Monday - February 23, 2009

another bad night at bowling league

Getting tired of losing. We lost 0-7 tonight. We lost 0-7 on Saturday. We lost 2-5 last Monday. We lost 3-4 last Saturday.

Worse, at about 26 weeks into the season, I’ve reached the point where the ball is essentially dead. This happens every year. You pay a LOT of money for one of today’s super balls, but they do not hold up. You can clean them with the proper factory approved Wonder Goo every single time you bowl, and it doesn’t do much at all. I bought an entire quart of the stuff. You can use denatured alcohol. You can use various grit Abralon wet sanding pads. You can soak the ball in hot soapy water. You can scrub it with dish detergent. But it isn’t going to do much at all. The modern porous ball surface absorbs oil, and no matter what you do you can only get the very top layer off. But when you roll the ball, centrifugal forces will make the old oil rise up; a perfectly cleaned ball will only work for 15 or so throws, and then it goes downhill quickly.

So unless you can rev the ball up like a machine, it ain’t gonna do much. Plus I still can’t throw the damn thing properly. 5 years I’ve been at this. I’m getting tired of not getting it. I just might walk away after this season. I never get any better, and I usually only get worse. I think it’s time to go.





graphics courtesy of Rancino

Posted by Drew458     on 02/23/2009 at 09:33 PM   
Filed Under: • Bowling Blogging •  
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One Safety Plate Please

Making the rounds ...

A 14-year-old boy in China was killed when his chair exploded, sending chunks of metal into his rectum. The bleeding this caused killed him.

The alleged explosion came from the gas cylinder that was in the base of the chair, the part that allowed the user to adjust the seat up and down.

No, I have no idea how much the kid weighed, or how hard he sat down, or what brand of chair it was. Or even if this is fake. It’s one of those blog stories that’s going around. Pretty sure the original starts out here ... if you can read Chinese, please tell us what it says.



So, while you spend the rest of your afternoon working while standing up in your cubicle, here are some nice teeth. With hair too!. More? Fine with me.. Ok, now you’re getting greedy.

Posted by Drew458     on 02/23/2009 at 04:00 PM   
Filed Under: • Odd-Strange •  
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BT suspends 30 call centre staff for circulating ‘harmless’ Irish joke by email. JEESH!WHAT NEXT?

BT - British Telecom.

What a sorry state we’re in when a silly joke based on misused words can get people sacked.
Or maybe they’re canned because the joke wasn’t really funny.  Whatever.  What the hell is the world coming to?
Yeah,yeah.  I know.  Just do not wanna face it.

The joke really wasn’t funny so much as it was silly. See for yourself.
But I guess it only takes one officious oaf to bitch about something for a company to, “take appropriate measures.”

Had an almost sleepless night and a long morning what with legal stuff and starting probate and just normal stuff right?
Then see an article with a really dumb move by a company being pc and it just raises hackles because there really isn’t any need for this kind of thing.

ONE STOOLIE COMPLAINS, MOMMY,MOMMY . 30 SUSPENDED FROM JOBS!

By Daily Mail Reporter
Last updated at 8:11 AM on 23rd February 2009

BT has suspended 30 of its call centre staff after they were caught forwarding an email joke poking fun at the Irish.

Bosses at the telecoms firm did not see the funny side of the story, which involves four Irishmen, and an investigation is under way.

But the probe was today branded a waste of time and money, and a cynical ploy to axe staff during the recession.

One worker said yesterday: ‘Either BT have no sense of humour whatsoever or the bosses are deliberately trying to get shot of people without having to pay any redundancy money.

‘The joke was sent around the office as a bit of fun. Everyone is worried about their jobs but we all try and cheer each other up.

‘It was light-hearted but one person complained and suddenly managers were grilling people about the joke saying it was offensive and could be interpreted as a racist slur on Irish people.

‘I’m a quarter Irish and I didn’t think it was offensive. BT are being ridiculous and morale here has hit an all time low.’

John Midgley, of the Campaign Against Political Correctness said: ‘I sincerely hope that common sense is brought to bare on this and that political correctness does not cost these peoples’ jobs especially in the present economic climate.’

The Joke involves the death of three Irishmen. The first leaps with a budgie thinking he’s budgie-jumping; the second kills a parrot thinking he’s parrot-shooting and the third leaps off with a hen, believing he’s hen-gliding.

It was circulated around staff working at the BT call centre in Leicester - which employs 340 people - two weeks ago.

Managers suspended every worker who had forwarded the joke to someone else and warned them they face disciplinary action.

One suspended worker said: ‘The joke was harmless fun and the sort of thing millions of office workers send to each other up and down the country.

‘I received it and forwarded it to a colleague without thinking about it.

‘The next thing I knew managers were demanding to look at my computer to see who I’d emailed the joke to.

‘The fact I could now lose my job over this is really scary and I’d leave if I could afford to but there are no other jobs anywhere.’

This month, BT saw its share price plummet to an all-time low of 7.8 per cent to 97p.

It also emerged that the firm is paying 1,000 workers to do nothing while operations are scaled back to save cash.

A BT spokesman said: ‘A complaint was made about a joke which could be offensive to some people.

‘BT takes these matters seriously and will investigate any allegations.

‘We cannot comment on any investigation that may be taking place internally at the moment. These matters are treated in the strictest confidence.’

The Communication Workers Union (CWU), the UK’s largest union in the communications industry, blasted BT for suspending the call centre workers.

A spokesman said: ‘It’s incredible BT can spend this money on such a petty, meaningless investigation with customers very likely picking up the bill.’

The Leicester Irish Society also defended the employees, claiming BT bosses had lost their sense of humour.

A spokesman added: ‘The Irish are famous for their sense of humour but it appears BT have lost theirs.

‘The English and Irish communities have a long history of taking the micky out of each other.

‘The Irish probably have just as many, if not more jokes, about the English but they’re all meant in good spirits.

‘Suspending staff over a little joke is stupid and it would be funny if it wasn’t so serious for the people whose jobs are on the line.’

Posted by peiper     on 02/23/2009 at 11:19 AM   
Filed Under: • Big Business • Daily Life • Nanny State • Stoopid-People • UK •  
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Unusual Outsourcing

Norway has accepted that foreign squads can control the border to Russia. The guards will be wearing their own national uniforms with armband showing EU flag, carry out border patrols and check and stamp travel documents in critical situations.

In a pre-Christmas Council of State meeting the Norwegian King Harald V approved the government’s suggestion to join EUs rapid reaction teams of border guards. The decision by Norway on December 12th last year is a follow-up of the European Parliament’s approval in April 2007 of the European Commission’s proposal for the creation of Rapid Border Intervention Team.

The Commission proposed the establishment of such EU border squads to deal with critical situations member states could face in the event of high influx of illegal immigrants. The border squads can directly and efficiently assist the national border guard services of Member States in such situation, including with regard to the correct implementation of the Schengen Border Code.

Interesting. Pretty sure Norway is not part of the EU. And neither is Russia. So who will be guarding the Rodina? Turks? Poles? Latvians? Yeah, I’m sure they will do a most excellent job. But I really can’t blame the russkis and the ‘wegians. Who the heck wants to stand around in the cold all day? And they’ve got cold like nobody’s business up there.

Posted by Drew458     on 02/23/2009 at 11:03 AM   
Filed Under: • International •  
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We’re Having a Party

Good grief! I’ve got over 160 visitors online here all at the same time. And it’s been like that for a bit more than an hour.

Well glad to see everyone, come on in, pretzels and sody pop on your left. Please wipe your feet. And have something to say.

160 people in da house ... and not one new comment. COME ON.

UPDATE: yes, the cheese dip is gone. But I’ve got smoked pork products slow grilling out back. mmm, mmm! Pork products! I may have to run down for some beer or something soon.

There likely will be bowling blogging later, so be warned. We lost on Saturday. 0-7. I am right peeved. But I soaked the ball in detergent overnight and gave it some sanding today, so let’s see if it can hook again tonight for my other league.

New folks - nobody is going to twist your arm too badly to get you to leave comments, but I’m interested in why so many are showing up today. How did you find your way here, from where?

Posted by Drew458     on 02/23/2009 at 10:59 AM   
Filed Under: • Miscellaneous •  
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GOP Anniversary

The Republican National Committee is 153 years old today. Nearly as old as Senator Arlen Spectre (Idiot-PA) and Senator Robert C. Byrd (IV Dynasty Mummy - WV).

Republicans from many state parties held their first national organizational meeting in Pittsburgh on February 22, 1856.

Hooray. Woo hoo. Now get back to work and put the country back on track, you blighters.

Posted by Drew458     on 02/23/2009 at 10:54 AM   
Filed Under: • Republicans •  
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Good Luck With That

Binyam Mohamed, an Ethiopian-born former British resident released from Guantanamo Bay, returned to Britain on Monday, Foreign Secretary David Miliband said.

“I am pleased that Binyam Mohamed has today returned to the UK following his release from Guantanamo Bay,” Miliband said in a statement, as television pictures showed what they said was Mohamed’s plane landing at RAF Northolt airbase in northwest London.

“This is the direct result of our request for his release and return and follows intensive negotiations with the US government.”

In a statement earlier, Mohamed said he had been “tortured in medieval ways—all orchestrated by the US government.”

Mohamed is the first prisoner to be transferred from Guantanamo since US President Barack Obama took office last month and promptly pledged to shut it. Miliband added that Mohamed had been accompanied on the flight by Foreign Office officials, Metropolitan Police officers and a doctor and that Mohamed’s family and lawyers had been informed. Home Secretary Jacqui Smith said Sunday that Mohamed would be granted temporary admission into Britain, where he has refugee status.

Silly Britons. The guy is from Ethiopia, not the Lakes District.

Mohamed was arrested in Pakistan in 2002 before being taken to Morocco and Afghanistan before Guantanamo. Although he was suspected of having attended an Al-Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan and of having plotted to build a radioactive “dirty bomb,” he was never charged.

Charged? By whom? If this guy committed a crime it was in Pakistan. That’s where he should be sent home to. Nowhere else. So how did he wind up in our POW camp? I have no idea. My guess is he was a little fish that lead to bigger fish. Maybe it is a good thing that we let him go. Maybe he was this close to pushing the button when he was nabbed. Without a whole lot more information, we will never know.

Posted by Drew458     on 02/23/2009 at 10:13 AM   
Filed Under: • War On Terror •  
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an inconvenient exclusion

TROLL RESEARCH STATION, Antarctica – A parka-clad band of environment ministers landed in this remote corner of the icy continent on Monday, in the final days of an intense season of climate research, to learn more about how a melting Antarctica may endanger the planet.

Representatives from more than a dozen nations, including the U.S., China, Britain and Russia, were to rendezvous at a Norwegian research station with American and Norwegian scientists coming in on the last leg of a 1,400-mile (2,300-kilometer), two-month trek over the ice from the South Pole.

The visitors will gain “hands-on experience of the colossal magnitude of the Antarctic continent and its role in global climate change,” said the mission’s organizer, Norway’s Environment Ministry.

They’ll also learn about the great uncertainties plaguing research into this southernmost continent and its link to global warming: How much is Antarctica warming? How much ice is melting into the sea? How high might it raise ocean levels worldwide?

The answers are so elusive that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a Nobel Prize-winning U.N. scientific network, excluded the potential threat from the polar ice sheets from calculations in its authoritative 2007 assessment of global warming.

The IPCC forecast that oceans may rise up to 23 inches (0.59 meters) this century, from heat expansion and melting land ice, if the world does little to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases blamed for atmospheric warming.

But the U.N. panel did not take Antarctica and Greenland into account, since the interactions of atmosphere and ocean with their enormous stores of ice — Antarctica has 90 percent of the world’s ice — are poorly understood.

And yet the West Antarctic ice sheet, some of whose outlet glaciers are pouring ice at a faster rate into the sea, “could be the most dangerous tipping point this century,” says a leading U.S. climatologist, NASA’s James Hansen.

... another IPY project, an all-out effort to map by satellite radar the “velocity fields” of all Antarctic ice sheets over the past two summers, to assess how fast ice is being pushed into the surrounding sea.

Then scientists may understand better the “mass balance” — how much the snow, originating with ocean evaporation, is offsetting the ice pouring seaward.

“We’re not sure what the East Antarctic ice sheet is doing,” David Carlson, IPY director, explained last week from the program’s offices in Cambridge, England. “It looks like it is flowing a little faster. So is that matched by accumulation? What they come back with will be crucial to understanding the process.”

The politics of climate inevitably mixed with the science. Stranded in Cape Town an extra two days when high Antarctic winds scrubbed a planned weekend flight, the ministers were gently lobbied at lunch and dinner by Scandinavian counterparts favoring urgent action on a new global agreement to succeed the Kyoto Protocol, the deal to reduce greenhouse gases that expires in 2012.

President Barack Obama’s new U.S. administration has promised action after years of U.S. resistance to the Kyoto process. But the complexity of issues and limited time before a Copenhagen conference in December, target date for a deal, makes the outcome as uncertain as the future of Antarctica’s glaciers and offshore ice shelves.

Much more research lies ahead, say the scientists, including investigations of the possible warming and shifting currents of the Southern Ocean ringing Antarctica. “We need to put more resources in,” said IPY’s Carlson.

Outspoken scientists say political action may be even more urgently needed.

“We are out of our cotton-pickin’ minds if we let that process get started,” Hansen said of an Antarctic meltdown. “Because there will be no stopping it.”

Posted by Drew458     on 02/23/2009 at 09:07 AM   
Filed Under: • Climate-Weather •  
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   Sunday - February 22, 2009

The Real Prize

A guest post by Rancino.

During WWII, Irena got permission to work in the Warsaw Ghetto as a Plumbing/Sewer specialist.

She had an ulterior motive… She KNEW what the Nazi’s plans were for the Jews, (being German).  Irena smuggled infants out in the bottom of her tool box she carried, and she also carried in the back of her truck a Burlap sack, (for larger kids). She also had a dog in the back that she trained to bark when the Nazi soldiers let her in and out of the ghetto. The soldiers, of course, wanted nothing to do with the dog, and the barking covered the kids/infants noises.

During her time and course of doing this, she managed to smuggle out and save 2500 kids/infants. She was caught, and the Nazi’s broke both her legs and arms and beat her severely.

Irena kept a record of the names of all the kids she smuggled out and kept them in a glass jar, buried under a tree in her back yard.  After the war, she tried to locate any parents that may have survived it, and reunited the families. Most, of course, had been gassed. Those kids she helped were placed into foster family homes or adopted.



Last year Irena was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize ...

She LOST.

Al Gore won for doing a slide show on Global Warming.

Posted by Drew458     on 02/22/2009 at 04:38 PM   
Filed Under: • Heroes •  
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Times Gone By

A poetic guest post by Carol, who found this somewhere and liked it. Me too, except I have no idea who Jean McKinney was.

Long ago and far away, in a land that time forgot,
Before the days of Dylan, or the dawn of Camelot.
There lived a race of innocents, and they were you and me,


For Ike was in the White House in that land where we were born,
Where navels were for oranges, and Peyton Place was porn.


We learned to gut a muffler, we washed our hair at dawn,
We spread our crinolines to dry in circles on the lawn.


We longed for love and romance, and waited for our Prince,
And Eddie Fisher married Liz, and no one’s seen him since.


We danced to ‘Little Darlin,’ and sang to ‘Stagger Lee’
And cried for Buddy Holly in the Land That Made Me, Me.


Only girls wore earrings then, and 3 was one too many,
And only boys wore flat-top cuts, except for Jean McKinney.


And only in our wildest dreams did we expect to see
A boy named George with Lipstick, in the Land That Made Me,Me.


We fell for Frankie Avalon, Annette was oh, so nice,
And when they made a movie, they never made it twice.


We didn’t have a Star Trek Five, or Psycho Two and Three,
Or Rocky-Rambo Twenty in the Land That Made Me, Me.


Miss Kitty had a heart of gold, and Chester had a limp,
And Reagan was a Democrat whose co-star was a chimp.


We had a Mr. Wizard, but not a Mr. T,
And Oprah couldn’t talk yet, in the Land That Made Me, Me.


We had our share of heroes, we never thought they’d go,
At least not Bobby Darin, or Marilyn Monroe.


For youth was still eternal, and life was yet to be,
And Elvis was forever in the Land That Made Me, Me.


We’d never seen the rock band that was Grateful to be Dead,
And Airplanes weren’t named Jefferson, and Zeppelins were not Led.


And Beatles lived in gardens then, and Monkees lived in trees,
Madonna was Mary in the Land That Made Me, Me.


We’d never heard of microwaves, or telephones in cars,
And babies might be bottle-fed, but they weren’t grown in jars.


And pumping iron got wrinkles out, and ‘gay’ meant fancy-free,
And dorms were never co-ed in the Land That Made Me, Me.


We hadn’t seen enough of jets to talk about the lag,
And microchips were what was left at the bottom of the bag.


And Hardware was a box of nails, and bytes came from a flea,
And rocket ships were fiction in the Land That Made Me, Me.


Buicks came with portholes, and side shows came with freaks,
And bathing suits came big enough to cover both your cheeks.


And Coke came just in bottles, and skirts below the knee,
And Castro came to power near the Land That Made Me, Me.


We had no Crest with Fluoride, we had no Hill Street Blues,
We had no patterned pantyhose or Lipton herbal tea
Or prime-time ads for those dysfunctions in the Land That Made Me, Me.


There were no golden arches, no Perrier to chill,
And fish were not called Wanda , and cats were not called Bill.


And middle-aged was 35 and old was forty-three,
And ancient were our parents in the Land That Made Me, Me.


But all things have a season, or so we’ve heard them say,
And now instead of Maybelline we swear by Retin-A.


They send us invitations to join AARP,
We’ve come a long way, baby, from the Land That Made Me,Me.


So now we face a brave new world in slightly larger jeans,
And wonder why they’re using smaller print in magazines.


And we tell our children’s children of the way it used to be,
Long ago and far away in the Land That Made Me, Me.

Posted by Drew458     on 02/22/2009 at 04:33 PM   
Filed Under: • Fun-Stuff •  
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Both Barrels

Pull!!

Hit!

Hit!

Posted by Drew458     on 02/22/2009 at 01:23 PM   
Filed Under: • The New Conservatives •  
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Why Obama removed the bust of Sir Winston Churchill

You probably have already heard, read, or had a pigeon message that the The Obamessiah had a bust of Winston Churchill removed from the Oval Office.

As Mark Steyn wrote:

Meanwhile, President Obama has removed Winston Churchill’s bust from the Oval Office and returned it to the British. Given what Sir Winston had to say about Islam in his book on the Sudanese campaign, the bust will almost certainly be arrested at Heathrow and deported as a threat to public order.

I will probably get in trouble, but I think I know why El Presidente Obama had the bust removed. I offer my evidence…

Sir Winston Churchill

And now:

Rush Limbaugh

The resemblance is uncanny, isn’t it? Rush! Where’s your cigar?

Posted by Christopher     on 02/22/2009 at 09:23 AM   
Filed Under: • Fun-Stuff •  
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   Saturday - February 21, 2009

NO offense to islam of course but make up your own mind.

Sneakingly made off with this from Vilmar’s site, who grabbed it from HotAir
H/T Vilmar

THE QUR’AN CHALLENGE.

Posted by peiper     on 02/21/2009 at 01:47 PM   
Filed Under: • Humor • RoPMA •  
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   Friday - February 20, 2009

Ramirez!!

Posted by Drew458     on 02/20/2009 at 02:43 PM   
Filed Under: • Humor •  
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