Miraclo Miles

Meanwhile, back in PA Hey, I'm tired again. Imagine that. Wednesday started too early and ended too late with respect to work. A long, frustrating day, I finally got out of there well after 9pm. On the way home I tanked up the van at $2.61/gallon. When I passed that same way againt today it was up to $2.85. The executives of major, international oil companies had best wake up and start plowing larger portions of the profits back into their infrastructure and exploratory drilling. It's not only good business sense, but if they follow these price increases and all of the excuses for why it's costing more (I'd wager "Katrina!" is now the name to be screamed at the point of orgasm for members of the board) with yet another report of record earnings we should be able to make a justifiable homicide case. Market analysts are now blowing past the hitherto point of trepidation at $3/gal (which it's already hitting in some places) and talking about $4/gal befor...

Noble Cause? Something points of possible interest from Thom Hartmann. I'd done my small part to spread the component pieces in earlier entries, but this re-collects it in light of the Cindy Sheehan public awareness campaign. Some repetition in a good cause is forgivable... and probably necessary. George W. Bush's Noble Cause - 'Political Capital' by Thom Hartmann Cindy Sheehan continues to ask George W. Bush what the "Noble Cause" was for which her son died in Iraq, and why Bush's daughters haven't enlisted in this Cause. While Bush talked to us about WMDs, an imminent "mushroom cloud," and tried to link Saddam and Iraq to 9/11 (when it was 14 Saudis who hit the World Trade Center), those all fell apart and were exposed (by no less than Paul Wolfowitz) as intentional lies. When Bush shifted his Noble Cause to invading Iraq to bring democracy to the Iraqi people, the Downing Street Memo told another story. And now, also, so does Bush's ...

Do you really believe, George? The "Yellow Republican" movement, under various names, has been rolling on for a long while during this "Time of War." The basic argument is that if the people who have launched, pressed and supported this war truly believe this is an action that will in part safeguard the nation from future acts of terror and bring democracy to other nations and create a more peaceful world, then why aren't those who are eligible and/or their military age children not enlisting? A great deal of this was directed at pro-war bloggers, who then apparently kicked into high gear, expressing their outrage and declaring the idea as absurd while fishing around for actual answers. Their second wave of "response" was apparently to look for others who'd come up with something aside from empty outrage and then repeat whatever they could find in sufficient volumes and with such regularity that they took over most, though happily not all, of the...

The (China) Cabinet of C.L. & A A long, fun, tiring day today. After having cleared numerous obligations on Saturday (though not the postals ones I'd intended to in the morning, before the post office closed) most of Sunday was spent over at Crypt Leak and Abbygal 's place, visiting with them, their furry brood, and tearing a piece of furniture apart. This'll give me a little extra project during this week. As I'm almost obligated to display a pic of it once it's back together, in place and in use, the sooner I get to it this week the better. Here you see what it looked like before they emptied it and it fell to our implements of destruction. (Click on the image for a larger view.) As I have to take Wednesday off to go through an orientation at the high school with Trav, then taking care of another matter over at the middle school, and then getting to a doctor's appointment... hmm... maybe Tuesday night won't be the best time to start that. Monday n...

How many of these gags will hold? I've just read that over the course of four days this past week approximately 1,000 detainees have technically been released from Abu Ghraib , though many of them had actually been held in other, unspecified detention centers, but brought to Abu Ghraib for release. The section of the US military statement concerning those released has me wondering: "Those chosen for release are not guilty of serious, violent crimes such as bombing, torture, kidnapping, or murder. All have admitted their crimes, renounced violence, and pledged to be good citizens of a democratic Iraq," How many of them had to sign things that say things they don't agree with, and how binding this "pledge" is supposed to be. Are there strings set to yank them back? How quiet will 1,000 people really be? It'll be interesting to listen. Also, is the move to release them through the gates (fencing, whatever) of Abu Ghraib despite many of them never having...

Music meme Okay, I don't usually play these things, but I'm in a susceptible mood. I caught this one over at Tom the Dog's You Know What I Like? . Here's what you do: First, go to http://www.musicoutfitters.com/ Enter the year you graduated high school into the search engine. Click on the "Top 100 Hits of XXXX" link, and copy the list. Bold the songs you like, strike through the ones you hate and underline your favorite. Do nothing to the ones you don't remember or don't care about. Tom added italicizing the ones he simply doesn't remember, which, upon looking at the list I pulled, makes perfect sense. Ladies and gents, presenting the truly sucktastic year 1979 . No wonder I feel as if I passed most of it in a coma. There are so many I simply don't recall, but then again I don't believe I listened to a top 40 format after hitting my teens. Even several of the ones I've marked as ones I liked are wobbly choices. I was much more likely t...

A little bit of comics My comics arrive twice a month via FedEx, dispatched by The Westfield Company , and then my time off is so seldom my own that the comics tend to sit. The shift toward trade and hardcover editions has suffered some backsliding over the past year as more monthly titles have slid onto my list. Simultaneously, the above mentioned situation and my slovenly habits frequently find me getting a new box of comics, starting to pick something out, realizing I didn't get around to reading the previous issue (and in too many cases the one before that, and perhaps the one before that, etc.), which I know is in one of the stacks I've "cleaned" out of my computer desk work space. Still, I do get to some, and I'm going to take a stab at some comments on a few of the ones that made it through the mesh. Between noticing the dearth of comics comments making their way not only onto this page but into my Legends zine, and seeing such an update over on another b...

A little tinkering After a morning that found me running around concerning a sudden health issue for one of the kids (things seem okay now, but it sank my plans to get some things to the post office before it closed at noon) and then some shopping, lunch made up for all the dependents here, and then I had a chance to sit down and get to some other items. Aside from working on something for Legends APA , I also finally took the time to fix something that's bothered me for a long time with this page. I looked and found the simple code addition for my links so that the ones over on the sidebar will now open in new windows. That way people won't have to Back-button their way back here, something that's not even possible with the Chinese finger traps that are sites set up on Tripod and Angelfire, where once the page loads the backbutton refuses to work. A little more looking and I'm guessing I'll find a way to change the default setting in my posts so the links ...

"A droid doesn't pull your arms off if he loses." In the world of online poker, who's really playing? Poker-playing robots in online gambling games are the focus of this Wired article .

Icons: Less Than Two Weeks This week, I see, Wizkids confirmed September 7th as their release date for their new DC base set: Icons . With more information laid out I'm more comfortable than ever with making this set a slow and easy acquisition rather than buying a case. They've also been updating their list for the set , and appear to have all but one Feat card up (whatever #6 will be) and may have all of the Battlefield Conditions for the set up, set a t a nice, economical five. They've made the nice move of doing a DC release for Unstoppable (for 5 points a character with Super Strength gets to move more freely and smash things up) as one of the Feats. Siphon Power expands the abilities of characters with wild card team abilities, albeit at a cost of 20 points so those prone to whine "wildcard abuse!" will have less to squawk about. Then there's the momentarily confusing Darkness Within , which may turn out to be a really nice card -- allowing on...

I wonder if Robertson wants to get one of these for Chavez for Christmas? A seemingly twitchy Japanese security robot blasted Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi with a plume of smoke on Monday when they met up at the Mall where T63 Artemis has been patrolling for the past year.

Comments update Owing to blasts of spam posts, some more devious than others, in the comments, I've activated something that'll hopefully at least cut out the ones placed there by automated spam engines. Now posters will be asked to type in a short string of characters seen in a graphic before submitting the post. If I'm going to have to continue to delete "Nice blog!" comments with links back to purely commercial websites I want to at least know someone took more time spamming me than I have rubbing it out.

Daft Pat I'd been noting that Media Matters has been tracking various lies being spread by Pat Robertson concerning Democratic Senators Barbara Boxer and Patrick Leahy. Now he's upped the ante by publicly calling for the assasination of Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez . (Something I see that Mark Gibson , among others on my blog list, noted Tuesday. My favorite is Monday's Daily KOS report, "Radical Cleric Issues Fatwa to Kill President." ) (Now with a quick, late afternoon update.) A transcript from the August 22nd broadcast of Robertson's 700 Club: ROBERTSON: There was a popular coup that overthrew him [Chavez]. And what did the United States State Department do about it? Virtually nothing. And as a result, within about 48 hours that coup was broken; Chavez was back in power, but we had a chance to move in. He has destroyed the Venezuelan economy, and he's going to make that a launching pad for communist infiltration and Muslim extremism all over t...

More against the war, this time from one of the fallen Jim Kulik has been telling the story of his brother, John, who was one of the Pennsylvania National Guardsmen killed recently in Iraq. Primarily he's been talking about emails John sent to his brother during the eight months he served in Iraq, during which his opinion of the mission changed radically. In the event this piece soon falls into their more protected archives and the above link no longer works (as if the case with most of the news links in the piece itself), I'm reproducing it here: The legacy of "Johnny K": Fallen Philly soldier revealed the ugly truth about Iraq Last week, we wrote about the unspeakably sad story of Gennaro Pellegrini Jr. -- Philly cop, welterweight boxer, and National Guardsman. The 31-year-old's life was hitting full stride when he received a fateful phone call ordering him to serve in Iraq, just two weeks before his hitch was supposed to end. Pellegrini was quite unhappy,...

Format Changes Taking a cue from Tim Tjarks , who had taken a similar step a while back, I've finally made a few format changes on the site this morning. Some early attempts to tinker with the site ran me into sudden formatting disasters, so I was a little gun-shy. These seem to have worked out well enough, though I doubtless have some tinkering to do. The bulk of the posts will look silly for the moment, but I'm not going to go back and reformat all those. Yes, I know some of the color choices (or lack thereof) aren't attractive. I'm still getting the hang of this. In time, in time... For now: First, the longer posts were scrolling the screen, so I wanted to be able to keep the bulk of a piece on its own page. Second, it bothered me that the Haloscan system I was using wouldn't notify me that a comment had been made unless I made a cash contribution. Oh, I understand their need, but I thought it was time to give the comments sections Blogge...

Artistic expression? Infringement? Parody? Is it even art ? The Kathleen Cullen Fine Arts gallery opened an exhibit back in February (I thought some of this looked familiar, but I don't believe I made any comment on it back then; apologies if I saw something about it on one of your blogs) and lawyers for DC comics want the displayed closed . Why? Because of a selection of watercolors by Mark Chamberlain depict a series of pieces of Batman and Robin in homoerotic, nude and semi-nude poses. A cross-section of the works can be found here , and it'll be a matter of individual interpretation as to how artistic it is. The work appears to be technically weak, attempting to draw substance from a controversial subject selection, as the work would be overlooked were it not for Chamberlain tapping into the fame of the characters in question. Indeed, the work is of sufficiently poor and exploitative quality that I've decided against using any of it in this post. Your mile...

A couple answers I don't believe we're ever completely done with childhood, which is probably a good thing in the end. Those of us who are parents frequently find ourselves playing parents to ourselves as we go through the motions of doing so for our kids. So long as we don't make the mistake of only seeing the similarities and not the differences, and so oversimplify our kids into nothing but copies of ourselves, everyone involved can benefit. Not having a father around for most of my growing up, nor even an older brother or uncle who was in the picture much, I have to make all this up as I go. Feeling eternally half-baked and unsure of the ingredients in the meantime, I'm doing what I can to make it work out for all of us. Well, at least I like to think I am. Anyway, recently I found myself running over the old lament of being 44 and not knowing what I want to be when I grow up. Then two answers occurred to me. They're not especially helpful for me, but they'r...

Herobitchin' I woke up in need of some water -- I'd falled back into drinking too much soda and not enough water the past few days, and it's leaving me feeling generally gummed up -- and decided to pop online to check mail, etc. Recalling something I'd seen in passing yesterday, I thought I'd take a moment to make a few comments. In one of those moves of questionable promotional value, Wizkids' Heroclix sites directed people to look in on something on the UnderGroundsOnline site on Wednesday: A girls meet gamers demonstration of the game, in an exercise they call Herochix . In this demo of the game, four "young, attractive models" (so-described on the site, one's own tastes will vary) are hooked up with four Heroclix players who act as coaches, and a game is joined. Petty bickering and in-fighting ensue, including moments of terrible rules lawyership. An example: When there's an attempt to hold one player's call as a mistake because sh...

Rolling back the years: Saturday Morning Tammy recently passed along a link to a site where we can revisit the Saturday morning (mostly) cartoon line-ups from the years when NBC, ABC and CBS concentrated those shows every Saturday morning, covering the years 1966 through 1988. Look for some favorites and reconstruct what you were watching most Saturday mornings each fall. Included in each year are scattered audio and video clips, including commercials that might bring back some memories. We were all about new toys back then, after all... not so very different from now, I suppose. My own kids, who've never known a time without cable tv and multiple channels with cartoons of some stripe to be found more often than not at any hour of the day, can't quite grasp how limited our choices were back then. When we were moving an old television set, hooking it up to serve as another impromptu monitor, I was able to show them that one can tune in local television station...

Sky High Gratitude The next time you pick up a cordless tool or look up at your satellite dish, will you think of NASA? Perhaps not, but chances are that you are enjoying one of the many benefits of technologies developed as a result of space exploration. Infrared sensors designed to remotely measure the temperature of planets and stars are being used for early detection of breast cancer and for measuring body temperature. JPL's Global Positioning System (GPS) software and receiver technologies are used in monitoring millimeter-level tectonic plate motion and large-scale tracking of airplanes. This talk will focus on the brilliant innovations of JPL technologists that have improved the quality of our lives and in some cases changed them greatly. Thursday and Friday lectures on technological spin-offs from the space program will be webcast. One can catch them live at 7pm Pacific time (10 pm here in real time on the East coast), or watch the archived versions later at the sam...

Another local sounds off on Wizard World Chicago's location... From this week's infotmation mailing by the people at Chicago's Atlas Comics : CHICAGO CON NOW ONLY HALF THE SIZE OF SAN DIEGO! Considering the fact that Wizard World is held in the culture-free zone of Rosemont, Illinois, we should be proud that our fair convention is roughly half as popular as it's main competitor in San Diego. According to figures, 54,000 people crammed into the (*choke*) Donald E. Stevens Convention Center 2 weeks ago, compared to over 100,000 in southern California. Maybe one day our show can take place in a REAL city, instead of the mobbed up, dumbed down, putrid wasteland it's in now.... This echoes some of the laments we were kicking around here and in that day's comments. No obvious solutions in sight, just more signs that the problem's recognized.

2008 just became a little more dull Christopher Walken's publicist says that unlike what was reported earlier , the star will not be running for the presidency in 2008 . What? No cowbell?

Another day Sunday night we had quite the light show, with power being knocked out for several hours. Brilliant lightning diffused by clouds, firece downpours for three minutes, then little more than scattered drops with what's fallen already wisping from the asphalt. A literal cheer from the neighborhood when the power came back on - half the neighborhood was either outside or looking out open windows, as the power had been out long enough that the air inside had warmed and gotten stale - and as loud an "Awwww!" when it winked out again ten seconds later. By the time the power came back on I opted to let my auctions - which had closed while I was incommunicado - wait to be settled. All the storm activity in so many places in the Eastern states (where WizKids has said most of their buyer/player base is) likely had a negative impact on browsing and buying. Even if power didn't go out, most don't want to risk fried modems and mother boards. Eh....

Another Sunday A lost Sunday morning and then some, but spilt milk and all that. Next up is a shower, a brief time in work (I won't be there tomorrow, and I need to clear out a little of it if my Tuesday return's going to be manageable), a quick shopping trip, then home to slice into strips and marinate chicken and steak (along with onions and peppers) for fajitas; it struck me as good, summer fare as each of us can assemble them as and when we choose from late afternoon and well into the evening. We're keeping it very pleasant in here, but I know the heat outside is awful. At the moment it's 93 F with a heat index of 97. It probably won't be that much better even by this evening or whenever it is you happen to be reading this . We have a shot at rain today, but we'll see how that goes. The aim's to by the time it hits 5pm I'm free to do whatever I want to with the remainder of the day. Aside from catching the penultimate episode of Six Feet Under ton...

Batman: The College Years Okay, I don't know quite where this is supposed to be from, but thanks to Scott Saavedra I was sent to this site out of Barcelona and found this panel. (Or, look at the amusingly, poorly-translated Google version. ) I guess the Joker was still angry about something .

Maybe not crazy talk... Though the info's some four days old I've just learned that Christop her Walken has announced, via a press release, his intention to run for President of the US in 2008 . Part of the site claims the campaign, for now, will be minimal because he has various work and connection commitments to various film projects, and another section claims he's simply collecting and organizing his thoughts, getting them carefully into words. Probably a bit of both. So far it's nearly impossible to pin down what "type" of candidate he'll be, and what his political bent will be. On his Politics page he states that he's for campaign finance reform, channeling more money to the troops themselves rather than the "Pentagon's pet projects", and stem cell research. Too little, too soon, and for now it's just a curiosity piece. It could be a good way to churn the political compost heap -- the political parties hav...

Medical Care Info: Bush Administration Style Oh, okay. We can't have the government drive a healthcare plan for the nation -- you know, like nearly every other advanced nation has -- because we're told "it wouldn't work over here" and because government programs are just so terrible. However, it's a great idea to dump $60 million over the next five years into a program to monitor all prescriptions so they can catch people who "doctor shop" to get multiple prescriptions they're addicted to? We need to spend this much money to, what, catch Rush Limbaugh the next time he gets hooked? Let them establish -- as a benefit of being a citizen -- a national prescription program so we only pay $15-20 for name brand prescriptions and $5-10 for generics, and then I'll say that federal monitoring of them makes some sense. If someone has the medical insurance and/or cash to be running around in and out of state to get their Vicodin and Valium then let t...

Saturday out and about A little banking done and some checks written out & mailed, I've begun to get a grip on our current financial state. I'll be collecting the rest of the current bills and writing out some more checks/making some online cash transfers this evening. With Ari being out on a medical leave from work for months now, I'm feeling a bit of a pinch but it appears to be survivable. September turns out to be one of those accounting margin anomalies for me -- a three-pay month -- which should help. My decision to cancel my case order of Icons is a good move, too. That wasn't primarily a financial move, though the finances did provide a telling nudge. There's simply too little in the set that I'm genuinely interested in, it's a small set, and as a new base set it'll be around for a while. I'll buy the starter and a couple boosters on the release day, then (undoubtedly) some more at venue events... and beyond that I'll see wha...

Portents & Plans on a Friday Night We've made it to another weekend, for those of us whose work schedules make that something to be reached. Sure, it's a sand castle refuge, but solid and secure enough from Friday night through Saturday. Sunday's when the tide starts to come in. Well-wishes to Abbygal , who's down with some awful cold this weekend. Crypt Leak 's keeping her soothed with Alka Seltzer Cold Formula and pizza, so she's expected to pull through. This spares me having to do the necessary clean-up out in the living room this weekend, as they're giving me a china cabinet and we were originally going to do that this Sunday. Next weekend's much better, or at least that's how it seems now. I'll probably still be as lazy and/or tired next weekend, but from here is seems a marvelous plan. Last night I decided to fill up the van's tank when I saw that the gas station up the hill from us was still selling gas for $2.43/gallon when e...