Bent Corner

Sheri and I are driving down to Dulles this morning to catch a flight out to southern California to visit my family. It’s been far too long since I’ve been home. We will be out there for a week.

We are flying on jetBlue. I’ve never flown them, but I’ve heard nice things about them. They have a TV built into the back of each seat. Not only do they show movies, they offer Direct TV along with XM satellite radio. An added plus is that they fly into Burbank Bob Hope airport and not Los Angeles International (LAX). (more…)

If you were watching the mainstream news media tonight, you would have thought Hillary Clinton placed the bloody head of a dead race horse in Barack Obama’s bed. (more…)

Not that I really know how intense 1,000 suns are, but I can imagine. I’m just getting tired of dicking with WordPress.

Yesterday I had a problem that resulted with nothing but the header image loading. I ended up fixing it be reloading WordPress 2.5. So far, so good. I would like to upgrade to the latest build of WordPress, version 2.5.1, but when I do just that, the RSS feed to my blog dies. Why? Who knows. I’ve read on the WordPress forums about other people having the same problem, but I haven’t read anything that solves the problem. It’s just another one of those WordPress “mysteries”.

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Because I follow English Premiere League (EPL) football (soccer), I read BBC News quite a bit. They have been covering the news coming out of South Africa. At least 42 people have been killed and 15,000 have sought shelter from the South African mobs, who blame foreigners for high crime and unemployment. The foreigners come from neighboring Zimbabwe, Mozambique, and Nigeria.

South Africa has approximately 49 million people with a staggering 30% unemployment rate. The foreigners coming into South Africa are better educated and more skilled then many of the South African population. These people coming into the country from Zimbabwe, Mozambique, and Nigeria are taking jobs from South Africans. Jobs that were already hard to come by.

The violence has been staggering. Not only have roving gangs of South Africans murdered foreigners, some were killed by dousing them with fuel and lighting them on fire.

Update: I’ve had MSNBC on most of the morning, and I still haven’t heard a word of the carnage going on in South Africa. I have heard about Denise Richards supposedly sending an email to the girlfriend of ex-husband Charlie Sheen and asking to borrow a cup of Charlie’s sperm.

Pretend you are a candidate for the Democratic nomination and you just lost the Kentucky primary by 35 points. What do you do? If you are Barack Obama, you fly to Iowa and announce that you have just achieved a pretend milestone. You announce that you have won an absolute majority of pledged delegates.

Think of it as Barack Obama’s very own MISSION ACCOMPLISHED moment. The only thing lacking was a flight suit and an aircraft carrier.

From Larry Johnson’s superb blog NO QUARTER:

How does winning a majority of pledged delegates qualify as a “major milestone”? It doesn’t, because winning the majority of pledged delegates does not make Obama the nominee. Period.

Under the Democratic Party’s un-democratic rules, super-delegates can vote for whomever they want (and they can switch), regardless of the pledged-delegate totals or popular-vote count.

Facts aside, some media have given air time to Obama’s surrogates to create potentially misleading headlines and sound bites about the pretend “milestone.”

I often wonder if Obama supporters even know that superdelegates don’t actually cast their superdelegate vote until the Democratic National Convention in August. From reading many of their posts on Daily Kos or Democratic Underground, I’m guessing not. Otherwise I’m not sure they would be so visceral and arrogant about their favorite candidate.

The superdelegates will have a choice to make in August. Will they simply go with the candidate that has a slight lead in the pledged delegates or will they go with the candidate that has a slight lead in the popular vote?

Obama might regain his lead in the popular vote in the remaining contests, but he seems to have all but decided to start campaigning for the general election against John McCain. He seems confident that he will be given the nomination no matter what happens in the remaining contests.

Who knew selling crack might result in the loss of your liquor license? From the Herald-Mail:

The Waterin’ Hole Tavern at 15 E. Baltimore St. in Hagerstown faces a $2,500 fine and the revocation of its liquor license after the owner and several patrons were charged recently for selling crack cocaine.

Therisa Lamp, owner of The Waterin’ Hole, appeared at a hearing Wednesday before the Board of License Commissioners for Washington County, also known as the liquor board, to answer the charges.

Board chairman Robert L. Everhart said a decision would be made within 30 days.

What’s to decide? It seems like a no-brainer.

It should be no surprise to anyone at this point that it’s delegates — not votes — that decide each political party’s nominee for President.

What is a delegate?

Each state or territory is allotted a certain amount of pledged delegates. Currently there are 3,253 pledged delegates. Large states have a lot of pledged delegates. Small states have fewer delegates. How many voters does each pledged delegates represent?

That depends. Take a state like California. It has the most Democratic pledged delegates at 370. A total of 4,794,846 Democrats voted in the California Primary. That means that each California pledged delegate represents 12,959.04 California Democratic voters.

On the other end of the spectrum is Wyoming. It has a total of 12 Democratic pledged delegates. A total of 8,689 Democrats cast their votes in March for the Presidential nominee. That means that each Wyoming pledged delegate represents 724.08 Wyoming Democratic voters.

Why are the Democrats in Wyoming more important then Democrats in California?

They aren’t more important. We just have a really stupid and archaic method of choosing our President. In 2000 we elected a President that received less votes then his opponent. Now we Democrats are about to select a nominee for President that received less votes then his opponent. Why doesn’t this fact bother anyone?

One of the most annoying things about working with Microsoft Vista is dealing with User Access Control (UAC). It’s this annoying pop-up that, well, pops up when you try to open certain programs. It asks you if you really, really want to run the program you just tried to open. It asks the first time you run the program. It asks the second time you run the program. It asks each and every time you run the program. It doesn’t matter if you have answered in the affirmative thousands and thousands of times. It will still ask.

It’s a stupid security feature that doesn’t make your computer the least bit more secure. It’s just one of those things Microsoft threw in to Vista to make it look like things are more secure. It’s like having to take off your shoes before boarding an aircraft. Nether practice makes anything more secure.

I looked online for advice on how to work around this annoying feature. This is what I found:

Disabling User Account Control:

1. Press Windows + R, type msconfig and hit enter.
2. Select the Tools tab
3. Find Disable UAC (near the bottom)
4. Click on Launch
5. Restart the Computer

The first issue came out August 22 and the second issue came out three months later on November 21. If the rest of the miniseries followed the same 3-month release pattern, the third issue should have come out in February.

It didn’t.

Marvel Comics has a real problem with following through with releasing subsequent issues in some miniseries comics. How many years has it been since issue #2 came out for Ultimate Hulk Versus Wolverine?

What’s so hard about releasing the third issue of a series? When they are releasing the first issue, they have to know they have nothing after the second issue. How does this kind of stuff happen?

I liked this series. At least I think so. It’s been so long, I don’t really remember. This is just another reason why people wait for the trades.

I know they are from Florida and you are to expect a certain amount of creepiness to come from the state, but I think this is pushing it. Here we see Hulk Hogan spreading suntan lotion on his daughter Brooke’s rear end.