It's Happened

"Jumping the shark is an idiom used to describe the moment of downturn for a previously successful enterprise."
from wiki

The currently ongoing discussion of the previous thread reminds me of a bull session I had with a cousin last year.
He was a Woodstock brand, full force member of the 60's hippie movement. Dope smoking, vegetarian, long hair, earth worshiping, peace brother... all of it.
He still is all of 'that', proud of it, and well into his late 50's. And I think he just turned 60.

And you all know my general position on things. I'll let you categorize it, because sometimes I'm not so sure myself on a proper label for me.

The thing is, the two of us are not really far apart in our ideals. We appreciate the same things. We love the same life, and the lives of those who pass through it.

Let's not make our differences too personal.

Just an aside.

Rant

Been working some extra hours that last couple weeks, and fighting off some sort of illness that past few days.
Seriously, got a lot in my head, but trying to avoid getting deep into the latest political stuff. Too many are already addressing that, and I've got a headache from it. In a way, I'm apprehensive about the whole mess, and the whole economic mess as well. Not seeing much of a way out at all.
The future is looking bleak, and I may never find that happy place that I thought I was working toward.

But, I do have an idea to address the coming entitlement avalanche: breeding. We need to encourage, mandate even, the bearing of children.
The more the better.
It's the only way to have the next generations available to support those of us who are going to live to ripe old ages.

Yeah, you collectivist nimrods never thought of that shit, have ya?
Hey, lets just give shit away, and let people live a long time.
"Kids would ruin my career path", or "interfere with my school". "And they are so expensive." you say.

How can you have the cool house in Irvine, the vacations, and the soccer-mom Lexus if you breed more than twice, preferably only one of each.

News for you: Somebody needs to be left behind while you sit on your ass during a twenty-year retirement, never missing an election of course, cause you gotta protect your monthly stipend. Maybe even increase it, if you can.

The more I see, the more I see that I was right when I last said the age-old wisdom were ages old, and wise, for a reason.
Large, self-sustainable extended families, that provided for the elders, usually on property that was owned outright.
Back when they knew that twenty could provide for twenty twice as easy as ten could provide for ten.

It was an honest Ponzi. Where those who gave, got back what they gave when their turn came to receive.

What the hell made anybody think they could improve on that?

Now, we see five kids and say "Whoa, did you know there's a cure for that?"
Maybe we need to return to a time when we see a two child family, and wonder to ourselves "I wonder what their problem is?"

The welfare state depends on it.

Instead, we screw our children not yet born, with demands on their earnings not yet earned. Don't be surprised when the next generation is a batch of slackers.

From an email:
We passed a health care plan written by a committee whose chairman says he doesn't understand it...passed by a Congress that exempts themselves from it...to be signed by a president who smokes...with funding administered by a treasury chief who didn't pay his taxes...all to be overseen by a surgeon general who is obese...and financed by a country that's broke. What could possibly go wrong?

Cheer Up

Over five thousand years ago, Moses said to the children of Israel , "pick up your shovel, mount your asses and camels, and I will lead you to the Promised Land".

Nearly 75 years ago, Roosevelt said, "Lay down your shovels, sit on your asses, and light up a camel, this is the Promised Land".

Now Obama has stolen your shovel, taxed your asses, raised the price of camels, and mortgaged the promised land…… I got so depressed last night thinking about Health Care Plans, the economy, the wars, lost jobs, Savings, Social Security, retirement funds, etc...I called the suicide hotline.
Got a freakin' call center in Pakistan .
I told them I was suicidal. They got all excited and asked if I could drive a truck........

I trust no health plan passed by Congress that exempts the members of Congress from having to participate.

King Of The Wild Frontier

I know that most of you reading this grew up watching at least some of the Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett series.
If any of you were like me, you were a fan of Fess Parker's portrayals of both frontier heroes and probably had a coonskin cap,too. I still have mine (I think), though it doesn't fit any more.

I haven't seen anything in the media, but a phone call today informed me that Fess has passed away.

Genuinely kind and gracious, Fess, though successful, never really went 'Hollywood', maintaining himself as the same decent guy he always was with the old school attitudes of friendship and family.
I had the privilege of meeting him once, about five years ago, when he flew in for for my father-in-law's surprise 80th birthday party. They had both grown up outside San Angelo, Texas and had been buddies all their lives.
And until today, had kept in touch every couple weeks or so.

Thanks for the good times, Mr. Parker, and for fueling this young boy's fantasies and imagination.

Here are a couple windows into a time when televison was good for all ages, and we always knew who the good guys were.

If It Ain't In Rockford...

I spent a whole day in Rockford, MN last year as the esteemed guest of King David and the Royal Family.
A nice, quaint little town surrounded by farmland. It struck me as the kind of place where most folks might already know your business without you having to explain.

There ain't much there, but what you need isn't that far away. I can see myself living there and being quite content with it's content.

Apparently, though, it's just a little too small for some.

Just a Thought

I'm about as fed up with this whole health care thing as anybody. Tired of hearing about, tired of reading about it, tired of seeing protests about it.

But one point about it has stuck in my head lately: as it stands now, this has absolutely nothing to do with health care of any kind for any body. Nope.
Now, it's personal. Pelosi and Reid and Obama do not want the L in their column, and will stop at nothing to enact it, with nobody really knowing what 'it' contains, which is a moot point now, anyway.

Ode to Gino

I, Tully, sing, my blogging compatriots, of Gino.

When I had a blogging career of my own, I was quite the scrappy little runt, getting into fights with whoever would take me seriously, mostly with certain LGBT bloggers, as I would make arguments, for whatever reason, against gay marriage on their blogs.

Gino frequented my own blog long-ago, and was one of the only bloggers who consistently seemed to understand my facetious, underdeveloped intellectual angle. With his wonted good sense, he never took any post of mine too seriously, and he's always had something witty and often even something insightful to say. Here is one having an uncanny ability to cut through bullshit with the cool, unscarring efficiency of a scalpel and with the humorous buzz of an electric carving knife. I don't know that these metaphors are the greatest in the world, but my point is that Gino defies neat little categories in the most delightful of ways. He is comfortably non-academic and far from stupid. He rejects political correctness to a humorous extent, yet I don't believe for a second that he is sexist or racist. The list goes on, I assure you. Indeed, the mark of an interesting person is that he or she puts forth upon this stage of life more masks than can be kept straight by those less-skillful of showmen. And that he doesn't take his masks seriously is what keeps him both sane and interesting. So what can we spectators say but that we like the show, and that we will never understand.

Gino is the only reason I've had anything to do with blogging since the time he started commenting on the output of my then-precarious blogging career. He has encouraged me in this medium not with mere advice, and not just by allowing me to post here, but, as long as I can remember, with his example: cool, smart, witty, snarky, streetwise...none of these and far more describes Gino! Why else continue with such a precarious medium but that it should bear a unique outlet to such a character as Gino's. In short, if he does not love his life at the moment, he ought to know that I, for one, am glad to have him around.

I'm sure most of you remember this milestone procedure from last fall.
Well, just to remind you, it lasted about two weeks before beginning to fade away, and by Thanksgiving my voice was a bad as it was before the procedure.

A few of you I was able to speak to soon after it was done got a glimpse of the 'before' and 'after', and the 'after' was pretty damn good, wasn't it? I was hoping for some more of that this past several weeks as I patiently awaited to schedule a re-do.

Finally, finally, finally... the re-do was scheduled for tomorrow morning, but first Doctor wanted to consult with me one more time (yesterday) to explain stuff further, yadda yadda...
and decided to just go with the larynoscopy (the camera shoved through nostril) portion of the procedure to assess the situation then decided again just what other options may be favorable and less risky.

We already had approval from my insurance for the full injection procedure. This includes the camera thing. The whole process took 10 weeks waiting for approval and then getting a date/time scheduled.
Doctor told his staff to cancel the injection procedure and schedule it again as just the larynoscopy. They did.
Now, we can't get the insurance to approve the latter procedure in time for the appointment slot it took two months to schedule.

So, I asked why they didn't just go with what they had, bill their asses for the whole thing and just do half, claiming we had to abort midway due to complications, like what happened last October?

Yeah, well, too late now.

I'm one pissed off dude.
I mean, so blood spittin angry I can hardly cope.
I'm tired of this bullshit. I want it over.

Beyonce Just Doesn't Look That Attractive Anymore

1 in 6 Americans infected with herpes

Black women had the highest rate of infection at 48 percent

Giving added meaning to the term 'Jungle Fever'.

This Blog is just Begging for an Abortion Debate!

Tully here,
Just a thought to spark some controversy:

If you believe in the definition of a living-thing as a "self-replicating system" which I believe to be a fairly fundamental notion in biology, then doesn't it pretty well follow that a human being is not a living-thing until it cuts off all ties to the umbilical cord?

Or, if you buy Aristotle's definition of human as "a living thing with logos (words/reasoning)" or "political animal" then doesn't it also follow that, if it ain't communicating, it ain't human?

Or, if we take a metaphorical cue from the Gospel of John I, that "1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God; 2 this one was in the beginning with God; 3 all things through him did happen, and without him happened not even one thing that hath happened. 4 In him was life, and the life was the light of men," then, being that the life, the light of men, comes after the word (the beginning), shouldn't we say that the word is the precondition of life, and insofar as a thing lacks a physical means of communicating itself (language) it is non-living?

What does all this mean for the fetus and it's/his/her "right to life"?

Too Many Reservations

RW brings up:
"Why is cable TV basically 600 channels of total shit I have to pay for when I remember there being five channels of free stuff that was a hundred times better? And does the fact I pay for the service now mean I am a complete idiot?"

This problem is layers deep, but there is one layer I do understand, and was explained by the morning drive host on KFI, 640am, Los Angeles. The host: Bill Handel.

All broadcasting, television and radio, survives not just on the viewership-sponsorship relation, but on the over all economic pie.
With the economy down, there are far fewer advertising dollars chasing ever more expanding broadcast minutes. How many ads for new cars do you hear on the radio any more? Or television, for that matter? Those are high dollar items that provided high dollar revenue for broadcasters. Now, they are gone.

With loss of revenue streams comes the loss of the product quality, which is used to generate an increasing revenue stream. It's a vicious circle. Talk radio has been shedding local hosts coast to coast, and filling the time slots with syndicated hosts, who are cheaper to contract.

Television is much the same. We have more channels, chasing fewer dollars. Back when there was only five channels, Ford could run ads on all of them, pay the money, which in turn was plowed into product that competed with the other four channels.

With every channel offering a diluted-by-sheer-numbers potential audience, revenue is further decreased. As a result, we get to watch originally cool shows, like Anthony Bourdain, rerun so many times we get sick of them.

There are 600 frikkin channels! And whatever is on, we've seen twenty-three times already. And there is no end in sight to our collective suffering. It's an agony of riches we only dreamed of when we were kids.

The 'good stuff' isn't free anymore because 'good stuff' is not there anymore. And it was never free. It was free for us, yeah, but was paid for by somebody else. Now, nobody is paying for anything for us, so we get to pay for the shit all by ourselves.

We could stop paying, but then we'd miss out on the 47th showing of 'No Reservations, Iceland."
And we won't let that happen, will we?

They call it the 'Boob Tube' for a reason. We are all guilty as monthly charged.

Bearing Down

Free agency is on, and it's looking like the Bears made some improvements.

Adewale Ogunleye and Adrian Petersen (no, not that AP) are both free agents, and have been replaced with Julius Peppers and Chester Taylor, both better than the man they are replacing.
Ogunleye was good, don't get me wrong, but Peppers brings another level with his freakish package of size and speed.

Now, let's hope they work on the real problem from last year: fixing the O-Line.

The Bears have made some expensive moves that better pay off, or the Jerry & Lovie Show will be soon hitting the road.
And I think that's what is going on.

Now, in response to Guitarman's snark:
I will predict the NFC-N will come down to Green Bay and Chicago this year. Favre will not be back, and without him, the Purple Favres will be just Purple again. No ring for you. Still. And yet, again.

Newfangled Pringles?

Tully brings up the topic of Pringles in a bag.
I did some digging around and found out he's is partially correct. Don't worry, traditional Pringles still come in a can, and always will, I assume.

But, now here's the twist, Proctor & Gamble, the maker of Pringles, decided to capitalize on the brand's popularity with a different kind of 'chip' and calling it a 'Pringle'.

Pringle Selects do come in bags, but are smaller and thicker than the real Pringles, and are offered in various 'gourmet' flavors to appeal to a higher-end snack eater.
To me, that concept is all a bunch of crap.
And I'm dead sure that what is presented as 'sun-dried tomato and basil' flavored Pringles Select tastes coincidentally similar to the 'pizza' flavored Pringle.

As for the Pringles can itself, here's a bit of trivia:
The guy who designed/invented/whatever the Pringles packaging was so proud of his product that after his death, his ashes were interred in a Pringles can, as per his wishes.
Crunch on that next time you eat a Pringle. Personally, I prefer eating them in stacks of four.

In Response: Part I

W. B. Picklesworth asks:
Well, you live in California. Berkley is in California. And student rioters are in Berkley. What gives with them? Are they French youths? The Upper Midwest demands an answer!

We got strange birds inhabiting the campuses of the University of California system. Supposedly, the best and brightest, the future of the state, attend these schools. But somethings are woefully lacking from the entrance exam: mathematics and economics.
That right. Basic math aptitude is not a requirement for admission. They figure that 12yrs of counting up grievances should suffice.

So, when you add mathematical ineptitude with economic ignorance, protests are bound to result.
And why in recent weeks we have seen protests over student fee hikes, cuts in funding, and demands for 'affordable' student housing (in one of the tightest housing markets, Orange County, of all places) along with demands for higher wages and benefits for university janitors. (this is not a joke)

I think it's called 'higher education' based upon what the student body must be smoking.

But the best protests, at least my favorite locally, result when Jews and Arabs think we haven't yet heard enough about the Zionist's ethnic cleansing in Palestine, or the newest Holocaust waged on Jewish women and children in Israel.

A Quick Dump

Hoo-boy, we've been slow here at Shreds House the past couple weeks. I chalk it up to two things: I'm really tired of politics. Not the issues and discussions. I'm always up for that. But it's just the politics that turn me off.

You know... where one side gripes about another side, and even I know, that if the sides were reversed, there would still be the same gripes. Partisan hackery sucks balls. And that is all most blog politics is.

Although, it is amusing watching the Republicans get all cheesed at the Democrat's plan to use the 'nuclear option' to pass health care when their own side was too sissified to do the same thing over something far less, like judge appointments.
Make's you wonder who's really getting punked, don't it?

The second thing: I've been heavily involved in some very serious side business, as I build a mafia family and take over New York and Cuba on facebook.
Soon, not even the Russians will be safe from my criminal predations.

I'm leaving the floor open to you, my illustrious readers who routinely sully yourselves with regularised associations here.

Pick a topic.
Ask a question. I don't care.
Call it. I'll do it.
Or about it.

Oh, yeah...
Did anybody see something about some wetback who is protesting being a wetback, or something like that, and wants to march on Washington to demand that 'wetback' not be used to identify wetbacks? I just caught a whiff of it, so I'm low on specifics.

I guess I need to google that one.

"Why Don't You Commit To Kissing My Ass?"

Is my first gut reaction to facebook friends who sent me links to pages like this one.

Go ahead. Click and puke.

(I sent him a warning that further such invitations will not be tolerated.)