I'm getting pretty tired of the BP Concern Troll commercials.  In amongst the very reasonable alternate energy solutions presented there is always, without fail, one Average AmericanTM absolutely insisting that offshore drilling must be a part of any future energy solution.

Just say NO to Sock Puppets.

I blog because I care.

Sadly, No! has a fantastic article contrasting the UK's conservatives with our own.  The article is light on snark, which is unusual for SN!, but the article is really really important to read.  So go read it!  GOGOGO!  The Shorter: Britain's conservative party's attitude on torture makes America's newest mostest ultra liberalest prezdent evah look like a torture appeaser in contrast.

Today I went out to eat lunch with my lovely wife.  At the table next to us were two businessmen who were discussing future plans for their business.  Of course, rather than using the word plan they kept using the word vision.  This isn't the first time I've heard this euphemism.  Marketing departments must stay awake late at night coming up with cute buzzwords to replace boring old words that everybody, you know, actually understands.  I think it's part of what keeps them employed.  I'm guess I'm not really one to talk because IT is also a department very famous for coming up with new complex words too, but at least it's not to replace perfectly fine existing words, it's usually just fancy acronyms for new technology.  I confused a manager the other day by saying KVM.  Either way, I'm sure it keeps us employed.  :-D

But, I digress…

I actually heard these two say things like, "we need to communicate our vision" and "can you explain your vision for this?"  The one that took the cake for me was, "Wow – that's a lot of vision."

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Six thousand years ago, back in 2005, which was the dawn of modern democracy, this was the common thinking in the Senate.  Want to take bets on how many of these Senators flip-flop this year?

P.S. I can't wait to vote against Senator Burr in 2010.

Last night I caught part of the Ed Schultz Show on MSNBC and some conservative hack was claiming (using an out-of-context quote) that Sonia Sotomayor is a racist against the poor downtrodden rich white male.  How come these days it seems conservative pundits (usually old white men, natch) claim only non-whites are racist? 

Thankfully, I got a great link off Atrios' site that digs into this issue and sets the record straight.  Much better than I could ever do.

http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/tapped_archive?month=05&year=2009&base_name=the_racialism_of_stuart_taylor#115268

I wish I would have read this on Monday.  This post at ginandtacos.com absolutely nails what Memorial Day is about and how we all should reflect on that day.

That said, I did enjoy my day off, but was a bit perplexed why MSNBC decided to run an all-day marathon of Lockup.

Today our house received a citation because we haven't mowed our lawn often enough.  Yes, seriously.  For some perspective, it's been a little less than two weeks since we mowed our front yard.  We've been getting  a ton of rain, so the grass is growing like crazy right now.

The inspector was super polite, so I have no hard feelings toward the city.  He said it was so borderline, that he had to measure it with a ruler and then found that we did, indeed, have a few blades of grass over eight inches of length.  I wonder if a subcommittee on grass blade length had to be formed by the city to determine this magic number.  lol

Anyway, it turns out the city itself doesn't really care, but we had a busybody neighbor report us, so they are obligated to investigate.  No doubt it was the same neighbor that complained to our HOA about our security camera near the front door when we installed it (which, btw, there is no city or HOA rule against having).

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Following in the wake of the massive blockbuster success of G4 and Spike TV, The SciFi Channel has decided change their name to "SyFy."  Their new tagline is "Imagine Greater."  No, it's not April 1st.  This is real.  I saw an ad that actually said, I'm not making this up, "Bright Lights, Big Imagination, Top 5 Channel."  Wha--?

Okay, I'm admit I'm not marketing professional like Dave Howe, but I think I have pretty good common sense.  I'm trying to figure out why companies think that changing their name will suddenly cause people to flock to their product (in this case, a cable channel).  Remember when Borland was going to take over the world as the newly christened Inprise: Integrating the Enterprise?  You know they thought they were oh-so-clever when they thought that one up.  Just as I'm sure SciFi is thinking now.  Well, you saw how well that turned out for Borland.  They became a minor player (and lost a lot of money) until they went back to the name that people actually knew: Borland.

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Apparently there was a bug in my website forums that was preventing new users from registering. OOPS! Sorry about that. All fixed now!