Two-faced advertising

Email advertising from countrywide:

BIG PRINT:
Enjoy your summer even more by taking a little heat off your monthly budget and making sure you have all the funds you need to put your "cool" plans into action! Just think of all you could accomplish with extra money in your pocket!

SMALL PRINT:
Taking out a home equity loan or line of credit may increase the total number of monthly payments and the total amount paid when compared to your current situation.

Too bad people pay WAY more attention to the big print than the small. I hear the print on Foreclosure Notice papers is more small than big.

Root of problem: Man accused of blinding wife with carrot tossed in anger

MONROE, Conn. - A 46-year-old man is accused of assaulting his wife with a carrot, causing her to lose sight in one eye. Roderick Vecsey is charged with second-degree assault and disorderly conduct.

Pamela Vecsey, 46, underwent six hours of surgery after being hit in the left eye with the vegetable Saturday night, but doctors were not able to restore her vision, prosecutor Stephanie Damiani said.

The couple was arguing when Roderick Vecsey tossed the carrot, Damiani said.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/13922513/

In other lame news,

Cops: Man throws knife at judge after yielding hammer, fork, 2 other knives.

YORK, Pa. - The county sheriff has apologized for what he called an "embarrassing and egregious" security breakdown after court security workers missed a knife later allegedly thrown at a judge in a courtroom.

Terry Lee Rehm, 58, was arrested Thursday after authorities said he threw a 13-inch butcher knife at Judge Michael J. Brillhart, who was seated on the bench. The knife went over the heads of several county employees and a defendant and sank into a wall to the judge's left, authorities said. No one was injured.

Also found on Rehm after he was taken into custody were a 4-inch knife, a 3-pound hand-held sledgehammer and a utility knife with a blade, officials said.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/13817324/

umm. Oops.

Making the (viral) email rounds

Got this in my email a few days back and again this morning. A co-worker also got it. I must admit I chuckled, then didn't think much of it, but then I noticed the file name of the picture itself:

"A Child's Last Day On Earth"

and I chuckled.

However, with the little 5 year old missing this week here in Salt Lake, I am certain her parents would choose to have their home, and everything in it painted by hand by their little girl..

But the picture IS funny though....

:)

The Book Of Mormon story you DON'T know...

Saw this elsewhere and thought I'd do my part in perpetuating faith-promoting seminary stories:

Abercrombie and Fitch, of course, were the two older brothers of Nephi in the Book of Mormon, older than Laman and Lemuel, the ones we often read about. Abercrombie (Hebrew for "less is more") and Fitch (Hebrew for "yuck!") were trendy moguls of fashion in Jerusalem and were the reason why the family had silver and gold. Unfortunately, they were not only rebellious, but utterly shocked their parents in the New World by introducing immodest styles for men such as their "Nothing But a Loincloth®" line that became an instant hit with many locals in the hot climate of Mesoamerica. (Scholars to this day fail to recognize that many ancient Mesoamerican carvings and figurines of mostly naked people were actually part of early advertising campaigns for Abercrombie and Fitch's fashion shop and the related businesses spawned by their breakthroughs in fashion.)

Lehi was so disgusted that he burned their beautifully illustrated catalog, forcing Abercrombie and Fitch to start engraving their designs on metal plates which could not be so easily destroyed by fire. Yes, that's where the idea actually got started. Nephi tried to stop their repulsive business by stealing the plates and later realized he could use them for his own record, starting another enduring trend among his people. But Abercrombie and Fitch only escalated their business, drawing upon the shrewd business skills of their brother Laman who helped draw numerous locals and much of Lehi's family into the fold of their scantily-clad customers.

Lehi disowned them and decreed that there should be no mention of those two sons in any family records. And as the current record indicates, tensions between Nephi's group and his more fashion-conscious siblings escalated, forcing Nephi to head north in hopes of living life in a more modest environment. But once a fashion trend starts, it's hard to stop, and soon the land was sprawling with "Lamanites" - Nephi's euphemism for those who dressed with appalling bad taste (staying true to Lehi's command to never mention Abercrombie and Fitch again).

My Thought

It's so freakin hot out. I wish I could wear my sundress and get away with it. WAIT!! was that my "outloud" voice??!!

DELETE DELETE DELETE......

EEEKK!!

uh-oh. Dammit.

The One Campaign

Last year, President Bush pledged on behalf of America that we assist the world's poorest nations. Congress must now honor our pledge by writing the check to fund life-saving programs.

Join me in urging Congress to keep America's promises to the world's poorest nations just one year ago.

G8 leaders promised $50 billion more in effective development assistance per year by 2010. This critical funding means real help for real people, to care for AIDS orphans, give basic education to all children by 2015, and much more. We've made some important progress on canceling debts for 19 countries, but there are many more on the list. In the last year, we accomplished a great deal, but we’ve only scratched the surface.

President Bush requested a $3 billion increase in effective international assistance so that America can keep our promises on track. Currently, Congress is going only about a third of the way to help Africa and the world's poorest nations. Both the House of Representatives and Senate cut around $2 billion from the President's request, putting America's G8 pledges in jeopardy.

The Monday Pessimist

Do you remember the last time you said to yourself, after seeing some heartwarming occurrence, "Gee, that restores my faith in Humanity."

Do you remember that? Remember?

Well, take it all back, because you are wrong. Humanity has one and only one common denominator: I don't like you - I kill you.

With an insurgency in Iraq showing no sign of tiring, and a US occupation showing no sign of intelligence...

to the middle east where different factions of powerful terrorist organizations lob bad things at each other and all the civilians in the way, there seems to be no hope for humanity after all.

So, call in the United Nations Security Council. Yes, that will do the trick.

Seeing comments taped over the last few days, these men are nothing more than flacid wrinkly old men whose words are meaningless, and offer no real substance to anyone in harm's way. They are Pavlov's dogs, who do nothing more than offer old trained rhetorical statements to new conflicts as response to "what we've always said in situations like this", and problems that have been around so long, they're almost older than dirt itself. Almost older than the dirt over which they fight anyway.

RRRIINNGGG!!! Time for food!

Here's to a better Tuesday.

Salt Lake City's cultural community itches to come of age

And Utah's capital knows just what it wants to be when it grows up: Denver.

That was the teaser headline recently in a Tribune article lamenting the fact that because Salt Lake doesn't have an appropriately-sized theater, some of the bigger "broadway on tour" shows won't be stopping in Utah.

Recently, the Soccer Fuster-Cluck had, as an appendage, the construction/renewal/revitalization of a massive downtown arts district in exchange for a Sandy soccer stadium complex that dwarfs HRH Larry Miller's Jordan Commons.

Since that whole thing has been shown to be what it REALLY is - the pipe dream of a silver-spooned and equally silver-toungued Dave Checketts, there hasn't really been much talk of developing a large Arts District like the one Denver has right now. Want to go see Miss Saigon - the original touring production? You'll have to go to Denver to do it. Same with The Color Purple, and several other top-drawer Broadway shows.

Why is that, really? Is it because we don't have a venue that will attract the green-visor-wearing bean counters for these tours, or is it because Salt Lake Valley residents simply won't support something like this? Is it a case of "build it and they will come"?

I doubt it. And here's why. Well, two reasons, anyway.

First, Denver's culture is different from here. There, the median income is higher, the median education level is higher. The higher up you go on these two scales, the more support for arts there is. How do I put this delicately? There aren't enough "cultured" people here whose time isn't tied up with weeknight church activities. By the same token, there are A LOT here who think the motocross event at Rice-Eccles is THE event of the year. You topless-bronco-drivin', beer-from-a-can drinkin, shotgun ownin', overall wearin', no lawnmower ownin', front tooth missin', neighbor's dog shootin' rednecks, you.

Second, a great preponderance of people here in Utah, regardless of income or education, think that high culture is a stake production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, staged in the gym of a local church building, starring the neighbor kids. Seriously.

Here is a description of the Denver Cultural District, showing another symptom of Salt Lake's shortcomings:

The Boettcher Concert Hall hums like a nightclub. Crowds line the lobby, sipping cocktails. Inside the Colorado Symphony's home, audience members tap their feet or wave their hands like a conductor to what is described as hot dogs with salsa - classical music meshed with Mexican mariachi.
Steps away, in the Broadway theater, Jean Valjean mesmerizes the well-heeled masses as he tries to escape Inspector Javert in what is touted as the last national tour of "Les Miserables." When the curtain falls, the fur-clad crowd files past a cabaret, where the college set mulls over a Second City political sendup.

Can you spot it?

It's alcohol. They're called "cocktail" parties for a reason, and the reason isn't some sick reference to the Navy's "Tailhook" scandal of several years ago. It's alcohol because when people put on the good clothes in most other cities, they do so in conjunction with sharing some adult beverages with good friends. We're not talking about a MGD 3-kegger up the road at a place on Frat Row, where you can end up at home without your pants, or any knowledge of where they might be. We're talking about nice drinks in martini glasses, or a Manhattan Dewars, three cherries, rocks (my personal favorite).

In general in this country, when people go out for the arts, they go out for drinks, before or after. That's just the way it is. But in Salt Lake, it is so hard to buy a drink, and further, it's so hard to get alcohol licensing for public venues, that most don't offer it.

Most suits in this valley are threadbare from wear on church pews.

Would "The Color Purple" sell out here? Probably. Would Miss Saigon? Certainly. But what about the OTHER 40 weeks of the year? Is there enough money or time in Salt Lake among those who would patronize these shows, to allow them to patronize other things held there? And what would those "other" things be?

Hmmm. Good questions.

"Four Things" for Friday

4 Jobs I’ve Had:
McDonald's Burger Flipper
Edmonton Oilers Hockey National Anthem Singer - okay, just once, but it was cool.
Technical Writer
Recording Engineer/Theater Sound Designer

4 Movies I Can Watch Over & Over:
Gladiator
Princess Bride
Braveheart
Elf - Just kidding.Really.

4 Places I Have Lived:
Aarhus, Denmark
Regina, Saskatchewan
Victoria, British Columbia
Sherwood Park, Alberta

4 Places I Want to Live:
Bigfork, MT
Summit County, UT
Tuscany, IT
New Mexico

4 TV Shows I Watch(ed) Regularly:
Lost
West Wing
Amazing Race
Arrested Development

4 Highly-Regarded TV shows I have never watched a minute of:
Entourage
Six Feet Under
Grey's Anatomy
The Office

4 Places I Have Vacationed:
Tahiti
St. Thomas
Oahu, HI
Montana

4 Places I would Like to Vacation:
Tuscany
Paris
Australia
Tropical-anything

Favorite Dishes:
Rib Eye or New York Steak, Medium Rare
Home-made hamburgers


4 Sites I visit daily:
MSNBC.com
Marketwatch.com
Google
My blog page


4 Places I Would Rather Be:
Bed
Beach
My back yard, with my wifey
A quiet Mountain Hotel


4 books I've read I'd recommend:
The Fountainhead
Middlesex
The Kite Runner
The Life Of Pi

Put up or shut up...

A day or two ago I made a comment on another blog about the fact that I felt the judge got it right in the suit brought by film directors and producers against "film sanitizers".

I said generally that you don't get to put gym shorts on the statue of David, just because it might offend your moral sensitivities.

A couple of hours later, I got an email from the owner of the blog asking if I would provide a sound bite to that effect for a local radio show on KSL radio. After some initial griping on my part, I decided that if I was willing to share the opinion on someone's blog, I should be willing to say it to a microphone. So I did.

Apparently, the show aired last night between 10 and midnight, and Ethan, over at SLCSpin was a guest on that show, offering other political opinion and observation.

Get Some PAC Money for Pete!!

Pete Ashdown can score some badly needed cash here. Help him out with a vote.

Spend five minutes, educate yourself a bit, and help make a difference:

In May, PAC for a Change community members voted for the Democratic House member and promising House challenger they wanted to support next. Based on your choices, we raised nearly $30,000 dollars for Rep. Leonard Boswell in Iowa and Francine Busby in California.

Now it’s time for the next step. I want to invite you to choose which promising Democratic challenger for the Senate that we’re going to support next. Like before, the winner of our online vote will be featured in a fundraising email to our PAC for Change community. So your vote, and the votes of your friends and family, are critically important.

Click here to read more about each candidate. Then please cast your vote below -- our online polls close at 11:59pm PDT on July 21st!

Candy for all.

I like candy.

Bush Budget Office: The Titanic Has New Lifeboats

Only 296 Billion in deficit, instead of 429 Billion? That's GREAT. Keep it up, fellers.

SLCo to Real Salt Lake:

RSL: Like everyone else, you have to EARN a nice shiny new home.

Old-School Orrin

So, Orrin Hatch is out playing favorites again. Seems to be a passtime with "lifers" on the hill.

Salt lake Tribune reports this morning that Hatch plied some pressure in Dubai after a fellow "musician" was convicted of smuggling cocaine and ecstacy into that country. Hat-tip to Bob the Cookie Monster on the summary:

Some facts about the case:

1) Dallas Austin, an R&B producer from Atlanta, got caught smuggling cocaine and ecstacy from the United States into Dubai, which is located in the United Arab Emerates (UAE).

2) Austin employs entertainment lawyer Joel A Katz, who also represents Senator Orrin G Hatch (R-UT), who is a songwriter.

3) Sen Hatch hired Katz in late 2004. Prior to hiring Katz, Hatch had made less than $25,000 in his 8 years making music, including some questionable sales. In 2005, Hatch made $40,000 from his music.

4) Austin was sentenced to prison for possession on July 4. Shortly after the conviction, Senator Hatch's office was contacted by Austin's lawyers asking for help.

5) In a statement released by the Senator Hatch's office, we learn that the Senator has "good relations with the ambassador and other good people in Dubai." That is believed to be the reason why Hatch was contacted, instead of Austin's own two Senators.

While I was reading that story this morning, my mind went to the story in last Saturday's Tribune of a much more deserving family who came here legally a little more than 10 years ago now, and applied for political asylum through the proper channels. Read the story here, and ask yourself, as I did, where Orrin was in support of one of his own state's hard-working families.

From the story:

"Although Ken got no response to his asylum request for almost a decade because of logjams in California, immigration officials quickly ruled against him on the same day as his July 2000 hearing - 31 days short of his 10th anniversary in this country.
"That was very unusual," Lawrence said.
If Ken had been in the United States a full 10 years before the hearing, he could have applied for legal residency on grounds that deportation would be a hardship on his son, an American citizen."

Head-Strong soccer player

Zinedine Zidane, reputed to be the best soccer player on the planet, when Beckham isn't on the pitch, anyway, carried his team into overtime of the World Cup soccer tourney yesterday. But halfway through the overtime period, he HEADBUTTS a dude from Italy. He gets a red card, gets ejected from the game, and the field. Then France loses the game on a PK that COULD have been taken by him, if he were still in the game.

Fine. Whatever. He shows his true self as a regular soccer hooligan like so many others.

But then, in an incredibly lame turn of events, he is awarded the tournament's Best Player by FIFA.

FIFA sucks, which was evident in the way games were officiated throughout the tournament. They confirmed it with this crowning little achievement.

As a side note, Zidane plays for Real Madrid, as does Beckham. Real Madrid has apparently been signed to make a trip to Salt Lake. The interesting part of that tidbit is the fact that they have a new coach, and when he was asked about his upcoming trip to Salt Lake, he responded, "we're still deciding if we are going to the US this summer."

[insert cricket noises here] - the silence is deafening. Blank stares - deer in headlights....

Huh???

I imagine the Real folks have sweaty armpits about now. They have been hawking those premium tickets for a while. The only way to get them at this point, is to either buy a mini-season ticket package, or buy 100 tickets for you and your posse.

Death of a Salesman

So many things...

About a month after being found guilty of everything that was wrong with Enron, Willie Loman, err... I mean... Ken Lay dies of a heart attack at his Colorado vacation home, after being served with a Notice of Property Seizure... and he's scheduled for cremation.

Heart Attack. Cremation. RRRRight.

I'm starting a contest for the most outlandish explanation of his actual whereabouts. I think it will be fun.

Your Own Personal Internet

The Senate Commerce Committee deadlocked 11 to 11 on an amendment inserting some very basic net neutrality provisions into a moving telecommunications bill. The provisions didn't prohibit an ISP from handling VOIP faster than emails, but would have made it illegal to handle its own VOIP packets faster than a competitor's.

Senator Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) explained why he voted against the amendment and gave an amazing primer on how the internet works.

There's one company now you can sign up and you can get a movie delivered to your house daily by delivery service. Okay. And currently it comes to your house, it gets put in the mail box when you get home and you change your order but you pay for that, right.

But this service is now going to go through the internet* and what you do is you just go to a place on the internet and you order your movie and guess what you can order ten of them delivered to you and the delivery charge is free.

Ten of them streaming across that internet and what happens to your own personal internet?

I just the other day got, an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why?

Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the internet commercially.

So you want to talk about the consumer? Let's talk about you and me. We use this internet to communicate and we aren't using it for commercial purposes.

We aren't earning anything by going on that internet. Now I'm not saying you have to or you want to discrimnate against those people [¿]

The regulatory approach is wrong. Your approach is regulatory in the sense that it says "No one can charge anyone for massively invading this world of the internet". No, I'm not finished. I want people to understand my position, I'm not going to take a lot of time. [¿]

They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the internet. And again, the internet is not something you just dump something on. It's not a truck.

It's a series of tubes.

And if you don't understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and its going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.

Now we have a separate Department of Defense internet now, did you know that?

Do you know why?

Because they have to have theirs delivered immediately. They can't afford getting delayed by other people.

Now I think these people are arguing whether they should be able to dump all that stuff on the internet ought to consider if they should develop a system themselves.

Maybe there is a place for a commercial net but it's not using what consumers use every day.

It's not using the messaging service that is essential to small businesses, to our operation of families.

The whole concept is that we should not go into this until someone shows that there is something that has been done that really is a viloation of net neutraility that hits you and me.

I got a copy of the internet that Senator Ted Stevens's staff sent to him, and which, as he told the full Commerce Committee as proof that net neutrality was bad, took almost five days to get to him because the internet's pipes were so full of traffic.

I admit to a little skepticism, so I asked the Senator's office to send me a copy of the internet via Fed-Ex (to avoid internet rush hour). After signing for it this morning, I unwrapped it and set out to test it forensically to make sure the senator was telling the truth (turns out it was just an internet letter, not an entire internet).

(For you eggheads out there, I used a command line tool called Bioforensic Unfragmenting Logistical Level Systemic Hopping Information Tracerouter, which is open-source.)

Turns out he was right.

After his staffers sent the internet letter and the letter shattered into pieces by the internal sledgehammer encased in the congressional mail server, the pieces were slingshotted into the internet's pipe (to visual this, think of how a potato gun works and then simply reverse the process in your head).

According to my analysis of the pieces:

One packet made its way up north along the jagged border of New Hampshire and Maine, eventually landing on the Canadian side of Niagara falls, where the packet met a very nice portion of a picture of a lovely, and busty Canadian woman named Sue (you don't know her) and spent a romantic weekend in a posh Cisco router.

Another was waylaid after bumping into 419 packets which all claimed to belonging to a family member of a recently deceased Nigerian finance minister and over a period of three days, the packet gave away all of its contents to a fake bank in Nigeria in hopes of striking it rich.

One other packet got sandwiched in Norfolk, VA between a YouTube video of a cat adoption video gone bad and a Google Video of a carbon fiber mountain bike disintegrating under its rider. After splitting itself in two from laughter, the packet was sued by the recording industry since one of the maker's of the videos once downloaded a Britney Spears song as a joke.

Yet another accidentally got routed through a Pakistani server and was subsequently sucked into AT&T secret room, where it was strapped down and water-motherboarded. AT&T denies any knowledge of the packet, while the government says that even it if it did water-motherboard the packet, such interrogation is legal under Article II and to boot, ICANN is a tool of the French.

One entrepreneurial bit of the internet letter decided to start its own social networking site called Paketr where packets can make friends and post snapshots of the insides of the routers they pass through, giving Michael Arrington a minor blogasm which led Rupert Murdoch to promptly buy the company and have his engineers figure out a way to put Flash ads in packet headers.

Intriguingly, another was flagged and strip-searched by a TSA screener since the packet was using a serif font that made it's 1's too sharp for travel post-9/11.

Luckily enough of the packets finally made their way back to the congressional mail server that the email was able to be re-assembled.

The message: "Dear Senator, Our extensive research (based on briefings from the largest cable companies) demonstrates that That Internet must stay as empty as the $320 million "Bridge to Nowhere" or the terrorists will win. Sincerely, Your Staff."

Ryan Singel - Wired Magazine

How Are You Defined, Part Deux

So, this is my 180th post... fun stuff...anyway...

Quite some time ago, I wrote about how we as individuals are defined by what we do, or how we impact the lives of people around us. I noted something similar here in the blog belonging to a friend of mine. And in some light reading between brain tumors today, I've noticed a lot of entries surrounding the Fourth of July, some more irreverent than others. Then I came across this list: 15 People Who Make America Great.

While I may or may not agree with all the choices, there are some people here, who, after reading their story, have made America great. So, the question to you is this: who is it that makes YOUR world great?

Comments welcome here - I'd love to hear who your heroes are, and why. One rule: no spouses, no parents allowed, unless they have done something extraordinary, aside from your conception, or actually agreeing to marry you, that is...

:)

So, What is Wrong WIth This Picture

Got this in my email this morning.

What have I done to deserve this?