Yet another clear example of East Coast Elite Bias.  This map of the interments of past Supreme Court Justices says it all. :-)

I wish I'd posted this.  Damn that Cheney.  But at least Terrorism will end soon.  :-)

A friend of mine is getting married this weekend.  I tried to reason with him, but he won't listen.  Anyway, I'm performing the ceremony, and it lead me to thinking about a personal hero of mine:  Country Dick Montana.  Ironically, Dick died 11 years ago today. Dick was the drummer and sometime lead singer of the infamous Beat Farmers.  If you never got to see them live, or at least hear one of their albums, boy, did you miss out.  What an amazing guy.  One of his best quotes was regarding Dan Quayle.   "People say he's a pussy, but I'm telling you, he's no pussy. A pussy is a good thing!" Anyway, Dick was also often called upon to perform outrageous wedding ceremonies.  He married people floating down the Colorado River, in the middle of the desert, etc.  I attended one once before a Chargers' game, out in the parking lot.  Talk about a party!  But the best story was told by Dick's longtime friend, Mojo Nixon, on the 10th anniversary of Dick's death last year, in an interview with HARP.

One of these weddings, I think it was in Arizona, [the couple] got married in a bar, then went back to their house. They wanted Country Dick to continue partyin' and drinkin' with them [so he did]. Well, the groom eventually passes out-and the bride is there on her wedding night unserviced. Who steps up to the plate? Country Dick Montana. And the groom didn't care! It was kinda like having the King fuck your wife, you know?

Man, I miss that guy.  And I hope I strive to be more like him every day.  Though I doubt any wedding I preside over will ever end quite like that.  :-)  RIP, Dick.  The world is a much more boring place without you. 

€œIt is God€™s miracle. Our savior has returned,€ said Fernanda Lopez, 76, tears of joy streaming down her face.  This is regard to Daniel Ortega likely winning the Presidential election in Nicaragua. You deserve each other, you fucking idiot.

A friend of mine and I recently had a conversation about wearing rude or offensive t-shirts.  We both like them, but he feels as though he can't pull them off.  I, on the other hand, would be happy to wear most of them, though I do prefer them on chicks. Anyway, I'm going to order some from this site this week, and see what kind of reaction I get when I wear them out.  :-)

OMG.  So, I'm watching live election coverage today on MSNBC, and Tucker Carlson is wearing a regular honest to god tie!  Not a bow tie, but a good old fashioned Windsor knot style tie! Surely this bodes badly for the Republicans.

I don't think I've posted on this before, but I now have a new way to track the amount of Spam email I receive on a monthly basis.  You see, I now filter all of my mail through Gmail.  I forward my regular email account to Gmail, and then use my POP3 client to check my mail there.  This way Gmail filters out most of the Spam for me, and I never have to see it. When I first started doing this, I would go in every few days and delete the email from the Spam folder, basically because I hated looking at that huge number.  Then I noticed one day that Gmail automatically deletes anything in that folder that is over 30 days old.  An idea stuck me.  What if I just leave that folder alone.  Then I would have a perpetual count of how much Spam I had received in the last 30 days.  When I first started doing this, the number was around 2800.  It slowly crept up to 3000.  Well, I checked today, and it's 4697.  Wow.  At first, I was tempted to be angry about that general volume of Spam, since you and I all pay for that at least in the form of bandwidth charges.  But then I realized something.  That number is a beautiful representation of the wasted time and effort of the Spammers.  I know, I'm really reaching for a bright side here.  But hey, it's the only one I can find.

Among the themes embodied in the incessant pedantic ranting from the Angry Left vis-a-vis illegal immigration, one often hears that these illegals are needed here, because they take jobs Americans just won't do.  In Los Angeles, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has claimed that without illegals immigrants, the country could not run.  They "clean your toilets," he once famously said. Perhaps.  But it does not mean that an American will not clean my toilet, if offered the job.  In fact, I've often thought this to be a particularly bogus argument.  If anything, it would seem to me that illegals take away jobs from honest, hard working Americans.  However, living in Southern California, I've always had a hard time making this argument, since almost all of the manual labor in this part of the world is done by illegal aliens.  Virtually ever hotel maid, gardener, busboy, etc. around here is Mexican, and probably here illegally.  Even when travelling to Las Vegas, one sees the same thing.  None of the hotel maids speak any English.  Are these really jobs Americans won't do? Well, I recently had the pleasure of travelling to North Carolina.  My thoughts on the state in general will have to wait for another post.  But I did notice one rather amazing thing!  Everywhere I stayed, and everywhere I ate, the ENTIRE staff was English speaking Americans!  Every last one!  You can imagine my amazement, I'm sure.  Here are thriving American businesses, using regular old Americans for their labor force, and guess what?  They could fill these jobs! And what's more, it actually seemed to me like the prices at these places were lower than what I pay in Southern California for similar goods and services.  How can this be?  I mean, I know the cost of living is cheaper in that part of the world, but come on!  These are Americans actually working in regular jobs!!!  Surely they cost a small fortune to employ, right?  Man, I bet I could make a killing just helping illegal workers get to North Carolina.  Think of all of the jobs there that "Americans won't do!" Ok, enough sarcasm.  But the one thing I truly don't understand is why the labor movement isn't more pissed about this?  These people are taking jobs Americans clearly can and will do, assuming there isn't some illegal alien at the ready to undercut them. I really wish some major news outlet would do a piece on this freaking nonsense, but I'm not going to hold my breath.

Christoher Hitchens weighs in on this whole notion of an Iraq exit strategy.  In a recent conversation with a friend, we both agreed that immediately pulling out of Iraq would work just fine, assuming that we destroyed everything in our path on the way out.  This is a perfectly fine solution to me, but of course, this will never happen.  Hitchens points out that we've basically been emasculated by the notion that actually fighting back against these thugs worsens our position. Money quote:

To this way of thinking, victory is impossible by definition, because any response other than restraint is bound to inflame the militancy of the other side. Since the jihadists, by every available account, are also inflamed and encouraged by everything from passivity to Danish cartoons, this seems to shrink the arena of possible or even thinkable combat.

So clearly, we're just supposed to curl up in a ball and just hope it all goes away.  This is so not the America I want to live in anymore.