Because any jinx I could muster would be a gnat on an elephant’s butt at this point.

My beloved Stars are in Motown for Game 5, being down 3-1 in the series, and facing elimination for the second game in a row. In a nutshell, the Stars will probably have to play their best game of the season to defeat the hated Red Wings at the Joe today at 12:30pm. Mere fans such as myself are grasping at lucky straws and rationalizing the super-slim chances of a win (game win, not a series win) with such silliness as, this is the first day game of the series and so the Wings might be put off their game from being forced to hold Bible study earlier in the morning.

As Charles puts it, “Damn, most of the time it looked like the were on a power play at even strength.” Yes, it does. No matter where Stars put the puck, there are always at least two Detroiters checking at it. Detroit passes are laser-true, and their sticks have top-secret rubber magnetics built in. Two Red Wings can fly down the ice utterly unmolested by five Stars. I read stories about Chris Osgood’s wonderful play, but frankly, he hasn’t had to be wonderful. Serviceable is doing just fine, because the guys in front of him are the most talented team I’ve ever watched. Of course, I haven’t watched a lot of hockey, not like a Canuck or a square-head Minnesotan, but I’ve been a pretty good fan for many years, as good a fan as you can be in hot, dusty old Texas. And really, the Red Wings are spanking everything that moves, and spanking them hard. If the Stars fail to post only the third 0-3 comeback in NHL history, I will still be watching the Stanley Cup series, simply to see the carnage.

So - Go Stars Go. Make them put their squids back in the freezer for some other day, and make them come back to hot, dusty old Texas one more time. Because if you can do that, well, anything can happen, you know.

End of the Century : The Story of the Ramones

Sux being up at 3am, but this was just irresistible. Awesome look at a rock band.

I think Obama’s lack of experience is central to his appeal to “core Democrats.”

Me, I think his experience at being nothing but a politician is the main draw, since that’s what these fools want. “Career politician.” Doesn’t that sound awesomely like just what American needs!?!

Add in the Chicago connection, and man, you’re talking about some real lawmaking stuff, there. Nothing they love more than more laws…laws, laws, laws…wheeeee! I hear there’s some change and hope, too.

America needs to get back to drinking black coffee and smoking unfiltered Lucky Strikes. Four damn doors of “energy drinks” and tap water in the cooler section of the truck stops of Texas is purely ridiculous. VitaminWater, my ass. Five rows of that shit, with five rows of private-label knock-offs from the franchise owner. I saw something called “white tea” yesterday. WTF is white tea? Me, I call it ‘water.’ Who’s the dumbass that buys white tea, and what do you expect to get out of it?

No, it’s black coffee and a hard roll, to quote Mr. James Brown, that built this country. Not kiwi-banana-taurine flavored soda waters. That’s something in a Hi-C can for the grandkids. Preferably spiked with bourbon, so you can get some miles in.

Alan Sullivan:

Geology.com has an article telling everything you could possibly want to know about North Dakota’s great oilfield. Production is now ramping up rapidly. Since Teddy Roosevelt’s day, no one has paid much attention to North Dakota. It is perhaps the only place in the US where a large new oil development could proceed unmolested by decades of lawsuits. But even greater troves of fossil fuel exist in the Gulf, the Rockies, and the Arctic. There is no need for the US to bankrupt itself with purchases abroad. Nor should we tremble over global warming that ended a decade ago, and was never persuasively linked to anthropogenic carbon. A second US oil boom would buy time for transition to other, more technologically advanced fuel sources — and I do not mean the poupourri of so-called “alternative” fuels.

I’ve highlighted the most relevant part of that. God, I detest the NIMBYs. It’s a personal embarrassment to me that our president has to go begging the Arabs for more production (after we showed them how to produce in the first place) simply because we’re far too pussified to do for ourselves. That kind of pusillanimous hat-in-hand crap disgusts me, but I’m feeling very lonely in my place here saying we should pump that shit ourselves. No, we Americans are much more worried about the damn polar bears and caribous and ocean views from the vacation cottages, than we are about our grandkids.

Where are all those bright boys who were saying we should be paying more for gasoline, just like Europe does? Heard much from them lately?

wcbstv.com - N.Y. Senator Pushes For Cameras On Cop Handguns

The device could create a critical visual and audio record of police shootings for use in court, said state Sen. Eric Adams, a Brooklyn Democrat and former police officer. He is drumming up support for testing the cameras with the state police SWAT squad.

This Adams douchebag is in the pocket of whoever’s making this piece of crap. Probably his brother or his daddy, given New York. Somebody ask him why he didn’t carry one on his gun when he was a cop, if it was such a great idea. The technology existed, yet he chose not to use it? Why would that be? The answer is, “Because I couldn’t make a lot of money off it.” If he says anything different, he’s a lying sack of shit.

Looks like John McCain has the same problem as old Barry. Wants some dude named Doug Goodyear to run the convention in MSP this year. Except, Goodyear is a fathead consultant who took 1/3 of a million dollars to represent Burma’s military junta six years ago.

Potentially more problematic: the firm was paid $348,000 in 2002 to represent Burma’s military junta, which had been strongly condemned by the State Department for its human-rights record and remains in power today. Justice Department lobbying records show DCI pushed to “begin a dialogue of political reconciliation” with the regime. It also led a PR campaign to burnish the junta’s image, drafting releases praising Burma’s efforts to curb the drug trade and denouncing “falsehoods” by the Bush administration that the regime engaged in rape and other abuses. “It was our only foreign representation, it was for a short tenure, and it was six years ago,” Goodyear told NEWSWEEK, adding the junta’s record in the current cyclone crisis is “reprehensible.”

I love that “burnish the junta’s image.” That means mountains of bullshit designed to extract more money from the Burmese generals. As a capitalist, I can’t blame him, because there are only about a gajillion more PR firms who’d blow the junta in Times Square for 1/3 of $1,000,000. Still looks ugly, because it is ugly.

Lobby, lobby, lobby, lawyer, lawyer, lawyer, PR, PR, PR. Thomas Jefferson would be so proud.

Got two of my first four products in alpha, on my garage work bench.

Got at least three websites to knock out.

But first, I’ve got the series I shall not name on the toob, and my ass on the couch. Darlington is going on for the roundy-rounds, as well. Would be nice to put this laptop down and enjoy them both, but when you wake up thinking about margins, bulkhead adapters, CSS wireframes, and accounts payable, it’s not easy. Go to school, kids, get a good profession…don’t be like me.

UPDATE: Man, it looks like the hated mumble-mumbles had 5 days of Bible study, plenty of sleep in fresh air, and lots of whole milk before this series started.

So I fucked up the Mars thing (boy, is my face red! much like our planetary little brother, Mars) — chant some U!S!A about this, BG:

One of Barack Obama’s Middle East policy advisers disclosed yesterday that he had held meetings with the militant Palestinian group Hamas – prompting the likely Democratic nominee to sever all links with him.

Robert Malley told The Times that he had been in regular contact with Hamas, which controls Gaza and is listed by the US State Department as a terrorist organisation. Such talks, he stressed, were related to his work for a conflict resolution think-tank and had no connection with his position on Mr Obama’s Middle East advisory council.

Regular. Contact. With. A. Terrorist. Organization.

Obama used the “I’m Rubber and You’re Glue” defense.

He went on to suggest that Mr McCain’s attack showed that he was “losing his bearings”.

I’m willing to bet that no other presidential candidate has anyone anywhere near his staff of advisors in regular contact with death-dealing Palis. I’ll put it at 5-3, mainly because Nader and Paul are still wandering around, and they’re probably both thick with over-educated dipsticks looking for a staff job at a conflict resolution think tank.

Those last four words, what they’ve always meant since I’ve been alive, are US Armed Forces, but I’m not allowed to say that since I never served. One more demerit for me.

Via Ace.

Some fathead lawyer talking 10 year-old smack.

Over the Fourth of July weekend of 1999, I had the good fortune to accompany my then fiancée (and now happily my wife) to the McCain vacation home in Sedona where she was interviewing them for a Home and Garden Television show. The interview itself was entirely apolitical, focusing on fabrics and furnishing in their lovely Oak Creek abode, topics about which I do recall the senator was less than comfortable discussing.

Or you can use this as a perfectly good example of the the tinterubes suck.

One day, I will have a fiancee who is a producer for Unique Whips and I can sidle up to Chelsea flipping burgers at the grill and find out how she really feels about Obama. Just you watch, it’ll happen. So long as The Man doesn’t try to stop me, of course.

Prevailing scientific consensus holds that the existing Moon was formed when a Mars-sized planet collided with the Earth 4.5 billion years ago, when the solar system was very young.

Really? I always thought Mars was larger than Earth…I learned that many moons ago. If this scientific consensus is true, how did Earth survive? A wallet that says Bad Motherfucker? Are we really two deeply-fused planetary bodies? If so, it would sure explain a lot of the weird shit I have to deal with, like Al Gore, and people who can’t listen to their voice mail before they return a call. “Whadja want?” Well, let me explain in detail again, since I’ve got naught else to do.

That right there is a big ‘don’t-give-a-shit’ gene activator. Alert the biologists.

Mr. Beck:

Hofmeister says that we’re twelve to fifteen years away from seeing significant domestic production increases at the pump. It should not be difficult to understand that the greatest part of that lag is located in Washington, where prissy little scribblers backed with main force presume to stand in the way of men of action who would get out there and produce in exchange for our production (”division-of-labor economy”, kids) denominated in money. There is no telling how much of the cost of end products — at least half a generation away now — will have been devoted to “negotiations” and “partnerships” with these slugs: corporate legal departments living cheek by jowl with them for whole careers, accounting departments forced to count their bloated and rotten beans, not a single boot set anywhere without first referring to every sort of creep with a “mandate” and “authority” to make sure that some legislative committee hearing won’t sling his ass on an election-year whim. All of that Rube Goldberg effort has to come from somewhere, but at least it’s not a “windfall profits tax”. You’re going to pay for it, though. That’s the price of not exterminating parasites.

I really don’t want to hear any more about the high cost of gasoline, but I will, because I turn on the radio now and then to hear some tiny snippets of Texana in between Idiocracy outtakes.

And where are all those whining morons who were bitching that America wasn’t paying it’s fair share at the gas pump for the last three decades? I don’t know whether we were or not, but the whiny bastards were thick underfoot for many, many years. Don’t hear much from them anymore.

That sucked. It was like Class A vs. MLB. SUCKED. S-U-C-K-E-D. Sucked like there were 12 vs. 6.

3 accused of using corpse head to smoke pot

That lines up pretty good with all the pot-heads I know.

The Kingwood teenager’s story of decapitating a corpse and using the head to smoke marijuana was so outlandish that at first Houston Police Department senior officer Jim Adkins did not believe it.

Yet, Kevin Wade Jones Jr., 17, appeared almost indifferent as he relayed the bizarre description of his and two friends’ activities at a Humble area graveyard, Adkins said.

“I just doubted it because it’s very morbid, and I couldn’t see anybody doing something like this,” Adkins said Thursday.

Not until police went to the home of another Kingwood teen, 17-year-old Matthew Richard Gonzalez, did the officer believe the tale.

“He regurgitated in his plate of food when I asked him about it,” Adkins said. “So I knew there was some truth to the story.”

That’s my Texas, leading the charge to the gutter. Can I just die now?

Bizarro World — Gene Bromberg.com

Questions about how they’re going to combat collusion and what happens if someone dies (or gets locked up, or can’t get back into the U.S.) were hardly reassuring.

Because that’s a legitimate question to ask. You’d never worry about the final 5 pairings of the Masters getting dead, getting barred from the USofA, or getting a long-term lease at the Crossbar Hotel, would you? I think it goes without saying that they wouldn’t be bartering foot wedges, either.

This is a result, of course, of teevee. Not that I’ll ever bitch about that — major cash there, sucking the suckers dry.