Rain, rain, rain. Yes, God’s crappy aim strikes again. While I understand His need to unleash His wrath against the charlatans and hate-filled losers in the bible belt that take His (and God Jr’s) name in vain by preaching that greed, hatred, death, and destruction are His will, I only wish His fury was a little more precise. Keep it down South, Dude. While we’re not in too bad a shape where I live, though it’s mighty wet and there’s definitely some flooding in places. Not enough to keep me from going to work, unfortunately. But I did have to pump the pool down a couple inches last night. Plus, it’s cold and damp. Sucks. Now I’m waiting for my subterranean river to rise (now there’s a phrase worthy of Elmer Fudd) and give the sump pumps a workout.

Things are a bit more difficult to the south and east of me, though. All the roads in Tompkins County (which is where Ithaca and OKat’s brother are) are now closed. The Susquehanna River is expected to rise to record levels (meaning that Broome County and Binghamton – which is where Rod Serling and, IIRC, Okat’s mother went to high school – are going to be flooded big-time, and they expect the NYS Thruway east of here to Albany to be closed (again).

I certainly hope the private sector is prepared to help everybody out.

I’m sure you watched our heroic field of Republican warriors last night. I somehow missed it (we go to bed early here in Real America), but from what I understand, Mitt Romney was the big winner in “general election” terms, as he appeared less insane than everybody else. Of course, in Republican, teabagger terms, Rick Perry won by out-crazying everybody else.

Next up, the President, who addresses Congress tonight. I can’t think of a bigger waste of time. Obama has made himself totally irrelevant, and there’s no way he can get any sort of a jobs bill passed. Maybe he thinks he can get Republicans to go on record being against tax cuts for the middle class or against jobs or whatever, but if that’s the plan, he’s even dumber than he acts. ‘Cuz the Republicans don’t give a shit how they look, and the media will never hold them accountable. I don’t care how “great” a speech he gives. In fact, I’m getting really tired of his schtick and stilted speaking style.

I predict a great post-White House career for him, though. He can go on a speaking tour with Sarah Palin. They would draw WWE-like numbers. Joe Liebermann could be their warm-up act.

I bet it’d be a sellout. Which would be entirely appropriate.

Back when I was a kid, we referred to the first day of school as Black Wednesday. I don’t have to go to school today (would that I did), but it is back to work. It’s a short week, but I see no more days off in my future until Columbus Day (yes, I will gladly accept that day off, but for me it will be a personal celebration of ‘Goodbye Columbus’).

Anyhow, yesterday was cold and crappy, and today is colder and crappier – supposed to rain, rain, rain. That should fit my mood quite well.

On the bright side, we have the Republican debate tonight. This seems odd, as it occurs to me that the election is over a year away. Does this mean we have to put up with this shit from now until then? I mean, it’s bad enough they had the Halloween shit out at the store this weekend.

If my head didn’t already hurt, I’d have an awful headache right about now.

Well, crap. Summer’s officially unofficially over now. The kids are headed back to school today (or tomorrow), it’s cold out, and I guess I need to start thinking about closing up the pool. It could be worse, I guess. At least I took today off. If I had to go to work today, I’d be really depressed.

It’s not all bad news, though, as the Auburn Doubledays not only made the NY-Penn League (that’s baseball, BTW) playoffs, but clinched home field advantage for the first round (or series, or whatever they call it in baseball) as they open against the Vermont Lake Monsters (named, no doubt, for ‘Champ’ – cousin of Nessie – who lives in the depths of Lake Champlain). When Major League Baseball has a team named “Lake Monsters,” maybe I’ll pay attention to them. Now, I know what you’re thinking. Why is a team from Vermont in the NY-Penn League? No clue. However, if I have my way, they’ll be redrawing the borders so that where I live will be part of Vermont and Bernie Sanders can be my Senator. Actually, my first choice was Canada, but I don’t think they want us.

It looks as though President Obama has achieved his goal of uniting the nation. New polls show that pretty much everybody thinks he sucks. Of course, everybody thinks all the Republicans suck, too. Kind of a shame that Obama is, well, whatever it is that he is, because somebody – damn near anybody – else would have taken advantage of his initial popularity and mandate for change and run with it (especially in that short little window when the Democrats had at least theoretical control of both Houses of Congress and the Republicans were still stunned and trying to figure out how to call Obama a n*gger w/o calling him a n*gger; fortunately, the teabaggers came through for them in their hour of need).

I’m still trying to figure out how somebody can get swept into office the way he did and, to all appearances, spend every day in office trying to undermine his own effectiveness. I just can’t figure that guy out.

I’d pine for a Hilary Clinton administration, but the fact that she appears to have the support of Dick Cheney kind of gives me the willies. Even if Obama did the honorable, LBJ-kinda thing and decided not to seek a second term, I don’t know who’d be out there to fill the void. I mean, that could actually get elected.

Sounds like the USPS is in kinda deep shit. I hate to see anybody get laid off, but if they want to cancel Saturday delivery, that’d be OK with me. In fact, if they wanted to scale residential delivery to, say, three days a week, that would work.

They should also quit shipping physical pieces of mail across the country. Instead of a mailbox, you could have an ATM kinda thing. So if you want to send a letter, you put it in the slot, enter the recipient, select tracking and delivery options, it charges your debit card, and it scans your letter, encrypts it, sends it in electronic format to the PO distribution center nearest the recipient, where hi-speed printers print it out and put it in an envelope for the carrier to deliver (your mail person would just go to work in the morning, press a button, and in a couple minutes all that day’s deliveries would be spit out, all sorted and bundled and ready to go). Then your letter would be stamped as sent and returned to you as a receipt.

This would not only save shipping and sort time, but it would save the FBI and NSA and whatnot all the hassle of opening your mail and reading it. It could just go directly into a databank to be analyzed.

For paper bills that you can’t pay online – like the damn school taxes – these mail Kiosk things would have a check slot for scanning your check (or, alternatively, you have it charge your debit card and it spits out a check or postal money order or whatever at the other end).

Of course, all this would also be available both at home via your Internet connection, or from inside the Post Office for those who require assistance. The PO could even offer encrypted flash drives where you could not store your mail and receipts and stuff, but you could also add money to your postal account on them. And if you lose it, you just get a replacement (since it’s encrypted, it’s only accessible to you and the NSA), and ‘deactivate’ the old one – which is automatically erased if anybody tries to read it.

You could also design birthday cards and stuff like that, scan a note and your signature, select the card stock, pay to have a ‘rush’ delivery (‘cuz you forgot tomorrow was mom’s birthday), and off it goes.

Oh, and of course there would have to be iPhone and Droid apps for it.

If they’d put me in charge, I could fix pretty much everything. But as long as old men who don’t know the difference between a fax and an e-mail are running the show, we’ll be lucky they aren’t delivering the mail by stage coach.

I don’t know how things were where you were yesterday, but here, it rained. Pretty much all day long. Not monster rain – pretty light, but steady. Kind of a shame it had to do that here (and down south), when they need so much of it in the Southwest.

The rain is supposed to stay (barely) to the east of us today, but move back in tonight. So I reckon I’d better get the grass cut. Oh, and do three day’s worth of laundry.

Tomorrow’s gonna be really, really depressing.

It’s Labor Day, so I hope all the Republican candidates for President will take the opportunity to blame the woes of the world on unions. And of course President Obama ought to jump right in there, too. Working people have been riding the gravy train far too long, and it’s time those persecuted, enslaved, rich white guys (and gals) were emancipated from their burdens of taxes, regulations, and, most importantly, organized labor. After all, the Free Market is kind of like the one ring that rules them all, and must be snatched away from the ghosts of Samuel “Gollum” Gompers and Franklin “Frodo” Roosevelt, and returned to Milton “Sauron” Friedman’s undead husk so that He might rule benevolently. Just don’t ever forget that the “Free Market” doesn’t include labor. No, no, no. They must not be allowed to band together to get a fair wage for a day’s work. Gotta keep the dwarves deep down in the mines of Khazad-dûm if this economy’s gonna take off, you know.

Anyhow, once we get this ridiculous Labor Day thing over with (where the peasants spend the day bowing down before the graven image of FDR when they ought to be out there creating wealth for their overlords so that they, in turn, can create more slave wage jobs), we can get back to the 10th anniversary of 9/11, which has been all but forgotten.

Perhaps you saw this AP story.

It was about three years ago, the first time Jerry Swiatek got to the 9/11 portion of his social studies class and had some freshmen say they’d never seen footage of planes flying into the World Trade Center.

Each year since, more students among the current crop of 15-year-olds tell him the same thing, leaving him still amazed that they’ve never experienced the horror of watching the twin towers collapse.

This is shameless. How can our society not be instilling horror into the psyches of our children? Who will be their generation’s war mongers, torturers, and civil rights deniers?

My God, don’t you realize this sort of thing could turn them to – gasp – science (or at best, math, with its “Arabic” numerals – and not the good math that Jesus intended us to have, either, with dollar signs and decimal points, but that shit with funny little un-American squiggly lines and Satan’s alphabet, and angles and “logic” and “theories” and “proofs” – in my book, teaching kids to “prove” stuff is tantamount to telling them to abandon their faith in God)?

And not the good science, either, that teaches us the melting point of steel and how a secret cabal of illuminati could secretly rig the tallest buildings in Manhattan (and not the good Manhattan in Kansas, either, but the one in Godless New York, which Real Americans always despised until those damn, dirty mooslams attacked it – or did, they? I forget how that works. I need to listen to more Alex Jones, I guess) with enough explosives to bring them down (after they called all the Jews and told them to take a sick day, of course).

No. Our children (and by “our” I mean, “your” ‘cuz I don’t have any, unless you count all the ones I’m subsidizing with my goddamn school taxes) could at this very moment be out there starting to believe in Evolution and Global Warming. Which I’m pretty sure leads us to the fact that 9/11 was all a part of Al Gore’s plot to enrich himself through science and “Green” (how dare these Pinkos usurp the sacred color of money and use it to their own twisted ends) Technology (which is bad, unlike, say, the Carlisle Group’s plan to enrich its members through greed, death and destruction, which is what Jesus would want).

I mean, seriously. Here we are, a scant ten years past 9/11, and how often to you hear about terrorists or mooslams? Probably fewer than 10 times a day, I reckon. And they hardly ever show the towers falling any more. That’s what happens when you elect a godless mooslam socialist Nigerian illuminati schwarze President.

When Rick “rootin’ tootin’ shootin'” Perry is Prez, we’ll get rid of this goddamn Roosevelt holiday and make 9/11 a national day of mourning instead, where everybody will be required to go to church (or Guantanamo – your choice) and pray in front of a big screen teevee showing the towers collapsing in a loop, over and over again.

Until then, though, y’all enjoy your Commie Pinko barbecues. Looks like rain, here.

Tropical Storm Lee is pissing all over Louisiana this morning, and they say they could get 20 inches of rain in places. That’s a lot of rain. Fortunately, I heard a government dude say not to worry,’cuz everything’s designed to handle a hundred year storm. So that’s cool. Not so cool up here, though, as yesterday was hot and humid, and today is supposed to be even, um, humider. The weather geek yesterday said “tropical” humidity. My little weather station says it’s 77 degrees with 80% humidity in here, which is pretty damn warm for 6:00 in the morning. All that’s gonna change tomorrow, though, as things cool off, summer ends, and it wouldn’t surprise me if it starts snowing. OK, so maybe it won’t get quite that cold. Soon, though.

Normally, I wouldn’t link to a Wall Street Journal article, but I wouldn’t want anybody to miss out on seeing this one.

You know what’s nice about a laptop carved out of a single block of aluminum (when its touchpad hasn’t gone insane)? It gets nice and toasty warm in the winter. You know what sucks about a laptop carved out of a single block of aluminum (besides the fact that it’s touchpad is prone to insanity)? It gets really f*cking hot in the summer.

Too darn hot.

I haven’t been doing my due diligence in reporting on what’s going on at the NYS Fair, and for that, I apologize. I can tell by the lack of comments that you’re all quite disappointed, so I’ll try to make amends. Today, it’s the North American Draft Horse Championship. I don’t profess to know a lot about horses in general, or draft horses specifically. The only info that I can pass along is what I found out, long, long ago – if your stirrups are adjusted too long so that your feet don’t reach them, you’re in for a very, very bumpy ride. Especially when the lead horse decided to bolt and gallop away wildly, and the heretofore all-but-dead nag that they put you on because you’ve never ridden before decided to relive her youth and not only follow, but pass that sucker and make it first back to the barn. If you can’t stand up in the stirrups, here’s what happens: when the horse is on the way down, you’re on the way up, and when the horse is on the way up, your ass is headed down at maximum velocity. My butt still hurts, and that was probably 30 years ago. Let’s just say I now prefer to admire horses from afar (or at least from the ground).

Anyhow, as a Fairgoer from years past, the one thing I can tell you is that draft horses are really, really, really f*cking big. Like, 19 hands and 2,000 pounds. Having no idea whatsoever what hands are, I had to look it up, and hands are 4 inches. I have no idea how they measure horses, so I had to look that up, too. Apparently, you measure them to the top of the withers. No idea what the hell withers are, so that required another trip to the Google (whatever did we do before the Internet? I guess we just remained ignorant. Not that we’re any less ignorant now, really; we just know more). Anyhow, withers, I guess are the top of the shoulder-blade. So 19 hands would be, like 6’4″ from the ground to the shoulder (why they can’t just say that in the first place, I dunno; must be secret code).

So that would mean the horse’s shoulder would be about 7 inches over my head, and the top of his (or her) head would be, well, way the f*ck up there.

Any way you measure it, that’s a big goddamn horse – and one you don’t want stepping on your foot.

As if that wasn’t enough, Sugarland will be appearing at the Grandstand here at “Nashville North” tonight. Sugarland, you may recall, is so despised by God that he cursed the Indiana State Fair and destroyed the stage rather than allowing them to perform.

Here in godless NY, however, we aren’t expecting any trouble thanks to our large number of atheists, as well as our business-killing regulations and adherence to “construction standards.”

Speaking of the NYS Fair, I went to the stove store yesterday. In fact, we were the only people at the store. And the kind lady there informed us that a lot of their stoves were “at the Fair,” which is something I hadn’t actually given any thought to. Anyhow, the bad news is that they had no chimney liner in stock, so I had to order it. The worser news is that 25′ of stainless steel flex pipe plus a chimney cap is $350. Having looked around online a bit, I don’t think I can do much better, so I guess I’m stuck. A bummer. Oh well. It’s only money, right?

Speaking of money, I finally pulled the plug and ordered by bucket-mounted snowplow. Since I’m anxious to get it as soon as possible, I waited until the Friday night before a holiday weekend to order it. I’m sure they began processing it immediately. Well, what the hell. It’s not like I need it right away. I hope. 😯 In fact, I’m kinda hoping that just the act of ordering it will mean an extraordinarily snow-free winter.

Oh well, time to go and crawl underneath my car and see if I can find the O₂ sensor that’s going bad.

Yesterday was “Veteran’s Day” at the NYS Fair, which meant that all vets got in for free. They just had to show an ID card or discharge papers. Today is “Native American Day,” and all Native Americans get in for free. They haven’t said what kind of ID is required. Maybe they just do some racial profiling? Or do they just take your word for it? Perhaps they have a “code word” or something (if so, let’s hope it’s not ‘Geronimo’). At any rate, this is the beginning of the last weekend of summer, which of course is pretty goddamn depressing. Not as depressing as it would be if I was working today – and not nearly as depressing as next Wednesday will be when I have to go back.

Today also marks the start of ‘Friday Night Lights.’ Not, sadly, the teevee show with the cute 25-yr old girls (yes, sadly, they are all boys and girls to me at that age; talk about depressing) pretending to be high school girls – that was cancelled by the brain trust at NBC Universal (who are not content with ruining the Sci-Fi – oh, ‘scuse me, the SyFy – Channel, but also have to f*ck up everything good on NBC, too).

No, tonight is the start of HS Football season out here in Real America. Granted, it’s not as big here as it is in, say, Texas. But the upside is that I don’t have to live in Texas (no offense – too damn hot for me, plus the Governor is a dick, and, judging by the droughts and flooding that He constantly assaults it with, God hates Texas).

Back in my day, there were only a couple of high schools that had lights (certainly not mine; as I’ve probably mentioned before – all part of that whole getting old thing – we didn’t even have one of those fancy-schmancy electronic scoreboards. Somebody had to actually hang up the numbers), but apparently lights are now mandated (teachers? Optional).

In my little town, it’s a home opener tonight, so, Go Mustangs! I’d go, but I think they actually have t audacity to charge admission, and having just had a look at my school tax bill, they can goddamn well suck my…. Um, that is to say, I shall not be attending tonight’s game.

In the next town over, there’s a bit of a controversy, as the coach is being investigated for recruiting players. He’s a contemporary of mine (OK, well, he’s about 3 years younger. Everybody’s younger than I am these days), and I never did f*cking like him. First off, his high school was pretty much filled with scumbags. And – although he played for SU, and therefore gets a bit of a pass for that – he crossed the picket line during the NFL Players strike back in 1987 (I think it was).

One thing I cannot abide is a scab.

So hopefully they’ll throw him in prison. OK, that’s probably not a criminal offense. But they can ban him from coaching forever. That’d be OK.

Oh well, I have a lot of money to spend today, so I better get busy.

God, I can’t believe summer’s over.

If you needed more evidence that President Obama is an insignificant, sniveling, um, I can’t think of an appropriate noun (well, I can, but I think it would be considered sexist), so I’ll just say “wimp,” you got some yesterday. When a real President says, “I want to come to address a joint session of Congress on Wednesday,” the Speaker of the House does not say “gee, Wednesday’s no good for us. We can squeeze you on Thursday but you gotta be quick so we can get home to see the Saints/Packers game.”

Can you imagine if Nancy Pelosi had done the same to Dubya? Holy Christ, Rush Limbaugh would’ve either had a stroke or become severely dehydrated from loss of spit. Bush would’ve had his minions out there 24/7 expounding upon how the “Democrat Party” was playing politics with American jobs and shaming Congress into acquiescing to his will. Then he’d have told them to go Cheney themselves, and forced Congress to attend a joint session on an aircraft carrier while giving the address in a flight suit and cowboy boots.

Obama? He says, “OK, thank you Jon. Er, I mean, Mister Boehner, sir.”

Obama is to Boehner as Blair was to Bush. :pup:

F*cking sad and pathetic.

Speaking of sad, it’s goddamn September. Wow. Even though I knew it was coming, it still seems to be taking me by surprise. Worse, because it sums of the stage of life I’m in. Summer’s over, there’s still some life left, but the bone-chilling cold of winter is in the air, and I can feel the end approaching.

But first, I have to pay the school taxes. This is gonna be a tough couple of months, cash-wise. School taxes, homeowners’ insurance, car insurance (and of course the regular mortgage and utility payments). Plus I need to get some chimney liner to install a second pellet stove (that’ll probably cost $200-$300 or so), buy at least a couple tons of pellets (assuming I can figure out where the hell to put them), get a plow for my tractor so I can get the driveway plowed before my feet fall off once the snow flies again, think about getting diesel delivered so I don’t have to go get it 10 gallons at a time, and then deal with whatever “surprises” pop up. Hopefully said surprises won’t include human waste this year.

All of which will be bearable if only SU doesn’t suck this season (starting with tonight). Bonus points if the Vikings and Jets are good, the Redskins and Eagles suck, and Michael Vick suffers a career-ending injury. No, wait. Let him be healthy but play like shit.

Oh well, time to finish the pot (of coffee, that is) and make another.

Just gotta get through today, and then I’m off until next Wednesday. :banana: