A Dixie Carpetbagger

Um, yeah, you see, my “easy” classes are kicking my butt.  On the funny note, I just used my new-but-now-well-used Turabian guide to cite a teacher’s lecture in a report… to that teacher.

[Insert "Dat's the Chicago way" joke here.]

Yes, I’m still alive (kinda, sorta, okay I just check my pulse to make sure).  Unfortunately, the institution of my educational improvement is experiencing a wave of sickness, leaving me the only functioning member of three different class groups I belong to.  So, I’ve been doing a lot of writing, just not here.

Oh, and here’s a completely unrelated but awesome music video via MacBourne:

Just on a treadmill… that keeps going and going and going…

12/7/1941 – 9/11/2001

Dates which will live in infamy.

Do not allow the victims of either day to fall from memory, for their deaths served as an alarm call to their countrymen.

AWAKE!  FEAR!  FIRE!  FOES!  AWAKE!

Lately, I’ve found myself saying “Self, there’s no way things could get any more surreal.”  Then things get more surreal, and Self simply shrugs his shoulders.  Lessons to learn?  One, talking to yourself isn’t a great sign of mental stability.  Two, when life hands you apples, make apple juice.

Warning: naughty, naughty language warning.  Viewer discretion is at the viewer’s discretion.

If you don’t recognize the group that did it, I present you with the video that made the rounds a while back.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go put on some Zeppelin and eat cheddar cheese.

…is ridiculous.  Now, there are a lot of things I could comment on here– encroachment of government, the surreality of being fined for one bottle, the irony of a guy who recycles so much being fined while on vacation…  but I’m just going to say that this reminds me of something:

“This stresses the importance of compliance, and not littering.” No shit, Sherlock…

Is it wrong that the first thing I thought of while reading this story was a post-apocalyptic game set in a dystopian future which is controlled by a nanny-state government led by slug-like aliens?

My family came from a diverse set of places on this Earth– if I were to turn over enough stones, I could claim relatives from Scandinavia, Mongolia, the river valleys of Germany, the mountain slopes in Northern Ireland, and the highlands of Scotland.  I do claim these relatives, and I claim their legacy… and their legacy was a search, a struggle to find a free land.

I am an American.  Why would I wear the oppression my ancestors bore as part of my identity?  Should I wear the scars my German ancestors gained from the Romans?  Or perhaps the ones gained by my Irish ancestors under the care of the British?  Or should I simply leave off all hyphens, prefixes and suffixes and say that I’m from here?

(H/T I Own The World)

What happens when hundreds of thousands of conservatives gather in our nation’s capital?  Blood in the streets, violent uprisings, maybe a few thousand simultaneous lynchings?  Nope– this.  (More photos here, here, here and an “aww” inspiring one here.  Newspaper coverage is here, Website coverage is here.)

As you can guess, the numbers the media has been throwing out have been lowballed.  (In the figures by CBS, by a few hundred thousand…)  Compare the crowd at the rally with the crowd from the “I Have A Dream” speech, and then with a few other crowd sizes, and it becomes apparent that there was a good-sized crowd.  (Waiting for somebody on the left to claim it’s all clones.  Yes, we’ve built our own Grand Army of the Republic, lefties…)

Of course, the commentary from said leftists has become… well, to be blunt, the sheep from Animal Farm had more cognitive ability than the commentators I’ve seen so far.  Case in point (via I Own The World):

The damn teabaggers and right wing Beckheads had the nerve to plant people in the crowd with trash bags coordinating cleaning up after themselves. Typical conservative selfishness that stops the union park service from work and earning a living. What right to they have to take jobs from the hard working men and women in DC. Their selfish, self-centered, and malicious manners make me sick.

So… not trashing our nation’s capital is selfish, because we’re somehow taking the bread from the mouths of union workers.  This would explain the condition the Coronation crowd left D.C. in– “Hurricane Latrina.”  (No, I didn’t think that one up.)  Also, I’m laughing at the “hard working” bit.  Then there’s the fact that (apparently) the entire crowd was “white trash,” complete with Igloo coolers and beer helmets.

The funniest part is that the left is becoming unhinged at Beck holding the rally at the Lincoln Memorial on the anniversary of Dr. King’s speech.  “The Ultimate Thumb In the Eye,” they’re saying.  I have to ask… why?  Dr. King was a registered Republican– as was his father– and Republicans were seen as the defenders of civil liberties until 1964, when LBJ signed the Civil Rights Act into law.  (Ironically, LBJ opposed the CRA in 1957, when he was Senate Majority Leader during Eisenhower’s time as President.  You have to make hay when the Sun shines, I guess.)

So, all in all, it was a good rally– no-one got hurt (even though the Black Panthers and Al Sharpton promised they’d show up… ), the place was left in better shape (oh, the poor park employees with nothing to do…), and a large chunk of money ($5 million plus) was raised to help out a very good cause.

Weer’d's wife will be going into surgery sometime tomorrow– give her your prayers and thoughts.

The reason I’ve had a time getting posts up is that the Fall semester has started– and for the first time in… a long time, I have more than one physical class.  And, since my new educational institution doesn’t have the same common sense the old one did*, I’ve been on negative time.

*My old college was set up with a commons surrounded by a large group of class buildings, with parking lots surrounding all these, a ring road feeding the parking lots, then auxiliary buildings around the outside of the ring road.  The new one is a hodgepodge of lots, a trolley system that makes no sense (wait, there’s no trolley stop anywhere near Building XYZ, why is that lot restricted to Resident only?), and a sheer mass of red tape.