After much debate, I bought myself one of these bad boys. Nothing improves performance (superchargers, exhaust upgrades, bah!) like a good radar detector. This one will get a stress test soon, hopefully it'll deliver.
I also picked up a small DVD player (component, progressive, mp3/vcd/jpg/dvd+-rw) for $45. Amazing. The plan is to hook it up to a couple of handheld TV's for my kids to watch movies on long trips. It fits perfectly under the X5's rear armrest.
I also loaded up the Sportrak Pro with maps for the upcoming trip. In the process, I discovered Magellan has announced a new product that'll let my tiny GPS do routing, though they want $150 for the maps. I've already been bitten before, so I'll wait away before buying it, if I ever do.
Picked up three interesting books this weekend:
1. The Lies of George Bush by David Corn
2. Cyberia - Stanislaus Lem
3. Ficciones - Jorge Luis Borges
#1 cuz I enjoy this guy's blog immensely. #2 because I've heard good things about Lem, and #3 because Jorge Luis Borges is a master, and I can't believe I've never gotten around to reading Ficciones.
War critics astonished as US hawk admits invasion was illegal
I just love this shit :)
I just realized that buying media and access to media requires a big chunk of change. Though it pales next to my gargantuan mortgage, it's still big enough. Consider:
1. TV - $50, no premium channels, but $10 for cloning + Tivo (ripoff)
2. Phone $25
3. Cellphone $90
4. DSL $50
5. Netflix $20
6. Magazines $10
7. NPR $5
8. xmradio $10
9. and now, xblive (?)
So thats, what, $260 per MONTH? And I ain't including all the DVDs, books, magazines, movie theaters, and games I buy either (probably another $100 or so, on average). Thats somewhat less than I spend on restaurants, but a more than I spend on booze. :)
Make no mistake, The Administration is waging an all out war for the future of this country. They know that those which control information, control everything. They appear to want nothing less than what Orwell warned us about. Funny thing is, when as a child I read Animal Farm, I knew, instinctively, that the Pigs were wrong, that wanting to be a Pig was wrong. I figured this was obvious to everyone.
I was wrong, I guess. I figure Bushy goes to bed every night thinking "It's good to be the Pig".
Mark Byron: The Usefulness of Civil Disobedience-Part II-The Bonhoffer Option
Am I right to be scared out of my skull? What is wrong with these people?
"Suppose that some time in late 2000, Russian and Chinese leaders, with the covert support of some other national leaders, were convinced that the US election results had been materially altered by a small right-wing clique, and that as a result the US was in fact no longer a democracy, and its weapons of mass destruction, now apparently in the hands of an unelected, psychopathic and illegitimate group of radical religious extremists, posed an imminent threat to world peace. "
I went through this thought process myself early on. It tickles me to find someone wrote it up, well....
"we were lied to. Most of the lies are now familiar: there appear to have been no weapons of mass destruction and no evidence to suggest that, as President Bush claimed in March, Saddam had "trained and financed ... al Qaeda".(3) Bush and Blair, as their courtship of the president of Uzbekistan reveals, appear to possess no genuine concern for the human rights of foreigners.
But a further, and even graver, set of lies is only now beginning to come to light. Even if all the claims Bush and Blair made about their enemies and their motives had been true, and all their objectives had been legal and just, there may still have been no need to go to war. For, as we discovered last week, Saddam Hussein proposed to give Bush and Blair almost everything they wanted before a shot had been fired. Our governments appear both to have withheld this information from the public and to have lied to us about the possibilities for diplomacy. "
This is exactly what this country needs to set them damned bleeding hard liberals straight. They read too much damned books, think they're all smart and, uh, stuff.
Sigh.
Stuff like this just pisses me off to no end! I'm amazed it made it into mainstream media.
U.S. troops arrest Iraqi for criticising them
This stuff has been happening since day one. The US has destroyed orchards, handcuffed children, randomly bombed, and just all around behaved like a spoiled brat having a tantrum. I don't see this on CNN (though I watch often) or MSNBC or FOX (HAHAHAHAAAHAAAAA!) - I read it online, a little here, a little there. Why am I do the reporting? Why isn't all this inarguably newsworthy stuff not hitting the front page of the Merc, EVERY DAY? Why do you think?
665's is a list of six hundred and sixty five random (generally funny) entries, and the author is finally nearing the end (he's up to 654). I've been following this site for the last 400 entries or so (yeah, I need to get I life).
You may have noticed I've not been posting here. Blame my webhost - they insist on changing my absolute path, breaking MT every time they do. No wait... blame me. I'm such a lazyass. But, it's fixed, at last for the time being.