Pennsylvania Primary

Today’s the big day.

The world will look different tomorrow.

(Unless, sadly, it manages to look the same.)

Courage.

Spring Cleaning!

OK. Major spring cleaning underway. This means maintenance of hard drives, defragging, archiving, etc. Installation of a new CD burner. Major renovation of office. Moving two computers. Restoring network. Major house issues. Etcetera. Most services off line: minimal email, etc.

So, there will be a hiatus of approximately a week. Sorry for the inconvenience, but nothing big is happening right now, anyway.

Thanks for your forebearance.

Courage.

Spring Cleaning

This Week’s Podcast

This is the podcast version of Monday’s “Why Add My One-Liner to the Humoral Pyre?“

CLICK TO LISTEN

NOTE: Right click and “save as” works best.

VITAL STATISTICS: 4.35 megs; 9 min 30 sec

Currently there will be one podcast per week. More as it becomes easier (e.g. I don’t spend as much time producing the podcast as it took to write the original piece).

Greggie P suggested this a long time ago. I hope he’s happy now. Are you, Greg?

Courage.

Even Before The Torture Monkeys Met

I am, of late, astonished and deeply ashamed for my nation that, just as the “constitutional democracy” that we’d spent the last 230 years in trying to form a “more perfect union,” of was catching on as THE form of government around the planet, and, just as everybody was taking it up, George W. Thug and his band of Evil Torture Monkeys from Hell showed every pipsqueak dictator and secret police thug who ever tapped a wire just how easy it was to give the APPEARANCE of democracy, as long as you controlled how the votes turned out.

Not that this was exactly a NEW development in American political history.

Podcasting Begins

Now that tax season is over, it can finally be accomplished.

Podcasting, Overture.

Today, we begin podcasting. There are RSS and XML issues to be dealt with, but this is the trial run of the “guts” of it, uploading and making files available. In future, there ought to be a snazzy logo that you click on to hear that day’s blog. (The first one is already in the ‘can’).

This, however is the overture. The first piece is a piano bit of something that I composed the other day. The second bit is a synthesized interpolation of a Public Domain piece by Someone Else. (I leave it to you to figure out who that might be.)

Click on the guy falling down the stairs to download.

STATS: mp3. 64 kbps. 3 minutes 20 seconds. 1.6 megabytes. Stereo.

Recorded using the amazing Roland Edirol R-09.

All right. They’re dimming the house lights.

Courage.

Gloating on the Day Shift!

Just knocked off my last night shift.

(Tax preparers have a somewhat twisted sense of humor.)

Now for a well-deserved nap.

“Friends and neighbors complain that taxes are indeed very heavy, and if those laid on by the government were the only ones we had to pay, we might the more easily discharge them; but we have many others, and much more grievous to some of us. We are taxed twice as much by our idleness, three times as much by our pride, and four times as much by our folly.”

– Benjamin Franklin

Courage.

Why Add My One-liner to the Humoral Pyre?

CLICK TO LISTEN

I like pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals.
— Winston Churchill

If, just to piss off Christopher Hitchens, there really IS a God, then He’s laughing His ass off right now.

After all, if he couldn’t laugh at the folly of the Human Race, then he’d cry such a river that it would drown the World. And, if there were a God, just to piss off Bill Maher and Janeine Garofolo, then She would a Sense of Humor, even for Satan’s little riffs.

Because, my children, this one is oh, sooooo special.

Tax Freedom Day, Progressive Style

I don’t know about you, but I don’t consider taxes to be theft. I like to go around and see what I’ve bought with my tax dollars. All of my tax dollars go to the Hubble Space Telescope, of course, and the pictures that they continue to bring back is a source of ongoing joy to me. I wish I had more money, of course, but it’s not the taxes keeping me in a lower tax bracket than I’d like to live in.

So, for me, who has prepared taxes for nine seasons now, it is a profound mystery why I do it. I have all the facility with high finance and mutual funds, farm income and investment strategies as a fish has with an ATV. In REAL life, that is. But I can do the taxes.

Blogosphere Invited To Pull Its Head Out Of Its Collective Ass

I would like to cordially invite the Greater Blogosphere to grow the fuck up and pull its head out of its collective ass. See the monkeys capering at Memeorandum.

The latest tempest in a teapot involves an alleged sleight to “small town” America. Naturally, the fuckwits doing the “interpreting” either can’t read English or, more likely, don’t care to. There are plenty of jobs at Faux Nooz™ for hateful imbeciles* like that.

Half of the Certainties

Four more days. Then, life returns to being good.

Courage.