Monthly Archives: March 2008

General, Humor, Politics

Free kittens! Just ask!

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FREE KITTENS, JUST ASK!

Little Suzy had a box of very small kittens that she was trying to give away, so she placed them out on the street corner with a sign “FREE KITTENS” next to them.

Suddenly a big line of big black cars came up the street with several policemen on motorcycles in front. The cars all stopped and a tall man, with big ears, stepped out of the largest car, a Mercedes limousine

“Hi, little girl, what do you have there in the box?” he asked.

“Kittens !” Little Suzy says. “They’re so small, their eyes are not even open yet.”

“What kind of kittens are they?” he asked.

“Democrats” says Little Suzy.

The tall man, who was none other than Sen. Obama, smiled and returned to his car and they all drove away. Sensing a good photo opportunity, Sen. Obama called his campaign manager and told him about the little girl and the kittens.

Together, they planned that they would return the next day, have all the media there and tell everyone all over America about these great little kittens.

The next day, Little Suzy is back –standing on the corner with her box of kittens with the “FREE KITTENS” sign on it and, again, the big motorcade of black cars pulled up, this time with all the vans and trucks from ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN and five New York Times reporters. Everyone had their cameras ready and then, Sen. Obama got out of his limo and walked up to Little Suzy.

“Now, little girl, don’t be frightened,” he said, “I only want you to tell all these nice news people just what kind of kittens you’re giving away today.”

“Yes sir, “Suzy said, “they’re REPUBLICAN kittens.”

Taken by complete surprise, Sen. Obama said, “But yesterday, you told me that they were DEMOCRATS.”

Little Suzy says, “Yes, Sir, I know. But today, they have their eyes open.”

(stolen from a post on CSP Gun Talk’s Political Page where it was posted by tford (OFC) )

The Name Game

The Name Game #138 – adjunct

Via Drew Curtis’ FARK.com I get the link to this article:

More parents using txt language to make their child’s name gr8
By LUKE SALKELD –

The mobile phone age: More parents are using text language in their children’s names

It might not be every parent’s idea of a “gr8” way to name a baby.

I don’t buy this premise. I look at names every week, and if “text language” is the cause for any of the foolishness I see, then it’s only a tiny percentage.

The article goes on:

. . .

Abbreviated versions of traditional Christian names are appearing on birth certificates along with “original” ways of spelling which even include punctuation marks.

Anne has been changed to An, Connor to Conna and Laura to Lora.

There were reportedly six boys who were named Cam’ron instead of Cameron, and according to the online parenting club Bounty, one girl born last month was born Flicity.

And basic changes to spelling have led to numerous Samiuls (Samuel) and reports of 23 different versions of Isabelle or Isabella, ranging from Izzabella to Yzabel

That’s all standard goofiness I’ve been seeing for years. Apostrophes? They look coll and sophisticated. Strange spellings? “My baby is unique. I ain’t gonna spell his name like everybody else…”

Some experts have warned that odd spellings bestow no favours on the child.

Albert Mehrabian, a psychology professor at the University of California who has researched the impact of irregular names, found in that “less attractive characteristics were attributed to individuals with less conventionally spelled names”.

Professor Mehrabian said: “Unconventional spelling connoted less masculinity for men and less femininity for women [and] more anxiety and neuroticism were attributed to those with less common names.”

Then I have to ask if the anxiety and neuroticism is due to the name, or rather due to the likelihood that a household where those sort of names are bestowed is likely to be a more stressful environment with unmarried or absent parents, low socio-economic status, poor education and a life filled with other poor choices.

John Dunford, the general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, said that it was possible that new mothers and fathers had lost the ability to spell forenames.

He added: “Some of it is genuine misspelling; some is parents looking for a unique way to spell a name and some is just carelessness.

“It makes life very difficult for teachers taking the register and completing forms.”

The new names continue the trend by parents who seek to be original over the naming of their children – although not always successfully.

Where have you heard that before?

Go read the article if you want more…

The Name Game

The Name Game #138

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A nice quiet Sunday at home.  Not a bad way to do a spring day after a week on the road.  I woke up  and walked out to pick up the paper in mid-sixty degree air.  We’re headed for the mid seventies today.

After breakfast I’m sitting here enjoying a good cup of coffee and looking at the paper.  I find two hospitals reporting fifty-five new babies between the first of February and March 22.  Twenty-three of them join a mommy and a daddy who hadn’t yet gotten around to legitimizing the relationship with a marriage certificate.  Seven of the new mommies are still trying to remember who the baby daddy is.

Getting on with the festivities, we’ll first look at people who could not meet social obligations to name the baby after somebody with just two given names, so they used three:

Miss Natalie L. presents her new daughter, little Grace Steele Rodger.  aybe in that cluster of names there’s a clue as to who the father was, because his name doesn’t make the papers.

Michael & Vickie V. bring us their new little girl, Chelsea Rae Marie.

Next we’ll look at people who change spelling in a name.  There are several reasons for this, none of them good:  1) Make sure people know it’s aname and not an extract from a fifth-grade vocabulary lesson.  2) Keep this baby from being confused with somebody else witht he same name.  3)  I like the name but I want to use the letter from my favorite episode of “Sesame Street”.  4)  I really don’t know HOW to spell it right.:

Miss Christina S. shows us her new son, little Karter Elliot.  Everybody just KNOWS that the letter “K” is sophisticated…  Nobody knows who the daddy is…

Dallas & Christy W. bring us their new son, little Isiah Dandre.  If only there was some common old book that told us how to properly spell that first name…

Tyra P. & Kenneth A. name their new daughter Kenadie Lynn, carefully spelling the first name in that fashion to keep her from being confused with a notorious clan of drunken privileged womanizers.

Next we traipse into the rich territory of people who break new ground with baby names.  We can make’em up.  We can use last names for first names.  We can name our kids after random words from the dictionary.  We can feed the dog a Scrabbleâ„¢ set and name the kid out of the results.  Here we go:

Dusty & Elizabeth T. pop out a little girl and tag her with Daylee Danielle.  I guess going through life as “Dusty” would color one’s judgment.  Can we expect her to have a sister named “Annua Lee”?

Shannon & Jana (which one’s which?) I. have a new son, little Dracen Wyatt.  Somebody apprently spent to much time off into the “sword & sorcery” crap…

Thomas B. & Bridgett C. have a new daughter, little Jaydynn Danae.  Because everybody KNOWS that the letter “y” is used by people of quality…

John & Michelle L. tag their baby girl with Macelynn Marie.

Sarah L. has a new son, little Macin Bryce.  Sounds like the commercial name of a new antibiotic.  It didn’t cure what she got from an un-named co-conspirator.

Miss Sparkles (!) T. presents her new son, little Kordell Jamar.  And she still hasn’t come up with a name for the baby daddy.  Hillary’s village?  It’ll be raising this one…

Check out all the “k’s” here:  Kevin & Kristie M. have a new son, little Kaden Zachary.  Tell me that the letter “K” wasn’t the most powerful episode of Sesame Street…

Miss Tiffany R. has a new daughter and takes the opportunity to provide us with a little foray into world geography, bringing us Kenya Nicole.  Candidate for the next kid?  Let’s try little Burkina Faso…  Let’s alos try to find a daddy’s name in this listing…

Shamainna B. & Jermaine F. bring us a new little girl, Amani Janae.  Oh, yeah, it’s a good African word, and we should build on the success of Africa by naming our kids like this…

Mr. & Mrs. Corey J. present their new son, little Arzell Cortlen.  I don’t know what to say…

Emily H. & Murphy B. bring us their new daughter, little Nyah Yrline.  Some elementary school teacher’s gonna pop an Excedrinâ„¢ over that one…  But then I’m thinking that the use of the letter “Y” as the first letter of a name has a certain Old Norse quality, like in “Yggdrasil”.  Anybody want to take bets that these people wouldn’t know “old Norse” if it came up and bit them on the a**?

Mr. & Mrs. Dominic L. have anew daughter, little Chaslyn Monique.  How too, too cute…

Lacy B. & Thomas St. A. have a new son, little Keilian Paul.  Can you say “contrived”?  I knew you could…

Lastly we have a rather weak showing of the group whos ay “Punctuation makes my baby’s name special”:

Miss Magan R. has a new son, little Landon Da’Veon.  He’ll be in the middle of Hillary’s village, too.

Miss Misty L. brings her new daughter, little Ha’Leigh Grace.  Another one on the playground fo that village…

No “Name of the Week” this week.

I know that many of you folks come by here every week to read the silliness of the baby names, and you, like I, imagine that the thought patterns displayed are indicative of many things, including disdain for tradition and muddled thought processes, but i look at the numbers of kids born to unwed couples and fatherless homes, and I see the delicate fabric of society unravelling before me.

Yeah, I know there are stories of single moms who’ve gone ahead against great odds and raised good, educated and well-balanced children while earning a good living away from government handouts, but as the saying goes, that’s NOT the way to bet.

Worse, many of the generation that are producing these babies are themselves products of unstable homes, and the deep foundation of family support is well and truly broken.  The pillars of strength in a society, family and church are replaced by government and social programs based on nebulous theories of modern ‘educational’ institutions, and we’ve dispensed with what brought Western civilization to its peak.

so what I’m saying in a somewhat humorous fashion with these articles is that you’re looking at the crumbling of the magnificent structure of society as we know it.  But it still sounds so cute…

Blogging, General, Gun Stuff, War Stories

A belated birthday

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From PawPaw’s House:

Matt G reminds me that on March 28, 1911 the Army adopted the Colt 1911 pistol as their service sidearm.

I’m an M1911 fan. Actually, make that an M1911A1. I met the 1911 as an armor crewman. Tankers carry pistols, and in the time I was in the army, the term “pistol” meant only one thing, the M1911A1.

I preferred the shoulder holster for duty purposes. There were several advantages to that carry, among them the fact that the pistol stayed with me instead of stuck in storage in the tank’s oddment tray where it had to be retrieved before dismounting. Another advantage was that you could strap that holster on and carry the pistol under your field jacket where it was less likely to get dirty.

I taught pistol marksmanship when I was an instructor at Fort Knox, and in retrospect, that’s where I learned of the REAL 1911. The pistols we used for training were OLD. They were mixtures of parts thrown together, disassembled, reassembled. worn parts replaced, cleaned to death and stuck on racks, issued every week for training and carrying by young men who treated them to less than perfect care. And those pistols worked.

When I was a young armor trainee myself, our course of fire for training was similar to the NRA pistol course: bullseye targets at varying ranges and under varying constraints as to time. Of a hundred of us, three made the minimum score for actual qualification. The rest received the classification of “familiarized”. I qualified.

When I was an instructor, the course of fire changed away from the bullseye targets to standard army silhouettes. These targets were the same size as an average human, and wer set at ranges of ten, fifteen, twenty-five, fifty and seventy-five meters. The two close-in targets were “prone”, showing only the torso from the armpits up. The longer ranges were from the crotch up. They were pop-ups. The range NCO selected targets at a given range, hit the switch, and the target popped up for a set time period. You shot at your target and if you hit it, then it dropped down. Otherwise, at the end of the elapsed time, all the targets dropped down. If your target fell when you shot, you got the point. There were point ranges for different classifications, but a hit anywhere on the target was good enough to take it down. For combat training, it was much improved over the bullseye.

The funny thing is that those old “off the rack” .45’s were good enough for this exercise. That’s the M1911 as John Browning designed it. It wasn’t meant to be a pampered poodle of a pistol, it was supposed to be a combat arm, able to hit a chest cavity ten out of ten times at fifty yards. After spending a week stuck in a holster. With standard issue military ammo.

The fact that you can take John Browning’s platform and tighten up the clearances and do a little trick or three and make it into a precision target gun is a plus. But don’t confuse those guns with soldiers’ sidearms. There’s as much similarity between those two as there is between a happy ol’ labrador retriever, splashing through the marsh and a perfumed shih tzu sitting on a silk cushion. Somewhere between John Browning’s original design with the standard hardware and fixed sights and the pampered paper-punching equipment of a NRA bullseye competitor is the happy range where most .45’s fall.

You can buy them today form a dozen or more different makers, and you can buy even more varieties of every part that it takes to make the pistol. With the internet at your fingertips and a M1911A1 frame, you can assemble the pistol of your dreams. Thousands have. Of course there are some operations that should be done by folks knowledgeable in the design, but there’s a reasonable chance that the average pistoleer can install many “upgrades” and “enhancements” and still have a working pistol. Even more indicative of the brilliance of the design is that you can take the weapon down to the smallest part without specialized tools. It’s a good design.

And I don’t have a pie chart to show John Browning’s pistol sales as compared with the other .45 platforms, but 97 years after its adoption, if it’s not the biggest seller, I’m gonna be surprised.

So Happy Birthday. To a pistol…

General

The ongoing upgrade saga

Apparently the good people at WordPress have finished playing with the beta version and got around to releasing the official, finished version 2.5.

I’ve just installed it over the beta version I installed a couple of days ago.  That upgrade fixed a commenting problem that had locked out the incomparable Keeskennis out.  You probably saw video of the party he threw when he found he could comment here again.  It didn’t make Fox, but it probably got on MSNBC.

As always, if you see any problems, email me at “tankerATmostlycajun.com” and we’ll see what we can do…

General, Wheels of Industry

So, how’d your week go?

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Thank you for asking.

The odometer on my car has 1380 miles more on it than it did at 0630 Monday morning.

I visited the three northern-most stations on my chunk of the pipeline, two for the first time.

I reaffirmed my notion that the farther one gets from the border, the less likely one is to find good Mexican restaurants. I tried one in Hernando, Mississippi. It was right across the road from the motel I spent one night at. I had an urge for Mexican food. I walked in. The entire staff was of a decidedly Mexican conformation. I thought: “this is a good thing.” The menu looked good, so I ordered a set of enchiladas with green salsa, with a side order of pico de gallo. It LOOKED good. But it was waaaay too bland. I wanted KICK. I got just the barest of gustatory nudges.

On the other hand, the Chinese restaurant near the same motel turned out a pretty decent lunch, especially in light of a decent selection of sushi, freshly laid out. Don’t give me that “bait” crap. Sushi is good stuff.

My stations in Tennessee and the northern extremity of Mississippi are nestled amidst rolling hills and look like little snippets of industry among paradise. It’s beautiful country, but in many cases where you’re looking at “beautiful country” you’re also wondering what people do for a decent living in those parts. A handful at each of these locations work for an interstate pipeline making sure that the North keeps its lights on and its homes warm.

Away from cities like Memphis and Jackson and Baton Rouge, traffic was rather light. My trip was about 90% on the interstate highway system. Mississippi and Tennessee back roads made for a pleasant excursion, what with the spring popping green back onto the countryside and the punctuations of flowers and all.

But I’m back home now, and it’s good to sit in my own chair and see the cat studying me trying to decipher why I left her for those nights.

Next on the agenda is a trip to the other extremity, down toward the tip of Texas. Bet I can find a good Mexican restaurant down there…

General

‘Nother WordPress Upgrade

Tiptoeing off into the realms of the bit jungle, I have just upgraded the blog to WordPress 2.5-RC1. This is a beta version, not the official release to the masses. The theme remains the same, as do most of the things that you’ll see when you visit here.

every now and then I tend towards the adventurous on the computer, hence the beta test…

On my end, the editor has been extensively redone, along with the mechanism for uploading files, and a bunch of other things have changed to make it a bit easier and cleaner to use.

As usual, if you find anything running a bit ‘off’, drop me an email at “tankerATmostlycajun.com”.

Politics

Hillary being heroic

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In this photo from March 25, 1996, during her drop into a hot LZ in Bosnia, Hillary Clinton bravely places her body between hostile sniper fire and an innocent little Bosnian girl…

hillarybosnia.jpg

Following this event, she donned her BDU’s and participated a ground assault on the enemy position…

. . .

Honestly, folks, I’m in the same age group as this “woman” and I have memory episodes from time to time, but **I** can remember the difference between an event in which a little girl hands me flowers and one in which I have to run for cover with bullets hitting the area… And yet people STILL buy into her crap!

Humor

Humour… of the vilest sort…

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A couple lived near the ocean and used to walk the beach a lot. One summer they noticed a girl who was at the beach almost every day. She wasn’t unusual, nor was the travel bag she carried, except for one thing; she would approach people who were sitting on the beach, glance around furtively, then speak to them.

Generally the people would respond negatively and she would wander off, but occasionally someone would nod and there would be a quick exchange of money and something she carried in her bag. The couple assumed that she was selling drugs and debated calling the cops, but since they didn’t know for sure, they just continued to watch her.

After a couple of weeks the wife said, “Honey, have you ever noticed that she only goes up to people with boom boxes and other electronic devices?”

He hadn’t – and said so. Then she said, “Tomorrow I want you to get a towel and our big Radio and go lie out on the beach. Then we can find out what she’s really doing.”

Well, the plan went off without a hitch and the wife was almost hopping up &down with anticipation when she saw the girl talk to her husband and then leave. The man then walked up the beach and met his wife at the road.

Well, Is she selling drugs?” she asked excitedly. No, she’s not,” he said, enjoying this probably more than he should have.

Well, what is it then? What does she do?” his wife fairly shrieked.

The man grinned and said, “She’s a battery salesperson.”

“Batteries?” cried the wife.

“Yes …..” he replied –

OOOH – Now this is going to kill you

OOOOH – You’re gonna hate me for this –
but it will make your day!!! Continue reading Humour… of the vilest sort… →

Politics

Internet bites Hillary!

So let’s see:  Her Filthiness, (Hillary (haaauugghhhh! Spit!) Clinton wanted to fling a little feces at her opponent for the dimmocrat party nomination, sh she says, not once, but several times, that when she flew into Bosnia she came under sniper fire on the apron of the airport when her plane arrived.

Imagine her ire when we hoi polloi had the unmitigated gall to question her truthfulness.  Video surfaced of her arrival.  Instead of Her Filthiness in a flak jacket being hustled off the tarmac, there’s Her Filthininess and her daughter doing the standard “Hi, peasants!  I’m here!  Be properly fawning and worshipful in my presence.”

And now it’s on the mainline media.  And Her Filthiness has announced that she “mis-spoke”.  Apparently that’s the new term for “I lied and got caught at it.”

Around veterans’ circles there are certain types of individuals who want to claim combat records they never had.  These people are universally despised.  Hillary is one of these now.  As if you really need another reason to despise her at this point.