No man is exempt from saying silly things; the mischief is to say them deliberately.
- Michel de Montaigne

One of the neatest things I've run across lately

I'd love to give some of these a shot...

Recaps to make:

Harry Turtledove
GenCon
Williams Pinball

The people cannot look to legislation generally for success. Industry, thrift, character, are not conferred by act or resolve. Government cannot relieve from toil. It can provide no substitute for the rewards of service. It can, of course, care for the defective and recognize distinguished merit. The normal must care for themselves. Self-government means self-support.

- Calvin Coolidge

There is nothing worse than aggressive stupidity.
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Thanks to TV and for the convenience of TV, you can only be one of two kinds of human beings, either a liberal or a conservative.
- Kurt Vonnegut

Dollars and air and facial hair

Damned if it isn't easy to change the air filter in my car.

11 dollar filter, 7 screws to undo, a panel to lift off, and you just make sure you don't dump anything in the clean half of the compartment. Hardest part of it was that I was using my swiss army knife instead of a real screwdriver.

Also, I know that I don't really need to get my oil changed every 3,000 miles, but the engine purrs so nicely after getting that fresh lube.

On a side note, I'm not sure if I feel like a dick or just an unhappy consumer when I refused to bow to the cashier at the auto shop saying it was 'government regulations' that said I needed to show my ID before I could use my credit card. She folded like a house of cards when the words 'merchant agreement' came out of my mouth. I think people respect what I say more with the beard action, too. Who would have thought it could be so useful in arguments and as a conversation starter?

How's this for pretentious?

vi veri universum vivus vici

Fox Business News - Boobs that matter

How are they not just doing the news in lingerie and bikinis?

I *know* there's a producer somewhere that goes to sleep every night cursing the close minded idividuals that are keeping him from showing the business news as it should be shown. THEY DIDN'T SUFFOCATE HIM WITH THIS SHIT IN RUSSIA!

HOLLYWOOD JUSTICE!

7/25/08 The Soup - possibly the best episode of The Soup I've seen.

How much for a cup of ice?

If you worked in my office and answered anything under 50 cents, you would be wrong.

I feel like I just got robbed.

U-Verse

Preliminary assessment of AT&T's U-Verse.

The internet is not better - our DSL could have been this good if somebody had just come out to fix our wiring like the installation guys spent hours doing on Saturday morning.

Yeah, it's a lot of channels, but they're all standard definition. Standard definition looks like ass. We could pay an extra $10 a month for maybe 20 channels of HD. I get almost that much HD with my rabbit ears..

Premium television services have a long way to go before they hit what I was imagining them to be. HD paradise my ass.

On the positive side, the included DVR is pretty sweet. Hopefully 120 hours of SD is sufficient..

Bottom line, though is that we're probably ditching the cable after baseball season again anyway. There is so little on that we even want to watch.

Comic questions from the weekend.

Are the Avengers and Fantastic Four racist(species-ist)? The X-Men and mutants in general get screwed routinely and non-mutant super teams always seem to be otherwise occupied... I bet they're just sitting around in pointy white hats, shooting the shit about how mutants are going to all die.

Why didn't Kal-El's dad Jor-El send his whole family to earth when Krypton was dying? Were they on a tight budget or something?