Category: Uncategorized

The Next Vacation

Now that our long weekend in the mountains is over, it’s time to start looking forward to the next get away. The kids’ father is taking them on a trip during February vacation. That means we need to look toward April.

At first we thought of driving back to Disney. There are two downsides to that. First, my step daughter hates amusement park rides. If we went to Disney she would spend a lot of time being bored waiting for rides to end. The other problem is that my step son is a little nine year old dare devil. He will go on any ride at any time. That means one of the adults has to go on the death defying rides with him, and that just ain’t happening.

So we were sitting down to lunch today and we asked the kids to suggest a place we could travel to. My step son threw out Phoenix. That’s a good idea, but a little too far for a road trip. My step daughter came up with Quebec City. Now there’s an interesting idea. Jen then added a stop in Niagara Falls, which lead to stops in Toronto and Montreal. Now we’re talkin’, eh?

We often plan elaborate road trips like this, and we usually scrap the plans and just go to San Diego. For now though… Oh Canada!

A Modest Proposal: We Need to Tax Ammunition

A Modest Proposal

How much does a bullet cost?

I Googled “buy ammunition” and this site was the top hit returned.

Just a quick glance shows prices like, 1000 rounds for $225.00, or $0.225 per round.  880 rounds for $165.00, or $0.1875 per round.  My favorite headline on the site was 500 hollow point rounds for $285.00, or 57 cents a piece.

So let’s just say that bullets are not expensive.  Cheap, even.

Now let’s calculate how much the life of a human being is worth.  Incalculable?  How much is the life of a six year old child worth?  How much is the life of a school teacher in Connecticut worth?  How much are the lives of a class room full of elementary school kids worth?

I have no idea.  No one does.  Priceless?  That sounds right to me.  More than half a buck?  Duh, absolutely.  Obviously.  It’s insulting to even consider that.

So how is a bullet that exists for no reason other than to end a life worth less than a buck?  Worth less than a quarter?  How is that a fair trade?  We should change our system so that the value of a bullet is the same as the value of the life the bullet ends.  I would even be willing to sell the bullets at a massive discount.  How about we take that $0.57 hollow point bullet and add a tax to it.  I say we tax it at about 20 million percent.

0.57 * 20,000,000% = 0.57 * 200,000 = $114,000.

Compare $114,000 to the value of a human life and you are still getting that hollow point bullet at an obscene discount.  What a savings!  The 2nd amendment still applies.  You still have the right to bear arms.  You still have the right to be a gun owner whose chosen home security device is statistically more likely to end the life of either you or a member of your family, but now the price for your weapon’s ammunition more closely (but still not that close) equals the value of that which it was created to destroy.

It sounds like a fair plan to me.  Actually, it doesn’t, but it sounds more fair than the current system.

You Can Not Justify This At All

I’m not going to talk about the shooting in Newtown, CT today.  That evil speaks for itself.  My thoughts and best wishes go out to all of the people affected by this horror.

I want to talk about guns.  Within minutes of the news breaking, there were people all over the web giving the NRA propaganda word for word.  Gun control is pointless because the criminals don’t obey the gun control laws anyway.  The gun didn’t kill those babies, the man did.

I can’t stand it anymore.  How can you stand there and justify the fact that this guy was able to obtain a fucking cannon and bring it to an elementary school and slaughter children.  How can you possibly speak of the guns as if they are the fucking victim.  I can’t stand it anymore.  How many children need TO DIE before people stop spewing some outdated, inaccurate, pointless, EVIL political propaganda.  Did Charlton Fucking Heston go to that school today and pry that gun from the murderers cold dead hand?

That man’s rifle was a monster.  It was a cannon.  That was an instrument of death.  It has no purpose to exist other than to kill, kill quickly, and kill in large numbers.  And that asshole’s mom was able to obtain it legally.

LEGALLY!

The second amendment is not the issue here.  Legal restrictions on guns are not the issue here.

THE FACT THAT THE GUNS EXIST IS THE ISSUE HERE.

Maybe if manufacturing firearms outside of the military were illegal, our latest killer, and the killer from the mall shooting the other night, and the slime from the Batman movie shooting, and the kids from Columbine, and all of the others would have had a significantly tougher time bringing death to the innocent people around them.

One comment making the rounds on twitter tonight is that one person tried to sneak a bomb onto a plane and ever since the entire airline industry has been altered and every passenger’s shoes need to be inspected.  Yet this bitch kills children and their school teachers just a few days after another bitch killed holiday shoppers, just a few months after yet another bitch killed a bunch of people who just wanted to watch a movie… and nothing changes.  Heaven forbid we as a society did something to make our children safe.

All of the propaganda spewers talk about how the Constitution of the United States gives us the right to bear arms.  Well guess what, assholes, the Constitution of the United States gave us the right to own slaves as well and that evil was put away when the time came.  The second amendment will eventually be removed too.

Rant over… for now.

The Hobbit: An Expected Worry

I’m worried about The Hobbit.  I’m afraid it’s going to end up as nothing more than a visual sleep aide.  I’m afraid it is going to be to the Lord of the Rings trilogy what the Star Wars prequels were to the original Star Wars trilogy.

The Lord of the Rings is a seriously long story.  Three books.  A massive amount of information.  Almost every character is developed in detail.  Most of them are dealing with deeply personal issues on top of the whole end of the world crisis.  There is just so much there.  If they had shortened the films at all an enormous amount of important story would have been sacrificed.  Even more than there already was.  The story required three ridiculously long movies.  There’s no way it would have worked otherwise.

The Hobbit is, what… 400 pages?  For the most part it’s a light weight tale of short people wandering around a fantasy land.  Compared to the intricacies of Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit is kids stuff.  The good guys are good, the bad guys are bad, no one except Bilbo does any growing or changing throughout the story, and Bilbo only does in that he acts in ways that are unexpected.  He doesn’t so much grow as a person as roll with the punches.

Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed the book.  I just think it’s a little insulting to have this story ballooned into three, three hour films.  It’s going to result in exactly two things.  One, a shit load of money in the studio’s bank account.  Two, lots of really bored movie goers.

There, I said it.  It’s going to be boring.  Really boring.  Even if they add in mountains of content from the Lord of the Rings appendixes and what not, it’s still going to be hours on end of a bunch of Dwarves walking around with a Hobbit.

I still want to see it, but as the reality sinks in… we’re looking at nine hours of movie to interpret a 400 page book.  Even if it’s decent, it’s still never going to live up to the Lord of the Rings.  It’s never going to live up to its own hype.  This whole thing is a disaster waiting to happen.  I hope I’m wrong, but somehow… I don’t think I’m going to be.

New iOS Apps Make Me Happy

Chocolate Christmas Cheer

What is significant about this?

I uploaded it to Flickr, using the brand spanking new Flickr iPhone app.  Why is that significant?  Because it uploaded the full sized image!  The old app couldn’t do that.  The old app shrunk the image down.  Why on earth would a huge photo sharing web service have a mobile app that reduced the resolution of the images it uploaded?  What they hell were they thinking??

Anyway, the problem is gone.  The new app uploads the full image.  It also has all sorts of instagramish filters that I totally ignored.  I might play with them eventually, but not this time.  I have pretty much stopped using Instagram.  I actually deleted my account in protest of the removal of Twitter and (more importantly) Posterous integration, but then I went and opened another account.  These days, when I want vintage looking camera phone pictures I go to hipstamatic.

Anyway, back on subject.  I never really used the old Flickr mobile app because it sucked.  Simply.  I stuck to the web for my mobile Flickr needs, even though the Flickr mobile site kinda sucks too.  I haven’t really done much with the new app, so I’m not going to declare it a success of anything.  I am going to say that it’s a step in the right direction.  When Marissa Mayer took over as the CEO of Yahoo I was among the many who publicly begged her to restore Flickr back to its former glory.  I love Flickr.  I want everyone and their mother to use Flickr.  I want Flickr to once again be THE place on the web for photography, whether it be professionals posting magnificent works of photographic art, or dweebs like me posting hundreds of random camera phone images mixed in with slightly higher quality, but no less pointless vacation pictures.  Basically, I want Flickr to rule again.  May this new app be a sign that Yahoo is actually going to support, develop, and grow Flickr once again.

In other free iOS app news…

It’s back…

Untitled

Google Maps is finally back!  Oh happy day!  No longer do we need to worry that our iPhone’s maps app is going to lead us to the wrong place, or lead us to the right place only to find out that the thing we’re looking for isn’t there.  Peace of mind returns!

I had the new Google Maps app installed literally within seconds of hearing it was available.  I couldn’t grab it fast enough.  I only really used Apple Maps once, but after hearing all the horror stories and even hearing Tim Cook apologize for how crappy it is, I never even considered giving it a chance.  Even before taking the last update I was playing with Waze quite a bit, but I still prefer Google.  Tried and true, trusted Google Maps.  It’s nice to have you back, old friend.  We’ve missed you.

Deer

This morning as we were walking out to the car I heard leaves rustling behind our neighbor’s house. I looked up and saw, just on the edge of the woods, a deer running away. I called out to the kids and my step daughter and I both saw a second deer, but my step son was too far away an he missed them.

We went through a stretch last year where we were seeing deer behind the house pretty often. Once every couple of weeks or so. They would sometimes even come out of the trees into the yard and hang out for a while. Once I even managed to get into the back yard with them, but only for a second before they got spooked.

This year… nothing. I’ve seen one deer since January, and that was at night a few houses down the street. This is the first time since then that I have seen them up close, even if it was just a couple of tails dashing away. I love living in a house that has wild deer living close by. I have thought about getting a salt lick and hiding it behind the house somewhere, but I doubt the neighbors would appreciate that. Random deer sightings will have to be enough for now.

12/11/10…
2010-12-11 - DEER IN THE WOODS 007

1/21/12…
DSC_0186-1

11/2/11…
2011-11-02 - Deer in the Yard 007

7/17/11…
DSC_0689

Say it Ain’t So, Youk

Oh great.  First Babe Ruth, now Kevin Youkilis.

Former Red Sox third/first baseman Kevin Youkilis has signed a one year deal with the New York Yankees for $12 million dollars.  He now joins folks like Wade Boggs and Johnny Damon and Babe Ruth as players who left the Red Sox and went to the Yankees.

This time feels a little different to me.  He didn’t leave us, he was traded.  He didn’t run off to New York, he was swapped to Chicago first.  The Yankees need a third baseman to fill in for King Douche Alex Rodriguez while he is off recovering from hip surgery.  They also need a first baseman to spell Mark Teixeira (damn, that’s tough to spell).  Youkilis is like a defensive dream come true for the Yankees.

When I project myself into next season I don’t see me booing the hell out of Youk when he comes back in pin stripes.  Maybe a little, but nothing like the wrath we visited down upon the trader Johnny Damon.  Damon’s move to New York was evil.  Youk’s move was, as mentioned, actually to Chicago.  If anything we should be furious at Schmucko the Clown (my pet name for the idiot accurately known as Bobby Valentine).  It was the conflict between Schmucko and Youk that resulted in the trade.

Good luck, Kevin Youkilis.  May you have a good year on a team that goes 0-162, and may you not take it personally when I boo your ass when you play the Red Sox.

2013 is going to suck for Red Sox Nation.

Crud.