Telling it like it is

It's coming up for neighbourhood cleanup again. We put a ton of junk out on the kerb two hours ago and the Mexicans have already been through the pile. I swear these people have no dignity. They drive around in beaten up old pieces of shit, rummaging through other people's rubbish and taking it. I swear if I could get away with it, I'd put out a bunch of knives blade-up in the pile just to spite these fuckers.

WTF? Nintendo announced the official name of their next console today. Goodbye Revolution , hello Wii . Pronounced "wee". As in "piss". As in "taking the piss" or "piss poor idea". Not only have they gone a bit funny on the name, but the controllers look like TV remotes. Apparently Nintendo are concentrating more on how we control the games than how they look and sound. Oh dear. I think that's doublespeak for "our console has been outgunned by Sony". This is a real shame. I'm a huge fan of Nintendo hardware but it all went a bit pear-shaped for me when they introduced the DS with its touch screen. And their continued insistence on SuperHappyFunFunKiddySunshineHappyHappySmile type games sucks ass so badly that they've lost a consumer here. Story

And there was. And you could see the farthest reaches of the family room. Yes, we have light again in the basement. Well, part of it anyway. In other news, all women drivers in Utah should be shot the moment they walk into the DMV looking for a license. I swear the accident rate would plummet if we did that. I hit the pentafecta this morning. Asian(1) woman(2), on a cellphone(3), driving an SUV(4), in Utah (5). Dingdingdingdingdingding! Of course there's no prize for getting the pentafecta. Instead, I was rewarded with a near-death experience as she drifted out of the side road on my left and drove across both kerbs and the grass median dividing the road, bumped down into my lane and then stopped dead. She was in a total daze, yakking away on her cellphone, parked in the middle of the road. What the fuck, woman?

The conditioning of the population is carrying on apace. To wit : a domestic dispute got a bit hairy today when a woman went all Blues Brothers on her husband and chased him through the lobby of an office building - driving her SUV. The conditioning part of this story was the witness interviews on TV. They managed to find some hysterical white woman who thought that terrorists had driven into her office building to blow it up. ! ? It boggles the mind that people are swallowing this rhetoric. Is nobody using their brains any more? Hey - hysterical white woman - not everything is due to turrrsts, despite what Captain Cuckoo Bananas would have you believe.

I've finished the first pair of network cables and phone cable in the basement now. The new canister lights are all up and we reckon there's going to be power to them today so we'll have a properly illuminated basement for the first time. The bizarre wiring story continues with one 240v breaker supplying a 240v circuit and a 120v circuit at the same time. Eesh.

That's that then. I've provided my "specimen" for the mandatory drug testing for Rockwell Collins. Doing it isn't so bad. What's got to be a nasty job is the attendant - he has to transfer it to tamper-proof containers and feel its temperature (!) I think that comes under the classification of "jobs I'd rather not have".

I can tell I've lived in the US for too long - I've become used to cheap petrol. I now consider $2.50 a gallon to be expensive (compared to what I was paying in the UK which was about $7.00 a gallon). Bush keeps telling us there's nothing he can do about it, but this morning, he's announced there's going to be an investigation into price gouging, as well as a stop in dumping oil into the strategic oil reserve in an attempt to bring prices down. This is all part of the popularity contest for the upcoming midterm elections. Frankly I could care less what he does - as a green-card holder, I can vote at the local level. Lower gas prices won't make me vote for our local Republican. We're supposed to not associate a local GOP candidate with the party's abject failure in Washington. But that's simply not going to happen. People are going to vote Democrat simply to take over the house and senate so they can nix anything Bush tries to do and try to keep him ...

This phrase is rapidly becoming the most irritating thing on TV. It seems like every show on Fox and a bunch on other channels now have the phrase printed on screen and spoken in a deathly voice at the beginning. Worse, its cropping up in the damn promos now too. I can't understand why. Nothing on TV here is even vaguely risque or close to the knuckle. All the swearing is bleeped out and there's no nudity to speak of. Yet we're all being told 'viewer discretion is advised'. I'll tell you what shows should have a disclaimer. Things like this John Lennon seance that's on tonight - that should have a huge disclaimer : "Viewers must understand that this is only entertainment". I'll exercise my viewer discretion and call bollocks on that show.

The time has come to part ways. I'm talking of course about The Most Dangerous Man In The World tm . Yes, my commentary on B*sh has grown so bloated I'm going to move it out to its own blog, which (once the servers have updated) you can find here :-) http://dubyaworld.blogspot.com/ On to less political ramblings then - the basement. Audio wiring is done. Video wiring is happening later this week, and 40kg of network gear is arriving by UPS today so there's going to be some networking going on tonight. So many wires.....