So the new Japanese finance minister said something about not keeping old people artificially alive because it incurs unnecessary public costs, and some folks went predictably ballistic over it. See? This is an example of socialized medicine! They’ll just discard old folks when they’re no longer useful! ZOMG DEATH SQUADS! Here’s the thing I don’t…
ten years of us.
Robin and I got married on this day ten years ago. The ceremony took place in a ramshackle little Baptist church on Chapman Highway and was performed by a little preacher with a speech impediment. His wife managed to blur every single shot she took with my camera. The day couldn’t have been more perfect….
the kids is playing them vid-jo games again.
We have now passed that developmental milestone where the kids can out-play the Old Man on the Xbox 360. They each got a new 360 game under the tree last month, and both of them have finished the “Brave” game from start to finish. I know that as children of the Gadget Generation, mastery of…
the right to own and drive cars.
Forty thousand people die on American highways every year. Do we just shrug that number off as the price of freedom? Why is it perfectly legal to buy a 500HP Corvette capable of 180MPH top speeds in a country where no state has a legal speed limit higher than 75 or 80MPH? And you can…
this person’s vote cancels out yours.
And this is why we don’t ever read comment sections at YouTube or CNN or pretty much any news site on the Interwebs: I think currency is the root of all evil. Take away all the inequality and government interference laws like drug and prostitution,etc etc then you take away any reason to commit a…
a thrill before dying.
Teenage flight student steals plane for a joyride with two buddies, crashes same, and kills everyone on board. That’s some stunning overconfidence right there. Doesn’t even have his pilot license, has only flown a single-engine Cessna a few times, and takes a twin out at night in IFR conditions, with predictable results. He may have…
god’s gift to women, that one.
One Joshua Becker, a student at USF in Tampa, apparently thinks it’s fun to sexually harass strange women over the Internets. Only the target of his dubious attention didn’t take his shit lying down (no pun intended) and posted screen shots of the entire exchange online. She also pledged to send the evidence to both…
the impartial media and virtual scarlet letters.
So a newspaper called The Journal News put up an interactive map marking the location of every single registered pistol permit holder in two New York counties. Predictably, they’re getting a little bit of flak for that. Also predictably, the paper’s defense is all “that’s public information, and the public has a right to know.”…
chickens in winter.
Help! I’m schtuck! We’ve had the most annoying kind of winter weather in the last few days. We got about three inches of snow Thursday night, but because the temperature hovered right around freezing, it was already too wet in the early morning to clear with the snowblower. (When the snow is too wet, it…
analog data: the longevity thereof.
One of my regular reads from the old Fatherland has an interesting article today about a letter that took 71 years to deliver. (link is in German) In WWII, German troops occupied the Channel island of Jersey for five years. Some of the local yoots decided to steal a bag of German military mail as…