Much as I’m not paying attention to the Olympics, it’s pretty hard to totally ignore them. Whether it’s the daily medal wrap-up, or stories about how people on Twitter are mad at NBC for tape delaying the “big” events so they can show them in prime time (note to Twitterers out there: they’ve always done this, partly because many of us have jobs and can’t sit around and watch the Olympics all say, but mostly because they paid, like $1.8 billion for the damn games, and they need to get their money back. Second note: I’m assuming that if you use Twitter, you have access to a thing called the Internet, where NBC is streaming all the events live, and on-demand replays. Though I think you need to have cable or satellite with MSNBC).

This morning on the way in to work, I heard a story about a 16-yr old Chinese swimmer who suddenly swam faster than Michael Phelps and set a world record.

China has become embroiled in the first doping controversy of the London Games after one of the world’s most respected coaches described the swimming prodigy Ye Shiwen’s gold medal performance as “unbelievable” and “disturbing”.

The American John Leonard, executive director of the World Swimming Coaches Association, said the 16-year-old’s performance was “suspicious”….
[…]
Ye was more than seven seconds faster in the Olympic 400m individual medley final than she had been in the World Championship equivalent last July.

Leonard said that although this vast improvement was possible, it would be very hard to achieve. “But the final 100m was impossible. Flat out. If all her split times had been faster I don’t think anybody would be calling it into question, because she is a good swimmer. But to swim three other splits at the rate that she did, which was quite ordinary for elite competition, and then unleash a historic anomaly, it is just not right.”

I found this story interesting, not because of the “doping” thing. Because of this kid’s name, Ye Shiwen, which is pronounced, “Yay! She win!”

I mean, with a name like that, how could she lose?

If you live in India, there’s a pretty good chance you’re not reading this right now, mostly because half the country – so far – is in the dark with no power, including the capital, New Delhi. That’s about 600 million people (which is twice as many people as we have here in the US).

They’re investigating the cause, but, if it’s anything like the power company around here, I have no doubt that the cause will be “squirrel in the transformer” (which is electric company code for “our shit’s old and falling apart, and we fired 2/3 of our maintenance crews so we could increase profits”).

Well, time to get busy, I guess.

Wow, it’s been a busy day today. Which I suppose is a good thing, because it makes the day go faster. But all this chair time is really killing me. I did have a chance to see that Mitt Romney praised Israel for being a health country that only spend 8% of its GDP on health care (as opposed to 17.5% for us). Of course, Israel has socialized health care that covers 100% of its citizens (I wonder if that includes Palestinians?), and which the teabaggers would become apoplectic over if somebody tried it here.

I also saw that Ancestry.com has been snooping around Obama’s family tree (probably trying to prove he was born in Kenya), and found that Obama is a direct descendant of the first American slave (through his white mom, no less).

A research team from Ancestry.com (NASDAQ:ACOM), the world’s largest online family history resource, has concluded that President Barack Obama is the 11thgreat-grandson of John Punch, the first documented African enslaved for life in American history. Remarkably, the connection was made through President Obama’s Caucasian mother’s side of the family.
[…]
“Two of the most historically significant African Americans in the history of our country are amazingly directly related,” said Ancestry.com genealogist Joseph Shumway. “John Punch was more than likely the genesis of legalized slavery in America. But after centuries of suffering, the Civil War, and decades of civil rights efforts, his 11th great-grandson became the leader of the free world and the ultimate realization of the American Dream.”

So, that’s kinda cool.

Oh well, back to work.

Oh, and Happy 76th Birthday to Buddy Guy!

Gee, what a big weekend we have in front of us. First off, there’s that whole Olympics thing getting started tonight. From what I understand, pretty much every event will be streaming on the intertubes, so there’s no reason to miss any Beach Volleyball matches. Not to mention Dressage. Speaking of horses, poor old Mitt managed to step in horse shit right from the git-go over there in London. Way to piss off the Brits (and here I thought Romney understood the special bond white people have with one another).

As if the Olympics weren’t enough, it’s also Harborfest up in Oswego (which, of course, means nothing to most of you out there – but then it doesn’t mean much to me, either, since I won’t be attending any of it). Lots of bands and lots of stumbling around drunk. Ah, if only I was young again. Or still.

The severe weather that came through yesterday pretty much missed us, thank goodness. We got some rain, and that was about it. South of us got hit pretty hard, though, and Elmira appears to have had a tornado. I’m glad that stuff mostly stays in the Midwest and the South and stuff (no offense to you folks, but you can keep the hurricanes and tornadoes and stuff; I’ll stick with snow).

Oh well, I guess I’d better get back to work here. Let’s get this damn week over with already.

The shootings in Colorado have sparked an increase in gun sales in the state (up by over 40%, in fact). How typically American. I got an e-mail from Michael Moore yesterday (two, actually; I guess I’m on his list with two different e-mail addresses), where he makes the case that the right and the left are both half-right in how they view the whole gun thingie.

…here’s the difference between the rest of the world and us: We have TWO Auroras that take place every single day of every single year! At least 24 Americans every day (8-9,000 a year) are killed by people with guns – and that doesn’t count the ones accidentally killed by guns or who commit suicide with a gun. Count them and you can triple that number to over 25,000.

That means the United States is responsible for over 80% of all the gun deaths in the 23 richest countries combined.
[…]
Both conservatives and liberals in America operate with firmly held beliefs as to “the why” of this problem. And the reason neither can find their way out of the box toward a real solution is because, in fact, they’re both half right.

The right believes that the Founding Fathers, through some sort of divine decree, have guaranteed them the absolute right to own as many guns as they desire. And they will ceaselessly remind you that a gun cannot fire itself – that “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people.”

Of course, they know they’re being intellectually dishonest (if I can use that word) when they say that about the Second Amendment because they know the men who wrote the constitution just wanted to make sure a militia could be quickly called up from amongst the farmers and merchants should the Brits decide to return and wreak some havoc.

But they are half right when they say “Guns don’t kill people.” I would just alter that slogan slightly to speak the real truth: “Guns don’t kill people, Americans kill people.”

Because we’re the only ones in the first world who do this en masse.
[…]
My liberal compatriots will tell you if we just had less guns, there would be less gun deaths. And, mathematically, that would be true. If you have less arsenic in the water supply, it will kill less people. Less of anything bad – calories, smoking, reality TV – will kill far fewer people. And if we had strong gun laws that prohibited automatic and semi-automatic weapons and banned the sale of large magazines that can hold a gazillion bullets, well, then shooters like the man in Aurora would not be able to shoot so many people in just a few minutes.

But this, too, has a problem. There are plenty of guns in Canada (mostly hunting rifles) – and yet the annual gun murder count in Canada is around 200 deaths. In fact, because of its proximity, Canada’s culture is very similar to ours – the kids play the same violent video games, watch the same movies and TV shows, and yet they don’t grow up wanting to kill each other. Switzerland has the third-highest number of guns per capita on earth, but still a low murder rate.

So – why us?

What it mostly boils down to, he says, is that Americans are both good killers, and easily frightened.

1. We Americans are incredibly good killers. We believe in killing as a way of accomplishing our goals. Three-quarters of our states execute criminals, even though the states with the lower murder rates are generally the states with no death penalty.

Our killing is not just historical (the slaughter of Indians and slaves and each other in a “civil” war). It is our current way of resolving whatever it is we’re afraid of.
[…]
We send our lower classes off to do the killing, and the rest of us who don’t have a loved one over there don’t spend a single minute of any given day thinking about the carnage. And now we send in remote pilotless planes to kill, planes that are being controlled by faceless men in a lush, air conditioned studio in suburban Las Vegas. It is madness.

2. We are an easily frightened people and it is easy to manipulate us with fear. What are we so afraid of that we need to have 300 million guns in our homes? Who do we think is going to hurt us? Why are most of these guns in white suburban and rural homes? Maybe we should fix our race problem and our poverty problem (again, #1 in the industrialized world) and then maybe there would be fewer frustrated, frightened, angry people reaching for the gun in the drawer. Maybe we would take better care of each other….

I would add one more thing, though. We are also, by and large, really fucking stupid.

Dallas police said they arrested a man whose gun accidentally went off inside a Walmart store….

Todd Canady, 23, of Waco had allegedly bolted from the store in the Lake Highlands district Monday night when he was confronted by an off-duty police officer about the shooting, which left a woman and a 5-year-old child wounded.
[…]
Canady, who has a concealed-weapons permit, was reportedly reaching for his wallet in the checkout line but grabbed the pistol he was carrying instead. The gun went off, wounding Canady in the buttocks. The bullet then hit the floor and sent fragments into the other two victims.

Don’t mess with Texas, I guess.

Now, I don’t mind some Bozo shooting himself in the ass (in fact, I highly recommend it), but when they take innocent bystanders down in the process, that’s where I have to draw the line.

Of course, there will be no new gun laws (not even ones that would ban high-capacity clips, so that maybe some nut could only shoot five people instead of 60). And on this, we can be proud, both Barack Obama and John Boehner agree.

Speaker John Boehner on Tuesday said he agrees with President Obama that Congress should not approve new gun laws in response to the Colorado movie-theater shootings.

God bless America. Especially our guns.

I guess by now everybody’s heard that Sally Ride died of pancreatic cancer at the far too young age of 61. Pancreatic cancer is one of those cancers that, when you get it, it’s time to get your shit in order, ‘cuz you’re pretty much history. Ruth Bader Ginsburg is a notable exception (so far). Patrick Swayze, Joan Crawford, Michael Landon, Fred Gwynne, Luciano Pavarotti, Jack Benny, Rex Harrison, Donna Reed, Henry Mancini, Count Basie, and Dizzy Gillespie are among the more famous folks who got it.

So, so long Sally.

It’s Monday. I’ve been waiting for this day all weekend. Since Friday, really. It’s great to be here at work again. Actually, given what went on in Aurora, Colorado, I guess it’s good to be pretty much anywhere today. Another good reason to only go out in public when it’s absolutely necessary (like, to buy beer).

As for the weekend, well, it went too quickly (as usual). I did manage to clear some trails in the woods a little bit. Not a whole lot, as I don’t have a bulldozer (a mini excavator would be ideal, if you’re trying to think of what to get me for Christmas; I’m partial to Kubota, but I’m not all that fussy).

Otherwise, I just found it very difficult to get my ass in gear, and wound up doing a lot of reading, and a lot of not burying my nose in a computer screen. Saturday night was kind of odd, as we were sitting around the fire in the dark, both my wife and my stepson had their faces buried into their laptops. It was kind of like sitting out there alone, but together. So I went and got my tablet, but I just wasn’t into it, so I just went to bed (which was probably a good thing, as I could use a little extra sleep).

But now, glorious Monday is here. Oh boy.

Another citizen exercised his Second Amendment rights in a Colorado movie theatre last night, at the premiere of the latest Batman movie. No idea what his deal is yet, but they supposedly have him in custody, so I guess we’ll see. I only hope he isn’t a Muslim.

Otherwise, I’m happy that it’s finally Friday. Today we have our annual team “Annual Review Meeting.” Ominous as that sounds, it basically means the five people in my team take the afternoon and go hang out and have lunch. It beats working, but, truth be told, I’d just as soon go home instead. One of our members will be bringing her daughter, who has just (or is just about to) turned one year old. I will try to be suitably awed by her presence (but they’re really not very interesting at that age – unless they’re yours, of course – since they mostly just crawl around and bawl and shit and spit/puke up a lot). They’re more fun when they start acting like little people. But at least I don’t have to deal with the diapers.

Happy 65th birthday to Carlos Santana.

The DNC created a couple of ads to needle Mitt Romeny’s $100,000 dressage horse that’s competing in the upcoming Olympics. The opted to drop those ads when Ann Romney whined that they were part of her MS therapy. I wonder if Blue Cross pays for that? I guess we’ll never know, because Ann says they’ve given “you people” all the damn information about the Romney lifestyle and financial situation that we’re gonna get. Sadly for Ann, the Labor Super Pac isn’t laying off, and they plan to make the Romney horsie an issue. Most damning will be the fact that Mitt strapped the horse to the top of his trailer before embarking on a cross-country trip.

It’s amazing how touchy these rich people are. I mean, if I was worth a quarter billion dollars or so, I think I’d be pretty laid back. I also wouldn’t be running for President (for one thing, I’d never make it through the vetting process). It’s starting to look as if Mitt might not make it through the vetting process either. Or maybe this is all a ploy, and when he eventually releases a few more years, his taxes will just show your average rich guy not paying much in the way of taxes, and he can say, “see, nothing there.”

Joe Arpaio really wants to see the microfilm.

“Show. Us. The. Mircofilm,” he demanded. “I said it a while back. Show. Us. The. Microfilm. And we’ll all go back home and forget this! Where is the microfilm? Where is the microfilm?

I’m not sure what microfilm he’s talking about. Presumably it has something to do with Obama’s birth certificate and “secret codes” and whatnot. But I didn’t realize it was microfilm he was after. Maybe he’s been watching 1950s spy movies or something.

Much cooler around here today, and it’s only going to be in the low 70s tomorrow. Guess I better dig out my winter jacket.

Well, it actually got up to 101 degrees here yesterday. That’s only the 10th time since they’ve been keeping records that we hit triple digits. I can’t say as it bothered me all that much. I was sequestered in my office all day, and it was kind of warm, but not too horrible with my fan blowing directly on me. It was a hot walk out to the car, but I parked where I knew it’d be in shade by the time I left, so it wasn’t too horrible.

Out at my place, it was a few degrees cooler, and there was a pretty brisk wind (that felt kind of like a blast furnace). But I was in the pool pretty quickly, and from there everything’s nice and cool. I only wish they made a “sports” Kindle that was waterproof so I could hang out in the water and read (not sure I trust a zip-lock bag). I’ll have to get with Amazon on that.

So, Mitt seems pretty adamant about not releasing any more tax returns. This seems pretty silly to me. As many others have said, we all know he’s rich and that rich people hate to pay taxes, so just release the damn things and be done with it (better to get it over with now, than in October).

His refusal to release more can only make everybody wonder if there isn’t some really twisted tax evasion shit going on there. Or who knows what? Maybe he lists some of Ann’s sister wives as dependents or something.

Mitt also doesn’t seem to want to talk about Bain Capital. I thought that was his big claim to being qualified to be Preznit. That, and the wonderful job he did for the Olympics in Utah that I don’t actually remember (and there’s some dispute as to just what I big hero the Mitt-man was). I guess Mitt it kind of the Guidi Ruliani of Salt Lake City.

He was Governor of godless Massachusetts, too. But that doesn’t help him with the rightwing wackos, and he can’t talk about his big accomplishment there, because he hates Obamacare (now). No Bain, no Romneycare, no tax returns, and, frankly, who gives a shit about the 2002 Olympics?

I mean, who cares about the Olympics in general? When they were only every four years (and when I was a kid), they were a pretty big deal. There were also only four teevee channels back then, and we had the godless Soviets (and their commie cohorts, the East Germans, whose women’s swimming teams always looked just a wee bit masculine) to hate and root against in the all-important medal count.

Now? Eh. There’s a summer or winter Olympics every couple of years, and there are 4,000 teevee channels with at least 348 sports channels. You can see every sort of obscure sport you want, any time you want. It’s just not much of a thrill (with the exception of women’s diving and volleyball competitions, of course).

Oh well, time to get back to work. A bit cooler today, thankfully.

After surviving the horror known as “Monday,” we slide into a slightly less horrific Tuesday. And a hot and muggy one, so they say. Depending on who you listen to, it will be anywhere from 96 to 101, depending on how much sun we get this afternoon. This is far too hot for us Northerners, but I guess we need to get used to it if we’re going to be the new Miami (Miami, of course, will be the new Saudi Arabia, and I don’t know what the hell will happen in places like Texas, Oklahoma, and Arizona, but my advice for you folks would be to head north before the water runs out).

A couple of sad motes, as Deep Purple’s co-founder and keyboard player – Jon Lord – passed away at the age of 71 from a pulmonary embolism, and the Queen of Country Music – Kitty Wells – died at 92.

Oh well, back to work.