Something Warren Buffett once said intrigued me...

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Warren Buffett once said an insightful line... Something like "Saints have a past; sinners have a future."


I will listen to a saint long before a sinner. The sinner still needs to make that future. Saints have been there and done that, which does not make them hypocrites but reminders as to why it's best not to do it in the first place.

Like a fictional sci-fi character also once said, "When you are bleeding, find a healer with scars."

How to deal with the financial crisis:

1. Ask the financial wizards how to restore confidence? If bailing out the big banks isn't helping, more forensic investigation needs to be applied. Find the cause and deal with it. At least that's how the theory might go...?

2. Don't sell; that ADDS to the panic - never mind all the penalties and taxes you'll have to pay. Is it really worth it?

3. Drink a glass of red wine, light a candle, and bonk like bunnies. Some like to think that will relax people. If you're single or have a fear of getting cooties (or anything real like herpes or HIV), there's that pr0n0 website that a left-leaning news/forum site (*cough* Huff*cough*ington Post*cough*) felt compelled to advertise to everybody... thanks, y'all! :D

"The Science of Straying"

This article has an apparently interesting article that tries to explain why people cheat.

One key phrase they mentioned was 'fidelity in marriage'. Um, okay... 'Fidelity in marriage'? Try 'liquidity in marriage' instead. That ought to bring up not only a handful of interesting sites, but an advert for YaK Brand Massaging Intimate Love Fluid (note, to spare any company free publicity, or give the impression I put in a naughty acronym anywhere else, I put in a fictitious brand name in its place. If there's anything more disgusting than any liquid from a yak being spread on me or my purported wife, I don't want to know what it is.)

Strange how an article pertaining to infidelity has lead to this joke of a response by me. That's okay, it's a joke of an article. Fidelity is in the spirit as much as it is in action and is the ultimate test if you genuinely care about your "partner" or not.

If they gave surnames to hurricanes...

You've heard that hurricane "Ike" is threatening Texas with a sound beating.

Of course, hurricanes were originally given female names -- male names being added on to eliminate any sexist overtones.

But they forgot about surnames.

Which might be for the best.

A hurricane named "Ike Turner" might not go over well.

Or when we get to the "M"s, hurricane "Mike Tyson" really would cause a stir.

Or going back to the feminine nomenclature, I'll just cut to the chase: Hurricane "Lorena Bobbitt".

Yes, let's stick to single names only. And if this were 1989, Hurricane "Jackée" would still be too far away from "227"...

Pier 1 Imports?

There used to be a chain store called "Pier 1 Imports". Here you would find all sorts of knick-knacks; from fabrics to dinnerware to even picture frames and more. All imported.

Of course, back then "imported" was equated to something regal or special. Pricey too, because the stuff was said to be imported and therefore special.

These days, I think they changed their name. I think they're now called "Wal-Mart".

News just in: "Airliners Miss Colliding By 1 Minute"

Here is the article!
(Happy reading!)

They must be expert pilots. When I play "Microsoft Flight Simulator X", I fly around for hours and deliberately try to chase or dog other planes. Computer-generated, these planes follow a direct path, without any element of "the human factor" getting involved. The result? I keep missing them by miles. Now if I turned the "other aircraft" amount to 80% then I might have a chance.

If this flight simulator is close to real-life flying, how do two humans collide? Apart from meeting at a hook-up bar and going to a cheap, cockroach-infested hotel, but that's not relevant right now.

But, oh look, I just opened the window, poked my head out, and turned it upward. The sky is blue and pretty, and just like in the simulator there's nary a plane in the sky.

What all that says, I have no idea... I just like to come across silly.

Next week I will be reviewing the simulated accuracies of "Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas", complete with that special hidden gem of a sub-game: "Hot Coffee". Or perhaps I won't...

Potato Chips and Corn Flakes are NOT vegetables.

It'd be nice if they were vegetables. Indeed, as far as these things go, I'm amazed nobody has made "Broccoli Chips" yet.

Or even "Broccoli Flakes", complete with slogan "They stay crunchy in milk!" (Because nobody ever puts them there...).

Why not call them what they are: "Vegetable matter dunked in grizzle and fried to a crispy coronary condition". But then nobody would by them and that Lito Fray company would go out of business...

"slower than a turtle snorting Valium in a freezer"

Are there days when, off the cuff, you come up with a new aphorism or maxim?

Of course, "a stitch in time saves nine" can't hold a candle to "slower than a turtle snorting Valium in a freezer" in terms of incoherence. I mean, we know what a turtle is - a slow moving animal with a heavy shell to ensure it remains slow. We know what Valium does - it's a drug that relaxes anxious or other fast moving people. We know what freezers are and do - it is a man-made localized containment climate apparatus, as we all can't have Alaska in our back yards. Apart from keeping food edible, anyone happening to be in a frozen environment, naturally occurring or synthetic, is going to slow down.

The point is, the noun I'd be describing with that phrase is really, really, appallingly, really very slow. Just like that description.

Now, to compare: "A stitch in time saves nine":

We know what a stitch is - the position that a piece of thread is in, in order to keep a torn item (fabric, skin, et cetera) intact.

Most of us knows what time is - a perceived abstraction rather measuring a concept than a tangible item. You can't reach out and cuddle with time. Well, you can do that with a stopwatch, but cuddling plastic is pretty goofy, and a watch only shows a representation of a relative measurement OF time.

Nine is a number; often used as a figure of quantity, part of a lewd position many adults seem to like to engage in, or a measurement.

Now unless the coiner of the term "A stitch in time saves nine" was a famous science fiction writer of the twentieth century, I just can't fathom how sewing up a rip in time saves nine of, well, anything! Of course, if we go back to that risque definition, maybe "time" was the Latin word for "Levis" and the coiner of the term was in an orgy, shame on him?

The Oster Fusion blender - a sappy review.

I recently bought this nice Oster brand blender with a 600 watt motor, to replace the underpowered 400 watt blender I currently have.

Now, it's fast. Think "Superman on crystal meth" and there you go. And the results were a very smooth mixture...

Sadly, when I took the motor unit out of the box, you could feel the motor inside go up and down if you turned the main part upside down and back. That didn't feel right.

Worse, when actually using this thing, the motor sounds wrong. It's loud, that's not the problem, but the whir noise is unevenly pitched. Now I've only used this thing in manual mode; no pre-set modes that turn the blades backwards and forwards at various speeds; just "maximum" or even holding down the "max pulse" button. The whirring noise should be constant and consistent. It sounds like the thing is going to fall apart at any minute.

Then I went to a professional review site to read peoples' glowing reviews. Well, they were indeed glowing... Glowing with anger, it seems. Many people have reported premature failures in as little as three uses. I've a feeling this unit is going to peter out within a month. Even the 400 watt puny Oster model I had prior to this one didn't sound like a duck choking on tootsie roll!

I'm going to risk keeping it. I mean, it's only money and the way it's built I'm going to expect the blade to fly off and slash my wrist one day and claim "I did it in self defense, because that meanie of an owner wanted to return me because he figured it out I'm a poorly made piece of junk!"

So if you've bought this for $60 at some discount retail store, return it. I worry you'll be out of a lot of money if you don't.

Recursion

See an example of Recursion here!

Recursion: 'A procedure that falls back on itself.' A loop. I shouldn't be so fatuous, but I wanted to demonstrate why "Recursion" is my favorite word.

The credit card industry wants to augment how credit card scores are tallied. You'll love this!

The credit card industry now wants to base credit card scores based on the types of items we purchase. Do a web search; it's true. :(

http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com/Banking/YourCreditRating/YourLifestyleMayHurtCreditScore.aspx

There - I'll let you be indolent this time. :)

Get massage therapy twice a month? You’ll probably be socked 50 FICA points. Greedy little sots… Given the banks’ own record in light of all this, shouldn’t we be examining what they do before our tax dough bails their bread out?!

More importantly, if your doctor tells you to get massage therapy, why should my credit score be affected? Credit is about paying it back. Not what one purchases.

On the other hand, if they see lots of $500 payments to someone named "Candy", they'll think I'm seeing a hooker. They'll probably also figure I'm a closeted politician...

But seriously, it is sick how companies will ram up interest rates or lower your score. It's bizarre enough as it is. Cancel a card, especially an older one? Your score goes down. Have too many cards? Score goes down. Never use a card? Well, you have no history so your score is 0, but that's not relevant right now...

Never cancel a card, especially older ones, because the oldest one is the key to your credit history. Then the company closes it for you, saying you never use it… I think I will set up autopay for one of my bills for my other card, then go and set up that card to autopay it off every month. Then they’ll blame me for using only $x0 of the $x000 otherwise available and sock it to me anyway.

In short, I hope Oprah or Dr Phil or even Oscar the Grouch has a special on these vultures. We all know Barney the oddly-shaped Dinosaur wouldn’t sing and prance over this issue (it’s too mean), so maybe we can get the Teletubbies involved. They probably use Masturcard to buy their tubby custards with anyway… Now I had my problems in the past, but this is the sort of thing that won’t get said on the 5PM news. Probably because the newscaster’s credit rating would be obliterated…

So there's a new ring tone available - a "condom ring tone"...

Seriously! Google it up! Even MSN flaunts it prominently on their web site!!

If you go to Microsoft’s web site, (MSN), their A-List page has a new article; hyping up the Big Gates Foundation for putting out, you guessed it, a “condom ring tone”.

What the ??!!!???!!

I know Microsoft has screwed its customers over time and again, I mean who doesn't, but a freakin’ ring tone that everybody around the phone’s owner gets to hear?! Yeah, that’s a real smart thing to do… You can imagine such a guy asking his friends “Hey, wanna hear my new ring tone?” (Now, aren’t you glad I only use bits of 1960s psychedelic tunes as ring tones? Except, I, unlike the creator of this ‘condom ring tone’, am not drugged up!! Well, on anything illegal that is…)

Unless the ring tone tells people how to make balloon doggies out of them, I’m not sure I’d want to hear about it… Or perhaps water balloons, but I don’t see any practical use for those…

On the plus side, the next time you go to a movie that claims to be a “romantic comedy”, when some twerp’s phone starts ringing, you might actually laugh for once instead of wishing you could find a mallet and hammer the phone into a million tiny pieces!

Renowned Sony Quality

So I had this TV, 25”, I bought in 1994. It lasted me 14 years, though the cable/antennae input died 6 years ago – so now I use it only for DVDs.

Well, last night it was time for it to go. Takes a minute to warm up and even then it’s a washed out image. A few times there’d be a black line going through it.

So I pick up this 40 pound mutha of a TV. Lay it down, gently, on the ground, albeit angled slightly on its side.

…I wish I had a camcorder…


The case shattered. Completely SHATTERED! It was a spectacle to behold... much like a political convention, or even gaggle of teenagers setting a school on fire. I mean, what’s the difference these days?

And for each piece that broke off, to even touch it would have it break into much smaller pieces. It was as stable as Rosie O’Donnell on amphetamines. BTW: She’s not related to Chris O’Donnell… Nepotism seems to run in Hollywood - just like how diarrhea does, but I digress.

So now I’ve got 80,000,000,000,000 little, dust-coated, black plastic bits – plus two sections of case that still remained intact (though they had fallen off the TV too). Talk about falling to pieces… So now what’s left, apart from the assorted not-yet-bundled of jagged plastic confetti, is a big glass tube surrounded by a sharp circuit board!

Thank goodness for vacuum cleaners…

As for those two sections? Well, putting them into a trash bag, you’d still be able to hear them straining from the gaudy reality of entropy.

Just like how my back is this morning. YEEEEEOOOOOOOOWWWWWWWWWWWWWW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Hmmm… Now if I were to impose anthropomorphic traits, I’d say that television was a geriatric flasher in need of valium! Or perhaps lithium, it clearly acted unstable…

Who came up with the aphorism "Smile and go with the flow"?!

I think the person who coined it was going to the bathroom at the time. I mean, it feels like we’re going down the toilet and all, so why not enjoy it? One always has to wonder about the origins of aphorisms, maxims, and catchphrases…

Ruminations on fish and computer peripherals...

Why do salmon swim to where they were born in order to “do it”? How do they manage to migrate? Worse, are there “Gen Y” salmon that are so lazy, that slothful Sammy Salmon says “Hey Sally, let’s just do it here and go to Starfish Coffee afterward?” Maybe that explains why salmon can be found in diverse places such as Washington, Alaska, and that lead- and mercury-laden hatchery farm in China!

Did you know I bought a new video card? Performs better than its predecessor with anisotropic filtering set to 8x, runs 20+ degrees (centigrade) cooler, and when overclocked, performs as well as its high end, far more expensive brother. $300 vs $450, all I can say is: Oh yeah!! It's the BFG nVidia 260GTX, in case you were wondering...

And, lastly, I bought a new hard drive. 10,000RPM. Vista’s load time was certainly impressive before the upgrade – since then, the boot time is halved and I’ve never had any operating system feel so responsive. Except for BeOS, of course, but then consider Windows Vista is loading hundreds of megabytes of cached application data along with system startup tasks… never mind performance in Microsoft Flight Simulator… I haven’t frothed so jubilantly in quite a long time.

Speaking of Flight Simulator, let’s be grateful those nice people who made “Grand Theft Auto” didn’t make “Grand Theft Flight Simulator”… they probably will by 2010 anyway…

And now I have a memory block. I tried to work on a new 3D image in trueSpace and couldn’t think of anything to design. Oh well. At least it loads in 3 seconds.


What do computers have to do with fish? Probably nothing, unless the fish are tagged with little transmitters to show where they go and what they go do with themselves...

So about this controversy about English being America's official language...

Let me know when more Americans start using it proficiently before we demand everyone else learn and use it properly...

Until then, let it be the official language. Just don't use words like "supererogatory", "adumbration", or "toast". Always remember: People, especially managerial types, like to keep things simple and uncomplicated...

Then people get blamed for being dumb.

Celebrities - What's the Point of them, except to be proverbial punching bags by proxy?

Right. We humans tend to praise others for various and often indiscernible reasons. There are two predominant reasons:

1. Because they're filth and love to draw attention to themselves via the crudest way possible. Like me, except I tend to actually have something to say...
2. Because they know how to mince words, sensationalize, or have the charisma to get you to do something they want, even though they themselves have no intention of following through on their own words.

#1 is fairly straightforward: Read about a star who had pictures of their "special parts" photographed. or made a video tape engaging in "special acts" and deciding it should be released into the media for all to see?

#2 Aww heck, this is an election year and I've already bashed Hollywuss too much (for today, anyway)...

Some Random Thoughts Regarding My Pet Parrots

Last night I was watching the telly with the parrots; taking Scooter out (both are never out at once because Rusty will try to display feed Scooter, and he will bite the dickens out of Rusty in return…).

I had one of my famous narcoleptic spells and had fallen asleep. Almost an hour later, I woke up and groggily noted Scooter had nestled under my armpit to nap with me.

I moved to the left. Scooter woke up and quickly waddled over to nestle between my neck and head.

Does this bird have a death wish? How the heck does he breathe? If I didn’t shower at night, how COULD he breathe?!

This is the same bird that gets annoyed and bitey whenever I want to scratch his neck – something 99.99999999^64% of birds love their human owners to do! (Rus, once he gets out of “hyperactive mode”, will be calm enough for me to scratch his neck - for hours on end if I had the stamina...)

I went to an online forum and asked; conures just love to snuggle close to their owners like that. Worse, a sleeping person might subconsciously roll over and squash the bird. Or the bird could suffocate too for being dumb enough to press so deep into one's arm pit. (blech!!)

Now I will let Scoot perch on my neck when I’m at the computer; he’ll crawl around using my t-shirt to cling on and later snuggle on my neck. But never when it's bed time. Parrot pancakes do not sound appealing. Unless I was a cat.

I can also tell you that Rus has found a new hobby – climbing chains. I took some rubber ball dog toys, strung a metal chain w/bell at the end through them and hung them in both cages. Scooter bats them with glee; he digs the noises they make. Rus will cling to two balls with his talons and maybe bang a third with his beak – he’s the little acrobat, and he’ll even “horizontally backflip” when traversing the front of his cage too... Am I ever so glad they don’t have parrot equivalents to catnip or LSD... But I digress. However, on the balls with longer chains, Rus will climb up the chain. While it’s great to see him exercise, but recalling the time he broke his toe nail, it’s possible he might put his toe through a link instead of wrapping his talon around it, fall, and really get hurt. Chances are slim he’d have a nasty accident, but I don’t want the risk (or another $534 vet bill, even though Rus is well worth it). So I removed the longer chain. I might get a rope toy he can climb, then remove it once it starts to fray (nails can get trapped). He'll just have to hang upside down from the top and be happy. Fortunately, most parrots ARE happy in that position...

Lastly, both of them cried when I left for work this morning. Some say parrots have the minds of toddlers. I say they have the minds of manipulative little con-artists...

Another reason to hate being organic

I’d called the doc this AM about fatigue and this really neat pain on my left side. They had me set up an appt this morning, thinking about a possible kidney stone…

So now I’m constantly thinking about kidney stones. Kidney stones?! It’s not like I went to the beach to pick up some of these things. I don’t even like pebbles! Worse, how does one get rid of kidney stones? I tried having a garage sale; nobody was interested. Not even in the garage. I even brought them to Goodwill in hopes they’d take ‘em. Nope, Goodwill didn’t want them either. Worst of all, neither had McDonalds; and we all know what they put in their Happy Meals™…

Oh well. At least I don’t have crabs, which is why I never go to the beach…

Can’t wait to find out if it is kidney stones. I hope it’s something else… you know, with all those ailments that cause pain, it’s a darn shame the body can’t make its own morphine. The kidneys would have a use after all; making morphine balls! Or maybe the appendix; it’s said that thing serves no purpose except to get inflamed, burst, and make a surgeon richer…

"Survival of the Fittest"

Who came up with that expression, and why?

First of all, who defines what is "fit"?

Could a cockroach be considered fittest?

Then comes "survival". This typically pertains to food, water, shelter, temporal endurance, and fulfillment of emotional needs (sex).

Cockroaches have lived long before mankind took over the planet. They will continue to endure.
Cockroaches will live under a rock. They think that is shelter.
Cockroaches will lap up water from a cesspool.
Which reminds me, cockroaches eat crap.

Cockroaches are vermin. What makes them fit to survive when we humans tell each other to go crawl under a rock, eat crap and die, and... well, I think you get the point by now.

One other thought... If it's to be fit to eat crap, who'll start a fast food franchise; put it in a bun? Imagine the adverts on television... I won't, thanks anyway.