As I mentioned yesterday, it was so nice out that I was motivated to remove one of the storm windows from my office and put the screen in (just one of the two – no point in going crazy here). It’s not supposed to be quite as nice today but they’re talking about temps in the 70s over the weekend and maybe even 80 on Monday (that ought to get the pool algae fired up) before of course turning to shit on Tuesday. So the big plan for the weekend is to take the chains off the tractor tires and get the snow tires off the car. Pretty ambitious, I know – and risky, too. But I reckon I can drive through whatever Mother Nature throws at us (or wait it out in my bunker, as long as I have enough beer).

Do you use Dropbox? I do – I also use Google Drive (or whatever they call it), Microsoft’s OneDrive (which used to be SkyDrive), Apple’s whatever it is they call it, I have 5 GB with Asus, and I think I’ve even got a few gigs of storage at Yahoo. And I know I’ve got, like Flickr and Picasa and other stuff out there that I occasionally use, but my “go to” cloud storage is Dropbox (at least until the free space I have gets all used up). The main thing I use it for is uploading pictures from my phone and tablet (I already encrypt any documents I put up there – not that anybody give a shit about my ref-fi documents or copies of my tax forms, but, hey). It automagically syncs whenever I dock my device and then I have everything on every device I can connect to the Internet with.

So it was with much chagrin that I read yesterday that Dropbox has added Condi Rice to its Board of Directors. Because, hey, who wouldn’t want a person who loves her some warrantless wiretaps to have a say in what happens to the private data I store on the cloud. Not that I’d be terribly worried if all my photos of dogs, cats, and snow were to somehow be leaked to the NSA (who no doubt has them anyway), but it’s the principle of the thing.

At least pretend you give a shit about my privacy (and your integrity).

So now I guess I need to move everything over to Google or something. What a hassle.

Along those lines I dunno if this has made it out to the mainstream news or not, but a while back a vulnerability (the “Heartbleed” bug as it’s known) in OpenSSL (used by a shitload of websites – for instance, Yahoo) was discovered and to make a long story short, it…

…would let anyone on the Internet get into a supposedly secure Web server running certain versions of OpenSSL and scoop up the site’s encryption keys, user passwords and site content.

Once an attacker has a website’s encryption keys, anything is fair game: Instead of slipping through a proverbial crack in the wall, he can now walk in and out the front door.

Here’s a list of what’s currently vulnerable and what isn’t (those that aren’t may have been in the past, so going out and changing every password you have is up to you – though if you use the same password for everything, I’d advise you to knock that off).

If you’re curious about sites you go to, you can check them here. And if you want more information, there’s plenty of it out there. Google is your friend.

So, a coworker of mine is experiencing some angst. Her son left for college last fall, and although he’s fairly close she laments that they “never see him.” Add to that her high school age daughter told her that there’s a boy she wants to have over and, well, let’s just say she’s got some premature empty-nest syndrome feelings going on.

Those of us who know better, of course, tried to tell her that a fledgling leaving the nest is not a time of sorrow. It’s when they friggin’ come back that the real depression sets in.

When they leave, well, remember when you were young and you got your first apartment? That feeling of freedom you experienced, and you realized you could sit around on your couch (which was probably a pine frame with plaid-covered foam cushions that came in a set that included a “rocking chair”, coffee table, two end tables, and two lamps) in the living room and drink beer and smoke cigarettes (or whatever else your little heart desired) in front of the teevee and you didn’t have to explain your comings and goings to anybody and nobody was expecting you or making demands of you and if you wanted to live surrounded by pizza boxes, beer cans, and cigarette butts, well, by golly, that was your goddamn choice.

When the kids come back, though? That’s like your mom moving back in with you. And, don’t get me wrong, you love your mom (you really do), it’s just that you’ve kind of gotten used to her living over there and you can go visit or she can come and visit you and that’s really nice but eventually she goes the hell home.

Things are better that way. I reckon my coworker will figure that out soon enough.

Oh well, time to virtually head off to work. Let’s get this over with.

I did something quite uncharacteristic for me yesterday. The new printer I ordered was delivered yesterday afternoon. That’s not really the uncharacteristic thing – though I’ve had the old one since about 2001 or so. Imagine that. A year that was once the epitome of the concept of the “future” is now far enough in the past to have become somewhat murky in my memory (though, let’s face it, last Tuesday is kinda murky in my feeble little mind). I mean other than you know what, I don’t really remember much about 2001.

It (the printer) wasn’t exactly new even back in 2001. It was an HP LaserJet 4 that came with both the standard paper tray and a second high-capacity one that could hold a full ream of paper (plus it had a network card in it – a pretty expensive option back in those days – so I could just plug it into my home network and print from anywhere). They were “surplussing” it at the Law College and I got it for $25 (including full paper trays and a brand new spare toner cartridge for when the one that was in it ran out).

I think it was about 8 years before I had to change the toner on that sucker, and it printed a lot of stuff for me – not the least of which was a few hundred “lost dog” flyers when Siggy went missing way back when.

Of course it was big and heavy and really cranked out a lot of heat, which was OK in the winter but kinda sucked in the summer.

Unfortunately after a few years I started to notice my computers making surging (or whatever the opposite of surging – declining maybe) noises, and upon further inspection I found that, with the printer turned on, the voltage in my office outlets was swinging down and up quite wildly. So from then on, I didn’t turn it on unless I was going to actually print something (which probably saved a lot of electricity, considering this thing wasn’t exactly Energy Star compliant).

Still it was quite serviceable up until the past year or so when it started insisting there was a paper jam when the HC tray was in.

And then finally in the last couple of weeks it just scoffed at any print jobs I sent to it.

So, sadly, it was time for a new printer. One thing I really didn’t want to mess with was an inkjet, so I resigned myself to paying out the ass for a new laser printer. Much to my surprise, the damn things have gotten pretty darn cheap.

I don’t print all that much and have no real need for color (I can do that at work if I really need to), and I wound up getting a nifty little monochrome laser printer that has both Ethernet and Wireless, will do (it claims) 27 ppm and automatically duplexes for $99 (plus it’s black and fits nicely on top of the little black “retro” fridge I have in my office). Can’t beat that.

It came with a “starter” cartridge that’s supposedly good for 700 pages, and I sprung for a “high yield” one that claims to have an expected life of 2,600 pages.

I’m pretty sure they’ll be able to print my obituary out using that sucker – at least, assuming the printer itself lasts a few years.

Anyhow, the part that was actually uncharacteristic was that as soon as I got the sucker hooked up, I dragged the old one (all 500 pounds of it) to the Town’s electronics dumping area and got it right out of my life.

Granted, part of that was because it was a good excuse to stop at the store and buy beer but still, normally I’d have kept the thing around intending to fix it or get scrap parts off it or just in general kept it sitting around and in the way somewhere for a few years until I got bitched at enough to motivate me to get rid of it.

So I’m pretty proud of myself. I know it aint much, but, hey, for somebody who can barely walk….

It’s actually been a thoroughly productive weekend here. My new sump pump came on Friday (the old one had a bad switch and wouldn’t stop running). Fortunately it was in the sump pit (got three of ’em in my basement and with the snow melt and rain, those puppies are really humpin’) that has a backup pump in it, or there would have been a great deal of urgency in replacing it. My rather conservative estimate is that this one sump alone is pumping about 2,000 gallons of water an hour.

So, anyhow, that came on Friday afternoon and I installed it after work (now I need to see if I can find parts to fix the old one – pump’s fine, just need a new switch).

Yesterday morning, the DB upgrade at work apparently went fairly smoothly, but the stuff I’m responsible for wasn’t working. Turned out they’d set up a new DNS alias for the new DB server (so that the old name would now point to the new server’s IP address). It eventually dawned on me that our server no doubt had the old information in its cache, so I flushed it (so to speak), and all was well.

Made me feel as if I was worth the extra money they weren’t paying me to work on Saturday.

Then yesterday my wife was kind enough to go out and get me new curtains for my office. Did you realize they expect you to iron the folds out of those things? I mean, shit, for the price of them they should be wrinkle free (roll ’em up and put ’em in a tube or something). It was really difficult having to watch her sit there and iron them (so I didn’t – I used the time to set up my new printer, ditch the old one, buy beer, and then watch a few episodes of “I Hate My Yard” on DIY). Took her forever.

Turns out you can only get them in, like 63″ length, so, being the talented seamstress she is, when she got done ironing them, she had to shorten them up for me, too.

I’ll tell ya, I’m tired just thinking about it.

As if all that wasn’t enough, I finally went over my taxes one last time and clicked the button to file them. And I figured I might as well go ahead and print them, too. I mean, what with the new printer and all.

Now where’s my damn refund?

And now tonight is a big old teevee night, too. It’s the season 4 finale of Shameless, which I am gonna miss (not to worry, there will be a fifth season). But Nurse Jackie starts up again next week, so that will help fill the void. Some.

It’s also the season premiere of Game of Thrones, which I am most definitely geek enough to really like. Have to watch that one on my own, though, as it’s too violent for my wife (she should read the books – the show is pretty tame by comparison).

On a lighter note, though, VEEP also starts back up tonight. I just can’t get over little Anna Chlumsky all grown up. Plus there’s a new show starting tonight called Silicon Valley, which I don’t know much about and don’t have high expectations for, but, hey, it’s HBO and it’s another geek show, so I’ll give it a shot.

With all this going on, it’s a damn good thing I’m off tomorrow. I’m gonna need the rest.

First, let me say that NCAA basketball is dead to me, so I don’t really care (I’ve moved on to lacrosse and that’s not going all that well either – actually, women’s lax is doing quite well so that’s good), but I was reading something this morning that said today’s two Final Four games are not on over-the-air teevee, but are only on cable channels and that they are on three different channels with three different announcing crews. This seems pretty bizarre to me. CBS (or Viacom or whoever owns them) presumably pays a lot of money for the broadcast rights for this stuff, and you’d think the advertising money they can get showing the games OTA on CBS would be way higher than they can get on a cable channel. Plus, why three channels? I mean if, say, 3 million people were gonna watch on one channel, it’s not like 9 million are gonna watch on three. Seems silly to me, but then again I’m not the type of crack network executive that would do things like buy the Sci-Fi channel and put “professional” wrestling on it on Friday nights (never mind changing the name of the channel to “SyFy”). Shoulda just renamed it the “sigh” channel.

So I just noticed that it’s April 5th (aka, 10 days to taxes) and my tax info is sitting there on my desk. Funny thing is, I did my taxes back at the beginning of February but I suffer from “fear of filing.” Anytime I have a decent refund coming, I’m afraid to file the damn things lest I’ve unwittingly made some egregious error that Turbotax didn’t catch. Which is silly, because I’m only getting a refund because I pay a ridiculous amount of property taxes and a somewhat less ridiculous amount of mortgage interest every year. It’s not like my taxes are even complicated – I have no hidden foreign assets or funky home office deductions and I don’t even bother to write off my charitable contributions (it’s not like I’m Andrew Carnegie anyway). And the interest rate on my savings account is negligible.

I’m not like the rest of you limousine liberals out there hobnobbing with Hollywood stars driving your Priuses (Prii?) and drinking your fancy Starbucks coffee as you head out to your weekend house in the Hamptons or Martha’s Vineyard or most likely some other place that I’ve never heard of because if I’ve heard of it, it can’t be trendy enough. No, we’re simple pickup truck driving folks out here in real America. Well, OK, I drive a Hyundai (Korean car and Japanese tractor – maybe I’m not a very good American after all) but I’m hoping to buy a plow truck this year. So I’ll shoot for a Ford.

But, still, I have this fear of pulling the trigger on my returns (and am too lazy to motivate myself enough to go over them one more time). It’s really more of a fear of the possibility (no matter how remote) of having to deal with the IRS. Or any authority (maybe this is why I’m a mostly “good” person – I don’t actually believe in a god, but on the odd chance that there actually happens to be one, I don’t wanna have to get scolded by him/her) – it’s what keeps me from speeding (much – I do the obligatory five mph over the limit so that I feel like I’m getting away with something) or breaking the law in other ways. I just don’t wanna have to deal with the cops. And I don’t want people coming to my house and ringing the doorbell (fortunately that doesn’t happen all that much out here in the boonies). Basically, if I don’t already know you’re coming, you shouldn’t be coming. And if you ring the bell, there’s about a 5% chance I’ll do anything more than peak out the window and give you the stink eye.

I used to feel that way about the phone, too. I used to tell people, if you’re gonna call me you need to send me an e-mail first to let me know you’re gonna call me. I fixed that by not having a phone anymore. Or at least a landline. The only people that call my cell phone (do they still call them that?) are work or my wife. One I don’t mind talking to and the other I can’t avoid (I’ll let you figure out which is which).

I actually have to “work” today. A bit. They’re upgrading Oracle on one of the database servers from 10g to 11g (which means we’ll only be one version behind, which is actually pretty “bleeding edge” for my particular organization). So once they’re done, I’m supposed to go and check to see if anything’s broken. A real thrill.

Fortunately, I happened to glance at the work calendar, and found that I’m off on Monday. This was a pleasant surprise. I think my original intention was to be able to properly prepare myself to watch SU win the National Championship on Monday night.

Guess I’ll have to find something else to do.

So I was perusing the headlines yesterday, and caught one that said something to the effect of “Marijuana cookie bought in Colo. pot shop blamed in Wyoming student’s suicide jump” which if nothing else is a really long headline. Sounded like bullshit to me, and I didn’t bother to read the story, but I saw another headline today that said “Student Dies in Colorado Fall After Eating Pot Cookie“.

“This was not a suicide, and he was not a regular drug user,” said Michelle Weiss-Samaras, a spokesperson for the Denver coroner’s office.

So, so much for the whole suicide thing. Still, it proves marijuana is a killer. I know I’d feel much better if he’d been drunk when he fell.

Then I was watching the teevee last night and I saw a commercial for something or other that had Jennifer Garner asking, “what if you could shrink your pores just by washing your face?”

Wait, what? Why the hell would I want to shrink the size of my pores? Aren’t they, like, the size they’re supposed to be? Personally, I don’t think you ought to be fiddling with the size of your pores – it could interfere with your ability to sweat.

So you probably heard that SCOTUS did away with the aggregate limits on campaign contributions yesterday. Let’s hear it for our democracy: One Dollar, One Vote.

Oh well, back to work.

Hah! It’s actually April 2nd. Gotcha.

In other news, today was stupid meeting day, and for the first time in longer than I can remember it wasn’t cancelled. These aren’t the type of stupid meetings where you just have to sit there and pretend to be somewhat interested in the proceedings (or at least not start snoring), but the kind that the mid-level mucky muck insists on having so he can grill everybody and make us all feel uncomfortable and hate our lives even more than we ordinarily do. So we’ve been quite happy to have the goddamn things cancelled, but today it appeared that the show would actually go on. This of course led to lots of fear and loathing, and I actually came to work early in order to properly prepare myself for discussing just what the fuck it is I do around here.

Of course mister mid-management was late to the meeting, and it was my hope that I could get my part over with before he showed up, but much to my delight he never showed up. I was torn between relief and pique that he feels he can get us all filled with angst and then not only not show up for the stupid meeting that he insists on scheduling every month, but doesn’t even bother to send an e-mail saying he won’t attend.

Something tells me that if I did that, I’d hear about it.

But, whatever. I’m not one to look a gift horse in the mouth, and the stupid meetings are both more comfortable and more productive when it’s “just us” in attendance.

In other news, I happened to go to my LinkedIn page today (because some guy in Mumbai looked at my profile, and I was hoping he was hiring though it would be kind of a long commute) and in the list of “people you might know” or whatever it is that they have there was a guy who was “connected” to me in some convoluted way (like, he worked with some guy I once worked with, but not at the same place I worked at). Anyhow, the amusing part was that I actually know the guy.

By “know” I mean I met him about once, and that happened to be when I was delivering my oldest stepdaughter to his house on the night of the Senior Ball (for the high school I actually graduated from 20 years earlier – though I of course didn’t go to the Senior Ball).

I was pressed into service that night because my wife was working for Hospice or the VNA or some damn thing, and I had to go and meet the parents and take pictures, which was pretty awkward for me, since I was born without social skills.

Hard to believe, but that was almost 16 years ago. Time sure does fly. Except when you’re stuck at work until five o’clock.

The geese were really on the move yesterday, with squadron after squadron of Canadian geese flying overhead. Yesterday it was mostly snow geese (the kind that are all white except for black wing tips – as opposed to the snow geese that are “blue” with white heads), though there were plenty of “regular” ones flying about too. I took this to be a sure sign that spring has finally sprung.

And then I woke up to fresh snow on the ground this morning. Not a lot – maybe an inch or snow of actual accumulation, but it’s somewhat disheartening anyway. It may actually be snowing right now, even. It’s too dark to tell if it’s snow mist or fog.

They claim it’ll hit 60 on Tuesday, but I’ll believe it when I see it. These things tend to get revised down as time goes on.

I don’t usually bother with the Sunday Boobleheads anymore, but I happened to notice that the Press the Meat roundtable will include Svante Myrick, who was the youngest person ever to be elected Mayor of Ithaca, NY in 2011 at the age of 24. Ithaca, if you don’t know, is not only a gorgeous area (seriously, there are lots of gorges), but it’s a liberal bastion and home to Cornell, Ithaca College, Tompkins County Community College, and the Namgyal Monastery in Ithaca, which is the North American seat of the Dalai Lama (I don’t really know what that means, but it sounds good).

Myrick was first elected to public office at the tender age of 20, when he was elected Alderperson (no, not Alderman – this is Ithaca we’re talking about here).

So it’ll be interesting to see what he has to say and if they actually let him talk. Not interesting enough for me to watch, though.

Ah, it’s brightening up out there and, yes, it looks like it’s very foggy out there. I can’t see the corn field next door (it’s been soybeans for the past couple of years, so I’m anticipating corn this year), so it looks pretty thick. Hopefully it’ll all burn off before I have to do my weekly shopping over in Pixley. I blew it off last week, and I need food for the week (and gas, too).

I’m looking less forward to work this week than I normally am. Not only do I have the “support” duty this week (our users appear to have suffered a collective 30-point drop in IQ over the past six months or so – and they were barely above double-digits to start with), but it’s also stupid monthly meeting week on Wednesday, and it’s been cancelled so many times that if we actually have one this week, it’s gonna be even more uncomfortable than usual.

Plus there’s this whole not being able to walk thing. Kinda sucks.

It wasn’t exactly a picture-perfect day yesterday, but we’ll take it. For one thing, it was warm. I don’t know how warm officially, but it got into the 50s and fifties are better than twenties (temperature-wise – not so much when it comes to age), and it didn’t rain as much as they said it would, though it started raining late again late in the day. So the sump pumps will be humping pretty good by the end of the weekend, I reckon. And, hey, looks like there may be another storm or two before we’re done with the snow. Stay tuned.

I was looking over there at the “top commenters” and I can’t help but be amazed by the late, great, Fred. I went in search of his final comment, which appears to have been the first one on May 15, 2008. Nearly six years ago – and he managed to compile darn near 11,000 comments in only two and a half years with us. At that rate, if he was still around today he’d be up to around 30,000 comments.

It’s a shame he was never able to say goodbye. Makes me think I should schedule a “death” post that I can schedule to be published a week into the future and then go in weekly or daily or something and push the date back again – something like, “if you’re reading this, it must mean I’m dead. Either that, or I forgot to change the publish date.” It all depends on how I croak, I guess.

If I buy it in a car accident on the way to work or something (please let it be on the way in, and not the way home!), hopefully the wife will put something up, like “Free at Last!” If I’m diagnosed with cancer or something, then of course I’ll “live blog” it every step of the way until I succumb.

But odds are it’ll be a stroke that’ll either kill me outright or turn me into a veggie burger that can’t do much more than crap the bed and pray to a god I don’t believe in for a merciful death (though by then I might have had my “come to Jesus” moment, so you never know).

Well, I guess I better have another cuppa joe.

So, you maybe already know this and I assume it works for everybody but if you buy shit at Amazon (and, really, who doesn’t?), you should get there by going to smile.amazon.com. They’ll then offer to set you up with a charity (or you can pick your own – I went with the CNY SPCA, ‘cuz it’s a no-kill shelter) and some rather small portion of your purchase goes to the charity (hey, it’s better than nothing). So do that.

Rumor has it it’s gonna warm up today (after a potential record low – it’s 15° out there right now, and we need to get below 13 to set a record). Of course, if you’re in New England or Atlantic Canada, things kinda suck for you with blizzard conditions and 100+ mph wind. Sorry to hear about that, but better you than me.

Then of course down in the south there’s some severe thunderstorm type stuff coming up, and I reckon it’ll be tornado season pretty soon. Not to mention the flooding and mudslides. And drought. Always something to look forward to.

Here, it appears we’re going to lose the Golden Snowglobe title to those evil denizens of Erie, PA who are currently 2″ ahead of us. It’s something we’ll just have to live with all summer – assuming we ever get summer.

Anyhow, they’re talking about some crazy temps like over 40° today, which would be most welcome (except I don’t know where I’ll get my foot snow from – already running low on the front porch). I know there have been worse winters, but, damn, this one seems like it’s been going on forever.

I caught something or other on the teevee the other day – don’t recall what it was – but there were several people who used a phrase that really irks me: “graduated high school.” As in, “I graduated high school in 1978.”

FROM. Graduated FROM high school. I dunno why, but that really bugs me. I hear it so often, I had to look it up ‘cuz I figured maybe it was me that was wrong. Nope. It’s “from.”

I mean, I’m no expert and make my fair share of mistakes (I prefer to think of them as “typos”) but Jesus Christ.

Sorry, just had to get that off my foot chest.

Monday at work, I got a new PC. This is a good thing, ‘cuz the old one was from 2009, was running the soon to be EOL’d Windows XP, had a crappy Core Duo CPU, and a measly 2GB of RAM. So now I’ve stepped up to an eight core CPU with 8 GB of RAM. It’s also a bad thing because I have to get everything I use restored and working again (a chore made more difficult by trying to find 64-bit equivalents for everything). I’m still struggling to get things working even today.

The other thing that was bad was having to repeatedly crawl under my desk to plug and unplug things. It must have stressed my foot a lot, because I woke up in horrible pain Monday night, and around midnight had to get up, go outside, and get a block of snow/ice to throw in my soaking bucket. I kept the sucker on ice for about a half hour, and between that and 800 mg of ibuprofen, I was able to hobble back to bed and if not sleep, and least not writhe around in pain. I think I did finally get an hour or so more of sleep after that.

Things seem a bit better this morning. I did wake up at about eleven last night and had to take a fistful of ibuprofen (I was prepared, though – I made sure to put water and my bottle of bills next to my bed so I wouldn’t have to walk far), and we’ll see how it goes today. If I could just stay at home and keep my foot on ice, it wouldn’t be so bad. But not only do I have to go sit at my crappy desk, it’s my late day, too.

Oh well, at least the big nor’easter that had everybody on the East Coast all worked up isn’t going to do much to us here, as they say it’ll stay well east of us. Instead, it’s merely only going to be “bitterly cold” with snow showers.

It was an emotional day (sort of) yesterday, as I bid adieu to my van, which I sold to my friend. It’s a 1998 Chevy Astro (AWD) that I bought in 1999 for the purpose of driving out to Minneapolis for my stepdaughter’s high school graduation. Mostly I got it so we could bring little Siggy (who was only six months old at the time, though not really all that little by then) with us.

We got back from that trip only to find that my mother was in the hospital – turned out she didn’t leave there alive, but at least I got to say goodbye. From there I went on to quit my job and take a similar one at SU so I could finish up my degree, and within about five months, I left my greasemonkey days behind and got a job as the Web Guy at the College of Law. And the rest, as they say is history. I went from being a young, healthy, active working man to a fat old cripple in what seems like a matter of days.

So, anyway, that van has a lot of sentimental value to me, but it mostly sat where it was because I hardly ever use it (in fact, I don’t think I’ve driven it since August or September). So now it will go to a good home and a good owner who will take better care of it than I ever did. Plus I can go visit it once in a while.

But today, it’s out in the cold and off to work.

Whether you wanted to or not, you’ve probably heard there’s a basketball tournament going on (unless you’re my wife, who I’m pretty sure has no idea). You might also have heard that during a game between Oklahoma State and Gonzaga last night, CBS announcer Andrew Catalon (an SU grad, I’m sorry to say) referred to OK St.’s strategy of fouling Gonzaga’s Przemek Karnowski (who’s a crappy free throw shooter) toward the end of the game as the “Hack-a-Polack” defense. Even better, Catalon’s broadcast partner for the game was Mike Gminiski. As a fan of alliteration, I’d have probably gone with “Poke-a-Polack.”

Despite the fact that this is how guys tend to talk to each other in private (being perpetually childish, we tend to give each other shit – I think this is part of the reason why women can have a tough time in historically male-dominated professions. They expect us to act like professionals, and we act like adolescents. Of course, it’s all part of our charm) Andrew really should have known better. I assume Catalon comes from “Catalonia” so I wonder how Andy would like the “Smack-a-Spic” defense?

That would probably have gotten him in even more trouble – as would “Whack-a-Wop”, “Deck-a-Dago”, “Grab a Guniea”, “Clobber-a-Kraut”, “Mangle-a-Mick”, Jab-a-Jew”, or “Nail-a-N….” Well, that last one would get him thrown off the air permanently, I bet.

This all reminds me of the 1968 (I think – maybe ’72) summer Olympics. One of the basketball announcers on ABC (have no idea what his name was – I mean, shit, that was like 45 years ago after all) went on and on one night about the “Polack team.” I mean, he said it like 20 times at least. I can remember my dad and me laughing more and more every time he said it.

The the next night he offered a heartfelt on-air apology that went something like “I had no idea that wasn’t what you called them people.” :rofl2:

It was right up there with “as God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly.”

And then it was all over and everybody forgot about it. Of course that was before the Internet and YouTube (hell, it was even before regular people had VCRs – which you younger folks will have to ask your grandparents about) so you could do something stupid in public and not have to suffer eternally for it.

You also didn’t have the huge number of perpetually outraged people out there looking for something to be outraged at (the bible thumpers are currently pissed at Neil deGrasse Tyson for not giving creationism “equal time” on the new Cosmos series – when they find out Seth MacFarlane in one of the Executive Producers, their collective heads will implode I say “implode” because that’s what happens when you poke a hole in a substance that contains a vacuum).

Plus I bet 43% of American households were going, “hell, that’s what I thought you called them people, too” – my wife will tell you how when she and her first husband moved to Poplar Bluff Missouri people wanted to meet her husband because they’d “never seen a Jew before.”

Oh well, let’s hope those other fellas from Syracuse have a better night tonight than Andrew had yesterday. It’s still not very warm around here (though not only are we in the lead for the Golden Snowball, we have now overcome what was once more than a one-foot deficit and are tied with Erie PA for the Golden Snowglobe award – and there’s more snow a-comin’), and winning definitely takes the edge off the cold.