In the beginning

I guess the best place to begin is the beginning, that being just who I am. Well, the obvious would be the name, which appears at the top of the blog page, but for the common sensically challenged, my name is Matt Pritt. I am a happily single male, 38, that lives in the very heart of Steeler nation in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I am the producer of the Lynn Cullen Show, heard in Pittsburgh on AM Newstalk 1360, weekdays from 9am-12pm. The show tends to be left leaning, though I am a moderate politically and have worked in the past at the station with Jerry Bowyer (Republican) who you may have seen from time to time on Fox News Channel, and Doug Hoerth (Libertarian), I tend to joke that I have went off of the political plantation if my politics end up to the right of Jerry or to the left of Lynn.

I can't really say why I got into blogging, I am not much of a glory hound, though I will let the blogging public know if I end up with any sort of public appearances, such as this Friday when I will be a guest on Doug's show. I guess I tend to blog more than anything for me. The things that pop up on the page are things that interest me, so things may range from the political to the comical to any place in between.

I am a fantasy sports geek, so from time to time I will do updates on teams that I have playing in different leagues. Right now I have 2 yahoo fantasy teams, one hockey and one football, both leagues I play for fun only as they are free and there is nothing to be won in them save for pride and an addition to the fantasy trophy case in my yahoo sports fantasy profile. And since I didn't post the results for last week on yahoo, I might as well get that out of the way now. In the football league, I was a 89-63 winner, so my overall record there is now 7-1 and I remain in first lace. In the hockey league, I wasn't quite as lucky, posting amy second straight bad week in a row, going 1-7-2, so the overall record is now 17-16-7 and I am tied for 6th place.

I am also in a league for cash in fantasy football with the local watering hole, where not only am I playing, but I am league commissioner. I often joke that I have assumed the commissionary position, but I will save the B material for some other time. I posted my third straight win there, a 114-85 victory which puts me in sole possession of third place with a 5-3 record, 2 games behind the league leaders at 7-1.

Lastly, I am in an office pool where we wick the winner of the NFL games. No point spreads are involved, we just pick the winners straight up. At the end of the season, the worst week gets dropped and the top three players throughout the company get either cash or trade or both. The advantage of being in radio is we do sometimes get stuff for free, whether that be books or stuff from clients. The trade option would be free stuff from some of our advertisers. Last week in that contest I went 10-3, so I am at 67 wins, 6 behind the leader.

Anyway, there are other things that pop up in my blog at irregularly scheduled intervals that I should warn all of the new visitors about as well. I keep a thing called a change meter, it is a running total of the change I find on the ground through the course of me being out and about. The change meter is roughly two years old to the page and the rules are pretty simple, it has to be money and it has to be new money, not money that I had and lost and reacquired. The example I used to start the meter went something like this, if I am doing laundry and at the laundromat I find two pennies on the floor, those would count toward the total, if I find money in the washer that fell out of my pocket, that would not, I already had it, just misplaced it. When we last left the change meter, it was sitting at $29.65. That total is about to change, as the other day I made my venture to the corner store to fetch me a gallon of iced tea. One of the advantages of being single is you don't have to use glasses, you can drink straight from the jug, carton , bottle, watering dish, etc. so I will often have a gallon jug of iced tea somewhere in my premises. Anyway, while at the store, what should my wandering eyes should appear but three solitary dollars lacking an owner right there on the floor. Well, the dollars have a new owner and the total is a'changing as the new change meter total is $32.65.

There is also an Asshat of the Week. The Asshat title goes to a person, place or thing that goes above and beyond the call of mere stupidity and is handed out on a weekly basis. Mind you, there is no set day in which the award winner shall appear, only that the award will go for the previous 7 day span (Sun-Sat). LIke, I didn't post a winner from last week, though for those here in the states it would be almost an obvious winner. You may recall see wildfires raging through the hills of California, creating such a presence that one million people had to be evacuated from there homes before they were brought under control and the danger to the public minimized. An event of such magnitude usually involves a response from FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Administration for those playing at home) and FEMA did in fact play a role in coordinating the response to the fires. They even called a press conference to discuss with the media what they are doing to respond to the fires. The press conference was hastily arranged, most media outlets were given notice of it about 15 minutes before it was to begin from FEMA HQ. If the media couldn't attend in person, they were able to phone into the press conference and listen in as it was happening, but those using phone lines were not able to ask questions, just listen. Well, the news conference went off without a hitch, a gentleman took the podium and answered some questions from the people that were assembled, FOX News and MSNBC both carried video of the conference that was being sent out, and to the naked eye it would seem to be your run of the mill press conference. This is Asshat of the Week however, not boring government press conference of the week (a feature that will never appear on the pages of this blog, so breathe a little easier) so something had to be amiss and it was. Remember the phone lines that the press could listen in on, but not ask questions from? That was as close to a press conference as this actually came, as the people on site, asking questions of FEMA"s role and response were not in fact journalists, nor members of the media in any way shape or form, rather they were other FEMA employees. You know, like Joe who you saw in the break room earlier, he was good for a question, or maybe Sue the receptionist, yep, she was good for one too. A FEMA performance worthy of an Academy award, it just wasn't a press conference, and while we don't hand out Academy Awards here, which is just as well, the acceptance speeches run far too long anyway, we do hand out Asshats and the speeches are much shorter and FEMA is this week's winner.

I am sure I mentioned this previously, but for those new to the page, I will clear something up. There are going to be posts popping up that are going to be titled "Originally appeared" followed by a date. It is going to screw with the continuity of the page somewhat, but there is a reason for it. I had blogged on 360 for a decent amount of time, amassing over 500 entries there, but through the course of my blogging, at some point either my account was hacked or yahoo went through some sort of technical breakdown, the result being that I lost my yahoo profile page, no big thing there, but also that unless I was signed into yahoo, access to all of my old material wouldn't work. When yahoo started its "Month of A Thousand Technical Glitches", I started this page and while the import option to Multiply was nice, because of the problems I had with yahoo, all of the posts I had prior to the screw ups with my yahoo account did not come over when I imported my blog material. As a result, I could either leave them in the Internet ether, or transfer them by hand. I am opting for the transfer route for the time being, whenever I have time enough to transfer some, but it will create continuity issues here, and there for I am titling those entries simply with a date rather than a full fledged title, the better to keep the confusion to a minimum.

By all means, while visiting this page, feel free to check out the pages of the contacts as well. I tend to think that those people attached to this page are usually better and brighter than myself, and usually their content is far more compelling than the idle prattle you will get from this page.

I steal stuff. Some of you may have noticed this already, but those things I find of interest through the course of my internet day may in fact show up on the page. Those could be in the form of a Best of the Web series, where I will post stuff from people whose opinions I think are well reasoned, even those that I disagree with, videos of stuff I like, such as the Bill Maher entry a couple of blogs back, or stuff from the likes of Chad Vader or Foamy the Squirrel.

You will also see me focus on the minutae of my life from time to time, like Pogo badges or my MLB Y2K6 character, Joe Random, things that by and large have no appeal to you whatsoever, but hey, I like games, even though I am not very good at them. As a result, if I do something with them, I tend to blog about it. I haven't tinkered with the baseball game in a while, Pogo on the other hand I tend to play pretty consistently, especially come Wednesday when the new badge challenges come out. As for this week;s badges, all I can say is that they suck. It doesn't help that I chose a long badge for my personal challenge, reaching the speed round in Word Whomp Whackdown 100 times. The bingo badge is long enough (35 jackpot spins) so tacking another long badge on top of it just means it will be a long week of gameplay for me.

While I will steal content from those people that I find interesting, I should make a special note for one Christopher Hitchens. He is probably the thinker that I most respect when it comes to all things political and his writing style is one that I admire greatly. He and I agree on a lot of things, though not all, but he has a gift for the written word that I only wish I had one one hundredth of. That being said, I am going to close this entry with something Hitchens related that I knew about, but didn't feel a need to pull on until the radio show today, when something came up about the war in Iraq. There are many that call Hitchens a neocon because of his support for the war, thus showing they have an epidemic lack of understanding of the man, and there are many on the right who would call him a socialist and by and large anyone that can piss off both sides of the political spectrum tends to be someone that I am more than likely going to admire. Anyway, as some of you know that have been around the page for a while, Hitchen's writings on the war had led a college graduate by the name of Mark Daily to enlist in the military. Mark's military career was a brief one, as he was killed by a roadside bomb in Iraq. Hitchens wrote a very moving piece about the doubts he had, knowing that his words may have in some way led this gentleman to his death, and the subsequent meeting with Mark's family, a story which he wrote to Vanity Fair and I will not copy here, it is much too long and this post is long enough already. That being said, today on the radio show, a guy called us and said that all soldiers that went to Iraq to serve and didn't flee the military ere in fact murderers and nothing more. It was at this point that I went to Mark's myspace page and pulled for Lynn Mark's own words on why he left. It, more than any words issued by me or some policy wonkish buffoon, makes the case for why he and others may have went. I found his words to make me feel proud to be an American yet small at the same time, because in his short time on the planet he was a greater man than I could hope to be. Rather than do some sort of paraphrase that would do him an injustice, I am going to close the blog entry simply with Mark's own words. Thanks again for tolerating me for the last few paragraphs and now, the words of Mark Daily;

 

Mark Daily 's Blurbs

About me: Why I Joined: This question has been asked of me so many times in so many different contexts that I thought it would be best if I wrote my reasons for joining the Army on my page for all to see. First, the more accurate question is why I volunteered to go to Iraq. After all, I joined the Army a week after we declared war on Saddam's government with the intention of going to Iraq. Now, after years of training and preparation, I am finally here. Much has changed in the last three years. The criminal Ba'ath regime has been replaced by an insurgency fueled by Iraq's neighbors who hope to partition Iraq for their own ends. This is coupled with the ever present transnational militant Islamist movement which has seized upon Iraq as the greatest way to kill Americans, along with anyone else they happen to be standing near. What was once a paralyzed state of fear is now the staging ground for one of the largest transformations of power and ideology the Middle East has experienced since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Thanks to Iran, Syria, and other enlightened local actors, this transformation will be plagued by interregional hatred and genocide. And I am now in the center of this. Is this why I joined? Yes. Much has been said about America's intentions in overthrowing Saddam Hussein and seeking to establish a new state based upon political representation and individual rights. Many have framed the paradigm through which they view the conflict around one-word explanations such as "oil" or "terrorism," favoring the one which best serves their political persuasion. I did the same thing, and anyone who knew me before I joined knows that I am quite aware and at times sympathetic to the arguments against the war in Iraq. If you think the only way a person could bring themselves to volunteer for this war is through sheer desperation or blind obedience then consider me the exception (though there are countless like me). I joined the fight because it occurred to me that many modern day "humanists" who claim to possess a genuine concern for human beings throughout the world are in fact quite content to allow their fellow "global citizens" to suffer under the most hideous state apparatuses and conditions. Their excuses used to be my excuses. When asked why we shouldn't confront the Ba'ath party, the Taliban or the various other tyrannies throughout this world, my answers would allude to vague notions of cultural tolerance (forcing women to wear a veil and stay indoors is such a quaint cultural tradition), the sanctity of national sovereignty (how eager we internationalists are to throw up borders to defend dictatorships!) or even a creeping suspicion of America's intentions. When all else failed, I would retreat to my fragile moral ecosystem that years of living in peace and liberty had provided me. I would write off war because civilian casualties were guaranteed, or temporary alliances with illiberal forces would be made, or tank fuel was toxic for the environment. My fellow "humanists" and I would relish contently in our self righteous declaration of opposition against all military campaigns against dictatorships, congratulating one another for refusing to taint that aforementioned fragile moral ecosystem that many still cradle with all the revolutionary tenacity of the members of Rage Against the Machine and Greenday. Others would point to America's historical support of Saddam Hussein, sighting it as hypocritical that we would now vilify him as a thug and a tyrant. Upon explaining that we did so to ward off the fiercely Islamist Iran, which was correctly identified as the greater threat at the time, eyes are rolled and hypocrisy is declared. Forgetting that America sided with Stalin to defeat Hitler, who was promptly confronted once the Nazis were destroyed, America's initial engagement with Saddam and other regional actors is identified as the ultimate argument against America's moral crusade. And maybe it is. Maybe the reality of politics makes all political action inherently crude and immoral. Or maybe it is these adventures in philosophical masturbation that prevent people from ever taking any kind of effective action against men like Saddam Hussein. One thing is for certain, as disagreeable or as confusing as my decision to enter the fray may be, consider what peace vigils against genocide have accomplished lately. Consider that there are 19 year old soldiers from the Midwest who have never touched a college campus or a protest who have done more to uphold the universal legitimacy of representative government and individual rights by placing themselves between Iraqi voting lines and homicidal religious fanatics. Often times it is less about how clean your actions are and more about how pure your intentions are. So that is why I joined. In the time it took for you to read this explanation, innocent people your age have suffered under the crushing misery of tyranny. Every tool of philosophical advancement and communication that we use to develop our opinions about this war are denied to countless human beings on this planet, many of whom live under the regimes that have, in my opinion, been legitimately targeted for destruction. Some have allowed their resentment of the President to stir silent applause for setbacks in Iraq. Others have ironically decried the war because it has tied up our forces and prevented them from confronting criminal regimes in Sudan, Uganda, and elsewhere. I simply decided that the time for candid discussions of the oppressed was over, and I joined. In digesting this posting, please remember that America's commitment to overthrow Saddam Hussein and his sons existed before the current administration and would exist into our future children's lives had we not acted. Please remember that the problems that plague Iraq today were set in motion centuries ago and were up until now held back by the most cruel of cages. Don't forget that human beings have a responsibility to one another and that Americans will always have a responsibility to the oppressed. Don't overlook the obvious reasons to disagree with the war but don't cheapen the moral aspects either. Assisting a formerly oppressed population in converting their torn society into a plural, democratic one is dangerous and difficult business, especially when being attacked and sabotaged from literally every direction. So if you have anything to say to me at the end of this reading, let it at least include "Good Luck" Mark Daily