Senator Byrd Smackdown! Smackdown! Smackdown!

The blogger site seems to be having some issues today.  It won’t let me write the post directly on the site so I’m trying to send this one in via email.  So if it looks funny or doesn’t display correctly it’s blogger’s fault.

 

This story is awesome.

 

 Who would have thought the old guy still had this kind of fire still in him.  Regardless of what you think about the Iraq war I don’t think many people will argue that it’s not necessarily going swimmingly.  And now the administration has come back and said it’s going to need another $190 Billion to keep it going.  If we use the McDonald’s scale, that’s enough money to buy every single American a medium sized value meal 3 times a day for over 40 days!   On the beer scale it’s enough to buy again, every single American, 33 cases of Budweiser! 

 

So Byrd is upset.  He knows that with that kind of money he could replace all the teeth in the entire state of West Virginia and still have enough left over to build another Byrd Superdome in every county.  Despite his pork barrel prowess, however, he’s been knows to fall asleep at hearings, give speeches on the Senate floor about his dog,  drool on himself and give people that weird old man eye look.  (Just enlarge the photo on the article page and look at his face.)

 

In a moment of clarity, however, he scolded the administration witnesses yesterday and really got the anti-way crowd into things.  I wish I could have been there to see it for myself.  Banging his gavel and yelling everything 3 times.  Of course, I have to wonder if he was actually doing it on purpose or he regularly talks like that now.

 

Sen. Byrd at Deli:  “I’d like a ham and cheese!  Cheese!  Cheese!”  

Childrens Do Learn

I just love this guy. Good 'ole W is good for one of these at least a few times a year.

I wonder if it was just coincidence that he was on the front page over at the onion today?

Bush Makes Surprise Visit To Work

WASHINGTON, DC— Dressed in a special suit-and-tie uniform, Bush entered the East Room at about 3:30 p.m. and greeted an enthusiastic crowd of staff members.

Has Your Favorite Show Jumped The Shark?

www.jumptheshark.com

This is pretty random. I was just out running an errand and the DJ on the radio was talking about this website. It covers shows that "jump the shark." The history of the phrase refers back to the Happy Days episode where the whole gang is out in LA and the Fonz jumps a shark tank (in his leather jacket) while water skiing or something. It's basically a signal that the show is on it's way down and the creative team is pulling out things that should never be pulled out. Shows that have never "jumped the shark"? According to the site The Simpsons, M*A*S*H, and Buffy The Vampire Slayer.

The Next Season Of 24

I don't in any way condone driving while under the influence. It's a bad bad thing. That said, I just couldn't help myself.... Not bad for Microsoft Paint eh?

Last Soldier Standing

A friend of mine stopped by the house yesterday afternoon. He was just coming from an auction where he bought a couple WW II items which he then resells on Ebay. "And did you know we have a new celebrity here in Charles Town?" he says. Evidently, Ken Burns' new epic series on WWII features an interview with Charles Town's Russell Roper. I watched the first installment last night, but no Roper. The next installment is tonight, but I really don't have time to block out 3 hour chunks every night to watch the whole thing.

So back to our porch conversation on WWII. My friend specializes in combat uniforms. He says they're much more valuable than the dress uniforms. As he explained, "Every Tom, Dick and Harry came back from the war and threw away their dirty, disgusting, blood stained fatigues, but kept their nice and pretty dress uniforms that their wives and girlfriends thought they looked so good in. It's a supply and demand thing. Old dirty combat stuff is more valuable."

He's interested in not only American stuff but also Japanese and German items. "In fact" he says, "...did you know that the last Japanese soldier didn't surrender till 1974!"

"No way." I didn't believe him. He couldn't remember the name. He couldn't remember the island where this guy was hiding out.

He was right. An easy search reveals the story of Hiroo Onoda. It's truly fascinating.

Don't Sweat The Small Stuff

I posted a similar presentation a couple months ago, but here's another one I just got this morning as an email fwd. It's basically the same except with a message behind it. Just remember, if you're struggling with something or you have some problems or challenges that your facing...the universe is so huge that when you step back you are so small that it is impossible to tell that you even exist. I guess that's not very motivating or uplifting...

Try this...God must know you exist and love you because if he didn't then no one would.

hmmm, still not great...

Or this...Horton Hears A Who is REAL! We're all just Who's reaching out for Horton. I like that one. Makes me feel better. Dr. Seuss has a way of doing that I suppose. Anyway, on with the post. Enjoy!

THE UNIVERSE

I CERTAINLY THOUGHT THIS WAS ENLIGHTENING. BEYOND OUR SUN ... IT'S A BIG UNIVERSE.

ANTARES IS THE 15TH BRIGHTEST STAR IN THE SKY.
IT IS MORE THAN 1000 LIGHT YEARS AWAY.
NOW HOW BIG ARE YOU?
------------------------------------------------------------------

NOW TRY TO WRAP YOUR MIND AROUND THIS...

THIS IS A HUBBLE TELESCOPE ULTRA DEEP FIELD INFRARED VIEW OF COUNTLESS
'ENTIRE' GALAXIES BILLIONS OF LIGHT-YEARS AWAY.


BELOW IS A CLOSE UP OF ONE OF THE DARKEST REGIONS OF THE PHOTO ABOVE.


HUMBLING, ISN'T IT?

NOW HOW BIG ARE YOU?

AND HOW BIG ARE THE THINGS THAT UPSET YOU TODAY?

KEEP LIFE IN PERSPECTIVE.
AND DON'T SWEAT THE SMALL STUFF!

"Don't tase me, bro!"

I love what this college student from Florida University said just as he was being hauled out from that Kerry speech. I don't think it gets any better...unless he said "dude."

Of course I don't advise anyone to use this line to keep yourself out of trouble. Evidently as soon as he said it he was promptly tasered. See the whole story here.

Quest For Cyrus

I was wondering the other day what kind of stuff would come up if I did a search on Google for "Cyrus." It's not the most common name in the world although you do hear it once in a while. According to census data there are 10,599 other people in the U.S. with the name "Cyrus." And no one with my last name. Weird. Perhaps I don't really exist. You can check your own name at www.howmanyofme.com

Some interesting results of my search.

1. The number 1 spot goes to the Cyrus Restaurant. Looks like a nice place.

2. Lot's of references to Cyrus The Great.

3. A high end video and audio shop in England called Cyrus Audio.

4. Billy Ray Cyrus.

5. Billy Ray's daughter, Miley Cyrus

6. I'm a "highly scaled enterprise mail system..."

7. A travel agency. Cyrus Travel.

That's all for now.

Internet To The Rescue

In case you didn't already know, famed adventurer Steve Fosset went missing last Labor Day. He took off from some luxury ranch out west and never came back. The government has been looking for him ever since. He was supposed to be flying around and looking for dry lakes where he could attempt his next feat of setting the land speed record. This is the kind of stuff you work on if you're an "adventurer."

But after more than a week and lots of money spent, the government is now turning to you for help in finding the wealthy Mr. Fosset! Yes you, the anonymous internet user. You may not be trained in search & rescue. You may not know what kind of plane he was in. You may not even know who Steve Fosset is. No matter! Uncle Sam wants YOU!.....to use Google Earth to help find Steve Fosset!

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/13/AR2007091302586.html?hpid=topnews

I really hope someone from the internet does actually find him. This person would be famous for about a day or two. They would go on Jay Leno and talk about it. Ideally, it would be some kind of retired guy who just learned how to surf the internet last week from his grandson.

"I was just lookin' at the google thing and thought I saw somthin'."

You just watch. It'll happen.

Architectural Digest

This is the cover for the October 2007 issue which I just got in the mail. See if you notice anything funny about the cover.

The "Architecture Issue"? I asked Liz, "What the h*ll have all the other issues been about!" Oh yeah, ads....and interior designers. Think I'm kidding? This issue has 325 pages. 153 pages are ads which is more content than the magazine usually has. I'm not complaining. There actually are a lot of really neat houses in this issue, but isn't it like Newsweek coming out with a "News Issue." It inspires skepticism.

Jet Pack

Something else from the dusty shelves of my newly cleaned inbox. Sometime this last winter my bro-in-law came to town for a schizophrenia conference. He's a clinical research psychologist who is particularly interested in the brain of schizophrenia patients. "So you're here for conference on schizophrenia?" I asked. "Kind of like a schizopallooza?"

Before taking him back to the airport, we had a day to go and check out the new Air & Space museum out at Dulles Airport. It's a pretty cool place if you've never been with a lot more planes than the Air & Space museum downtown. They even have jet packs you can fly around on. No really, they do. I think the music is that free stuff that everyone puts on their slide shows created on a Mac. It's peaceful nice guitar music. Perfect for pictures of flowers, cute wild animals, sweet old ladies, etc. But jet packs? So I changed the music on the second version to something more suitable for a totally awesome jet pack.

Shhhh....This Is A Library

Last night I started cleaning up my Outlook inbox. I had around 2600 emails in there dating back to the last holiday season. I've seen worse (5 or 6 thousand emails in the Inbox) but it's nice to get it back down to a manageable 400 emails. Emails 2600 down to 1000 are the easiest to "file", from 1000 to today's emails could still be useful, so it's a lot of making new folders and shifting emails. One bonus is finding funny things that have been sent to me by friends that I never took the time to post on my blog. This one is from a couple months ago, so if you've seen it before....watch it anyway and laugh....laughing is good for you.

I'm just wondering....How many emails does one typically have in their Inbox? Does anyone have over 10,000?

Learn Ya Some Market Stuff

A mentor once told me, "If you're going to make your career in the real estate industry you need to subscribe to the Wall Street Journal." So I went on Ebay and got a subscription for a 75% discount over the normal rate. The downside is you have to wait for about 10 weeks before you start receiving it, but it did eventually start arriving and continues to do so 6 days/week.

It's my only daily paper and while I don't get to it every day, I do read it most of the time. However, I have to admit that I don't always understand everything going on in the markets and more specifically, I don't always understand what it ACTUALLY MEANS for me individually. Granted I don't have millions of dollars in the bank today, but I may in the future. And I would like to know how I should be investing cash as my deals reach the end of their life cycle. Which brings me to a discussion I've had recently with my friend and investment partner Tom Harvey. Tom is a retired aerospace industry executive, but has studied and invested in the bond and currency markets for over 30 years.

Tom was telling me on the phone the other day about where the world economy is heading and also about all the information that is ACTUALLY IMPORTANT which no one is talking about in the financial media. Sure, the sub-prime market is failing....sure the credit crunch is affecting real estate markets.....will the Fed raise rates?....won't they?....

All this, he explains, is interesting but there are much more disturbing underlying forces at work which are totally being ignored. Tom then went on to explain that his real desire was to write a newsletter and/or blog that would educate people on how to think for themselves in the modern financial world. I told him that I would be happy to help put together a blog, and now we have http://economyguy.com If you have the slightest interest in money and how it works and what it ACTUALLY MEANS to you, then I highly recommend checking it out. It's now part of my daily reading in addition to the WSJ and I believe that in the short term it will positively affect my own returns.

St. X Prevails

I don't think about my old alma mater very often but this win is really nice to see. They won the Ohio state championship last year and I still keep an article taped to my wall in the office to remind me of my champion roots. Go Bombers!

Cheap Camera Photos

Just some of my other shots from the recent wilderness adventure...

Diversion

Camping Trip

Wow, it's been soooo nice to sleep on a real mattress the last couple days. I found myself last night waking up in the middle of the night and smiling thinking "this is the most comfortable bed in the world..." Actually it's just a regular bed but after sleeping on either the ground or a fold out couch for a week it feels really nice. Back to the post...

So we pack up everything we're going to need for the trip into the mini-van along with all the participants. That's 4 adults, 3 kids, 4 giant packs/bags and a whole bunch of other stuff. I really had doubts going in that it was all going to fit in the car, but somehow Liam figured out a way to make it work. That kid is a genius.


We drove all the way up to Ely (way up in Northern Minnesota) on Sunday and made it to Bill and Jane's place, a beautiful cabin perched up on a hill on a lake just outside the park. It's nicknamed "Best Place On Earth." Bill is a colleague of Angus' from the University of Minnesota Department of Psychology. He examined all of us before we went into the park to make sure we could psychologically handle the extremes of living in the wilderness for 4 days with 3 young children. We failed miserably but decided that since we had spent all this time and energy just packing that we should go ahead with the expedition despite the warnings.

After a wonderful meal and a great game of Five Straight, we spent the night at the BPOE on a fold out before we set out on Monday morning to Lake One, where we would be entering the Boundary Waters.

We saw two park rangers as they were launching from the same point. I said "Hi." They said "Can we see your permits?" And off the rowed into the park to make sure other people had their permits and weren't lighting camp fires. (There was a fire restriction in the park because of draught.) The first thing you learn when camping in a wilderness with 3 small children is that everything takes way longer than you would expect it to. While we were getting stuff into the canoes there must have been at least 10 canoes that came and went in the same time. Luckily we didn't have any dinner reservations that we were trying to meet so it worked out OK.

Bill took this next picture just as we were leaving for our adventure. It reminds me of my ability to make just about anything I sit in to look really small. Notice how the other 3 adults all look like they are proportioned correctly to the canoe and I look like I'm trying to ride in a kid's toy I got at Toys 'R Us. I'm second from the left.


And we were off. In case you've never gone on a canoe/wilderness adventure in the BWCAW what you essentially do is paddle around this series of lakes/wide rivers and fish and/or camp. There are campsites strung out through the park, but they are first come first serve. Each lake may only have 2 or 3 campsites and if they are taken then you have to keep going to the next lake to see if there are any openings. Thus we come to the word portage. It means pick up all your stuff and carry it to the next lake which is sometimes only a few hundred feet away but can be up to a mile. Which still wouldn't be bad if it were a nice smooth trail...which it isn't. It's more like a jagged ankle twisting maze of rocks and makeshift bridges... which sill wouldn't be bad if you didn't have a canoe on your head....which I did. Here's my view of portaging.


Our original plan was to get all the way to Clear Lake and spend a layover day there and then return on the following day. It would involved 3 long portages (each one nearly a mile) and lots of smaller ones. We never made it to Clear Lake.

About an hour after we set out from Lake One the skies started to darken and pretty soon we could hear thunder in the distance. We found a campsite and set up camp and proceeded to get rained on for the rest of the night. Luckily it didn't come down that hard until after dinner so we could at least eat something while we were dry. Typically we would pull one of the canoes up to the camp and flip it over to use it as a table.


The first night was probably the most concerning. The rain fly on our tent wouldn't stay tight and so it would keep drooping down and lie right up against the tent. The ground around us was all pine needles and so the stake wouldn't stay in place which was anchoring the rain fly. At the time I didn't think of using a rock which probably would have solved the problem. Instead I endured what could best be described as slow irritating water torture. I had almost every square inch covered and just as I was about to drift off into much needed slumber a single drop would hit me right in my eyeball....ah the joys of camping in the rain. Eventually I did get some sleep and eventually the rain did stop and the weather was wonderful for the rest of our trip.

The two funniest moments for me happened on our third night. We were on our way out of the park having decided to spend 2 days going toward Clear Lake and then 2 days coming back. This was our last night and the sense of accomplishment had everyone in a good mood. Even the wildlife seemed to come out and greet us. As soon as we pulled the canoes in there were a couple chipmunks that were clearly used to campers and they danced all around our bags and our feet looking really cute. We named one of them "Chippy."

Their scheme worked. Soon we were giving them little crumbs of crackers and they started to become more bold. Jumping up on the logs where we were sitting....jumping up on the canoe where dinner was being cooked....but you still don't really mind since they're so darned cute. All of a sudden Liam (the 3 year old) is highly upset and crying. We go though the normal questions....did your sister hit you?.....did you fall?.....did you spill your drink?.... Through tearful eyes Liam says "Chippy stole my cracker!" From then on Chippy was no longer welcome and we shooed him away for the rest of the evening. (Chippy's a little hard to see in this photo but he is on the lower right hand side of the picture.)


The second funny moment for me was just a normal baby occurrence. I really do look forward to having children of my own, but sometimes I'm really glad I don't have to deal with exploding babies....especially on trail.


The final day we did one more long portage and safely made it back to Bill's house, reloaded the mini-van and headed back to Minneapolis. No capsized canoes...no broken bones...no missing children....and overall a complete success. "We did it!" I exclaimed as I high fived all the kids. Would I recommend this trip to others with small children? Maybe....but only after a psychological exam.

Sympathy?......

I'm sorry. I apologize. I shouldn't be enjoying this so much. If you went to Michigan it's nothing personal, but come on....Appalachian State?!?!