We're people too

D's Pics

I was collecting pictures to re-enter the photo contest when I became eligible again but the contest has been discontinued so I can open my vault and make them public. Here's some of my favorites.

Rose: Ok. You didn't maintain a hundred beats per minute. And the ambulance didn't arrive because no body called 911. So you lost 'em.

Dwight Schrute: Ok. He's dead. Anyone know what we do next? Anybody? Rose?

Rose: I have no idea.

Phyllis: We bury him.

Dwight Schrute: Wrong. Check for an organ donor card. If he has one we only have minutes to harvest.

Creed: He has no wallet, I checked.

Michael Scott: He is an organ donor.

Dwight Schrute: [excitedly] He is? Give me some ice in a Styrofoam bucket. [removes a hunting knife from his ankle and cuts open the dummy] We search for the organs! [digging around inside] Where's the heart? The precious heart.

(after Dwight proceeds to remove the dummy's face and immitate Hannibal Lecter...)


David Wallace: Can you tell me why you had to cut the face off the dummy.

Dwight Schrute: I didn't think it was very realistic in the movie, and it turns out, it's pretty realistic.


Best Office scene ever.

Fun with snow

So Mason and I (mostly) have been having fun with our snow accumulations much to the entertainment of certain other people like my wife. Not only are snow caves fun to build but they can serve a lifesaving purpose as a shelter from the cold and wind. Ideally they should be not much larger than you are to hold in your body heat. I'm not in the business of merely surviving. Why survive when you can thrive? I have put the finishing touches on today's work at least by leveling floors, smoothing archways and removing excess snow from entry and exit points. It looks like the hardwood floors will be installed after Christmas. I still need to put in the fireplace. It will be comfortable enough for now but I have several expansions planned. The next wing will include some extra space for the kids to have a play area and maybe a study. On to the pictures.


This is the view from the mudroom looking through the den and into the arched foyer. I think the arches have a bold yet elegant look. On the right you can just begin to see the master suite and the kids' room.

Here we can see the den and the back door all the way at the other side of the mudroom.

Here's a better shot of the foyer.
A close up of the foyer archway and the entrances to the living quarters.
Back door.
Front door.

Hopey Changemas!!

In a race to see who can hyper-inflate our currency the quickest and turn America into the new Zimbabwe we had a beautiful (it's bringing tears to my eyes) bipartisan effort in congress to give away hundreds of billions of dollars to those poor banks. Now we're giving a slice of the pie (euphemism for billions of dollars) to the antiquated and uncompetitive car makers. These recipients are the ones who still haven't figured out that Americans don't like cars that look like jelly beans and.......break. Add to that the Trillion dollar proposed "stimulus package" that our American Mugabe has proposed and we're well on our way to our own banana republic. No, I'm not referring to the clothing store.

For a meandering and maddening narrative of what's happening in America check out this column by Mark Steyn. He hits on a lot of material and yet he doesn't even get to the guy who made up the "Office" of President Elect, Barack Obama. Maybe next week.

Oh yeah, Cantaffordya....HA! That's as good as San Franfreakshow or Killadelphia (insert shout-out to all my peeps in Filthydelphia here).

By MARK STEYN

Syndicated columnist

| Recommend 8

"See the USA in your Chevrolet!" trilled Dinah Shore week after week on TV.

Can you still see the USA in your Chevrolet? Through a windscreen darkly.

General Motors now has a market valuation about a third of Bed, Bath & Beyond, and no one says your Swash 700 Elongated Biscuit Toilet Seat Bidet is too big to fail. GM has a market capitalization of about $2.4 billion. For purposes of comparison, Toyota's market cap is $100 billion and change (the change being bigger than the whole of GM). General Motors, like the other two geezers of the Old Three, is a vast retirement home with a small money-losing auto subsidiary. The UAW is AARP in an Edsel: It has three times as many retirees and widows as "workers" (I use the term loosely). GM has 96,000 employees but provides health benefits to a million people.

How do you make that math add up? Not by selling cars: Honda and Nissan make a pretax operating profit per vehicle of around $1,600; Ford, Chrysler and GM make a loss of $500 to $1,500. That's to say, they lose money on every vehicle they sell. Like Henry Ford said, you can get it in any color as long as it's red.

In the 20th century, most advanced nations made automobiles but only America made them mythic: "Drive the USA in your Chevrolet!" sang Dinah. "America's the greatest land of all!" America had road movies. With car chases. Thelma and Louise drove their vehicle off the cliff and, unlike the Old Three, they didn't demand American taxpayers come along for the ride. But, if you didn't want to hit the open road, you could just hang around, being cool. In Chuck Berry's immortal quatrain:

"Riding along in my automobile

My baby beside me at the wheel

Cruising and playing the radio

With No Particular Place To Go."

Not if you were a European teen. Cruising was an American activity. A Saturday night out for a Brit meant hanging around at a rain-streaked bus shelter hoping the night service would show up. Even if you had a particular place to go, you had no means of getting there.

So many areas of endeavor that once embodied the youth and energy of this great land are now old and sclerotic. I include, naturally, my own industry. I loved the American newsrooms you saw in movies like "The Front Page," full of hard-boiled, hard-livin' newspapermen. By the time I got there myself, there were no hard-boiled newspapermen, just bland, anemic newspaperpersons turning out politically correct snooze sheets of torpid portentousness. The owner of The Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune recently filed for bankruptcy protection. The New York Times is mortgaging its office to fund debt repayment. The Detroit Free Press is cutting out home delivery except on Thursdays, Fridays and Sundays, thereby further depressing sales of delivery trucks in the Motor City.

The newspapers blame the Internet, just as Detroit blames Japan. But the Japanese have problems of their own. One day they'll get theirs. That's the beauty of capitalism. Nothing is forever. The big railroad barons smoking cigars and enjoying pheasant under glass in the dining car on the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe thought Henry Ford was a schmuck. Who'd want to ride around in that thing? Next thing you know, everyone's getting their kicks on Route 66:

"You'll see Amarillo

Gallup, New Mexico

Flagstaff, Arizona

Don't forget Winona

Kingman, Barstow, San Bernardino."

Ah, California. The Golden State! To a penniless immigrant named Arnold Schwarzenegger, it was a land of plenty. Now Arnold is an immigrant of plenty in a penniless land. What's the motto on the license plates? "Ah'll be back …for more of your money!" In California you don't have to be an orange to have your pips squeezed. The Terminator makes Gray Davis look like Calvin Coolidge. Care to terminate a government program, Governor? Hey, great idea! We'll hire 200 people to do an impact study on terminating the Department of Impact Study Regulation and get back to you in a decade. And when Gov. Girlyman has run out of state taxpayers to fleece for his ever-more-bloated bureaucracy, he'll go to Washington to plead for a federal bailout of Cantaffordya.

California! The state that symbolizes the American Dream! If you can make it there, you'll make it anywhere!

No, wait, that's New York. "This is the worst fiscal downturn since the Great Depression," announced New York Gov. Paterson. So what's he doing? Why, he's bringing in the biggest tax hike in New York history. If you can make it there, you'll be paying state tax on it, sales tax, municipal tax, a doubled beer tax, a tax on clothing, a tax on cab rides, an "iTunes tax" on downloads from the Internet, a tax on haircuts, 137 new tax hikes in all. Call Albany today and order your new package of tax forms, for just $199.99, plus 12 percent tax on tax forms and 4 percent tax-form application fee partially refundable upon payment of the 7.5 percent tax-filing tax. If you can make it there, you'll certainly have no difficulty making it in Tajikistan.

Hey, and who needs to make it therewhen you can just get appointed there? Gov. Paterson is said to be considering appointing Princess Caroline of Kennedy to Hillary Clinton's vacant Senate seat. After two and a third centuries of republican experiment, America has finally worked its way back to the House of Lords.

"Friends Say Kennedy Has Long Wanted Public Role," Anne Kornblut assured readers in an in-depth Washington Post tongue-bath. She hasn't "long wanted" it to the extent of, you know, running for dog catcher in Lackawanna and getting – what's the word? – "elected," but, if you have a spare Senate seat, she's graciously indicated that she'd be prepared to consider accepting it. As lady-in-waiting Anne Kornblut pointed out, Caroline is highly qualified, being "the author of several books." It's true! She's an experienced poetry editor. She edited "The Best-Loved Poems Of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis." Jackie Kennedy wrote poems? Of course! She wrote so many poems that some are better loved than others.

See the USA from your Chevrolet: An hereditary legislature, a media fawning its way into bankruptcy, its iconic coastal states driving out innovators and entrepreneurs, the arrival of the new Messiah heralded only by the leaden dirge of "We Three Kings Of Ol' Detroit Are/Seeking checks we traverse afar," and Route 66 looking ever more like a one-way dead-end street to Bailoutistan. Boy, I sure could use a poem by Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis right now, even one of the lesser-loved ones.

"I feel like I lost my country," the Hudson Institute's Herbert London said the other day, wondering whatever happened to the land of opportunity and dynamism. But I'm more of an optimist. Maybe Princess Caroline will be appointed CEO of GM and all will be well. Or maybe Bed, Bath & Beyond will put wheels on the Swash 700 Elongated Biscuit Toilet Seat Bidet.

And on that cheery note let me wish you a very Hopey Changemas.

©MARK STEYN

52% of Americans are Ignorant and/or Stupid.

If my title offends you then I guess you are one of the people who should be offended. As poor a candidate as John McCain was he was the better choice. At least Sarah Palin had some true conservative ideals but she was totally demonized by the left and their propagandists in the media. It's actually quite interesting to see feminists eat one of their own because she doesn't fit their mold. The two supposed champions of women's rights, Liberalism and it's cousin Feminism, have proven themselves to be hypocritical and completely irrelevant by their treatment of her.

This article pretty much sums up my feelings of the election.

Barack fools us

Whole world will pay for America's electoral mistake

By MICHAEL COREN, TORONTO SUN
Last Updated: 8th November 2008, 3:41am

A young student friend e-mailed me on Tuesday night.

"Have locked myself in my room because the place is full of little idiots -- who cannot spell Barack Obama's name and could not name one of his foreign or domestic policies -- running around screaming obscenities about George Bush, conservatives and how Sarah Palin is a bitch. I love democracy!"

Even so, the people spoke. A victory for the hysterical Oprah Winfrey, the mad racist preacher Jeremiah Wright, the mainstream media who abandoned any sense of objectivity long ago, Europeans who despise America largely because they depend on her, comics who claim to be dangerous and fearless but would not dare attack genuinely powerful special interest groups. A victory for Obama-worshippers everywhere.

A victory for the cult of the cult. A man who has done little with his life but has written about his achievements as if he had found the cure for cancer in between winning a marathon and building a nuclear reactor with his teeth. Victory for style over substance, hyperbole over history, rabble-raising over reality.

A victory for Hollywood, the most dysfunctional community in the world. Victory for Streisand, Spielberg, Soros and Sarandon.

Victory for those who prefer welfare to will and interference to independence. For those who settle for group think and herd mentality rather than those who fight for individual initiative and the right to be out of step with meagre political fashion.

Victory for a man who is no friend of freedom. He and his people have already stated that media has to be controlled so as to be balanced, without realizing the extraordinary irony within that statement. Like most liberal zealots, the Obama worshippers constantly speak of Fox and Limbaugh, when the vast bulk of television stations and newspapers are drastically liberal and anti-conservative.

Senior Democrat Chuck Schumer said that just as pornography should be censored, so should talk radio. In other words, one of the few free and open means of popular expression may well be cornered and beaten by bullies who even in triumph cannot tolerate any criticism and opposition.

WEAK TOWARD ENEMIES
A victory for those who believe the state is better qualified to raise children than the family, for those who prefer teachers' unions to teaching and for those who are naively convinced that if the West is sufficiently weak towards its enemies, war and terror will dissolve as quickly as the tears on the face of a leftist celebrity.

A victory for social democracy even after most of Europe has come to the painful conclusion that social democracy leads to mediocrity, failure, unemployment, inflation, higher taxes and economic stagnation. A victory for intrusive lawyers, banal sentimentalists, social extremists and urban snobs.

Also a defeat for one of the weakest presidential candidates in living memory.
Why would anyone vote for a man who seemed incapable of outlining his policies and instead repeatedly emphasized a noble but, if we are candid, largely irrelevant war record?
He was joined by a woman who was defended so vehemently by her supporters when it was cuttingly evident that she is years away from being, and perhaps never will be, a serious candidate for senior national office.

Most of all it was a terrible defeat for democracy and the United States. A politician of nothing defeated a nothing politician and a credulous electorate screamed in adoration. I fear we will all suffer very much indeed.

Train up a child in the way he should fish: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.

When Mason turned 6 I took him on a quick fishing trip with his own little spinning rod. I ended up breaking out the fly rod since nothing was taking his spinner. I was fishing for a while and Mason started complaining that he wanted to go home. I really wanted him to reel in a fish so we stayed a while longer as he was eaten by all the mosquitoes. We did land one fish but ever since he's told me he really doesn't like fly fishing. I realized the other day that he didn't understand the difference between "fly fishing" and "fishing while flies(mosquitoes) bite you".

I took him out again Saturday evening. There were no mosquitoes and we caught some nice fish. We both had a great time. I'd hook 'em and walk to the bank and let him reel them in. We caught 4 Rainbows and a Brook Trout.

As we were walking back to the car Mason said "Dad, this is the best day of my whole life". Usually Mason's hyperbole is a little more cryptic. Something like "Dad, this is the best day I never had" is more typical.

On the ride home I was telling him that Brook Trout are my favorite fish to catch because they are so pretty with their spots and orange bellies. He said nonchalantly, "Yeah, my favorite is sharks".

I'm hoping I'll have a bona fide fishing partner soon.