Author: VD

Yeah, this sort of circular email is only one half-step up from Spam, but some of these were pretty funny and it will amuse a certain pretty blonde girl to see them here. How many dogs does it take to change a light bulb?

Golden Retriever: The sun is shining, the day is young, we’ve got our whole lives ahead of us, and you’re inside worrying about a stupid burned-out bulb?

Border Collie: Just one. And then I’ll replace any wiring that’s not up to code.

Rottweiler: Make me.

German Shepherd: I’ll change it as soon as I’ve led these people from the dark, check to make sure I haven’t missed any, and make just one more perimeter patrol to see that no one has tried to take advantage of the situation.

Greyhound: It isn’t moving. Who cares?

Poodle: I’ll just blow in the Border Collie’s ear and he’ll do it. By the time he finishes rewiring the house, my nails will be dry.

Ridgeback: I’ll bark at the next delivery guy. He’ll change it. After he changes his underwear.

Vizsla: Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful.

Beagle: WHAT? THE LIGHT BULB NEEDS TO BE CHANGED?? HEY! HEY! THE LIGHT BULB NEEDS TO BE CHANGED! WOWOOOO, WOWOO! SOMEBODY BETTER CHANGE THE LIGHTBULB!!

Cat: “Dogs do not change light bulbs. People change light bulbs. So, the real question is: How long will it be before I can expect some light, some dinner, and a massage?”

The Eagles squeaked out another win, moving them to within one game of the NFC East-leading Cowboys. One could argue that McNabb is finding ways to win, though of course even winning a Super Bowl that way wasn’t enough for Trent Dilfer to keep his job. Nor is a quarterback usually anointed a superstar because his team wins a few low-scoring games against mediocre opposition.

CMP ATT PCT YDS AVG TD INT RTG

108 213 50.7 995 4.7 3 7 54.8

At least he’s got his completion rating up over fifty percent again after last week’s 17/23 performance. I’d hardly characterize a 141-yard, 1-TD, 1-INT performance as “McNabb Outduels Pennington“, though.

28th in Yards Passing. 34th in Touchdowns. Tied for 12th in Interceptions. Off the charts – below 35th – in Completion Percentage, Yards per Attempt and Quarterback Rating. This is well below quarterbacks who have lost their job this season, such as Mark Brunell and Tim Couch. Of course, we’re still waiting to hear the sportswriting community confess that Rush was right about McNabb being overrated.

Three of the four laptops I’ve owned are Dell machines. I’m not sure how I feel about them anymore, though. I was just considered moving from 256 megs of memory to 512, now that Linux will prevent my current Latitude from becoming hopelessly outdated in another year or two, when I had a chilling reminder of a past problem with my other Dell. I’ve experienced:

1. Broken clamshell holder – old machine, gave it away

2. Broken Delete key – keyboard replaced under warranty

3. Broken PCMCIA socket – replaced under warranty

4. Broken USB socket – didn’t even know this was possible, still broken

5. I, K and , keys didn’t work this morning. A hard boot seems to have taken care of this, but I’m nervous. It’s hard to write without any letter in the alphabet, but partcularly hard wthout one of the fve vowels. Just kddng!

Still, these are not problems that I’d expect, considering that I seldom move my laptop and have never treated it roughly. And when I consider that Dell gives you your choice of which flavor of XP you want pre-installed, I’m not as sure as I once was that my next laptop will be a Dell.

I think that the explosion of interest in fantasy football has created some high profile openings for some very mediocre analysts. Here’s some of the “insight” being offered by CNN/SI’s vaunted fantasy gurus:

Bob Harris suggests staying away from: the Chicago Bears offense, Cleveland Browns QB, Miami QB, New York Jets QB and Philadelpha WRs. He also recommends not contracting the Ebola virus, not sticking your head in the microwave and not driving your car into a brick wall at 60 miles per hour. Thanks, Bob!

Meanwhile, Dr. Football thinks that Peyton Manning, Daunte Culpepper and Steve McNair are good starts. Are you sure, doctor? Do you really think the three starting QBs with the three highest QB ratings in the league are good starts? Manning is going against the second-worst defense in the league this week, but until I read your brilliant insight, I was planning to sit him and start Kordell Stewart. Dr. Football also just discovered that Joey Harrington, currently leading the 1-5 Detroit Lions into oblivion, is “starting to fade”. Starting? I ditched him as a backup after Week 2, when it became clear that my mother could throw for two TDs against Arizona, and probably rush for a third

Who are these jokers? Look, the kind of questions that we need answered are things like: in what order would you rank Onterrio Smith, Michael Bennet and Moe Williams for the rest of the season? Do you start Domanick Davis against Indy, or should you sit him since he’s getting vultured at the goal line by Stacy Mack? Does LaDainian’s 200 last week help or hurt David Boston against Miami?

Please try to keep this in mind, gentlemen. If you’re only going to predict the sure thing, you are as useless as calling a QB draw for Vinnie Testaverde.

Not long after the St. Paul Pioneer Press abandoned its register-to-read policy, the paper across the river, the Star Tribune, has initiated one. I won’t bother providing a link, since you can’t read it anyhow. As I am opposed to all corporate tracking measures that compromise Internet anonymity, I refuse to register for any online newspaper, which is why I no longer read:

1) The New York Times

2) The Washington Post

3) The Star Tribune

I don’t read them online, anyhow. There’s still nothing to keep me from picking up the office copy of the Star Tribune in the meantime, not until they manage to produce newsprint that bursts into flames and consumes the entire paper should it be touched by a non-registered biometric pattern.

True, I will probably be a little late to the next NYT-manufactured non-story, such as the massive Master’s protests that swept the nation – who could ever forget the rage – but I’ll survive and thrive nevertheless. I also predict that the Star Tribune will open up its content within six months as its Internet readership drops off a cliff. I’m not saying that they don’t have a perfect right to close off their web site to anonymous visitors, I just don’t think that culling one’s readership is a particularly smart move in this day of media saturation. I quit reading the Nando Times, an early web favorite, when they began to require registration, and it doesn’t look as if I was the only one to do so.

Registration is akin to a cable news show declaring: “you can watch us, but only if you first tell us who you are.” Yeah, good luck with that.

Okay, that’s not true. I recommended Red Hat because I’m using Redhat 8 and I know it works. However, I suspect that the many folks who recommended Mandrake 9.2 were doing so on the basis of its 9.1 release, not because they have used it themselves. Mandrake 9.2 is not looking so great at the moment, at least not for those with LG Electronics CD-Rom drives, which apparently are widely used in Dell machines. However, the statement from LG Electronics seemed to imply that the problem is a Linux incompatibility, not a Mandrake one, so clearly more information is needed before we can conclude either:

a) another distro would be a better option for beginners

b) Dell users can’t migrate to Linux

Now, (b) can’t be entirely true, as I’m typing this on a Dell Latitude CPx running Redhat 8. However, it’s pretty obvious that before you install Mandrake 9.2, and quite possibly any other flavor of Linux, you’ve got to make sure you don’t have an LG Electronics CD-Rom drive.

Neal Stephenson, technoprophet and quite possibly the finest writer of my generation, voiced prescient doubts that Microsoft would be able to wean itself from dependency on its operating systems in his excellent In The Beginning was the Command Line. He saw them as following in Apple’s footsteps, missing the opportunity to make a necessary self-transformation in a futile attempt to protect the increasingly less valuable crown jewels.

Microsoft’s latest move demonstrates that the dependency is stronger than ever, as after acquiring Virtual PC from Connectix – a means of running multiple operating systems on a single machine – they removed mention of Linux and a few other operating systems from the setup wizard. Jury is still out on whether the Microsoft “improvements” have altogether crippled the product. This is not only short-sighted, if one accepts Stephenson’s point of view, but borders on downright stupid considering that Microsoft has repeatedly denied that it buys other companies simply to shut them down and avoid competition. Not that Microsoft has a whole lot of credibility anymore. (Reader DZ points out that this isn’t the first time, either.)

One is reminded of Lenin’s famous quote about capitalists selling the rope that will be used one day to hang them.

Here’s a cheerful story for everyone who still has any doubts about the brainwashing element of the public school system. Don’t read. Don’t think. Take your test, accept your assigned place and be a good little cog in the socialist corporasphere. And if you’re not clear on the difference between a good little consumer and a bad little consumer, the MPAA, with the aid of Junior Achievement, will send special teachers to your elementary or junior high school to make sure you know right from wrong.

Not that there’s any such thing as right and wrong. All morals are relative. Except for what the people responsible for murderous bloodbaths such as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Kill Bill tell you, that is.

“We’re really trying to teach young people to be responsible and to obey laws that they may not understand,” said David Chernow, Junior Achievement’s chief executive, apparently oblivious to the fact that children from 5th to 9th grade are seldom considered to be experts in intellectual property law.

Teach them to obey laws they don’t understand. Yes, that sums it up nicely.

Many states already require vaccinations before children are ‘allowed’ to attend government schools. Now, a government school is the first to institute universal radio tracking. I wonder precisely how long will it be before implanted RFIDs are required for children attending government schools. Yet another reason to keep/take your children out of the public schools.

“The EU has even described Switzerland’s position on future membership of the bloc as ‘controversial’. Commentators say Brussels has always seen the bilaterals as a first stage towards full membership of the bloc – a view certainly not held by the People’s Party. And they believe Brussels would be unwilling to continue negotiations if it thought Switzerland was reneging on this unspoken promise. ‘If this were withdrawn, it would be difficult to explain to the EU member countries why Switzerland had been working on special accords with the EU’, said a EU commissioner.”

Of course, when getting the first bilateral agreement approved, the Swiss government absolutely denied that its approval had anything to do with joining Europe Uber alles. And the Swiss people voted heavily against putting their necks in the Eurofascist noose, with 80 percent of the population voting against even holding discussions to join the EU in 2001. Which leads one to wonder just what that unspoken promise was, and by whom it was given, since all four of the parties in government were officially against joining the EU at the time.

But it’s clear now that three of them were lying, as less than two years later, the Christian Democrats, the Radicals and the Social Democrats are now all lobbying openly for Switzerland to join up. Which, no doubt, is exactly what has propelled the People’s Party from a distant fourth place to first. It’s not too hard to see how the other three parties might find common ground with the anti-democratic EU, though, since they are banding together to deny the People’s Party, the top vote-getter in the most recent national elections, a second ministry of the seven available.

This is not the first time that talk of the inevitability of European union has been heard in Switzerland. Target Switzerland is an excellent history of the Third Reich’s failed attempt to swallow the small Alpine country. Here’s hoping the new Fourth Reich will have no better success.