Something’s wrong when the old friend from high school, who once told me he and his wife are "more into nature then technology" are more comfortable paying their bills online then I am.  I’m a computer systems engineer for chrissake.  He told me the other day that it was "Very ironic.  Very." that I wasn’t using online payment these days.  And there is this now: most of the places I mail paper checks to convert them into electronic payments anyway, and I never get a canceled check back.

So this weekend I’ve been setting up online payment accounts at various places.  Also automatic payment plans for things like the phone service and utilities.  I’ll get them to send me email statements now, and over the summer work on cleaning out my filing cabinets of packrat junk I just really never needed to keep, just look at and pay once a month.  All I really need to keep on hand I think, are the bank statements, the pay stubs and the tax forms I’ve filed over the years. 

I’m going to make an effort this summer to simplify my life some.  I have too much clutter in the house…things I inherited from mom I just don’t need to keep, even for sentimental value.  Furniture I really don’t like or want, old computer books and hardware I’ll never touch ever again.  Keepsakes that don’t mean anything to me anymore.  My house is too cluttered with stuff that I don’t use or need or want and isn’t me anymore.  Some of it came here when mom passed away.  Some of it is stuff I’ve kept over the years because it reminded me of a simpler time when I was younger and the future seemed brighter.  I need to go through it all.  I need to simplify. 

I don’t drink to forget.  I don’t drink to ease the pain.  I don’t drink to make life more bearable.  I drink to make my Baptist grandmother roll in her grave. 

Hey grandma…my fellow sodomites took me to Mexico last month and I discovered Tequila!  It’s very nice!

Relax and enjoy the inevitable…as Heinlein once said…

Andrew Sullivan has all the reason he needs now, to like Obama…

The Grim Truth

02 Jul 2008 03:04 pm

Andy Borowitz nails it:

The liberal blogosphere was aflame today with new accusations that Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill) is trying to win the 2008 presidential election.

On the other hand Andrew, it may all just be an act to trick independents into voting for a democrat so they can raise your taxes, surrender to the French, confiscate your SUVs, and give pink Cadillacs to welfare mothers.  Ever think of that?  Isn’t it awfully convenient that the left is suddenly getting mad at Obama now that he’s won the primary?  Kos is a tricky bastard…

The State Of The Union…

China Inspired Interrogations at Guantánamo

WASHINGTON — The military trainers who came to Guantánamo Bay in December 2002 based an entire interrogation class on a chart showing the effects of “coercive management techniques” for possible use on prisoners, including “sleep deprivation,” “prolonged constraint,” and “exposure.”

What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners.

The Bush republicans.  The Family Values voters.  The Religious Right.  They wanted to take back America.  They wanted to remake it in their own image.  They have.

Those wacky Wall Street hedge fund managers…

DoJ says fugitive financier Samuel Israel arrested

Fugitive hedge-fund manager Samuel Israel surrendered to police in Massachusetts, The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday in its online edition, citing the Justice Department. Israel has been on the run since June 9 when his sport-utility vehicle was found abandoned in New York’s Westchester County with the words "suicide is painless" scrawled on the hood.

I’ll bet that suicide was especially painless.  He was heading for jail for defrauding investors, so maybe he simply decided to end his life the way he lived it…by faking it.  They talk a good game in the financial stratosphere about free markets and self reliance for pretty much the same reason the religious right likes to yap, yap, yap about Jesus and family values.