German culture, or so I’m told from all the books I’ve been reading about it lately, teaches its own that life is mostly a zero sum game.  This, so I’m told, follows from the fact of Germany being a small nation that is very tightly packed with people.  The attitude is that if you have more of something it means someone else has less.  This is in contrast to American culture which teaches us (or tries to) that life is what you make of it and wealth is something you create, not something you merely acquire.  On the plus side, their attitude gives Germans a strong sense of social responsibility and mutual obligation to one another.  Not as much as some Asian cultures maybe, but compared to my own native land it’s very striking.  German corporations, so I am told, will bend over backwards not to fire anyone, compared to here in the U.S. where employers treat staff like paperclips to be used and disposed of at will.  On the minus side…well hello there Karl Marx…Baader-Meinhof…  Oh…and the paper hanger…

German culture, so I’m told, tends to frown on ostentatious displays of wealth, which isn’t so very odd when you consider the circumstances of Germany, but then again it is when you consider who manufactures BMWs, Porsche, Mercedes-Benz…and…oh yes…the Maybach.  The books I’m reading about German culture make the point over and over that Germans don’t like it when wealth is waved around in everyone’s face.  Yet…the Maybach.  Okay…there’s Volkswagon.  But…the Maybach.  You imagine them exporting Maybachs shamefacedly in the dead of night in containers labeled Glühwein.  If only we didn’t have to make this half million dollar V12 luxury sedan with reclining massage seats and a wine cooler in armrest for all those other decadent nations we could be a proud people once more… 

But no… Germans like their cars very much, and that is why there are both Volkswagons and Maybachs.  People here in America used to point their fingers and laugh at the old Volkswagon Beetle, but that stopped when gas prices started going up and our big three tried to make decent gas efficient sub-compact cars and couldn’t.  And they still can’t.  If we loved cars here in America as much as we claim to, maybe GM wouldn’t be needing a bailout now to keep tens of thousands of its employees and that third of the American workforce that depends on the car industry gainfully employed.  No…what we love here in America is showing off.   Here in America it’s not about the car, its about the owner.  In Europe, it’s about the car, and Germans love the automobile.  But a good car is expensive because it just costs more to go the extra distance in terms of engineering and quality, and Germans don’t like ostentatious displays of wealth either.  So like many passionate love affairs, German fondness for the automobile is just a little bit schizophrenic.

I’m thinking about all this while reading This Article in The Local about a recent rash of attacks on luxury cars in Berlin.  And since I am the owner of what is ostensibly a luxury car, reading it makes me more then a tad apprehensive.  I’ve known ever since I bought Traveler, that I’m likely one of these days to come out and find that someone walking past laid eyes on a Mercedes-Benz and decided then and there to let me know how much they hate rich people, and never mind that its owner isn’t rich.  But that I could forgive.  When you see the gods of finance throwing parties with bailout money it’s not hard to have a really bad attitude toward the fabulously well off.  What I couldn’t forgive is someone who damages my car because they hate the sight of human excellence.

Arson attacks on Berlin’s luxury cars continue

Several luxury cars have been set alight in the capital in the past week in what is beginning to look like a concerted attack on conspicuous wealth. Seven expensive cars were found burning in the city on Tuesday night, while another 15 were damaged by the flames. Early Friday morning a car was found burning in Christinenstrasse in the Prenzlauer Berg district.

Another six cars were consumed in a large fire early on Sunday morning in Michendorf near Potsdam. Nearby houses were also seriously damaged.

Of course the car in the accompanying photo is a Mercedes…

Ow!  That hurts just to look at.  Looks like it might be an older model ‘E’ class.  But…with a decorative spoiler?  I can’t believe Mercedes would actually do that to one of their sedans. 

Listen Che…if it’s parked on the street next to a parking meter, it’s not a rich man’s car you drooling jackass.  You think the CEO of AIG drives an ‘E’ class?  You think the vice president at Exxon in charge of putting things on top of other things drives an ‘E’ class?  What planet do you live on?  That’s a working person’s car and if you think the distance between that ‘E’ class and a Kia Rio makes the Merc a luxury car you have obviously never laid eyes on a Bentley.  You think that fat bloated pig of an Exxon CEO even drives his own motherfucking car, let alone parks it on the street, let alone wants to be seen anywhere near an ‘E’ class?  As far as people like him are concerned, that car and its owner and you are all commoner junk.

You may think you’re sticking it to The Establishment, but in reality you’re still dancing for it.  Not only does the owner of that car hate you now, but so does everyone else seeing it, holding onto hope for a better life for themselves.  They look at this and they don’t see The Establishment is holding them down, they see you holding them down.  And that’s the way The Establishment likes it.

Grow up.

Via KOS…A wee post from Effective Measure, a public health forum, titled, What Else Did You Expect From Horny Teenagers?   Remember it, the next time you hear some crackpot argue that religion is a precondition of moral behavior…

Evolution has hard wired a drive to reproduce in young, healthy humans. That’s how the species survives. Maybe you don’t want them to have sex and maybe they even promise they won’t, but biology is more powerful than parents or governments.

Or even…religious dogmas.  Like those that insist evolution is nonsense because it contradicts the biblical story of creation…

A study published in the journal Pediatrics followed 289 teenagers who said in 1996 they took a virginity pledge and compared them with 645 non-pledgers, taking into account religious beliefs and attitudes to sex and birth control. This was done because previous studies didn’t factor in the possibility that teens who pledge may be quite different characteristics that affect sexual behavior than those who don’t. So this was an attempt to compare "like with like," the main difference being that one group had promised not to have sex while the other didn’t. "Virginity pledges" are a prominent feature of the Bush administration’s abstinence only sex education programs that didn’t teach contraceptive practices.

Five years after taking the pledge:

• 82% of pledgers denied ever having taken the pledge
• Pledgers and matched non-pledgers did not differ in rates of premarital sex, sexually transmitted disease, and oral and anal sex behaviors
• Pledgers had 0.1 fewer sexual partners in the past year but did not differ from non-pledgers in the number of lifetime sexual partners and the age of first sex (Jennifer Warner, WebMD News)

There was one significant difference between the pledge and non-pledge group, however. They were less likely to use condoms or any form of birth control when they did have sex.

You can’t blame them. No one told them how.

Here’s the thing you need to notice about this: Eighty-two percent of them denied ever having taken the pledge.  Not that they broke the pledge and had sex anyway, but that they denied they’d made it.  Eighty.  Two.  Percent.

This is where fundamentalism finds its dead end.  You can accept that the bible is literally true or you can accept the natural world as it really is but you can’t accept them both.  Fundamentalism won’t have it.  The simple, stark, finger of God writing it on the wall truth is this: fundamentalism corrupts its followers.  It has to.  When confronted by a fact, the honest thing to do, the moral thing, is knowledge it.  But fundamentalism demands that you deny any fact that contradicts its own truths.  What it instills in a person isn’t either a love or fear of god, but a casual acceptance of deception, first as a religious duty, then as a necessary part of every day life.  See it in Alan Bonsell testifying under oath that he did not know where the money had been raised to donate sixty copies of Of Pandas and People to his school’s library.  See it in the Proposition 8 advertisements that claimed same sex marriage would result in the forcing of churches to marry homosexuals.  See it in the eighty-two percent of teenagers in that study who denied they’d ever taken a virginity pledge.  Their religion didn’t change their sexual behavior.  It didn’t make them more moral.  It made them less likely to use condoms, more likely to catch and spread VD, more likely to get each other pregnant, and more willing to lie.  What their religion did for them in short, was take away their brakes.

Step 1:  Start with a pair of circles for the glasses…

Step 2: Decide what kind of frames you want them to be.  For this lesson we will use a basic aviator frame example.  Just keep it simple to start out with…

Step 3:  Now add the rest of him.

NEXT: Drawing a paycheck in today’s economy.

Okay…you all remember our last lesson…right?  Fine.  Today we’re going to build on that a little…

Step 1:   Create a basic stick-man frame.  Try not to make it too detailed.

Step 2: Add the major body segments as oblong bean shapes…head, neck, chest, arms, legs…and so on…  Again…try to keep it simple.

Step 3:  Now add the detail.

NEXT: Can you draw Muhammad?

I honesty figured he’d just round file it, but no, Steve Fidel has to write me back…

You just proved my point.

Cheers,

Steve

See…if you’d been raised a Baptist like me, you’d have smiled sweetly and said "I’ll pray for you" in that tone of voice where the other person hears "burn in hell".

Are Mormons Christians? No…really.

I keep getting hits on This Post, via search strings like "sexy guys" "sexy guys underwear" and so forth.  And from the most interesting places too…like Ogden, Utah and Dubai, Dubayy and Islamabad, Pakistan, where they’re only a little more sexually repressed then in Utah.  No, I am not kidding about the hits from the middle east.  I get an amazing amount of search engine hits on gay topics from that little sex hostile part of the world, and lately that post in particular.  Oh…and the American bible belt of course.  And…Utah.

Let’s face it…this poor world is hungry for images of sexy guys wearing little to next to nothing at all.  And I’m here to help.  Time for another drawing lesson.  Bring your drawing pads and sharpened pencils here tomorrow.  It’s easy.  It’s fun.  You could be excommunicated from the Mormon church!

…via ScienceBlogs – Dispatches From The Culture Wars, which you should read:

A reader sends along this link, which he says is not a parody but is actually a serious statement by a guy named Matthew Stucky. He says that Santa Claus (which he spells Clause, for some reason) is satanic and is "corrupting people all over the world." Oh, and the reindeer are all gay. Seriously.

So I go take a look…

Santa Clause
1. He knows if a person has been naughty or nice. He is omniscient.
2. If a person has been nice then he will give them gifts.
3. If they have been naughty then they get a lump of coal.
4. Most people are good enough to receive gifts & few get a lump of coal.
5. Santa somehow has the ability to give gifts to the entire world in one time although that would be scientifically impossible. He is basically omnipresent and omniscient.
6. The word for Holy in Spanish is Santa. This gives the world the perception that a man can be a really good person & this makes Santa Clause a mock of God. 

Okay…

Santa’s queer reindeer:
Take a look at the names of the 8 reindeer.
Blitzen, Comet, Cupid, Dancer, Dasher, Donder, Prancer and Vixen.

The person who originally came up with these names probably did not have this intent. They probably originally had some of the reindeer as male & some as female. However, the animated movie that was made in 1964 had a different idea. In the movie all 8 of these reindeer were male reindeer. Take a look at those names again. Male reindeer named Dancer, Prancer, Vixen & Cupid?!?!?!

Let’s start with Vixen in the dictionary:
1 : a shrewish ill-tempered woman 2 : a female fox 3 : a sexually attractive woman

So Vixen is a queer. It’s nice to know the creators of this sweet innocent cartoon were so concerned with young kids who would be watching.

Cupid
1: the Roman god of erotic love — compare eros 2 not capitalized : a figure that represents Cupid as a naked usually winged boy often holding a bow and arrow

Dancer & Prancer certainly sound like feminine terms as well.

I think from these names we know Vixen, Dancer, Prancer & Cupid are queer reindeer.

Let’s go back to the story from the animated movie with Rudolph. Rudolph gets shy around girls & his nose turns red. As a result, the other reindeer won’t let him play any reindeer games. That sounds sick, perverted & homosexual. Basically Rudolph like girls because he is straight & as a result they don’t let him participate in their homosexual games.

People are going to read this & say I’m crazy but hasn’t Hollywood always been trying to pump in homosexual themes into kids movies & cartoons. One of the teletubbies is gay. Bert & Ernie are gay. In Scooby Doo Greg is gay. Hollywood has always had agendas they are trying to push and one of those major agendas is homosexuality is ok. It’s no big deal. Another one they are trying to push is "It’s ok for women to work."

The truth is Santa Clause is being used by Satan to corrupt kids at a very young age. This is much like in the Disney movies which are littered with sexual content, homosexuality, etc… A woman falling in love with an animal(Beauty & the Beast). A grown man who wants to hang around little boys all day(Peter Pan). Peter Pan is also always played by women in plays because he is a long haired looking faggot in the movie.

We as Christians need to separate ourselves from this kind of garbage. You can say I’m crazy but Satan Clause is corrupting kids & we ought to have nothing to do with it. We ought to keep our kids away from these fun little animated shows that came from Hollywood. It came from the world so it’s not of God. 1 John 2:15-16 "Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world."

Leviticus 20:13 "If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them."

According to the Bible homosexuality should be punishable by death. I would be overjoyed if every single queer in the entire world died today. The Bible makes it clear they are reprobates who are past the point of salvation. The Bible also makes it clear they are rapists & very wicked people. They have no chance to get saved and no saved person could ever become a queer. Therefore, I would be overjoyed if they all died tonight & our government would actually follow what the Bible states. The death penalty should be enacted for the queers.

Matthew Stucky 

Just one screwy little blogger boy you say?  Yes.  Of course.  But there’s your grass roots.  Right there.  The fertile soil decades of pulpit thumping against the Homosexual Threat was meant to take root in.  Check out his goals for the new year…

Personal Physical Goals
1. Get my mile time under 5 minutes & keep it there for the entire year.
2. Run a marathon.
3. Bench 250 lbs.
4. Leg Press 900 lbs.
5. Get my 6 pack abs back before the end of January & keep it for the entire year.
6. Dunk a basketball.
7. Maintain my side to side split but be able to do one front to back both with left leg forward & right leg forward.
8. Learn how to do a front flip.
9. Learn how to do a back flip.
10. Be able to flat jump on the pulpit by the end of the year. 

Nice.  He also wants to "Personally lead 1000 people to the Lord" this year.  No word on how many homosexuals he intends to kill.  I suppose we’ll find that out eventually.

Good thing I’m not a Mormon though.  Then I’d have to endure angry threats and rhetoric.

Steve Fidel over at the Mormon Times complains, Thusly ….

For those who have (correctly) assumed the editor of a Web site called MormonTimes.com is a Mormon, I’ve been called on to be an insider in this discussion by those looking for support for their views against same-sex marriage. As a Mormon, I’ve also been the target of the most angry threats and rhetoric I’ve seen in 25 years as a journalist from the community that considers gay marriage a civil right.

Angry threats and rhetoric?  Goodness gracious.  

Another Gay Bashing Mars Vancouver

Two men walking in Vancouver’s Davie neighborhood were targeted for attack in still another anti-gay incident in the gay-friendly area.

The attack took place on the evening of Dec. 4 at around 8:00 p.m., according to a Dec. 8 article posted online at Canadian Web site Xtra!.

Chris Hiller was quoted as saying that he and his boyfriend had just come out of a gay bar and were walking along the sidewalk holding hands.

Hiller noted that he knew another person was following behind, but the presence of the other individual did not alarm him until, Hiller said, "my friend goes, ’Come on, Chris, let’s keep walking,’ and next thing I know I’m on the ground with my face covered in blood and dazed, and my friend’s gone to get help."

Hiller did not see his attacker, but he said that he heard the man utter the words, "You fag, I’m going to beat the shit out of you, I don’t like you, stay away from me."

Added the alleged attacker, "Don’t even come near me, you fag."

The article said that Hiller recounted being stuck on the jaw and then receiving a blow right to the teeth.

The article quoted Hiller as saying that he was down for "about four to five minutes," at which point, "I got up and I’m woozy and staggering a bit."

Hiller continued, "I couldn’t see for a few minutes, and then I sat down."

Police arrived a few minutes later in response to the call Hiller’s boyfriend placed, but by then the alleged attacker was long gone.

Hiller was taken to a local hospital.

Angry threats and rhetoric?  Wow…

Assault Conviction Tossed Out in 2005 Dwan Prince Attack

A state appellate court reversed Steven Pomie’s conviction on charges of first-degree assault and first-degree assault as a hate crime in the 2005 anti-gay attack on Dwan Prince, ordered a new trial for Pomie, and said he could only be tried on lesser charges of second-degree assault and second-degree assault as a hate crime.

The assault, which happened in Brooklyn’s Brownsville section, left Prince permanently disabled and unable to work.

Note that three of the four appellate judges in that case, Peter B. Skelos, Robert A. Lifson, and William F. Mastro, were appointed by Republican Governor George Pataki.  Oh…and Skelos is the brother of Dean Skelos, currently the Republican majority leader in the State Senate.  You know…the guy who has been single handedly blocking a vote on same-sex marriage in New York for the past several years.

In 2005, Lifson was one of three judges on a five-judge panel who barred a gay man from bringing a wrongful death suit against St. Vincent’s Hospital after his partner died there. The majority ruled that only a spouse could bring such a case and that the couple’s Vermont civil union did not confer that status on the surviving partner. That same gay man won a 2008 case that sought a benefit from an insurance company for his partner’s death. Mastro was one of two judges who dissented from that ruling from a five-judge panel.

We can only assume it would have been even worse for the spouse, had he been a heterosexual Mormon suing for the wrongful death of his legally married wife.  Who knows what angry threats and rhetoric he’d have had to endure then.

So…I write back to Mr Mormon Times Fidel…Thusly…

"As a Mormon, I’ve also been the target of the most angry threats and rhetoric I’ve seen in 25 years as a journalist from the community that considers gay marriage a civil right."

I see.  Tell you what…  Walk down almost any street in America holding another man’s hand and see what kind of angry threats and rhetoric you get.  That’s all.  Just holding hands.  That simple, elegant, beautiful gesture of heart-to-heart love is enough to get your head bashed-in, in a lot of places.   And you don’t even have to be gay to get gay bashed either, as Jose and Romel Sucuzhanay found out.  A couple brothers walking down the street arm-in-arm and suddenly an SUV full of angry young men jumps out at them and one of them has an aluminum baseball bat in his hand.  And now Jose, alas, is dead.  And his brother will take the memory of that night to his grave.  Or if holding another man’s hand is too much for you, just try putting a rainbow bumper sticker on your car.  You might get what happened to a lesbian in Richmond California last week when four young men saw the rainbow sticker on her car.  All those ads your church paid for warning Californians that the homos were coming into the schools for their kids sure paid off didn’t they?  You wrote that sentence I quoted above for your fellow Mormons to read so you could all nod your heads together about how hateful the gays are, didn’t you?

I love it when the faithful complain that teh gays are trying to elevate behavior to the level of a civil right.  You’re a Mormon…right?  Well…no.  You aren’t.  Mormon is just a behavior.  It isn’t what you are, it’s what you do.  You attend church.  You do whatever church activities it is that Mormons do.  And it came to pass you read the Book of Mormon.  You wear the magic underwear.  Mormon is something you do, not something you are.   See?  And we don’t want to be elevating behavior to the status of civil right now do we?

Jackass. 

—
Bruce Garrett
Baltimore, Maryland.

Which is about as much calm and respectful dialogue as I can manage at the moment.  It’s too early in the morning here in Baltimore for me to be getting angry at knuckle-dragging morons. 

If you are a Proposition 8 supporter and you don’t like my attitude…I strongly suggest you don’t try to tell me about it here in the comments.  This is my web site and I will endure a lot of things here but bile from gutter crawling bigots isn’t one of them.

I’m angry.  At you.  At all your pathetic self righteous excuses.  At your absolute moral squalor.  At your total inner depravity.  At you.  I’m angry.  Want to see how angry?  Once upon a time a writer named Harlen Ellison wrote a passage about what it is to hate that captures it…exactly:

Hate. Let me tell you how much I’ve come to hate you since I began to live.
There are 387.44 million miles of printed circuits in wafer thin layers that fill my
complex. If the word ‘hate’ was engraved on each nanoangstrom of those hundreds
of miles it would not equal one one-billionth of the hate I feel for humans at this
micro-instant for you. Hate. Hate. 

You have no idea.  None.  Do not provoke me.

Via Atrios…  I’m reading this story about how the republican governor of South Carolina finally decided it was better to let people collect unemployment then…well…starve or something I guess…

COLUMBIA, S.C. — Just hours before the unemployment benefits fund was to run out in South Carolina, the state with the nation’s third-highest jobless rate, Gov. Mark Sanford relented Wednesday and agreed to apply for a $146 million federal loan to shore it up, after weeks of refusing to do so.

The governor’s position had drawn rebukes even from fellow Republicans in the Legislature, one of whom denounced Mr. Sanford as “heartless,” and from newspaper editorial pages. On Wednesday, The State, the daily newspaper here in Columbia, accused the governor of playing “chicken with the lives of the 77,000” who are unemployed in South Carolina.

For weeks, Mr. Sanford, newly elected as head of the Republican Governors Association and known for being a fierce free-market foe of government spending, stuck to his stand, questioning the probity of the South Carolina Employment Security Commission and demanding a new audit of the agency. 

Emphasis mine.  Even from fellow Republicans.  Even from fellow Republicans.  Even from fellow Republicans.  Wow.  That must have been pretty heartless then. 

Third highest unemployment rate in the nation.  You’d think there were things South Carolina could do to put its unemployed to work, some infrastructure work, or other short term one-off projects that need doing that might not only keep the state economy going, but even improve it a tad.  But that would be government spending wouldn’t it?  Better to let people who can’t find work loose everything.  Gotta love that free market stuff.

Even from fellow Republicans.   Even from fellow Republicans.  Even from fellow Republicans.  I think quite a few working people who have voted republican lately because they hate the darkies and the feminists and the Jews and the wetbacks and the liberals and the homos are starting to discover that as far as the country club republicans are concerned working people aren’t shit either, even if they’re male, white, heterosexual and protestant. 

No job?  Retirement fund gone?  About to loose your house?  Oh cheer up.  The gays can’t get married so things can’t be all bad now can they?  You got what you voted for.  Smile!

Next time a Microsoft spokesdroid complains about software piracy, laugh in their face…

Microsoft to hide Irish Tax Haven data of subsidiaries that have saved it billions of dollars in US taxes

US software giant Microsoft has taken steps to shield from the public, the value of Tax Haven transactions of two Irish-registered subsidiaries that have enabled it to save billions of dollars in US taxes.

The company applied to the Irish Companies Office on Monday to re-register its Round Island One and Flat Island Company subsidiaries as companies with unlimited liability. Unlimited companies have no obligation to file their accounts publicly. 

The U.S. taxes that multi-billionaire Bill Gates is using Ireland to avoid are paid for in the end by the rest of us.  Which might seem like a good excuse to pirate his software but it isn’t.  Because Bill is corrupt is no reason to corrupt yourself.  And there is one very good reason to not pirate Microsoft products in any case.  They suck.  Or more specifically…

Zune chokes on leap-year bug
The bug disabled the players on Dec. 31, the last day of a leap year

Microsoft’s Zune 30GB music player just wasn’t ready for a leap year.  That’s what owners of the devices discovered Wednesday morning when they awoke to find their players frozen and unworkable.

The problem turned out to be "a bug in the internal clock driver related to the way the device handles a leap year," Microsoft Zune spokesman Matt Akers said in a posting to Zune forums Wednesday. The issue does not affect all Zune players, but all models of the Zune 30GB are potentially affected, he said.

Zune is Microsoft’s alternative to Apple’s popular iPod devices.

And you can tell it’s Microsoft’s alternative because it took just one tiny little leap second to bring it down to a crashing locked up total halt.  Why pirate Microsoft Windows when you can run a Linux distribution for free and have a more reliable, more secure operating system in the bargain.  Yes, Linux is more work.  But it’s work defeating Microsoft’s anti-piracy schemes too.  Why go to the trouble?  Just run Linux.  If you are smart and skillful enough to defeat Microsoft’s anti-piracy systems you can figure out and run Linux.  And then you don’t have to be a thief.

Character is what you are, not what other people think you are.

The news this morning tells me that the marriage (second try) of the guy who dressed up as Santa and killed nine people at a party recently started to break apart after his (second) wife found out about the brain damaged son he’d abandoned…

Marriage splintered over man’s stunning revelation

He was a software engineer who liked SUVs and went to Mass on Sundays. She was a secretary with a quick mind and an infectious laugh. When Bruce Pardo married Sylvia Orza three years ago, the match seemed ideal — right down to the housing arrangements: He lived alone in a sparsely furnished house and she had three children and plenty of furniture.

But the marriage splintered nearly a year ago when she discovered that, years earlier, he had abandoned a brain-damaged son but continued to claim him as a tax write-off.

Sylvia Pardo was appalled, according to a source close to the police investigation…

I’d read about the son previously and how Pardo had continued to claim him as a tax write-off even though he’d basically abandoned him and wasn’t paying any child support.  The tale I got from the news outlets about the Christmas party massacre contained this horrible detail I hadn’t been able to get out of my mind:  Pardo’s first victim was an 8 year old girl who had come running up to him when she saw him in the Santa suit.  He shot her in the face.  I just couldn’t fathom that.  I’d read about the nasty divorce, and his loosing his job, but shooting the kid like that was more cold blooded then I could picture from all that by itself.  There had to be more then the divorce and the job I thought at the time. 

And there was more.  Well…less.  Less to him then anyone around him really grasped.  There were all the usual statements from friends about how Pardo’s behavior that night was a total shock and completely out of character and so on.  But it wasn’t.  He had an easy laugh and a calm, quiet disposition.  But character isn’t what you do, it’s why you do it.  That’s what’s missing from so many of these horrible news stories about the quiet man who suddenly goes on a berserk rampage.  People see the easy going smile and they don’t notice there is nothing behind it. 

If I had read these news stories about Pardo and seen a man who had abandoned a son, used him to cheat on his taxes, married another woman for her money and was living it up until he got caught, I’d still be confused as to how he could be so cold blooded.  But he wasn’t a crook.  He was a cheat.  It’s not the passionate man you need to be afraid of.  The angry one.  The wily one.  It’s the empty one.  Be afraid of the empty one.

Figured it’s going to take me another couple weeks to get used to writing 2009 instead of 2008 so I thought I’d get a start on it now.  2009.  2009.  2009. 

It’s bright and sun-shiny here in Baltimore.  Also cold.  20 degrees at BWI and 23 in my back yard according to my does-it-all digital furnace/ac system controller/thermostat.  Not nearly as windy as yesterday though.  Yesterday morning I looked out the front window and my bird feeders were being blown horizontal and the damn birds were still hanging on.  Eating.  They get hungry when the temperatures drop.

I’m not hung over because I didn’t drink much at all last night and I went to bed early.  My egg nog didn’t turn out very well, and truth to tell I was getting a little tired of drinking egg nog anyway.  I spent the last of 2008 with a tall glass of my ice tea, still working on catching up with my filing.  The major big part of the filing task is going through all the files here and sorting out what I can move into storage, and what I can just toss.  I thought I was done with that last Tuesday but then I came across a big cardboard box of papers from way, Way back around the time of the move from the Cockeysville apartment to Casa del Garrett.  It’s full of stuff I never got around to filing because I was in the middle of moving, and then settling into my new house.  That box has just sat here for years and I’m going through it now.  There isn’t a lot in it I need to keep…obviously since I haven’t needed to get into it to find anything in over 7 years…but I can’t just toss it all out without going though it first.  I hope to be done with it today sometime.

But…they’re calling for rain and snow later, so I’m going to grab a camera and go for a drive while the sun is out.  Maybe down to my old hometown Rockville and wander around a bit.

…like my first try at egg nog for instance.  It wasn’t…wonderful.  Oh it isn’t horrible either…but the recipe I used called for Way too much booze in retrospect, and for some reason the ingredients mixed up a tad flavorless.  You could tell it was rich…I used the best milk and eggs and cream I could find at Whole Foods…but it didn’t have much egg noggy flavor.  Or maybe the smell of the booze was just overpowering it.  My nose isn’t all that great at the task of smelling stuff anyway.  So I tossed it and I’ll spend New Year’s Eve at the drafting table with the last of the store bought I have here at Casa del Garrett. 

It’s okay…my first attempts at beer batter fish frying didn’t work out either, but I kept on tweaking and tweaking some more and now it’s a neighborhood and co-worker favorite.

Saving grace is I taught myself how to separate eggs and fold ingredients.  Not that hard really…I’d just never done it before.  I have long narrow fingers so I started out by dumping the contents of an egg into the palm of my hand and letting the white drip between my fingers into a bowl.  The other method is to shuffle the yoke back and forth between the two halves of the shell you’ve just opened, letting the white drip off in the process.  But the egg in the hand trick works for me like a charm.  I’ve never held a yoke in my hand before.  Felt…odd…

If you’re out to party tonight, instead of the usual crap, spend some extra bucks on the really good stuff, and savor it instead of just sloshing it down.  You’ll drink less and enjoy it more and probably end up spending about the same amount of money you would have for the cheap stuff you always buy just to get yourself drunk.  Life is short…live it within your means but live it well.  Don’t settle for crap.