Learning Disability

Mon Apr 16, 2007 10:21 am by McGehee [Elections] [Here's Your Sign]

Afterwards, while answering a question from a viewer on the program “Your Show” about why he chose not to run, Kerry said he had decided it wasn’t the right time. “Could that change?” Kerry said. “It might. It may change over years. It may change over months. I can’t tell you, but I’ve said very clearly I don’t consider myself out of it forever.” » 9News.com:   Kerry reopens door to possible presidential run Kerry, you have been out of it forever.

Master of My Domains

Sun Apr 15, 2007 12:26 pm by McGehee 5 comments [Asides]

According to Technorati, only two other blogs—Dustbury and Let the Finder Beware—have updated their blogrolls to reflect the sudden and virtually unannounced end of Yippee-Ki-Yay! and its succession by this here bloggish incarnation of The McGehee Zone. For the time being, I’m keeping most of the old links alive through the magic of mod_rewrite, but that won’t go on forever. I can’t really afford to continue maintaining four domains, especially if I’m no longer using one of them actively anymore. There’s plenty of time to update blogrolls—and for those sufficiently motivated to use whatever mass-editing capability they may have at their disposals to change outstanding links to individual posts (changing “yippee- ki- yay. us” to “mcgeheezone.com/ee” should be all it takes, in most cases). I’ve been one of the few bloggers that has tried to keep old links alive, or to revive broken ones, but that was back when the pond was smaller and the big fish fewer. Not that breaking links ever seemed to hurt the big fish at any time… Anyway, just a heads-up. I haven’t decided how soon I’ll let that old domain go, only that I will.

Marley-motional

Sat Apr 14, 2007 9:27 pm by Chris McG. [Cat-cetera] [The Essential Critter Library]

Dammit, dammit, dammitall. I knew I was gonna cry. Hate that. My boss left a book on my desk one day, with a note saying he thought I’d enjoy reading it. The book was Marley & Me by John Grogan, about the big adorable wrecking ball of a yellow Lab that was part of his family for many years. There were plenty of warnings in the reviews on the back cover—“a funny, touching tribute...”, “tenderly follows its subject from sunrise to sunset...” I knew I’d thoroughly enjoy most of the book, even while dreading the end. And sure enough, Marley’s exploits were a pure delight. Last night I was still reading for a good while after Kevin had gone to sleep, and I had to stifle several good outbreaks of mirth. A great book. I guess it’s a trade-off that those of us who will enjoy such a book the most will also be the most saddened when the wonderful furry protagonist’s time on Earth comes to a close, in large part because it brings to mind our own experiences of losing a pet in the past, and our dread of losing the dear ones who share our lives now. Lucy benefited greatly from my finishing that book—she got invited in for hugs and treats even though she was kinda wet. I’m going to have to recommend that book to some folks who live in our neighborhood. Their goofy yellow Lab, Sandbag, comes to visit us sometimes despite the electronic fence around his yard. (I have got to ask them one day if he got his name because someone saw him all curled up as a puppy and said “Aww, he looks just like a little sandbag!") I get the feeling they think he’s quite a handful, and I won’t disagree, but he’s also a very sweet boy—and next to Marley I bet he’s a model of canine deportment! When Sandbag comes to visit I take him home. Someday when we get a proper fence I’ll be happy to let him romp with Lucy for awhile (she seems to think he’s an absolute rockstar—I swear last time he came by I saw her throwing a bra—and he’s not discouraging her one bit!) For now, I take him right home, and I hope his people don’t misunderstand. I tell them every time, I love him and I love his visits, I just want him to be safe. There are a couple of women who walk in our neighborhood (I don’t think they live here, so who invited ‘em anyway...) carrying big sticks. They seem to be quite irrational about dogs. One time Lucy ran up to them in her usual “Ooh, more people to love!” fashion, which if they had any grasp whatsoever of canine body language they should have realized, but one of them raised her huge stick over her head and whacked it hard on the ground in front of Lucy—fortunately not making contact, or she would have had to deal with me. OK, I can try to have some sympathy for severe dog phobia because my mom has it too, but dang it, even with the phobia Mom adores Lucy. So those women need to get a clue, and give a sweet loving dog a chance. I’m not sure, but I’d almost bet those women were involved in a disgusting episode several years ago. The dogs next door at the time were Smokey and Cassie. Smokey’s part Chow, and he does bark (that’s all!) at what he considers potential invaders. Also, at that time, he wasn’t contained in the yard, so he might have ventured into the cul-de-sac. But somehow, the dogcatcher was called to come get him out of his own yard. And when the dogcatcher couldn’t corral Smokey, he instead picked up and hauled off poor Cassie, who was so old and arthritic she could barely walk, much less bother any pedestrians. I caught this performance, gave him a piece of my mind which he of course ignored (and then lied barefaced to me, denying it all when I confronted him about the Auschwitz-like extermination methods used at our lovely Coweta County “humane” facility...) In the end, all I could do was to track down my neighbor at work and let him know, so poor harmless Cassie could be sprung as quickly as possible. Grrrrr… Yeah, I know, I’m irrational too—but mine’s the good kind! But anyway. Next on my critter reading list is a story I know has a happy ending (and in my brain it’s going to freeze-frame that way!)—From Baghdad, With Love, about a puppy who was adopted by some Marines in Iraq, and who has now been brought back to the States to live happily ever after with the unit’s commander.

Suicide Bird Fails in Bid to Assassinate Vice President

Fri Apr 13, 2007 9:51 pm by McGehee [Our Times]

And Cheney almost had a perilous flight to Chicago because of a run-in between a bird and his plane. As CBS 2’s Mike Puccinelli reports, wildlife getting caught in engines is a troubling trend in the aviation world. As Air Force Two taxied to the awaiting vice presidential motorcade everything looked normal. But moments after the vice President got into his limousine and drove away, mechanics started giving one of the engines the once over. On the approach to landing a bird hit one of the plane’s engines. » CBS:   Bird Flies Into Engine Of Cheney’s Plane What does it tell you about the environmental crimes of this administration, that even dumb animals are fighting back in the only way they know how? They don’t have tanks and bombs, they have only their bodies, which they’re now sacrificing in futile but valiant attempts to fight Bushitlerburton.

Why Am I Posting About This?

Fri Apr 13, 2007 1:10 pm by McGehee [Here's Your Sign] [Media Ochre]

First they wouldn’t debate on Fox News. Now this: They came by the hundreds that hot August day in tiny Johnson City, Tenn., gathering on an asphalt parking lot to meet Rep. Harold E. Ford Jr. It was not just that he might become the state’s first black senator. More than that, even in Republican eastern Tennessee, the Democratic congressman was a celebrity—a regular guest on Don Imus’ radio show. And today, with Imus’ career in tatters, the fate of the controversial shock jock is stirring quiet but heartfelt concern in an unlikely quarter: among Democratic politicians. That’s because, over the years, Democrats such as Ford came to count on Imus for the kind of sympathetic treatment that Republicans got from Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity. Equally important, Imus gave Democrats a pipeline to a crucial voting bloc that was perennially hard for them to reach: politically independent white men. With Imus’ show canceled indefinitely because of his remarks about the Rutgers University women’s basketball team, some Democratic strategists are worried about how to fill the void. For a national radio audience of white men, Democrats see few if any alternatives. » Los Angeles Times:   Democratic politicians lose a soapbox with Imus I always did kind of like Al Sharpton.

Moo

Thu Apr 12, 2007 10:57 pm by McGehee [Out West]

I’ve blogged before about my liking for buffalo meat, and how there are a handful of restaurants here in Coweta County or nearby, where buffalo is on the menu. There used to be a few head of buffalo on land near the small Coweta County town of Turin, but it’s been over a year since I’ve seen them there; however there’s a place south of Grantville, just inside the county line, where a few head can be seen fairly regularly. A neighbor of ours in Alaska—who is a member of the Fairbanks North Star Borough Assembly—had a few head on his property near Plack and Greenwood roads, and there’s a free-range herd in the Delta Junction area, which can be hunted if you’re very lucky. I also reported on the plan by Wyoming’s Northern Arapaho tribe to buy some buffalo and build a herd on the Wind River reservation they share with the Eastern Shoshone tribe. The Northern Arapaho Tribe has applied for a $175,000 grant from the Wyoming Wildlife and Natural Resource Trust Fund in pursuit of a bison restoration program on the Wind River Indian Reservation. “The tribe wants about 47 miles of fencing so they can enclose bison on about 32,000 acres in the northeast corner of the reservation,” said Bob Budd, executive director of the trust fund. The grant proposal is one of 59 applications pending before the trust fund board this month. Ken Trosper, director of the tribe’s traditional resources department, said the tribe wants to establish a genetically pure, disease-free bison herd of 300 head on the Arapaho Ranch, bounded on the east by Boysen Reservoir and Wind River Canyon. The proposed range for the bison project has been evaluated by Bureau of Indian Affairs range scientists, who say the 32,000 acres can provide forage for 450 cattle, Trosper said. The project rests on both cultural and health goals for the tribe, he said—both to renew the Northern Arapaho’s cultural ties to bison, as well as for the health benefits associated with bison meat. » Casper Star-Tribune:   Tribe seeks bison fence Wyoming is home to a great many buffalo already, as one might imagine. There are small herds at at least two state parks—both of which my wife Chris and I visited on our 2005 vacation trip to the Cowboy State—plus a private herd near Cheyenne (I’d be surprised if there weren’t others scattered around the state, as they are here and in Alaska ... and I remember one in the Sierra foothills of California), and the wild, free-ranging Yellowstone herd. Yellowstone’s buffalo, like most surviving specimens but unlike the South Dakota herd that will be the source of the Arapaho tribe’s initial collection, are not genetically pure. They also are a cause of concern among cattle ranchers around the park because of brucellosis. [Montana] State Department of Livestock crews spent much of Tuesday hazing about 500 bison into Yellowstone National Park. It was the largest hazing operation so far this year. The bison had wandered out of the park’s western border. About 65 of them were on airport property at West Yellowstone, and another 35 were in a nearby parking lot, said Rob Tierney of the Livestock Department. Others were scattered on private land and elsewhere. The hazing of wandering bison is allowed under a state-federal management plan aimed at reducing the potential spread of brucellosis from bison to cattle in Montana. Many of the park’s bison have brucellosis, as do some elk in the region, and the disease can cause cows to abort. » AP:   Crews haze bison into Yellowstone Hazing—which is just another word for “chasing”—would seem preferable to shooting, which I remember having seen news footage of, many years ago, but… Opponents of hazing have said bison deserve more tolerance when they leave the park. I’m sure they do—but cattle ranchers kind of deserve not to lose calves to brucellosis. But I’m carnivorous, so of course I’d side with the people who provide the meat I like to eat. And the Yellowstone buffalo, being scenery rather than livestock, don’t tend to find their way onto my plate.

Tower to Pilot: You’re Fired

Thu Apr 12, 2007 1:21 pm by McGehee 2 comments [Asides]

My Windows XP Media Center bugbox is acting like it wants to crash again—for the second time in 2007. So I’ve got it running the disk check, which would suit me better if it didn’t seem to be stalled partway through the file data check. I’m letting it chew on that to see if it will get moving again, and meanwhile my internetting will be done on the surprisingly trusty old laptop with its embarrassingly small amount of installed RAM. As with any Media Center PC, the only copy of the OS I have with which to rebuild the system in the event it does crash, is on a recovery partition on the main hard drive. Which means merely replacing this apparently failing drive won’t do me any good, even with nearly all of my personal data stored, this time, on other physical drives. Unless there’s a way to transfer the recovery partition’s contents to a new drive, I’ll either have to buy a new copy of Windows (and MCE doesn’t appear to be available except with a Media Center PC) or a new computer (which almost certainly means Vista, which I’m not ready for). We shall see what we shall see. I did make semi-regular backups, of the registry as well as of actual files, but I’m not ready to have to go through losing even a small amount of personal data so soon after the last time. I tried to get the system to let me move the “Documents and Settings” folder tree off of the C:\ drive but it wouldn’t allow it, so a bunch of my Firefox stuff, for example, is stuck there, waiting for the crash. Dammit. Update: Well, I’m back on my bugbox. It never did finish the disk check but the first spot where it stalled it did fix something, and it seemed to correspond to what killed my attempt to backup “Documents & Settings” from Safe Mode previously. But I’m still hugely gun-shy about this thing. I have to wonder whether having the Media Center capabilities is worth not being able to replace an untrustworthy hard drive. Then again, if the worst happens, I’ll have to replace the hard drive and install a different version of XP on it anyway.

The Real Joke

Wed Apr 11, 2007 7:08 pm by McGehee [Media Ochre]

...is on the Ford CEO who thought he could joke about the President’s intelligence to reporters and that they would realize he wasn’t telling a straight-up funny story. Ford Motor Co. Chief Executive Alan Mulally is no longer laughing about his suggestion that he saved President Bush’s life during a recent White House visit. The No. 2 U.S. automaker on Tuesday apologized after Mulally said his claim of intervening to prevent U.S. President George W. Bush from plugging an electrical cord into the hydrogen tank of an experimental Ford vehicle had been meant as a joke. Ford said Mulally never expected the story he told journalists in New York last week would be taken seriously. » Reuters:   Ford CEO apologizes after joke on Bush blows up Buffoon. The conviction that George W. Bush is an idiot, is such an article of faith among the drive-by media that telling them a joke like that is on the same level as making fun of Stepin Fetchit at a KKK rally. And he “never expected” those fenderheads to take it as factual? What cave has this doofus been living in?

Harp Metal
Wed Apr 11, 2007 1:51 pm by McGehee [Humor?]

Still One of the Sanest Non-Conservatives in Media

Wed Apr 11, 2007 10:06 am by McGehee [Media Ochre] [Nature]

...and thus, certainly one of the most suspect, in the eyes of devout Global Warming™ proselytizers. However, I am a skeptic about what is currently called global warming. I have been highly suspicious for years about the political agenda that has slowly accrued around this issue. As a lapsed Catholic, I detest dogma in any area. Too many of my fellow Democrats seem peculiarly credulous at the moment, as if, having ground down organized religion into nonjudgmental, feel-good therapy, they are hungry for visions of apocalypse. From my perspective, virtually all of the major claims about global warming and its causes still remain to be proved. Click Here! Climate change, keyed to solar cycles, is built into Earth’s system. Cooling and warming will go on forever. Slowly rising sea levels will at some point doubtless flood lower Manhattan and seaside houses everywhere from Cape Cod to Florida—as happened to Native American encampments on those very shores. Human habitation is always fragile and provisional. People will migrate for the hills, as they have always done. Who is impious enough to believe that Earth’s contours are permanent? Our eyes are simply too slow to see the shift of tectonic plates that has raised the Himalayas and is dangling Los Angeles over an unstable fault. I began “Sexual Personae” (parodying the New Testament): “In the beginning was nature.” And nature will survive us all. Man is too weak to permanently affect nature, which includes infinitely more than this tiny globe. » Camille Paglia:   Real inconvenient truths The excerpted part, which led Drudge to link the article, is actually on this page, in case you don’t want to wade through her commiserations on, for example, George W. Bush’s swaggering cowboy persona (like that’s a bad thing, or something). As she says at the beginning of the climate-change portion of the column, her opinion about Global Warming™ will surely stir up a hornet’s nest. The Taliban may actually behead those whom they consider heretics, but the True Believers of the Most Holy Church of “We Say the Debate Is Over So Shut Up, Just SHUT THE @#$!! UP!” will be issuing fatwas left and ... lefter over this.

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