End of the World! I feel . . . okay, I guess. And you?

Holy shit, Sarah Palin is inept and incoherent!  She got torn a new asshole by Katie Couric.  Ouch!!  Imagine what Biden will do to her in a debate?  Palin said the word “guest” when she meant “guessed” and “maritime” when she meant “marine”.  If she says “axed” when she means “asked” I am jumping off the Bayonne Bridge in protest.  She’s done, failed like WaMu.  No more white trash in the White House.

And if Putin, based in Moscow, decides to fly to the US, he is probably going to head west and fly over Europe and the Atlantic rather than fly east over Alaska and the Pacific.

McCain is done to.  He charges into “Wharrrshingtun” to fix the financial crisis, and at best he did nothing (looking like a fool in the process) and at worst he derailed the talks and fucked everything up (looking like a first class failure).  If he misses the debate in Mississippi, he might as well get into the grandfather business.  Merely suggesting the debate be postponed, and that he may not show up at the debate has to be one of the stupidest things a politician has ever done.  It does not exactly say high-performing, multi-tasking, leader of the free world.  It kinda says: whoa, I need a break, can I get some water?  Missing Letterman was political suicide.

Hey, WaMu has failed.  Let’s see if that affects anyone other than the shareholders of WaMu.  Let’s hope (pray) the FDIC manages this failure properly.  Kind of a interesting idea: let WaMu go bankrupt, let the shareholders take the hit on the liabilities, and sell the assets to a competitor.  We may need to employ this strategy again.  Let’s see if the world ends as another bank does.  Probably not.

One thing is for sure: we are at economic war and the war profiteering has begun.  GET SOME!

Prediction: there will be no bailout, because no one wants another American civil war.

Let them eat cake!!!

MacBook Air

Who gives a fuck if the damn thing fits in an interoffice mail envelope? I mean those things are kinda spacious anyway. You can fit about a quarter ream of paper in them. You can actually fit a regular fat-ass MacBook Pro in one. Plus, do the young whippersnappers even know what an interoffice mail envelope is anyway? Stuff a laptop in a standard #10 business envelope and I’ll be impressed.

I bet some douchebag designer is gonna make a fabric laptop shoulder bag to look like an interoffice mail envelope. If so, I’ll expect a check.

United America

While many are going on and on about how we need to bring America and Americans back together again, recent evidence suggests that most American’s are united about a few things. Recent (and not so recent) polls show that nearly two-thirds (and sometimes many more) of Americans agree about the following . . .

1. Bush is a lousy president

2. Cheney is a lousy vice-president.

3. Congress is pretty lousy too.

4. The Iraq war sucks, and we should get troops out of Iraq right away.

5. The economy also sucks, and America is in a reccesion.

6. Oil prices are too high and are affecting American’s bottom line, and America needs to reduce it’s dependence on oil.

7. The world needs to lower the amount of greenhouse gases released into the air.

8. Americans would like to see a decrease in the number of illegal immigrants entering America.

9. The health care system in America needs revision.

10. FEMA could be doing more to help the victims of Hurricane Katrina.

That’s right TWO-THIRDS of American’s agree on the above things! Two-thirds is a landslide mandate in American politics these days. America seems rather united to me, despite what you see going on in the debates in both houses of congress.

(poll data source: pollingreport.com)

Stuff White People Like . . .

How about camo? Crackers love the camo! They hate war and the military, but they loves the camo!! They never serve in the armed forces, but they love love love camo!!! (Blame The Clash.)

But ONLY the 1960’s vintage jungle kind. Not the 1990’s Gulf War desert type or the current Iraq War digital type.

And the 1960’s camo type has to be in shades of green &/or brown. Blue, black, red, orange, and any other color jungle camo is the exclusive province of non-whites.

Random Rants

Everyone’s a nutritionist! I know how to eat healthy, so why does everyone try to convince me otherwise and try to convert me to their particular diet? I mean, if you’ve had your stomach stapled, maybe, just maybe you are not the world’s #1 authority on eating behavior. I’m glad you lost that weight and feel great, I hope you lose those other 40 pounds too. But bitch, I’m skinny, I’m doing something right. So if I have the occasional steak or junk food meal I do not think I will die or have a radical and irreversible mood swing. Spare me your new found arrogance regarding eating healthy. Glad you stopped drinking 2 liters of soda a day. I’m fine, thanks, I don’t need your notes from the horror show.

The Sopranos sucks. Fat, stupid, ugly, ineloquent people do crimes and murders. Factor out the mafia angle to The Sopranos, and you’ve got yourself the highest-budget soap opera around. Even with the mafia angle the show is pretty lame. Are we STILL supposed to be impressed/entertained by these ignorant slobs? What lousy character development; it’s almost like a cartoon. Predictions: Tony dies, that kid drowns, Christopher makes it big in Hollywood (why the hell not, that would be a surprise), Tony’s sister kills her husband who’ll get pinched for that hit he just did, Meadow gets pregnant, A.J. OD’s, Carmella becomes a successful real estate broker, all the other gangsters go to jail. And those HBO Original Entertainment promos are so overdone. It IS just television, not religion. Big deal you can curse and be nude on HBO. You can do that on the Spice channel too, so stop acting so high-brow HBO. So when does the new season of The Wire begin???

Apple TV sucks. It can’t even do Hi-Def. And I mean real Hi-Def content, not just Hi-Def menus. Sure it has an HDMI out, but just because you have the spigot, doesn’t mean you have the stream. Get yourself a TiVo if you really want a device like this. I mean, come on! Why did Apple even come out with something that is far worse than the competition? Only 40 gigs? My iPod has 80 gig guys. No volume on the remote? Huh?? It’s locked into iTunes and can’t record a signal off a cable/satellite box? What’s the point then?? Why would anyone create a set-top device that cannot even match the quality of a regular DVD player? All iTunes videos are in standard definition, which don’t look so hot on an HDTV, the only kind of TV the Apple TV will hook up with. Apple, I’ll just buy “School of Rock” on DVD (actually HD-DVD) if I really want that movie. The home video environment is moving toward, not away from, high quality imagery in the form of Hi-Def video in 1080i and 1080p. In a world where HD-DVD fights for turf with BluRay, Apple TV is marginalized. LG makes a unit that plays both HD-DVD and BluRay discs. Now THAT is smart product development. I foresee a day where all units will do this and have a DVR, and cost less than $99.

Anna Nicole Smith was a junkie whore.

Bush needs to represent the people, not his fantasies.

The British are better than us at foreign diplomacy.

Vonage is going to be out of business soon.

Palm is in trouble.

RSS is underrated.

LaCie drives work just fine you Tekserve idiots. Glyphs blow.

Fuck the evangelicals and the drug companies, let’s get behind stem cell transplantation for type 1 diabetes treatment research. And right quick!

Even with spaceships, spacesuits, and exercise bikes, space is one of the most toxic environments man can be exposed to.

Sell your house and put your cash in uranium futures.

Even if global warming was not real, isn’t a good idea to have clean air anyway?

Hydrogen trumps ethanol.

Payback: Fire Destroys Longtime Johnny Cash Home.

I could live with Clinton, Obama, Richardson, or Giuliani as president; when have we ever had such good choices?

If you’re a vegan, it’s hypocritical to do illegal drugs, as the illegal drug trade causes actual murder.

If you support our troops, don’t buy a bumper-sticker, give the money to the USO and/or the VA.

Most film/video shooters never get enough b-roll.

I hate it when . . .

. . . you go to a party and some guy insists on turning off the host’s music and plugging in his iPod so we can all have the pleasure of listen to whatever music (usually some lame-ass emo and/or techno) the guy is into now. Ya know, it’s Christmas, let the carols play! I swear the next douchebag that does this is gonna have his iPod yanked out of the sound system and crushed under my boot!! And I don’t care if he is the host’s boyfriend. I’m off to another party right now: douchebags and their iPods BEWARE!!!

Battery Scam

What ever happened to the popular use of the 9-Volt battery?

It used to be, not too long ago, that nearly every small radio or electronic device ran off a 9V battery. Now everything seems to run off AA, or worse AAA batteries. Is it me, or do these batteries die sooner?
Once upon a time if you had a typical small mono am/fm radio, it ran off a 9V battery. And that battery would last a long time, sometimes a year or more with average use. Why don’t portable CD players run off 9V batteries? Instead they run off AA’s and drain them very quickly. Is this a ploy for the battery companies to make more money?

Six AA’s at 1.5 volts equal the 9 volts of one 9V battery. I read that one 9V lasts much longer than six AA batteries. Now you may say that a 9 volts is more volts than most devices require. But consider that 9V batteries are routinely used in low-drain devices like smoke detectors. So clearly they could be used to run portable CD players, no?

In fact the 9V is the “go-to” battery for most long-life devices like smoke detectors, carbon-monoxide detectors, pool alarms, PAL lights, active guitar pick-ups, guitar pedal effect boxes, etc. The 9V can last years in such devices; especially the low-drain ones like smoke detectors. You never see a smoke detector running off AA or AAA batteries, since it seems like you’d have to change them every few months! So why aren’t 9V’s used more in regular devices like portable CD players??? Are we being scammed to purchase more batteries when we really do not have to???

Here’s an example: I recently bought a DigiTech RP50 Modeling Guitar Processor. It’s your typical digital multi-effect foot pedal. The AC adapter it came with is rated 9 volts DC 300mA. I was shocked to find it takes six AA’s rather than the 9V typical for such a device. Why????? Am I being fleeced into buying more batteries more often than really needed??? The manual says I can expect 15 hours of continuous use with the six AA’s. That’s like two weeks of use or so. The older pedals with 9V’s in them would last for a about two months. And the beauty was that you’d run down the 9V so it was outputting 7 or 8 volts and it would often give you a better, more mellow tone in distortion & pre-amp type pedals. Brand new, out-of-the-box 9V’s are often thought to produce too harsh a tone. This is especially true with old vintage pedals, where alkaline batteries are never used, since these pedal were made before alkalines were invented and alkalines tend to over-juice them. (These are analog pedals, not digital ones; I don’t think this technique will work with a pedal with a chip in it.) Old-school type blues players would always be harvesting partially drained 9V batteries by playing them in a radios for hours. They’d need a bunch on hand, since they’d run the risk of them dying live on stage, and would need to switch them out if this happened. Although it never seemed the 9V’s died completely, they would slowly lose enough power to finally adversely effect tone, then need replacing. (Okay, my digression alarm just sounded.)

Any electrical engineers out there with any info to share on this issue of AA’s versus 9V’s???