My Blog's Future

I'm considering making some big changes to this blog. The first would be cosmetic: I'd get my own domain. The second would be substantive. I'd refine my content and probably split the site into two separate blogs, a serious one and a non-serious one. The serious one would include interesting news updates, political commentary, and useful resources. I'd also probably expand into giving financial advice, since it seems to be in high demand these days. The second blog would be the funny stuff (the links, the quotes, the stories, and the rants).

It would allow me to control the content better, and I could put up other pages on the domain. I could also set up message boards, post files for download, and shamelessly self-promote. Plus I'd get my own e-mail address at my own domain. Awesome. But regardless of location, my wit charm will remain unaltered.

But a blog is useless if no one reads it, and since I only started blogging at the insistence of my eventual readers, I'll leave it to you. Should I try to make things bigger, better, stronger and faster? Or should I keep it as the quaint little diversion with which you're familiar and comfortable? Feel free to weigh in through any convenient medium (comment section, IM, e-mail, etc.).

Merry Christmas to all my readers who celebrate it. As for me, I'm celebrating the fact that I can now go into a store without hearing "Sleigh Ride." I will miss the Entenmann's Holiday Popems though. 'Twas the season for deliciousness.

If anyone would like to give me an annual performance review as a blogger, please leave your suggestions and feedback in the comments. If there's anything you want more or less of, I'll try to accommodate.

My Future - Update 1

John Kanzius, the inventor from Erie, Pennsylvania, has made a deal with researchers at Pennsylvania State University. Dr. Roy Rustrum, head of the Materials Research Laboratory, will begin studying Mr. Kanzius's amazing salt-water burning invention. He was very impressed by the initial results John had achieved working out of his home, and is expecting a scientific "gold mine."

I'm very excited to see the research from, and eventual commercial applications of, this device. Years from now, I hope people won't speak just of the work of Mr. Kanzius and Dr. Rustrum, but refer to the path down which they're starting as a course all of humanity followed. I expect (or at least hope) textbooks will one day refer to "mankind's struggle to turn one of the most plentiful natural resources on Earth--saltwater--into fuel" as "one of the most significant achievements of the twenty-first century" which "transformed the geopolitical landscape." I can see this saving lives, bringing everyone who wants to be connected into a global community, and allowing us to take significant steps towards achieving our potential as a species. I may be overstating things, but if ocean water can become a source of energy, who knows what our limitations are?

And it will have all started with the humble John Kanzius, who--still thinking of the little kids he met going through chemotherapy--plans to spend his spare time, and any profits from this device, working on using the same machine to help cure certain types of cancer.

For a more newsy update on John and his machine, go here.

My BaconSalt

http://www.baconsalt.com/

Chuck just showed me this. It's salt that makes everything taste like bacon. It comes in three flavors (original, hickory, and peppered). And it's kosher.

While it's not available in Pennsylvania stores yet, you can buy it online from anywhere. They also sell BaconSalt related merchandise, and all the proceeds go to Mercy Corps. Nice people, those BaconSalt guys.

It's a Jim Gaffigan dream come true. If anyone tries it, feel free to send me your comments (or post them here).

My Voicemail Messages

Taking a break from the political, for my more apathetic readers, I'd like to go on a small rant about people leaving, as Kevin James says, "long ass boring messages on my machine." I get the worst voicemail messages sometimes.

But today was the worst. I got a really unbelievably long message that included 61 seconds about leftover balloons and if I wanted them. Later I realized the woman leaving the message was asking if my KIDS wanted the leftover balloons from the wedding this past weekend.

Seriously, people, if you don't have much to say--or anything at all to say--say it quickly. Also, if you don't know me, don't leave messages on my machine. And lastly, please don't start the first 10 seconds of a voicemail with the tail end of a conversation you're having with someone else. It confuses me to no end, because I assume--perhaps erroneously--that things you say to my answering machine are for my ears and in some way pertain to me.

I'd like to take this moment to thank Sergeant Trouser (a new pseudonym for this blog) for leaving an interesting message on my voicemail. If only more people could be like him. This was his voicemail message, and the rest of you could learn a lesson in being interesting from him:

"How DARE you not pick up when I call!! You had better be either (a) having sex, (b) talking to George Lucas or (c) doing something incredibly important for your boss. I understand not wanting to get fired. But if it's anything else, I'm going to be SEVERELY disappointed in you."

(Editor's Note: I don't have kids, and I didn't attend a wedding this weekend.)

My 2008 Presidential Possibilities (Part 2)

Part 2 - Why the leading Democratic presidential hopefuls are essentially unelectable, or at least would be if we had anyone good running

Hillary Clinton (polling at 39% down 11% in the last month) - This is the easiest one to figure out. She's a fraud-committing carpet-bagging penisless shrew of a senator, all of which spell doom for a presidential hopeful. (Fraud = Whitewater, Carpetbagger = Arkansas to NY just to get a senate seat, penisless = being a woman hurts more than people will ever admit to a pollster, shrew = she's not likeable at all--meanwhile people like Bush campaign essentially on being likable, and finally senator = she'll have trouble running against a former governor or someone with executive branch experience). And this is even before we get to her issues, and lack thereof. Aside from her healthcare plan, which is just like Edwards', she's waffled, dodged questions, and done so much not to piss people off that she's pissing people off.

Barack Obama (polling at 24% without significant change) - Unfortunately, and I hate to say it, his biggest weakness is his middle name: Hussein (I don't think this makes him unelectable, but it hurts his chances in today's environment against a white Republican governor). Every attack ad will end with something like "Barack Hussein Obama: Wrong on [issue], wrong for America." What his biggest weaknesses SHOULD be are: (a) that he's a young guy in the middle of his first term with no experience and (b) that he opened his mouth. Let me explain (b) a little bit, because it's why I need to take back my endorsement of him. Back when everyone sucked and he was neutral, I was pulling for him because I liked his fashion statement. I like the no-tie look. I'm trying to help him bring it back. We shouldn't care what people wear, or how they look (all this crap about "looking presidential" makes me lose faith in democracy). But then he had to start talking, and he lost my support when he proposed his healthcare plan. He has a REALLY dumb idea. Make affordable coverage universal but not mandatory. This means that it punishes people who do what people should do, and get insurance. It rewards people who don't have insurance, because they can always get it later when they get sick. In fact, it creates an INCENTIVE for insured people to drop their insurance, knowing they can just sign up for it later when they get sick. The idea of insurance is we all go on it, share risk, hope we don't get sick, and have a cheap safety net if we do. This isn't that.

John Edwards (polling at 15% without significant change) - I have to say, right now he's looking the best to me (of everyone polling above 4%). He's too closely tied to lawsuit happy trial lawyers, and should but won't support a federal-level malpractice tort reform law (which would be huge in PA, a battleground state, and serve to distance himself from that bad image...which I actually pointed out to his campaign...they responded by spamming me). He's not the sharpest tool in the shed, and throw in the fact that in the last election he was the Vice Presidential loser...and he's looking like a handsome up-and-coming youngster, who should still be playing JV, pulled off a shallow bench. He still lacks presidential gravitas.

Right now, though, he's got my vote. I'm actually considering of switching party allegiances (I'm currently registered Republican) to vote for him...in addition to sucking the least, his healthcare plan is pretty good. Also, he has a positive message that I think would be therapeutic for the country. Despite his notable shortcomings, and my assessment that in any other year he'd be pretty much unelectable, this time he's got a shot. And I think we should give it to him. He might make something of it, while the others seem intent on squandering their opportunities in exchange for political positioning.

My 2008 Presidential Possibilities (Part 1)

A number of people have asked me why I am not only disappointed with the field of presidential hopefuls, but feel that many of them should be considered by voters to be "unelectable." And I believe that if either party had decided on a strong candidate, many of the other party's candidates would immediately seem unviable. It's the fact that both parties seem to want to nominate a candidate with extremely unpopular traits that makes them able to do it.

Now, ideally a situation like this would be good for the voters. We could get a superstar with one or two things that don't play well in the press and normally would label the person as "too risky." But instead we're getting fundamentally flawed candidates inferior to the fields in any primary I've seen in my lifetime.

Let's go through it candidate by candidate. The numbers I'll be using are from a recent USA Today-Gallup poll, and carry a 5% margin of error.

I'll just do the Republicans for now. I'll handle the Democrats in a later post.

Rudy Giuliani (polling at 25%, down 9% in the past month) - Despite being the front runner, the Republicans should know better than to nominate him. He has plenty of skeletons in his closet, ranging from the serious to the wacky (like the time he floated the idea of forcing homeless people onto old retired cruise ships and sending them south for the winter). And The Onion was right; he'd essentially be running for president of 9/11. His policies are poorly thought out, and like most of the candidates, seems to be a Bush clone on a lot of policy issues.

Mike Huckabee (polling at 16%, up 10% in the past month) - Despite the meteoric rise of this uber-religious zealot from Arkansas with what I personally think is a fantastic record on education, there is the problem of him being the uber-religious zealot from Arkansas. Furthermore, I suspect there should be some serious doubts about his ability to handle foreign policy or relate to people who aren't religious white Christians. And lastly there's the problem of being a Bush clone on a lot of policy issues.

Fred Thompson (polling at 15% without significant change) - As the Capitol Steps said of a potential Thompson-Clinton race, "Law and Order is no match for a Desperate Housewife." He'd be an actor as a president, delivering other peoples' speeches, ideas and plans. He'd be a party puppet, and lack not only the gravitas we should require of a president (and that we have sorely missed the past 7 years) but also the trust of the people. I can't think of a single original idea that's come from him. In addition to being a Bush clone on a lot of policy issues, he's filled in the rest of his platform with smaller cloning operations.

John McCain (polling at 15% without significant change) - If he had stuck to his image of being the common-sense loving self-made man from the school of hard knocks (aka POW camp) who answered to no authority but his own morals and conscience, he'd have a shot. Voters wouldn't care that he's been about the third most conservative voter in the senate for most of his career there; they'd remember the few high profile issues on which he diverged from the party and turned into political capital and trust. And he's also the only candidate who seems to value national security over looking tough (such as his position on torture, which he admits is not a reliable means of extracting information while hurting our efforts to get other countries to extradite terrorists to us so we can ask them questions in the first place). BUT, he had to declare himself to be a "Bush Republican" making him, yup, you guessed it, just another Bush clone on a lot of policy issues.

Mitt Romney (polling at 12% without significant change) - Though I admire his views on religion, and think that the separation of church and state should be in our hearts and minds as well as our laws (after all, if we demand a specific faith from a candidate we're just asking to get lied to a lot), I haven't heard him make sense on any issue yet. Also, where's his base? His only qualifying experience is in a state that's in a region that has very little shot of voting for him. In a normal year, the Republicans wouldn't dream of running a Mormon who didn't have anything really original to say anyway. His unelectable attributes stand out while his party-line attributes make him just another Bush clone on a lot of policy issues.

And what's wrong with being a Bush clone? How about the fact that this past month his approval rating has skyrocketed to all of 37%, and his approvals haven't been higher than his disapprovals in well over a year (maybe longer; I don't have data on hand going back that far).

No other Republican is polling above 4% at the moment.

My Schoolbus Seatbelt Law

So the Philadelphia City Council just passed a law requiring seatbelts on school buses. It sounds like a good idea, but it's really a waste of their time and a huge waste of money. If the Inquirer would ever print anything I had to say, here's the letter I'd write:

The City Council's school bus seatbelt mandate is a political move that does nothing for the safety of our city's schoolchildren.

A ten year study showed that there are, on average, 10.2 school bus passenger deaths per year in the entire country. Furthermore, the design of school buses makes fatalities most likely to occur in accidents which tip buses over--which is more uncommon in urban Philadelphia than on an average bus route. Meanwhile a 2002 study by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration found that even seatbelts which include shoulder straps, when misused (as many young children will do by simply putting the shoulder strap behind them), can increase the risk of injury in a crash (especially to the abdomen and neck).

It's politically popular to get kids to buckle up, but with all the dangers facing our children, when kids are more likely to get killed walking to school than taking the bus, how can this possibly be a priority? How can this be the best use of limited resources to protect kids? I hope when the new administration begins, the council can start focusing on actual problems instead of handing down useless unfunded mandates.

My Elementary School Lunchroom

I'm really hoping local news got this one wrong.

In a rare bout of usefulness, local news actually brought something to my attention that I was interested to hear. In the current debate in Congress regarding a national law limiting the degree to which American public schools can offer unhealthful choices to children, on the table is the idea that only diet sodas will be permitted--not regular sodas. This raised an eyebrow of mine, because the health risks associated with diet soda have long been believed by the scientific and medical communities to outweigh the gains of reduced calorie and sugar intake.

Diet sodas contain aspartame, a chemical about which we know little, but what we do know is almost all bad. Aside from being a calorie free sweetener, there's evidence to suggest it does everything from cause cancer, contribute to memory degradation, stunt development, and--ironically for the dieters--increase appetite. This is on top of a myriad of lesser health effects that we don't want plaguing our children as well (such as headaches and irritability).

I'm going to do a little more research, and if I'm still not satisfied, write my congressman and ask that he bring this issue to the attention of the debaters. I'd ask my reader(s) to mobilize and do the same if they care to.

That said, let me shift gears for a moment and praise the good parts of the bill--mainly the spirit of it.

Mandating good nutrition in our public schools is a great idea. It instills good habits early, and promises to be a national blessing. It will help fight our nation's obesity epidemic (as named by a surgeon general). It will save money on national healthcare expenditures in the long run. It will reduce the rates of everything from diabetes to heart conditions. And if done right, it can educate the next generation, who will in turn do an even better job raising their children.

It's important to note here that the ban would be on school-provided junk food. Parents still have the final say, and can send little Sally to school with a pound of gummy bears for lunch (I ate that for lunch once, by the way, and had a tummy ache later). But the schools couldn't aid and abet minors damaging their bodies through poor nutrition.

There's also a strong legal argument against the naysayers, the ones who say that this would be an infringement upon individual rights. And it comes in two parts:
1) These children are minors
2) When they are in public school, the schools have a fiduciary duty to take care of them

A fiduciary duty is the highest legislated ethical standard you can find in every day life. It essentially means the schools have a responsibility to give their students the same level and quality of care that a parent would. Essentially it's the legal equivalent of "treat these kids as you'd want to be treated were you in their position." Now that doesn't mean schools should be instilling religious values or disciplining children for falling asleep during grandma's 90th birthday party. But it DOES mean that they have a LEGAL obligation to not harm the kids and take every reasonable precaution to prevent harm from befalling the kids under their care. And with all the evidence regarding the effects of junk food, schools not only have every right to make sure that they're not providing the kids soda, chips and candy to gorge on, but some could argue they have the legal obligation as well. And this would be congress recognizing that, and making it nation-wide.

My Review of Bender's Big Score

At long last, Futurama has returned! In a feature-length straight-to-DVD movie (which will be chopped up and modified to make the first four episodes of the comeback season), the best TV shower ever has limboed out of retirement and into our hearts. Go to hell, Grey's Anatomy!

Bender's Big Score was to fans as a breath of fresh air is to a guy trying to set the world record for consecutive seconds spent underwater. Having already seen it thrice, I consider myself a competent, albeit biased, reviewer.

OK, so I tried writing a review and it was so ridiculously long I figured no one would read it. So I'm going to condense it to bullet points:
-Musical numbers were weak
-Subplot with Hermes was a little more involved than necessary
-Plot was complicated enough to deter new or unintelligent viewers (not a problem for yours truly)
-The time travel was very clever, and--as they claim--paradox free. There were a couple of inconsistencies with previous glances through time, though most are easily explained with a simple 5D Space-Time model and the assumption that the time code had the ability to jump through a 5D plane, not just along a 4D line
-The Chanukah Zombie, voiced by Mark Hamill, needs more screen time. Brilliant!
-Many of our favorite characters return
-The commentary, which ranges from very subtle to hit-you-over-the-head is relevant, insightful, and funny
-Most underrated line: "I can wire anything directly into anything! I'm the Professor!"
-Longtime fans will be quite pleased with all the things that get explained
-It's as touching as it is funny
-While not exactly like the original series, due to the different format (movie vs. episode) and fewer writers (1 main writer as opposed to a team of 6), it was enough like the original not to disappoint--and to make fans like me squeal with delight...metaphorically speaking of course.
-Fry's more like me than I thought, or maybe he's more like I want to be than I thought
-I can't wait for the next one