Ima Buffoon

My New Alter(ed) Ego


In a moment of genius inspired activism, I just signed up for a new Yahoo E-mail account using the name "Ima Buffoon." The address is imabuffoon@yahoo.com if you want to sent me a howdy doo sometime in the future.

Ima's a pretty fun loving yet serious guy, and I'm challenging Ima to wander around the Internet on my behalf over the next few months, torturing the various scam artists that manage to piss me off on TV or via the WWW with offers of things that intelligent people should know better than to believe.

You know--things like "systems" promising unimaginable riches gained through buy low cost foreclosed real estate, E-bay marketing schemes, programs teaching you to make money by placing "little tiny" classified ads in newspapers, hair re-growth concoctions, and pills promising larger male body parts.

Don't the ads and infomercials touting these products bother anyone but me? I'm really tired of the onslaught--free speech issues aside--and I'm going to dive in with my altered ego Ima and find out what's going on from the inside if I can.

This morning Ima got things started with The Home Equity Repositioning people. These guys purport to advise you on how you can borrow your home equity and use the money to buy into some mutual funds and securities they sell.

As if you aren't already making (or losing) enough appreciation on your home investment--these morons are encouraging people to borrow money against their HOUSES and give it to them to pay their sales commissions while they put you and your house at risk in the stock market.

If you think that's a good idea, I have another scheme that you'll find attractive...

Interested?

I have a program to sell your pre-school aged kids each a 9 MM pistol and some ammunition, then I'll give them target training and send them back to your home to be in charge of you and your family's personal security.

You'll never see your little munchkins while they're running around the perimeter of your property in their new camo colored fatigue uniforms...and don't worry, you can borrow the money from your home equity, and the program only costs $10,000 per student.

Such a deal, huh?

The Equity Repositioning website has absolutely no information on it, it's just a data collecting screen that asks for your name, e-mail address, and phone number.

I gave them my real phone number and the Ima Buffoon name and e-mail address, and it will be interesting to see what happens.

I'll keep you informed as the situation develops.

Sixty Six Years Ago

How Soon Most Of Us Forget...


Just in case you aren't paying attention, let me remind you that about 66 years and 9 hours ago from right now the Japanese Navy and Air Forces attacked Pearl Harbor.

We've all seen the movies and read the history books in school, so I really don't have much to say this morning other than to pause to recognise my Aunt and three Uncles--two since deceased--that served in the military during that time in what ended up being called World War II.

None were at Pearl Harbor, but all three served with honor and survived the war unscathed to come back home and live long successful lives enjoying the freedoms they risked their lives for.

It's sad that today, when I look back, all I see is that we as a country and citizens had a Hell of a lot more patriotism and resolution then than we do now, and I regret that we've probably already squandered most of the hard earned advantages and political currency earned by a generation of true War Hero's that believed in the US Constitution, Personal Responsibility, and the original American Dream.

The way I see things, most of today's so called "Dream" is in reality much closer to a freak show or a nightmare to me...

Here's Your Christmas Card

An Oldie But Goodie...

I promised myself that I would get my Christmas shopping done early this year and get my Christmas cards out early also. Unfortunately I didn't have the energy to make my own new cards, so the store bought variety will have to do for the first time in about three years.

There will also have to be no last minute shopping rush for me this year because we're having company for the holidays and I'm going to be busy acting as Head Chef and Island Tour Guide and won't have time to be dashing to the mall to brave the wild eyed masses while dodging sniper fire.

The good news is that all of the shopping will be done as of tomorrow, the cards are laying here beside the computer on the coffee table ready to be addressed, and by scrolling down here you can have your own Christmas Card delivered immediately.













I'll feel free to check Christmas Cards to my Blog Readers off my list now...

(I apologize to any of my regular readers that remember this original PhotoShop image from last year, but it's just too good to not use again...and doing the Owl Gore Hanukkah Card reminded me of my earlier efforts...so here it is.)

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Equal Opportunity Enviro-Whackism

Spreading the Misery Responsibility...


I'm sorry to report this morning that it looks like Owl Gore's Environmental Derangement Psychosis has spread to the Jewish community now during Chanukah.

In a campaign that has spread like wildfire across the Internet, a group of Israeli environmentalists is encouraging Jews around the world to light at least one less candle this Hanukka to help the environment.

The founders of the Green Hanukkia campaign found that every candle that burns completely produces 15 grams of carbon dioxide. If an estimated one million Israeli households light for eight days, they said, it would do significant damage to the atmosphere.

"The campaign calls for Jews around the world to save the last candle and save the planet, so we won't need another miracle," said Liad Ortar, the campaign's cofounder, who runs the Arkada environmental consulting firm and the Ynet Web site's environmental forum. "Global warming is a milestone in human evolution that requires us to rethink how we live our lives, and one of the main paradigms of that is religion and how it fits into the current situation."


Do WHAT???

Leave out a candle from the ritual?

Which one would they have honorable religious people to omit?

The first one?

Don't light the eighth night's candle?

These morons are Jews, and they aught to know better.

So what about leaving dark the Shamash light usually presented in the center highest position in the Menorah?

Is any religious ritual sacred and safe from their assault and scrutiny?

While we're at it let's get the Methodists to dump their Acolytes and/or leave at least one of the two candles dark on their altars every Sunday.

Let's make all of the Christians leave a candle dark on this years Advent Wreaths --that will lower CO2 and reduce global warming by something like 0.000000000000000000000123 degrees Celsius.

And let's not leave the Catholics out--they could stop with the incense burning during Mass and possibly prevent a couple of Locust plague induced crop failures in the Sudan and Ethiopia (...oh...OH...OhhhhhhhhHHHHHH....you live in a Desert...)

Seriously, this whole story is ridiculous, and the people behind it are clearly mindless politically motivated morons asking people to jump on the Man-Made Global Warming bandwagon while making strictly ineffective "SYMBOLIC GESTURES."

The next series of wildfires in the foothills of Malibu will undo everything accomplished by leaving little wax candles unlit by ten fold. The next volcanic eruption on Montserrat or in Micronesia will spew more CO2 and volatile organic hydrocarbons than all of the cars in the US in an entire YEAR.

The ritual surrounding the lighting of the Menorah involves eight or nine little bitty candles sized to burn for about thirty minutes each night, and I think that leaving one out for a silly reason like this is beyond pale.

This is a perfect example of ever increasing politically correct crap which we can look forward to in the future if we don't manage to nip this Climate Change insanity in the bud.

Today it's candles, tomorrow it's your fireplace, your lawnmower, your electric razor, and your chain saw.

By the way, I tried to contact Owl Gores' office for comment, but all I could get was this photo:





(Yes...that's the product of me and my Photoshop skills)


So sue me...

Where's Bob Dole When You Need Him?

I'm Suffering Disenchantment With The Whole Crowd of Candidates


Will someone please call the School Principal or the Hallway Monitor and separate Obama and sHrillary for me before someone gets food thrown on their clothing? I don't know how much further below Kindergarten and First Grade we can sink in what should be an otherwise serious political adult debate.

I fully expect in the next week for someone to pull out Fred Thompson's Vacation Bible School finger paintings and interpret them like Rorschach Inkblots --using them to accuse him of sexual harassment of the volunteer teachers in church, or possibly racism for smearing out an image that vaguely looks like Jesse Jackson having sex with Madonna using a weed eater and a chicken as "marital aides."

Speaking of Bob Dole, while we can blame him for at least 4 years of Bill Clinton's tenure, I sort of miss him walking around speaking of himself in third person (or whatever it is when you address TV cameras and microphones with phrases like "Only Bob Dole speaks for Bob Dole...")

Then there was the omnipresent pen that poor old Bob always carried around in his wounded hand to keep people from noticing that he was in fact a GENUINE war hero and had been wounded in action. If I were him I would have been proud of the abilities he showed and accomplishments he made in spite of his combat injuries.

It would be sort of funny if someone had stabbed John sKerry's ass a couple of times with a ball point pen so he could have, using Dole's logic, wandered around clenching an ink pen is his butt cheeks at campaign events. Imagine the scene when he signed autographs using that method. "Sorry there kid...you'll have to excuse the brown streak...did you know I served in Vietnam?"

Kerry was definitely no Bob Dole in any shape, form, or fashion, else he would have resigned his Senate seat as he started his presidential campaign like Bob did. Then we wouldn't have to have paid his useless carcass for not appearing on the senate floor for a year and a half.

Of course if he'd resigned the Senate Seat he'd be reduced to carrying Mrs. Heinz's purse and polishing the calluses and bunions on her feet these days, because I doubt that even the glorious State of Massachusetts, home for Ted "Jabba The Hut" Kennedy, would bring him back to congress once he'd given up incumbency.

Come to think of it, maybe Senator Dole was on to something back then--using a prop in an attempt to distract people from defects that they find personally embarrassing as a political candidate.

For instance, today I think Fred Thompson should consider carrying around copies of old Video Tapes of episodes of Law and Order and the movies he's appeared in looking Presidential. Let's face it, I'm afraid that's the only way many people are going to see him in that light based on the performance of his campaign thus far.

As for sHrillary Rodham-Clinton, I think that she could mount herself on Bill Clinton-Clinton's back like the pair of actors calling themselves "Master Blaster" in the Mad Max-Beyond Thunderdome movie.

Then Bill would have to walk around everywhere all day wearing her while she bitches at him and does that cackling laugh of hers at debate questions. Using the toilet and taking a shower could become a bit of a problem with that arrangement however.

Here's a look of what they'd look like in Iowa next month:





Obama...now he's a little more difficult...let's see....

I know, he could be forced to wander around from event to event holding a sign that says something like "Remember I'm Black...remember I WAS Muslim...but today I'm not a BLACK MUSLIM..."

Does anyone buy that story?

Ron Paul is a little tougher still.

No, he's actually easy. Mr. Paul could come out with a line of T-shirts with the saying "I'm With Stupid" with an arrow pointing upwards towards his own face.

I guess that I could go on and on here, but my inspiration is becoming less funny on a moment by moment basis. I think that I'll leave things at that.

Please feel free to leave a comment and tell me if you come up with anything obvious on the other candidates, and I may come back by later if I come up with something else on my own.

I'm Developing My Own Weapons of ASS Mass Destruction

Filibustering My Way To Insanity Infamy


I'm just beside myself. I don't know what to say this morning folks.

I was actually in a bit of a bind figuring out what to write about, then I stumbled onto this story...

I saw some Pinhead on TV on MSNBC interviewing some captive commentators (you know...so called experts like Pat Buchanan and some other talking head media morons) about the revised US Intelligence estimate stating that regardless of what we've heard on the news for the past two thousand years, Iran really stopped developing Nuclear weapons in 2003.

If you don't believe that story, other versions are printed here, here, and even here at the NY Times.

The MSNBC Pinhead moderator was already on the "Bush Lied" mantra, while I'm sitting here wondering why everyone is willing to ignore the bullshit uttered by Iran's own little Capuchin Monkey look-alike dictator:

...statements basically admitting that Iran has Nuclear refinement technology beyond that NEEDED TO SUPPORT A PEACEFUL ELECTRICAL POWER GENERATION PROGRAM, and saying that they (the Iranians) have the right to develop nuclear powered handbags and suitcases to lob into your living rooms and stow on airliners for your enjoyment and demise in the future.

As I recall, a stupid dead SOB named Saddam Hussain kept on pounding his hammers and rattling the swords in this same manner back a few years ago before we captured his rat bastard ass and his fellow citizens stretched his neck to the point of breaking.

My point here is this...

I you don't want the US Marine corps to tear your door off the hinges or the US Navy to fly a GPS guided Cruise missile up your butt, stop with the rhetoric, because the partisan liberal idiot professional morons down at the US State Department and the so called "Intelligence Agencies" apparently spend more time watching old "Get Smart" 1960's TV reruns than they do actually gathering any Intelligence.

If I were Bush I'd be walking around poking people with a pointy stick and kicking their butts with my size 13 boots...but instead I'm relegated to delivering commentary here on my measly little website safely sequestered in rural coastal Georgia. (if ever you piss me off enough and I manage to get close enough to grab hold of you and bite you, believe me that I'm taking something important like your nose with me...so keep that in mind in the future.)

And while you're at it, stop blaming the President and the White house for the failings of these Partisan "PROFESSIONAL INTELLIGENCE" shitheads...It's Bush's fault he let them keep their jobs when he took office after Clinton hired them in the 1990's, but it's not his fault that they lied to him and the American public or just plain missed the truth when they wandered into the sandy abyss to do their jobs.

After all, grumpy old Helen Thomas and the balance of the White house press corps would have soiled their undergarments and had public conniption fits should he have kicked them to the curb like sHrillary Rodham-Clinton would have done in the same situation.

Dammit.

Back To The Real World

Building Fantasy...


Well, I reluctantly walked out of the Ritz Theater a little after 3 PM Sunday afternoon having turned over my set and giant puppet to the actors and stage crew.

I've done all I can do with it...the rest is up to them.

I think that I just might feel like the parent of a little first grader on the first day of school....I sure hope everything performs as expected.

On projects like this there are always things that you would have liked to have done or could have done differently in retrospect, but I think that I exceeded 90% of my own expectations and the cast was pretty impressed with the results of my efforts. I got the electronics installed just in time for a couple of trial runs and the strobe light eyes really make the scene effective and scary.

Now I have to buckle down and turn my attention back to my for-profit construction efforts with the arrival of the new windows and a few thousand pounds of unmixed concrete this week.

I wish that someone would volunteer to come over and help me for a few days for free...but that's not how the world works.



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All The Math I Needed To Know

I Learned By The Ninth Grade...


From time to time in my public service career I have some interesting revelations and insights about teaching science and math to today's children.

Since I don't have any kids of my own, it is through my work with the theater and one of the local high schools which brings me into contact with the occasional rare student that asks the question: "how did you figure that out?"

In answering these little darlin's questions, of course I could as a matter of pride drag out my calculus books and differential equations textbook--all giant, dusty hardcover tomes with which my instructors tortured me while I was attempting to make my way through the first couple of years at Georgia Tech back in the late 1970's.

Instead, thus far I've resisted that urge and tried to keep things simple.

I usually just mention how I use a handheld calculator to solve simple little things like the Pythagorean Theorem and Sine/Cosine/Tangent functions that most college bound children learn in middle school.

Unfortunately, I'm not sure how far my attempts at putting a practical insight into the use of apparently mundane subjects goes when it comes to inspiring academic excellence, but I'm darn sure of how easy my ongoing mastery of those subjects makes my life on a day to day basis.

Tonight I'm working on the pre-planning for the final Ghost of Christmas Future fabrication later this morning, and in that process a working knowledge of basic geometry concepts are all that I need to lay out the shape of the "tether lanyard" that keeps Mr. Ghost Puppet from crashing down across Scrooge while "leaning down in the middle of his face with flashing red strobe light eyes." (you know what I mean here Rusty...)

I did have to cheat a little by employing some of my Sophomore year college Statics Structures class to fine tune the details, but the basic geometry was still the key to problem.

I really wish that our schools could employ more hands-on educational solutions instead of computer labs and diversity sermons--employing things like balsa wood, wooden dowels, or PVC pipe in lab sessions in order to demonstrate the usefulness of mathematics concepts. I'm building giant pyramids featured on football fields and humongous puppets seen on the theater stage using the exact same simple concepts.

At the same time, it would also be nice if they taught things like (real) economics, household budgeting, credit management, and how to balance a checkbook.

Is it just ME???