See, frisbee can be dangerous

A public service announcement to remind you to never dive for a frisbee. That is all.

Thanks Lee

I stole this from Lee's page, so if you have to blame someone for this, blame him, not me.

TELL ME YOURS.........

21 SECRETS

1. WHAT IS YOUR DISPLAY NAME ABOUT? It is just my first name and last initial

2. WHERE WAS YOUR DEFAULT PICTURE TAKEN? In the radio studio, or my home away from home

4. HONESTLY, IF SOMEONE WERE TO TELL YOU HOW THEY FELT, WOULD YOU LISTEN? It would depend on the person, there are 6 billion people on the planet right now, and most of them I just don't give a rat's ass about and I assume the feeling is mutual

5. WHATS YOUR CURRENT MOOD? Busy, I am doing this at work, only because the incompetence of others has given me a few free moments, that story will go with my vacation blog when I decide to do it

6. And 7. What is 13? If only final Jeopardy were this easy.

8. IF YOU COULD GO BACK IN TIME, AND CHANGE SOMETHING, WOULD YOU? Perhaps, but the series of events that have gotten me to this point haven't been all that bad, if one plays with the past, who knows what would happen to the present.

9. IF YOU MUST BE AN ANIMAL FOR ONE DAY, WHAT WOULD YOU BE? "I am not an animal!!!!"

10. EVER HAD A NEAR DEATH EXPERIENCE? Let's see, there was nearly decapitating myself on the family go kart, being in my friends Camaro when he rolled it, being shot at by a now thankfully ex-girlfreind and being across the street from a drive by shooting, so I guess those might qualify.

13. HAVE YOU EVER SANG IN FRONT OF A LARGE CROWD? No, I know my limitations quite well.

14. WHAT'S THE FIRST THING YOU NOTICE BOUT THE OPPOSITE SEX? Usually, the first thing I notice is a game I play called "End of the World" and I ask myself if it were just me and her left on the planet, would the human race continue, or would I damn the human race and remain celibate.

15. WHAT DO YOU USUALLY ORDER FROM STARBUCKS? I don't go there, I have no desire for $5 cup of Honey Nut Mocha Suck.

16. DO YOU STILL WATCH KIDDY MOVIES OR TV SHOWS? Both, though kiddie shows today aren't nearly as cool as the ones I grew up with. SpongeBob is cool and all, but he is no Bullwinkle and Rocky.

19. DO YOU SPEAK ANY OTHER LANGUAGE? Not really, I have some rudimentary knowledge of both German and Spanish, though it is basically just enough to get me slapped or locked up.

20. IS THERE SOMEONE ON YOUR MIND NOW? My mind is blank, otherwise I would be coming up with a creative blog entry and not stealing one.

21. WHAT HURTS YOU AT THE MOMENT? The grassburn on my leg (see last blog entry), and my sunburn that I picked up over the weekend that is so deep that it blistered

Really, it can wait

I would bore you all to tears about my vacation, but it was capped with a family picnic which usually involves me being incredibly sore afterward, and this one was no exception. Between the sunburn that now occupies my face, neck arms back and chest and the grass burn from diving for a frisbee (that I caught I might add), I am in no shape to bloviate on anything right now, especially with work a mere 4 hrs and 30 minutes away. Maybe later on, but not right now.

Time to change

Whilest I get ready to head homeward bound, I leave you with this little tidbit of information. The new change meter total is $26.69. I can see $30 in the not too too distant future.

Best of the web.......revisited

Haven't been down this path in a while, and truth be told Johnathon Alter is someone that by and large, I can live without reading on a pretty regular basis. That being said, it is nice to notice someone who caught this what must have passed for a blurb in the news last week, as I know about the only paper I saw it in (not that it wasn't in others, just the only one I saw) was the Des Moines Register. I know it didn't show up on the cable news outlets, simply because it didn't involve a missing white woman or video of a car chase or that day's tragedy du jour. And while I know the number of people that will read this particular blog can probably be counted on two hands on a good day, that is still potentially 10 more people that otherwise wouldn't have known this story.

MSNBC.com

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Alter: How Superficial Has Our Culture Become?

By Jonathan Alter

Newsweek

July 30, 2007 issue - It's a trifecta much bigger and rarer than an Oscar, an Emmy and a Tony. Only five people in history have ever won the Nobel Peace Prize, the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal: Martin Luther King Jr., Mother Teresa, Nelson Mandela, Elie Wiesel ... and Norman Borlaug.

Norman who? Few news organizations covered last week's Congressional Gold Medal ceremony for Borlaug, which was presided over by President Bush and the leadership of the House and Senate. An elderly agronomist doesn't make news, even when he is widely credited with saving the lives of 1 billion human beings worldwide, more than one in seven people on the planet.

Borlaug's success in feeding the world testifies to the difference a single person can make. But the obscurity of a man of such surpassing accomplishment is a reminder of our culture's surpassing superficiality. Reading Walter Isaacson's terrific biography of Albert Einstein, I was struck by how famous Einstein was, long before his role in the atom bomb. Great scientists and humanitarians were once heroes and cover boys. No more. For Borlaug, still vital at 93, to win more notice, he would have to make his next trip to Africa in the company of Angelina Jolie.

The consequences of obscuring complex issues like agriculture are serious. Take the huge farm bill now nearing passage, a subject Borlaug knows a thing or two about. Because it seems boring and technical and unrelated to our busy urban lives, we aren't focused on how it relates directly to the environment, immigration, global poverty and the budget deficit, not to mention the highly subsidized high-fructose corn syrup we ingest every day. We can blame the mindless media for failing to keep us better informed about how $95 billion a year is hijacked by a few powerful corporate interests. But we can also blame ourselves. It's all there on the Internet (or in books like Daniel Imhoff's breezy "Food Fight"), if we decide to get interested. But will we? Sometimes it seems the more we've got at our fingertips, the less that sticks in our minds.

Born poor in Iowa and turned down at first by the University of Minnesota, Borlaug brought his fingertips and mind together in rural Mexico in the 1940s and 1950s to develop a hybrid called "dwarf wheat" that tripled grain production there. Then, with the help of the Rockefeller Foundation, he brought agronomists from around the world to northwest Mexico to learn his planting and soil conservation techniques. "They [academic and U.S. government critics] said I was nutty to think that it would work in different soil," Borlaug told me last week. The resulting "nuttiness" led to what was arguably the greatest humanitarian accomplishment of the 20th century, the so-called Green Revolution. By 1965 he was dodging artillery shells in the Indo-Pakistan War but still managed to increase Indian output sevenfold.

The experts who said peasants would never change their centuries-old ways were wrong. In the mid-1970s, Nobel in hand, Borlaug brought his approach to Communist China, where he arguably had his greatest success. In only a few years, his ideas—which go far beyond seed varieties—had spread around the world and disproved Malthusian doomsday scenarios like Paul Ehrlich's 1968 best seller "The Population Bomb." Now the Gates Foundation is helping extend his innovations to the one continent where famine remains a serious threat—Africa.

Borlaug, who launched the prestigious World Food Prize, has little patience for current agricultural policy in the developed world. "The claims for these subsidies today by the affluent nations are pretty silly," he says. So far, Congress isn't listening. The octopus-like farm bill does little to curb the ridiculous corporate welfare payments to a tiny number of wealthy (and often absentee) "farmers" who get more than $1 million a year each for subsidized commodities that make our children obese. (Did you ever wonder why junk food is cheaper than nutritious food? Because it's taxpayer-funded).

Borlaug scoffs at the mania for organic food, which he proves with calm logic is unsuited to fight global hunger. (Dung, for instance, is an inefficient source of nitrogen.) And while he encourages energy-conscious people to "use all the organic you can, especially on high-end crops like vegetables," he's convinced that paying more for organic is "a lot of nonsense." There's "no evidence the food is any different than that produced by chemical fertilizer."

In 1960 about 60 percent of the world's people experienced some hunger every year. By 2000 that number was 14 percent, a remarkable achievement. But as Borlaug cautioned at the ceremony in his honor, that still leaves 850 million hungry men, women and children. They are waiting for the Norman Borlaugs of the future to make their mark, even if they aren't likely to get famous for it.

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19886675/site/newsweek/

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MSN Privacy . Legal

© 2007 MSNBC.com

The clock on the wall...........

............says it is two days until vacation, woohoo!

A present before I go

Just me longing for the good old days of Homicide being on TV. I notice that WGN in Chicago is now airing the show weekdays at 11am, and when the radio show is going slow, I will click over and watch some with the close captioning on. It is as close as I can get to a fix, unless of course I head over to Youtube. You on the other hand, just get a blurb like this.......

Where it's Asshat, 18 pages and no microphone

The Asshat was pretty easy this week. Usually I will spend some time mulling over choices, as to worthiness compared to other likewise deserving individuals. That really wasn't the case this week, with the actual paperwork filed on the dog fighting case filed against Atlanta Falcons quaterback Michael Vick. Mind you it is the feds that are pursuing the case, and according to an article in the Pittsburgh Tribune Review, the feds tend to get their man roughly 99% of the time when they file an indictment against them. Given that there may be as many as four informants for the government in the case, I am going to go ahead and convict Michael Vick here, after all this is just the court of my own opinion, not a court of law, though I don't think Michael Vick stands much of a chance, and the charges against him almost defy belief. Not only was apparently involved in dog fighting, but he left little to the imagination in the realm of torture to those dogs that lost, including drowning some, shooting some and even electrocuting some.

If your friends ever ask you what an Asshat is, just give them this and say nothing more,

http://cdn.sfgate.com/c/acrobat/2007/07/19/sfchronicle_via_ajc_vick0717.pdf

Promoting the locals

Far be it from me to say I am a country music fan, quite the opposite actually. That being said, I thought I would throw a local band on here, they seem to sound professional enough, but then again, you could take my knowledge of country music and fill a thimble with it, and still have room to pack my social life in there as well.

My fingers tremble with the awesomeness that is me

Fear the Asshat!!!! Apprently mocking the Pittsburgh Public Schools was all it took, as the bastion of all things educational in my sleepy little hamlet decided to change the name back. They call it public outcry, but in your hearts you know the real reason, and I am gladly taking credit.

Public puts 'Public' back in Pittsburgh Schools

By Tony LaRussa
TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Friday, July 20, 2007

Last week's plan to remove the word "public" from Pittsburgh Public School's official moniker caused enough of an outcry to warrant reconsideration of the decision, Superintendent Mark Roosevelt said Thursday.

"There was a bit of a brouhaha over dropping the word 'public' from our name," Roosevelt said. "So we're going to put it back in, even though it will make the name a little bit longer and cumbersome."

While the reaction to the original name change was more match strike than firestorm, it nonetheless caught the attention of district officials.

"I personally didn't get any calls about it, but I guess some people didn't like the idea," the superintendent said. "The reaction was a bit of a surprise, actually, because the fact is our actual legal name is 'School District of Pittsburgh' and that isn't being changed."

The original decision to shorten the district's name to Pittsburgh Schools was a result of past inconsistencies, the superintendent said.

"School District of Pittsburgh" is written on its trucks; the "Pittsburgh Board of Education" is written on the administration building in Oakland; "Pittsburgh Schools" is used on police cars; and "Pittsburgh Public Schools" appears on business cards.

"Because of all the different names out there, we wanted to create a little consistency and simplicity," Roosevelt said.

Roosevelt cautioned that there is no plan to "go out and start spending money to paint over the names and change letterhead. All the changes will be made as things are replaced."

The district did, however, pay about $15,000 to a pair of consultants who suggested the school district start using a shorter name on letterhead and other written materials.

Roosevelt said the decision to go back to using the name Pittsburgh Public Schools will not affect plans to change the names of individual schools. When the school year begins, "Pittsburgh" will precede the name of each school. For example, Peabody high school would become Pittsburgh Peabody.

Tony LaRussa can be reached at tlarussa@tribweb.com or (412) 320-7987.

Brittany's ass is hungry again

Low and behold Brittany Spear's backside seems to want to snack on something, or as the federal government would put it, her ass is suffering from low food security.

The devil is in the details

The scary thing amazingly isn't the headline, which is awful enough, but that the fine people in Child Protective Services had taken the kids once already, only to give them back.

And to the proud couple who apparently lacked the common sense that is required to dispatch of soiled diapers and dead babies, but still found it within their ability to produce 6 kids, I can only say "It's a vagina, not a clown car!"

Fetus found in Lubbock home; 7 kids removed

By BETSY BLANEY
Associated Press

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LUBBOCK, TEXAS — A judge today ordered seven children removed from their rat-infested home strewn with dirty diapers after the mother's miscarriage led to the discovery of the dead fetus in a baby wipe box in the refrigerator.

Gloria Ramirez, 26, was four months pregnant when she delivered the stillborn baby in her bathtub with the help of her oldest child, a 9-year-old daughter, according to court documents. Authorities came to the home after she called a funeral home to ask about a casket for the fetus, a spokesman for Child Protective Services said.

Anthony Moya, the 40-year-old father of the six younger children, has been charged with seven counts of child endangerment, and the same charges were expected to be filed against Ramirez next week, Lubbock police Sgt. Scott Farmer said.

When authorities arrived at the dilapidated house July 7, they found stacks of dirty diapers — nearly four feet high in closets — throughout the house, along with rat, roach and lice infestations, according to documents.

There was little food, and some of the children told CPS investigators they ate only a hot dog out of the freezer for breakfast that morning, having been prohibited from opening the refrigerator, documents show.

"The lack of sanitation was just amazing," Farmer said. "Trash is one thing but what they were storing up was ... my goodness."

Decaying food lay around the home, trash bins overflowed, and mattresses had no sheets and were dirty, CPS spokesman Greg Cunningham said. Agency investigators suspected the children were malnourished, he said.

The oldest child often was left to care for the other six when Moya and Ramirez went out, court records state. The children range in age from 11 months to 9 years.

The two youngest children were taken to the hospital for suspected dehydration, and all seven had to be treated for head lice, documents show.

The funeral home contacted a Lubbock hospital after Ramirez called. An ambulance and police went to the house, Cunningham said.

Ramirez also was taken to the hospital because of the miscarriage, documents show.

After the children were removed, a city code enforcement inspector cited the home for 37 violations, including unsafe wiring, no working hot water heater, holes in exterior walls and no proper connection to public sewer and water systems, according to the report.

The attorney appointed to represent Ramirez in the child custody case, Lisa Ratzke, declined to comment today.

It was unclear whether Moya, who was released on $17,500 bail Saturday, had retained an attorney in his criminal case. He received paperwork today to have an attorney appointed in the custody matter.

Today's ruling wasn't the first time Ramirez and Moya have temporarily lost custody of their children. In May 1999, CPS removed the oldest daughter and a son Ramirez had with Moya for physical neglect, Cunningham said. Case workers verified the allegations, and the parents completed a program required by the agency, he said.

The two children were returned to the parents in October 2000, Cunningham said.

Jeremy Acosta, the father of the oldest child, said after the hearing that he knew about the first removal.

"Is this the only time she's going to get her stuff together when she gets her kids taken away?" he asked of CPS workers in the hallway outside the courtroom today.

Judge Blair Cherry told Ramirez and Moya that the agency's goal was to reunite the family.

"We want everything to work out the way you want it to work out," he said. "We want to make sure they get into a safe environment."

Later, Acosta said he was angry when he learned about the conditions in the home.

"That's my little girl, my daughter," Acosta said. "I trusted (Ramirez) with the life of my daughter."

Yahoo owes you an apology

For those of you who have sent me messages in the past few weeks and have not received a reply, it was not that I was ignoring you, rather yahoo decided to turn into US Postal Service, taking their sweet old time delivering said messages. They popped up yesterday in the mailbox section, as well as a slew of alerts telling me about said messages and alerts on comments I have already read.

But for those seeking a response to anything sent and I didn't get back to you, I take the Bart Simpson defense "I didn't do it!"

Is that Pittsburgh Public Asshat or Asshat Pittsburgh?

It's early this week, and not without competition. Certainly the John McCain for President campaign had an Asshat worthy week, what with the resignations of the campaign's top two people, McCain blaming his poor showing on "gay sweaters" and the head of his Florida campaign finding a new way to raise funds for the campain by offering to perform oral sex on an undercover police officer for $20 all within a 7 day span. As could be the parents who neglected their kids in lieu of playing video games to the tune of leaving the son in need of treatment for starvation and the daughter needing part of her head shaved because it was matted with cat urine. Certainly we have all seen the video by now (if you haven't, you go get it, I am not getting it for you) of the kid on ecstasy. Yet none are this week's Asshat. You, I am sure, are wondering why Matt, why are these not Asshat worthy?

Truth be told, most weeks any one of those could have been the winner (just where the hell were they a week ago anyway?), yet this week we tackle the fine realm of education in the land of the Asshat. It goes without saying that American schools have been less than stellar, consistently getting outperformed by their foreign counterparts. Places like Washington DC continually spend over $17,000 a year per pupil, and yet results get worse, not better. In Pittsburgh we are only slightly better, spending in the ballpark of $14,000 a year, yet nearly half of all African American students never see graduation. Obviously money can not be the sole solution for what ails the public schools. Fear not however, the Pittsburgh Public Schools decided to seek the help of consultants to see what could be done to fix the image of what can best be described as an educational system in need of plenty of work. And how praytell are we to make the public schools here in the city of Pittsburgh better you ask? We will just quit calling them public schools!!!!!!!!! Check please, that's an Asshat!

Pittsburgh schools drop 'public' from name to boost image

Wednesday, July 11, 2007

By Joe Smydo, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

The Pittsburgh Public Schools will drop "public" from its name and adopt a new, standardized way of referring to its schools as part of a campaign to brighten and strengthen the district's image.

For example, Schenley High School will be called Pittsburgh Schenley.

Superintendent Mark Roosevelt's staff unveiled the policy at a school board Education Committee meeting last night.

Under the policy, the district simply will call itself the "Pittsburgh Schools." The district's logo -- a pattern of circles, triangles and squares -- will still be used.

But the district also will begin using "Excellence for All," the name of its sweeping academic-improvement plan, on all stationery and other written materials. "Excellence for All" has its own logo with a gold swirl and star.

Lisa Fischetti, chief of staff, said the district isn't changing its legal name or the legal names of its 65 schools, it's just introducing a new way of referring to them. She said the new policy complements Mr. Roosevelt's efforts to remake the district academically and boost its image.

Under the new policy, Sterrett Classical Academy will be called Pittsburgh Sterrett. But the school's traditional name still will be used -- albeit in smaller print -- on stationery and other printed materials.

School board members offered little reaction to the policy, which does not require board approval.

By dropping "public" from its name, Randall Taylor said, the district might be able to avoid the negative attitude often associated with public schools.

Ms. Fischetti noted that suburban districts don't have "public" in their names, and a marketing consultant who helped develop the policy, Meade Johnson, said the district is less interested in the "public" tag than in linking its identity to the "Excellence for All" agenda.

By adding Pittsburgh to the identity of each school, Ms. Fischetti hopes the public will come to associate a level of quality with every school in the district. Ms. Fischetti said the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center has developed that sort of customer respect by attaching its acronym, "UPMC," to its member hospitals throughout the region.

Ms. Fischetti said she had no timetable for implementing the name changes.

Also, the district last night announced plans to upgrade its parent hotline into a "customer service center," another initiative aimed at boosting the district's image.

The plan includes better training for operators, the ability to send out thousands of phone messages or e-mails at once and a standard turnaround time for responding to parent complaints.

The district also said it was forming a committee to revise its curriculum on human reproduction. Mr. Roosevelt said the group will study the possibility of adding contraception to the curriculum. Currently, that subject is raised only in presentations by outside agencies. Students must have their parents' consent to attend those sessions.

Evening update

Okay, time to reset the blog again, I have bantered the last couple of days and have very no been all that good about keeping everyone up to date on what happened after the fact.

We will begin by adding another 12 cents to the change meter, thus breaking the $26 barrier, as the new total is $26.08.

I mentioned the other day that things had gotten off to a less than stellar sart, the cool thing is, in a mere few hours, literally everything had turned around almost completely. My chair was still broke, but I managed to steal another one for the time being, the transmitter was fixed in relatively short order, it turned out that it had nothing to do with the transmitter itself, rather the connection we had to it at the studio was on the fritz, so none of the buttons to power it up or down actually worked. It took a mere fixing of a circuit by Verizon (who I swear are going to go down as my arch nemesis) solved the problem. All told, we were only running on reduced power for maybe an hour at most, so it wasn't that bad. My blind is still broke, but because it is in the process of being replaced, I could see a rather preety awesome spectacle this morning. Not the pic on the previous blog, but as the sun was just coming starting to come up this morning, and the sky still had plenty of darkness to it, I could look out the window and see a crescent moon in a deep blue sky with a orange hue just starting to chase it. Fabulous stuff and I wouldn't even have noticed had the blind been there. I did the meeting with the boss, and while I am not going to be independently wealthy anytime soon, my salary is starting to get a little more reasonable, as I was kicked a little over an extra 2 grand a year. Some of the interviews I have been chasing down for the radio show have finally started getting back to me. Summer is usually a dead time for talk radio, so anything we can do to help kill time is always a plus. My luck has been pretty lacking in the booking department since the Hitchens interview in June, not barren but with trying to find a part time job and dealing with scheduling around vacation times and trying to piece together my vacation, it hasn't been as good as I normally would like. That being said, it was nice to have three different publicists get back to me in one day, I may get us some guests yet.

As for the pic on the last blog, it actually taken from a TV webcam this morning, I just happened upon the page where the cam is located, I was actually looking for something else, I had seen smoke coming over the hill, but a way off in the distance from the studio, and I figured I would access the cam and see if I could get a better view of what may or may not be happening when I happened to see that particular shot. I quick save picture as option and upload to the blog page and we have morning. For the record, I am not a morning person, I would rather sleep till noon and work all night, but that isn't the hand I have been dealt, so if I have to suffer at being up at 6am, the least I can do once in a while is share.

One thing I can't share is sleep however, and I am overdue, it has been a long but good day. Till manana kids.

Changing one's meter

Oh but where to begin?

Maybe I will start by thanking the governor of the great state of Pennsylvania. It is not often that I will thank those of political ilk on my blog, but thanks I guess are in order. When I started at Subway, some three weeks ago, I was told that I would start at $6.25 and hour, which is the minimum wage, and then after thirty days, I would get a .25 cent raise. I forgot, that the minimum wage was also going up, as part of the two tiered increase here in Pennsylvania, therefore, I may be getting a raise to $7.15 that I hadn't even anticipated. As a result, I guess kudos are in order, if only from my own selfish perspective.

I do have a change meter update of note too. I say of note, because many of you I am sure snicker at my paltry totals that I post from time to time, but that received an unexpected boost the other day, when walking home from work at Subway, I spotted a bright and shiny, well maybe not bright and shiny that may have just been the dollar signs in my eyeballs, $10 bill. Yes, we have an increase, the new total is now $25.96. I may crack $30 by the end of the year, woohoo.

I am also halfway to my next check from the survey people. They just dropped a new survey in my email, which I filled out, and the account now stands at $5.70. Once it gets to $10 I can have them issue me another check. They haven't posted my points for doing a mail survey last month, so that total should go up again in the near future, they usually take about 4-6 weeks to process mail surveys as opposed to the immediate credit you get for doing them online.

I have officially taken over last place in the fantasy baseball league, just as we reach the All Star break. I still lead in stolen bases and I am in second in strikeouts, so I may get some of my money back, but it would take a miracle for me to get one of the top three money spots at this rate.

I usually tend to shy away from our local PBS station this time of year because they tend to interrupt the programming with lots of pledge breaks. That being said, the last couple of Sundays have been awesome as they have been rerunning Ken Burn's series on the Civil War. That my friends is quality television, as opposed to the claptrap that passes for programming on TV these days.

If I see one more promo for "Age of Love", I think I am going to scream. For those of you who are fortunately unfamiliar, the premise is that someone will eventually be paired up with tennis star Mark Philippoussus. The twist to this show is that he is 30ish and there are two groups of women, one in their twenties and one in their forties and I guess we are supposed to care if he picks a young woman at the end, or an older one. My question is, how fucking sad is he, that a wealthy, relatively attractive tennis pro needs a TV show just to get a piece of ass? Talk about pathetic, this takes the cake.

I guess while I am doing this thing, I should probably include a Joe Random update, because I know how much you all care about the goings on in my video game life. When last we left, I had received a call up to the major leagues and went 1 for 5 in my first start for Tampa Bay. I would like to say things have gone swimmingly since then, and I thought they might. My next game, I was again getting a chance to start and in my first at bat, I hit a ground rule double, then everything went all third world on me as the electricity went out, thus wiping out the game. Instead of me having a nice start to my second appearance in season two, I had to go and start again from immediately after my 1 for 5 game, and my next appearance was a pinch hitting role, where I came into the game late and was promptly hit in the head, then I was demoted back to the minors, where I continue to languish as best as I can. I can't request a callup for about 20 days yet, and the major leagues haven't come beckoning my presence. Between that, and my stint on the 60 DL earlier this year, my numbers aren't as good as I would like. That being said, my second year numbers in the minor leagues are as follows; (48 games played) .461 average, 47 runs scored, 21 doubles, 18 home runs, 55 RBIs. I can only imagine what the numbers would have been had I not missed all of those games. I might be in the major leagues as opposed to toiling away in the minors.

I haven't picked an Asshat yet, so if anyone has any suggestions, I am all ears. Not that I can't find one, I just haven't been looking all that hard. I have been trying to get things squared away for my vacation later this month. I still have to get my bus ticket and start packing those things that I will need, like my swim trunks, which I am definitely taking, especially given how warm it has been here recently. Once again, we cracked the 90 degree mark, the second straight day of such summery goodness. That being said, there is something unappealing about it being so warm your ass sweats. It looks like there will be plenty of ass sweating (maybe Richard Simmons can do an Ass Sweating to the Oldies) as the next two days look to be over 90 degrees as well.

I did get to catch some of the Wimbledon Final today, at least most of the last set. That being said, I am sorry I had to work, because it looked like the final between Federer and Nadal was one for the ages, going 5 sets with two of them ending in tiebreakers. Usually I just watch sporting events for one of two reasons, either they are compelling and they draw me in, or it has hot chicks involved. Given the hotness level wasn't there for me in the women's final and it wasn't all that compelling, it was good to at least see some incredible tennis in the men's final.

I am sure there are other things I wanted to jabber about, but it is hot and late and I have to try to sleep at some point in time.

How I spent my 4th of July

Audio torture kids as once again I post an audio blog, I know how much you love them after all.

The 4th of July Blog

I know, I should commemerate the holiday with something profound, but stealing is easier.

Scooter Libby In Hell

What do Dick Cheney, Paris Hilton, "The Sopranos" and colon spasms have in common? Find out here!

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist

Wednesday, July 4, 2007

So there you have it. Bush shrugs and smirks and then commutes the easy soft-focus sit-on-your-ass-all-day-and-knit white-collar prison sentence of a hollow political lackey who, in turn, took a bullet for his sneering mafia thug of a boss, Dick Cheney, who in turn was complicit (along with lead flying monkey Karl Rove) in the appallingly illegal outing of a CIA operative, which itself was a tiny but particularly nasty link in the giant chain of lies and deceptions undertaken to lead our wary and tattered nation into an unwinnable impossible costly brutally violent war that will now last, if current estimates are correct, until the goddamn sun explodes.

You have to laugh. You have to laugh because if you do not laugh you will likely be overcome with a mad desire to stab yourself in the eye with a sharp feral cat and/or shoot yourself in the toe with a high-powered staple gun, over and over again, all while tearing out pages of the United States Constitution and crumpling them into tiny little balls and hurling them into the smoldering firepit of who-the-hell-cares as you shiver in the corner and swig from a bottle of Knob Creek and wail at the moon. Or maybe that's just me.

But really, you do have to laugh at the vicious antics this administration, and perhaps Dick Cheney in particular, that most nefarious molester of U.S. law and ignorer of all political integrity and deeply homophobic father of a creepily lesbian daughter and overall gruntingly guff sneerer at all moral principle, masterful mocker of everything you somehow still manage to think, even in your most despondent and ethically disillusioned state, that American politics is somehow supposed to be about.

For it was Cheney, you well know, who yanked Bush's puppet strings in order to get Libby off the hook. It was Cheney who whispered sweet, oozing nothings into Dubya's ear to convince him to screw the goddamn law and mock the American jury system and further lock down America's standing as the most corrupt and least accountable nation in the entire developed world.

What, are you surprised by all this? Of course you're not. It is, of course, all about the cover-up, all about preventing Libby from revealing the real criminals in all this, about Cheney's nefarious role in the Plame case, all about ensuring the cabal remains intact and unassailable and throbbing with misprision.

It was so cute as to be actually damaging to the soul. Bush actually ambled forth and said that, while he "respects the jury" in the Libby case, the 2.5 year sentence was simply "too harsh." Baby, if 30 months in a comfy well-stocked rape-free Martha Stewart-decorated facility for compromising national security is too harsh, I've got a draconian little thing called the Patriot Act to sell you, cheap.

Here's a swell side note: You know who gets harsher sentences than 30 months in white-collar prison, George? Pot dealers. That's right. The average sentence for a convicted marijuana dealer in California is 3.3 years. In real prison, George, not that namby-pamby Club Fed where Scooter would've played badminton and sipped tea for two years. Hell, in places like Oklahoma and Alabama, you can get a life sentence for possessing a single marijuana bud, which is ironic indeed, given how if you live in Oklahoma or Alabama, there is nothing that would serve your miserable id better than to be deeply and thoroughly stoned every single day and twice on Sunday. But that's another column.

Just a hint of perspective, George. See, we all know you drank like a monosyllabic fish and were rumored to enjoy your share of premium flake during all those years you were skipping poli-sci class in college as you snorted money from the silver spoon you were born with, so maybe you can appreciate this viewpoint. Or, you know, maybe not.

You know who's now done more jail time that Scooter Libby? Paris Hilton. Paris Hilton has now accomplished more in the eyes of the law to pay her debt to society than the VP's former chief of staff ever will for assisting BushCo in corrupting the soul of the goddamn nation. Isn't that cute? Cute enough to cause sharp stabbing pain in your abdomen requiring great amounts of scotch and marijuana to anesthetize? You bet it is.

Lest we forget, Dubya's latest abuse of law follows hot on the heels of Dick Cheney declaring himself a unique and unassailable branch of government, free to ignore the law and refuse to hand over detailed reports of how he's handled classified information to the federal, Bush-approved oversight agency in charge of making sure people just like Dick don't take too many liberties with power and ego and dictatorial megalomania. Whoops, too late.

Just another appalling notch in the belt for Dick, really. To be added to the collection, right alongside the bit where he endorses torture, or how he initiated the secret detention of foreigners in brutal Easter European prisons, or his love of military tribunals, or the hard-on he gets for detaining foreigners illegally, for years, at Guantanamo Bay, or the way he works to derail freedom of the press, or how he abuses environmental law and rearranges the federal budget as he sees fit all while sucking up Halliburton kickbacks, and...

Oh my. The list is long indeed. And it is, in its way, far uglier and more dangerous than that of his bumbling, inept boss. But you already knew that, right?

All in all, you could say it's much like a very bad episode of "The Sopranos," all thick-minded thugs and boorish mafia tactics and the childish calling in of violent favors, all about ruthless loyalty at the expense of, well, everything else: humanity, integrity, decency, the will of the people. And there is Bush, the hollow figurehead, the smirking decider, with Cheney as the henchman, the hangman, the guy at the door with the black gloves and the baseball bat and the black van waiting outside.

Except wait a minute; in this endless episode, there's no deeper sense of existential angst, no smart-tongued therapy sessions full of humor and revelation, no hint of greatness, no darkly heroic Tony Soprano character who transcends it all and suspects there is more to life than this world of blood and violence and war and even craves, somewhere in his soul, to find it.

OK, check that. It's not "The Sopranos" at all. It's more like an particularly noxious episode of "Mama's Family," all Neanderthal redneck inbred imbeciles doing bad accents and idiotic pratfalls and slapping each other in the face to the tune of an insufferable, forced laugh track, all centered around a laughably dreadful character who blurts out sarcastic one-liners so stupid and inept they make your skin crawl.

Except no one's laughing. And tens of thousands of people are dying. And the country is rotting at its core. And the world, oh the world, the world knows this degrading, deeply humiliating show cannot be cancelled fast enough.

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Thoughts for the author? E-mail him.

Back on the air

Just a chance to pimp another public appearance, I will be a guest on the Doug Hoerth Show tomorrow from 3pm-6pm EST. What better way to spend a 4th of July than to listen to the inane prattling of one such as me? Beats actually enjoying the holiday, that's for sure.

The link for the stream on the web is www.1360wptt.com .

Back after a week's hiatus.......The Asshat (woohoo!!!!!)

Sorry I took last week off of this feature to the blog page. Between making sure all of my guest hosts were squared away for Lynn's vacation, putting together a Best Of episode on Friday, getting used to the two job routine and wrapping myself up in the Benoit family story, it was just something that fell through the cracks.

That being said, we do have an Asshat this week, John Potts. You may ask yourself what it was that Mr. Potts did that qualifies him for Assaht status? Not much, except for mistaking a peacock for a vampire, besides that he is just like you and I.

Kudos to the NY Daily News, with all of the wholesome goodness of John "Buffy" Potts, Vampire Slayer

Staten Island pa turns in son after sicko attack on peacock

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BY LISA L. COLANGELO and MELISSA GRACE
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITERS

Monday, July 2nd 2007, 4:00 AM

A Staten Island man was arrested yesterday in the cruel beating of a wild peacock, who was stomped and choked last week in a Burger King parking lot.

John Potts, 32, shouted, "I'm killing a vampire," as he attacked the beautiful bird Thursday morning in Tottenville, police and witnesses said.

Potts, of Surfside Plaza, was arrested after a shovel-wielding fight yesterday with his dad, who then turned his son in for the bizarre animal beating.

The male bird's delicate body was crushed, and most of his vibrant feathers were destroyed. The injuries were so severe the bird had to be euthanized.

"His father is the one who gave him up," a police source said.

Potts was charged with aggravated cruelty to animals, a felony, and cruelty to animals, a misdemeanor, police said.

He had been arrested on unrelated burglary charges Friday after a Surfside Plaza neighbor returned home and found Potts inside, police said. He was carrying a knife and was charged with criminal possession of a weapon, police said.

Yesterday, cops were called to the home he shares with his father about 7 p.m., after Potts threatened his dad with the shovel, police said. He fled and headed to the beach at Sprague and Surf Aves., where he was arrested about 8:30 p.m., cops said.

The wild bird had wandered into the Burger King parking lot early Thursday and perched on a parked minivan. He was so tame employees were able to feed him bread and water. Bystanders tried to stop the attack, but Potts ran off before police arrived.

lcolangelo@nydailynews.com

And the winner is....everyone

This past week saw a political controversy of sorts. Chris Matthews of MSNBC's Hardball had Ann Coulter on the program. During the interview, calls were taken and one such caller was Elizabeth Edwards, wife of Presidential candidate John Edwards. She came on to ask Ann Coulter to stop the personal attacks on her husband. For those who haven't followed, in the past, Ann has suggested that John Edwards had a bumper sticker that read "Ask Me About My Dead Son" (referring to the Edwards son who passed away at 15 years of age), called John Edwards a faggot and most recently said that she would no longer talk about John Edwards, she just would wish he would die in a terrorist attack.

For those that have spent more than 10 seconds listening to Ann Coulter, this is what would be called par for the course for her. That being said, Ann Coulter is correct when she claims that the Edwards campaign uses her remarks to raise money. One needs only go to the Edwards homepage and, after skipping the intro, is a tally meter congratulating everyone for reaching their donation goal of $9 million dollars by June 30th. Directly underneath that tally total is a link to what Ann Coulter has said about the Edwards campaign. Ann Coulter is a financial boon to the Edwards campaign, and one has to wonder just how much John Edwards really minds the attacks, given they are probably his most effective money raising strategy, given he is trailing both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama amongst the Democratic hopefuls when it comes to acquiring campaign cash.

Ann Coulter benefits as well here. Ann is plugging the release of her most recent book in paperback, and at a time where even some Republicans have begun to back away from her, and some newpapers have went as far as to drop her syndicated column, nothing helps book sales quite like contrived controversy. Let's not kid anyone, she wasn't on a giant of a news show when she appeared on Chris Matthew's program, it is one of the lowest rated news shows on cable, hardly an outlet that will generate more than a few hundred thousand viewers on any given evening. By national programming standards, that is a pittance. But the buzz that went with the controversy of taking on a candidate's wife will get the moonbats into the bookstore if they haven't already bought the hardback version.

Even Chris Matthews wins here, because for a brief moment in time, people get to talk about his show, as though it means something, which doesn't happen every day when so few people normally watch it. It becomes a basis for people to tune in in hopes of seeing another like controversy, even though one on this scale isn't likely to happen again any time soon, as higher profile guests will now think twice about appearing on the program for fear of being "ambushed" by another staged caller calling in. But for a nanosecond, people will pay attention to Chris Matthews, which is a nanosecond longer than they normally would have.

So at the end of the day your winner here is.....everybody.