Crapper Napper

PRODUCT IDEA:

Ever over eat during your lunch hour and need a power nap to get back into the groove? Find yourself dosing off at your desk and wish you could just sneak a quick nap? Well I have the solution for you! The Crapper Napper is a pocket size device that unpacks to create an elbow and chin rest you can place on you knees while sitting in the bathroom stall. Just rest your head on your hands and let the Crapper Napper hold you comfortably and stable to host a quick private slumber party right in your workplace restroom.

Culture of Corruption

The buzz word this year being used by the Democratic party has been the Republican Culture of Corruption. Unfortunatly, as usual, the talking points lack any fact or historical support when you look at the history of political corruption, even ignoring current headlines regarding political scandal in the Dem's own ranks.

What drove me to blog about this was a item of trivia shared by a radio talk show that speaks truth of where the bulk of corruption stems from when speaking of our congress.

Since 1978, 12 congressional delegates have been convicted and served time for various corupt practices, severe enough and with enough evidence to send them to prison. You can look them all up if you have the time, but the numbers speak louder than words. Of the 12 convictions, 11, YES 11 of them were Democrats and only one a Republican!

Now with current events speaking of the Lousiana congressman William Jefferson facing alegations of bribary, and Harry Ried being accused of taking free boxing tickets, when senator McCain paid for his out of pocket, I have to say: When you point, Mr. Howard Dean, 3 fingers point back at you, and with 11 Convictions under your own party belt your gonna need more than two hands.

Just read the talking points of the party to learn what hipocrites they are, and again, this is not in support of the GOP, but to point out why I would vote for the lesser of two evils.

Oregon Weather

Oregon has some strange weather. Known for being mild, and also for the rain, this part of the country is always a roll-of-the-dice weather wise. For years Memorial Day weekend was our first camping trip of the season, and 2005 was the last year for that tradition. We got rained out the first two days, only to have a marginally acceptable Sunday afternoon, and retuned to have enough time Monday to clean all the mud off the gear. This year I bagged the idea, and was actually thinking I would regret it, as usually the weather threatens but is never as bad as forcasted. This year, it was worse than forcasted! We got poured on all Friday and Saturday, with some hail to add to the mix (LEFT) Fortuntatly we were not at the campsite but in the comfort of our home. I guess this is just another example of me showing my age.

Charlie Daniels on Illegals

Charlie Daniels on mexicans - not only can he play a wicked country song on his guitar or fiddle, but he can "tell it like it is":

By Charlie Daniels www.charliedaniels.com

Mexican Standoff

I don’t know how everybody else feels about it, but to me I think Hispanic people in this country, legally or illegally, made a huge public relations mistake with their recent demonstrations.
I don’t blame anybody in the world for wanting to come to the United States of America, as it is a truly wonderful place. But when the first thing you do when you set foot on American soil is illegal it is flat out wrong and I don’t care how many lala land left heads come out of the woodwork and start trying to give me sensitivity lessons.
I don’t need sensitivity lessons, in fact I don’t have anything against Mexicans! I just have something against criminals and anybody who comes into this country illegally is a criminal and if you don’t believe it, try coming into America from a foreign country without a passport and see how far you get.
What disturbs me about the demonstrations is that it’s tantamount to saying, “I am going to come into your country even if it means breaking your laws and there’s nothing you can do about it.”
It’s an “in your face” action and speaking just for me I don’t like it one little bit and if there were a half dozen pairs of gonads in Washington bigger than English peas it wouldn’t be happening.
Where are you, you bunch of lilly livered, pantywaist, forked tongued, sorry excuses for defenders of The Constitution? Have you been drinking the water out of the Potomac again?
And even if you pass a bill on immigration it will probably be so pork laden and watered down that it won’t mean anything anyway. Besides, what good is an other law going to do when you won’t enforce the ones on the books now?
And what ever happened to the polls guys? I thought you folks were the quintessential finger wetters. Well you sure ain’t paying any attention to the polls this time because somewhere around eighty percent of Americans want something done about this mess, and mess it is and getting bigger everyday.
This is no longer a problem, it is a dilemma and headed for being a tragedy. Do you honestly think that what happened in France with the Muslims can’t happen here when the businesses who hire these people finally run out of jobs and a few million disillusioned Hispanics take to the streets?
If you, Mr. President, Congressmen and Senators, knuckle under on this and refuse to do something meaningful it means that you care nothing for the kind of country your children and grandchildren will inherit.
But I guess that doesn’t matter as long as you get re-elected. Shame on you.
One of the big problems in America today is that if you have the nerve to say anything derogatory about any group of people (except Christians) you are going to be screamed at by the media and called a racist, a bigot and anything else they can think of to call you.
Well I’ve been pounded by the media before and I’m still rockin’ and rollin’ and when it comes to speaking the truth I fear not. And the truth is that the gutless, gonadless, milksop politicians are just about to sell out the United States of America because they don’t have the intestinal fortitude to stand up to the face reality.
And reality is that we would never allow any other group of people to have 12 million illegals in this country and turn a round and say, ”Oh it’s ok, ya'll can stay here if you’ll just allow us to slap your wrist.”
And I know that some of you who read this column are saying “Well what’s wrong with that?”
I’ll tell you what’s wrong with it. These people could be from Mars as far as we know. We don’t know who they are, where they are or what they’re up to and the way the Congress is going we’re not going to.
Does this make sense? Labor force you say? We already subsidize corporate agriculture as it is, must we subsidize their labor as well?
If these people were from Haiti would we be so fast to turn a blind eye to them or if they were from Somalia or Afghanistan? I think not.
All the media shows us are pictures of hard working Hispanics who have crossed the border just to try to better their life. They don’t show you pictures of the Feds rounding up members of MS 13, the violent gang who came across the same way the decent folks did. They don’t tell you about the living conditions of the Mexican illegals some fat cat hired to pick his crop.
I want to make two predictions

No. 1: This situation is going to grow and fester until it erupts in violence on our streets while the wimps in Washington drag their toes in the dirt and try to figure how many tons of political hay they can make to the acre.
No 2: Somebody is going to cross that border with some kind of weapon of mass destruction and set it off in a major American city after which there will be a backlash such as this country has never experienced and the Capitol building in Washington will probably tilt as Congressmen and Senators rush to the other side of the issue.
I don’t know about you but I would love to see just one major politician stand up and say, “I don’t care who I make mad and I don’t care how many votes I lose, this is a desperate situation and I’m going to lead the fight to get it straightened out.”
I don’t blame anybody for wanting to come to America, but if you don’t respect our immigration laws why should you respect any others.
And by the way, this is America, and our flag has stars and stripes. Please get that other one out of my face.
Pray for our troops
What do you think?
God Bless America
Charlie Daniels
April 10, 2006

Low-Bid vs No Bid Contractors

Cyber Parenting

Although my family thinks I'm nuts, I have a vision, and I wan't your opinion. Here's the issue: Our kids are often out of control. In the rat race of both parents working, after-school activities, and a busy prime time TV season has left our discipline lacking. The kids don't do there chores, and talk back when reminded. Groundings and revoked privilages have become so commonplace they are no more effective than a UN resolution. What is a parent to do? We started threatening to cancel Christmas gifts when it occured to me.... A discipline blog!

YESSSS! I create a blog, email all the grandparents, aunts, uncles, godparents, or whomever can review and keep up on our family dicipline blog to see how things are going. I will start each kid off with 100 points. For each negative post I will assign a certain number of deductions, for each positive point we will add some bonus points. At the end of the year, the resulting number will be the percentage of christmas budget remaining for gifts!

Say child #1 nets a loss of 25 demerits, and he was hoping for a IPod, well shucks I guess the %75 of the IPod buget means they will be getting a real nice AM/FM walkman instead.

Not only can the grandparents and other family members get a real picture of our family life, they can see if the kids really have been bad or good for goodness sake, and as a bonus I get to vent my frustrations so I don't snap and end up on the evening news.

IT Phone Home

If you are like me, you are fed up with paying for your land-line phone, your TV programming, your internet connection, and your cell-phone service. Mike posted a neat gadget on his blog that could help wean you off your land line phone. This device will connect your existing land-line phone to your broadband internet connection thus using the free Skype service to make calls to any landline phone. You can then make calls to anywhere in the US and Canada free through the end of this year, or buy credits to make low cost international calls. I have tried Skype using my headset through my computer, and the sound quality is good if you can handle a slight audio delay, what do you expect for FREE! I am tempted to order this little device.

Tree Fall

Our HR guy awoke to a tree in his house this morning, not only was he late for work, half of our office left to go take a look. My boss returned with the pictures he took with his PDA and I decided to share. 

Sunset Shadow

On my way back home we had a short burst of thundershowers followed by the sunset sneaking below the cloud cover. A few miles back behind this shot the rain was comming down so hard the traffic came to a standstill and visibility was near zero. Once the rain let up the low sun was casting long evening shadows on the cars below a dark sky, I noticed a perfect silhouette of the cars on the dividing freeway hedge. You can see the blurry vision of the Brooks powerplant in the background. 

Fly a Kite

My wife is sick of me so she told me to go fly a kite. 

Soldier Imports Armored Car From Iraq

A US Army soldier purchased an armored Mercedes in Iraq for $3000 while stationed there and had it shipped home. The car now impounded by the FEDS was likely used by the former Iraqi regime, and possibly may have belonged to Saddam himself. The car reportedly has a loudspeaker system, hidden recording microphones, and the best part, pipes where flames shoot out of the sides. This sounds just like my first Volkswagen, but it wasn't armored and the flames shot out the engine compartment when you stepped on the gas too hard.

Sunset Wool Company

Another photo I took while while out Geocaching then enhanced it with Picasa last night. A herd of sheep with some new lambs were grazing away in the early sunset. I found it to be picturesque.

Urban Watersking

Recent flooding in New England has resulted in a new pastime, Urban Watersking, and talks of introducing this new sport in the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing has begun.

Lie-yers

Some lawyers have filed a $50 Billion, (YES BILLION DOLLAR with a capital "B") lawsuit against Verizon for privacy violations related to the NSA antiterrorism database to track terrorist phone numbers. Their claim of $1000 per occurrence per customer is where they get this amount and I for one would like to opt out of my claim. There is no way some lawyer is going to get fat using my name on a lawsuit that results in penalizing my cell phone carrier for helping our national security. To equate a computer looking for US phone number connections to known phone numbers of terrorists to an illegal search and seizure is outrageous! The lawyers should be arrested for treason, and undermining yours and my security. Find me one person this has damaged and I will shut up, until then, PLEASE, track every phone number dialed, email address routed, and web site visited if it is even remotely tied to terrorism until we eradicate this hatred. One suicide bomber in your neighborhood can ruin your life, forever!

Calamatosis, Say What?

When you don't get ANY results from your web search these days you must assume you mispelled it. With so much content, and so many places any keyword might reside, it is very rare to yield ZERO results. Take "calamatosis" for example: Is it an inflamitary disease of clams? An affliction that only occurs in Calama, Chile? Nither, just a made up word, but can you believe some people actually consider it a game to come up with a word with no internet search results. They must be more bored than I am posting this useless blog entry! No the real reason is I am hoping to get some hits from the FARK post refering to calamatosis and this stupid idea of a game to make up non-words!

Sunny Days

Finally sunny days are here and the kids and I took full advantage today. One geocache search took us to a riverside park here in Albany I had not yet visited. There is a boat launch and some great river frontage for skipping rocks. Daisy our dog was so excited she nearly jumped off the dock after driftwood but fortunately we had her on a secure leash. Most warm days after sucessfully locating some caches we finish up with a trip through the King Kone drive through for a strawberry soft serve icecream cone. They have $1 cones twice the size of a small DQ cone and the strawberry flavor tastes like a strawberry milkshake. The only downside is this little run down shop is owned and opporated by a guy with a mole on his neck that NO LIE, has 4" long hairs coming off the sucker! I so want to ask him how much for the mole hair on his neck. Seriously I would give the guy a $20 spot right there to pluck those suckers out. He is of asian decent, it may be a cultural thing like an orhodox jew. 

Don't Feed The Animals

Why does the media avoid the obvious solution in the imigration debate? Several outspoken immigration reformers have suggested the obvious solution to the flood of illegial immigrants and yet nobody want's to act. STOP FEEDING THE ANIMALS! If you provide easy means of getting a job, free education, social services, do you ever expect them to stop migrating here?! Aministy failed during the Reagan administration, just as it is doomed to fail to correct this problem today. Our representitives need to take the hard line, and make employers accountable to hire only documented resident aliens or US citizens or pay steep fines. Immigration officials need to ENFORCE our laws that currently exist. No new legislation is required. Excuses abound about how difficult it is to place the burden on our government offices, voter registration officials, and employers to verify the status of applicants when all that needs to be done is to update our SS cards so they cannot be forged. An online verification process can validate each worker, social service recipient, and v0ter to this national database. If the person is not paying taxes, not a legal resident, or a non citizen then they won't be able to benifit by being here and they will leave on there own. HOW HARD CAN THIS BE?! It's not hard, it is just politics as usual. Dems want the latino vote, and republicans want the labor force so again.. TELL YOUR REPRESENTATIVE. Enforce our laws, or elect someone who will.

Congressional Hypocrite Oath

I can't escape the political hypocracy in america today, no matter what side of the isle you stand, your representative more than likely is swinging both ways leaving you and I to make our decision based on the lesser of two evils. While Replicans are screwing us on immigration reform, the Democrats are going to stick us at the gas pump without a lube job.

IMMIGRATION REFORM:

Stop illegal immigration... but lets give the illegals here free admission, RIGHT, that's like sneaking into the movies, and when caught already in your seat the usher giving you a free ticket and kindly asking you "please don't sneak in again".

GAS PRICES

Cut the tax incentives for oil exploration because the oil companies make too much profit. RIGHT, and expect them to now LOWER gas prices out of the kindness of there heart while they spend those profits on oil exploration and pay additional leasing fees for the oil rights. Sure that will work!

ALTERNATE FUELS

Since we won't subsidize oil exploration, or allow us to extract our own oil, we are supposed to be energy independent by instead subsidizing ethanol production that actually uses more energy to plant and harvest the crops and refine, than what results from the efforts. (Would you pay more money to go to work than you earn) Oh, and did I mention the environmentalist who support ethanol production also want it produced without pesticides, fertilizer, clearing of land for agriculture, or endangering any gopher habitat.

THE WAR

Ask a liberal: "Should we have removed Sadam in the 1990 gulf war?" Many say YES, Bush Sr. was wrong not to go to Bagdad and finish the job causing the mess we are in today. Ask them if we should have gone to war today, and they say NO, BUSH LIED PEOPLE DIED. Ask about Osama Bin Ladin, and that too is a BUSH BLUNDER, but Clinton had 8 years and never persued him, even after the 1st WTC bombing and the attack on the USS Cole.

HOMELAND SECURITY

We must have more spies (Dem talking point), but we must not listen to phone conversations of terrorists if the calls are made in the US... Ok, so it is only ok to listen to terrorists if they are not here yet.. Once they sneak across our open border, and reach US soil, they are protected by our constitution. Sounds like a game of hide and seek, "I call SAFE, I'm on home base!" Oh, and if a terrorist is caught, we must give the invading enemy the same fair trial his victim would have had, but if we don't catch him we go to a funeral while he goes to paradise.

Don't expect your lawmakers to protect your family, keep your gas prices low, and insure our future national language is not spanglish. They are all just grasping for power, so they can keep the campaign dollars flowing. Before you cast a ballot this year, I suggest you make sure your interests are being represented.

Evolution of Dancing

This video is worth the wait if it takes some time to load, I only wish the quality was better. My viewpoint needed some lighter content!

Writers Block

Posts being few and far between is evidence of my recent writers block. Several attempts to post new content resulted in surrender as I read my rants and decided the subject was not going to serve much use. Recent current events are discouraging, and one more opinion on the subject is futile so I have decided to return to the roots of this blog and post some photos and personal experiences.

Over the weekend I worked in Puyallup, WA and since my Cousin whom, I had not seen in years was staying in Seattle, we hooked up for a visit. Pictured is Brad's first geocaching experience. We located one just across from the hotel I was staying. Thinking ahead, we would have had a umbrella and a flashlight, but after a short search we uncovered what we were hunting for. Now Brad can say he has been "Geocaching"

Poll Time