You really can be bored to death, scientists discover | Mail Online

Usually by people talking about teevee shows or some dirt-stupid shit they heard on the news.

Miller High Life and Tim’s. Awesomely outrageous genius.

And here it is:

Miller High Life is my new favorite beer. This just flat rocks.

Slampo's Place: Second Thoughts, Re: Memorializing Lightnin' Hopkins

As it is, Hopkins got frozen in time too soon. With his shades, his extra-long mentholated cigarettes, that leering laugh, those decidedly non-P.C. lyrics and the fierce native intelligence, he's as foreign to the Houston of today as the ghost voices captured on those old Marvin Zindler radio broadcasts. He didn't stick around to let time sand those rough edges down to smooth, marketable contours.

This is where the “blogging” profession dives under the rug:

I’ve been thinking about what seems to me a double standard in my treatment of vice-presidential frauds, with respect to Sarah Palin and John Edwards, and trying to figure out where I went wrong. No, I’m not backtracking on Palin: all I regret is not being able to expose her for real yet. But I’m a blogger not an investigative reporter; my job as I see it, is to make sense of the facts on the table and disseminate them, not to do the vital legwork to get new facts

Ken Layne defined blogging as “fact-checking your ass”, and he also defined blogging as “typing into the internet.” Well, Layne is writing the typically Layne-esque genius into the internet at Wonkette, and fact-checking is just not that interesting to anyone anymore, really, or Andrew Sullivan’s bosses would be on him like white on rice for typing the words “not being able to expose her for real yet.” And so would Layne, who’s basically MIA, hiding out in a Nick Denton joint.

Well, whatever…this cycle is over, and mass media won again. The idiot Sullivan might as well be talking about Taylor Swift as Sarah Palin. Bottom line, a full-grown man has to giggle at this — “my job as I see it, is to make sense.” FAIL, as the kids these days say. That’s just fucking ludicrous. “sense.” Someone come up to the mountain and tell me when that moron makes sense.

This seems to make an awesome stopping point. Maybe it is, maybe it ain’t.

Heinz revamps ketchup packets – Yahoo! News

The new design has a base that's more like a cup for dipping and also a tear-off end for squeezing, plus it holds three times as much ketchup than a traditional packet

A Top Story, according to Yahoo News.

The Fourth Estate, covering itself in glory…reprinting ketchup packet press releases. Laugh or cry, your choice.

Lazy radio people doing corporate shill interviews with recently-retired Celebrities of Sport pimping out the likes of Doritos, Sprint, Prilosec, Massengill = ridiculously boring radio.

I made up that last one, but it’s probably not made up.

Via South Texian, who uses it in a different context. Me, I just like the short dress skirts or shirt dresses on the gals. And I have to admit, I’ve come to admire the Big Box cheesiness of the band. We were young, once, and strong…with moustaches.

Believe it or not, those girls are supposed to holding guns. Excellent camoflauge, I says.

Debugging a SQL database injection hack. Still not sure it’s cleaned. My head, back, knees, and hips hurt from sitting here.

OK, where was I?

Via the Cajun, I learn that today in 1855 a man was born:

1855 – John Moses Browning, patron saint of American weapons design, is born. His designs include both sporting and military models of rifles, pistols and shotguns. I own a M1911A1 pistol, his design. His M2 .50 caliber machine gun went in service in 1921 and is STILL in front-line use today.

That pistol design is still, to this day, in production, with very few, if any, design changes. You could say the same about the Colt SAA, but the Colt SAA is (guessing here) rarely carried into what I will refer to as extreme situations. Just the other day, I was at a local sandwich shop, and there was a group of three Texas Rangers* two tables over. Each one had a 5″ barreled 1911A1 of some form on their belt, and two clips on the other side. Some things just work.

Personally, I am rarely more than 50 feet from my own 1911. It’s a Springfield, basic model, parkerized, with a Hogue wraparound grip, and the crappiest front sight ever put on a gun, bought a decade ago, and probably 20 years old by now. It’s still my favorite gun to shoot, though I must admit a fondness for my Ruger Super Blackhawk .44 Magnum thumb-buster.** I spend way too much time in the throne room looking at tricked-out 1911s. And I still need to get another Springfield basic — for the grandsons, you know.

I hope Mr. Browning is enjoying the three-ring circus that his pistol has created, because I sure do. Happy birthday, sir.

* Yes, they were real Texas Rangers, unless some LE agency has decided to plagiarize the cinco peso. I can’t imagine that. No, I didn’t ask. Those dudes are way too far up the ladder for me to go fan-boy on them. Which, a sandwich shop? I just expect those guys to be either eating beef & beans out on a trail somewhere, or dining in the halls of Olympus, not chowing down on the special of the day.

** I watched a lot of cowboy shows growing up. Then I watched Dirty Harry. Then I grew these gorilla hands that the old model SB fills real well. It’s an absolute hoot, though I don’t really shoot it that much. I don’t much care for the new model SB, as the grip seems smaller…but I have one anyway.

My Mini-Me has moved on up, from leasing office space from another doctor, to leasing her own space and bringing in lessors of her own. As per usual, I get to be tech support, and it’s fun.

The main primary objective is to hold costs down. Today, that means being as virtual as possible, with as little infrastructure as we can get away with.

The first thing that calls for is broadband. Sadly, in North Dallas, at LBJ and Midway Rd, right next to Brookhaven College, the only provider is Ma Bell. Not only that, but they only provide the lowest ADSL speeds available (1.5M down, 512k up). Time-Warner Business doesn’t serve there, which I find to be super-weird. Clear, despite their enormous blob of green on their Dallas map, doesn’t have a tower close enough to provide their vaunted 4G internet. Perhaps they should invest in towers, instead of hipster-douchebag commercials. I understand the business model, but it’s kind of maddening, especially now, to see their onslaught. So Ma Bell it is, and their crap service.

Next up is a VOIP provider, and my randomized research turned up Toktumi. At $15 per month, it looks like the best value. Lots of features, including cell phone support, softphone support, conference calling, call forwarding, and more.

Next on the list is fax support, since yes, there are still people in this world who use fax machines. I think I got four last year. Tiresome, but there it is. So, I recommended using eFax Free, at $0.00 per month. The only drawback is you don’t get a local number, which, big deal. Nobody has to pay long distance anymore, do they? Can (or do) people still mentally track local area codes in the era of ten-digit dialing? And if there has to be a local number, then she can get it for $10 a month from Toktumi.

You still have to have some hardware on site. So dear old Dad is going to put in a wireless network, plus call on dear old Uncle to pull wire (and terminate, and put in nice wall plates) to all of the seperate offices in her suite. The wireless is going to be your basic Linksys WRT-310N, which support 802.11b/g/n, and has four GbE ports on the back. We’ll wire the offices to a basic D-Link 8-port office switch. Our costs for that is going to be the wall plates, since we already have scavenged Cat5e. Our combined 50 years of voice/data/video expertise is going to run her a bucket of KFC Original and a 12-pack.

At some point, she’s going to want a teevee in the waiting room, for, erm, messaging. Personally, I can’t stand these things, but since it’s everywhere*, I’ve taught myself to tune it out. I imagine others have, or will do the same. So we’ll come up with some kind of Linux based media station to run that in kiosk mode, or alternatively, stuff a secondary video card in a receptionist’s PC and run it off of that. When she gets a receptionist. Which will likely be soon, since we’re about to embark on an AdWords campaign, to get her off the marketing treadmill a little bit.

And that’s kind of that…pretty low-impact, wallet-wise. I’ll try to remember to do a post-install wrap-up and let you know how it all went from an installation/configuration setup, and then do a 90-days-in review of the services. If I remember.

* Hell, the gas pump started talking to me last week, trying to sell me injected additives for my gasoline. At $2.51 per gallon already, I didn’t feel a burning need to do such a thing, since I already do that on a monthly basis with good old Berryman B-12 Chemtool. That’s some good stuff there, boys.

I always knew Bill O’Reilly was a gasbag faux-populist. This is proof:

Bill: So what do you do for fun? I mean, we hear that you shoot things, you know, wolves and you are a hunter and a fisher woman and all of that. Is that what you do, outdoors stuff?

Sarah: Sure, I’m Alaskan and we eat, therefore we hunt. Yes.

Bill: Do you actually shoot things and you skin them and put them in the refrigerator and eat them later and stuff?

Sarah: We sure do. The freezer is full of that organic wild game that keeps us healthy.

Bill: Like what?

Sarah: Moose, caribou. buffalo.

Bill: You eat moose steaks?

Via Jim Treacher, who has the video, which I can’t embed.

And belatedly, mucho congratulationes to Treacher, who has got a paying gig at The Daily Caller. Jim has been on my blogroll since the dawn of the blogroll. Pure effing genius, and I’m really glad someone is paying him to blog, since I was bereft over his abandonment of blogging for the vacuous Twitter. CLICK!

I miss Puce.

Most of anything in the “news” today, I find the Super-Secret Jeebus Codes on the Jeebus Guns to be beyond mockery. There are six million ways to go with horrifying news, this Americans loving Jesus business. Who would have ever guessed, really…an arms maker being called to service, after all?

Who do these assholes think they’re dealing with, anyway? Crusaders? Are you kidding me? Really important point for you Musselmen to take away from this — America is loooooong way away from a crusade. As we normally do here in America, we’ve put the professionals in charge…they are very good, and they care way more than I do.

Really, boys & girls, you don’t want to see an American crusade full of amateurs like me. Very simply, you would lose, and you would lose badly. And there’s enough Jesus-loving wealth here, I think we could bring it to you towel-headed, sister-killing, goat-banging, sheepherd-worshiping sonsabitches pretty hard. So, like, don’t get all up in our grill about bible verses on gun sights, hear?

The previous two days here in Mexico Jr. were the absolute rainiest I’ve ever seen — not in total volume, but in the sense of continually falling. It just doesn’t happen here like it does in North Texas. I kind of miss it, but after two days, you start to wonder if your feet are going to dry out.

I’m in the TFG Remote HQ (the LaZBoy) doing a little bit of biz planning on the tinier laptop, and I flipped on the toob for some background noise. It was on Fox News, and here’s Joe Biden, filibustering some poor bastards down in that Florida. What a gasbag. I’m nodding off, see ya later. Here’s a much more useful purpose for Biden’s relentless hot air – a balloon bikini:

You know the right thing to do is help those people, and I recommend doing it through the Salvation Army. Damn near every nickel is going to get there, and that’s what we want. I’m just a fat guy typing into the internet, so if you have a favorite charity, use them, but do something. It’s a horrendous situation, and if I could find my way over there and be useful, I’d go. I bet you would, too.