Concealed Carry Permit

I was working today and had some time to spare - if you've ever had to install Visual Studio 2005 with its service pack you know it can take over an hour.

I gotta get me to a firing range to get some target practice and then get that concealed carry doc! It's real easy to get in AZ.

Sandstorm

No, this isn't about Darude. Saturday afternoon I walked out the door to find that the sky was the same color as the mountains, there was immediately grit in my mouth and the wind was blowing HARD.

The dog was disappointed because I was going to take her to PetSmart to buy a brush and groom her. No way was I going to drive with the risk of zero visibility.

12 lanes to the same place

I drove the US 60 autobahn (shit, it seems like it) out to Gilbert, AZ this evening. It's a half hour from where I live in Scottsdale.

There is truly no sense of place in modern America. I drove half an hour to an area that looks almost exactly like the one I live in.

Goldfish racing hosted by beavis, attended by muffy and biff

Ok so we were in old town Snottsdale this evening. Actually it was a block from the office... I was with some co-workers who'd decided it'd be fun to do this.

Now the rules they post on their flyer should give you some idea of how highbrow this experience was.

Rule 1. Put your racing name on the bottom line and give this form to the host... (Beavis)

Rule 2. The first contestant drawn from a hat and the best squirt gun, use the bathroom sink to fill your gun. (Beavis recommended that the guns not be filled with beer or urine)

Rule 3. Take your gun and goldfish back to your table and train your fish. Don't fuck or hurt the lil' dude. Please refrain from eating him also...
The patrons in this bar were definitely capable of all of these things. Muffy and muffy and muffy and muffy and biff et al were generally pretty ripped. Fun to watch.

Rule 4. You will be called up to the fish track to race against another fish and his trainer. You get speed out of the fish by squirting him in the ass with your squirt gun. Please do not act like assholes and squirt each other.

Rule 5. Whoever wins the race will be passed on to the next heat. The looser (sic) is eliminated. This elimination goes on until the fastest fish is found...
What they don't tell you is that girls can lose the race and show Beavis (the emmcee, with the intelligence of Beavis and Butthead combined and the deep respect for women of Andrew Dice Clay) their tits. Two sluts, er, women, did display their tits to Beavis in exchange for favorable treatment in the competition.

Rule 6. The final fastest fish's trainer will be put into the cash blowing machine to grab as much cash as they can and push it out a little hole on the side... what is pushed out and counted is used to pay their bar tab, so sign up now!

At the bottom of the rule sheet you give your fish a name.

I called mine Moby. It's an inside joke my co-workers can appreciate.

You're supposed to squirt the fish with the squirt gun but you can totally cheat and just use the squirt gun barrel in the water to create a wave that pushes the fish from one end of the "race course" (actually just a couple of lengths of rain gutter fastened together and propped up on chairs).

Now to set the scene... they do another game at this bar called wheel of fearfactor - they not only have an applause light but another light with the word PUSSY that I assume has some use during the game. They also have a stripper pole that female patrons are encouraged to make use of, much like a Jerry Springer pay-per-view.

Now the emcee, Beavis, has a microphone and another fun prop: a fishing rod with a big old dildo on the end. Beavis emcees and referees the races and all female contestants have to contend with this largish dildo in their face. The more the woman shies away from the dildo, the more "fun" Beavis has with her. It's amusing for about five minutes but after that it just grinds.

There was some other entertainment - the people at the next table were quite obviously offended by the show. Um, HELLO? Does the big sign that says PUSSY up by the stage not give you a little hint? How about that sage admonition NOT to fuck the fish?

Fortunately, the establishment does not provide black tape and this is one reason not to try to fuck the fish. Also as a practical matter the fish provided is not all that large so you'd have to be substantially underendowed. Also minimizing the risk of fish being fucked is that in downtown Scottsdale the crowd has few asian males that generally fit that category. (Note that that's not a racist statement, it's from my own experience visiting bathhouses and saunas all over the US, Western Europe and Argentina. One notices trends. Girls, if you want to FEEEEL the earth move - date an Italian for example because they generally are hung like horses.)

But I digress. So Beavis dangled the dildo in front of all the girls, a couple of the Muffys showed Beavis their tits so he'd overlook them losing the race. It was all very lowbrow.

One of the people I was with made a comment about how degrading it all was for the women. While I agreed, I can't shed many tears. When I go into a gay bar I'm equally objectified. Besides, guys like Beavis who puff up like that, make fag jokes, etc. are often some of the most submissive bottoms in bed - with another guy.

I didn't find it at all offensive, just lowbrow. Very little offends me.

It was also the first time I've been good at some bar activity. I can't shoot pool to save my life, I'm dangerous with darts - but getting a fish from one end of a gutter to another ---- this I can do. I raced three times and lost the 3rd race - had I won it, I'd have been in the final round with a chance to win a $25 gift certificate. (Yup, they ain't got no cash blowing machine, the only blowing machine I saw was the girl with the big-ass implants.)

The only other pitfall is while you're watching the Muffys doing one shot after another and showing off their implants, you really have to be careful not to drink the water out of the cup where your fish is. :)

psy ops in the homeland

In the last week I discovered The Pentagon Channel. Can't say I recommend watching it... It's like the 4th of July all the time. It reminds me a bit of Pat Robertson's CBN news broadcasts.

It's an interesting window into the military mindset and quite the propaganda tool for marketing the military.

Interesting link picked up from watching this stuff: http://www.battlemind.org/

new gizmo

Those who know me waaay back know that satellite telvision has always been a hobby. Specifically I like to get the oddball stuff that's up there, mostly just for the sake of doing it. It's great fun to watch the live unedited feeds from a satellite truck on location being sent back to the TV station, for example.

Or to watch television from Cuba, which was tonight's adventure.

I have a Sky Mexico system that I use for watching the equivalent of Mexican cable TV. The same satellite that carries Sky also carries a variety of other channels. It's not like satellite TV in the USA where the satellite provider controls the actual satellite in the sky. Sky Mexico just rents space on Intelsat 9, which is located in orbit at 58 degrees west.

There's some sort of Indian religious channel - the only thing of note was that the guy preaching had a round band-aid over his red dot... I couldn't take but a few seconds of that.

There are a couple of occasional video channels which are used to send signals between North America and Europe. They lit up a couple of times to either show test patterns or scrambled signals I could not display.

Cubavision Internacional is also carried on this bird. It was showing a baseball game live from Havana. The last time I had occasion to watch Cuban TV it was, um, live and received over the air from my hotel room on the Cuban coast. (What can I say, sometimes travel to the Caribbean gets boring and you have to throw in a curveball...)

It was interesting to watch baseball and listen to the commentary. The stands were packed although the crowd was not particularly well dressed, quite unlike an American sports event. The onscreen graphics were great - if it were 1990. When they needed to cut away for a moment there was most certainly NO advertising, they'd just cut to some bombastic video clip about how bush was a terrorist and then hey, back to the game.

The game ended and I was about to make a comment about how their production quality had improved... but then they cut to a propaganda music video showing a lot of anti-American themes.

In playing around with the receiver I found out that my flatscreen TV will do a neat thing: it will lock a signal that's 625 line 25 frame per second with PAL color and display it perfectly. (TV in North America is generally 525 line 30 frame per second NTSC color - the result of a PAL signal being introduced is usually a fuzzy black and white picture that rolls like crazy.) Anyway, this receiver is relatively inexpensive but has features that are not found on most North American electronics. You won't find one of these puppies at Best Buy.

It was a neat evening and it's got my desire increased to get a proper motorized dish outside so I can see MORE. :)

I don't know that I'll spend much more time watching Cuban TV, its crap.

victory for traditional media, killer sends video to NBC and not YouTube

Looks like the mass-murderer Virginia went out with a videotape and a bang. He reminds me of an ex-boyfriend.

But look on the bright side, this is good news for the traditional media boffins. This is an example of someone under 25 who could well have used YouTube and chose not to. ;)

definitely a better shot than author...

It's doggerel purportedly written by the guy who killed 31 people yesterday.

http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/years/2007/0417071vtech1.html

chutzpah

Microsoft routes users to this page when Office crashes LOL. "Our software crashed your computer. Buy more."

1 day later, the press is back to the usual

Four lines below the story about the Virginia Tech shootings, another headline. "Lindsay Lohan in lesbian affair."

Sarcasm ------> I know I was definitely looking for that information within 50 pixels of the other story.

North Korean music = Vogon poetry?

I really think they have a similar effect on the listener....

32 dead at Virginia Tech today

32 people were gunned down at Virginia Tech this morning. When I turned on CNN they were all agog about the details - you could tell it was going to be a Story With a Theme and a Logo for a coupla days.

Now lets compare and contrast this for a second. Today's the 16th. Virginia Tech will be in the news for at least the next week or two.

On the 14th, 32 people died in a bus-bomb attack in Iraq. The story got a couple paragraphs mention and maybe a picture, a few words on the news - but it was just that days deaths from Iraq, nothing more. The story will not have a musical theme, a logo, and not much mention.

I ask a rhetorical question: how are the 32 human beings in Iraq so different from the 32 at Virginia Tech? Is it not an equal tragedy? Is it just possible that we're so hardened to hearing about deaths in Iraq that it somehow minimizes their impact?

Think about it.

Friends of Kim

I'm watching a film on Link TV. Link TV is as far left as Fox News is far right, to put it in perspective.

They are so far left in showing this film its a little out of my league, but I've been curious about North Korea even before they could land a nuclear warhead in Las Vegas or Phoenix.

The film is about a march, pro-North Korea, to be held in Pyongyang. Naturally they will say all kinds of pro Korea, pro Kim Il Sung pablum that will make everyone with the little red DPRK flag pin on their shirt feel warm fuzzies inside mixed in with music that sounds like cats singing along with minor key chromatic scales being played.

They have Alejandro Cao de Benos, the Spaniard president of the Korean Friendship Organization. I've read about him a few times - but never saw him. Watching his body language - gotta check the gay box.

In short, every single one of these blokes from Spain and England are from posh families and I'm sure it pisses their mums and dads off to no end that they're spending the trust fund on this globetrotting.

The film is called Friends of Kim. It's a very "potemkin village" view of the DPRK. Looks to be a neat watch if you hold your nose a bit to keep the stench of the dogma down a bit.

h1-b visas revisited

I read an interesting article today about the subject - seems Indian companies are taking advantage of them with their US subsidiaries. Now this kind of usage I approve of - it's not in the best interest of an Indian company to have their employee emigrate, but it is in their best interest to have in-country representation. The article said that $60,000 might not be a high salary for what they do, but its 5 times more than they'd make in India.

This is absolutely true - when I lived in Uruguay I made the annual equivalent (post tax) of $9000 annually. The hypothetical Indian in the article's example would be at $12k. In the US it would be impossible to live on that, but there one can live reasonably comfortably if one goes native.

But I like this - they will come, help their company and economy be competitive in the world market - and then they will leave. Perfect. :)

Another birthday

I feel like I should feel older but I don't.

This year's birthday finds me in a much different state of mind than in the past. Very realistic about my assets and liabilities both in terms of finances and in life generally.

I'm glad that I'm living where I am, have the dog that I've got. The job I have, mmm not so much but it'll do.

37 years young. Woo hoo. 90 more years until retirement at the rate I'm going :)

An alternate good Friday story...

So if Jesus comes out of the cave and sees his shadow, will we have six more weeks of winter?

H1-B visas, poor Intel and Microsoft, waah

Seems the folks at Micro$oft and Intel are in a snit about the number of H1-B visas to be issued in 2008.

I'd like to see even fewer of them issued. Most H1-B visas are issued to highly skilled technical people. This brings wages down for American workers because H1-B workers generally work for less money.

I've no doubt that there has been abuse of workers here on the H1-B visa. If they get hired by certain consulting companies they risk being taken advantage of for that bargain salary; after all if they don't like it and quit - they have to find another H1-B employer to sponsor them (not easy at short notice) or leave the country.

However, many employers hire H1-B workers with special incentives. The visa sponsor letter is written, the letter of the law is followed, a good salary is paid - as well as fees paid by the employer to an immigration attorney because the goal is a green card.

I'm not against immigration - but if you're here on a "temporary" visa (which is what the law says about H1-B) it should be just that.

When I die...

When I read this news story from today... I thought "Holy shit would that HURT..." That and its ghoulish and incestuous. He's outdone Ozzy Osbourne for gross...


LONDON — Keith Richards has acknowledged consuming a raft of illegal substances in his time, but this may top them all.

In comments published Tuesday, the 63-year-old Rolling Stones guitarist said he had snorted his father's ashes mixed with cocaine.

"The strangest thing I've tried to snort? My father. I snorted my father," Richards was quoted as saying by British music magazine NME.

"He was cremated and I couldn't resist grinding him up with a little bit of blow. My dad wouldn't have cared," he said. "... It went down pretty well, and I'm still alive."

Richards' father, Bert, died in 2002, at 84.

Richards, one of rock's legendary wild men, told the magazine that his survival was the result of luck, and advised young musicians against trying to emulate him.

"I did it because that was the way I did it. Now people think it's a way of life," he was quoted as saying.

"I've no pretensions about immortality," he added. "I'm the same as everyone ... just kind of lucky.

"I was No. 1 on the `who's likely to die' list for 10 years. I mean, I was really disappointed when I fell off the list," Richards said.

Argentina re-iterates claim on the Falklands...

Um, pointless?! There are bigger internal problems (like unemployment) than dredging up some old ones. They should spend their time and money on important things like more plastic surgery for Mirna LeGrand. (she's a well preserved talk-show host on at noon every day in BsAs)

la novela de la vida de mi perro (the soap-opera life of my dog)

Shaggy goes ape-shit when she sees a cat. It happens without fail.

I need to re-arrange my living room so she can't get access to the front window. The local cats have learned that it doesn't take much at all to get that doggy in the window going nuts. They apparently stop by during the day when I'm not home - the neighbors have complained about the noise she makes.

There is one cat that is particularly brazen: the damn thing has chosen a spot right on the stairs outside the door. It knows that the dog is either inside or kept on a leash.

Think I'll be going to Petsmart and getting a can of Kitty No, a spray that repels the little shits. Late tomorrow night I'm going to spray the stairs down to keep the little fuckers away.