Christmas Shopping Ideas

For the 'hard to buy for' on your christmas list, be sure to check out AMERICA REMEMBERS for all your custom tribute firearms. Here are a few examples, but there are many many more.

For you NASCAR fans out there, all the great drivers are immortalized in American Firepower, but my favorite is the Richard Petty Revolver, embossed with his many Winston Cup wins.

For the music lover, we have the Travis Tritt Revolver. Notice the 'Here's a Quarter' on the cylinder! That Travis!

The Elvis Presley 'Taking Care of Business' Tribute Revolver

No television is safe with this baby around.

For the leftist-agriculturalist-rural-sportsmen on your list, there's the Progressive Farmer-Rural Sportsman Tribute Rifle

and my personal favorite, for all you Scarecrow and Mrs King fans, we have the Bruce Boxleitner Tribute Rifle

This Time, I Mean It

This morning marked the kickoff of the New-Year's-Resolution-in-November. I got on the elliptical before work. Amazing, I know. It felt pretty good to do a quick 30 minutes. You know, get the joints loosened up and kickstart the day.
We are going home to Binghamton for christmas for the first time in three years, so we are both anxious to drop a few pounds before then. We only have three weeks, so it's cram-time.
I had a granola bar for breakfast and will have tomato soup for lunch, which means I'm officially vegan since yesterday.
Mrs Schwartz and I laid around for most of the weekend. After I finally got the computer working, I spent most of Sunday trying to get past the opening scenes of Black Hawk Down without getting killed. I finally succeeded, but one of my objectives is to pick up some documents from a warehouse. I don't know how to pick up anything, so I blew up the documents. Mission Failed!

Speaking of BibleThumpers

Atheists going door to door


I love this. This guy flies to Salt Lake City and goes door to door, hassling Mormons to discuss atheism.

Bible Thumpers

I have a door mat that says "GO AWAY". What more do I need to do to prevent Bible Thumpers from trying to save me?
Look, I think it's cute that y'all have this little superstition. Honestly, I believe it truly is necessary for a large segment of humanity. I know it helps a lot of people lead better lives. I think that's great; it's just not for me.
You have to understand. I'm not accustomed to unannounced guests. When my doorbell rings at 10:00 Saturday morning, it throws the whole house into a tizzy. The dog freaks out. Mrs Schwartz gets just plain pissed off. (Her aunt is a Jehovah's Witness) I have only recently stopped getting a gun out of the cabinet to answer the door. (They say you mellow with age).

After all that tension gets jacked up, the last thing I want is to spend a few minutes discussing my personal relationship with our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.

I hate Microsoft

My hard drive has been making weird noises from time to time.

Kachunk Kachunk Kachunk.

I've been concerned that it was on the verge of dying, so I pulled the hard drive out of an older pc that I still had in a closet. It was only 6Gig, but I figured I could load all the pictures and tax info and other important stuff onto the spare, and then if the main drive died, I could always reload everything on a new one.
I figured, while I'm at it, I might as well upgrade the memory. I bought another 512MB stick. I also added an analog-to-digital video converter to convert all the old VHS movies to DVD.

Everything came up ok (or so I thought) so I packed everything back into the cabinet and re-connected all the cabling.

The first problem was that Office XP said it had to be re-activated, because the platform had changed. I re-activated it, but the pc still had a tendancy to suddenly reboot itself.
Grrrrr....
Today, I started out by removing the new hard drive. It still failed.
I removed the new A2D card. It still failed.
I removed the memory stick. It still failed.

My Black Hawk Down game kept locking up and causing a reboot.
Office XP wouldn't even start anymore.

I un-installed the game and Office.
The internet connection failed.

I moved the ethernet card back to the slot it was previously in. That fixed the internet access.

I tried to re-install Office. The pc reboots as soon as the install CD starts.
(Still unresolved. Fuckers!)

Black Hawk Down doesn't allow me to start the game anymore, just to edit the options.

I re-installed the hard drive and the memory and the video card. I think I now have some sort of driver conflict that is independent of the hardware.

Mrs Schwartz can't take anymore yelling and keyboard banging. She has blocked me from further tinkering, for the sake of Thanksgiving peace.

At least I have the internet back up.

UPDATE 8:15 am Friday:
My virus scan is getting hung up on a wave file. Fuck. I may have to just re-install Windows and be done with it. Fuck.

UPDATE 4:33 pm friday:
SUCCESS! It looks like there is something in the A2D card that Windows does not like. I had earlier uninstalled the drivers for it, but apparently that's not enough. I had to actually remove the card. Now everything is back to working, with the new hard drive and the new memory.
Happy Thanksgiving.

Don't help me, Kramer

Yeah, we've all heard about Kramer's Racist Rant. What irritates me the most about this, is his stupid, "I'm not a racist. That's what's so insane about this." apology.

What he's saying is that he's not a racist; he was just mad. What bugs me about that, is that it reinforces the message to black people that all white people secretly feel this way, we just don't say it.
In addition to repeatedly calling them niggers, he made scathing references to lynching and white supremacy:

"Fifty years ago we'd have you upside down with a f***ing fork up your ass."

"You interrupted me. That's what you get for interrupting a white man."

And people wonder why minorities don't trust whitey; why they think white people all secretly want to turn the world back to before the civil-rights era.

No, Kramer, you are a racist. Sadly, you are also a very negative, and dead wrong, representative of your race.

Slumber Party!

Young ladies, between 18 and 35, are invited to come to my Peace Awareness and Celebration Party, being held on December 22nd.
We will move all the furniture out of the way and join together on the pillows to focus on world peace.

She thinks she's funny

I came home from work last week to find a coffee mug on my living room floor. Mrs Schwartz said that a huge cockroach palmetto bug was running across the floor and she trapped it. I was supposed to clean him up and get him out of the house.
It became a test of wills. She nagged me all week. I kept putting it off.
Last night, during extra heavy nagging, I acquiesced and agreed to do it.
When I lifted the mug, there was nothing under there.
HA! I tricked you! I took care of it on Tuesday. Did you think it had crawled up into the mug? What did you think?

Houses are Wack!

In celebrity gossip news, Whitney Houston has managed to lose 2 houses in about one week.

Her "and Bobbie's" mansion in Country Club of the South has been foreclosed and sold here in the Atlanta area AND their mansion in New Jersey was foreclosed on Wednesday and is slated to be sold at auction in January. So if you want to live in the Garden State, and enjoy hunting for crack, hidden in the floorboards, don't miss this opportunity.

No Surprise

(Flyer from April 2006)

Democrats to 'revisit' law creating border fence

Democrats will look again at the legislation mandating 698 miles of fencing along the U.S.-Mexico border and might seek to scrap the plan altogether when they take control of Congress next year.

Granted, the fence was only going to be 700 miles long, but it would have been a start.

Ola!

I'm a genius

Carl Levin was on npr this morning. He was asked what the democrats could do to "compel the president to" do what they want over Iraq. His response was priceless. When the transcripts are available, I'll post them, but it was along the lines of...
"I think the President should do what the American people have so clearly shown him what they want him to do, which is (what the democrats want him to do)"

Announcer: But couldn't they use the "pursestrings" option; defunding the iraqi operations?

Levin: Well, nobody really WANTS to pursue that. It would take enough votes for the legislation to overcome President Bush's VETO...

Damn straight, Carl. You know that the only power you have is to whine to the leftwing media, and hope that Bush knuckles under to your bluff, (which he may do. I wouldn't credit republican politicians with the stones of a gnat)

Geezer Alert

I'm at home alone. Mrs Schwartz has gone to some sort of spa-thing with her friends. They live about 30 miles out in country, so she'll be gone until about ten this evening, at the earliest.
It wasn't long ago, that I'd be calling a few friends and we'd head out for a night of drinking, possibly a strip club, followed by poker until ten o'clock tomorrow morning.
Tonight, I feel like I'd rather just watch a few movies with Zachary, get to bed early, and get stuff done tomorrow.

I for one, Welcome our new Overlords

I'm reading and hearing a cacaphony of different directions the government is going to take, now that the democrats are "in power".
One of the most reasoned came from, of all people, Barbara Boxer, who pointed out that the democrats do not have the votes to overcome president Bush's VETO.
This got me thinking about what will change in our policy towards Iraq. If you think about it, the democrats have all the power of a paper tiger.

President Bush is still in control of the armed forces. He still decides how many troops stay in Iraq, and for how long. But "Congress has control of the pursestrings", you say. "They could de-fund any activity until Bush does what they say". Yeah right. Imagine how that will look.

There, on your TV, will be a soldier complaining about how he doesn't have the armor, or the humvee, that he needs because those bastard democrats voted "NO" on appropriations Bill X.

"Senator Liar said we'd have the equipment to do our job, but then he yanked the rug out from under us".

Good luck with that one, democrats. That'll REALLY score you points, come 2008.

The word on the hill is that they won't pursue impeachment, because everybody knows that they don't have the votes to make it stick, and they will end up looking like schmucks for wasting time and money.

A lot of it will depend on Bush's balls.

They will try for that huge jump in the minimum wage. Will Bush VETO it?

The Amnesty for Illegals will sail through. There's nothing stopping it. Ola, mi amigos!

A return to normal programming

In Chattanooga, Tenn., a court heard the case of an illegal alien convicted of running her car into a house and killing a 91-year-old woman. A judge ordered Claudia Nunez Vitalina Bautista Vargas deported. Amazingly, the family of the victim remained compassionate and merciful. "They wanted one of the conditions to be that she learn how to drive," prosecutor Jay Wood said. Prosecutor Wood said federal officials insisted that she be deported. He said as a convicted felon, she will not be allowed to apply to re-enter the country for at least 10 years. Louella Winton, the victim, was asleep in her bed when the car crashed into her house. The vehicle knocked the victim through the bedroom wall and threw her against the wall of the house next door.


For a VERY long listing of illegal alien crimes, go here:
http://www.immigrationshumancost.org/text/crimevictims.html

A Voting Problem I Believe

Long fingernails to blame for glitches?

“It was infuriating,” Bryant said. “I had to go back and double check every one of my selections. It seems like we spent a lot of money to put machines in place that aren’t reliable.”

Latimore said in some cases, it was a problem with voters, not machines.

“We’ve had voters come in and their fingernails are as long as three inches and when they touch [the screen] they are touching more than one box,” Latimore said. “It could record for the wrong person.”

Pat Pullar, deputy director of the Democratic Party of Georgia said the group has received “numerous calls” all day of voter irregularities at mostly black precincts.

Hatin' Whitey

UPDATE: After receiving a bunch of flack from white people who (for some strange reason) were offended at being called racist and grouped with the segregationists of the 1960s, the racist politicians of Atlanta changed their election message after the election. CYA, anyone?

If Comcast had a clue as to how to how to provide online storage that is workable, I could post the original. Since they don't, you'll have to refer to the text below.

******************************************************

"This is Congressman John Lewis."
"And I'm Mayor Shirley Franklin"
"And I'm Andy Young"

(John Lewis) "On November 7th we face the most dangerous situation we ever have. If you think fighting off dogs and water hoses in the sixties was bad, imagine if we sit idly by and let the right-wing Republicans take control of the Fulton County Commission."

(Shirley Franklin) "The efforts of Martin and Coretta King, Hosea Williams, Maynard Jackson and many others will be lost. That's why we must stand up and we must turn out the vote for the Democrats on Election Day."

(Andy Young) "And especially for John Eaves for Fulton County Commission Chairman. Unless you want them to turn back the clock on equal rights and human rights and economic opportunity for all of us, vote for John Eaves as Fulton County Chairman"

(Lewis) "Your very life may depend on it."


So there you have it. If Republicans are elected, they will use their WABAC machine to project us all back to 1962.

Vote Early, Vote Often

I got to the polls at 6:45. There were 20 people in front of me. As people came in, I watched as the line reached the door, then started turning back and extending up the other side of the hall, as more people added on. Soon it had reached the front of the line (except on the other side of the hall). Those people had no choice but to turn it back again and start extending the line down the middle of the hall.
I wonder what's going to happen when so many people come in, that the line can't keep doing that.
There was no single demographic of voters. Old, young, retired, single, with kids, black, white, hispanic. Come to think of it, I didn't see any asians. Come on, asians, get out the vote!

They had us all sign an affidavid that we aren't committing voter fraud. They also had us all show ID, although they allowed about 20 different forms.

We use touchscreen voting. The left has already started screaming about how the evil republicans will change all the votes. Something that gets lost in that debate is the fact that it was the democrats that screamed for electronic voting after the "hanging chad" debacle of 2000.

They didn't open until 7:05 (I've been disenfranchised!)
I was out of there by 7:30.

UPDATE:

Piss me off. Voters overwhelmingly approved tax breaks for every little pet project there was:

A Farm Equipment Tax Exemption
Farmers avoid paying state ad valorem taxes —- similar to the ones motor vehicle owners pay every year on their birthdays —- on tractors, combines and other equipment held under a lease-purchase agreement.

Veterans Exemption
Veterans groups recognized by the federal government do not pay state property taxes on their facilities. Now, the exemption expands to any nonprofit veterans organization that refurbishes and operates historic military aircraft acquired from the federal government and puts it on display to the public for educational purposes.

Charitable Exemption
Charitable institutions are currently exempted from tax on the property used in their charitable work. They are now exempt from tax on the property they use to generate profits for operating the institution.

Seniors Exemption
Georgians 65 and older would not have to pay state property taxes on their homes. The exemption would apply only to their primary residence, up to 10 acres. The homeowner would be responsible for state taxes on the value of the rest of the property.

Spouse Exemption
The surviving spouse of a peace officer or firefighter killed in the line of duty would not have to pay any property taxes on his or her home. The exemption would apply only to a widow or widower who has not remarried.

Spouse Continuation
A property value freeze will remain in effect for a home kept by the surviving spouse upon the death of the applicant for the exemption. This exemption applies only to counties and cities that have adopted a base year or "freeze" exemption. The amendment would not have any impact on cities and counties where such freeze exemptions have not been passed.

An 8 letter word for stupid

For your viewing pleasure, The Knuckle Tattoo Project.

Check them all out.

Mr Low-profile

How the hell difficult would it be to find THIS GUY in UTAH?

Here's his story.

Quote of the Day

It turns out that Zachary may have drank some bad water, that's making him sick. We got pills from the vet.

Mrs Schwartz: You give him his pills. I always have to do it.
Exador: Maybe he'd prefer me to hide it in some banana, instead of the usual cheese.
Mrs Schwartz: Yeah, good idea.

So I hide the pill in a piece of banana and give it to him. He promptly spit it out on the couch and analyzed it. I tried to feed it to him again, he continued to spit it out.

Mrs Schwartz: It's probably because the banana is too green.

I changed tactics. I rinsed off the pills, so he wouldn't recognize them from the banana incident, and hid them in a piece of cheese. He was on to me, and spit that out too. Mrs Schwartz took over and warmed the cheese in the microwave and encased the pill in the ball.

Parallels

The other night I watched "The Perilous Fight" on pbs. It was very good. It told the story of WW2, mostly with color footage from the era.
The first part of it covered the build up to the war. The parallels with today were everywhere.
One thing I didn't know is that we had several ships attacked, and two sunk, by German U-boats, prior to Pearl Harbor. Several hundred Americans died in the attacks. FDR was making speeches that "America's sons will not die in Europe's wars". There were several anti-war groups opposing US intervention, including the American Communist Party, and American Nazi Party. They showed the Nazi training that went on during the German Historic Society field trips in New Jersey. Many members of congress came out against getting into the war.

It really makes you think what a difference a strong leader makes, and how history will remember that leader, compared to how he is thought of by his contemporaries.

Money well Spent

Zachary has been sick for a few days. We're not sure if it's related to the ham bone, since he seemed ok immediately afterwards, but he gets sick if his eggs aren't cooked right, so it's a possibility.
Since Mrs Schwartz is a smothering mother, I get phone calls at work.

Mrs Schwartz: Zachary's sick again.
Exador: Leave him in the back yard. He'll work it out.
Mrs Schwartz: I think I should take him to the vet.
Exador: You want to spend thirty bucks to have the vet tell you that he has diarrhea?
Mrs Schwartz: What if it's something more serious? I'm taking him in.

So she took him to the vet. Shortly after they get there, they are herded into one of the examination rooms to wait.

PTHPTHBPTHBTHT!

Zachary squats down and lets loose all over the floor. She said he was looking up at her the whole time with a look of "Help Me Mommy".

She had to leave the exam room from the smell. She closed the door and asked for help. Two of the vet assistants came with a mop and Pine Sol, and spray. One of them told her that she had never smelled anything so bad. Mrs Schwartz had to stand out in the hall in shame until they were done.

The vet told her that it wasn't anything more serious than Lil Lord Fauntleroy's usual digestive problems. He did give him some Xanax, to help him stay calm and sleep through the night.

Father Guilty Of Genital Mutilation

A jury convicted 30-year-old Khalid Adem of aggravated battery and cruelty to children after deliberating for about four hours. Adem could face up to 40 years in prison.

Adem, an Ethiopian immigrant, used scissors to remove his daughter's clitoris in his family's Atlanta-area apartment in 2001.

During her father's trial, the girl, now seven, testified on videotape while clutching a teddy bear that her father "cut me on my private part."

Adem testified he never circumcised his daughter or asked anyone else to do so. He said he grew up in Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, and considers the practice more prevalent in rural areas.

UPDATE:

He was sentenced to ten years in prison and five years probation.

The least Exciting Halloween Post

Atlanta is not the best city for Halloween. I don't know, maybe that's the way it is everywhere but New Orleans and Key West. For one thing, it's too corporate. All the bars have all the same corporate crap. In addition, it's become known as another "All Hallows Night for roadblocks".
Having it fall on a Tuesday was the last nail in the coffin. (Get it?)
No, Mrs Schwartz wrestling with Eve's Curse was the last nail.

Last Sunday, we had some people over. After a few drinks, I could hear Mrs Schwartz telling the daughter of a friend of ours that they should go to one of the big, corporate Haunted Houses in town. I hate these places. They are $25. You have to wait in line for an hour. They last 15 minutes, if you're lucky. It's a bunch of hack actors and college students jumping out at you under fog and strobelights. No thanks. I'll watch MonsterVision with some gin.
So when I heard her say they were going to do that, I thought, "Have fun, suckers. I ain't going."

Last night, I come home from work.
Mrs Schwartz: Hurry up. You don't have much time before we have to go.
Exador: I'm not going to that Haunted House. You said you were going. I said no such thing.
Mrs Schwartz: But you have to go! I can't go alone. I don't want to go!
Exador: Too bad. You said you'd go. I didn't.
Mrs Schwartz: But you never said you WEREN'T going.
Exador: I never said I WAS either.

This went on for 30 minutes. She finally said, "That's it! I'm putting my foot down. You are going!"
Exador: Buuuulllllshit! I am not.
Mrs Schwartz: I can't believe you are not going when I have put my foot down. I have never put my foot down before.

Now, I know these people are consistantly unreliable. True to form, Mrs S watched, as the minutes ticked by without the girl arriving or calling. When 7pm hit, she said, "That's it. She's too late. I can now claim that it's too late for me to go. I'm off the hook."

Sure enough, she never called and never came over. We watched spooky movies. No kids came trick or treating.