The days of Boss Tweed

Via Slings & Arrows, an article by John Fund, author of Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens our Democracy, providing historical perspective on how today's "Count every vote!" breeds its own self-sustaining political corruption.

Why is such activity proliferating (today)? It flows from the success of Democratic lawmakers in pushing aside clear, orderly, and rigorous voting procedures in favor of elastic and "inclusive" election rules that invite manipulation.. . .

(I)f "anything goes" continue to be the ballot bywords, the nation may soon wake up to a crisis even bigger than the 2000 Florida nightmare. Perhaps then the public will demand to know who subverted the election laws.

More here.

"(M)y record is not public"

What record? Kerry's military record and yes, that is Kerry admitting that contrary to his repeated statements, and bleats from his followers that he's already released everything in it, he hasn't.

You've known it, I've know it, and now Kerry has finally admitted it:

Brokaw: Someone has analyzed the President's military aptitude tests and yours, and concluded that he has a higher IQ than you do.

Kerry: That's great. More power. I don't know how they've done it, because my record is not public. So I don't know where you're getting that from.

When and where did this admission occur?

Last night, on NBC's Nighly News.

Good job, Brokaw.

A second chance

I've been keeping track of Lilly via Florida Cracker, who covered her from the start and then continued with updates.

Listings like Lilly's were nothing new to me. My son's a vet tech and for a while as a freelancer, I had what I called the "barnyard beat" for a local paper. Some of the articles were about reunions held by farm families who've lived here for generations. (When I was done with one, I managed to jumb back inside my car before a big Emu ate me. Then it and its bretheren chased my car off the property. But, that's another story.) Others were about animal-involved youth activities.

And some of the articles were about animal shelters, both the publicly and privately-funded, no-kill ones.

All I could say when I read FC's newest update about Lilly, well. I didn't say much of anything. I just gave my own "Wonderdog" another scritch behind his ears.

No vote.

Overvotes are when more than one candidate for an elected office has been selected on a ballot. Quite frankly, if someone is so dumb or ill-informed not to know specifically who they are voting for, it really is best that they decide not to vote for anyone at all in that particular race.

Undervotes are when no candidate for a specific office has been selected on a ballot. It could be an oversight, which the new technology will alert the voter to so that they can correct it, or it could be a conscious decision that the voter made not to cast a vote in that particular race.

There’s a whole lot of stupid yammering about how undervotes are some sorta indication that people have been disenfranchised. Denied the right to vote yadda, yadda, yadda.

We can only hope that one day someone will wise up enough to design a ballot so that for each race, the voter can clearly indicate that the decision they have made is not to.

Chubs

No, not those logs of ground meat you see in the grocery store or fish. Chubs are also raw peanuts, which is something I’d forgotten until I went looking for some.

My son, The Eating Machine, mentioned a few weeks ago that he was really in the mood for boiled peanuts, so I . . .

People boil peanuts? Ewwwwwwwwwww!

That’s right, not everybody lives in the South! It’s okay. Relax. I reacted the same way when I first got down here, but it didn’t take long for me to acquire the taste. The ones that are sold in cans are okay, but when they’re fresh!

. . . so I went to the little produce stand that normally has them and paid way too much, $3 for a sandwich-sized plastic bag of them. And they were only okay.

It’s not that they weren’t wonderfully salty and juicy (a roll of paper towels is required when eating boiled peanuts, and a bowl or some other container for the discarded shells), but there weren’t many good-sized peanuts in the bag. Most were downright small and some were so young, they hadn’t even had a chance to form any peanuts inside.

So this week, I decided to try boiling my own. Yankee-born, I don’t know how but how hard could it be?

Except as it turned out, it’s far more difficult than I had envisioned because first, I had to have raw peanuts to boil. There aren’t any which is why the bag I bought at the stand a few weeks ago was so expensive and the peanuts were . . . only okay.

If you’ve never picked peanuts (I have at a friend’s father’s house) you may not know that peanuts are actually attached to the roots of the plant. You dig up the plants, roots and all, then pull the peanuts off the roots. And with all of the tropical storms and hurricanes, the peanut crop rotted in the ground. In other words, there are no raw peanuts.

Oh, you can find them here and there: $65 a bushel if you buy 5 bushels or more or if you only want a small quantity, $5 a quart.

Suddenly, $3 doesn’t sound quite so expensive.

Open mouth, insert foot.

There's a good reason why this year, the Jacksonville Jaguars are being referred as the "Cardiac Cats" by their fans. In fact, there are five of them.

Seven games into the 16-game season, the Jags have a 5 and 2 record, and each one of those five wins has been cinched in the fourth quarter: one with less than three minutes left on the clock and four in the last minute of the game.

By comparison to the first game when the win came with a touchdown as the clock hit 0.00, today's seemed like a real snoozer. Josh Scobee, the rookie kicker, put the ball through the uprights from 53 yards with a whole 38 seconds left in the game, for a 27 - 24 win.

Byron Leftwich, the quarterback, isn't much more than a rookie himself. This is only his second season, and he wasn't even the starter during the first part of last year's.

He's, what? Maybe 24 but he already has the unflapable maturity of a veteran QB years older in age, and an arm, oh what an arm. An accurate arm that can pull off a 60-yard pass or drill a short one right between the numbers of one of his receivers. Which one? It doesn't matter. Whoever is open, and that guy had better be ready to catch a bullet.

Leftwich is working the plays called in from the sidelines, or calls an audible at the line of scrimmage if it's obvious it's not going to work when the other team lines up, and uses his smarts when the plays don't work as called.

And Leftwich keeps getting up off the grass for the next play. Same thing last week when he took a helluva hit that the announcers thought would take him out of the game because of the way he'd landed on his shoulder. A few plays later they said he's gotta be out now because of the hit he'd taken and the way his ("Ooh, he's limping! Bad! Let's show that replay again!) ankle had bent.

So this game's over and all game long SeeBS's commentators have been extolling Leftwich's wonderful and amazing virtues and what an incredible career this young quarterback has ahead of him, and they can't say enough great things about him.

And when the game was over, one of them said: "Leftwich may be one of the best black quarterbacks I've ever seen."

Well, dang SeeBS. Does that mean you evaluate Leftwich and all black quarterbacks by a different standard than you do white ones? That old separate but supposedly equal thing?

Or did you mean that the qualities and abilities Leftwich brings to his position seem incredible to you, considering that he's (ya know . . . nudge-nudge, wink-wink) black.

Gag me.

Short and sweet.

The only way I can think of to describe to you the road in front is to tell you to imagine a bell curve. We're at the underside of its top. Does that work? I hope so.

Long, long ago we all stopped counting how many dingbat drivers have taken that curve too fast and ended up smashing through fences or into poles on its topside. We on the bottom half have generally been spared, except for the drivers who've lost control, then over-corrected and ended up on our side.

We've been lucky, though. (Knocking on wood quickly and repeatedly.) Nothing of ours has actually been hit although one vehicle did come to a rest, finally, upside-down only a few feet from our front gate. The church, our only connecting neighbor, has also been spared. Or it had been until last night.

Another dingbat driver, forgetting about centrifical force, took the curve at high speed. Going off the road on its topside, the driver over-corrected. His vehicle became airborne, landing on this side of the road on top of the the church's mailbox, and all of the rural-route mailboxes in line with it. The car also smashed about 15 feet of the church's concrete parking markers and not done yet, a few other sundry items before it finally came to a rest.

Rescue transported the apparently uninjured driver to the hospital for observation, before his trip to jail for driving under under the influence of, whatever it was he was under the influence of.

Most of the debris in front of the church and in its parking lot had been cleaned up by this afternoon, but it's going to take a while before all of the breakage has been repaired or replaced. And in the midst of it stands the church's sign on which it announces upcoming events.

Its base bent a little on one side, instead of showing its usual list of services and their times, something special that they have scheduled for the week or a verse from the Bible, the sign its members will see tomorrow when they pull in for Sunday service is quite simple.

"You really can't describe it."

Which is why I’m using the URL shown below that includes photographs, rather than the printable version of the article which doesn’t.

None of them were this big or even close, but they were large. Very large. Big enough for me! And the parking lot was filled with ‘em sunning themselves on the pavement.

Which is why years ago when he was small, instead of taking Da Kid on the Okeefenokee Swamp Tour, after one look I hit REVERSE and headed for a movie theater instead.

It’s one thing giving your child an appreciation of nature. It’s something else when with one look, you connect as completely as I did your place in nature’s food chain.

Their boat, an appropriately named, 'Psycho 16 footer' bears the scars of battle.. . . There are four large scrape on the underside of the hull, and a quarter-inch diameter puncture mark in the heavy aluminum deck.

All I was doing was looking up something about the Florida Gators.

Instead, I found this.

Lilly tells her tale

"This Weblog, as told through the eyes of a 2-year-old German shepherd at Lee County Animal Services, was written by The News-Press reporter Karen Feldman."

(Via Florida Cracker)

The "American Elections . . ."

". . . are rather more crucial for (Iraq) at the moment than our own ." says Alaa in Baghdad at The Mesopotamian. It's not that theirs aren't important, he continues, they are. It's that Iraq is at such a critical stage in its continued progress, the Iraqi people simply can't afford a Bush defeat. And neither, he says, can the United States.

Unfortunately, it seems to me that many in the U.S. don’t quite appreciate how high the stakes are. The challenge is mortal, and you and we are locked in a War, a National emergency; and in such circumstances partisan considerations must be of secondary importance.

More, much more here.

When this SPAM arrived in his INBOX ...

. . . Omar, one of the three brothers blogging from Baghdad at Iraq the Model, was thrilled.

This was the 1st advertizing mail I get from an Iraqi living in Iraq, and I suppose it’s at least one of the 1st advertising mails sent by an Iraqi living in Iraq in English to anyone.. . .

It gave me hope because more Iraqis are planning for the future, making use of the Internet and information technology and seem to be optimistic and welcoming foreigners.

More about it here.

Blogging

What a dumb title, but perhaps not. Just as I'm not sure of I'll keep this thing I'm never sure what to name what I'm writing about. Often by the time I'm done, a new title -- a much better one -- comes to me so I change it. It might happen again, I hope it does, at which point I'll delete this paragraph and you'll never see it or the lamentations in it.

From the start, at the beginning of this month when I all I was trying to do was get a sign in to a friends blog and somehow ended up with one of my own, I've made no secret that I'm not sure whether or not I'll just hit DELETE and make it disappear.

I got an email the other day from a good friend at No Shades of Gray offering encouragement. Through blogs, he said, almost anyone with a mind and something to say now have a means by which they can be heard. That holds true also, he noted, for complete idiots but that those are quickly weeded out.

So I'm sitting here tonight glancing through some of the most popular blogs, blogs that get thousands of hits on daily basis, and noticed an entry at Instapundit linking to an "Interesting OPED": Blogs can help democracy, especially in partisan times.

The mainstream press has frequently been called the fourth estate because of the watchdog function it serves in keeping an eye on government.

A key issue recently has been whether anybody is keeping an eye on the press.. . .

That role is increasingly served by bloggers.. . .

Blog readers must scrutinize blog material carefully and put it in context with the political information they get from more traditional sources.

Read the whole thing here.

My friend's email and the oped meshed, which is why I guess I'll keep blogging, for a little while anyway. At least until after the election, which will extend through gawd only knows when while the DNC's attorneys . . .

I'm doomed.

Ramblings . . .

The first free election in 5000 years has just occurred in Afghanistan.

Free elections have already occurred in many of Iraq's governates and their first, free national election is scheduled for January.

Meanwhile, DemoRATS are doing everything in their power to smear, sabotage and interrupt our own.

Kerry, you're screwed . . .

. . . big time.

If you notice John Kerry stumbling even more than usual, it’s because after the third debate he now only has one foot to hop around on. The other one, the missing one, he jammed up his own butt.

Unless you’ve been living in a cave, it’s not a revelation that one of Dick and Lynne Cheney’s daughters is gay. It’s not something that they have tried to hide nor have they publicized it. She’s one of their two daughters, period.

Yet both Edwards in the VP debate and Kerry in last one, chose to bring her sexual orientation into their answers.

Why? Were they hoping to somehow damage Bush and Cheney in the eyes of some conservative voters? Oh, horrors! A gay daughter? Well, then I’ll have to vote for the other guys! That intent was made clear after the debate, when Kerry Campaign Manager Mary Beth Cahill described Miss Cheney as "fair game."

Later, "Dad" spoke up:

"You saw a man who will say and do anything in order to get elected. And I am not speaking just as a father here, though I am a pretty angry father, but as a citizen."

And so did "Mom":

Now, you know, I did have a chance to assess John Kerry once more and now the only thing I could conclude: This is not a good man. Of course, I am speaking as a mom, and a pretty indignant mom. This is not a good man. What a cheap and tawdry political trick.

In response to Lynne Cheney expressing displeasure at having one of her daughters reduced to a cheap political ploy, Elizabeth Edwards, John Edwards’ wife and herself a mother replied:

"She's [Lynne Cheney] overreacted to this and treated it as if it's shameful to have this discussion. I think that's a very sad state of affairs.. . . I think that it indicates a certain degree of shame with respect to her daughter's sexual preferences.. . . It makes me really sad that that's Lynne's response."

"Preferences"?

And no, dim bulb. Since you’re too dumb, too ambitious, or too brainwashed to understand, let me clarify the actual issue for you. It’s really quite simple.

It has nothing to do with Miss Cheney. There is no justification whatsoever for using someone else’s child for your self-serving purposes. Ever. Smack each other around all you want, but leave the kids out of it.

But they brought her up only as positive, the KerryKrew has been saying since. To show how the gay issue can be handled in a positive manner like the Cheney family has done, with tolerance!

I rant some other time about my intense dislike of the word "tolerance," but does anyone really believe in the middle of each debate the intent was to show either Bush or Cheney in a favorable light?

Pollsters and pundits yammer endlessly guessing who mothers will vote for in Presidential elections, using such convenient labels as "Soccer Moms" or "Security Moms."

With the Demorats trying to use another mother’s child for their own gain, I suggest that there’s one that hasn’t yet been considered when it comes to the November 2 vote. It should be.

It crosses all states, political parties, races, creeds, religions, and national origins.

It’s called PISSED.

UPDATE: Jim Geraghty at Kerry Spot may not be someone's mother and he's much nicer than I was, but he shares my sentiments.

UPDATE: Former NYC Mayor Ed Koch, changed his mind. Instead of Bush beating Kerry by 8 points, he's now predicting 10.

Tommy Franks . . .

. . . is on the campaign trail telling voters why they should vote for Bush.

And if you haven’t read his best seller, American Soldier, you should. It's a great read.

Pride

One of the grocery stores in the area does its part in hiring the handicapped by employing the mentally retarded/challenged/disabled (whatever of the politically-correct term de jour is) as baggers.

"Max" — obviously I’m going to be changing names — was the first one they hired several years ago and you’d be hard pressed to find a more diligent or enthusiastic employee. Unfortunately, at first, Max thought his job was to bag the groceries on every single check-out, all at the same time.

In order to do this, Max had to work fast. And work fast he did, thumping groceries into those disgusting little plastic sacks as fast as he could without rhyme or reason. Then he’d dash to the next check-out or run to another one further down to flatten yet another loaf of bread under the canned goods.

The cashiers adapted and quickly began bagging more delicate items, like eggs, themselves before handing them directly to the customers, in order to totally bypass Max’s enthusiasm.

It took time and patience, but slowly Max began to pay attention to what he was putting in those disgusting little plastic sacks. Bag like with like, I’m sure he was repeatedly instructed by someone until it finally took. It takes more time but that’s okay.

Max calmed down. A lot.

But bag-like-with-like presented another set of challenges for him. Like yes, it’s potatoes but it’s not good to put a 10-pound-sack of potatoes on top of a bag of potato chips.

The store has continued to work with and hire more people like Max. After working mumble-something years in and around social services, I’m all for it.

But the store also uses a lot more of those disgusting little plastic sacks now. On one shopping trip I bought, among other items, both a bag of pretzels and a bag of potato chips. While "Anthony" was bagging, he started putting the chips and pretzels into separate bags. When I said both the pretzels and chips could go in the same one, it really upset him. Badly.

I’d contradicted what he’d been taught, in whatever way he understood it. I’d confused him.

I told Anthony he was right, it was my mistake. It really made more sense if they were in different sacks. He calmed down immediately, smiled and said, "It’s my job!"

There are other hitches, specifically, canned goods. Like this week and the canned goods sale when I stocked up.

It doesn’t matter how much each sack weights, under like-goes-with-like "Carol" just kept putting more cans in the same one until it was full . . . beyond full, and then she triple . . . quadruple-bagged so that it didn’t rip open with the weight. And then in its own disgusting little plastic sack, all by its lonesome, was my only other purchase: a single package of dental floss.

I don’t see much of Max anymore. When I asked about him a while back, the store manager told me that Max is there only occasionally now. He had been promoted and now spends much of his workweek in the company’s other area stores helping to train their new baggers.

Today when I stopped in for a couple of gallons of milk, I saw Max for the first time in weeks. He was out in the parking lot enthusiastically rounding up the shopping carts strewn throughout. Before I could even begin pushing my empty cart back to the "cart corral," Max was at the back bumper of my car to take it.

I thanked him.

Max smiled that incredible smile he has that’s so filled with pride, a smile I’ve grown to know over the years.

"Ma’am, it’s my job!"

Are you ready for tonight's final debate?

I am.

I have a bucket.

A bucket?

Yes, because I know I'll need it.

Each time Kerry says, "I have a plan!" I know I'm going to puke.

Was the United Nations always like this?

I remember growing up believing what a wonderful organization it was and in all of the grand things it supposedly stood for like helping little kids all over the world through UNICEF.

I’m older now. The U.N.'s sole reason for existence is to maintain itself in New York City in the grand style to which it long ago became accustomed, as it tries to expand its reach not only as the prime arbiter between member states nations but as the only one.


To achieve this, all member states nations are assessed dues based on their economic strength. It should be no surprise, then, that the U.N. assesses the United States 22 percent (far more than any other country) of its annual budget, a budget that the U.N. itself and alone establishes.

In exchange, the U.N. gets to tell the U.S. that it’s dirt and jerk us around in any manner it wants.

An example? There are so many from which to choose but how ‘bout its Human Rights Commission as just one.

Do you know that the U.S. had a seat on that Commission for years, but was voted off? What country replaced the U.S.?

Sudan. Yes, that Sudan where 50,000 people are believed dead and 1.4 million have been driven from their homes.

The U.N. cannot continue on its current course with regard to the crisis in Sudan. Despite the abundance of evidence and outrage, the most aggressive action the Security Council has taken to date has been a resolution giving Sudan 30 days to disarm the janjaweed. Those 30 days expired Aug 30. A feckless Sept. 18 resolution threatening, but not actually applying, sanctions against Khartoum's oil industry has only served to buy more time for the regime, as has (Kofi) Annan's call for an "impartial commission" to investigate.

Will the U.N. stop playing its shameful games? Of course not. Why should it?

It's time for the U.N. to give up its cushy lifestyle in New York City, and find a new home in the real world, in a country where it is faced daily with the results of its ineptitude.

latimes login: sands745 / 1528moss

Rant!

I read a newsgroup post recently, where isn’t important, with a warning that Google/Blogspot had become infested with a variety of nasty things including viruses (virii?), trojans, adware, and spyware. Lovely people who delight in creating misery for others, had created blogs simply to spread them.

Those who know me know I don’t know what I’m doing when it comes to computers. What I do know is that I know just enough to really screw things up, which I have done on more than once occasion. As a result when my pc acts up, I immediately blame myself and don't have a clue what I did wrong or what to do.

This blog is the most adventuresome thing I’ve attempted, ever. I even downloaded the recommended application that would allow me to add photographs to it.

And over the weekend, I knew something was wrong. Stuff I didn’t recognize began trying to access the Internet on its own and hit my firewall, instead. Thank goodness for that!

Despite up-to-date AV and a firewall, something had apparently gotten in. In fact, a bunch of bad stuff that I couldn’t seem to get rid of despite running Spybot, Ad-Aware, and McAfee AV repeatedly.

The different programs would find stuff, kill/obliterate it, and then it would be back all over again. And whatever it was, it seemed to be multiplying, hogging more and more RAM with each reincarnation.

And that’s when I saw that post.

I’d visited one Blogspot blog blindly using the NEXT button. The possibility was, if that post was accurate and I’m not sure it is, that I’d accidently stumbled right into one of those blogs created by lovely people who delight in creating misery for others.

The other possibility was that I’d done it to myself. The only thing I’d downloaded, except for Spybot and Ad-Aware updates, had been that photo program. Whether or not it was the actual culprit, I didn’t know or care. I deleted it.

But the problems kept on and got even worse.

Like I said, I don’t know what I’m doing, but I did eventually notice something while I was again trying to cancel an individual application that had frozen (again) without having to do a reboot, or have the whole pc freeze on me, again. On the list of active programs was something called webrebates. Several of them, in fact.

Via Google, I managed to track down enough information on it between shut-offs.

Webrebates is a little program that brazenly loads itself in full view in Windows, and the only thing you can do is remove the program. But when you do, keep your fingers crossed that it hasn’t entwined itself among other programs that you want and need. So, establish a restore point first, just in case.

Now, all of this may seem like nothing to you because you know what you’re doing. It is a big thing to me because I don’t.

Mission accomplished. I think. So far, anyway. Maybe.

If I feel really adventuresome, I may download that photo program again because I really don’t know for certain if that’s where that Webrebates thing came from.

But not now or probably for a while. I’m not feeling too adventuresome right now.

If, however, it turns out that post I read was accurate and lovely people who delight in creating misery for others are creating blogs for people to accidentally stumble into, may they roast in Hell.

Slowly.

And they call him nuanced.

The most recent evidence of how unbiased the MSM is in its coverage of Election 2004 is an internal memo that surfaced, which was sent by ABC's political director, Marc Halperin, to its reporters.

In it, Halperin says that neither Bush 43 or John Kerry are telling the truth, but that reporters should show more leniency with Kerry than Bush.

"Kerry distorts, takes out of context, and mistakes all the time, but these are not central to his efforts to win," Halperin wrote.

They're not? Then why is Kerry doing it if not to win?

Or is Halperin saying that Kerry's constant distortions, repeated errors and self-serving lies are something he has no conscious control over. That Kerry can't help himself because that's just the way he is.

If so, then what it is "central to" is Kerry's innate character, which Halperin should not try to have ABC's reporters hide behind carefully "nuanced" news reports.

Dope.

Via Florida Cracker, a home invasion that landed the perpetrator in an operating room.

Don't mess with Mama!

Deja Moo: The feeling that you've heard the same BS before

The 2004 Presidential Election is now less than a month away, and it’s shaping up to be another winner . . . for lawyers and their billable hours, that is.

The Democrat Party’s nominees — John Kerry and his running mate, John Edwards — take every opportunity to keep the myth alive that Floridians voting for Al Gore in Election 2000 were done wrong. Je$$e Jack$on is doing his part, too, with his usual race baiting techniques. Representative Corrine (Corrine Delivers!) Brown (D Fl) opened her yap once again, this time on the House floor, and was so over the top — which is nothing new for her — that her fellow congress critters voted to have her remarks stricken from the Congressional Record. Oh, and let’s not forget good old Jimmy Carter who recently said that Florida doesn’t even meet international standards for fair elections.

I wish Jimmy would go build another house or something. He’s better at than that anything he’s ever done in his life especially his disastrous, single term as President.

It’s all the Republican’s fault, they whine. Republicans are all cheaters and liars and will do anything to keep you from getting the elected officials you should have. A Democrat!

They don’t want you to pay attention to the fact that of the 25 counties with the most spoiled ballots, 24 of them were run by Democrat election commissions.

And no where is this more evident than the constant and continuing chaos still occurring in one of the four counties Al Gore cherry picked for recounts during 2000: Broward.

(Miriam Oliphant, Supervisor of Elections) combined ineptitude, arrogance, volatility and mule-headed stubbornness in a uniquely toxic mix that also served to increase racial polarization in Broward County.

That’s right, Miriam Oliphant. Still there two years after Broward County commissioners ordered an audit of her office and news reports began appearing about her complete incompetence.

Until the sheriff’s deputies escorted her from the Government Center building, she seemingly believed that her office was in fine shape and that the governor would never suspend her.

When Governor Jeb Bush did, it didn’t take long for the games to begin.

"Wrong or right, we’re going to stand up for you, and we’re not going to let them lynch you," says the Rev. Dennis Grant, the senior pastor of Restoration Ministries of Margate.

Instead of lambasting Florida as a whole, voters would have been better served if Jimmy Carter had just concentrated on Broward County and the circumstances Shawn Barbe describes in detail to support Miriam Oliphant’s selection as Jackass of the Year by City Link Magazine.

The Rules of the Road

If you don’t like what you read here, don’t read what I write.

I don’t mind opinions that differ from mine. I’ve always been willing to learn something new, but back up what you say with solid, verifiable facts. None of that "common dreams" stuff, either.

If the fabric of your reply is denigration of me or any other person who may reply in the comments section, I will delete your reply. If I find the language you employ offensive, I will delete your comments.

Don’t waste your time calling it censorship when I do. That’s not censorship. It’s the rules of the road.

And that’s the basics you need to know.

Why'd you choose this name for your blog?

It's kind of a special feeling.

I almost entered HUH? when the window popped open — remember, I was only trying to get a log-in for a friend's blog — except a song I've loved for a long time began playing in my head. Talk about a major EARWORM! So, I entered its name and it didn't bounce back as already used, and there you go.

A Cool Change's lyrics, to me, are about finding a quiet place for myself, often within myself, while everyone else around me seems to be going nuts. For as long as I can remember, that physical place has been looking out at the ocean.

Little River Band's lyrics are about sailing. I morphed them to fit me because all I need to do is be by the water. And with that song, many times, I almost feel like I am.

How the heck did this happen?

I didn't want a blog. I really didn't and I don't. All I did was try to get a sign in to a friend's blog, and now look.

Dang.