Kentucky recently enacted a new sin tax on tobacco and alcohol. It’s easy to get new taxes on stuff like that, so they went for our vices.

Now, one of our elected representatives has suggested that the revenue from the tax on alcohol should only be used in counties that allow the sale of alcohol.

You see, even though prohibition has been gone for over 75 years, a lot of areas of Kentucky still don’t allow alcohol sales in any form. Interestingly, a lot of distilleries of bourbon are located in dry counties. And all of these dry counties, which do not contribute to the revenue from alcohol sales, get a fair share of the funds from these taxes

Anyhoo, it seems fair to me that if you make it a point to not allow the activity that raises revenue, you shouldn’t get money out of that activity.

What say you?

Well, it’s been a pretty good weekend.

Friday night was spent just relaxing. After I took Girlie Bear over to her mothers house for the weekend, Irish Woman and I spent a little time talking and then hit the sack early. We’ve both been on pager support this week, and we were bushed.

Saturday, we spent the morning doing a lot of housework. With us burning wood in the fireplace more, the house needed a good dusting, scrubbing, and airing out. Irish Woman went to get her hair done, and Baby Bear and I met her for an early lunch afterwords.

Saturday night one of the kids’ aunts came over and sat with the baby while Irish Woman and I went out for an actual adult dinner at an actual sit down restaurant. We very rarely get a babysitter, and dinner was wonderful. Hint to Louisville diners: If you want to be seated at 7:30, make 7:00 reservations. We capped off the evening by visiting two of our friends for a couple of hours.

I got Irish Woman flowers delivered at her office and a nice card for Valentines Day, and I payed for her day at the stylist. For me, she got me a new Wii racing game and found two of the Wii Wheel attachments. We played it a bit this afternoon, and had a blast.

This afternoon, Junior Bear and I went down the street with the truck and picked up a load of wood from a downed oak tree one of our neighbors was cutting up. We’ll go back and get more at some later date. It’s nice having a working truck again.

It’s been a great weekend and hopefully this bodes well for the week.

Next weekend, a bunch of my friends and I are going to go to a local range for a mass shoot-em-up. Really looking forward to that. We haven’t done one of those in almost a year.

Great Balls of Fire!

Residents of The Great State of Texas are reporting seeing burning debris falling from the sky, and possibly making it to the ground.

Consensus at the moment is that these lights in the sky are pieces of the two sattelites that collided earlier this month.

If pieces are making it to ground, how long is it until someone’s house gets hit? And you thought tornado season in Texas was bad.

And you know that eventually the news will feature an interview with a local resident, who while being a wonderful person and an expert in his or her profession, isn’t what we would call a great public speaker. The interview will come down to “I seen it, it come down over there in that there goat pen”.

You ever notice they never ask the surgeon or lawyer what happened?

UPDATE: Opinion is now that the fireball was caused by a meteor. Still, I’m sure they didn’t get the local judge to comment on it in front of the news camera.

to vote for Dianne Feinstein? This ignorant wench should be dipped in honey and left for the bears.

This week, she decided to let slip that American Predator drones may be based in Pakistan. Remember these are the aircraft that are being used to strike targets inside Pakistan.

True or not, it’s caused quite an uproar with our semi-ally Pakistan. We’re trying to prop up that government because it’s better than the alternative. We may or may not be basing aircraft in the country that we are using to strike at targets in Pakistan. And of course, these airstrikes are very unpopular in Pakistan.

So of course, you announce your belief that we’re hitting Pakistan with aircraft based in Pakistan during an open session of your congressional committee. And then you seem shocked that Pakistan and its populace might have a problem with this.

Nothing like throwing a hand grenade in a hen house. Especially if you’re a twit from the Bay Area who should have been strangled at birth in order to save us all this trouble.

Well, finally got the time and the correct part, so I took a few minutes to put the new throttle position sensor on the truck. After getting everything put back together, the truck fired up and ran no problem.

I can’t say it’s fixed, because it still has a pretty bad power steering fluid leak, but that should be pretty easy to fix. But then again, nothing is easy.

I work on motors and such by a rule that I learned from a mechanic I knew in the Army. “No equipment is right. There are only three states for equipment to be in: broken, fixed, and !*#%’d”.

Right now, the truck is still in the ‘broken’ category due to the leak, but she runs. Eventually she’ll be fixed.

Saw this at the Survival Blog on how little time it takes to acquire goods now than it did in our ancestor’s time.

The author discusses how much less time and effort it takes to make the money to purchase some grain than it would if he had to grow it himself. He also talks about how dependent we are on powered tools and equipment to produce what we need and want.

I work in IT, and from where I stand, computers are the ultimate labor saving device. What it used to take an accountant days to do in ledgers is done in a spreadsheet in minutes. Timetables for shipping and trains used to be done by hand and took months to work out properly. Now we can schedule airlines and trains on-demand every day.

I watched some video on the news tonight about the economy, and they showed the line at an automobile factory. Even in the parts that aren’t fully automated, they were using motorized tools to lift, place, and weld the cars together. Even 50 years ago, this would have mostly been done with hand tools and non-powered lifting equipment.

On the other side of the coin, when I was a child I watched our local newspaper in Smalltown, North Dakota, literally cranked out on a hand-powered press that used metal type that was set by hand. My grandmother’s attic and garage were stuffed with 100 year old hand, garden, and farm tools. All she needed was a couple of horses or oxen, and she could have run a farm in the same way her father did at the turn of the 20th century.

I think we lose something when we fail to realize just how easy our life is today when compared to the past. A message to family in California is delivered instantly, where it would have taken over a week only 20 years ago. I can fly to San Fransisco in the space of an afternoon, where it took months to get there before the Trans-Continental Railroad was complete, and it still took a couple of weeks then.

If I want to construct something for the house, on the rare occasion that I don’t just buy it, I use power tools and store bought lumber. The shelves I built in the baby’s room would have taken a couple of weeks to make if I’d had to go out to the woods, select and fell a tree, make the lumber by hand, and then construct and trim the shelves using hand tools.

While I’m not planning on the economy or our society to collapse completely, I enjoy learning how to do things by hand. I just can’t imagine trying to keep up our standard of living if I had to grow/trap/hunt all of our food and process it, then find time to gather materials and construct everything we need.

Here’s another winner reported by the Washington Post via Dvorak:

A 4th grade teacher in Ohio was busted recently for prostitution. She allegedly used a school computer to set up a rendesvous via email, and took sick time to go to her illicit second job. She then got busted by the county sheriff’s office.

I know teachers don’t make a fraction of what they deserve. They do a very important job, work long and weird hours, and usually have a hard time making ends meet. But come on!

She’s been an educator for 13 years. I find it hard to believe that she couldn’t find a second job doing something a little more legal.

And the school is having to bring in counselors to explain what’s going on to her young students. No ten-year-old needs to learn that their beloved teacher has been prostituting herself out in between grading math tests and preparing for the big social studies project.

Saw this at iFeminists, and had to read the article.

A Japanese company has put together a video game where the protagonist gets points for stalking and raping women. The opening scenes apparently involves the stalking and assault on a woman and her two teenage daughters.

What exactly is wrong with people? Doesn’t Amazon have people to take a good hard look at the products they sell? It took complaints from consumers to get them to drop the game from their offerings. One wonders how many copies of the game were sold before it was pulled.

I’ve played some pretty graphic video games over the years, but this crosses a pretty wide, bright line. And if this dreck is selling in Japan, I have to wonder what’s going on in the Japanese collective psyche that something like this would be allowed on store shelves.

that the first half of “Full Metal Jacket” is a comedy.

If they’re a veteran, they probably do, but we always get weird looks when we’re giggling like fiends for the first 45 minutes or so of the movie.

Someone actually did a study to find out why a kiss feels so good.

And I wouldn’t be surprised if they didn’t get a nice fat grant to do this.

Hey brainiacs, kisses feel good because your lips are attached to an attractive someone of the opposite sex.

There, now give me most of your grant check.