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From Drudge
"This is an election year, and I think we're in desperate trouble and it's time for people to speak up and not pipe down. It's a real conflict for me when I go to a concert and find out somebody in the audience is a Republican or fundamental Christian. It can cloud my enjoyment. I'd rather not know."
Change the highlighted words to make wonderful new phrases.
So on Saturday night, my daughter Emily and I ventured to the cast urban expanse known as Wabash, IN to catch Night Ranger at the Honeywell Center. Anyone who grew up in the 80's knows who Night Ranger is, so I'll avoid going into details on their music.
The night started off again with one of the best cover bands I've heard called Souvenirs. They opened for Cheap Trick as well and once again, did a great job opening for Night Ranger.
Good show by Night Ranger overall. Like any crowd, we had two idiots behind us who were screaming at the top of their lungs during every song. Thankfully they moved up for most of the show so that we could enjoy it in peace. But of course, they had to come back and screw things up. I'll get to them later....
Night Ranger of course played all their big hits and a couple of cover tunes (including Highway to Hell where I was positive the bassist was going to blow his voice out). Throughout the night, Jeff the guitar player was launching picks and two landed right in front of the girl next to me who's husband was a bit faster than me in grabbing them and kept one and gave the other to some schmoe next to him while my daughter looked on. I think he got an earful from his wife later on about not giving one to the little girl standing next to him.
Finally the show ends and Kelly the drummer starts tossing his sticks. One heads out direction and Emily snags it in between two of her fingers but, yet again, the two idiots behind us rip it out of her hand and push both of us forward. At that point I had it and ripped into the asshole about pushing a seventy-two pound twelve year old. Fortunately/unfortunately he was too drunk to notice what an ass he made of himself.
As usual, we made our way around back and Emily got her picks with Jeff, Brad, and Kelly who were kind enough to stick around before they had to drive to Chicago that night to catch an early flight. Of course, who was there pushing people around to get fifity things autographed but the two idiots from the show. My daughter wanted to launch into them, but I told her hold off since #1 they were drunk and #2 they had lots of drunk friends.
Pics will be posted after vacation since I forgot the digital camera and had to use a $4.95 disposable one.
(Disclaimer: this company is one of my customers at work. I did not call in any special favors or tricks, this was done at the sole discretion of the employees at the airport while I was 200 miles away).
We've been planning a vacation, and thankfully we are in the home stretch of making lists, packing, and essential "what did I forget"ed-ness. Over the past couple of days, our son Tyler has become withdrawn and sullen. My wife and I figured out pretty quickly that he was afraid of something, and yes, it was flying.
Tyler has never been on an airplane before, and someone in the neighborhood must have said something to throw him over the edge. He was trying to keep brave about it, but my wife and I knew that if we waited until the day we fly, all hell would break loose. So my wife decided to take a journey down to Fort Wayne International to show Tyler the sites he could see.
Obviously with all the security measures in place now since Sept 11th, she didn't plan on getting anywhere near the planes, and was warned by me about "looking suspicious" since that's enough to get you detained for hours on end with the $6.50/hr lackeys. So my wife went down to security, described what she was doing there, and innoculously asked about getting to the gates so he could at least see what was going on around the plane. Of course, they said no, but told her to check with the ticketing desk to see if there was anything they could do.
Enter ATA and their staff. My wife went down to the ticketing counter, rang the bell and one of their employees came to the desk. After my wife explained the situation to him, he said he knew exactly what he could do. He printed off three fake tickets (something that can be done apparently without problems) and walked over to the Homeland Security desk to get them OK'd so my wife and kid (along with my niece who was tagging along) wouldn't have to be searched (apparently it's policy to physically search/frisk anyone who wants to get into the boarding area without a real ticket or if you buy a ticket that morning one way with stops in Riyahd and Islamabad). Homeland Security approved it immediately and within minutes my kid was in the boarding area getting his first look at an airplane.
OK, that's great. The two people from ATA got a scared kid through security and he could see the planes. But that's not the end of the story.
For the next 15-20 minutes, he explains to Tyler what all the carts around the plane do (that one's for air conditioning, that's for power, that one has the baggage, etc). Tyler is starting to get into it and starts asking a bunch of questions. The ATA rep states that he would show him more, but he didn't have a plane at the gate. Then he tells my wife to hang on, and walks over to another airline and explains the story to the gate agent. Two minutes later, they come back and gather my wife, son, and niece and promptly walk them out to an empty plane. My son was able to get in, sit down, try on the seat belt. Then the stewardess walked him back to show him where the bathrooms were, etc. At this point, he's glowing. After the tour, they go back into the gate area where my son gets his sticker and a cookie. Then the rep tells them he's writing a note down to let the people in Indy know that they have a special flier (i.e. my son) and to take good care of him.
For someone who's ragged on the airline industry post 9/11, it's absolutely refreshing to see that there is a sense of "doing the right thing" instead of blindly following rules and regulations. Instead, they followed the one regulation every business should know which is "Make your customers happy" and in this case, make one scared little boy's day.
When Wal-Mart forgets to tighten the oil cap to your favorite new toy and you only find out about it at the next oil change. Then they blame you for not looking under the hood every week.
And yes, they have already filed an insurance claim. The new oil cap will be in tomorrow and Wal-Mart did offer to pay for a rental van (which I gladly took them up on).
At least we now know that John Kerry has had some law enforcement experience...
It's nice to see the aliens who defeated the ancients have progeny living right here on Earth.
But still damn funny...
Especially when these poor people are left to do this in public.
What the hell was the UN thinking anyway???
Well at least to Aftenposten they can't....
Norway's gross national product per person amounted to USD 36,600, beaten only by Luxembourg. Its men and women are expected to live to an age of 78.9 years and Norway is one of 19 countries in the world with no measurable rates of literacy.
UPDATE: Apparently, they can now read. But for a while there, we were a bit worried.
Last night was my last class for my associates degree. It should have been next week, but we're heading out of town, so last ngiht I had to give two presentations and put together a twelve page paper on "Water Pressure Issues within Hunter's Ridge". Exciting stuff....
Should get the piece o'paper in a couple of weeks. Now the fun stuff....have to get the Bachelor's stuff done in September.
There's been an interesting story going on here in good old Fort Wayne regarding Brieana Noe and her parents. And its also one of those stories that makes you shake your head and hug your kids a bit tighter.
Brieana's Mom and Dad were in a custody dispute over Brieana. The dad, who lived in Ohio, wanted to get custody of his daughter while her mom fought like crazy to keep her. Several times during the entire process, Brieana's mom made the comment "Brieana will never leave Fort Wayne with her father".
Well, Brieana's mom is still trying to make that true. Last week, according to initial police reports, Brieana's mom murdered her to prevent her father from taking her away. On June 19th, Judi Noe wrapped her daughter up and held her under water until she stopped moving and "her eyes rolled back into her head". Judi Noe this morning was charged with Felony Battery and Felony Neglect of a child. Murder charges are still pending.
After being confronted with the news of his daughter's murder, Brad May took custody of his daughter's remains and made arrangement with a local funeral home to transport them to a cemetary in Ohio to be buried near his family. Over the weekend, the county coroners office took back custody of Brienna from Brad May stating that since he didn't have custody of Brieana while she was alive, the decision to bury her would be left up to the mother, Judi Noe. You know, the one who killed her.
In about an hour, Brad will be going to court to regain custody of his daughter's remains. Knowing our justice system lately, I have a feeling that mom is going to get what she's always wanted. Because even in death, she will still keep Brad May from taking his daughter home.
UPDATE: Brad May won his court case today. He will be taking Brieana home with him sometime this week. The coroner's office has also ruled that Brieana's death was a homicide and the state will be filing new charges against the mother shortly.
Earlier today I received a lovely visit from Comcast and had their high speed internet installed in my office. Here's the difference:
#1. Average download speed around 420 kilobytes/second. That works out to around three Mb/sec.
#2. No bounces on my VPN network so far, haven't had a session crash as of yet (tomorrow will be the real test).
#3. Found out from the installer that my neighborhood is on its own feed (i.e. what would normally serve a couple square miles is now serving around 15 homes up here).
Why the hell didn't I do this sooner????
File this under Politics for obvious reasons:
One of my favorite blogs of late has been ReformK12.com which has a surpisingly good piece on the cost of public education in the United States. According to public numbers, on average we spend over $10,000 per student/per year in K-12 education while public schools do the same thing for almost a third of the cost. Being a parent of public and private school children, I'll let you guess which one is getting the better education.
Now I know that a bunch of that overhead has to go into buildings, lights, management, clubs; stuff that private schools might not have to deal with. But I doubt that this amounts to $6,000 per pupil in expenses, especially when most kids don't participate in after-school activities.
I pay almost $3,000 a year for my daughter to attend a small private school run out of a former teachers house. Two years ago Emily went there and in one year went from C's and D's to being on the Honor Roll. She is now at grade level, even after a year of junior high, and is excelling accoridng to her teachers. Hannah is doing science and math well ahead of her grade level and will be even further ahead after this year with Mrs. Rupely.
One of the things I'm learning in my privately paid for college class is that true leaders realize where problems lie and propose bold inititives to make change where needed. Our current public school system sucks. It's a bloated money-sucking machine which siphons funds to create jobs that amount to shuffling paper. I think it's time the Conservatives of this country finally stand up and say "enough of this crap". Take the department of Education, and institute a five year plan to reorganize it. All funding from the DoEd will stop effective with FY09. The states will be required to totally fund their own systems by 2009, with funds coming from existing state taxes to pay tuition for those that can't afford it (which will be few). This will lower the tax burden on everyone, but still allow for kids to get a quality education. Of course, I've got a bunch of bugs in this plan, but I know that staying with the status quo isn't going to make things better.
Hoenstly, I think we need to get back to the way things were done back fifty years ago before the state and federal government dictated what happened in school. We're talking about a major paradigm shift that won't happen from the inside out. It's going to take taxpayers and parents to push this through.
What do you guys think?
So while I was driving to Fort Wayne today, it seems I made someones day. Well, at least everyone in their car's day. You see, they were pointing and laughing at my family. OK, some sick weirdo decides to get their rocks off mocking me, no big deal. And then they start mimicing my wife who was eating an apple. Once again, I'm pissed but I let it go.
Then they started on the kids.
Mind you, this entire encounter took about two minutes, the time it took the light to turn red and for me to stop and for it to turn green on a somewhat busy road.
So this mom is mimicing my daughter doing her hair in the back seat. I'm not quite sure how she saw in the back through the tinted glass, but she's making goofy faces and acting like her. Oh, btw, she's about 45 from my guess and her kids look like they are in their late teens. At this point, I have to say something. Unfortunately the light turns green and off they go. And at this point wifey knows I'm pissed and talks me out of being featured on the 11:00 news for Rural Indiana Road Rage.
What's the moral of this? Hell, even I don't know. But I do know that the next time I see the owner of a Black Jeep Cherokee with a certain license plate, I'll be sure to send them my best.
For those of you who think the Palestinians only want to live in a peaceful society, think again.