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Charlie Don’t Blog

But NewsComa does, and she has a post about some new evidence coming to light against Manson after all these years, along with something lots of us can relate to…

I remember thinking, when I was a child, that this was one of the most terrifying things I’d ever heard of. I was a child but our country was horrified and mesmerized with Manson and the family.

I’m a little younger than Coma and wasn’t yet born when the Manson family went on their spree, but I was fascinated with him/them as a middle schooler. I read Helter Skelter, and it scared the crap out of me. The scariest things these freaks did was go on “creepy-crawly missions” where they’d get into people’s houses and creep around…not hurting anyone or taking anything, just crawling around. Eeek!

I’m sure I worried my parents (or maybe not) because I read a bunch of books about Manson and Hitler at that time. At least I was reading, right? The killing part isn’t what drew me in though–it was the ability these guys had to persuade people to go along with their absolute lunacy. I mean, Manson wasn’t even at the Tate/LaBianca homes when the murders took place, but he had those people so far under his control that he didn’t have to be there for them to kill for him. Freaky.

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White-ity White

HT to Coma for introducing me to Stuff White People Like.

After spending a little time here, I’ve discovered I’m a lot whiter than I thought I was, especially with this timely post on The Wire.

Check it out…lots of funny stuff.  It’s definitely one that will stay in the feed reader.

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LOSTer’n’a Easter Egg

Last week’s episode of LOST (“The Constant”) answered a lot of questions for me–I thought.  My idea was that the island is the nexus for all possible universes.  This would explain why Jack’s father is alive in the future and Kate is so protective of Aaron.  I think that in the universe they return to Jack’s dad never went to Australia, so Claire was never born, therefore Aaron couldn’t exist.  But Claire came to the island from a universe where she does exist, and Aaron was born there.  Via the island he was able to move from a universe where he does exist to one where he doesn’t, or at least isn’t supposed to.

I was really looking forward to getting more answers this week.

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Spoilers coming Continue reading “LOSTer’n’a Easter Egg”

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Me! My Favorite Meme Ever!

Taylor tagged me with a meme.  In her post she mentioned that she was celebrating her 6 month anniversary blogging, and I realized that I let my one year anniversary slip.  Oh well, I don’t put much stock in that kind of stuff anyway.  Here are the rules to the meme…

** Post about the meme and link back to the person that tagged you.

** Go back to your archives and link to your five favorite posts.

Link One: must be about family
Link Two: must be about friends
Link Three: must be about yourself
Link Four: must be about something you love
Link Five: can be anything you choose

** Tag five other people (at least two must be new acquaintances so that you can get to know them better).

A post about family:  I almost feel bad claiming this post as my own, because I didn’t write most of it, and definitely didn’t write the best parts of it.  It’s all about my grandfather’s Thanksgiving day in 1945.

A post about friends:  it happened ten or so years ago, but I just posted last year about my buddy Eaton Beavers

A post about me:  in September I was busy damning Scrubs straight to hell.  The writing is corny and contrived, but the clips of highlights at the end of the post make it all worthwhile.

A post about something I love:  I wrote one in in December about the abandoned practice of exchanging emails with My Favorite.  I love My Favorite, and I love exchanging emails with her too…especially the kinds we’ll never ever ever show our kids.

A past about anything I choose:  Back in July, before I had the HUGE following I enjoy today, I wrote a post about Fury Face.  A tale of a terrifying mask or a cartoon character who is perpetually showing his anger?  Nah, just a group of educators who can’t spell.

So I think I’ll tag….

SVD, who is currently enjoying an Instalanche and riding the wave of success.

The Wookie at Total Diatribe, who will probably have something mean to say in every post he chooses

My Favorite, who is very starved for time to write, so everything she writes is very important

Hungry Mother, who has a plethora of interesting posts about every one of these topics.

NewsComa, who probably doesn’t even have time to participate because she’s churning out great posts one right after another.

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More LOST Than I’ve Ever Been

I’ve been thinking a lot today about last night’s episoe of Lost.  Why am I thinking about that?  Why not?  What would you have me think about?

Anyway, there are some spoilers here, so if you haven’t seen it yet stop reading.  Feed readers sometimes don’t pick up on the –more– from WordPress (that ruined this week’s episode of The Wire for me), so be extra careful.

Continue reading “More LOST Than I’ve Ever Been”

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More Educashun

I had a couple of interesting conversations about education yesterday. One was with a friend who home schooled both of his kids, and the other was with a couple of high school teachers. The one thing I took from both conversations is that it doesn’t seem like anyone is happy with the system, whether they are getting paid by it or paying into it.

So why do we keep it around? As I commented over at Meville, who is happy with it?

As is the case with most things, the answer probably lies in asking another question–who has the most to gain by keeping the status quo? That’s probably the group fighting the hardest to maintain it. I’ll leave it up to commenters to guess who that may be, but I have some ideas.

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Credit Card Regulation, Free Markets, and Paying Cash

The Coyote Chronicles challenges Free Marketers to defend deregulation of the credit card industry: 

You can make the argument that people who can’t pay their balances in full every month should not take out a credit card, but thats more than a little disingenuous since we would see a staggering drop in consumer spending if people only spent when they could pay cash. The restaurant and travel industries would suffer immediately. I doubt there would be a Black Friday at all. Don’t even get me started about the car business.

I’ll take a shot at this one.  First of all, Black Friday, car financing, and credit cards themselves are all fairly new concepts.  Somehow, civilization survived before they existed, and suspect it will survive long after they are gone.  The assertion that our economy is propped up by the insane amount of consumer credit that exists currently tells me that we are, as a country, living above our means.  The fact that the savings rate keeps declining while consumer debt continues to rise tells me that we are in denial of this fact.  Government regulation that enables this foolish behavior only delays the inevitable crash that must occur to correct the market and insures with each passing year that the crash will be harder.

What would happen to the economy if people stopped using credit cards and started paying cash?  One thing is for sure.  Every debt free individual would have greatly increased buying power because a higher percentage of his income would be available to purchase goods and services instead of paying interest on the Big Mac Value Meal he bought 4 months ago.

Hat tip to MCB.

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Hell Yeah I Follow!

ifollowgrey.gifFor quite a while I’ve been meaning to install the DoFollow plugin, and today I actually took the 30 seconds to do it. The whole idea behind this plugin is that it causes search engines to consider the link created in comments as a “real” link.

What does that mean to you? When you leave a comment on this blog with a link to your site/blog, search engines will actually follow the link back to your site (more juice for your blog). That usually doesn’t happen, as WordPress puts a “nofollow” tag around your site link when you leave a comment.

What does that mean for me? Probably not much. It will hopefully encourage you to leave comments here, and you’ll be rewarded if you do.

By the way, thanks to Randa Clay for the button design. All I had to do was change the color–cool!

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For All You Political Junkies

Kat Coble has posted a pretty good summary of present day politics in the United States.

But, really, the two major parties are very much the same now. They’ve both become interested solely in purchasing continued incumbancy, and any governance which may or may not occur is incidental.

Very true. This reminds me of an episode of The Wire I saw the other night–incredible show by the way. A Baltimore heroin operation is faced with the problem of taking an inferior product to the marketplace. Their solution? Split into two separate brands and manufacture some pretend competition between the two. The junkies end up buying the same crappy product either way, and the cash all flows to the same source.

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Three Things I Haven’t Let Go

When I first got hit with this meme by BillyMac, I thought the topic was “3 Things I Wouldn’t Let Go”. That one would be pretty easy–family, health, and some other random item.

But this is “3 Things You Haven’t Let Go”, which has a much different conotation. Maybe I’m inferring it incorrectly, and it’s vague enough for interpretation, but I take this as “3 Things I Haven’t Let Go (but probably should)”. Believe it or not, this is a part of my character I’ve really worked on over the past few years. I’ve really tried to develop “the ability to let that which does not matter truly go.” Despite my best efforts, I still have plenty options. After all, I am powered by spite.

Spite CanAs I’m trying to narrow it down to the top three, I’m realizing how much I don’t want to admit any of this publicly. It’s not the fear of baring my soul that’s holding me back–it’s the realization of how stupid they all are. All instances of forgiven, but not forgotten. In order of increasing ridiculousness on my part…

Las Vegas August, 2005
I was going out for a weekend with about 15 other guys. Soon after booking my ticket I saw that there were UFC fights that weekend, so I asked some other guys if they wanted to go. I could only buy eight tickets, and as soon as seven other guys said they were in, I bought 8 together. $100 per ticket before all the taxes and charges. Not a problem–these guys are all local and they all have jobs. I’ll get my money back this week, right? Wrong. But that’s not the worst part. Literally thirty minutes before the fights I met up with the final two guys who owed me for their tickets. They walked up with two other guys who I didn’t know, paid me for the tickets, and turned around and sold them for $200 each to the other guys right in front of me! Chuck Liddell is lucky he didn’t have to fight me that night.

Summer 1993
I was living in a dump of a house in Ft. Sanders with two other guys–$300 rent. We split the electric and basic phone service evenly, but if anyone had long distance calls they had to pay it themselves. The month he moved out, one of my roommates had $37 worth of long distance calls to his girlfriend in California. By the time the bill came, he was gone, and the other guy and I had to eat it. Sure, not a lot of money, but at the time it was, and besides it’s the principle. I never got the money back from him, but I did hit him in the back with a folding chair (part of the height of my pro-wrestling obsession) in Long Branch one night when he was playing pool. Surprisingly, it didn’t make me feel any better.

St. Patrick’s Day Rugby Tournament, Savannah Georgia, 2000
We had a pretty solid team, and were scheduled for a Sunday morning match. Of course we’d all gone out on and had fun on Saturday night. At game time on Sunday, we only had 12 guys there. We started the match shorthanded, and when the other guys finally rolled up, I was infuriated. I didn’t even want them to come into the game–my preference was to take an ass kicking and let them sit and watch it. After the match (we lost) I refused to shake their hands. I love all of those guys, but I haven’t let the fact that they didn’t show up for us that morning go. I could have stayed in Knoxville if all I wanted to do was drink beer and not play rugby. Under certain conditions and in the presence of certain people, this one still sends me into a mild rage.

See the common thread here? All cases of being let down by friends. So I guess that is my biggest pet peeve? Possibly.

Up next are:
SVD
Ivy
Taylor–fingers crossed she’ll relate this to public education