Why arent we talking about sending him to jail?

CNN.com – Attorney: Clergyman molested Foley as teen – Oct 3, 2006

You know, even if Mark Foley’s lawyer is telling the truth, and Foley was both molested as a child and never actually had any sort of sex with any underage boys, Foley still needs to go to jail. Unless he can prove, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that every single time he said or did anything innapropriate to or with an underage boy, he was completely trashed. Then I’m okay with alcohol treatment.

Where are the Florida police? Shouldn’t someone have arrested him by now for soliciting sex from a minor or something like that? You can’t tell me that they haven’t already published enough to get a warrant and arrest him. Are we not arresting him because he’s in alcohol treatment? If I go rob a bank and then join AA, is that cool with everyone?

We seem to be focusing a lot on Hastert, and whether or not he should resign. I mean, there was an article at the National Review Online calling for him to resign. He probably should. At the very least, he wasn’t paying enought attention.

But that’s really not the point.  The point is that Mark Foley broke the law, and he needs to be prosecuted.  He probably needs some help, too.  His lawyer seems to want to dismiss this by saying that Foley’s gay.  That’s fine, but there’s a huge difference between “Foley is gay” and “Foley tries to have sex with teenage boys”.

Electronic poll books in Tuesday test

Electronic poll books in Tuesday test

State election officials and the manufacturer of the machines, Diebold Inc., will conduct the test from 7 a.m. until 8 p.m. at the BWI Airport Marriott Hotel.

Any of you in Maryland anywhere near BWI should go take part in this test today.  I suggest reading up on how to hack a Diebold machine so you can try and do it while you’re voting.  Anyone who reads Techdirt (Or, for that matter, anyone paying attention to any election in the last few years) knows that Diebold has made a lot of machines that don’t work very well, has been extremely resistant to allowing any kind of testing, and has ignored repeated assertions that the machines are insecure.

To all of you who find a Diebold machine in front of you on election day – refuse to vote on it.  If we make enough noise, maybe we can actually have an election that is efficient, accurate, and verifiable.  Note well, though, that I can not be held responsible if you protest too loudly and are arrested.  That’s all you.

A whole bunch of complainers

VentBox

I got a link from a new complaint blog this afternoon, and I thought I’d return the favor.  Apparently there’s a whole complaint blog community out there that I haven’t made myself a part of.  I may have to change that.

Now, do I post this tagged with a “complaint” category because it’s on the subject of complaining, even though it isn’t really a complaint?  I think I will.

The Pop Tart Scourge

Someone in the office just toasted a cinnamon Pop Tart.  It smells really good.  But Pop Tarts are evil.  First of all, anything with that much sugar is dessert, not breakfast.  Second of all, and this should be illegal, they count a serving as ONE Pop Tart.  You all know the Pop Tarts packaging – they come two to a bag.  And the bag is not resealable.  It’s not even big enough to fold over to keep the second Tart slightly fresh.  There should be a law that anything contained in a non-resealable container is one serving.  Actually, I guess they’d have to make it more specific, because I’d hate to buy a value pack of six pounds of chicken breasts and then have to eat the whole package.  Could it apply only to snack foods?  I guess then they’d just fight to make Pop Tarts a breakfast food, not a snack food.

In any event, it’s an outrage.  One Pop Tart is about 200 calories, 60 of those from fat.  But you can’t eat just one Pop Tart unless you’ve got a buddy to eat the other one.  So one Pop Tart is, in effect, 400 calories and 35% of your RDA for saturated fat.

However, if we make anything in one package have to be a serving, they’d just start packaging things in more plastic.  You’d have a box of cereal that contains 15 little shrink-wrapped packets of exactly 37 bran flakes.  Our landfills would explode.

All of this makes me glad that I ate a bowl of Kellogs Smart Start and some organic yogurt for breakfast.

Good news – we really are married

So, there was some confusion as to whether or not the state of Maryland was going to accept our marriage license after we missed the deadline (five days after the wedding) by almost exactly a month.  Oops.  I called the license department this morning, and they said they didn’t have the license, which was sort of troubling.  After a quick consultation with the wife, who obtained a tracking number from her dad (the wedding officiant), I called back.  This time they found it, and everything is official.  So we don’t have to get our wedding bands re-engraved with a new date.  That’s a plus.

National Novel Writing Month is nearly upon us

National Novel Writing Month

So, signups for Nano opened sometime late last night.  For those who don’t know, Nano was started by a group of friends in San Fransisco who thought it would be cool to each write a 50,000 word novel in a month.  To put that in perspective, the average novel is about 120,000 words.  The point has been made that it might be better to call it Novella Writing Month (And it’s international, as well), but those people have been made to sit in a corner in shame and think about what they’ve done.

The first year, I think about 20 people did it.  This year, they expect 75,000.  It’s all on the honor system.  I’m sure people cheat, but since you don’t really win anything, it’s like cheating at solitaire.  I’ve never cheated.  I finished in 2002, 2003, failed in 2004, and finished in 2005.  It’s really amazing the first time you win (And pretty cool the other times).  In 2002, I finished the 50,000th word of “The Dance of the Ducks” at about 10PM on November 29th.  I rushed to Kinkos to print it out, but they were CLOSED.  Lights on, doors locked.  Oh, was I salty.  I’ve harbored a bit of a grudge towards Kinkos ever since.

In 2003, I finished “Love in Black and White” on the 27th.  I’m still working on LIBW.  It’s up to maybe 75,000 words now (I write a bit every 6-8 months, it seems).  It’s my favorite of the three, and the best prospect to be published should I ever finish it.

In 2004, I wrote about 450 words and didn’t get any further.

“The Dance of the Ducks” was a story about a man tormented by personal demons that manifest themselves as almost-real ducks.  Then he becomes the hero and saves the girl and banishes the ducks.  In 2005, I wrote “The Dance of the Ducks II – In the Land of the Ducks”.  It’s something of a continuation of DotD I, except from the perspective of the ducks.  It was the least serious (by far) of the three.

Anyway, it’s a lot of fun.  As it gets more popular, it gets harder to find the people who are really into it because they tend to be obscured on the forums by forum-junkies who have 4000 posts in the Off-Topic forums in November, and only 3000 words in their novel.  I’m not bitter, though.

So, you should all try it.  It’s really a rush, the first time you hit the word count button and it says “50,000”.  And I had never written 50,000 words before my first Nano.  My longest story was about 20,000 words prior to DotD.  I expect I will be doing something here to track my progress so you all can yell at me if I fall behind.

Dude clearly needs to get his priorities straight

Uni Watch » White Glove Treatment

Uni Watch is a weirdly fascinating daily blog that obsesses over quirks in professional and college sports uniforms.  I don’t know why, but after Mo pointed it out to me, I read it almost every day.  Today’s was particularly funny.

I know, as an announcer, it must be hard to come up with interesting banter when nothing interesting is happening on the field.  But I think they can try harder than this.

Democrats are incompetent

Whatever: On Moral Cowardice

I simply cannot understand the sort of rank and pervasive incompetence Democrats have to have in order to allow themselves to be politically flummoxed time and again by the least popular and least competent president in modern political history.

Great rant against our current government from John Scalzi.  What I find truly amazing is that, out of two dozen or so comments so far, not a single person has disagreed with him.  I imagine the trolls will come out soon, and I’m sure many of his commenters are regulars who like him in part because of his mostly liberal outlook, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a political statement online written with such anger that didn’t have a bunch of equally angry comments in opposition.

I love RSS

I’m curious, and I don’t have enough readers to do a poll, but I’d really like to know how many people don’t return to a website that doesn’t have an RSS feed.  Sometimes I’ll come across something interesting at a site and think, “Hey, I’d like to read this site regularly.”  But then I look in the address bar, and there’s no little Firefox Live Bookmark icon.  And that’s usually the last time I visit that site.  It’s just too much trouble to actually have to bookmark the site, then remember to check back and see if anything’s new.

With my RSS reader, Firefox plugin Sage, I don’t have to remember.  When I have a free moment, or need a quick break from work, I just click the Sage button on my toolbar, hit refresh, and suddenly I have new things to read from websites I like.

I don’t really read a newspaper (Too hard to recycle).  But I have RSS feeds for the Washington Post, CNN, the BBC . . . Certainly I don’t get every bit of news that happens, but I get the highlights.

Don’t really know where I was going with all this.  But I don’t know what I would do without RSS.  I look forward to the day when my little PDA/cellphone/camera/etc uses the ubiquitous free WiFi to keep my RSS feed updated wherever I am.