triticale - the wheat / rye guy

Best Drink of the Day

Jeff G asserts that he's not paying $5.75 for a Coors Light. Ever. Such an absolute statement makes no allowance for inflation or other variables. When I started drinking in bars, my usual, The Vine (closer than the St. Louis Zoo) offered dime beers from 7:00 until 8:00 in the morning. I would have figured on not paying $5.75 for a six-pack. Ever.

Emrack and I were sitting around last night discussing luxuries. He mentioned having a cold beer in the woods when camping. I handed him a promotional item I had been given earlier in the day by a marketing person representing Chimay ales. My son drinks Van Gogh vodka and aged Barbados rum, but a $7.50 25 oz. bottle of beer would be wasted on him.

"Naah," he said, "Point Special. Miller. Coor's Light. Aaaah, Coors Light." He gathered his thoughts and launched into a tale. "I stopped the van where the road dead ended, and heard 'hissss'. Not the place you want to hear a tire hiss, at the dead end of a 30 mile semi-paved road into the forest with no turnoffs." This was on his first California trip, driving an old camper on a van chassis. He had gotten a deal on it because the previous owner had bought it to use as a work van but the rear door was too small, and it showed. One of the two spares it came with leaked and he'd already mounted the other. "So I hiked back out a ways, and I found this woman who got some help for me. She asked me if I wanted a beer and I nodded so she got me a cold Coors Light. I've never enjoyed a beer more."

Canid Camera

Further pictures of our canine are awaiting either the aquisition of a faster-scanning digital camera, or connecting with Emrack this weekend while he is in town and has Hunter out in the sunlight. Here in the house she is usually moving too quickly to capture in a good pose. One picture actually suffers pixelation in lieu of blur.

Yesterday morning I actually wanted to camcord her, as she ran laps in our bedroom. She would jump up on the bed, do a bunny binky, run across and jump of the other side, and then run back around to where she jumped on, skittering on the hardwood floor. Eight times.

Just Keep Supposing

The "just suppose" question which I raised last week, which was "if you could have one each, a rifle, a pistol, and a vehicle, for the rest of the summer, in addition to what you already have, what would you choose?", remains open. The wee wifey is working tonite, which, what with one thing and another,means I won't tabulate my answers until Saturday shortly after noon. Further responses, via comment or email, remain solicited.

Quote For The Day

Milwaukee Talk Radio personality (for lack of a better title) Mark Belling has been the guest host on Rush Limbaugh's show for the past two days. When he does this, I find him less irritating than Rush. I also find him less irritating than when he is on his own show, altho it is still obvious how low an opinion he has of anyone who doesn't express an opinion much like his own.

So anyway, this afternoon he was talking about the perceived evils of Wal-Mart. In the course of the discussion, one caller offered up a quote from his own father which carries far beyond this one issue.

"Liberals are 100% in favor of progress, but 0% in favor of change."

Heresy and Felony

The strangest thing about the victim disarmament movement is the way its members view guns. Rather than seeing inanimate objects, tools with the potential to be used for good or bad purposes, they see the embodyment of evil. To me it smacks of Voudoun, but a friend who studied Christian theology identified it with Gnosticism and Manicheanism.

Such a believe can lead a person into doctrinal error, but it can also lead to illegal acts. A group of clergy in Chicago apparantly believe their spiritual power can overwhelm the evil power of guns, and thereby prevent G-d only knows how many deaths (other than guns turned in by criminals to break the chain of evidence, the statistics are strongly against any of these guns being a factor in a death). They problem is that in their hubris, they are, according to Illinois law, trafficking illegally in firearms, possessing unregistered firearms, and most likely possessing firearms without the state's mandatory Firearms Owner ID. Law enforcement authorities are blatantly uninterested in enforcing the law regarding this matter, presumeably because Chicago's mayor is an avowed adherant to the same primitive belief. I doubt that this violates the Establishment Clause as it was originally intended, but clearly it could be deemed a violation of the modern notion of separation of church and state.

There IS A Difference

Jane Galt's co-blogger, Mindles H. Dreck, felt it necessary to point out that cicadas are not locusts.

Of course not. This is Cicada. These are Locusts.

Update:

As Mindles has pointed out, he did not in fact originate the distinction, but was simply the one who saw fit to bring it to our attention.

Taken Friday

Yesterday was the traditional day in the blogosphere for posting canine images, but it is also the traditional day in Milwaukee for going out to eat fried fish and the traditional day in my household for doing grocery shopping. I managed, by ignoring much barking, to get Hunter to stick around long enough to get a few pictures last night, but it wasn't until this morning that I had time to edit (using Paint Shop Pro 4.0 and not Photoshop) out my thumb and some background noise. So anyway, better views of our canine than previously posted. By the way, she told my wee wifey, in a dream, that Hunter was her name, and has been far more responsive to it than she had been to Polarity.

Anyone curious about Hunter's ancestry, or concerned about Breed Specific Legislation, will find this of interest.

It's Out There

The truth no doubt is, so is a lot of other stuff. I have serious doubts about some of this; the explanations I've come upon elsewhere includes some direct contradictions. According to one succesful businessman I once worked for, Ron and Nicole were murdered by the same Arkansas hit squad who took out Vince Foster, and the motive was to create a big news story which would deflect media attention from Hillary's problems.

As for the assertions I linked, I think these people are behind them.

On The Other Hand

Kim du Toit put together what he called a "just suppose" game. Just suppose you could have only one each from now on, a rifle, a pistol, and a vehicle, to meet all your future needs. The tabulated results were interesting but not surprising; the man has a fairly practical readership.

I'd like to come at this from another angle. Just suppose you could have one each, a rifle, a pistol, and a vehicle, for the rest of the summer, in addition to what you already have. They don't have to be as impractical as the examples I linked. My choices wouldn't be. But the question is just for fun, and the selections should be too.

As per Kim's game, answers should be emailed to me, so that everyone has to think for themselves. entry is closed when I read my mail the morning of Saturday the 29th, and results should be posted sometime the 31st.

One Quick Question

I'd like to know if this man had been a teenage mutant.

Songs & Games

Even tho I got his name wrong the first time I linked him, Jeff Goldstein gets the fact that the word I use to identify myself need not be capitalized. Anywhom, he's still doing the talking back to music thing, most recently to a song I don't remember hearing. Another form of musical entertainment showed up in the comments is the practice of singing one song's lyrics to another's tune. This one has a lot of possibilities simply because almost everything we sing is built around one or another standard meter.

One of the things I play with is exploring the possibilities if the circumstances behind a song had been different. Consider, for example, if Jim Reeves had not in fact been a gentleman.

Put your sweet lips a little closer to the phone,
Let's pretend that we're together all alone.
I'll tell the man to turn the jukebox way down low,
And you can tell your friend there with you that if he is still
in my house when I gets home I'm agonna
blow his frimping head off.

Limits of Abuse

The Reverend Artillery has been leading an ongoing discussion of the ethics of torture and abuse. Most recently, the question of whether certain results justify certain treatment. I have to ask then if causing young men to wear women's underwear on their heads and attaching electrodes to them would have lead to a worthwhile result, would it have been justified?

Thought For A Day

Another thing I've been meaning to comment on is this great quote from one of Pejman's favorite quotees. Not only is it more precise and articulate than "work hard play hard" but it cannot be tattooed on the knuckles, altho Emrack is at least researching laser erasure before he has that done.

Movie Maybe, Reviews Definitely

One might speculate that the alleged puppy smoothies have ceased to energize him, but in any case, he needed to take it easy for a few days. During this break he and the Instawife watched a movie which I doubt would appeal to anyone who follows what I have to say. The reviews, however are worth reading; the whole thing, as they say, on past the first page.

Blog Dogging

By now everyone knows that Rachel Lucas is blogging again. No announcement was really needed; it is documented that people checking her page to see if it was still moribund constituted a non-trivial amount of traffic. The important news is that Digger and Sunny, putatively the cutest dogs in the blogosphere, are back. This leaves me with no choice but to introduce Hunter, the newest member of my household.

Emrack met her in the wilds of Arcata in the course of his recent travels. Altho he had left his regular job for a hippie wanderjahr he is currently working six days a week so she is staying with us for a while which is probably going to extend well past his current employment. He tried to get her to pose on his lap, but my camera's redeye preventer set off the natural nervousness of her breed (Roots Canine) and she would not hold still. You do get to see what a handful she is at an estimated four months old.

Still At It

Jeff Goldstein is still talking back to the music. So am I.

Just the other day, shoppers overheard me declaring, "No, but maybe I will love you once you also learn to sing,"