February 27, 2005
bye to nick
we sent nick off this evening. it was a great weekend. yesterday we went down to the mail and saw the nation museum of art and then the air and space museum. nick paid my way to convince me back in their crazy-ass-nausea-inducing flight simulator. that evening we went out to see some of the many crappy bars that dc has to offer. i ended up at the falafel shop and realized that i didn't have enough money. fortunately i was able to trade a metro card to someone one else in line for just under it's face value and enjoyed a late night falafel.
this morning we went down to the international spy museum. it was a great example of how given enough money you can put together an amazing learning experience. that was followed by a diversion to the urban outfitters where i broke my vow never to give them any money. nick's 25% discount card wore me down and the shoes i got were pretty darn pimp.
February 25, 2005
February 24, 2005
popcorn on the cob
krista and i went down to georgia to visit relatives last weekend. i'm planning on doing a full post about that trip so i'll only mention a highlight right now.
we stopped at a gift shop outside of ft. valley and came across a package of uncle ozgood's microwave popcorn. it was pretty freaking sweet, it's a whole corn cob that you micrwave. you take the cob out of the vacuum sealed pouch and put it into the enclosed popping bag. throw the bag in the microwave and bam! literally, it's the loudest thing you've ever heard, the thing goes crazy popping. best of all, the popcorn is great. the texture was much more substantial than most microwave popcorn.
so, moral of the story is, if you ever see uncle ozgood's popcorn do yourself a favor and buy one.
tweaking the css
as you may have noticed i've been tweaking the style sheet for the site. there were several things that had annoyed me for a while and i finally got around to fixing them. along the way, i found a color wheel tool that made picking colors much easier.
February 17, 2005
no taxation without representation
my mom forwarded this email from a family friend this afternoon:
-----Original Message----- Sent: Thursday, February 17, 2005 6:20 AM Subject: Chilling statistics... According to icasualties.org, there have been 88 hostile fire deaths caused by firearms since the beginning of hostilities in Iraq. The remainder of coalition deaths have been due to explosives or accidents. What does this mean? If you consider that there have been an average of 160,000 troops in theater during the last 22 months, that gives a firearm death rate of 60 per 100,000. The rate in Washington DC is 80.6 per 100,000. That means that you are more likely to be shot and killed in our Nation's Capitol, which has some of the strictest gun control laws in the nation, than you are in Iraq. The conclusion? Under the tactics of the left, we should immediately pull out of Washinton, DC!
here was my response:
I apologize for the tone of this email in advance but this little factoid has rubbed me completely the wrong way. Today we went driving around with a friend of Krista's family and got to see a lot more of the district so the humor is lost on me.
While I couldn't get that site to come up, the line about lies, damn lies and statistics comest to mind. Sure it was "only" 88 American deaths but a whole lot more Iraqis have been killed. The small number of casualties is a testament to the improvements in body armor and medical battlefield treatment that so few Americans have died.
But living in DC for the last two months had given me a new appreciation for how badly the residents of the District get screwed. The schools look to be falling down, the police cars look like they've been used in a demolition derby and the streets have pot holes big enough to loose a wheel in and Bush forced the DC to pay for his inauguration security out of their homeland security money. It's amazing what happens with no Congressional representation.
Now if everyone in the district was given body armor and medical evacuations to Germany when they were shot I'm sure the death rate here could be lowered. Heck, I bet most residents of DC would actually be pretty happy if the US did pull out.
February 15, 2005
Don't approve the extremist judicial nominees!
Senators,
Today I read that Bush will be reintroducing 12 judicial nominees that were not approved the last Congress. Republicans obstructed 63 of President Clinton's nominees while all but a handful of Bush's nominees have been blocked. Simply put, there is no judicial "crisis". I hope you will do everything in your power to prevent keep radical conservative judges out of the Federal courts.
February 06, 2005
death ride
sunday i met up with a coworker and another coworker's boyfriend and we went out on a bike ride with a bunch of folks riding for capitol hill bikes. we were under the impression that it was to be a coffee shop ride. out and back maybe 20 miles. apparently this week they'd decided to step it up. we ended up riding a little over 45 miles. i managed to stay up with the pack for the two-thirds of it but started boinking and ended up with a couple of other stragglers. people seemed pretty impressed that i'd managed to keep up on a fixie. it was the longest ride i've done on the john deere. krista commented that it looked like someone had hit me in the ass with a bat. i was contemplating padded shorts afterwards.
February 05, 2005
way to go gitmo! orwell would be so proud.
CBS News | Orwellian Guantanamo
The presiding tribunal officer accuses Idr of associating "with a known Al Qaeda operative." The detainee says, reasonably enough: "Give me his name." The tribunal president says: "I do not know." Idr understandably asks: "How can I respond to this?" The tribunal president asks: "Did you know of anybody that was a member of al Qaeda?" Idr says: "No, no ..."
And then Idr went to the heart of the constitutional problem, as Judge Green sees it, with an evaluation that the judge described as "piercingly accurate."
"This is something the interrogators told me a long while ago," Idr complains during his so-called trial. "I asked the interrogators to tell me who this person was. Then I could tell you if I might have known this person, but not if this person is a terrorist. Maybe I knew this person as a friend. Maybe it was a person that worked with me. Maybe it was a person that was on my team. But I do not know if this person is Bosnian, Indian or whatever. If you tell me the name, then I can respond and defend myself against this accusation."
The tribunal president then responds, presumably with a straight face: "We are asking you the question and we need you to respond to what is on the unclassified summary."
