Hallo-weenies

I'm Struggling To Give A Darn...


Well, the #20 Georgia Bulldogs beat the #9 Florida Gators late this afternoon in football down in Jacksonville (Georgia Tech was idle in anticipation of a Thursday night game with Virginia Tech later this week.)

I have to commend both Georgia and Florida for providing a fairly exciting game, punctuated with the usual vulgar behavior of Young athletes that resulted in numerous penalties for things like "unsportsmanlike conduct" and "facemasking."

After the dust cleared here on our little island around noon with the fan's departure we snuck out to the grocery store for some last minute shopping prior to entertaining guests and cooking two of my soon to be famous pizza recipes for dinner. That event went off as planned and now I'm sitting around belching while trying to catch up on the evening's news.

The past week's grocery store visits have caused me to continue to be disappointed by the quality of the pumpkins available this year because of Bush/Cheney's maniac dabblings and the effects of Man-Made global warming induced drought.

I was really looking forward to designing and carving another couple of masterpieces this year, but all you can find are overpriced basketball sized blobs in all the stores.

Last year I acquired several nice pumpkins, including this 120 pound fellow shown strapped down in the back of my Chevy Suburban:

(That's a large set of jumper cables rolled up there on the left to give you some more sense of scale.)

For those of you that weren't around as readers last year, here's Mr. Giant PumpKing sitting on a garden wagon in mid-carving at a local elementary school (the walls were over 4" thick and there was over 12 pounds of seeds inside.)


More exciting "PumpKing" reruns to follow unless I can find some new subject matter....

Yawn...

They're Here

Woof, Woof, Woof...woof


Well, it's official. Nine tenths of the Georgia Bulldog and a small segment of the Florida Gator Nations have arrived here on our little island.

A bunch of the blue collar crowd and the younger alumnus have to settle for roadside motels and even the fancier places IN JACKSONVILLE WHERE THE GAME WILL BE PLAYED, but if you're well-to-do or just well connected (i.e. you got a friend with a house here ) the place to stay is St. Simons

All both of the Georgia Tech fans like me can do is batten down the hatches and avoid going outside until Florida finishes stomping Georgia's butt on the football field tomorrow afternoon and everyone goes home.

Since the game starts at 3:30, that means that the island will clear out a little before noon and, assuming about four hours of game time because of the TV coverage, they won't be home until well after dark.

Then if like the past twenty years last year Florida wins, they'll all pass out after midnight and get up and slink back out to Athens and Atlanta before noon on Sunday--leaving piles of trash and about three or four million dollars in the local economy.

Since we don't sell anything tourists and football fans want, we'll just issue a heavy sigh of relief and go back to enjoying paradise in a normal manner.

If you don't hear from my by then, someone send up a flare...

Another Chinese Recall

I'm Getting Into The Toy Business...


So now we have YET ANOTHER TOY RECALL, again resulting from things made somewhere across the Pacific Ocean.

When is it going to ever end?

I think that it's about time that someone here in the US started building some quality toys that don't involve a computer and Monitor in order to inspire our children's imagination and get them up off their lazy butts and playing again like we did back in the 1960's and 70's.

Here's a few ideas I came up with by Googling around...what do you think about:

The Lead Paint-By-Numbers Set (wait..the Chinese already have that one.)

The GI Joe Rooftop Parachute Kit

Mattel Chicken Bone Crib Toy

My First Chain Saw

The Black & Decker Silly Driller

The Mommy's Little Helper Butcher Knife

My Abandoned Refrigerator Playhouse

Ronco's Pocket Bee Hive

The Junior Fire Eater Kerosene Play Kit

The Bathtub Toaster

The Junior Electrician Outlet Patrol

The Lee Press-On Sucking Chest Wound

Rudolph's Red Nosed Sobriety Test

Make Your Own Gasoline' Chemistry Set

The electric eel Bath Toy

The Sewing Scissor Relay Race

Tasty Treat Fungus Farm

The Sammy Davis Jr. Eye Gouge Game

Slippery Steps

My First Ferret Farm

Baby's First Bungee Jump Cord

Gasoline Powered Hula Hoop

I'm gonna do a little more work and see if I can come up with some pictures or drawings to further elaborate the concepts. I'm sure that there's a profit in here somewhere if I can just get organized.


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Photoshop Fun

For The Jihadist That Has Everything???


Matt Drudge at Drudge Report had a link to this story about the FBI threatening us with more "shoe bombers" again.


Here's what some recent future Owners of Virgins were working with on their path to Allah...

Pretty crude, huh?

Just out of curiosity, I wandered over to the Dr Scholls website to see if I could come up with something more comfortable to wear...something like this:



I was astounded to find this warning on the same page:

Under new security measures put in place by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), airline passengers are not permitted to board aircraft with gel insoles in their carry-on baggage or on their persons.


TSA regulations do allow passengers to pack their gel insoles in checked baggage.

As an alternative, travelers may wish to use Dr. Scholl's insole products such as Memory Fit® Customizing Insoles.

I had no idea that, after taking off your shoes at the airport security desk, that now you have to have your insoles consficated if they are't "factory."

What's the world coming to?

UPDATE:

I can't leave well enough alone...

Insane Insanity

Dumbasses Speak...The World Listens


I don't know what else to say, except that I'm pretty sure my hair is turning grey and falling out faster and faster because of my mind and body's reaction to the crap that I read on the Internet and see on the TV news each day.

Even FOX News isn't immune to being infected by the rampant stupidity that's bouncing around the planet, although they do usually manage to put some perspective on things over the course of time.

This CNN report by some self proclaimed "Expert" about the world's oil production peaking last year is the latest thing that makes me foam at the mouth when I read it.

Here...take a look:


LONDON, England (CNN) -- The world has reached the point of maximum oil output and production levels will halve by 2030 -- a situation that will eventually lead to war and disaster, a report claims.

The German-based Energy Watch Group released a report Tuesday saying the world's oil production peaked in 2006 and from now on will drop by around 3 percent a year. It says that by as early as 2030, the global availability of oil will be half of what it was at its peak.

"It's a very serious result," said Hans-Josef Fell, a German lawmaker from the environmentalist Green Party who commissioned the report. "I fear the world will come into a big economic crisis in the coming years."

The report warns that coal, uranium, and other key fossil fuels are also in declining supply. It predicts the fall in fossil fuel production will bring with it the threat of war, humanitarian disaster, and general social unrest.

But Leo Drollas, who leads oil and gas market analysis and forecasting at the Center for Global Energy Studies in London, said there are plenty of supplies and no looming crisis. He said the report sounds like "scaremongering."

Drollas says production could still slow one day, but only because new reserves will be considered too difficult or expensive to extract.

Anyone want to bet me that Heir Hans has never seen an oil well in person, let alone set foot on an offshore oil drilling platform?

Further, does anyone want to bet me that Comrad Hans is a card carrying member of the Socialist party and drives some kind of silly little Korean manufactured econo-box car to work at the university each day? (actually he probably drives a giant bad assed Mercedes or BMW and parks in a garage bigger than my house each evening when he comes home from his job at the Energy Watch Group)

How the heck can we let these so called "experts" that have virtually no credentials and only giant egos and agendas as motivation tell us what to do as a nation and individuals?

Oil hasn't even been a primary fuel of industry for a hundred years yet. Coal's been around for hundreds of years, and Nuclear hasn't seen it's 60th birthday yet, but this moron is proclaiming doom and destruction and demanding global legislative mandates to force us to change.

WE WILL CHANGE, but market forces should be allowed to cause the change, not government and new laws.

So what if gas is $3.00 a gallon. Pay the price, or DON'T DRIVE.

Walk.

Take a Cab.

Hitchhike.

Here's an idea, buy a horse and carriage. There's a whole bunch of horses and buggy whip makers (or the descendants thereof) that were put out of work by Henry Ford's production lines, and there might still be a few blacksmiths out there looking for work.

If we don't manage to waste all of the corn and oats making ethanol, you can convert your garage into a stable and spend your money on agricultural products instead of sending your cash to Nicaragua and the Sheiks in the middle east.

No...that won't work, because the GOVERNMENT has stepped in and zoned your house out of supporting livestock, so now you'll have to move even further away from town and your job if you want to not pay the market price for gasoline.

Isn't government wonderful?

Fully half of what you pay for gasonline is taxes of one form or the other, yet the people in the very government that's taxing your ass off have the audacity to stand up in Washington and complain about the profits that the oil companies make each year.

The government takes more in taxes, yet the oil companies are supposed to cut their profits and at the same time invest in new exploration and low pollution technologies.

Hans offers no solutions, just dire warnings and usless proclamations

What a total load of CRAP.

I've got to go now...my head hurts.

I'm Making a Roux

Gumbo Ensues...

The Audoulli Sausage is browned, the celery, bell pepper, and shallots are sauteed, and I'm about to dump a bunch of chicken and beef broth into the pot on top of a nice dark, dark, dark dark, DARK brown Roux I've been cooking for over an hour.

Chicken, shrimp, and Okra will complete the concoction with another hour of simmering before spooning it over some rice in a bowl.

Don't you wish YOU were here this evening for dinner?

Something Wicked This Way Comes

It's Georgia/Florida Weekend...AGAIN


Dang it all. I can't believe that once again we're going to be forced to live through yet another "Football Weekend" here in the Golden Isles.

The most damning thing is that there isn't a NCAA Division I college football stadium within 75 miles of our house, yet beginning today and continuing through Sunday we're going to be assaulted by grown men and women that should know better barking like drunken idiots and hooting and hollering and generally acting up in public.

The source of all of this misbehavior is, of course, the Georgia/Florida football game down in the stadium in Jacksonville this weekend. I almost wrote the words "Gator Bowl" when I mentioned the stadium, but now in this schizophrenic world they call it something else depending on who's playing--Florida Jaguars or whatever. (The last time I was there Georgia Tech beat Notre Dame back in the late 1990's.)

Any way, every idiot that has ever set foot in Athens Georgia, and all of the other idiots that never went to college at the University of Georgia but still cheers for "The Dogs", along with a good portion of the people that meet those same qualifications for the University of Florida will descend on our lovely little island home this weekend and proceed to make life unbearable for those of us that are fortunate enough to live here year round.

The Winn Dixie parking lot will see car loads of people loading onto buses to make the trip down to the stadium, and every single restaurant will be crammed with red/black and orange/blue clad fans stepping and stumbling over everyone and everything that gets in their way.

Have you figured out by now that I've learned to HATE Georgia/Florida weekend?

The most amazing thing to me is, the WOMEN, full grown women, behave worse than the men do.

Imagine that???

I'm going to the grocery store on Thursday, then coming home, bringing Missy the Turbo Pup inside, and locking our doors until Monday.

Wish us luck, if you will...

Famous Quotations Revisited

My Personal Golden Oldies...


"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."

--C. S. Lewis

Unspectacular

But A Success None The Less...


Here's the view from the boardwalk at the Old Coast Guard Station down on East Beach.

A small crowd gathered, and due to the haze an even smaller show was had.



(Click and look at the small streak in the middle of the photo)

At least it didn't blow up, and Shuttle Mission #120 is off to a successful start...

Mouldy Data?

NASA Squelches Air Safety Survey Report


I've mentioned here in the past that I've spent a little time as a pilot flying airplanes, and I've also got a few hundred thousand miles under my belt sitting in the back seats of commercial airliners since my first flight in 1977.

Aviation, including model airplanes, continues to be something of interest to me so I tend to keep abreast of things happening in the world of "things with wings" more than I do automobiles and soap operas on TV these days.

That said, I've been following this story for a while, and the latest evolution of it makes me think that the title of it should be "Aviation Safety Better In Spite of Government Intervention."

Members of Congress and aviation safety experts yesterday criticized NASA's refusal to release the results from an extensive survey of pilots that may help pinpoint potential safety lapses in the country's aviation network.

The reaction came in response to attempts by the Associated Press to obtain a copy of the database, which contains the results of more than 20,000 telephone interviews with airline and general aviation pilots. It is not known what the surveys uncovered.

NASA officials told the AP, which reported that it requested the database more than 14 months ago, that they would not release the information because it might shake the public's confidence in the airlines.

Members of Congress said that was not a valid reason to withhold the information and announced yesterday that they were also seeking a copy of the database and would hold hearings on the matter

[snip]...

David Mould, a NASA spokesman, said the data were still being analyzed and that he expected a final report on the project to be released this year. He conceded that it was behind schedule and said that denying the request on the grounds that it might scare the public "was probably not the best thing to do."

The database cost about $8.5 million to compile.

Here's my take on this situation and what NASA might be hiding in the process. It's bad, but I bet that it's also not what you think.

In my opinion, if aviation safety were left entirely up to the efforts of the GOVERNMENT, everyone would be in real trouble. It's been that way since the government got into the business of regulating aviation back in the 1930's.

It's the people--the professional pilots and mechanics and administrators--that keep us all safe in our daily comings and goings, in SPITE of the GOVERNMENT, not BECAUSE of the Government being there.

It's just that simple, but alot of you out there have been brainwashed to think otherwise.

Just like everything else the government is involved in, they take credit for the successes after imposing infinite artificial barriers and hurtles that have the effect of stifling progress. In this case, the problems lie with the FAA and the National Air Traffic Control system, and I say that is what NASA is covering up by refusing to release the data.

I've know a couple of Controllers in my day, and in addition to being under-paid and over worked, they were all critical of the computer and communication systems they had to work with. The FAA is still screwing around today--twenty years after I first visited the Control Tower at Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport--implementing new software and hardware systems. Generally the projects are over budget and under performing,

On my visit back in 1988 I was appalled to see the display on the "Ground Control Radar" system that they used during periods of fog and other low visibility situations. It was like something out of a 1950's TV show using an antenna rather than a cable feed.

Seriously, a layman couldn't any more make out what the display was showing than if you were looking at a MRI or an ultrasound image of the human brain.

Yet these guys managed to successfully keep all of the airliners apart and I don't think that there's been a substantial runway incident in Atlanta IN SPITE of the government and their CRAPPY SYSTEMS.

I hope that Congress or SOMEBODY makes NASA pony up our $8.5 million worth of results, but I wouldn't hold my breath on my next flight on Delta.

Pizza Sauce Now Number Two Industry?

Making You An Offer You Can't Understand Can't Refuse...


In spite of years of progress, tradition apparently still reigns in Italy as Organized Crime is the biggest business in the country:

ROME (AP) - Revenue from organized crime amounts to an estimated $127 billion annually in Italy, making it the largest segment of the economy, a lobby group for small businesses said Monday.

The figure, representing about 7 percent of the country's gross domestic product, is made from illicit activities such as extortion, drug trafficking, loansharking and prostitution rings, the Confesercenti lobby said in a report.

Business lobbies have launched campaigns in recent years to increase awareness of the extent of organized crime in Italy, which they say limits investment in the country. Organized crime is particularly rooted in Sicily, Naples and the southern regions of Calabria and Puglia.

Tano Grasso, head of Italy's anti-rackets commission, said on state TV that for every 100 foreign investors who come to Italy, only one sets up business in the south.

One of the major issues is the "pizzo," as extorted "protection" money is known. Many businessmen in southern Italy have long considered it an unavoidable expense. A business lobby of industrialists in Sicily recently said it would expel any member who pays the "pizzo."

But eliminating the "pizzo" has been met with violent resistance. Some merchants, factory owners and industrialists who have denounced extortion attempts by mobsters have seen their businesses torched or company vehicles damaged in recent years.

A small number of businessmen have also been killed for refusing to pay the protection money.

Can a Redneck say "Mama mia" without being accused of being "insensitive?"

Not Much To Say

So I Won't Say It...


Oh...I don't know...fires in California, Drought in Alabama, floods in New Orleans, and a bunch of humans rocketing into space down in Florida later this morning.

What else is new?

Thus far I haven't been able to work up any good commentary.

I'm sitting here watching NASA TV in anticipation of biking over to the beach to watch the launch if the weather holds out.

See y'all later.

Space Shuttle Launch Today

Photo's To Follow...

UPDATE:

Duuuuuhhh It's Tuesday morning...no wonder I couldn't find the video feed... good thing, cause the weather sucks here and down at the cape.

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People Getting Smarter?

Let's Hope So...


Did you hear that Zogby has a new poll out?

Well...they do, and the results are fairly stunning.

It seems that 51% of the 9,718 "likely voters" say that they would NEVER vote for sHrillary Rodham Clinton.

Worst of all, in the 65 and over age bracket, the crowd that is ALWAYS at the polls on election day, the number rises to 59%.

Daaaaammmmmmnnnnn...

(my man Fred Thompson garnered only a 41% negative vote...GO FRED...GO FRED...GO FRED)

Al Gore Takes A Wide Stance

Hurricane Season Craps Out...


Well, it looks like that we wasted about $600 this year buying windstorm and flood insurance on our possessions--first the condo and now the new house.

All and all, I still think that it was money well spent, having survived losing everything to a house fire a few years ago. When you buy insurance, you're rolling the dice. You're betting that you are going to have a loss greater than the cost of the insurance and the deductible, and the insurance company is betting that you don't have any problems and they get to keep your money.

This hurricane season the insurance company won, and Al "Owl" Gore and his global catastrophe followers are still crying in their tofu this morning wondering how Mother Nature could let them down so severely not one, but TWO HURRICANE SEASONS IN A ROW.

I swear to God people, the more we know, the less we understand about the way things work...at least when it comes to listening to the media and the so-called "experts" that are held up for media scrutiny.

Take the current rainfall situation here in the south, for instance.

If you listen to the news, it's going to take an act of Congress and intervention by the United Nations and NATO to refill the reservoirs around Atlanta. The entire state of Alabama is likely to spontaneously burst into flame, and every one's colon's are going to drop out of their pants legs in South Carolina due to a lack of fiber in their diet due to drought induced crop failures.

It's just not so...

We've been through the exact same situation before, and we'll see it again, yet the media and the morons of the world all have short memories and alternate agendas that require that they play a little downturn in the precipitation schedule into some kind of national disaster requiring emergency relief and tax credits.

I'm sorry, but I was alive back in 1987, and that year I was looking at buying a Ski Boat and Lake Altoona and Lake Lanier lieing just north of Atlanta each had 20' wide rings of red clay showing around them from the lack of rainfall. Half of the marinas' boatslips were dry and people were running aground in places that normally had deep water covering the rocks and stumps in a normal season.

By 1990 when I finally bought my first boat, the weather patterns had reversed and that year, when I finally acquired my 20' Bayliner, IT RAINED EVERY SINGLE WEEKEND FOR ALMOST TWELVE WEEKS IN A ROW.

Then in 1993 we had the great March Blizzard and that same year the Mississippi River and most of it's tributaries jumped out of their banks and flooded everything from Minnesota to New Orleans.

It was a six year cycle from low to high, but the rain came back--unfortunately all at once.

That's why they call it AVERAGE RAINFALL.

It's an AVERAGE.

That's A V E R A G E.

Got it?

Since we didn't have any land falling hurricanes here in the US this season, we also didn't get much rain. Texas got that one crappy tropical storm that flooded the crap out of part of the state, but the rest of the southeast and Atlantic Seaboard has been dry.

Imagine that?

If the Hurricanes had come, the news would be DEATH and DESTRUCTION rather than drought and parched tongues.

Understand?

Now go get something done worthwhile, and ignore the media's BS on the weather. Ive got copper to solder and research to do...