no worries

All work and no play makes Dave a dull blogger, but I wanted to throw out this tidbit:

However bad the economy might be right now, it's neither too bad, nor bad enough for Americans to rise up and demand that our "leaders" really do something about it. How do I know this? Because the Hannah Montana Corporation is expected to be a billion dollar business by next year. So if we've all got that much money to throw away on a child pop star, and this is everyone, not just the richest one-percenters paying her, then we've obviously not yet hit the point of pain. Or, at least as far as our Masters are concerned, not anyone important.

See you at the pump!

addendum:

I dont actually care much about the whole Miley Cyrus/Vanity Fair flap, but if you want to read more about it, this would be what I might have said, had I been a bit smarter and more interested.

props to the princess

Okay, and I'll throw in this article about the flap by Jamie Lee Curtis, mostly just because I really like Jamie Lee Curtis.

Seriously, though, this wasnt supposed to be about the Vanity Fair shoot.

drawing animals

Okay, let's just say that the elephant has no idea what it's doing, but has simply been trained to paint this image over and over again. It's still pretty impressive. And if the images come from the elephant's own imagination? What does that say about us?

Props to The Daly Blog

Dave's Blogroll, ver. 3.0

Okay, I think this thing is ready...

Welcome to Dave's Blogroll, ver.3.0. It's been over two years since the last blogroll, so I'm way past due. This time, I'm cloaking my blogroll in the cloth of the Blogroll Amnesty idea presented by Skippy the Bush Kangaroo and John Swift. The idea was to create links to the little guys, a kind of grassroots blogging interconnectivity movement.
And damn straight I'm all in favor of that. One of the beauties of blogging is that everyone can do it, but if the only blogs you read are the Big Boys, it makes all that creative (and communicative) effort pointless. Plus, if there's a problem with anything and everything in America, I suspect a lot of it can be linked strongly with the consolidation of media outlets by an ever-shrinking number of holders. The MSM is Authoritarian, while blogs are Democratic!
There's a lot of links here, and it's all pretty good stuff, too, though I dont think any of them are what one would call Big Boys (or Girls). Dont read anything into the order things are listed in, at least within their catagories. I'm too old (and too lazy) to be playing the Favorites Game, okay. And, please, if you're not listed on the sidebar, dont take that personal either. Well, maybe a little personal, since those are the ones that I read regularly, but who the hell am I, anyway?

These are my mutual blogs, that is, we link to each other.
100 Farmers
Library Bitch
Reverend Billy Bob Gisher @ Mental Masturbation
The Osterly Times
The Existentialist Cowboy
The Omnipotent Poobah
United We Lay
der Hundepo
Saurly Yours
Lydia Valentine
Spoonfighter
spiiderweb™
Monkey Eggs
Rational Rant
The Sapient Sutler
J. R. Kinnard
It's My Right To Be Left Of Center

These are the blogs that I read a lot:
Contrary Brin
Rude Pundit
Blog Around The Clock
What's Alan Watching?
Ran Prieur
Raed In The Middle
A Softer World
xkcd
The Liberal Doomsayer
Newsmericks
Spread The Good Word

These are blogs that I dont read a lot, but really should:
123 I Love You
Princess Sparkle Pony's Photo Blog
Haphazard Musings
(Not Only) Hotel Room Nudes
Bearskin Rug
Beam Me Up
Corrente
Have Coffee, Will Write
Consider This
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub
Welcome To The Now
The Neural Gourmet
Iraq Today
Watergate Summer
Gus Van Horn
Little Man, What Now?
Tales of the Cupcake Mafia
Flan: not quite jelly, not quite cake
Zen Filter
Fish or Cut Bait
The Daly Blog
The Daily Nooz
SPOtastic
Ghetto Uprising

"Bigger" blogs that I read from time to time: (definition: anyone who regularly gets a lot of comments)
Clusterfuck Nation
Bitch, phd.
Pandagon
Boing Boing
Blog For America
Suburban Turmoil
Demonbaby
Crooks and Liars
Robert Reich

Yeah, I consider myself a Liberal, but some of that's due to gentrification:
The Smallest Minority
The Underground Logician
The Reform Club

Other cool Internet stuff:
Internet Public Library
TPM cafe
Worldchanging
Uncyclopedia: not Wikipedia
Biblical Legos
The Six Lessons of School
The Costs of War
Futuro House

previous blogrolls: blogroll no. 2, blogroll no. 1
blogtrolls: no. 5, no. 4, no. 3, no. 2, or maybe it's no. 1, as I cant actually find 2 more in the archives.

today's quote

If I was a bed,
I'd be an unmade bed

Tom Waits from Baby Gonna Leave Me.

where credit is due

Have credit cards ruined America? Not the cards in and of themselves, but the mentality that we've adopted to go with them?
Normally, when one does not have enough money, one must make decisions about what not to spend money on. But with the credit, this no longer applies - money can be spent, even if one does not have it currently. No decisions must be made about what to cut and what to keep.
Also, I think that people use credit as a means of avoiding fights about what to spend on and what not to spend on, and so spend on everything rather than choosing, thus digging themselves deeper and deeper into debt.

So, the question is, can Americans get their own spending habits under control, because if they cannot, they're not going to be able to force those who govern them do it either.

sunday night at the movies

Uh-oh, it seems that the wildly popular 'Iron Man' trailer is to be adapted into a full-length feature film.



Once again, the folks at the Onion show their brilliance.

Got this from Beam Me Up.

anti-tax?

Listening to the "cut taxes" crowd is a lot like listening to my kids whine about having to clean the living room. Cooperation and sharing are hallmarks of civilization, and the selfishness displayed in the rejection of participating in this civilization, simply because they want to keep "their money", is one of the primary reasons for the decline of America. If you worry about government waste, the answer is not to cut taxes, but to cut waste.

today's quote

When people ask me why I have to roam,
I say that 90% of all accidents occur in the home

Peter Case, in Never Comin' Home

listen...

... to Kevin Phillips as he tells you that the American Century is done. Why? Because we've become a nation who's economy is based on finance, rather than industry and trade. That, basically, what we produce is debt, rather than goods. This was apparently true of the Dutch and English Empires also - at their ends.
Incidentally, if you click on the image, you can see who owns our asses. Bear in mind, one quarter of that debt money is the Iraq War.

singled out

This post is for The Boy, who really needs to get out of Dallas, and here's a good reason why. Wish I'd had this information back when I was young.

Maps from Who's Your City, via Pure Pendantry, via Blog Around the Clock.

how about now?

Seriously, can we do this yet?
props to Dusty for the video.

covering, my ass

Okay, let's get something straight. There are NO major candidates in the race for president who are planning to offer universal health care. McCain simply calls for more of the same, and his Democratic rivals call for universal health coverage. Coverage means insurance, and while this coverage may bring health care with it, it will do so while making profit for the insurance companies, sometimes at tax-payer expense. It gives us all health care, but with a unnecessary and parasitic middle-man soaking up money that could be used for further health care, or (crazy idea) spent somewhere else. The biggest problem in American health care today is not the health care system, it is the insurance system that skims a profit before paying for that health care system.

Obama's plan.
Clinton's plan.
McCain's plan.

Notice that not one of these people propose cutting the insurance companies out of the middle, yet all talk about "reducing costs". What simpler way to reduce costs than to remove a middle-man which, essentially, is paid to filter out "unnecessary"* health-care.
Look at each plan, and notice their unifying quality: All of them will benefit the insurance companies. Personally, I find this neither desirable nor the job of the government, which for too long has been about helping business at the expense of the People.


* as determined by accountants

geography lesson

I love maps, and this is a very cool one. Predominant religious affilliation in America, by county. Click to see bigger.

props to Strange Maps, via Thrutch, via Gus Van Horn.

monday movie

I've always said that the Republican credo is "Fuck you, I've got my own", but Obama has to be a bit more circumspect, so I guess his take will do just fine.

props to Kel

quote for the day

I wondered... if the people who had moved the jobs, whoever those people had actually been, ever came back to the city now , even to just drive through. And I wondered, when they did, what kind of feelings they might have, how they would explain the situation to themselves in a way that left them feeling like good people. Profit fed the life we lived, I knew that and saw the necessity of it. But those people had made a god of profit, it seemed to me, and according to the rules of their religion, if it was profitable to close the factory and ship the jobs overseas, then it was morally right. In order to keep from feeling guilty, they had, I supposed, devised all sorts of ways of thinking about what they did and didn't do, all sorts of clever rationalizations. It occurred to me that, in a different arena, I might be in the habit of doing the same thing.

Roland Merullo, from Breakfast With Buddha

by request

Gisher has made a request to see some tits, and since I try to be responsive to my audience, I feel I ought to oblige: Here's a picture with some great tits:


And if that's not enough, here's another picture with a nice pair of tits:

thursday matinee

Here's an odd video for your amusement. It contains a bear, which lately seems to be all it takes for me to enjoy it. Dunno why.

top o' the mornin'... or, something like that

I'm putting up a new header for a while. It amuses me to do so.

update: the header is gone now, but it looked like this:

realignment

You know I've been dissatisfied with the blog of late. There's been a kind of emptiness about it lately, hard to define, yet subtly draining me of energy. I thought perhaps it was just lack of sleep, or imagination, but after some thought, I've decided that it's simply that we are all fucked. Fucked good and royally.
The nation is suffering under worst president ever, with only a 1-out-of-5 approval rating, and yet Congress cannot even get their shit together enough to deny him more of the stupid shit which got him (and us) in trouble in the first place. And all my yap-yap-yap comes to naught. Hell, all the yap-yap-yap of everyone comes to naught, even as our president gets booed by an entire ballpark!
So screw it. I'm done.
From now on, this blog will be devoted entirely to breasts. I'll get a lot more hits (after all, 50% of the population loves breasts), which might lead to advertisements (lucrative sex-industry ones - booyah!). I wont be nearly as frustrated, because while politics pisses me off, I love breasts as much as any other red-blooded American man. At least as much.

So that's that. From now on, the only boobs you're gonna see here will be of the non-political kind. So I think it appropriate that I begin with a Demotivator.



ADDENDUM (April 2, 2008):
This was, of course, an April Fools Day post. Much as I appreciate breasts, there's something a little weird about devoting a whole blog to them. Or, at least, it's not a pasttime that suits me very well.
On the other hand, pretty much everything else in this post was actually true.

And I'll leave the demotivator up; I learned my lesson last year about deleting posts.

Plus, it's just funny.