I really need to take a vacation. But I hate to take time off and do nothing; makes me feel like I’ve wasted the time off. But, what to do? In my younger days, I used to throw the tent, sleeping bag, and camping gear in the truck, pick a direction, and just drive. Made it down to Myrtle Beach one year, which would meet with Cokie Robert’s approval, and found myself at a Preakness Party in Maryland another year (I didn’t make it to the track, but I didn’t really care). Of course I’ve headed the other direction a bunch of times, too, and made my way to the Adirondacks and Canada, among other places.

Spent several summers down on the Jersey shore with a friend of mine, too. Even got to replace my starter in a campground one year (always travel with your tools; that’s my motto), only to have the fan belt break literally moments later (traction cord and duct tape got me about half way to a parts store; always have a spare set of belts; that became my second motto).

But that was long ago, and I really don’t think I’ve done much of anything (except what other people have wanted to do) in quite a few years. So, I’m open for suggestions. What’s something relatively cheap that a person can do on his own for a week or so? A person who aint a kid anymore, that is. Just the daydream alone might help get me through another Monday.

Thanks to the Olympics, you’ll have to figure out when Press the Meat is on in your area. If you actually take the time to bother with it, you’ll get to see Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson in Beijing (there to beg the Chinese not to foreclose on our country, I suppose), plus David “Gilligan” Gregory will lead the roundtable on how John Edwards’ affair makes Obama look bad (an opinion shared by at least one of here, I suspect), while McCain’s affairs are his own private matter), with Dean David Broder, CNBC news wench Erin Burnett, the WaPost’s E.J. Dionne & WSJ whore Paul Gigot.

Faze the Nation has VA Gov Tim Kaine, and the Pillsbury Dough Nazi, Karl Rove.

At Fux News Sunday, Weaselface Wallace hosts McCain campaign manager, Rick Davis, Obama campaign co-chairman Dick Durbin, and they’ll recycle past “Power Player” Amy Zantzinger, White House Social Secretary, who will tell us why we’re never invited to the White House parties. Then it’s a slightly different collection of Fuxheads as Jill Zuckman of The Chicago Tribune, Byron “the dork” York of The National Review, and Ruth Marcus of the WaPost join regular Fuxhead William Kristol.

At the Goebbels network, George Snufalufagus has the week off, so ABC News douche Jake Tapper fills in, hosting VP hopefuls Bill Richardson and Bobby Jindal. Then, at the Roundtable, it’s the New York Times’ Matt Bai, former Pentagon spokesbitch Torie Clarke, Cokie “the hag” Roberts, and George :jerk: Will.

CNN’s Late Emission will have NY Mayor Mikey Bloomberg, PA Gov Ed Rendell, FL Gov Charlie “H” Crist, Carl Levin, crazy Texas redneck John “Barley” Cornyn, HUD Secretary Steve Preston (to tell us it’s a buyers market out there), and oilman who’se seen the light (or has he?) T. Boone “don’t call me Slim” Pickens.

Later, on 60 Minutes, tonight’s recycled stories include Bob Simon’s report singing the praises of the Israeli air force, Lara Logan’s report on Tennessee’s bloodthirsty desire to execute Gregory Thompson, and Lesley Stahl’s report on billionaire financier, corporate raider, and private equity investor, Carl Icahn.

Have a good Sunday.

Not much to say today (as usual). I think I might just go ahead and sleep until Monday. Except I should probably cut the grass.

Well, see ya.

This week sucked. Last week sucked more, though, so I guess things are headed in the right direction. Or they will be, at about 4:30 or so. Me and the boys are bach’ing it for the next week or so. I wonder if Eliot Spitzer can lend me his little black book (but I’ll be needing his little check book to go along with it).

Let’s get this over with already.

Every once in a while, I stop to think about how much has changed in the relatively short time that has been my life (so far). Oh, there’s bad shit, yeah, but there’s good shit, too. Or pretty interesting shit, at least.

I mean, when I was a kid, TV was black and white, and there was only AM radio (now, there might have been FM at the time, but not up here that I recall). When FM finally rolled around, there weren’t many stations, but damned if there wasn’t a hell of a lot more to listen to. The best around here was WOUR, 96.9 in Utica, They played the kind of stuff you hear on the Technicolor Web of Sound (except, as we moved into the 70’s, we started to get into punk and ‘new wave’ and what was ‘alternative’ music before they coined the phrase), and lots of other nifty shit that you’d never have heard on AM (like anything longer than 3 minutes). Now, of course, radio mostly sucks here. That’s part of the bad shit.

But, check it out. Communications satellites were basically born when I was. If you wanted to have satellite communication, you had to do it when the bird was above the horizon in both places. Until they managed to get geostationary satellites in the air. Now, I get my teevee from a satellite (actually an array of four or five satellites). I get bummed out if I can’t get a decent wireless Internet connection, and I can’t remember the last time I was out of cell phone range.

Amazing how far things have come. But I still miss those early days of FM.

I was gonna just post Paris Hilton’s response to the McCain ad, but Soupy beat me to it last night. So, I got nothing. Speaking of Paris Hilton, it’s hump day. Go hump something.

Oh, what the hell. In case you missed it….

Well, let’s see…. I have to be careful what I write, ‘cuz if I write something nice about the wrong person, all hell will break loose. And we wouldn’t want that.

I could tell you how shitty things have been going for me lately, and how I really don’t need any additional bullshit in my life. But that would be boring and self-indulgent, and while I’m perfectly happy to be one or the other, I’d prefer to not be both at the same time.

So, instead, I’ll just wish my wife a Happy Birthday. Hard to believe she’s 29 already. Doesn’t look a day over 25.

Happy Birthday, Granny. :cake: I don’t know what I’d have done without you the past 11 or 12 or whatever years it’s been.

Leo and Scorpio. Either a match made in heaven, or a scary, scary mix. Sometimes both, all at the same time (mamas, don’t let your babies grow up to be Scorpios).

Oh, and Happy Birthday to my brother Tim, too, who is exactly one year older than Granny (which makes him 30, I guess). :cake:

Today is the 47th birthday of Barack ‘Barry’ Hussein Obama, the presumptive (presumptuous?) presidential nominee of the Democratic Party for 2008. I hope it is a great one for him. It just might be his last for a while.

I do wish that it might not be the last great one he has for 8 years because his own wish for himself is for something I expect to be demanding and thankless and maybe impossible. He wants to bite off a huge challenge taking the helm of a once great nation that has been plundered and violated and driven into a ditch by a bunch of thugs and gangsters who will likely be long gone, unreachable, and held unaccountable when Presumident Obama and the rest of us try to see what we have left, what can be fixed and saved, or what the hell we can do.

I hope he has a good one today. I hope after 8 tough years he will be leaving the office intact with a tremendous amount of pride and deserved adulation and thanks for having saved the country and maybe the world. He will only be around my age then with a couple of teenage daughters and wife Michelle. He seems to like to take care of himself so maybe the presidency will not exact the same toll on him that it has on others. Then he can just move on to that organic arugula farm and drink exotic teas and hopefully the rest of us will be in higher cotton.

I wish him well in all of his Obamagance as I also hope for the best for all of us.

Thanks to the R’n’R Historian in Berlin for pointing to the artist Juke for this image.

:cake:

Today on Press the Meat, it’s whiny little conniving piece of crap Joe Lieberman, acting as head cheerleader (that’d be the one with the knee pads) for Grumpy old John McCain, and John Kerry. Plus, at the roundtable, it’s Andrea Mitchell (cutting her a little slack this week), piece of crap Mike Murphy, Chuckie Todd & Judy Woodruff.

Over at Faze the Nation, Bobby Schieffer hosts somebody who know something about economics (Robert Rubin), and somebody who doesn’t know shit about the economy (McCain ecoomic adviser, Carly Fiorina).

On Fux News Sunday, Weaselface Wallace gets li’l Lindsey Graham to come out of his closet for an interview, along with Tom Daschle, and this week’s Power Player, Ashley Judd. Plus the usual fuxheads, of course.

At the Goebbels network, George Snufalufagus hosts fancy Nancy Pelosi and rigid Tom Ridge. Plus there’s a roundtable of David Gergen, ABC News hack Jake “the snake” Tapper, political mastermind Donna Brazile, and of course George :jerk: Will.

CNN’s Late Emission includes on-again/off-again Democrat Claire McCaskill, Ohio organized crime members Rob Portman and Kenny “why isn’t this guy in jail yet” Blackwell, Maj. Gen. Mark Hertling (commander of U.S. forces in northern Iraq), Israeli foreign minister Tzipi Livni (great name), James K. Glassman, undersecretary of state (not a position I’d care to be in) for public diplomacy and public affairs, and one shill each from the Obama and McCain campaigns.

Later, on 60 Minutes, Steve Kroft does a double-length segment on the Kingdom of Dubai, and Morley Safer does a story on some guy who does statistical analysis for the Boston Red Sox. Oh boy.

Have a good Sunday. Damn, these weekends go too fast.

Ah, thanks to Melina and Vernon for giving me three days in a row off from trying to think of something interesting to say. You might think that would mean I’d be able to jump in with something witty and charming today. You would, of course, be wrong.

Among all the other things that went on this week, you may or may not have noticed the launch of Cuil (pronounced “cool”). It’s an attempt by a bunch of ex-Google engineers to “out-Google” Google. They had a pretty successful pre-launch marketing campaign, I guess. So successful that the site crashed and burned when reviewers and other curious folks went to the site to see how it matched up to the other search sites out there.

I have my own methods for testing search sites, so I set out to evaluate Cuil. Up first, the weaselface wallace test. Search for that at Google, and you get, well, this site first, and then links to other sites where people apparently posted Booblehead threads to other blogs and whatnot (rather flattering, actually). Search at Cuil, and you get, well, it says 32 hits, but it only provides one, which appaears to be a rip-off of the 6/18/07 booblehead thread, but when you click the link, it’s to a domain that’s not longer active. Not terribly impressive.

Next, I tried a search for ‘cokie “the hag” roberts’ on both sites. Google returned about 350 hits (we came in numbers 2 and 3). Cuil?

No results were found for: cokie “the hag” roberts

OK. So maybe Cuil doesn’t do subtle. I figured I’d try something obvious: morning seditionists.

Google returned 9,270 results, with us (as you’d expect) at the top of the list. Cuil found 2,125 results, with lots of sites linking to ours, but, alas, didn’t actually return the site itself.

So, while I certainly think that competition is a good thing, I am quite sad to report that Cuil is not all that cool. In fact “cuil” returned over 2.5 million results at Google and less than 125,00 results from Cuil, while “google” gets 517 million results returned at Cuil, and over 2.7 billion (with a “b”) at Google.

For now, Cuil fails to get our seal of approval, and Google remains the Morning Seditionists’ official unofficial search engine.

Enjoy your Saturday.