Timmerov's Blog
"news"
fox news has established in the us supreme court that a media outlet can publish information they know is false and call it news. to me, the word news implies the content is a reasonable facsimile of the truth. granted breaking news should be sprinkled with caveats. we don't have all the details yet but this is what some people on the scene are speculating. for example. i totally believe that a media outlet should be able to broadcast anything it wants. just don't call it news if you know it's not. call it the colbert report. or not news. or fox entertainment. sheehs. the scotus ruled that there's no law that defines news. hopefully, the current or some near future congress can rectify that. if they don't, then we'll need to come up with some other word that means what news meant before its meaning was corrupted. which probably won't hold its meaning for as long as news held its. 2 days tops. any takers?
bumper switchers
so the other day i was in the packing lot at the grocery store. two cars backed out of two parking spots and bumped into each other. their bumpers aligned perfectly. so there was no real damage. except to their bumper stickers. they had gotten all mixed up. the drivers didn't seem to notice. but i did. unfortunately, they didn't say anything funny. now when i drive to work i play the bumper sticker switcheroo game. just to keep from getting really bored and trying out that air bag in the steering wheel. feel free to share your bumper sticker switcheroos. here are some of my favorites: my other care is student of the month. baby '08. if you think education is expensive, try abortion.
grandma
my grandmother fell down and broke her hip. she's not exactly the most cooperative patient. she thinks she's 50 and can do whatever she wants. her physical therapist gets upset when she hurls her walker away and takes off up or down the stairs. heh. i'm thinking a 92 year old woman who can hurl a walker just plain doesn't need it.
genius
men love bacon. women love kissing. so here's the idea: bacon flavored lip gloss. i'm gonna be so rich.
hmfd!
i'm sad. not a single person wished me a happy mother fucker's day. ah well. maybe next year.
sleep
why is it that the part of the night when i'm getting the highest quality sleep... is right before the alarm goes off?
cheat catcher
finding evidence of election tampering is pretty tricky. perpetrators generally don't fess up to it. there might be a few ways though. suppose that like us, the iranians voted on measures in addition to selecting a president. common sense says there should be a correlation between voting for ahmadinejad and voting for conservative issues. and a correlation between voting for mousavi and voting for moderate issues. this argument was used in a recent us election. certain counties voted 80% for democrats and left issues yet voted 80% for the conservative presidential candidate. nothing much came of it. other than a bunch of exasperated arm waving. cause it was pretty trivial to tamper with vote counts and not get caught. good thing we vote on secure systems now. oh wait. sigh. anywho, expect even less in iran. except maybe dead people.
ahmawinner
the election results coming out of iran look somewhat suspicious. let's assume they're bogus. but could they also be right? invoke shades of oj here. the cops (may have) framed a guilty man. the taliban... err ayatollah (may have) put in the fix for ahmadinejad. who may have actually won the popular vote. yeah that seems completely alien to us enlightened westerners. but never underestimate the voting power of religious conservatives. of the ignorant masses who do exactly what they're told. down to such minutia as how many times they can shake their dick after taking a leak. we did, after all, re-elect george w bush.
a&a
now that baseball is in a lull... b and i have found some time to play axis and allies. the first game we played the allies just crushed the axis. it really wasn't any fun. so we looked to see what the heck was going on. we decided to penalize russia one tank. and make the allies pay 26 ipc to the bank every turn. the game was very interesting. there was still a bit of the butterfly effect. ie the brits won a low probability battle in africa and held the entire continent. but the game was decided by tactical decisions. which is the way it should be. we'll have to play again. maybe with a smaller ipc penalty.
bad ad
so... have you seen the new MARGARINE STINKS! ads? heh. someone should be fired. or i should learn to read.
timmerism 2
may the wind at your back not be your own.
timmerism 1
everyone is mayor in crazytown.
perfect loss
here's a bit of an oddity for you. little league baseball has some rules that work well in practice but are not exactly munchkin proof. for examples. you must have at least 11 players on the roster. every player at the game in uniform must bat at least once. otherwise, you forfeit. games end after 3.5 innings if the home team is ahead and more than 1 hour 45 minutes have passed since the official start of the game. so... both teams have 12 players. the home team pitcher pitches four perfect innings. the visitor team pitcher pitches 3 perfect innings except for a solo home run. time runs out before the start of the bottom of the 4th. game's over. the score is 1-0 in favor of the home team. but wait! all 12 of the visitors batted. but only 10 of the home team players batted. they forfeit. it goes in the books as a win for the visitors. and a perfect loss for the home team.
scout
b is officially a boy scout. he bridged from a webelos den of one. fortunately for g the pack doesn't have membership issues for any other den. anywho, we went to what i hope was our first of many court of honor ceremonies. b is officially of the rank of scout. which is officially further than i got in boy scouts. anywho, i got a mommy pin. the beautiful and talented alisa thinks its hers. ha! i'm so going to swipe it back. she can get her own at the next council of honor.
hoisters
the red wings failed to hoist lord stanley's cup this year. bummer for them. father-in-law is from detroit. he's gone down to the joe on a number of occasions. fortunately, he seemed to be taking things in stride. which is good. we'll keep a watch. hockey fun game. watching the playoffs makes me wish i had time to play roller hockey again. heh. it's kind of a moot point. there's no place to play near here. i'd have to move. heh. honey! we have to sell the house.
eos
yay! baseball season is over. now we start post season. wee! toc, all-stars, friendship tournaments, etc. all this stuff will be over just in time for fall ball. heh. baseball is dead. long live baseball.
SAVE!
so at work we have a fairly substantial network. it's got a fairly complex topology. some machines are only allowed to talk to other machines. and some machines are allowed to talk to any machine. but only if the other machine starts the conversation. yada yada yada. anywho. configuring everything just exactly has got to be a nightmare. i wouldn't want to have to maintain it. fortunately that's the demesne of it and ops. though i'm not real clear which group does what. anywho. guess what they forgot to do before the city shut off the power to the building to replace a transformer.
forgiveness
sometimes i piss people off. it's not intentional. it just happens. usually right after they piss me off. so anywho. so one of the players in b's league throws a shoulder check into a runner about to score. dad called it incidental contact. seemed to be rather proud of his little poor sport. we had words. less than an hour later we'd gotten over it. compare and contrast. a couple of years ago i pissed off this other guy. tried mightily to make amends. but the guy's still pissed at me. i gave up. anywho. guess which one is the christian.
economy
okay so everyone was employed two years ago. everyone was working their asses off. and making stuff. and selling stuff. and buying stuff. and everyone was very happy. except reality was about to bite them in the ass. it boils down to this: the prices of stuff that was being made and sold and bought were somewhat lower than published. consider the housing market for example. more people than expected defaulted on their loans. which made the bubble collapse. ie prices moved away from their pretend values and towards their real values. anywho, so here's the poser. today we have the same number of people. they have the same set of skills. the same number of hours they can work. we have they same amount of resources. so uh, what's different? heh. prices. people aren't willing to make or buy or sell at these new lower prices. they'd rather do without. or be unemployed. yeah you can blame it all on the credit market. but really. they would rather hold their money than invest it. cause investing is work. and the compensation for that work just isn't worthwhile. at current prices.
beaner
g got his first chance to pitch in one of the last games of the season. he's pretty small. but his mother said he could this one time. don't think he threw a single strike. he beaned a batter so hard his helmet flew off and hit the backstop. good thing i was off at b's game. i'd've said something inappropriate like: gee, sure hope his head's not still in there.
andrew
a fourth grade student at bennett's school had an aneurysm over christmas vacation and died. he was apparently quite the gifted athlete and all around nice guy. his family and the school set up a special memorial award for athletic ability and sportsmanship. the school assembly to hand out presidential physical fitness awards and the andrew award was this week. b got presidential. he didn't get the andrew award. the kid who did looked pretty stony faced. think he was working pretty hard to keep his emotions in check. looking around the cafeteria auditorium place, most of the parents didn't. do people have souls? i sure hope so.
souls
do you have soul? of course you do. can you prove it scientifically? nope. will science be able to prove that there's something out there beyond human imagination? maybe. but i doubt it. until the day it does, you'll just have to have faith that you have a soul. nothing wrong with that. conversely, until the day science proves souls don't exist. you'll just have to have faith that you don't have a soul. or you can sit on the fence with me. it's a big fence. plenty of room for all. i'm totally comfortable not knowing whether we have souls or not. get over it, you soulless bastards. heh. if you don't have a soul and want one, i'll sell you one. i have a nice selection available. reasonable rates. if you do have a soul, remember money corrupts. you should send it all to me. you know, to protect your soul. i'm gonna be so rich.
simpletons
some people like it when issues bin binary. black, white. friend, foe. i'm going to call these people "simple" even though the term implies stupid. which is not accurate. but the implication pleases me. anywho, simple people get uncomfortable with complex issues. unfortunately for them, the world is full of complex issues. unfortunately for the rest of us there are many of them. hrm. i think i'll start selling t-shirts that read: simple people suck. i'm gonna be so rich.
shrill voices
the first amendment protects unpopular speech. yeah yeah it protects all speech. but who cares? popular speech doesn't need protecting. anywho, you get all kinds of kooks saying all kinds of kooky things. on one hand, you'd really like to muzzle some of them. but as long as they're not yelling fire, or inciting criminal activity, then we really can't. sigh. on the other hand, do we really want to? their shrill voices are like an irresistible siren call to the the ignorant fucks among us. it is convenient this makes it easy to identify such individuals who might have otherwise passed themselves off as intelligent beings capable of independent coherent thought. but, you have to suffer public "debates" based on passion instead of facts and reason. tastes great. less filling. thank god for the second amendment.
murder
i hope there never comes a time when i need to take another person's life. if anyone (or anything) reading this blog (or my mind) has the power to influence such future events i would make this request. arrange things so i'm not forced to flee. i want to be able to stand there with a clear conscience. and regret that this thing was done. that's really a huge difference between right and wrong. between justifiability and murder. people who kill someone and flee the scene know in their hearts that what they did was wrong. was criminal. and they're damned. otherwise they'd stay put. there's no reason to run away if you're in the right.
sidewalks
sidewalks kinda piss me off. i am responsible for what happens on the sidewalk. but i don't have the privilege of restricting access to it. or charging for access to it. hrm. there's an ideo. oh, i'm gonna be so rich! yeah anywho, i teach my children you can't have one without the other. they want privileges. they take on responsibilities. they can't handle responsibilities. they lose privileges. simple, no? sidewalks actually are a bit different. when i bought my house i entered into an invisible contract with the neighborhood that i would take care of my section of the sidewalk. in exchange i get the privilege of using their sections.
mad skillz
so in g's regular season game there are two outs. he's playing second. kid hits a floating drive up the middle. i figured it was a clean base hit. but g took off like he was going to get to it. yeah, okay. but he'll never catch it. backhand stab to his shoestrings at a dead run. batter's out. inning's over. damn. who taught him to catch like that? heh. his mother. the beautiful and talented alisa. all them hours at the park with a trac ball payin off.
foul
at one of g's games over memorial weekend, one of the players hit a foul ball. i caught it and threw it back. then they announced, remember if you catch a fly ball you get a free coffee or ice cream at the snack shack. i don't drink coffee. and it was very unlikely they had ice cream free of corn syrup poison. but they really seemed like they wanted me to go claim my prize. so i dragged b along. he chose an ice cream sandwich made of frozen corn syrup. it was $1. so i made a donation. right about the time that got devoured another foul ball comes over the fence. i caught that too. sort of a fade back and catch it over my shoulder all star move. it was near the end of the game. so i went and got another ice cream sandwich. this time for g. and i made another $1 donation. fortunately there were different people working the shack at the time. i didn't think they'd believe that i'd caught *another* foul fly ball and deserved *another* free ice cream sandwich.
new order
new order is a three person band. lead singer. classical guitar. and orangutan bass. which has got to be the greatest phrase on earth.
