To Be Filed Under "Who Gives a Crap?"

I apologize for being crass, but really, who does think this is a worthy investment?

Your Tax Dollars at Work

Thank goodness we're paying our Fair Share™, 'cause this is important work they're doing with our taxes.  It's a huge relief to know that the federal government is on the cutting edge of such vital research.  Our lives will be infinitely improved by this study, for sure.

Derailed Duck

Two crazy Swedish guys break an amusement park ride. ;o)

(But really, they weren't spinning it that fast-- not so fast that you'd think it should come loose. Good thing there were no kids standing in the duck's path!)

News Snippets

Snippet the First:

Former presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) thinks he could have done a good job leading the country.

“I would have been a good president,” he said Wednesday on Fox Business Network’s “Imus in the Morning.” “Maybe even a great one.”

 Well, it's good that he's managed to stay so humble after all those years in politics...


Snippet the Second:

Speaking of/to a group of illegal aliens in the U.S., Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) said this:  "When I look around this room, I see America's future. Our doctors, our teachers, our nurses, our engineers, our scientists, our soldiers, our Congressman, our Senators and maybe our President."

Um, yeah... About that... Not really, unless you plan on rewriting the Constitution.  ...Then again, I'm sure you'd have no problem with that, would you, Mr. Durbin?  Let's just throw the whole d--n thing out and start from fresh, right?  It's so out-dated, anyway.


Snippet the Third:

A foreign national who flew from New York to Los Angeles last week with a stolen boarding pass and ID card has been arrested at Los Angeles International Airport, according to federal authorities.

Olajide Oluwaseun Noibi, a Nigerian-born man who was found with the stolen ID and up to 10 old boarding passes containing various names, was arrested Wednesday after attempting to board a flight from Los Angeles to Atlanta; five days after passing through layers of airport security at New York's JFK airport to board a plane with a day-old boarding pass. 

I guess the TSA is too busy checking babies' diapers and humiliating terminally ill women in their 90s to worry about little things like, oh, boarding passes.  (Gah!)  Seriously, guys.  He didn't have the correct ID.  The pass wasn't for the right date.  It wasn't even the right flight number! 

I want to know what this guy was doing.  Why did he even want to fly all over the place?  Was he just taking a cross-country vacation, or is there more to the story?  In any case, the honchos at the TSA have a lot of nerve expecting travelers to meekly accept all the crap they're put through when the TSA can't get a simple thing like this right.

Analytics Again

It's been a long, long, long time since my last Google Analytics post.  (The last one was toward the end of January 2010, to the best of Blogger's blog-search function's knowledge.) 

This may not interest anyone but me, but it's my blog, so...

As usual, I'm only looking at keyword searches (that led to this blog) in the months since my last Analytics post. 

At the top of the list, generating a whopping 29.43% of visits (from people who find me via a search engine), is "absolutly pure milk".  Ha!  As I've probably mentioned before, we have a couple of pressed glass tumblers that Donald brought from Sweden with that text raised upon them.  I wonder how many of the people searching for that phrase realized that "absolutly" is a misspelling...

"Crusti croc" (a brand of chips) comes in second place-- 4.13% of my blog traffic is coming here in search of information about snack food.  (Fascinating, isn't it?)  ...Oh, and I see that there are variations on this theme peppered throughout the list, so even more people are looking for information on Crusti Croc.

Rag quilting, vintage fashion, and black rat snake eggs continue to make up a large number of the search engine hits.  (If I add up all the various quilting-related hits, it would easily top "absolutly pure milk".)

Random Searches That Caught My Eye:

• marabou chocolate / marabou amigo 
• 80's cartoon moonbeamers / meet the moonbeamers fabric
• more dead birds / dead birds 2012 / any more dead birds?
• cockapekapoo
• anole eggs / do lizards lay eggs
• outdoor oddities / oddities of the ocean
• ken doll
• atm job killer
• playskool wonderfalls
• "become a social worker in 1 yr"
• "new puppy smell" / new puppy smell description / puppy smell worms 
• when does puppy smell end / why do puppies have a smell?
• caterpillars that sting
• chewy whoppers
• arguments against penny tax in baldwin county al
• dollar tree laser pointer
• g your hair smells terrific / recipe for gee your hair smells terrific
• green card interviews
• how to pronounce chickasabogue
• modesty personified
• the loony left 60 minutes
• "but why do we have to pay for the land? the land's free..."
• "fav or fave"
• "hop-and-go-fetch-its"
• "killing weeds with electricity"
• "odds and ends" it took laundary to cleanthe area
• "opinions depress"
• "turbo boil"
• "unrelated string of words"
• "why is st. john pronounced"  ("Why"? (g))
• affordable ingredients in making a catsup using tomato
• autumn oddities
• buy gele hallon / gelehallon equivalence
• can we make everybody happy? why
• can you think of at least one example from a recent movie in which a linguistic code was used to convey information about a character? what was it?
• do snakes have lips
• dog shaped rag quilts
• dying wasp+gif animated
• endorsed by aliens as a safe place to survive the demise of civilization
• explain "this that the other"
• fabric for curtains in vampire diaries kitchen
• got megapickles? t shirt
• happy fourth thursday
• how many children have choked on kinder surprise
• how to say none of my business norwegian
• insert wolf whistle here
• itchy hands vibration mowing lawn
• lashed terribly
• let's find odds and ends
• milk duds sverige
• mrs howell eating beets video
• muffin vintage
• mutant mosquitos
• once upon a wintertime
• photos of christmas betls (Huh?)
• pizzapolice blog spot
• psychotic moments
• radio ad young boozer
• sam's club ultra sonic bark stopper
• sniblet
• swedish vacuum candy
• the danger of shopping online
• ugliest irish
• urban yodeling
• what singer looks and sounds a lot like rod stewart?
• what was catsup in 1820
• wild man of chickasabogue (Again. Still never heard of him...)
• zenni opitcal felons

And that's all she wrote.  (As they say.)

Rainbow Fish

I guess this Rainbow Fish storybook came along after I was out of elementary school, so no well-meaning teacher never read it aloud to my class.  Having heard it mentioned a few times over the years, today I finally took a minute to look it up.

Get ready to roll you eyes, if you must, but I have to agree that it is somewhat troubling.

Most of all, however, it's boring.  It seems that the people who remember loving the book as children mostly just liked looking at the glittery/shiny scales in the illustrations.  The story itself is a real snoozer.

Then there's the "moral" that in order to be accepted by others, you have to sacrifice whatever it is that makes you unique.  If you possess something that others desire, you really ought to give it to them.  Otherwise, you're just a big old meanie and no-one will ever want to play with you.  (Another moral:  You shouldn't hesitate to ask for whatever you want, even if it happens to belong to someone else.  Heck! Why should they have it, if you don't?  But maybe I'm overly sensitive on that point; I've always found that kind of thing particularly annoying...)

As for it being A Child's Garden of Socialism... Yes, I can see why some shudder at it, but I can also see why others roll their eyes.  Basically... I wouldn't read it to my own theoretical children.  For one thing, there are just way too many better stories available.  For another, I wouldn't want to teach young, impressionable minds that individuality (and individual property) must be modified (or divided) to fit the mold (or make things "fair").

Sure, you want kids to learn about sharing, but there are limits to how much anyone should be expected to share.  Would people view this story differently if Rainbow Fish hadn't been quite so rude to the little fish when it first asked for a scale?  Let's say Rainbow Fish had answered in a more neutral voice, "I'm sorry, but no.  If I give one to you, everyone else will want one, too, until there are none left at all.  Besides, your own blue scales are very pretty just as they are!" (And from that point, it turns into a story about knowing and valuing your own special qualities.)  Would that have been acceptable?  Would Rainbow Fish still have been expected to pull its own scales out (which, ew, by the way) and hand them out to the other bratty fish? (Well, they did shun Rainbow Fish whey he/she/it didn't want to part with his/her/its scales, and that wasn't very nice, either, was it?)

Ugh! ...This story is just depressing.  And annoying.
(Which seem to be the only types of things I ever blog about anymore.  Sorry.)