Nothing But Love :: golf blogger

Best Stocking Stuffer Ever

There's no way that you can NOT get this for your kid, no matter what age; and, of course, you would necessarily need one for self defense.

The Christmas Spirit

Stacey is fond of citing Kermit the Frog as her authority for the true meaning of the Christmas spirit, when he sings:

I don't know if you believe in Christmas
Or if you have presents underneath a Christmas tree;
But is you believe in love,
That will be more than enough
For you to come and celebrate with me.

Christmas is the time to come together,
A time to put all differences aside;
And I reach out my hand
To the family of Man
To share the joy I feel at Christmas time.

But here's the reality -- The U.S. House of Representatives passed by a vote of about 400 to 6 back in October a bill that calls for the formation of the National Commission on the Prevention of Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism. The bill is over in the Senate now and may be coming up for a vote after the holidays.

The purpose of the proposed law is the formation of a committee that will:

Examine and report upon the facts and causes of violent radicalization, homegrown terrorism, and ideologically based violence in the United States, including United States connections to non-United States persons and networks, violent radicalization, homegrown terrorism, and ideologically based violence in prison, individual or ‘lone wolf’ violent radicalization, homegrown terrorism, and ideologically based violence, and other faces of the phenomena of violent radicalization, homegrown terrorism, and ideologically based violence that the Commission considers important.

How? Hearings, subpoenas, testimony.

History, it seems, repeats itself. The following excerpt is taken from Public Law 601, 79th Congress, 1946:

The Committee on Un-American Activities, as a whole or by subcommittee is authorized to make from time to time investigations of (i) the extent, character, and objects of un-American propaganda activities in tile United States, (ii) the diffusion within the United States of subversive and un-American propaganda that is instigated from foreign countries or of a domestic origin and attacks the principle of the form of government as guaranteed by our Constitution, and (iii) all other questions in relation thereto that would aid Congress in any necessary remedial legislation shall report to the House (or to the Clerk of the House if the House is not in session) the results of any such investigation, together with such recommendations as it deems advisable.

Kermit the Frog for President!

Man at Work

I'm working at my desk, trying to get things done.

And I am being force-fed much legal knowledge because the judge shows are on television in the background.

Then I hear a line from a woman, who obviously has it all together:

I look at all kinds of internal organs, veins, and arteries.

What the fuck?

I make a go-o-o-od living, and I didn't have to spend years in school.

She said I should call Sanford Brown Institute, but I took a break and visited the website and figured out that she was doing ultrasounds.

Not autopsies.

Ahh, Dude ... Fixing Elections

In Ohio, the Secretary of State commissioned a study of electronic voting machines and their reliability and integrity. The study showed that all of the machines could be corrupted. She called for a return to paper ballots. Damn ... back to Chicago-style stuffing the ballot boxes.

In The New York Times article, there was an interesting quote from a guy with one of the electronic voting machine companies:

The study released Friday found that voting machines and central servers made by Elections Systems and Software; Premier Election Solutions, formerly Diebold; and Hart InterCivic; were easily corrupted.

“It is important to note,” he said, “that there has not been a single documented case of a successful attack against an electronic voting system, in Ohio or anywhere in the United States.”

Mr. Riggall, like, y'know, I don't mean to be critical, duder, and I'm no ... errr ... rocket scientist, but if there was ... uhhhhh ... like a documented case, then it wouldn't have been ... uhhhh, what's the word ... oh yeah ... successful.

And I'm no ... uhhh ... psychologist ... dude, ... but aren't you like ... errr ... inferring ... no, that's not the word .... implying ... like ... uhhh ... tellin' us, y'know, like ... uhhh ... from your sub-conscious mind, dude, so to speak ... that there's like ... uhhh, an undocumented case of being ... ummm ... successful?

Just thinkin' ... y'know ... through the obfuscatory haze, dude.

Lead Exposure

Why didn't the mother fuckers warn me?

I repaired a string of Christmas tree lights, and now they tell us that Christmas tree lights could contain unsafe levels of lead.

Now, I'm wondering about the vaporization of lead on the PVC coatings by electrical charges -- there should be a study, y'know, a National Institutes of Health-funded study to find out how much lead is vaporized when someone puts the wire in his mouth after some of the PVC insulation is stripped away.

Okay, Okay, okay ... I know people aren't stupid enough to put live wires in their mouths; but you never know about accidentally getting live wires stuck in their mouths, like what happens down at Guantanamo.

You had to see that one coming -- it was only about an 85 mile-an-hour fastball. Eminently hittable. Or Eminemenently hittable.

G.I. Bill

The educational benefits of those who served in the military in the mid-to-late 20th Century allowed them to attend college. Back in the day, when I was in college, two guys on the baseball team, who were really, really old -- about 30 -- were in school only because they received the benefits of the G.I. Bill.

That benefit has been scaled back to such an extent that the advertising designed to emphasize the educational benefits available to those entering the military is misleading, at best, or fraudulent, if we want to be truthful about it.

Here's a fact, though. Assuming that a 4 or 5 year college education runs about $100,000, the government could have turned out 5,000,000 graduates with what has been wasted on the war in Iraq. What would that have done for this country?

Just sayin'.

Snow came down today. I can see why some people want to live in Florida, since it was 80 degrees every day we were there. Well, that's not totally true. The temperature was 74 in Sarasota, where we visited Stacey's sister, PJ, after a 3 1/2 hour drive around Lake Okeechobee and over to the Gulf coast.

Coming back to snow and colder weather was not as bad as you'd think. Among other things, we have:

1) No fucking huge cockroaches palmetto bugs;
2) No omnipresent smell of bug spray indoors;
3) A sense of "Fuck the Man!" when making U-turns;
4) The large fresh water lake a couple blocks north of here (No, you can't see Canada) which supplies water that doesn't taste like a sulfur-aluminum mixture;
5) Soft drinks in restaurants that don't taste like a sulfur-aluminum mixture;
6) Police that drive marked patrol cars instead of a 2006 silver Dodge Charger.

When Matt was 13, we went to the tattoo parlor together and were initiated into the world of body art. When J-dogg was 13, we went to the tattoo parlor to carry on the tradition; however, somebody changed the fucking laws, deeming that parents who allow their children under 16 to get tattoos are lunatics, and we were turned away.

Thereafter, J-dogg plunged into the dark abyss of substance abuse. Cause and effect, I say. He's been clean and sober for over a year, working his program. We carried on tradition and visited a tattoo parlor, finally. Equilibrium.

The Ham Situation

We took a trip to Florida to see the Jackal. We left there this afternoon just in time to beat the cold front that was moving through all the Palm Beaches, which, I understand, was going to plunge the temperature into the high 60's and low 70's. We were lucky to make it out before all flights were canceled.

I am posting this for your information. Many of you travel, and I wanted to make you aware of problems I have encountered in my own globe-trotting.

Please take notice that the TSA -- that's the Transportation Safety Administration to those of you who don't often travel by plane or train and have been sequestered from all contact with FOX News -- frowns upon packing half of an award-winning ham from The Sausage Shoppe in your luggage. The only things in the checked bag were the vacuum-packed ham and two cell phone car chargers, and I found one of these in the bag:

I'm trying to figure out just what the TSA inspectors thought when the bag made its way through the Scannabombometer 5000 and detected this:

Did they think that I put a bone bomb in my satchel? I mean what is the purpose of scanning luggage? To find contraband hams headed for Florida?