OK, if you’re doing the horizontal mambo with a lady and you don’t realize she’s dead, you’re doing it wrong.

One of three things is going on here:

1. This guy is a sick bastard who shouldn’t be allowed out among normal people.
2. This guy doesn’t know that your partner should at least occasionally move, make noise, or at least breathe.
3. This guys was too drunk/stoned/stupid to tell the difference between a living breathing woman and a corpse.

Good gravy, I hope this bluntskull hasn’t procreated.

If putting crosshairs over states on a poster promotes political violence, then this story can be used to accuse Ted Turner of promoting harm to children with his “24 Hours of Christmas Story“.

Firefighters poured water over his tongue to help free the boy. Apparently, the boy had risen to the challenge from his older brother while they were waiting for the school bus.

OK, Sherman, set the wayback machine to North Hill Elementary in Minot North Dakota, any school day in January, 1978.  At any given moment during recess, there was a kid with a tongue stuck to the metal piping that made up the swingset, the monkey bars, or the merry-go-round.  Minot got  brass monkey cold that winter, and we pretty much used the opportunity to prove we were tougher than the other members of our Lord of the Flies society.  Such challenges as walking barefoot across the playground, giving your coat to the fastest kid in class and chasing him to get it back, or sticking your tongue to exposed metal were common.  Of course, touching a wet tongue to bare metal in -20F weather instantly seals the mouth to the monkey bars.  Normal children would take off their mittens and use their fingers to slowly melt/pry their tongues loose.  Of course, real men, also known as dumbasses, would just tear their head loose.  Yeah, you’d bleed like a stuck pig, but for the rest of recess, you’d be The Man.

Needless to say, a DNA sample of the tissue frozen to these metal bars would show that a young Norwegian kid who would grow up to be DaddyBear was The Man more often than most.  Additionally, I walked barefoot through the snow often enough that whenever it gets well and truly cold my feet instantly go numb.  I never said I was smart. 

Remember of course, that Christmas Story didn’t come out until 1983.  Children, especially boys, will do stupid crap no matter what.  It’s part of growing up.  I’m sure that in Kenya there are groups of boys right now playing “Rochambeau the Lion”.  Kids in India must have something close to “Smack the Cobra”.   Those who survive make the species stronger.

Ted Williams, the homeless man who has become a semi-sensation after a reporter recorded him using his ‘radio voice’, has decided to enter rehab for alcohol and drugs. 

Good for him.

From some of the articles I’ve read about him and the family he left behind for his life as a drug and alcohol addict, he needs it.  Hopefully he will be able to find ways to deal with both his addiction and his reasons for turning to drugs and alcohol in the first place.

I’ve seen a lot of people, both in my personal life and in the news, who have gone into treatment after being caught out of bounds while under the influence.  It is exceedingly rare for someone to seek out treatment when things are going as well as they are for Mr. Williams.  Yes, his adult life up this point has been a trainwreck, but if he takes the assistance that is being offered and stays clean, he may be able to make a better life for himself and possibly help others.

Good luck to him.

Going to bed with a slight tension headache, waking up with a bad tension headache, and having a full blown, lay-down-before-you-fall-down headache by the time you’re out of the shower does not tend to make a good Wednesday.

I’m just now starting to feel human again.  How people who have migraines all the time stay functional is beyond me.  Thank the Lord for aspirin, caffeine, and rest.

One of our Kentucky legislators has apparently run out of things to do.  She wants parents whose children will be visiting the Capitol Building on school trips to sign slips acknowledging that there may be guns there.  She’s worried that a shooting like the one in Tucson may happen around all of the politicians in Frankfort, and she wants parents to worry even more about their children.

I’ve got news for Representative Marzian:  Children from Kentucky are in places that have guns in them all the time.  Every time they see a police officer, he has a gun.  Every time they go to the mall, there are CCW holders or open carriers there too.  I’d bet that everywhere in the Commonwealth that isn’t specifically spelled out in law as being off limits to firearms has someone, sometime, carrying a gun in it.

Here’s a clue:  All of the children at the mall in Louisville, specifically the Apple Store, The Disney Store, Dicks Sporting Goods, and Panera Bread, last Friday afternoon were around a a gun.  At least one of the people carrying a gun made goo-goo eyes at a cute baby, chatted with a store clerk about the Toy Story franchise, and looked at workout clothes without negatively impacting the little children.  That evil revolver just sat in its holster and didn’t jump out and run amuck, and neither did the gun’s owner.

So before Representative Marzian tries to freak out the sheep in Kentucky, she should apply just a tad of common sense.  Children are safely exposed to guns, both concealed and openly carried, every day and their little psyches aren’t bruised.  And all of those people carrying guns seem to have acted like grown-ups up until now.  Don’t add one more reason for non-gun people to fear hand-crafted lumps of metal.

Well, they called school in Louisville three hours prior to the first snowflake falling, but we got about 3 inches of snow this morning.  Guess I’ll give the school administration a pass on this one.

I’ve been indulging Girlie Bear and BooBoo with movies and TV today.  Girlie Bear did have some homework, so she’s doing that now that Boo’s down for his nap.  Guess I’m not indulgoDad after all.

I’ve spent the morning drafting a PERL script over our VPN in vi.  Haven’t done that in a while.  I didn’t realize how spoiled I’ve become with graphical editors.

The wind is picking up, so I’ll probably see some actual drifting of the snow.  It’s cold enough that it’s breaking up into sugar snow as the wind drives it.  Good sledding snow if we get enough of it.  Not so good for snowmen or snow balls.  If school is called again tomorrow, I may just take a personal day, bundle up the kinder and take them sledding at the park.

Dinner tonight will be another whooped together pot roast.  Beef roast, chopped onion, half a bag of russet potatoes, one Sam Adams Winter Porter, a can of beef broth, and a two pound bag of baby carrots in the crock pot on high for 8 hours.  Just what the doctor ordered on a cold and snowy day.

Tonight’s entertainment will be a cheery fire, a cup of cocoa, and watching the cable guy come out to replace the digital cable box that got fried when we had our power issue last week.  What a rocking, swinging life I lead!

If you’re snowed in, rained in, or flooding, stay safe.  I’m gonna go cuss at my xterm emulator some more.

Observe, overreact, destroy, apologize. – Weerd Beerd

I’ve had a hard time with the way the Tucson shooting is being used in the media, both conservative and liberal, to wave the bloody shirt at the other side.  The shooter seems to have been an equal opportunity whack job.

Tam does a good job dressing down those who immediately assume that the perpetrator is someone from the opposite side of any issue.

Deebow over at Blackfive does excellent work in arguing that political speech didn’t make the troglodyte who shot a Congresswoman in the head and then spray a crowd.

As for me, I want to see the wounded healed, the dead buried and mourned, the families comforted, and the monster who did this prosecuted.  If there was a larger conspiracy, I want it tracked down and obliterated.  But I refuse to blame anyone other than the man who pulled the trigger for the death and suffering he caused.

Part of the responsibility entailed in adulthood is taking responsibility for your actions, and holding others responsible for theirs.  Nowhere in there does it say you get to blame a third party in order to score political points.

Dear Intellectually Dishonest Jackhole,

I would like to thank you for the last decade of self doubt and recrimination.

My oldest son was diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome in 2001.  Like parents everywhere who are faced with an autistic child, even one who is as high functioning as Junior Bear, his mother and I looked for a cause of the issue, partly to try to prevent it from happening to the other children, but also to examine our own actions.  I have walked around for the better part of a decade blaming myself for insisting that Junior get each and every inoculation that is recommended for children.  When he was born in 1992, I followed the directions of our pediatrician, and let her give him four and six shots in one day in order to keep current with all of his vaccinations.

When Junior was diagnosed with an Autism Spectrum Disorder his mother, my ex-wife, immediately deflected all blame onto me, and I accepted it.  I put up with a lot of behavior from Junior that may or not be related to Asperger’s at least in part because I blamed myself.  If vaccinations were to blame for at least some cases of autism, then I had to take that hit.

When my other children needed vaccinations, I spaced them out, and limited them to those shots that are required by law.  While we were never behind on vaccinations, this spacing out put gaps in the protection that vaccinations were designed to give.  This added a small risk of preventable disease to our children.  I was not wholly convinced that vaccines would cause autism, but I was being cautious to a fault in order to minimize any risk of autism.  Luckily, my children were not afflicted by the preventable childhood diseases, but thousands of other children were not so lucky.

A couple of years ago, your theory about the link between vaccinations and autism was called into question, but it was more of a methods and conclusion quibble.  I was still careful due to my fear of making the same mistake twice and possibly condemning another child to autism of any kind.

Now I find that it wasn’t your methods and conclusions that were faulty.  Your entire endeavor was a fraud from the beginning.  You started your research with a conclusion and constructed ‘evidence’ to support that that conclusion, even if you had to fabricate it out of whole cloth.

Thanks to you, an entire generation of parents and their children have been tempted to either delay or totally skip out on vaccinations under cover of ‘science’.  Illnesses such as measles, whooping cough, and mumps, which were extremely rare when I was growing up, are back with a vengeance.  Some have been so convinced by your snake-oil that they still tilt at windmills to keep children from getting the vaccinations that they need to prevent horrible diseases.

You are a fraud, and a cheat.  Your ‘research’ has led directly to suffering and death for children, and for that I condemn you.  I hope that for the rest of your life, you reflect on the suffering you have caused to families across the globe.  I hope that some day you wake up from your self-centered stupor and realize just how much damage you have done.

Since our “dusting” turned into almost two inches of drifted snow this morning, we set the dogs and kids loose in the back yard to play for a while.  Irish Woman took some really great pics and here are my favorites:

Boo and Girlie Bear sweep snow off the deck of the slide.  Notice the cunning hats.

Boo realizes he should have put on chains before taking the car out of the garage this morning

From left to right, Girlie Bear, Shadow, Bluegrass, and Little Bear

Boo feeds Shadow one of many handfuls of snow