Getting my money's worth

I just applied for my two $40 coupons good towards a tv converter box.

Percent chance that I will actually use them, as I do not own a TV nor really desire to and if I buy one I'll buy a tiny new one: ~1%. There is always technically the chance that I'll decide to buy a used TV at Goodwill or off Craigslist or something. But I've gone five years now quite happily without a TV, so, you know, my urge to drop a couple hundred bucks - or even fifty - on something that does a teeny tiny part of what my computer does is minimal.

But if the government is financing everyone else's idiot box habits, then I want my slice of the pie, too. So there.

White (black?) collar crime, NJ style

Oh boy:

Two New Jersey assemblymen, three mayors, and rabbis hailing from Brooklyn to the Shore were among dozens of people arrested yesterday as part of a federal investigation into international money laundering and homegrown political corruption.

Yeah. Man is this rich. Forty-four arrests in total.

The investigation began with the FBI's looking into an alleged money-laundering operation led by a number of rabbis that reached from the Shore town of Deal to Brooklyn, N.Y., Switzerland, and Israel.

A Brooklyn man, Levy Izhak Rosenbaum, allegedly tried to entice people to give up a kidney for $10,000 so he could sell the organs for $160,000 each, according to acting U.S. Attorney Ralph Marra.

I don't actually have the slightest clue what these two paragraphs have to do with each other, but...a kidney? Really? That's fantastic. I can't express how much I hope it turns out to be true that there were rabbis - preferably orthodox* - that were trying to start some insane international organ-selling ring based in Hoboken.

Reasons to hate American number Idunnowhat

These people are just trying to sound important when they say that they actually vote, right? They don't actually do it, right? And, uh, it is against the law and morally wrong to kill them, right?

Man on the moon

Forty years and a few hours ago, two human beings landed in a strange looking vessel on the moon.

A few hours after that they crawled out the door of that vessel, down a ladder, and dropped a few feet to the surface of the moon. They looked up, and they saw a dark sky marred only by the glow of the Earth looming above them.



You can't put a price on awesome like that. That's human exploration in it's purest form. We went because, as President Kennedy said, it wasn't easy. It was hard. Things went wrong. Lots of things went wrong, from Liberty Bell 7's hatch blowing out and sinking, to the hatch not opening on Apollo 1. Some very talented, smart, and dedicated men lost their lives for it. But ultimately, we succeeded - not because America was a superpower, but because when brilliant, scientific minds get going on something they're not going to stop until they figure it out - and there we were. Two men on the moon...

...and one circling above.



And that, my friends, is why we've kept going, and why we need to keep going. It's awesome. Literally awesome; it inspires awe. We said to hell with gravity, extreme temperatures, and absolute vacuum. We saw something we wanted and we went for it, and we kept going until we got there, and is the response to victory to simply stop?



No. We keep exploring. We set our sights on Mars, on the next solar system over, on things constantly bigger and better.

Because it's awesome.

And that's the way it was

Walter Cronkite, legendary newscaster, has passed away at the age of 92.

I wasn't even born when he retired, but I certainly realize what a tremendous influence he had on America. He was a reporter's reporter: every night he sat down in front of a camera and said what happened. Sometimes he did let his emotions show: he expressed his amazement and excitement at the Apollo 11, he shed a tear at Kennedy's assissnation, and - most famously - he laid bare his concerns about Vietnam, but only after plainly stating that what followed was his opinion, not fact.

He did not understand the idea of a newscaster as a celebrity and clearly wanted no part of that. He wanted to spread information, nothing more, and he did so magnificently. With his death, we perhaps lose the last of his breed: honest, trustworthy, hard-working television reporters, who see TV as a medium to communicate and inform for the greater good. Generations of Americans grew up trusting him, maybe more than any other public figure, and that's something not likely to ever happen again.

Rest in peace, Mr. Cronkite.

Dear Sky

Please rain. Even just a little bit. But please, please, please provide us with some manner of cloud cover and precipitation.

What I did today

Today at work, I counted bits of brightly colored paper. For the entire 3.5 hours. (Well, no. Also I looked up an email address for my boss).

See, the organization I'm working for hosted Big Public Party on the 4th of July. To get into this party you had to purchase a ticket, and of course turn it over at the gate.

Now, for reasons which I'm not entirely certain on, those tickets now need to be counted. Guess who gets to do that? Me! So, yesterday afternoon I started counting. I counted 2,100 little pieces of paper.

Today I got to work and was told that not only was I supposed to be counting the tickets but also separating the two different types of tickets. So, I sorted through the previously-counted 2,100 tickets. Then I kept sorting, and counting. And sorting. And counting. And counting and sorting. And so on.

So that's what I did this morning. But I also met a lovely dog, and got a pair of nice capris for cheap at REI this afternoon, so overall I say a win.

Tornados suck

For reference, here's what a train can do to a typical, modern automobile:

The moral: don't screw around with trains, because trains are big and heavy and if you get in your way they will stomp the life out of you, continue on over your corpse, and not really even notice that they've done so, because they can move quite quickly and even when they're not, they're still really quite large.

Now here's what a tornado can do to a freight train:

The moral: sometimes nature just says 'screw you' to human progress and ingenuity, grabs a freight off the tracks and throws it, just like an elementary school bully knocking a couple first-graders out of the lunch line.

In honor of the holiday I'm drinking some British tea.

Happy birthday, America, you magnificent bastard. It's been not a bad year for you. There's been better, but there's been worse.

This year saw your economy collapse, which surprised far, far more people than it should have. A cynic could say it was just desserts for your unquenchable thirst for more, and that it was purely your fault. That cynic may be right, but the more gentle soul will argue that lots of people who had the least lost the most, and had no role in creating the disaster. The cynic may respond that that's certainly not the first time your poor bore the greatest burden for a problem they did not create, and again, the cynic may be right. The gentle soul can only hope that you'll finally begin to learn from it.

This year saw the tail end of a presidential election, one that brought lots of contentious and sometimes ugly issues to the forefront, one that saw record voter turnout and - quite improbably - a black man elected as president. For perspective, the White House where he now lives and works was built in the late 1700s primarily by black slaves and a few months before Mr. Obama was born, a number of people were severely beaten for suggesting that different races didn't need different buses. So that's some pretty good progress.

Meanwhile we've had a bit of back-and-forth on the issue of equal rights for gays and lesbians. Some states have taken monumental steps in granting those equal rights; others have gone in the exact opposite direction. It was only a few years ago that it was ruled that consenting adults can have whatever type of sex they want with each other, though, so the issue is still young.

So the year's been a mixed bag. There's been some great things - oh, did I mention that the Phillies won the world series? God bless baseball - and some not so great things. The nation has not collapsed, we're beginning to withdraw from one of our messes of a war, and even thought many things are bad, there's still that curiously American sense of 'Yeah, but we'll get through it.' Because this is a country born of the most improbably circumstances, a band of ragtag idealists and extremists who decided to poke their huge, hulking overlord in the eye - and then keep poking, and eventually escape his grasp. This is the nation which, after building it's capital on the backs of slaves, elected a black man president. This is the nation that learned that drafting people into military service to fight preemptive was is a bad idea, but hasn't yet learned how not to start needless wars. It's the country that loves sports, but went ahead and invented it's own damn games.

Today I'm going to listen to a ball game, go to a barbecue, drink some beer, and of course engage in that all-American pasttime of blowing things up in the sky. Why? Because 233 years ago, in my hometown of Philadelphia, a bunch of mad geniuses sweated out the hot summer and came to the conclusion that what the English parliament was doing was wrong, and those men had the responsibility, as people, to put a stop to it. So they, with their large but wholly uncoordinated and untrained militias, went to it, and fought, and many of them died, but in the end the right side won.

Keep on keepin' on, America.

(I really did start the day with a mug of PG Tips tea.)