Bigger Sham Than Global Warming

My old man found out he had to do legal CLE; he thought he was exempt because of his age. So he got himself some CDs, and I decided to borrow them so I could get my own CLE out of the way. I sincerely hope I will never have to practice law again, but this stuff usually costs hundreds of dollars, and I can’t pass that up when there is any possibility that I will want to use my license.

While I give the birds some time out of their cages, I’m listening to some professional do-gooder lecturing on ethics. It is absolutely disgusting. He’s talking about filing charges against people for cussing. And for rudeness. I am not kidding. This is what happens when a person goes straight from law school into a job where his main function is to persecute other people. They never develop any sense of proportion or mercy. This is why bureaucrats and academics are so heartless and tyrannical; they have no idea what real life is like. They can’t be fired. It’s impossible to get them disciplined. So they sit on their ivory thrones, bashing the rest of us with their tenured scepters.

Mercy is important. Without it, life can be unbearable. I have forgotten that many times in my life, and I am ashamed of it. When you’re in a position where you can hurt other people but they can’t do much to you, you have to do your best to empathize. This is one of life’s great moral lessons. I truly mean that. Think about it after you read this. In the age of assertiveness and Internet rage, it’s an easy thing to lose sight of. I have to wonder if this lecturer thinks enough about mercy.

If every lawyer I know who used bad language at the office or in the courthouse got disciplined, I suppose about 5% would escape the mighty sword of the avenging do-bees. The percentage for rudeness would be a little better, but if even one lawyer gets disciplined for something that trivial, it’s one lawyer too many. I mean, sure, if he literally flings dung at other lawyers, he should get a wake-up call. But barring egregious and bizarre behavior, he should be left alone. There is a remedy for attorney rudeness. It’s called “failure.” You lose your clients and go broke. And judges fine you for contempt. I don’t see why the bar needs to turn itself into Henry Higgins.

Law is funny. When we feel safe, lawyers are irreverent. We do things we should not do. We tell dirty jokes. We gossip. We make fun of people. I stood next to a Miami-Dade public defender in court, while he whispered to me, making fun of a criminal defendant who was talking to the judge. No one cares about these things; we know we’re only human. But when these peccadillos come to light in the context of an investigation, we are SHOCKED! SHOCKED to learn that [insert type of bad behavior here] is going on in the sacred halls of justice!

The hypocrisy stinks to high heaven. And I say that as a Christian who is working to cut back on dirty talk and other mischief. I guarantee you, many of the lawyers who, when volunteering to help the bar regulate other lawyers, squeal in dismay over the smallest infraction, behave like mere mortals when no one is looking. This is how life is. There is one standard of behavior for day-to-day life, and then there is another standard when you find yourself under the microscope. It’s completely unfair. Bar associations need to worry about things like fraud, overbilling, and stealing. In those areas, they do a very poor job of enforcement. But this lecturer says he threatened a man who swore and took God’s name in vain. I think he should be ashamed of himself.

On top of that, the lecture is terrible. It’s boring, and it seems to have no point whatsoever, except that the bar has extremely perplexing priorities. If that’s the message, I hear it loud and clear.

I will alway resent being forced to do CLE. My guess, and other lawyers I’ve asked have the same impression, is that the real purpose of CLE is to make money for CLE providers who lobby the bar to impose requirements and recommend their expensive materials. That’s only a guess, but that’s generally how government works. The materials are almost always bad; no respectable lawyer would rely on this garbage to educate himself for the benefit of a client. I would consider it unethical. There is absolutely no way I would sink that low, when a client’s interests were on the line. I could not live with myself, and I would most assuredly lose in court.

This guy asked the recording audience if they thought their law schools did a good job of preparing them for actual practice, including teaching ethics. He asked it in a sneering way, as if the answer could not possibly be yes. His pride is really something, given the quality of his lecture. My answer would have been “ABSOLUTELY.” The University of Miami had its shortcomings, but my ethics instructor was excellent–much better than these ridiculous CDs–and the people who taught me about litigation were competent. I can’t remember the name of my ethics professor, but he ended up clerking for the Supreme Court, and he prepared a beautiful set of notes for his students, and the CD guy can’t compare to him.

Here’s what I always say about CLE, and it’s true: every competent lawyer does CLE every time he does research. Unless you’re utterly incompetent, you refresh your knowledge of the law EVERY, EVERY, EVERY time you handle a case. That’s real CLE. These CDs are useless, and it’s a shame people are profiting from them, and that lawyers are wasting their very valuable time playing them. And when I say that, I am referring to those lawyers who really play them, instead of buying them and putting them in the trash.

I Have Dadoed

I spent like an hour and a half playing with my tools tonight, and here is the result:

That is a planing sled. You put crooked lumber on it, use the triangular pieces of wood to adjust it, and run it through a thickness planer. For thin wood, this works like a jointer, except that you have to finish the edges with another tool, like a table saw or router.

The idea comes from a woodworker named Keith Rust. I used his plans, which you can find somewhere at Taunton.com. His sled was different. He used plywood, because he happened to have it on hand, and his sled was five feet long, because the sheet of plywood he used happened to be that long. I had MDF, so that’s what I used. And because I had no flat wood to use between the sheets of MDF, I had to buy some oak. But the idea is the same.

Look at all the stuff I did! The first time I worked on this, I ripped two sheets of MDF on my table saw, and I used various drills and drivers to put everything together, along with my unbelievably cool Irwin clamps. Today, I did everything you see on top of the MDF.

I only used two cutting tools: the table saw, and the 10″ miter saw. And with them, I made 1″ square supports from a scrap two-by-four, eight quarter-inch dadoes in the supports, and eight 1/4″ wedges cut at 15 degrees.

The table saw is fantastic. I can see why woodworkers like Kelly Mehler and Doug Stowe like it so much. It’s as big as a house, and it has a 5-horsepower motor, but you can easily do work with tolerances of much less than a millimeter! And there’s very little setup. You just fire it up and go. And unlike a router, it’s trustworthy and cooperative. Routers like to bite your work and shift around. They’re a lot harder to use well.

I started by making the supports. I ripped a two-by-four down to one inch in height, and then I peeled two one-inch strips out of it. Then I had to figure out how to make the dadoes. I finally decided to rip a piece of long scrap at 15 degrees, rest it on a miter gauge, clamp other scrap to it, and use the result as a sled. Those Irwin clamps are perfect for this purpose. They’re strong, but they’re so small you can put three of them on a gadget like this without worrying that they’ll be in the way of the saw.

I clamped a stop block on the sled, made initial cuts, put a 1/8″ thick piece of aluminum against the sled’s stop block, and ran the supports through again. This gave me two 1/8″ cuts in each support, joining to form a 1/4″ dado which crossed through the supports at just the right angle.

I had no 1/4″ thick lumber, so I sawed a two-by-four down until it was narrow enough to resaw, and I ripped two 1/4″ sheets off of it. Then I cut them in two, stacked them, and cut wedges from the stacks using the miter saw. I was able to cut four wedges at a time. Keith Rust used a band saw and a jig, but I have no band saw.

The rest of the job is trivial, to steal a phrase from math and physics. I have to screw in some hooks, add grippy stuff to the wedges and supports, and cut very simple dadoes in the supports. I forgot to cut those tonight. I could pop them out on the router in a hurry. I also have to add some adjustable screws to hold the wedges in place.

Man, what a sense of satisfaction I feel. I lacked the tools you would ordinarily use to do the things I did, but part of the beauty of woodworking is using the innate versatility of your saws and drills and routers to overcome challenges like those. And the whole point of making this thing is to enable me to use one tool to do the work of another. I’ll be making straight stock with a thickness planer.

This was a good day, all around. My sister called just to thank me for cooking, and she said it was the best birthday she could remember. She said I should market my cheesecake. I reminded her that in a way, I already had. It’s in a book, after all.

I have my eye on a band saw, but it’s too big. Some guy on Craigslist is apparently dissolving his business; he has a bunch of tools for sale. One is a big Shop Fox 19″ saw. What I really want is a 16″ or 17″ saw, and I’d love to get my hands on a Walker Turner. But if a bigger saw comes along, and it’s cheap and local, why not get it? The floor area it will take up is about the same, and it will be more versatile and last longer.

I think a band saw will round out my wood tools very well. There are a lot of little things that are hard to cut safely on a table saw or miter saw.

Dust collection doesn’t seem to be as much of a problem as I thought. As long as I’m willing to wear a mask and drag the shop-vac around, I don’t make an unmanageable mess, and I don’t breathe in much crap. Maybe I don’t need a cyclone. Maybe a regular old dust collector with a very long hose will work, as long as the motor is big enough to overcome the resistance from the hose.

Tomorrow I fully expect to prepare a piece of wood to be made into a box. I am not willing to blow a lot of money, so I may use scrap spruce or go get a piece of cedar at Home Depot. As always, you will be informed of all the fascinating developments.

She Has Been Superseded

Check THIS out.

Not at all what I expected. I pictured a pallid vegan in dumpy fatigues.

There is apparently something in the food in Israel that makes the women gorgeous. Go there and see for yourself, if you don’t believe me. It will make you want to convert.

Look Upon his Chins and Despair

This is truly magnificent. Even better than “Obamalot.”

Enjoy a Nice Glass of Ice Water With Me

I realize everyone already knows I’m a bad person, but let me remind you anyway, by pointing out that I am glad I’m not doing anything for New Year’s Eve.

New Year’s Eve has no religious significance. It does not pay respect to people who died in wars for us. It does not celebrate our independence from England, whereby we gained many rights, including the right to edible food and a full set of teeth. All this holiday does is remind us that we are old and mortal and give us a reason to get blind stinking drunk and stay up all night.

I don’t like staying up late. I am tired of being really drunk. I dislike loud music. I can’t stand having my sleep routine disrupted.

But I sure look forward to tomorrow morning, when the world will be quiet, the drunks will be off the road, and I will be the only person in my neighborhood who feels good.

Welcome to Tools of Renewal

I finally got my site working again. My advice to those of you who think you may have to move a WordPress blog in the future is, delete your blog and go have a pizza. I had problems I could not have anticipated. Even if I were smart.

Now I’m back. Let the festivities resume.

I Have Returned

Hope everyone missed me.

Guess Who Leads?

This morning, while enjoying my delicious end-of-week McDonald’s breakfast, I saw a trailer for the new Tom Cruise movie. I have to tell you, I think this guy has finally lost the last fragment of his ability to perceive himself as others do. I mean, he’s in a trailer for a movie, and we are supposed to sympathize with him as the hero, and he’s a NAZI. I just can’t buy it.

I guess he was one of the NICE Nazis. The GOOD ones.

????

I think when you notice your boss shipping trainloads of Jews and gypsies and gays off to be gassed and turned into lampshades, and your big concern is that he may lose a war and cause problems for your country, you can be said to have completely lost sight of the high moral ground. Maybe I’m being unfair to Claus von Stauffenberg–the man Cruise plays–but judging from this quotation about Poland, I sort of doubt it:

The population here are unbelievable rabble; a great many Jews and a lot of mixed race. A people that is only comfortable under the lash. The thousands of prisoners will serve our agriculture well.

Oooookay.

Let’s take away Edward Teller’s house and make him spread manure for a living. Because he’s a JEW.

I am not seeing the warm and fuzzy side of this character.

Maybe Cruise is the Titanic, and destiny created this iceberg for him. Take a look at a bust of von Stauffenberg:

Come on. The resemblance is incredible. It would even fool L. Ron Hubbard. You can almost hear him yelling, “SP? PTSSP!!! I have CANCELLED that in my AREA!!!!!!”

This is the second “nice Nazi” movie in a decade, to my knowledge. The first was The Pianist. I guess you could throw in “Max,” because Hitler was so pathetic and wimpy in that one. I hope we don’t reach a point where confused Hollywood hipsters decide we have been unfair to the Thousand Year Reich and start issuing torrents of films with lovable Nazi protagonists.

Maybe we were asking for this when we laughed at Hogan’s Heroes.

Fricking Technology

I have found yet another reason to fantasize about visiting AT&T headquarters with a flamethrower.

The other day I bitched about my clock radio making irritating noises which rendered it unusable. A reader explained that the sound I was hearing was “GSM buzz,” which is caused by RF interference generated by cell phones as they synchronize with their towers.

Bear in mind, I have no idea what GSM or synchronization is.

Here’s a video that features the noise:

I found that video while trying to Google up a recording of GSM buzz, but in the process, I came across an ad for the solution to the problem. The video advertises little bags that kill the buzz. They’re anti-static bags. Stick your phone in there, and you don’t get the buzz. Does that mean it blocks the phone’s signal? Damned if I know.

The unfortunate thing about the product in the ad is that you can get it for nothing, all over the place. Good to have the information, however.

There are other solutions, which I am sure people more industrious than I will mention in comments.

Today I had to call AT&T and make them lock my phone’s Internet access. Why? Because the phone rang twice today and told me it was getting me THE LATEST NEWS FROM CNN!!! Which I did not want and did not intend to pay for.

I have referred to the phone as my Korean wife. I think we may need Dr. Phil.

Even Karl Marx Did Not go This Far

I am looking at the carmaker bailout story. Money quote:

Republicans, breaking sharply with President George W. Bush as his term draws to a close, refused to back federal aid for Detroit’s beleaguered Big Three without a guarantee that the United Auto Workers would agree by the end of next year to wage cuts to bring their pay into line with Japanese carmakers. The UAW refused to do so before its current contract with the automakers expires in 2011.

Here’s what’s interesting about this. The pundits all say that bankruptcy is the only alternative to a bailout, and that bankruptcy will nullify the collective bargaining agreements currently in place. So when bankruptcy is declared, auto workers will no longer have contracts, and when the companies are reorganized, presumably, the unions are going to get new contracts with much lower wages. How do they benefit from rejecting the bailout?

I suppose the answer must be that they hope their new contracts will be better than what the bailout offered. In the meantime, they may suffer unemployment and plant closings.

I am not sympathetic. They earn something like five times what comparable workers (not limited to auto workers) earn without insane union contracts. If they were paid what the Japanese companies pay, they would still be highly, highly overpaid. When you bring home $145,000 worth of wages and benefits every year, from a job for which you ought to be thrilled to get $30,000, you can’t really expect taxpayers who earn realistic wages to let the government take their money and give it to you, to preserve your wildly unrealistic and unsustainable situation.

Here’s something no one ever seems to ask the auto executives. Let’s take the amount of money you overpaid your workers over the last twenty years. Let’s compare it to the $14 billion you expect the public to give you, so you can continue to overpay them and make overpriced products and lose market share.

Which figure is bigger?

I don’t know the answer, but I would be utterly shocked if the overpayment were not considerably larger.

Explain the Conclusion That This Person is a Republican

Colin Powell. What was George Bush thinking when he hired Colin Powell?

For some reason, we automatically respect generals. It’s silly, if you think about it. Wesley Clark was a general. Would you want someone that weird and ruthless and ambitious in public office? This is the guy who wanted to launch a military attack on our allies, the Russians. Then there was the general who ran Abu Ghraib. And how about General Benedict Arnold? The notion that all generals are brilliant and of sound character is clearly unfounded.

Colin Powell, like Albert Einstein, benefits from a strange kind of mindless worship. Einstein is quoted as an authority on absolutely everything, from politics to religion to personal relationships. Outside of his narrow field, Einstein was almost helpless. He had no common sense. He was selfish. He was absent-minded. He was a bad father and husband. He had a naive, childlike belief in some sort of central global government. He was wrong about lots of things. In fact, he spent many years trying to disprove quantum mechanics, which was a complete waste of time and an embarrassment. Still, we quote him as though his words were scripture. And the press gives the same treatment to Powell.

What exactly has Powell done to justify his guru status? If I recall correctly (from reading Schwarzkopf’s book), he was among those who discouraged Bush I from entering Baghdad and putting an end to Saddam Hussein’s nonsense, back when we had a giant, enthusiastic coalition that could have administered a postwar Iraq relatively painlessly. Would anyone seriously claim this was good advice? Our generals told us the Iraqis would fight to the death, and that we would have to go house-to-house, slaughtering their brave troops and suffering terrible casualties of our own. Is that what happened in 2003? NO. We suffered very few losses, and the war was over in a few weeks. Since then, we’ve had trouble dealing with terrorists and religious nuts, but we are definitely in charge, and the job would have been much, much easier with the rest of the world on board, as they were when Powell and the others were telling us to cut and run.

Powell endorses affirmative action. Is that a sign of mental acuity? Affirmative action divides our country and ruins people’s lives. All over the US, there are people who earned jobs and college spots, yet who did not receive them because they were given to applicants with inferior qualifications. As a result, many of these victims of politics have suffered very severe financial damage and emotional pain. And many of the people who got the things earned by the dispossessed have proven incompetent and unable to benefit from them. If you want to see what affirmative action does, go to any law school and compare the percentages of minority students in the first and second-year classes. Affirmative action beneficiaries show up in August of their first year, full of hope and optimism, and many of them leave in January or April with their dreams crushed.

Affirmative action discounts the achievements of women and minority members who get their success through merit. Have you ever been treated by a minority doctor and heard a little voice in the back of your head, asking you how he or she got his job, and whether you should make an excuse to see another caregiver? I sure have. On the other hand, if your doctor is a white male whose parents aren’t rich, you can pretty well assume he earned his wings, because when he applied to medical school, the entire system was trying to destroy him. It must be frustrating, being a highly capable black professional and knowing that people are unwilling to take your credentials at face value because so many of your peers are barely adequate. Powell is wrong about affirmative action, guru or not.

Colin Powell told us Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Personally, I think he was correct, and I believe whatever Hussein had was moved to Syria, while the French and Russians and Germans dawdled, in hopes of preserving their multibillion-dollar contracts with Hussein. That would certainly help explain the huge truckload of chemical weapons that departed from Syria in 2004 and was intercepted in Amman. But Powell now says he was wrong. Would a genuine guru let himself be wrong about a thing like that? Would he stake his reputation on it, as Powell did? Would he do that with war at stake? After leaving office, Powell turned on George Bush and tried to depict himself as the victim of a corrupt regime bent on invasion. Would a true statesman wheel around and attack his President in order to rehabilitate his own image? Is that what we call character?

Now Powell is telling us the GOP has been hijacked by religious nuts and far-right extremists. His advice is as sound as ever. He says we’re supposed to embrace minorities instead of “shouting” at America. Have you ever heard anything more vacuous and wrong? The GOP crawls on its knees, trying to attract women and minorities. How does Powell think he got his job? We’re already reaching out. The only way to reach out more effectively is to stop being Republicans, which is what Powell really wants us to do. He wants us to abandon God and conservatism and start pushing affirmative action. So we can have more visionary leaders like Colin Powell, I guess.

The ideas Powell is discussing involve notions like unity and chain of command. A political party’s leadership has to understand those things. Are we supposed to learn about them from a backbiter who undercut his former superior while we were still at war?

What is the point of having a Republican party that agrees with the Democrats? Didn’t we just try that concept, nominating a liberal Presidential candidate who, the press told us, could not possibly lose? That worked out real good, didn’t it? When we become a liberal alternative to the DNC, most of the base will disappear, and the rest of us will become Democrats or independents. Going to the GOP for the implementation of leftist policies is like going to Dunkin’ Donuts for health food.

Powell says, “Can we continue to listen to Rush Limbaugh? Is this really the kind of party that we want to be when these kinds of spokespersons seem to appeal to our lesser instincts rather than our better instincts?” I guess disloyalty, lack of firm principles, and personal ambition are our better instincts.

Furthermore, what’s wrong with voting your religion? If God is God, he is among us, working powerfully every day. Are we supposed to believe he won’t support us and help us if we let our belief in him shape our politics? If we believe that, we believe in a powerless God who is no god at all.

I plan to support conservatism and the most godly candidates available. Colin Powell’s opinion means nothing to me at all. Ronald Reagan was the most popular President of his era, and he would have sneered at Powell’s willingness to grovel and cave. Voters don’t vote for political philsophies; they’re not smart enough to understand them. They vote for people with confidence in their beliefs. Reagan proved that, and in the future, other conservatives can prove it again.

Here’s what I think is going on here. Colin Powell messed up his future by picking the GOP as his party. Now there is talk of a position with the Obama administration. Criticizing the GOP can only make his candidacy stronger.

I don’t think this guy is a statesman OR a saint. I realize I’m in the minority. Not the GOOD kind of minority, of course. But you know what I mean.

I Even Bought an Opener for Beer Bottles

I just got back from my semi-annual dental checkup. Everything is swell, except one of my old metal fillings is not looking too good. It’s going to be gouged out and replaced. Fun.

I told the doctor it was about forty years old, but he wasn’t buying it. I am pretty sure it went in there under the Nixon administration. I was thinking about it on the way home. My mother loved me and all, but I believe I am correct when I say I did not go to the dentist between my teens and thirties. I think she quit taking me when I was in high school. I had a few cavities as a kid, and then when I returned to the dentist in the Nineties, I apparently had some little things called “pits,” which are not really full-blown cavities, yet which are profitable to fill. So they got filled. That’s about it. The Nineties fillings are composite, so anything metallic has to be ancient. They always say metal fillings don’t last, but I am older than dirt, and this is the first time one has shown signs of failure.

Since things went so well, I am celebrating. With a bag of Krispy Kreme mini-crullers. They’re not that good, I know, but I felt I had to make a statement, and the store didn’t have the little cherry Entenmann’s hand pies I wanted. I think I’ll put Quik on them. My teeth have been deprived of their protective layer of tartar, so I need to build it back up.

The store had rib roasts on sale for $6 a pound. Is that even fair? How am I supposed to not buy that? I always check the price, but I count on them not to put them on sale. We have an unspoken agreement. Now they have gone and violated it.

I better go get the Quik.

Router Table!

I guess it wouldn’t be fair to all you tool wimps to tell you how great I am.

Feast your eyes on THIS:

That is my poor old computer desk, with a new router lift installed in it.

This is not hard to do, believe it or not. It’s hard for ME, maybe, but it’s not hard.

For this the Woodpecker people recommend a 5/8″ straight bit with a bearing on it, and wouldn’t you know, they just happen to have one picked out for you to buy. So I got that, and I bought the MDF template, which is a board with a plate-sized hole in it. I had a hell of a time clamping it to the desk, but I managed. I still haven’t figured out the best way to adjust the depth on the router, but I moved it down by increments, routing around the template over and over, until I got past the 0.40″ depth I needed. I could have done it in one pass; the Bosch is apparently a pretty powerful router, and the MDF and melamine didn’t seem to challenge the bit. But all the books and videos say to take an eighth of an inch per pass, so that’s about what I did.

It was unnerving, making that first plunge into the desk. But it worked perfectly. I got a perfect outer edge on the rabbet I was making. The inner edge was a little off, but that was scrap, anyway. I had read that a router this size was hard to handle, but it wasn’t.

When I got the rabbet made, I had to figure out how to get rid of the scrap in the middle. It wasn’t a rabbet yet; it was a groove, and the stuff inside the groove had to be disposed of. A lot of people recommend a jigsaw, but I don’t have one, and I suspect it would be very slow and make a real mess of the MDF.

I decided to use the router. I clamped boards to the table to use as templates, and I routed until I saw daylight, and then the scrap fell out. I nibbled the remaining rough bits off, freehand. I plopped the lift in the hole, and it looks perfect. The imperfections in the rabbet are pretty small; it doesn’t look bad even with the lift out. I still have to adjust the height, but that’s a five-minute job.

This is sweet. Now I have to do something about dust collection. I removed about three ounces of material and produced maybe thirty gallons of dust. And it flies up and goes under goggles. That was unpleasant. I’ll have to come up with an answer. I guess I need to finish flattening the table, build a fence, and see where I can attach hoses.

I got to use my vernier caliper! That thing rocks!

I feel semi-competent. I will cherish the sensation while it lasts.

More

It gets even better! I stuck the router in the lift! It goes up! It goes down! Next year, I’ll install a Wonkalift that goes frontways and backways, too!

Slim and Smart

I am loving the Blackjack II. It turned out to be compatible with my 8-year-old version of Outlook, and Outlook turned out to have useful features I thought it did not have, and everything is peachy.

The phone tells me to take my vitamins. It tells me when to take a break for prayer in the middle of the day. It makes sure I take Marv and Maynard out early enough to avoid conflicting with my bedtime. It tells me to get ready for bed. It tells me to go to bed. And I even programmed it to wake me up.

There is some kind of power problem here that makes electronic clock radios make funny noises in the middle of the night. I just discovered this. It’s infuriating; I think it explains why I keep waking up. Let’s see it make the phone buzz! HA! No way!

I’m just like Canadian inventor Le Trung, who built his own wife from parts. Drudge linked to the story today. She can’t have sex–he claims–but she does all sorts of other stuff. He spent his life savings on her; what a fool. My phone was way cheaper. And unlike his robot, it doesn’t slap me when I squeeze it.

Interesting detail: the robot looks like a Japanese anime babe, proving once and for all that even Asians think Asian women are the hottest. Sadly, if Asian women start designing husbands, they will probably take a different tack. After all, there are bars around the Pacific where Asian women go for the express purpose of meeting men who are not Asian.

Oddly, the robot is Japanese, while Trung appears to be Vietnamese. But I guess if he had a history of doing well with Vietnamese women, he’d be married instead of cohabitating with an erector set.

No Reasonable Bribe Rejected

My cellphone has been running me ragged today. Every time I try to sit down and think for two seconds, it beeps and tells me I’m supposed to be somewhere else. Deposit a check. Charge the Harley’s battery. Put my old crap on Craigslist so I’ll have room for new crap. It never ends.

I want a divorce.

I’ll try to catch up with blogging before long. Right now I’m busy trying to sell a piece of merchandise that just became available. I’m referring to the office of Governor of the State of Illinois. Place your bid, and I’ll see if I can get you appointed.

I’d love to give it to you as a gift, but it’s a valuable thing — you just don’t give it away for nothing. I want to make money. Hurry up, or I’ll take the office myself. If you’re not going to offer me anything of value I might as well take it.

Reverend Jackson, please stop calling.