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Congressman Randy Cunningham (R) tearfully resigned yesterday after being caught with his hands in a two million dollar cookie jar.

The thing that really bothers me about this is the way the guy denied that he’d done anything wrong back in July. “Noooo. Blah blah blah, this is a witch hunt, blah blah blah. I’m innocent of all charges, justice will reign, blah blah blah. War in Iraq!” I watched him last night on the news as he cried about, I dunno, trust and family or something but I just wasn’t biting. I think he’s only sorry that he got caught. Too bad he’ll have a couple million bucks to console himself in ten years when he gets out of prison.

The one line that really glared at me from the article says, “Prosecutors did not identify the defense contractors.” This shows that the problems with our government lie not just with officials. Halliburton? Nope, never heard of ‘em. Secret deals with defense contractors are nothing new but the outright raping and pillaging that is going on in Washington makes me gag. These people aren’t even trying to hide their shenanigans. Well, Cunningham tried…

The GOP is crumbling like a cookie made without butter. These arrogant warmongers are on the way out but they’ll be leaving a dessicated husk of a country behind. They have sucked this country dry and will be tossing it out of the car window on the way home. The true mind boggler here is that they’ll be back at some point because there are a lot of ignorant, uninformed people in this country that will vote for them again.

How many times will you look at the guy humping a corpse before taking action?

The game is about to start and the phone has been put on silent. While I’m totally pulling for the Pitt I have a feeling that the Colts are going to take this. My prediction: Colts win by 10. I’m not a bettin’ man and I don’t know what the current spread is, but that’s what I’m sticking with. We’ll see what happens…

UPDATE 8:59 PM: damn, there’s a minute and twenty-four left. 10 points??? I was being far too kind. My Steelers let me down every year. I’m tired of rooting for a losing team…I’m not going to give them up just yet, but man, it tries my nerves. These guys can’t even get a first down. Ever.

UPDATE 2 9:03: sixteen points. EFFIN’A. We’ll see how they do next week but Bubba, they’re out of the playoffs. The Steelers are finished for 2005. Maybe 2006 is their year. I seem to think that every year is going to be their year. Football sucks.

Bosnia unveils their tribute to Bruce Lee. Bruce died a year before I was born but he was such a constant figure in my life that I thought he was one of my parents. Anyway, very cool effigy. I hope to have such a cool bird-shitter when I’m gone.

via [BBC News]

Comeback of the year award should go to former head of FEMA Michael Brown. Brownie, as he likes to be called, is starting a disaster preparedness firm. He claims that companies have expressed interest in his services.

Why would anyone do that? Is he serious?

Step 1. Resign from cushy presidential appointment for failing to act during a moment of disaster and then act like a little weaseal and blame everyone else for what happened.
Step 2. ???
Step 3. Profit!

This park started as “Pac Bell Park” when it opened in 2000. Kind of an ugly name if you ask me, especially since the old park was named “Candlestick.” Well, I went to Pac Bell Park when it first opened and I immediately got burned by a souvenir-bat salesman. I purchased one of those little bats that’s about the same size as a policeman’s club and went back to my seat. Only then did I look at the bat and discovered that it wasn’t a “Pac Bell Park” bat, no, the bastard had sold me a “Candlestick” bat. I thought it was a dangerous move on his part to disgruntle his customers because they were all carrying bats but maybe he just gets lucky a whole lot.

Anyway, Pac Bell Park it was. Funny, Pac Bell wireless didn’t work inside the park, I wonder if that was ever taken care of…

In 2004 the name of the park was changed to “SBC” Park because of the corporate name change. I, along with everyone else in this city, yearned for the days when it was called “Pac Bell” because “SBC” just sounded horrible.

Today they changed the name of the park again, this time to an even UGLIER name of “AT&T” Park. Dammit. Why wasn’t the stupid park named after Willie Mays or something? Fucking AT&T? Gimme a break.

From now on, in my mind and when I’m talking to friends or in print, the new name of the park will be “Bullshit” Park. It’s the only way I can keep up.

Why was the merger of SBC and AT&T approved anyway? I thought that monopoly was broken up by the Justice Department back in the 80’s.

Tonight’s Family Guy was pretty funny. My favorite moments:
- Soundwave cameo. Soundwave was always my favorite Transformer even though he was an incompetant jackass that could never kill Megatron.
- Lois talking to Stewie’s teacher and looking at pictures that Stewie drew of himself killing Lois in various ways. The whole bit with Peter and Stewie laughing about trying to kill Lois was funny at first but seemed to go on a bit longer than it should have.
- Indian Jones bit which ends with Michael Eisner getting torn apart by crocodiles.

I don’t understand why Arrested Development was canceled but The War at Home is still around. I don’t think I’ve laughed once at that POS show. American Dad…hrm, I’m not used to it yet but it may grow on me. “Shoot first and ask questions later” made me laugh and the anti-gun musical number got a chuckle. I like Family Guy better…

I received an injection in my spine on Friday to help reduce the inflammation at the nerve root. My appt. was at 11:15 but I had to be there an hour early for prep. You’re not allowed to eat or drink six hours before the procedure so at one in the morning I had a sandwich hoping that it would hold me over until things were done. Things ended up running late (hospital culture dictates that you must hurry up to wait for hours on end, it also dictates that there should be lots of abandoned equipment stuffed into every available corner creating a harrowing ride for anyone unfortunate enough to be on a gurney) and I didn’t get my injection until quarter after one in the afternoon. Two damn hours of lying on the gurney and contemplating the ceiling, an older style of ceiling that had little holes in the tiles. I noticed some blood stains on the ceiling as well. I looked at those six drops of dried blood and tried not to think about the IV in my hand, there because my nurse had tried and failed to get the thing into one of the veins in my arm. Two hours later, I received a local anesthetic at the small of my back and then I received a steroid injection. Took all of 20 minutes and I still can’t figure out why they were two hours late. Maybe it was lunch time and everyone went out for tacos. Anyway, I’m just taking it easy this weekend and watching some football. Here’s a picture of my spine, the black line on the left being the needle that contains the steroid.

Awesome. The underground transit system in San Francisco, aka BART, is going wireless. I love riding the train but I don’t do it very often these days since I’m not working downtown anymore but I may start riding it again just for the hell of going to Pittsburg/Baypoint and back because wireless makes everything bearable. Having a wireless signal is great, I can take my new Sidekick II with me and sit on the train all day, surfing the interwebs or IM’ing (the way our language is evolving is scary to me but I’ll save that for another time) with people and sending email to the grandparents. Rawk \m/

Sitting on a train all day and watching people and writing is fun by itself but throw in a wireless signal and suddenly you’re *working* and getting things done and not just sitting at home and getting fat. No, instead you can sit on a train and get fat (as long as they don’t bust you for eating your lunch I guess) and look cool while doing so. The article says that downtown is covered and the stop near my apartment is scheduled so it’ll probably still be a little while before I’m posting to DMDN from the train but hopefully it won’t be that long of a wait.

Link via [Slashdot]

If you are on the Interwebs or World Wide Net and are not a member of the EFF then shame on you. If you are feeling guilty about your lack of membership then feel guilt no more, you can join the EFF by clicking on the little graphic in my sidebar under the heading of “organizations.” I’m not getting paid to put that graphic there, I feel that the EFF is absolutely necessary in defending the future of technology and digital rights and I feel lucky that they are around. Your mother supports EFF, shouldn’t you?

If you are too lazy to scroll down a bit and search for the flashing graphic then just click here to join the EFF.

My love affair with Sony began in the 80’s when I got my first Walkman. It was hard to believe that I could listen to my music while walking to school so I bought a bunch of blank tapes and I duped some of my records. I was the happiest kid in third grade and everywhere I walked I listened to I Love Rock N Roll, an album that my sister had given me for Christmas (mucho thanks Alexandra! I wish I knew where that album ended up…).

I replaced my Walkman with a Discman in the 90’s (my first CD that I bought was Slaughter’s Stick it to Ya, which I’d purchased before owning any sort of player…I kicked myself in the nuts the first time I finally listened to it…) and was dismayed that I had no means to dupe my records or tapes for this new medium. I could tell that the CD was going to change the way I listened to music so I went ahead and bought some cd’s of some of the records that I already owned. I didn’t know much about fair-use or copyright law back then but it really burned me to have to pay twice for the same damn music.

I received a Sony Boombox as a birthday present one year and was glad that I could finally listen to music without having to wear headphones. There’s nothing fancy about the boombox (I still have it and it still works) but it’s durability signed an invisible contract for me and Sony and I was firm in my belief that Sony produced the best consumer electronics available.

I’d always liked the look of the Sony VCR’s because of that round interface and the spinning-dial control for rewind and fast-forward so I picked one up (I still have it and it still works). This was a time of great rejoicing for me because I was old enough to rent porn.

Eventually everyone needs a calendar in their life and I was no exception. I picked up a Sony PDA, the sexily-thin PEG-T415 (I still have it and it still works…I don’t use it anymore because I’m on OS X these days) and my life was suddenly very organized. Thanks to Sony I could now carry appointments, contacts, games, and documents in my pocket. I haven’t seen a thinner PDA come out and alas, Sony is out of the PDA game for now.

I got sick of carrying cd’s around with me so I looked into the latest portable-music hardware and decided on MiniDisc. The latest Sony model was the first MiniDisc player to have a USB port and the idea of transferring music in faster-than-real-time really appealed to me (I still have it and it still works). I didn’t realize at the time (many people didn’t realize at the time) that in order to transfer the music I had to use the weird software that was bundled with the player and that the software converted the files into something called ATRAC, Sony’s own audio format. Wow, that software was terrible. It crashed my machine frequently and would seize up and refuse to transfer music. I couldn’t just delete a song on the player but instead had to “check” it “in” or “out.” Laaaame. Way lame. After browsing around the community of MiniDisc users I was finally able to find a method of getting music onto my minidiscs without having to use Sony’s software. That was a workable solution but I was really steamed that I had to go to such lengths just to listen to some Sade. My love for Sony began to fade.

These days everyone has heard of Sony’s recent f-up with installing rootkits on unsuspecting customers that happen to pop a CD into their computer. I’ve read numerous articles on this issue and to me it appears that Sony is only sorry that they got caught. True that they have “temporarily” stopped using the rootkit software but I think that this is only for as long as it takes to write a more secret and hard-to-find rootkit.

I haven’t bought a CD in quite a while but I know that I won’t buy any from Sony any time soon. I’m fed up with my old lover trying to cripple my music. While the Sony of old used to make incredibly sexy hardware I don’t find that to be the case these days. The stuff coming out of Sony is no better (and in some cases, quite worse) than anything else out there and it’s too damn expensive for what it is. Sony, you’ve sucked up plenty of my dollars over the years but you will suck them no more.

Now I must go and listen to some music to console myself. My DRM-crippled music that I purchased from the iTunes Music Store calls out to me. Well, thanks to jHymn it’s not really crippled anymore but once again I find myself fuming that I have to go to extraordinary lengths just to listen to music. Music that I’ve already paid for, sometimes paid for two or three times.

Apple, I use your products now but be warned that I’m keeping my eye on you.