The Death of Habeas Corpus -- Part II

Keith Olbermann had a Special Comment on the Death of Habeas Corpus last night that pretty much sums up what Americans have lost under this administration. Remember what he says when you go to the polls next month to vote for a senator or a representative; remember which party has stolen from you the rights you were born with and vote the bastards out for good.



The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either.

-Benjamin Franklin

The Death of Habeas Corpus

Today Bush signed into law The Military Commissions Act, which is nothing like what it sounds. First, it gives the US the legal right to torture people at the President's discretion. As bad as this sounds, it is nothing compared to what it does to Habeas Corpus. Habeas Corpus is the thing that keeps you safe from unlawful imprisonment by the government and The Military Commissions Act basically rescinds this protection. Bush now has the powers of a dictator to take any American and imprison them forever without ever accusing them of anything. I wish to god this was a joke, but it's not. Americans just became a whole lot less freer. Keith Olbermann talked about it tonight on his show and a few weeks ago when the bill passed congress.



If you cherish what this country has stood for for hundreds of years, vote out every Republican you can. They are simply rubber-stamping the destruction of your freedoms, one at a time.

Almost Getting Killed

I hate when that happens!

Yesterday I had to go into work for a brainstorming and project planning session for 2007. It was actually a pretty good meeting and afterward we had a great lunch at the Yard House. Getting to and from work is a 23-mile trek down the 210 freeway into Pasadena, which was surprisingly quick going in yesterday and really slow going back. At one point I had to actually get off the freeway and take side streets due to an accident. My mistake was getting back on the freeway.

As I approached the off ramp to my house I moved over into the slow lane (a place you will rarely find me for sure). With about 3/4 of a mile to go I ended up behind a line of big and small trucks, the one in front of me being a medium-sized truck, like a small moving van. As I took my place at the end of this slow-moving line the truck in front of me slowly made its way over to the shoulder. I couldn't see anything wrong with it, but I figured the guy had some sort of problem.

Now the freeway at this point, and all though La Verne in fact, is in a large ditch. La Verne fought the construction of this part of the freeway (which only opened up four or five years ago) for years, demanding that it be below ground level throughout the entire city limits. The city pretty much got what they wanted and the freeway is sunken through the length of the city in basically a large ditch with steep sloping embankments.

The truck in front of me goes right past the shoulder and up the embankment. pitching over precariously. I am looking in my rear-view mirror and moving into the next lane when the truck driver makes a correction and comes crashing back down onto the freeway in front of me, pitched at an angle and riding on only the left wheels of the truck. I am watching him and the mirror as I move over another lane and the truck falls back down on the right wheels (I would have bet he was too far over to stop from flipping completely) and then tips over in that direction, the left wheels now leaving the ground.

I accelerated past, now in the car pool lane as the truck pitched once again over on it's left tires. In the rear-view mirrors I saw the right wheels crash back to the pavement as the whole front end of the truck buckled into the shoulder and the truck slid to a stop.

Scared the shit out of me (figuratively, not literally).

I hate when that happens!

The Cost of Home Ownership - Part I

I like buying new things, but hate replacing something that has broken. First of all, I just hate dealing with it; the hassles of getting someone in just to tell you, "Yeah, buddy, this thing is toast" and then having to find someone to get and install a new one or go find out where you get a new one and, lord help you, pick out a new one. Second of all, you go through all this hassle and you end up basically where you started (you are after all replacing something you already had), only your checking account is missing some funds. So it's a net loss: product-wise you are back where you started (if you are lucky) and you are down some much needed dollars.

We've been in our home for nine years now and it was new when we bought it. Over the past few years all those bright new appliances that came with the home have begun to break. We spent a ton replacing one of our air conditioner units last year and having our oven repaired. So much money in fact that my wife began looking for some relief. She found a place called American Home Shield that basically is an insurance policy for your appliances. The thing we liked is that they handle everything; if anything breaks in the home you call one number and they send someone out, they diagnose, they repair or replace as needed. Yeah, you are still out some bucks, but in smaller increments and over time, but all of the hassles are removed. So, my wife signed us up and two months later our dishwasher goes out.

We are covered, right? Nope, it seems the coverage does not kick in until November, so let the hassles begin. It only takes a few days of doing dishes by hand to know that we need a new dishwasher and we need one now. Our dead dishwasher (and all of the appliances that came with our house) was a KitchenAid and my wife wanted to stay with the same brand. Other than that, we had no real requirements. Nor, in my stupidity, did I think there should be any other requirements.

I check on-line for stores that carry KitchenAid and it looks like Lowe's is our best bet, so off to the nearest Lowe's we go. They carry in the store a selection of maybe thirty different dishwashers, five or six of them are indeed made by KitchenAid and none of them look anything like ours because, well hell, ours is nine years old. So, we start checking number of cycles and how quiet they are. Now we notice that the least expensive ones are said to be "Whisper Quiet®" which sounded pretty damn quiet to me, but maybe not because the more expensive ones are "Whisper Quiet® Plus." Our old dishwasher was really quiet, but I never checked what it was called before driving to Lowe's, but I'm sure it must have been "Whisper Quiet® Plus" since it was so damn quiet.

Once we settle on "Whisper Quiet® Plus" our only real choice is color and where the controls are located. The more expensive models have the controls in the top edge of the door, so they don't show at all. I like this idea but my wife doesn't. I'm married so we go with the controls that show and since all our other appliances are white, we go with white. So we're done; all they have to do is tell us when they are going to install this puppy. Only, they don't know. They don't actually have any KitchenAid dishwashers in this gigantic warehouse, only the models. They will order it and when they get it, they'll give us a call. They guarantee it won't take more the six weeks!

It took two and a half.

The first thing we noticed when we got home was that our old machine was "Whisper Quiet Ultima™," surely some long abandoned designator since Lowe's didn't carry any models with that option. Well the Lowe's people installed the new dishwasher and it seemed quiet enough, so we were satisfied and back to where we used to be and the hassles were over and we were out about a grand. All in all a normal session of "fix/replace the broken product."

Then we saw the DVD.

Our dishwasher came with a DVD and like fools we played it! That's when we found out that or top-of-the-line dishwasher was...eh... not so top-of-the-line. In fact, none of the dishwashers we saw at Lowe's were the top-of-the-line model. Now the DVD was informative; we learned a lot about the great features of our really wonderful dishwasher. Unfortunately we also learned all of the wonderful features of the dishwashers we never knew existed; and we liked those features (like the aforementioned "Whisper Quiet Ultima™") more than the ones in our dishwasher. We went from satisfied and happy to unfullfilled and irked.

As a marketing tool I think KitchenAid ought to rethink their DVDs.

I'm beginning to see that the Cost of Home Ownership is a lot more than just money.

A Sneak Attack!

So I'm working from home this afternoon and the plane crash in New York happens and I follow a lead to ABC-TV live video. What a hoot! I guess they don't think that they are "on the air" so they say all kinds of stupid, inappropriate things. First of all, their copter picture is really bad, hazy and lacking in details and you hear them complaining that they are not being allowed close enough to the crash site to take really good video (the CBS photo shown here is much better than what we were getting from ABC).

At one point the helicopter pilot gives out the phone number of the agency to call for clearance and the name of the guy they need to yell at. He says something like "Take down this number Ed. Call xxx-xxx-xxx and ask for Bob Jones. Yeah, tell him we need to get in closer."

Later on we start hearing what sounds like a local anchor person who is watching the video feed and she is constantly complaining about the picture. "Is that smoke or fog? Is this from a chimney or is this the crash? I can't tell." At one point she is told that the reason they are not letting them in closer is that the radar in the area is down and she says, "What? We can't go in because the radar is down? Well if they can't see us tell them we're not there. Tell them we left then go in closer."

It would have been a sneak attack by the local ABC affiliate.

Joke of the Day

"The Democrats' approach to cutting the deficit is taking more of your money to pay for their spending," Bush said. "The Republican approach is to restrain spending."

This from the guy who has presided over the largest increase in government spending in history. If there were not people out there stupid enough to believe this creep, this would be funny.

George W. Bush, Republican turd of the day!

The Blame Game

Another in a long line of useless Republican politicians. I think we should be able to build some sort of graph or chart here that would signify the degree to which Republicans are to blame for shit and the degree to which the public will no longer believe them all based on which tactic they use as an excuse for their incompetence.

The first excuse is no excuse at all; just look into the camera and lie your ass off. This is the George Bush/Dick Cheney stance on just about everything they have fucked up. "There were weapons of mass destruction and we found 'em." "We had to attack Saddam because he refused to let inspectors in." "I'll fire anyone who had anything to do with the Plame leak." They use this tactic when they have the media wrapped around their fingers, when they know that no one would dare challenge their bald-faced lies.

Now when they have really fucked up and are caught with their pants down their excuse is that it's Bill Clinton's fault. "Naw, the problems in North Korea couldn't possibly have anything to do with Bush lumping Iraq and Iran and North Korea together as the Axis of Evil and then invading Iraq for no reason. Why would anyone think this would drive a madman into building atomic bombs to keep us at bay? It's obvious that the real cause of the problem was over six years ago, when Bill Clinton was running this country." John McCain has proven himself to be just another pathetic Republican hack. He sickens me. Maybe the Bush people were right when they said all the torture he sustained in Viet Nam had addled his brain functions.

The truth is this opportunistic hack knows that the problems with North Korea spiraled out of control when Bush declared them "evil" and cut off all communication with them. It was two years after Bush had taken office and declared them a pariah that North Korea kicked the IAEA out and restarted its main reactors. It was more than two years after that that they removed rods from the reactor in preparation for harvesting the plutonium and all during this time Bush and his croney thugs did nothing. They were too busy searching for nonexistent weapons in Iraq. They sat back and watched it happen and now they want to blame someone, anyone, as long as they have a "D" following their name and not an "R." Pathetic.

John McCain, Republican turd of the day.

The Lyin' King

The things you have to overlook to be a Republican these days make me so very happy I don't belong to that most worthless of political entities. I mean you have to overlook that your leader is an habitual liar, a man whose words can never be believed. A man who will just make stuff up when the polls begin to show he is on the way out. A bald-face, low-down, good-for-nothing liar. The lyin' king.

Keith Olbermann of MSNBC put it so eloquently last week:

The president of the United States — unbowed, undeterred and unconnected to reality — has continued his extraordinary trek through our country rooting out the enemies of freedom: the Democrats.

Yesterday at a fundraiser for an Arizona congressman, Mr. Bush claimed, quote, “177 of the opposition party said, ‘You know, we don’t think we ought to be listening to the conversations of terrorists.’”

The hell they did.

One hundred seventy-seven Democrats opposed the president’s seizure of another part of the Constitution.

Not even the White House press office could actually name a single Democrat who had ever said the government shouldn’t be listening to the conversations of terrorists.

President Bush hears what he wants.

Tuesday, at another fundraiser in California, he had said, “Democrats take a law enforcement approach to terrorism. That means America will wait until we’re attacked again before we respond.”

Mr. Bush fabricated that, too.

And evidently he has begun to fancy himself as a mind reader.

“If you listen closely to some of the leaders of the Democratic Party,” the president said at another fundraiser Monday in Nevada, “it sounds like they think the best way to protect the American people is — wait until we’re attacked again.”

The president doesn’t just hear what he wants.

He hears things that only he can hear.

It defies belief that this president and his administration could continue to find new unexplored political gutters into which they could wallow.

Yet they do.

It is startling enough that such things could be said out loud by any president of this nation.

Rhetorically, it is about an inch short of Mr. Bush accusing Democratic leaders, Democrats, the majority of Americans who disagree with his policies of treason.

I am sick to death of this worthless, lying fraud. It's time for an impeachment.

I Doughnut Know What All The Fuss Is About!

As I’ve mentioned a few times here, I go to the Los Angeles Country Fair every year. Well, this isn’t a life-long habit, but more one that started when I moved to La Verne ten years ago. La Verne is in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains, just a few miles from Pomona where the fair is held. I love the county fair environment I think that is from my upbringing.

I was raised in Muscoy, an unincorporated area of San Bernardino County, just outside of the city of San Bernardino. Berdoo, as those who live there have been known to call it, is celebrated for only a few things: Frank Zappa wrote a song about it; the Hells Angels motorcycle gang was founded there; it has been the drug-trafficking capital of Southern California more times than anyone would like to admit; the first McDonald’s was built there by the McDonald brothers; and each year the National Orange Show is held there. I grew up going to the Orange Show every year; it was a part of my life.

My brother Keith scared me shitless on the double Ferris Wheel at the Orange Show. Keith and I spent hours looking at the model cars at the hobby show at the Orange Show, I went down my first Giant Slide at the Orange Show, drank my first Orange Julius, saw my first stock car race, saw the Circus of the Fantastic (a sideshow with sword swallowers and fire eaters and the human pin cushion), spent hours watching the caricature artists, road my first roller coaster all at the Orange Show.

My brother Keith and I were in the 4H club; Keith raised a lamb and grew vegetables and I baked cookies and made lamps and all of our endeavors were entered into competition at the Orange Show. My lamp was so good it won a special award (a set of socket screwdrivers that I had for years). Like I said, I love the county fair environment (though the Orange Show was not the County Fair, it was the same breed of animal).

I don’t make it back to San Bernardino for the Orange Show anymore, but I do go to the LA County Fair. This may sound odd, but one of the reasons I love going to LA County Fair each year is to eat something strange.

This started two years ago when I tried deep-fried Twinkies and deep-fried Oreo Cookies. Neither impressed me much; the Twinkie was mushier than I expected with a heavy sauce that detracted from the taste of the Twinkie and the Oreo was even worse. But they whetted my appetite for the next strange food. Last year we tried deep-fried Snickers Bars. Now this is a winner! It looks like a corn dog sprinkled with powered sugar, but the batter is much sweeter. The Snickers is a molten mass of chocolate and caramel and nuts. They are heavenly. This year I tried the Krispy Kreme Chicken Sandwich. I kid you not.

The Krispy Kreme Chicken Sandwich is a fried chicken patty with a slice of cheese wrapped by a large Krispy Kreme glazed doughnut. In concept, this should be a winner, but the reality leaves something to be desired. I think the idea is great. I have a theory that really great, addicting food can be made with the combination of sugar and fat (think chocolate) and a fried chicken sandwich in a doughnut fits quite well with my theory. The problem the Krispy Kreme Chicken Sandwich has is that the chicken sandwich is horrible. It's a small, flat clump of flaked-and-formed chicken dipped in batter and deep fried. It needs real chicken, or at least better chicken, 'cause the idea works for me just like chicken and waffles.

Years ago my brother-in-law and his wife lived in Hollywood, just northeast of the intersection of Sunset and Gower. On Gower, just a half block above Sunset was a little place called Roscoe's Chicken and Waffles. It took them a few years to get up the nerve to go there, but one night they saw Los Angeles Laker basketball stars leaving the place with huge bags of food and climbing into a limousine and they thought, "Ah, what the heck, if it's good enough for Kareem we ought to give it a try." They became addicted.

Roscoe's serves amazing fried chicken and extraordinary waffles, and they serve them on the same plate, together. And they are a wonderful treat for your taste buds and as addictive as chocolate. Once you bite into the sweet waffle, drenched in maple syrup and the hot seasoned chicken, the fat juices dripping off and coating your fingers, you will be hooked too. It's fat and it's sugar together, the two things your body craves in one tasty meal. It is also some of the best fried chicken I have ever eaten and that is where the Krispy Kreme Chicken Sandwich falls flat on its face.

Maybe by next year they will have perfected the sandwich by using a decent piece of chicken. I will be looking for it. Oh, the guy in the picture is Charlie Boghosian, creator of the Krispy Kreme Chicken Sandwich and the Deep-Fried Twinkie and the Deep-Fried Oreo.

The Dreamer of Muscoy

My childhood was not exactly normal (which may explain a few things about how I turned out). In fact, I can with great assurance say that I did things during my childhood that very, very few other children ever did.

I grew up in the community of Muscoy California, an unincorporated section of San Bernardino County, about 50 miles east of Los Angeles and in that community there was a barber, but not your average barber. Douglas Q. McMasters was one of a kind. He seemed rather bohemian: he had a beard and smoked a pipe and he played guitar. Doug swore that he could astral project and taught by older brother Jack how to do it (I'll go into this in detail at a later time, I promise). Doug was also a hypnotist and a damn good one. But the thing Doug liked to do most was solve problems.

You give Doug a problem and he would come up with a solution for it. He designed a phone that could only make local calls, an emergency big rig braking system that could stop a runaway truck on an icy road in a perfect straight line. He invented packing foam that he sold to a national moving company (I remember we used to play football with a cut-open ball that had a raw egg inside incased in Doug's foam). He designed a jump suit that you could wear to survive jumping out of a plane without a parachute. The more he thought about airplane crashes the more Doug thought the airplane was poorly designed, so he came up with his own design for an aircraft, one that could not be crashed.

Doug’s initial prototype was a square cardboard box set in the center of a hula hoop. He wrapped the whole thing in plastic wrap creating a saucer shape and then spent the afternoon up on his roof throwing the thing at the ground. No matter how hard he threw it, he could not crash it into the ground; it would swoop back and forth falling gently like a leaf.

Next Doug built a toy model of his flying saucer using an engine from a gas-propelled Stuka that my brother and I had. It flew like a bat out of hell!

Doug talked people in the neighborhood into putting money into his “saucer” craft and formed a corporation. My family was poor and we could not put up any money, so for a stake in the company my Dad offered to build the saucer. My Dad would take me at night to a barn where the saucer was being built and while he and Doug went over blueprints and modifications, I would climb up into the cockpit, grab a hold of the joystick and let my fantasies run wild. The cockpit sat directly on top of the airplane engine, the prop aimed down at the ground. The body of the craft was made of aluminum tubing and the skin was made of parachute silk, painted silver.


Once construction of the “craft” was completed, Doug kept the saucer at his home, sometimes in his back yard and sometimes in a lot next door. He had to chain the thing to the ground, not only for security, but because the thing had a tendency to take off during the Santa Ana winds. The first time this happened the saucer was in Doug’s backyard and by morning was in his front yard, having flown over the house during the night. That's me by the way standing to the left of the saucer; my brother Larry is manning the cockpit.

I remember the day that NASA came out to Doug’s house to see the saucer fly. It had a few bugs in it still and got no more than a foot or two off the ground. That was the only time I saw the craft fly at all. There is a lot more to this story, but I think I will save it for a later date. I'll leave you with a page from Doug's patent.

Peron! Peron! Peron!

Watching the news lately and remembering things from the recent past that some seem to have forgotten, I am astounded at how much Bush and his party sound like Juan Peron from the Andrew Lloyd Webber/Tim Rice opera Evita. It's almost like Tim Rice was writing Bush speeches these days...

We can start with this video clip of Herr Bush.

It's annoying that we have to fight elections for our cause

The inconvenience, having to get a majority

Add to that Bush's demand that he be allowed to torture "enemy combatants," which could just as easily be me and you as Al Qaeda terrorists

If normal methods of persuasion fail to win us applause
There are other ways of establishing authority

There are the Diebold voting machines which are so easily rigged...

We have ways of making you vote for us

Then there are the voter ID cards...

Or at least of making you abstain

All I can say is this November vote like your life and all the freedoms you hold dear are at stake, because the just might be.

Not To Be Missed!

On Friday night I took my son Brian to see Grand Funk Railroad and the Doobie Brothers at the L.A. County Fair. I was supposed to take my wife, but Dayle is in Phoenix where her brother had surgery last week for a massive subdural hematoma that nearly killed him. I really wanted my wife to see the bands, but it was not to be... or was it?

Yesterday her brother's friend Steve shows up in Phoenix and someone mentions that Dayle has missed seeing Grand Funk and the Doobies. Steve says, "Hey, the Doobies are playing in town tonight and I'm very good friends with their manager." A quick phone call later and he has two free tickets for the show.

On Friday night I called my wife from the concert as the Doobies were playing Listen to the Music. Last night she called me as they were playing Long Train Running. The current DBs have their original lead singer Tom Johnson back with the band and they sound great!

They have three original members: Drummer Michael Hossack, guitarist Tom Johnston and guitarist Pat Simmons. But John McFee (guitar and strings) is also with the band and though not "original," he joined in the late seventies, he is definitely one of the guys I remember from the Doobies.

I wanted to take my wife to see them; their show is not to be missed, and she didn't!

My Newest Sticker

What this should really read is "Support the Torture of American Soldiers: Vote Republican," but I can't get it to fit on a bumper sticker. These are the Christian values the Republicans profess to embody? I guess I never read the Bible closely enough.

This administration argues for the rights, the rights to torture people in your name. They argue for this right because come Monday we will find out that they have already tortured people in your name in secret CIA prisons they claimed did not exist but now have admitted to, and they want to desperately cover their evil asses. The terrorist have won; the United States has become a rogue state and those who supported the Texas scum infesting the White House are complicit in their inhumane deeds. They are pure evil and if you support them, you support evil.

Miami Twice

A number of things have occurred in the past week or two to make me take a second look at CSI: Miami. When I first looked a this show, I spoke of just how awful it was; just how badly written and poorly acted the entire series was. So where could I be going now? Why would I come back for a second critical look? Well, three reasons really.

First, last week the A&E Network began running the show five nights a week, beginning with the first season, 2003. Out of curiosity I peeked in and what I found was shocking: it's good! For that first season CSI: Miami was really a good show. No over-acting hammy shit from star David Caruso. No suspects confessing at the drop of a hat. Real forensic work leading to the solving of crimes. No "baby girl, baby boy" shortcut to characterization nonsense, just good scripts being well executed. Like I said: shocking! If you get a chance to catch some of the first season, I think you'll like it.

The second reason for looking at this show again was an article in the Los Angeles Times that ran this week. It spoke of the show's season opener, which was filmed partly in Brazil, and how appropriate that was as the show has become a world-wide phenomenon. CSI: Miami is now the most watched U.S. television show in the world, seen by more the 50 million people each week. The article states:

"CSI: Miami" is the No. 9 show in the U.S. But it's the top-rated U.S. show in France, Italy and Germany and ranks second in Portugal and the Netherlands. Among dramas, it is No. 2 in Spain, No. 3 in Canada and Britain, and No. 7 in Australia.

Unless the rest of the world is watching three-year-old episodes, I just don't get it. But, with an open mind, I watched the first episode of the 2006 season, which is...

The third reason for this second look at this third-rate show. Ah, CSI: Miami, what a breath of stale air you are! Cheesy, laughable dialog, ham-bone over-the-top acting, cliches instead of characterization, plot twists you can see coming from across a football stadium, plot holes you can drive a large semi through, suspects confessing at the drop of a sombrero! This show has it all!!!!

A few scattered observations:

• For a show set in Rio there was an obvious omission of women in thongs. I guess this is the result of the Gestapo tactics employed by the FCC, which is turning American TV into a bland, vanilla wasteland. This is just downright insulting.
• I have noticed that I don't really mind all the shots of David Caruso's carrot-top hair blowing in the wind, but the shots of his eyebrows fluttering in the breeze are starting to seriously creep me out.
• When you only show one suspect for a crime they have to be the one who did it. You can't pull someone out of nowhere (in this case a house painter you didn't know was there) and suddenly say "they did it." Actually, in typical CSI: Miami style, the house painter is the one who says he did it. He confesses when they tell him that an electronic nose detected that house paint had been near the victim. I'd be laughing if this show didn't consider that great plot acceleration.
• Even if they are supposed to be the "good guys," the stars of a show are not allowed to go to another country and murder people.
• You are not allowed to prolong a plot by not speaking what has to be said. In this episode they do just that; Horatio has an opportunity to tell someone something that will stop the plot in its tracks, but instead says, "We need to talk," giving the character an opportunity to leave rather than hear the truth. But then again, piss-poor writing is the hallmark of this show.

If you haven't seen the episode yet, I'm going to give away something that should be obvious after the first five minutes of the show, Horatio's brother is killed by the bad guys (believe me, you see it coming way before it happens), and Caruso is standing over his dead body all alone, posing for the camera, hands on hips, pushing back the coat and as he turns and walks away he mutters, "I love you" to his dead brother. It's so ineptly done I almost fell off the couch.

I'll be catching Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip from now on.

Stuck inside of Mobile with the New PC blues again

Well, I am writing this from my new PC. It's a Dell XPS 410, their new "hot box." Surprisingly inexpensive in it's standard configur- ation, but I don't do "standard configurations."

My reason for getting this new box was the death of my last PC, a Sony VAIO I had for about four years. Still not sure what is wrong with the old box, but once I get this one set up I will have some time to deal with it. My VAIO died a horrible death four months ago when I was really in the middle of it with my son, so much so that I was hardly functioning. So instead of getting it fixed I moved to my wife's PC, but it soon died. So, I moved to my Dell laptop and have been using it since then.

I lost a lot of stuff on my VAIO hard drive, some artwork I had spent the better part of two years working on and a lot of writing, so when I looked for a new PC I wanted security of data. Dell offers dual hard drives in a RAID 1 configuration, one the mirror of the other. If one dies the other still works and has all of your data on it. So, my new Dell has two 320GB hard drives.

I do a lot of graphics on my PC so the more RAM I have the better. I splurged for 2GB of RAM and could upgrade to 4GB if I ever need it. It has the newest Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 processor, an NVIDIA GeForce 7300 LE graphics card, a 16X DVD-ROM, a 16X DVD+/-RW drive, a 13-in-1 Media Card Reader, a Creative Labs X-Fi Sound Card and the big splurge, a 24-in 2407FPW Wide Aspect Digital Flat Panel Display.

When I buy the PC they say I should have it in a week or two. When I get my email confirmation, it says I will get it in seven weeks. A later email extends that to eight weeks. This does not make me happy, but I've had this problem with Dell before. In 1995 I bought a Dell Dimension 120 right after PC Magazine, PC World and Byte all declared it the best Windows 95 PC. I waited almost two months for that PC to arrive.

So after the long wait, it arrives early Wednesday morning. I work from home (currently on the Dell laptop), utilizing VPN to access the company's network and then using Remote Desktop to access my PC at work. This all works surprisingly well. So I am working and setting up the PC at the same time, doing the PC setup whenever I catch a break from work (compiling code or running long queries, etc.). What I mean is, my full attention is not really being given to setting up the PC. I get the hardware all together and rearrange my desk to allow for a 24-inch monitor. I also cleared out about 10 years worth of computer jetsam: cables, transformers, switch boxes, wiring, microphones, etc. that lapped up around my PC and entangled itself in a twisted mass behind my desk.

While working I let the system set itself up, turning on whatever it wanted (virus protection, Windows Update, etc.). To facilitate this I had to connect the PC to my wireless network. At some point one or more of these programs wanted to reboot my PC, so I let them. In response I got the Windows blue screen of death!

Not happy, I rebooted and went into Windows Safe Mode, figuring that maybe something was amiss with the driver that allows for the 1920x1200 resolution on the screen (it is an amazing monitor). I booted up, reset my screen resolution back to something reasonable and did a shutdown/restart. Blue screen of death. Back to Safe Mode. Blue screen of death. Normal Mode. Blue screen of death. Safe Mode. Blue screen of death.

Now I'm really not happy. I locate the special tech support number for XPS machines and call Dell. I get a really nice guy who walked me through a number of things, none of which helped. We even tried to reload the system to its original configuration and that failed. He had me boot to the special diagnostic partition that all Dell PCs have and start running the hard drive tests, since he figures the problem has to be with the hard drives. I remind him that I have two 320GB hard drives and he gives me his direct number and says, "call me back when you are done with the diagnostics." He also says I should run the "Windows Blue Screen" diagnostics as well. It is 5:00PM when I start the HD diagnostics. They finished at a little before 1:00 the next morning.

Later that same morning I ran the blue screen diagnostics (which just so happen to also have in them the HD diagnostics). I start them at 7:00AM. They finish at 10:00PM. I've now run 23 hours of diagnostics on my new PC. It has passed every test. "Fuck it!" I say and reboot one more time. This time I tell it to go back to the last configuration that Windows knows worked.

My PC has been running ever since, even after a number of reboots just to be safe.

One of the things I remember Windows Update installing was the Windows Genuine Advantage Notification tool, a "feature" from Microsoft that ensures you have paid for your copy of Windows. This "tool" may be the culprit, because it wants to install it again now that I have reset my machine. I don't think I am going to let it.

I'm slowly adding software to the new box and will add some hardware (WinTV and my new Wacom Intuos 3 tablet) this weekend, crossing my fingers the whole time. I'm also going to set up my emails, I have a bunch of them, in Outlook and see how many I have gotten over the past five months (so if you wrote me an email in the last four to five months, I didn't get it yet!). Wish me luck!

Idiocracy

Run don't walk to your neighborhood theater and see Mike Judge's Idiocracy, that is, if it is showing in your neighborhood. It might not be and if it is, you most likely don't know about it since it has a advertising budget of $0. Not even newspaper ads folks, nothing. Really sad too because though not as good as Judge's Office Space, Idiocracy has a lot to say about America and the dumbing down of society.

It's a science fiction tale of a one-year cryogenic suspension experiment gone wrong. Mr. absolutely average, Luke Wilson, wakes up 500 years from now to find out the human race has been taken over by trailer-park idiots and he is now the smartest person in America. It's lewd, it's crude and it's funny. The laughs would have been bigger if they didn't hit so close to modern reality.

How dumb is America? Everyone is starving because of a food shortage. Crops don't seem to grow anymore now that the FDA was bought by a sports drink company and some sort of Gator-Aid is being used to water the crops. The #1 movie in the country is Ass, one and a half hours of a guy's ass farting. It won eight Academy Awards, including Best Screenplay.

There are still Starbucks on every corner, only now they serve hand-jobs, not coffee. Carl's Jrs motto is no long, "Don't bother me, I'm eating," it's now "Fuck You! I'm eating!" Fuddruckers name has changed. First is was Buddruckers, then Buttnuckers and now it's just plain old ButtFuckers.

According to Wikipedia, the film has only been released in Los Angeles, Atlanta, Toronto, Chicago and three cities in Mike Judge's home state of Texas--Dallas, Houston, and his hometown Austin.

But if you can, see it while you can and pray you don't live in a country where the president is a WWE wrestler/porn star. It's bad enough living in a state where the people were idiot enough to elect a two-bit actor governor (geeze, we did that twice; once in the 60's [whatever happened to THAT hack] and now again in the 2000's).

The Heart of the Matter

This evening my wife and I saw Heart perform for the first time. It's been 30 years since Dreamboat Annie was released, but the Wilson sisters are still in fine musical form. Anne's voice is just as big and impressive as ever, and oh, can Nancy play guitar.

It was an interesting set they played; mostly Heart Top Ten hits, but they strayed from that from time to time. Near the end of the set they played an amazing version of The Who's Love Reign O'er Me. They followed it with two Led Zeppelin tunes, as only the Wilson sisters could do them. It seems for 30 years now they have been trying to be the next Led Zeppelin, even in their other persona, the Lovemongers.

I remember the first time I heard the Lovemongers' version of of Zeppelin's Battle of Evermore. I was truely impressed. If you've never heard it, have a listen. You have to listen to a very short commercial first, but after that I think you will like.

Lovemongers - Battle Of Evermore
Music Video Codes By Music Video Code

Things That Might Have Been

One of the many things I am known for is the site listed to my right, the Art of Don Newton. Don was a professional comic book artist for about nine years in the 70s and 80s. Don was one of my favorite artists. I first encountered Don's work years before he became a pro, when he produced a prodigious amount of artwork for comic book fanzines. Don was really THE fanzine artist, producing hundreds of illustrations for dozens of fan publications. A lot of fanzine art was crap, but Don's art was something you could study and learn from. No small part of my early style was gleamed from looking at Don Newton artwork.

It was fun to watch a guy grow in the ranks of fandom and then slowly make it as a professional, first at Charlton Comics and then at DC and Marvel. After Charlton folded Don mainly worked for DC, spending six years drawing Batman and three years drawing Captain Marvel and Aquaman. At DC Don also drew The New Gods, The Brave and the Bold, Green Lantern, the Vigilante, Blackhawks, Hawkman, and Infinity Inc.

But there was a time when Don wanted to work for Marvel. He sold Marvel a single painting for Unknown Worlds of Science Fiction, but he also tried to sell them other paintings, beginning with a cover for The Rampaging Hulk. It was not to be; there were some at Marvel who did not appreciate Don's style, who thought Don did not belong there. The cover above is not real; it is a mock-up I created of what might have been had Don found a more receptive audience at Marvel. It is based on the painting Don tried to sell to Marvel in 1976, a painting which I own and love and which has a place of honor on the wall in my office.

I love the painting and think it makes a great cover. Too bad there were people at Marvel who did not feel the same. Had he sold this second painting, who knows how long his career as a painter might have lasted, what masterpieces he might have produced. Ah, the things that might have been....

The One and Only

A few weeks ago I wrote about the problems I was having with my Sony Cyber-shot DCS-P92 and how I had discovered that there are a large number of Sony products out there with defective CCD components. On the 21st of August I shipped the camera to Sony using a pre-paid UPS label from Sony that I printed at home. OK, it wasn't exactly free; I did have to pay $5.00 to Staples for a box and wrapping it securely, but that was it.

On August 29th I received email from the Sony Repair Center in Texas that they had received my camera and today UPS delivered my repaired camera to me. It took someone suing Sony to get them to repair this stuff for free, so they may not have willingly done the right thing, but they did do the right thing none-the-less.

If you have a Sony product that is causing you problems, visit the www.sony.com and look for "repairs." I think it may just be worth your while.

One for the Ages

Another amazing display of guts. Another astounding display of tennis. For 21 years now Andre Agassi has been treating us tennis fans to a show.

OK, maybe not for 21 years; that's just the length of his career. But for a good number of years Andre has been showing us what it means to be a champion and what it means to be a man.

Yeah, sure, he started out as the brash, "image is every thing" court smart-ass, but over the years, we have watched him grow from that young kid into quite a man. He has won over $30 million in his career. What do you do when you're rich? Well, if you're part of the George Bush set, you hoard your money, only using it to make more money or to buy power; you become the ugly American at home personified. If you're Andre Agassi however, you use your fortune to help those less fortunate than you.

You start and personally fund the Andre Agassi College Preparatory Academy. That's a long way from marrying Brooke Shields. But I digress.

In the last tournament of his career Andre has now put on two exhibitions of tennis magic, two stunning three-and-half-hour-plus displays of the intelligence of the mature player defeating the strength and energy of the young. If you haven't been watching the US Open, you've been missing history.

But it's not too late. Agassi takes the court again in the third round on Saturday. Can he do it again? Can his agonizing back hold together one more time? Can it hold together five more times to get him into the finals? Only time will tell, but I think the 23,000 who watched him last night in New York are all rooting for it.

I know I am.