Woohoo!

I just booked Rhys's birthday party at Casa Bonita! I'm excited, he's excited!

Casa Bonita in Denver is WAY cooler than the one I grew up with in Oklahoma City. Except the food tastes exactly the same. But hey, I've never gotten food poisoning there!

Why even bother getting a license?

I can't believe there's even a debate about this.

Apparently, if someone is pulled over in Denver and is an unlicensed driver, the police don't bother with impounding your car. Which means that unlicensed driver gets back in their car and continues driving unlicensed, and probably uninsured.

Four out of ten traffic stops in Denver are unlicensed, and so they're probably uninsured. Over 49% of traffic fatalities in Colorado involve at least one unlicensed driver.

There are a lot of things I love about Denver, but this isn't one of them. I'm guessing that the $210 a year we pay for uninsured motorist coverage would be at least a little lower if there weren't so many unlicensed drivers cruising around.

Apparently the City Council's argument is that police have better things to do than sit around waiting for a tow truck to show up. I know for a fact that at least one tow company that Denver uses generally shows up within fifteen minutes of calling - they do personal towing also and I've had to use them several times to tow cars to the mechanic. The longest wait I've ever had was twenty minutes. The City Council also argues that the law unfairly targets illegal immigrants. They're choosing to ignore that there's a reason the state doesn't give driver's licenses to illegal immigrants. It's because they're illegal. Not to mention, Denver already has awful traffic. If Denver police were allowed to be more diligent about taking unlicensed drivers' cars off the road, how long would it be before some of the traffic snarls would lessen? It's piecemeal, it's slow, but given the data, is it really too much to ask that driving in Denver requires a license?

Zombie daughter

Taken before she did a faceplant while running down the sidewalk, giving herself a bloody nose, a scraped cheek, and yet another goose egg on her forehead. If she follows in her brother's footsteps, it will be several months before we have an outing that doesn't involve a goose egg.

Aronofsky directing new Robocop flick

Darren Aronofsky is on board to direct a new installment in the Robocop franchise, slated for release in 2010.

MGM is keeping the logline under wraps, but insiders say it will take the sci-fi vigilante classic in more of a noir direction.

I'm curious how a movie that was originally rated NC-17 for its glorious ultraviolence and gore could possibly get any darker.

There's no word yet on who is playing RoboCop. If Peter Weller doesn't at least have a cameo, I'll be disappointed.

Beyond wrong

MTV is remaking The Rocky Horror Picture Show. I have no idea what they're hoping to accomplish from this. The original movie wasn't that good, it's the experience of showing up in the middle of the night and yelling and throwing things that makes it enjoyable. So unless they've got theaters lined up willing to clean up the mess after every showing, they're not going to get an audience. And that's a best case scenario. The worst case scenario is they hack off a bunch of old fans and generate even more ill will.

Collective medicine

CodeProject nailed it with this tagline: "For those who prefer their medical information from a site anyone can edit".

OK, not anyone. You have to have an MD or PhD to edit content. But I can't wait for the flame wars. And you know they're going to happen. Take a look at the controversies surrounding Morgellons, or thyroid, or autism, or ADHD, and you're in for a preview of some of the fun that should be upcoming.

No media bias here...

There's a link on the front page of CNN to an editorial written by Glenn Beck, decrying the insane amount of glowing MSM coverage that Obama receives versus McCain's largely neglected campaign.

What are the odds that CNN put it on the front page to try to prove that they're not as biased as the AP, ABC, NBC, and CBS, all of whom are called out as biased in the commentary?

NPH will be on Sesame Street

Neil Patrick Harris will be on the next season of Sesame Street. I can't wait! And I'm sure Zoe can't wait either - she is a shoe freak from a long line of shoe freaks.

There's a preview on YouTube, but they're not allowing embedding.

McCain leading in Colorado

Despite the hype and hoopla over the Democratic National Convention being held here, McCain is now leading in the polls. I have to wonder if the protest shenanigans and all the chaos the convention is causing aren't going to drive Colorado right into the hands of McCain. There's certainly no 'as Colorado goes, so goes the rest of the country', but I think it would be a definite sign that Obama has problems if the movement toward McCain keeps up, especially given the strong liberal leanings of Denver and Boulder and most of the Ron Paul followers moving to follow Obama.

Not gonna name my child that...

When we chose our kids' names, we did so with some care. We tried to make the names not too freaky, and chose short names to give them a preschool advantage, since our eight-letter last name paired with a seven-letter middle name is enough for a young child to learn how to spell. Four letters (Rhys) for our son, three letters (Zoe) for our daughter, and we often just shorten her name to z. No D'Artagnon, no Krystynya, no Ford (although we told people for a while that Rhys was going to be Ford, just to get them to stop asking about baby names), no Se7en, and certainly no Talula Does The Hula From Hawaii.

I have to wonder what kind of adult life these parents thought their daughter would have, with a name like that. It's like naming your daughter after a teenage prostitute in a movie and being surprised that she turns out to be a drug-addled narcissistic schizophrenic who can't hold down a job. It's like naming your daughter Destiny or Neveah and being surprised that the tools of her trade are pasties and a brass pole. Who names their daughter 'heaven' backwards, anyway? What's the opposite of heaven?


(h/t AoS headlines)

Cake wrecks

This site isn't helping my craving for buttercream.

Oh no they didn't...

This came across my husband's RSS feed as "New RIM jobs posted." I guess if you're not unembarrassed enough to apply for a RIM job, they don't want you.

Since they can't be armed, let's take away their protection against armed people

A school district in Louisiana has had problems with someone showing up to their school with a gun and a bulletproof vest, so now they're going to try to pass legislation to ban bulletproof vests from schools. They claim they can't punish the kid severely enough under the current laws, so they want to figure out another way to punish the next kid who dares show up to school in a bulletproof vest. Sheriff Ricky Adams, who's behind this nonsense, states: "We question the need for bulletproof vests in schools in the first place." Uh, maybe because you have people showing up to your schools with guns? I understand that you might not want students bringing their own guns to school for protection, but why on earth would you keep students from wearing something that might keep them from dying next time someone shoots up a school?

Shreveport's got a violent crime rate 1.72 times the national average. I can't wait to hear the campaign speech for the wastes of space in the Louisiana House that let this get out of committee: "In my last legislative term, I took steps to keep your children from protecting themselves!"

I wonder if they had permission to use this graphic...

Look familiar?

I don't mind snakes...

but I don't want to find one in my washing machine.

I have clothes waiting to be put in the dryer right now, and I'm not sure I can do it.

Things I wish I didn't have to say to my kids, part 1

I'm pretty sure this will end up being a regular series.

"Don't drink from your shoe, honey, it isn't clean."

"Hey, don't lick the walls!"

"Sweetie, use your fork, not your barrette."

Image-only emails aren't helpful

To whoever sent me an email earlier this month, or maybe last month, for a girls night out charity benefit...

You sent the ad as an image to be downloaded from your site. Now, I'm sure this ad looks pretty, and you may get an idea of how many people are viewing it, but since there's no text whatsoever in it that's searchable, I can't find it now without going through every email I've received over the past several weeks. Which is a shame, because I really wanted to go to this and I've got a friend interested too, but I've spent twenty minutes or so looking for it and just can't find it.

Three to eight more weeks

I got the buccal swab (an oral swab like you see on the crime shows on TV, except you're supposed to swab each swab for ten seconds, and each in a different part of your mouth) kit in the mail today to do further typing to see if I'm a bone marrow match. Apparently I'm a match on HLA-A and HLA-B, which was all the typing information that was available from when I registered fifty million bajillion years ago. If I'm understanding the numbers correctly, there's about a 1 in 12 chance that I'll match enough to donate. Bonfils said that it takes three to eight weeks for the rest of the typing to be completed.

Did you know...

Did you know that if you wash a Sandisk Micro Cruzer 8GB thumb drive in the washing machine, then let it dry out, it just might still work?

I speak from experience on this one.

I love solid state technology. At the rate things are going, soon we'll have entire computers we can throw in the washing machine, and then we won't have to worry about our keyboards being germier than our toilet bowls.

To a particular family member

Nothing that goes on in my life or the life of my family is any of your business. There is no reason for you to visit my blog several times a day, or at all. It's unhealthy. We are all much happier that we have no contact, and we want it to stay that way.

You are not welcome here. I don't know how to make it any clearer.

One...

of these kids is not gonna have nearly as much trouble learning how to spell his name as the other.

I can haz beanz?

Oh good god...


If 'I can haz beanz' turns up as an advertising slogan, I'm suing the hell out of Heinz, if only to make them stop.

(h/t The Drawn Cutlass)

That was unexpected

I just got a call saying I'm a possible match for someone in need of a bone marrow transplant. When I registered, I never thought that would happen, given that my genetic line is pretty mongrel.

The first rule of secret action camp is....

...you don't talk about secret action camp.

In Denver this weekend, a group of anarchists who have pledged to disrupt the Democratic National Convention will hold a secret action camp to learn about medical training and legal rights and to practice nonviolent tactics.

Uh, guys, putting up a myspace calendar and having your demonstrations announced isn't the best way to surprise people with your actions. Now we're expecting you to make spectacles of yourselves during the convention, which means that if the cops don't arrest your whiny disrupting asses as soon as you look cross-eyed at a single delegate, they're not doing their jobs. As a matter of fact, I'd be surprised if they haven't infiltrated your group and pick you all up on conspiracy charges before the convention. Let's see how well your anti-anxiety medications work against that thought, eh?

As much as I dislike what the Democratic Party has become, especially over the last twenty years, I don't want to see convention business disrupted. Heckled, sure, but let the conventioneers get their business done. Having the power to choose our candidates, even with the lousy choices we have this election cycle, is what keeps the rest of us from having to become mired in the day-to-day crapfest that is politics.

E.T. has the answer to the energy crisis

And he better speak up quick, cause I like me some gas-guzzling SUVs.

Last night, Peckman attended a gathering on the Auraria campus, which was attended by more than 400 people, in which the founder of The Disclosure Project asserted that the government has been concealing clean energy technologies used by UFOs.

I haven't quite decided if this guy's for real or not. He's charging $5 a head to come hear him speak, so if he can interest a couple of hundred people into coming to hear the lunacy, he's making a thousand bucks a night. That's more than many of us could hope to make doing anything legal. And he's shilling quite a number of publications and DVDs on his website.

Screwing corpses is bad, m'kay?

I can't believe this actually had to go to the Wisconsin Supreme Court.

Justice Patience Roggensack, writing a majority opinion with three other justices, said state law bans sexual intercourse with anyone who does not give consent whether a victim is dead or alive at the time. Dead bodies obviously can't give consent, she said.

This seems so painfully freaking obvious. But what's even more shocking is that apparently it's still legal to screw dead bodies in something like half the states, according to the article.

Is this one of those painfully obvious things you don't think you have to talk to your children about, but really needs a sit-down? "Johnny, let's discuss the ethics of digging up dead bodies..." I'm looking forward to having this discussion at my dinner table, let me tell you.

Maybe this is what happens when you show your kids Mr Happy Face videos at the tender age of four.

Another side effect of the ethanol fiasco

Apparently an increase in corn production is causing the Gulf of Mexico's dead zone to grow larger.

Scientists are testing for 'hypoxia'- the lack of oxygen in water. It's caused by an overabundance of nutrients -- things like nitrates and phosphorous -- that flow out of the Mississippi River.
...
Scientists said a virtual dead zone exists between 5 and 30 meters below the ocean surface and it's getting bigger because of this year's flooding in the mid-west coupled with increased corn production.

"If fish and other animals are mobile, they'll leave the area. But the things like clams and mussels and worms that can't leave the area, they'll die," Pride said.

And further down in the article:

Scientists said a tropical storm or hurricane would decrease the dead zone because it would stir up ocean waters.

So just to make sure I understand this...

The production of ethanol, which was ramped up to 'solve' the nation's fuel crisis, is not only causing global starvation because corn production that would have gone toward feeding the hungry is now going into fuel, but it's also causing a decrease in sea life, which is also a source of food, because it's causing runoff in the ocean.

But we can fix the dead zone problem if a hurricane goes through the Gulf of Mexico and stirs the pot. The increase in hurricanes is due to 'climate change', right? Does this mean that we need 'climate change' to repair the side effects of the fuel crisis?

Beer ads in the hands of kids

I know the Rapids game tonight was sponsored by Tecate - but who thought it was a good idea to allow Tecate to advertise on Thunderstix, a product largely employed as a noisemaker by the four-to-twelve crowd? Little soccer ball clappers with the Tecate logo were also being passed out. This is placing beer ads right into the hands of kids that are not even going to be legal to drink for at least ten years. Or does Tecate make some non-alcoholic beverage I'm not aware of?

Iran would kill me for this post

Steven M. Nielson pretty much covers it all.

Forget that the Iranian Parliament is guilty of funding the corruption of a generation, by airing children's shows that promote suicide bombing as a means to an (un)holy end for the sake of defending their Islamic Republic. Forget that they are responsible for terror training funding throughout the world. And forget that they are the epitome of corruption of civilized society... But let one blogger attempt to speak out against that corruption, and the state will have their heads (literally).

At what point do we step in to save the life of someone who puts it all on the line to speak out against his government? We waited entirely too long to step in the way of Saddam Hussein and the mass murder and torture he put the people of Iraq through - if America had finished the job during the First Gulf War, we could have done so without having to run a second front in Afghanistan and may have even averted some of the terrorist activity that Hussein sponsored in the form of $25,000 payments to Palestinian homicide bombers. Wouldn't it have been nice to have an ally in the Middle East, in the form of a democratic Iraq, during the strikes against Afghanistan? Instead, we allowed Hussein to consolidate his power by silencing all dissenting groups through chemical warfare and mass murder. We're about to let Mahmoud Ahmadinejad do the same thing. As long as the silencing starts on a small scale, maybe we won't notice.

Four years of blind adoration

GOPpundit at ColoradoPols.com attended both the recent McCain and Obama appearances here in Colorado. He noted an interesting difference between the two events.

On the one hand you have Obama who took precisely zero public questions and did not hold a single event open to the public. On the other hand you have McCain holding a townhall that burst at the seams where he proceeded to take question after unscripted question.

The Democratic National Committee has rented Invesco Field for Obama's acceptance speech. (How they're going to pay for this, I have no idea, given their economic woes and the $3 million price tag to rent Invesco.) The CEO of the convention makes the following claim (emphasis mine):

Leah Daughtry, the chief executive officer of the national convention, says the decision to allow more people to witness the historic speech highlights the fundamental differences between Obama and Republican John McCain and shows that Obama is more inclusive.

I'm so glad that inclusive means getting to gaze speechless upon the face of the Messiah.

Not nearly enough

A JeffCo school board member Vince Chowdhury repeatedly slaps and chokes his daughter for apologizing to him, then threatens his wife that she'll be next, and he gets off with a misdemeanor harassment plea, on a one-year deferred sentence. Did I mention this guy is also running for a seat in the Colorado House of Representatives? Mount Virtus has an interesting take on who is asking him to resign what.

A protective order was supposed to keep Vince Chowdhury away from his family after he assaulted his daughter. The next day, he started emailing his wife, and was arrested again. The charges have been dropped as part of the plea agreement.

Chowdhury claims that the charges and conviction have no impact on his school board position or on his House campaign. This throws up a red flag for me - I would think that if this were the first time Chowdhury had assaulted his daughter, it would be so life-shattering for someone who's supposedly such an upstanding citizen that he would immediately step down - if he were the man he has pretended to be, he would recognize that he's not fit to be in a position of authority over anyone, let alone the children of Jefferson County.

Chowdhury has asked for a second chance - I would hope that he would recognize that he threw away that second chance when he continued to harass his wife in violation of the protective order and was allowed to plea out.

Chocolate cake in five minutes

In your microwave, even. And in a single mug. So the only dirty dishes are a mug, a fork to stir, and a fork to eat with, assuming you don't turn it out onto a plate to eat it.

I think I'm going to make this tonight and top it with cool whip and cherry pie filling.

Update: Way too sweet, awful texture.

Happy belated Independence Day

I had planned on getting some good fireworks shots and then doing a late post last night, but I got out of the house without my memory card for my camera. And then I was thinking about writing some profound post about how that's a metaphor for how it seems that our country is forgetting how hard it was to win and keep independence and so now we're willing to just forget about it and hand over our economic system to the next Jimmy Carter and hand over our freedom of speech and religion thinking that if we're just nice enough then certain groups won't want to fly planes into our buildings, but it's just not flowing today.

$800K

That's what it's worth if a doctor cuts off your naughty bits, guys. At the tender age of 33.

An older article says it wasn't even an accident:

Surgeon Naum Ciomu, who had been suffering from stress at the time, had been operating on patient Nelu Radonescu, 36, to correct a testicular malformation when he suddenly lost his temper.

Grabbing a scalpel, he sliced off the penis in front of shocked nursing staff, and then placed it on the operating table where he chopped it into small pieces before storming out of the operating theatre at Bucharest hospital.

This guy needs to get married quick so he can have a reason for never having sex again.

Just in case you need a drummer...

Martin Atkins is auctioning off a drum session for a song.

Charbux closing 600 stores

70% of which opened after 2006.

I've got mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, Starbucks did for frufru coffee drinks what Microsoft did for the PC - make it accessible to every shlub on the street. On the other hand, both indie coffee shops within walking distance of my house have closed down, after Starbucks opened locations across the street. In the case of the first one, Starbucks actually opened TWO across the street - one in the grocery store, one in the grocery store parking lot. The second one, which frankly wasn't that good anyway but it was nice having someplace close, closed down when Starbucks announced that they were opening one in the grocery store in the same strip mall and one across the street.

And both of those shops closed down with me having punch cards full for free drinks, dammit!

It's like their trying to do what McDonalds did in the 80s - you never have to drive more than a mile for one. Given that there are ten in my zip code alone, and my zip code is partially rural, I think it's easy to say we've reached frufru saturation. And I never thought I'd be saying that, but a big part of the frufru coffee experience is tied to having a real barista prepare your drink, and I'm not getting any fancy latte art or any variety in my cardboard charbux.

I've lost some respect for Christopher Hitchens

S. Weasel got it absolutely 100% perfectly right.

Given that more journalists, and more American soldiers, have been waterboarded than terrorism suspects, I think we can safely refer to waterboarding as recreation that occasionally has a practical purpose.

Why you never buy clothing for your kids in a language you don't understand

and other Engrish fun.

I guess it's official...

Google is indexing Flash. Yahoo soon to follow.

They've been playing with this for a while. I first noticed Flash searches coming up a few weeks ago. We had a client present us with a very detailed 27-page document containing content for his website. After spending probably 40 hours on his project, including structuring the website around the outline of his content, something just wasn't sitting right with me on the content. I started Googling some of the distinctive phrases, and lo and behold, the entire thing had been ripped from a Flash site in the UK. We'd had discussions about this before, about the ethics of presenting other sites' work as his own, and had told him previously that we just weren't going to rip off other sites. A few days after the original ethics discussion, he mumbled something about needing to make a few text changes, but didn't mention that we were going to have to restructure the ENTIRE FREAKING WEBSITE. When Rich sent him an email about our discovery (I was too furious, we've been swamped and the last thing I needed to find out was that I'd wasted large amounts of time), he claimed that he'd never intended for the 27-page document to be the actual website content, but that he really needed the websites we're doing for him up in a hurry. We still haven't received new content.

This isn't the first time we've had funny business with a website. We had a small business a while back that hadn't finished paying us for the work we did for him. About a year after we did a site for him, we got an email from a guy claiming that he had taken over the company and needed the website rebranded for his new needs, and it needed to be done as quickly as possible, so how much? After several emails back and forth, and calling someone that worked for the original company, we established that not only had the guy not taken over the company, but he had been in talks with the company to buy the rights to their website and then hire us to rebrand it, after he'd paid the company enough money so that they could pay us for the outstanding bill.

And then there was our dentist, who had a web designer offer to rework a website he'd done for another dentist (essentially, just change the names and some of the text) for the low low price of something like $6,000.

A lot of this leaves me wondering - at what point does the template a web designer uses to build a website stop, and the content owned by the customer begin? One of the big time-savers on doing design work is being able to reuse code, and maybe even tweak some existing graphic arts work to make it fit the new project (it's amazing what a new color scheme will do for a site). But at what point are we stealing from our old clients to save time on new projects?

They can always print more money...

Except in Zimbabwe.

Unexpected preemie news

Although your pre-term baby may be a handful as a child, with behavior problems and difficulty in school, a new study shows that preemies are actually less likely to actually turn criminal.

The article I linked above is very confusing to me, since it seems to contradict itself several times. My decision to actually post something about this stemmed from the notes at the bottom of the article, where ways to decrease the risk of popping out a preemie are discussed. Um, if a baby born preemie is less likely to land in the slammer, wouldn't that mean having a preemie is a good thing?

Computer repair is about to get much more expensive

A new law in Texas requires PC techs to also carry a private investigators license. How this insane law was passed is beyond me. The relevant portion of the statute states:

(a) Unless the person holds a license as a security services contractor, a person may not:
(1) act as an alarm systems company, armored car company, courier company, guard company, [or] guard dog company, locksmith company, or private security consultant company;
(2) offer to perform the services of a company in Subdivision (1); or
(3) engage in business activity for which a license is required under this chapter.
...
(b) For purposes of Subsection (a)(1), obtaining or furnishing information includes information obtained or furnished through the review and analysis of, and the investigation into the content of, computer-based data not available to the public.

That college kid down the street that fixes your computer for beer money when you've been surfing porn sites and picked up some nasty bug? He now is required to either have a criminal justice degree or apprentice for three years before he can lay a finger on your keyboard.