Today President Bush said that the U.S. economy is still strong and growing. What the heck? Is he living in the same country I’M living in?
[This morning President Bush] attempted to calm jittery economic markets and anxious Americans at a morning press conference, insisting that the U.S. economy is still growing despite its problems, even as new reports showed inflation rising at the fastest pace in more than a quarter-century, and the prospect of more bank failures loomed.
If consumer confidence is any indicator of the strength of the economy, it’s far from strong. Many other indicators say the same thing. Yet Mr. Bush chose to point out that:
“our economy’s continued growing, consumers are spending, businesses are investing, exports continue increasing, and American productivity remains strong.”
Food and gasoline costs are the highest they’ve ever been, there have been runs on several banks (some actually folded), the housing market is still going down, foreclosures are STILL going up, job losses are still going up, the stock market is still going down, and the U.S. dollar is weak all over the world (including at home). That sure doesn’t sound to me like a strong economy.
Somebody is seriously deluded.
He’d be better off explaining what’s truly going on and suggesting ideas to make it through the tough times he acknowledges we’re in. Instead, all I hear is “We’re doing fine. We’re doing fine!” That’s no help. It’s delusion.
Below is a series of memos which, much like in the Telephone Game, gets degraded as it progresses. That’s natural enough, but when you get various levels of management involved, it’s even worse.
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From: General Manager
To: Department Heads
On Friday evening at 5 p.m., Halley’s Comet will be visible in this area‚ an event which occurs only once every 76 years. Please have the employees assemble in the park area outside the building and I will explain this rare phenomenon to them. In case of rain, we will not be able to see anything, so assemble the employees in the canteen and I will show them a film of it.
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From: Department Heads
To: Deputy Department Heads
By order of the General Manager on Friday at 5p.m., Halley’s Comet will appear above the area outside the building. If it rains, please assemble the employees and proceed to the canteen, where this rare phenomenon will take place, something which occurs only every 76 years.
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From: Deputy Department Heads
To: Superintendent
By the order of the General Manager, at 5 p.m. on Friday, the phenomenal Halley’s comet will appear in the canteen. In case of rain in the area outside the building, the General Manager will give another order, something which occurs only once every 76 years.
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From: Superintendent
To: Foreman
On Friday at 5 p.m., the General Manager will appear in the canteen with Halley’s Comet, something which happens every 76 years. But if it rains, the General Manager will order the comet into the area outside the building.
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From: Foreman
To: Team Leader
When it rains on Friday at 5 p.m., the phenomenal 76 year old Bill Halley, accompanied by his comets, will drive the General Manager through the area outside the building into the canteen.
This guy loved living on Staten Island, but he wasn’t crazy about the ferry. See, if you missed a ferry late at night, you had to spend the next hour or so wandering the deserted streets of lower Manhattan; not a pleasant prospect.
So, when he spotted a ferry no more than fifteen feet from the dock, he decided he wouldn’t subject himself to an hour’s wait. He made a running leap and landed on his hands and knees, a little bruised maybe, but safe on deck.
He got up, brushed himself off, and announced proudly to a bystander, “Well, I made that one, didn’t I?”
“Sure did,” the bystander said. “But your timing’s a little off. You should have waited a minute or two. We’re just about to dock.”
At home, you cook three square meals a day and try to get your kids to eat it.
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In prison, you get an hour each day in the yard to exercise and mingle.
At home you get to clean the yard up so you can mow it so your kids can spread more toys all over it so that you can go out and clean it again because little Jr. can’t sleep without his latest lego creation.
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In prison, you get to watch TV, cable even.
At home, you get to listen to your children fight over the remote control and get treated to hours and hours of mindless cartoons thanks to cable.
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In prison, you can read whatever you want and attend college for free.
At home, you get to read weekly readers starring Dick, Jane, and Spot and worry about how to send Jr. to college and still be able to eat for the next twenty years.
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In prison, all your medical care is free.
At home, you have to pawn your mother’s silver and fill out trillions of papers for insurance and hope the doctor will see you before you die.
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In prison, if you have visitors, all you do is go to a room, sit, talk and then say good-bye when you are ready or your time is up.
At home, you get to clean for days in advance and then cook and clean up after your guests and hope that they will one day leave.
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In prison, you can spend your free time writing letters or just hang out in your own space all day.
At home, you get to clean your space and everyone else’s space, too, and what the heck is free time again?
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In prison, you get your own personal toilet.
At home, you have to physically hold the bathroom door shut in order to keep from having someone standing over you demanding to know how long till you’re done so you can do something for them.
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In prison, the prison laundry takes care of all your dirty clothes.
At home, you get to take care of them yourself, plus everybody else’s, and get yelled at because somebody’s favorite shirt isn’t clean.
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In prison, they take you everywhere you need to go.
At home, you take everybody else where they need to go.
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In prison, the guards transport all your personal effects for you and make sure nothing is missing.
At home, you have to lug around everybody else’s stuff in your purse and then wonder who went in it and took your last dollar.
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In prison, there are no screaming or whining children or spouses asking you to do something else for them, or screaming at you because you didn’t.
At home… stop me when I get to the downside of jail, will ya?
One of the real benefits of using Firefox is that there are so many “add-ons” or “plug-ins” that people create and share. One that I just found (and that I really like) is called DownloadHelper. It’s compatible with Firefox3 and it detects any videos on the page you’re viewing and allows you to easily download them. This could be YouTube, Google Video, or any number of other sites that share videos. That in itself is handy, but many videos are Flash-based, with a .flv extension and you need to install a special player to play those and they’re not really standard. What you really want is to convert them to .avi or .mp4 files. Fortunately, DownloadHelper has its own add-ons that include conversion tools.
Once you’ve added the DownloadHelper plug-in (and restarted Firefox, of course), you can right-click on the toolbar button and select Preferences. There’s a tab there for Conversion. You click that and check the box to turn it on. Then you can edit the rule to convert to whatever format you like. You WILL need to download an extra Converter program, but there’s a button right there to do that. Follow the instructions. When you’re done, you’ll be able to click and download, converting at the same time, so the end result is the video you want in the format you want.
Pretty cool!
You do have to be patient though. Once the download is done, then the conversion takes place. The only way to find out when it’s done (besides checking for when the file size stops changing) is to view the Converter Queue (right-click on the toolbar button for that also).
So I was poking around IMDb the other day and I found out that Oliver Stone is directing a new movie that’s coming out on October 22, 2008. It’s called W. It’s a chronicle of the life and presidency of George W. Bush. Who’da thunkit?
Here are some of the actors that are in the movie, which is currently filming. Quite a few big names, which is sort of surprising given that the movie hasn’t been publicized very well and I can think of lots of people who wouldn’t want to see it anyway.
Two cowboys are riding their horses together on the prairie. They come upon a big pile of manure. The first cowboy goes to the second, “I will bet you a $1000 that I can eat all of this crap.” The second cowboy agrees, so the first cowboy eats the entire pile and wins $1000.
The two cowboys ride on and after some time come across another pile of manure. This time the second cowboy bets the first that he too can eat the whole pile for $1000. The first cowboy agrees and the second cowboy eats the entire pile and wins the bet.
They ride on again. After a while the first cowboy says to the second, “Do you realize that we just ate a whole pile of manure for nothing?”
One of my pet peeves is misuse of percentages. When talking about personal effort or certainty or whatever, you can’t have more than 100%, can you? It’s just basic logic. One hundred percent is the most possible. You can’t give 110% because it’s more than it’s possible to give. If you can give more than you used to, it’s either because you weren’t giving 100% before or your capacity has increased. Make sense?
There’s a similar misuse that I really find revolting. People using higher numbers to say that they’re MORE sure of something than the other person. Example: “You’re 100% sure of it? Well, I’m 200% sure it’s not!”
The other day I came home from work and decided to see what was on TV, since I don’t usually watch it when I come home. I happened to hit the “Maury” show. The only thing greater than my repulsion of the show is my hilarity at the stupid people that go on the show! There was a paternity question (seems like that’s most of what happens on those kinds of shows, but that’s a topic for another day) and the guy said he was 200% sure the child was not his. Then the girl said she was 300% sure the child WAS. Then the guy said he was 1000% percent sure it wasn’t. I shook my head, lamenting both their lack of logic and their tragic lifestyles, and turned the channel.
According to today’s regulators and bureaucrats, those of us who were kids in the 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s or even the early 80s, probably shouldn’t have survived.
Our baby cribs were covered with bright colored lead-based paint.
We had no childproof lids or locks on medicine bottles, doors, or cabinets, and when we rode our bikes, we had no helmets.
Not to mention the risks we took hitchhiking.
As children, we would ride in cars with no seat belts or air bags. Riding in the back of a pickup truckon a warm day was always a special treat.
We drank water from the garden hose and not from a bottle. Horrors!
We ate cupcakes, bread and butter, and drank soda pop with sugar in it, but we were never overweight because we were always outside playing.
We shared one soft drink with four friends, from one bottle, and no one actually died from this.
We would spend hours building our go-carts out of scraps and then rode down the hill, only to find out we forgot the brakes. After running into the bushes a few times, we learned to solve the problem.
We would leave home in the morning and play all day, as long as we were back when the street lights came on. No one was able to reach us all day. No cell phones. Unthinkable!
We did not have Playstations, Nintendo 64, X-Boxes, no video games at all, no 99 channels on cable, video tape movies, surround sound, personal cell phones, personal computers, or Internet chat rooms.
We had friends! We went outside and found them.
We played dodge ball, and sometimes, the ball would really hurt.
We fell out of trees, got cut and broke bones and teeth, and there were no lawsuits from these accidents. They were accidents. No one was to blame but us. Remember accidents?
We had fights and punched each other and got black and blue and learned to get over it.
We made up games with sticks and tennis balls and, although we were told it would happen, we did not put out any eyes.
We rode bikes or walked to a friend’s home and knocked on the door, or rang the bell or just walked in and talked to them.
Little League had tryouts and not everyone made the team. Those who didn’t had to learn to deal with disappointment.
Some students weren’t as smart as others, so they failed a grade and were held back to repeat the same grade. Horrors!
Tests were not adjusted for any reason.
Our actions were our own. Consequences were expected.
The idea of parents bailing us out if we got in trouble in school or broke a law was unheard of. They actually sided with the school or the law. Imagine that!
This generation has produced some of the best risk-takers, problem solvers, and inventors, ever.
We had freedom, failure, success, and responsibility — and we learned how to deal with it.
Bill Engvall is best known for his routine called “Here’s Your Sign.” It’s about how stupid people should wear a sign around their necks saying they’re stupid, so we’d know what to expect from them. Here’s a bit from his routine:
Stupid people should have to wear signs that just say, “I’m Stupid.” That way you wouldn’t rely on them, wouldn’t ask them anything. It would be like, “Excuse me… oops, never mind. I didn’t see your sign.”
It’s like before my wife and I moved from Texas to California. Our house was full of boxes and there was a U-Haul truck in our driveway. My friend comes over and says, “Hey, you moving?” “Nope. We just pack our stuff up once or twice a week to see how many boxes it takes. Here’s your sign.”
A couple of months ago I went fishing with a buddy of mine, we pulled his boat into the dock, I lifted up this big ‘ol stringer of bass and this idiot on the dock goes, “Hey, y’all catch all them fish?” “Nope. Talked ‘em into giving up. Here’s your sign.”
I was watching one of those animal shows on the Discovery Channel. There was a guy inventing a shark bite suit. And there’s only one way to test it. “Alright Jimmy, you got that shark suit on, it looks good. They want you to jump into this pool of sharks, and you tell us if it hurts when they bite you.” “Well, all right, but hold my sign. I don’t wanna lose it”
Last time I had a flat tire, I pulled my truck into one of those side-of-the-road gas stations. The attendant walks out, looks at my truck, looks at me, and I SWEAR he said, “Tire go flat?” I couldn’t resist. I said, “Nope. I was driving around and those other three just swelled right up on me. Here’s your sign.”
We were trying to sell our car about a year ago. A guy came over to the house and drove the car around for about 45 minutes. We get back to the house, he gets out of the car, reaches down and grabs the exhaust pipe, then goes, “Wow! That’s hot!” See? If he’d been wearing his sign, I could have stopped him!
There was a paternity question (seems like that’s most of what happens on those kinds of shows, but that’s a topic for another day) and the guy said he was 200% sure the child was not his. Then the girl said she was 300% sure the child WAS. Then the guy said he was 1000% percent sure it wasn’t. I shook my head, lamenting both their lack of logic and their tragic lifestyles, and turned the channel.
Desert Moon Song, by Dean Evenson
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