything. I’m trying one last time, following these exceptionally clear and throrough installation instructions. If I get the same problem again, I might just have to add this computer to the stack of stuff I intend to fill full of .223 rounds. Or I’ll probably just see if that older version of Libranet will do the job.

Just so nobody accuses me of being too geeky, here’s a real funny bit of news.

Update (12:23am): Fucking w00t! Slackware installed. Following Grogan’s advice, I installed LILO to the master boot record instead of the superblock. Error code 15 no more, baby!

Update (9:20am): Still getting compiler errors though. It installs under Cygwin, using Gcc 3.3.3, but not in slack using gcc 3.3.4

Am considering downgrading my compiler and retesting.

In the middle At the end of the Cardinals worst funk since June, Joe Morgan suddenly has something nice to say about the Redbirds. Oh well, take what you can get.

I was thinking about the difference between a team with “swagger” and a team that’s “cocky.” It’s generally believed that swagger is good and cockiness is bad. The difference is this: swagger is when you come into a game knowing you can beat the other team; cockiness is when you come into a game knowing the other team can’t beat you. The Cards are showing swagger in their losing streak, playing relentless ball even when they’re down by six runs, like last night. And I think tonight’s the night we end the funk, with Matty Mo heading out under the lights at Busch stadium. His last start was awful, so it’s time for the fierce, fearsome Morris to show up.

I heard a pretty nifty story the other day while watching the WB11 broadcast. Apparently the Cards uniform logo, the birds on the bat was designed by a little girl? One of the greatest men of the last century, Branch Rickey, was running the Cards at the time. (You may recall that he pioneered the system of minor league affiliates for big league clubs with the Cardinals.) He was attending some kind of a church function and a little girl had made placemats for everyone to eat at, and knowing that Rickey would be there, she decorated them with pictures of cardinals sitting on tree branches. Rickey was impressed by the design and incorporated the idea into the Cards uniform. I just heard it on the TV broadcast, and can’t find a source on the ‘net for it. I’m sure it’s in a book on Rickey somewhere, and I wouldn’t mind hunting one down for some easy reading.

I’m very surprised that we haven’t and probably won’t find large stocks of WMD in Iraq. One of the theories for why we haven’t is that Saddam smuggled them to Syria before the war. I think it’s most likely that the corruption in the regime ate up most of the funds Saddam put into WMD and not much ended up getting made in the past decade. But then you read stories like this one:

Syrian officers were reported to have met in May with Sudanese military leaders in a Khartoum suburb to discuss the possibility of improving cooperation between their armies.

According to Die Welt, the Syrians had suggested close cooperation on developing chemical weapons, and it was proposed that the arms be tested on the rebel SPLA, the Sudan People’s Liberation Army, in the south.

But given that the rebels were involved in peace talks, the newspaper continued, the Sudanese government proposed testing the arms on people in Darfur.

The Global War on Terror is truly WWIV.

Link due to Instapundit.

For those wer kann Deutsch (mine’s rusty), here’s the original article in Die Welt.

My girlfriend was born in New Orleans. I’ve never been. I read this story a long time ago, back in the bad old days when we thought that terrorist attacks were going to be something we were going to have to get used to. Fortunately, three years later I’m back to the point where I’d be surprised if a large attack happened. Back then, I was looking around for what might be the next target. I thought a shuttle launch would be a logical target, a symbol of American largesse, expertise, and strength. I considered after reading that article (or something like it) that terrorists might simultaneously destroy the pumping stations that keep New Orleans from flooding. The bastards might not get the chance, as the doomsday scenario described in that article, a hurricane directly hitting NO, might happen. (Although it is unlikely.) It would be very bad. As in dogs n’ cats…

Professor Bainbridge makes an exceptionally worthwhile observation about the disturbing events taking place in Russia. Unfortunately, (cool NHLCBA countdown aside) some people don’t (or won’t) see things so clearly.

Storm’s a’comin’!

Literally, it’s about to rain here. And I just watered my garden this morning. My tomato plants have pretty much sucked all the tastiness out of the dirt and have resigned themselves to a noble death. My peppers are coming on strong in the ninth inning. I aim to harvest my tobascoes soon and make a super-duper hot salsa to can for over winter. Hopefully I’ll be able to find a few more habaneros before the growing season is up and I put my garden down for the winter for inclusion in that salsa. My squash never did shit. I didn’t fence in the garden, so squirrels and rabbits and possibly cats would come and eat them, and trample down the plants. I got one underripe squash and stir-fried it with some beans and peppers, but that’s it. (It was pretty darned good, too.)

Metaphorically, a storm is on the way. The NHL lockout is expected to begin tomorrow night. I found Randy’s page with a countdown to the moment. Neato.

Seriously, storm’s coming. Big ‘un, too.

Blackfive points out something I hadn’t considered, that the real issue of the forged documents is that someone smeared Lieutenant Colonel Killian’s reputation with the forgeries, and just might get away with it.

In the post below, I had a brainfart, forgetting that the memos created from MS Word also carried the forged signature of a man who died in 1984.

CBS keeps digging their hole deeper, insisting their memos are legitimate in spite of the obvious and undeniable fact that they were created using Microsoft Word. The only possibility to save their credibility would be if they could produce handwritten memos that were word-for-word identical to what was written in the word processed versions they have. I doubt such things exist, and I doubt it would do them any good at this point. Any handwriting expert asked to verify the authenticity of them would be skeptical to the point of paralysis, given how painstakingly his opinion would be challenged.

I won’t be surprised if CBS is out of the news business two years from now. That means a whole lot of bullshit like “Yes, Dear.” At least they’ve got survivor. I might just have to watch that season premiere, the previews make it look like the cast gets attacked by natives.

I got my car fixed today. The diagnosis was correct: dead fuel pump. Bought a new one at autozone and had a friend install it today. The car runs perfectly again, so that’s one major source of irritation taken care of.

Cardinals won today, finishing off their first losing road trip of the season on somewhat of a high note. Our defense fell apart this weekend. Ankiel pitched great today, facing four batters over two innings and giving up a hit to the last one. It was a bloop single, so nothing worth criticizing. His curveball was looking sharp, although it was rarely landing for strikes.

This series against LA was exciting, I guess what you can take from it is that in a playoff series against them, we can own them at home and keep it within a run on the road. Adrian Beltre is a melodramatic dork. On Saturday, he was shuffling his feet when the pitch would come in, and when he’d swing and miss, would drop down to one knee. What a showboat.

My brother-in-law has an excellent 9/11 post. I strongly suggest you read it.

My friend Dave woke up this morning at 5 or so with a dandy of a hangover and wrote down this song:

He’s got a 90+ fastball, but where’ll it go?

Straight at your head, or way down low?

Baby-faced & chubby, he wears a goatee.

He’s hit more guys than Muhammad Ali.

Who’s that Cubs pitcher, who thinks he’s good?

It’s that son of a b*&%@, Kerry Wood.

Those crazy Cub hurlers, whenever they’re vexed,

It’s a sure thing bet, they’ll throw a tantrum next.

Now I just gotta get the band back together…

Some scientists found a skeleton in the Yucatan that dates to possibly as far back as 13,000 years, which would make it the oldest evidence of human inhabitation in the New World. They hypothesized that people back then would live near the ocean, and since this was the Ice Age era, the oceans would be significantly shallower. So they used scuba gear to explore caves underwater where the prehistoric shoreline would have been, and voila! They found what they expected. Well done.

I find the theory that pre-clovis humans could have explored and settled along the shorelines using boats, before the land bridge emerged, to be plausible, and this project looks like the best way to collect evidence to support that theory.

Or pissed Liam. The previous post (next one down) was rather nasty and grumpy. Jeff’s one of my best friends, so nobody should get the wrong impression. I was a little ticked at the big story of yesterday. It should be so obvious. I guess it’s true what the good Reverend says: “[Truth] is the filter through which we interpret facts.” What the faked documents purported to be fact fit with what the reporters considered to be truth.

I was also pretty grouchy when I wrote that because I had a super busy day at work and didn’t see opportunity to give myself a break for lunch. Lots of work and no food makes Liam grumpy.

Another reason I was grumpy was my school’s new accounting system, which worked just great over the summer when about 1/8th the anticipated demand would be using it. Now it’s useless, and my personal finances are affected because of it. But no fear! I’ve got a fake union on my side! In other words, I’ve got a bunch of make-believe revolutionaries making signs to distract the workers fixing the problem. And those faux ne’er-do-wells want me to pay them for their sign-making and agree to whatever they ask of the administration of the University. I think I’m holding up pretty well, frankly. Given that I’m surrounded by assholes.

Add to that: my car wouldn’t start tonight. It has always performed beautifully since I’ve owned it. But now it won’t start. The starter motor works, and it’s got plenty of gas. I think the fuel pump is pooped out. When you turn your key to the first notch in just about any electronically fuel injected car, you’ll hear a low hum. That’s the fuel pump priming. I don’t hear it, and it’s a good explanation why my engine doesn’t start burning gas. I checked the fuse, it’s good. The relay doesn’t look damaged. Fuel pumps are fairly expensive, and usually hard to access, which means I’m gonna have to cough up some dough. That harshes my mellow.