Nom de plume: Rivrdog

D.O.T.D.

Didn't have to go far to find the Dummy of the Day today.

Last night, confirming that my City's street-corner floodlight had burned out for good (it had been intermittent lately), I copied the "belly-button" info and fired up my computer to send it off to Portland General Electric, known hereabouts simply as PGE.

Firing up a search on "PGE streetlights" brought me right to the page, and I quickly typed in the info and fired it off.

This morning, I get the email back, ""Dear Rivrdog (not the name I used), PG&E has streetlights all over Northern California, but you are out of our service area."

Damn ampersands.

Yep, I'll wear that DOTD hat, I deserve it.

Fox News caves to the Nanny State

The gudwife watches Fox News, me, not so much. I can't stand their fascination about local crime that just HAS to be spread all over the nation. A murder scene in East Bumfuck, Alabama may be news to parts of Alabama, but out here in OR, we don't need to know about it. Ditto a fire on the docks in Jersey.

Also disturbing to me is how Fox is now parroting "The View" and other shows that have women discussing/screaming about news of the day.

This morning, Megan Kelly, who seems to have risen to the top of the newsbabe scrum at Fox, put out a story about a woman who was convicted of endangering a baby of hers by feeding it her breast milk while she was drunk. OK, this type of child-endangerment case is not unusual at all, most jurisdictions have them on the docket from time to time.

What IS unusual is for a supposedly-conservative news network to show off a panel of women proposing nanny-state rules (no drinking for women during pregnancy) without having a clue as to what level of alcohol in a pregnant woman begins to affect the fetus.

The stupid thing this morning was that one of the women on the panel admitted that no one really knows (and proper research would probably kill or maim a few fetuses), but then they all agreed that some rule had to be done.

When you come from a scientific outlook, you simply cannot propose science-based rules when no science can be proven.

...Unless you are a liberal, and they do it all the time (see: Al Gore & Anthropogenic Global Warming).

Fox News, for caving to the liberal way of doing things, you are hereby suspended from being a conservative news outlet, until and unless you resume the use of solid science to back up your stories and opinions.

Oh, and BTW, Fox, you are also Dummy of the Week.

Now, how do I get the gudwife to stop watching it and wasting my TV's service life on it?

Dummy of the Week

This one was easy. I was dressing for church services this morning when I noticed that I couldn't find my Flag pin to wear on my suit jacket lapel.

No biggie, thinks I, I'll just stop by Walgreen's and pick one up on the way to the worship service.

I get to Walgreen's, dismount the Little Black Truck, and go inside. The only employee I find to ask for the pin was behind the photo-processing counter, a young woman maybe 20-22 years old.  I  ask her for an American Flag pin for my lapel.

She gets a puzzled look, then asks me, "What's a lapel?"

She was wearing a worker's smock which had a collar and lapel on it!

I was flabbergasted, but managed a (too broad) smile and pointed at my lapel. She asked again, "What's a lapel?"

I'm sorry, I couldn't contain myself any longer, and I laughed, just as her more senior co-worker was ALSO laughing.

I exited, laughing.

When you can get to that age and not know what a lapel on a coat or smock is, excuse me, but you're DUMB.

My grandpa on my father's side must be spinning in his grave. He was a tailor.

Anatomy of a Knee Jerk

...and nomination for Dummy of the Week.

The Rivrdog Blog nominates the German Federal Government for Dummy of the Week.

On the basis of ONE, each and only, mass murder, but one in which the German sheeple said Dooooooo Something!!! to their Bundestag, the Germans have decided to FURTHER restrict firearms (the Germans are good at this, Hitler pretty much invented severe gun control back in the early 1930's) AND ALSO BAN ALL VIDEO GAMES WHERE THE OBJECT OF THE GAME IS KILLING.

Oh, the virtual humanity that gets wasted in these games! Oh, the indiscriminate use of firearms! Sorry about that one. Video games actually PENALIZE you for missing your target by either running you out of ammo so YOU can be killed or not running up the score so you time out without any kills and no score and lose the game. But, I digressed.

The big losers here will be the publishers of the games, BECAUSE THE GAMES WILL STILL CONTINUE TO BE SOLD/DOWNLOADED UNDER THE TABLE AND PIRACY OF THEM WILL INCREASE.

Why is is so hard to see that social prohibitions don't work? Christ, all these people had to do was go back about 90 years in OUR culture to see what banning alcohol did to the social fabric of the Nation. We're paying for it today, as the Chicago Mob came about by running booze, and has finally sent one of their own to our White House. Banning drugs hasn't worked, either. The Chinese try to limit what Internet sites can be watched, and THAT isn't working out too well, either.

An information-seeking society will get it's information.

Look at Iran. The Mullahs desperately want to keep their dirty laundry off the world's computer and TV screens and aren't having much luck, are they?

OK, I just put the last member of the Choir to sleep with this sermon.

H/T to Random Nuclear Strikes

Last minute BTW: By The Way, like most modern military establishments, the German Armed forces uses video games to train their military. Are those going to be banned as well? Couldn't the publishers of the games simply claim that all these games are sold for is improving the military readiness of the nation's armed forces, Reserves and potential military members? Besides, I think that this law is easy to evade by adding a section to the games where all the "kills" appear at the end of the session in a concentration camp, perfectly alive as POWs. IIRC, the Germans are good at THAT, too.

BTW2, I don't own a single violent video game. I don't see the need to, since in this nation, I can practice with REAL weapons anytime I want to bear the expenses of said practice. Someone might point THAT out to the Germans.

Dummy of the Day

...and maybe the rest of the month as well, is Monsieur Dominique Bussereau, the French Transportation Minister.

Perhaps we should follow the French tradition and just refer to M. Bussereau as "Imbecile du Jour". The Frogs hate to use English, you know.

As shown here, he has completely lost control of the investigation of the disappearance of Air France Flight 447 over the Atlantic.

First, they had no clue. The Brazilians offered to help. The Brazilian Air Force found debris. The French said "impossible, vous est fou" (bullshit, you are crazy). Brazil sent ships and started to actually recover the debris. The Frogs pouted and said "Attendez pour nous" (wait for us!). The Brazilians continued their work, knowing that debris will sink eventually. The Frogs said we will bring serious ships to do the work, and they dispatched the Research Vessel "Pourquois Pas" and the submarine ""Emeraude", neither of which have arrived a week later. In the meantime, the French Pilot's Union wants the government to blame Airbus Industrie for the crash, saying it MUST be because of faulty pitot-static systems (bad instruments don't MAKE the pilot fly into severe weather), and couldn't be anything else, despite having ZERO evidence to show that that particular aircraft's instruments were not giving the pilots correct airspeed information.

So...

M. Bussereau, prenez ce chose, et portez-ce avec orgeuil. (Take this, and wear it with pride).

Dummy of the Day

...for yesterday. And today. And probably the rest of the week.

Is ME!

Yep, don't have to look farther than my wallet for this one.

First, I had to appear in Muni court yesterday in the cash-strapped town of Scappoose, OR and pay them their blood-money on a speeding fine, some $179. My mea-culpa grovel in front of the smiling pirate judge saved me exactly $32.

On the way there and back, I killed off the rest of the life in my Little Black Truck's clutch master cylinder, so I'm off to the meck-a-neck to have a new one put in shortly. That'll be at least as much as the traffic fine. There goes my gun and ammo budget for this month and the next month, but since I already bought some ammo and spent that, I'm now in the hole and my savings are lighter as a result.

My theory is that if you feel like a dummy, you probably ARE, so here I am, Dummy of the Day.

Gosh, I feel so special, NOT.

Why don't I feel good about it?

I'm not a liberal and don't feel good about EVERY award I get.

Dummy of the Day

Second-time award for the morning FoxNews newsblonde. Last week, she invented a new word for the weather-observer's lexicon, "downcrease".

Today, it seems, she can't do basic math and her brain doesn't operate fast enough to catch others' math mistakes before her lips repeat them (nice lips, though!).

The subject was the weekly unemployment numbers, which didn't show a hoped-for decrease ("downcrease?"), maybe this is why. There were 631,000 new jobless last week. Not content to offer any analysis or just leave it at that, the newsblonde does the math, blonde-style, and misplaces her decimal point.

(close approximation) "This number is not good, and it means that there are still a quarter-million new jobless per month."

OK, lets use the trusty Tech Solutions TS-600 Blogstation Calculator: 631,000 times 4.28 weeks (for a 30-day month) equals 2,700,680, not a "quarter-million".

Any of us can misplace a decimal point in a calculation. When we have a scriptwriter AND a producer AND our lightning mind all helping to get out the news, and we STILL make this kind of dumb mistake, we deserve the DOTD.

Excuse me, Miss, I'm a little tight on shekels this month, can I just take your last weeks' DOTD and shine it up and give it back to you? Thanks, sweetie, I knew you'd help me out here.

Once again, it was a close race. I see that POTUS Obama is having to 'splain away his impulsive Executive Order closing Gitmo this morning, since the Senate told him yesterday not do do it without a plan telling where the serious hard boyz incarcerated there are going to wind up. Who ever is running our good POTUS' affairs is definitely a candidate for the award.

Dummy of the Day, 05/14/09

Today's DOTD goes to the morning Newsblonde on Fox News. Ignoring her script (I'm sure), she's talking about how worried fire marshals are in So. Kali, now that the pressure systems are setting up for more Santa Anna and/or Sundowner winds in the vicinity of Santa Barbara. A close approximation of her words: "with the winds on the increase and the relative humidity on the downcrease..." The blonde just invented a new term to describe the process of downsloping wind drying out the air mass as it moves out to sea.

"Downcrease"...

What a dumb blonde.

Dummy of the Day for that, but it was close, Speaker Nancy Pelosi had it in the bag until the newsblonde opened her mouth and non-words fell out.

New Category: Dummies

With this post, I begin a series on Dumbed-Down America, what that state means for the future of our nation, and some hints as to what it might take to wise up our nation, to get it back into world leadership.

If this works out, I might negotiate a franchise fee with the outfit which publishes the "Dummies" books, and write "US Citizenship for Dummies".

As part of this category, I will feature at least one Dummy of the Week.

This week's DOTW is the yuppie, unknown name, who pulled in behind me in downtown Gresham when I parked on Main Street this morning. I was first in line in a three-car inletted streetside parking area, and my parking place was limited at the front by an extended sidewalk and a "no-parking" yellow curb, which I pulled up to within 30" of. There was a car already parked in the #3 position, so there were two spaces open. I had the first one, and the Dummy wanted #2. He angles in forward behind me, and as I shut down my truck and get out of my seat belt, I hear him beeping his horn. I look in the rear-view mirror and he's trying to attract my attention, parked half-in and half-out of the parking place in his Subaru SUV, blocking traffic in the narrow street.

I get out and face him, eyeballing the traffic backing up behind him. He yells at me, "Could you pull forward 10 feet so I can park behind you?" Now, mind you, there was enough room to get a full-size truck into the slot behind me, but this Dummy can't parallel park, apparently, so he wants ME to make up for his deficiency.

I answer back, "No, I can't pull forward, there's a yellow curb in front of me and I'm not going to risk a parking ticket because you don't know how to park your car." Exact words. No swearing, but I laid it on the line. He just stood in the doorway of his vehicle and glared at me until I locked up my truck and walked away, and those stuck behind him started honking their horns. When I came out of my weekly Geezer coffee an hour later, his vehicle WAS properly parked behind me. Don't know how it got that way, so I examined my rear bumper for crash marks, and there were none. He might have just been supremely lazy and know how to parallel-park, but just didn't WANT to, and wanted ME to do his work for him.

When and why did the various jurisdictions which issue Driver Licenses stop requiring a demonstration of the skill of parallel parking? I guess it's because the kids and illegals taking the tests were dumbed-down in Driver's Ed, or they don't DO that in Mexico, or other reasons.

We have a nation of dummy-drivers out there on our highways. That needs to change. If you can't PARK your farooking car, I certainly don't expect you to be able to avoid accidents, and that worries me, because I have to share the road with you.

Wise up, dummies.