Enoch

Ha! No problems with the 8-10 cups/day coffee habit-- it's that slice of lime in your rum & coke that'll destroy your stomach lining!! Last drink I had was water (unless jellybeans count as a drink). I'll remedy that shortly.

I do quite enjoy a baseball game if I'm at the stadium, and I'll usually watch some of the playoffs on TV each year, but I just don't have the time to really follow the sport. If I'm going to pick a sports team to follow, I'd like to be able to see a significant percentage of their games without being forced to quit my job and dump my fiancee. Reading the box scores the next morning doesn't make me feel like much of a fan. Plus, the lack of consistent competitive balance in the MLB irks me. (This is also one of the reasons I dislike college football, despite being a big fan of the professional variety.) Also, from a participatory point of view, office softball leagues are great fun.

Springsteen -- Adam Raised a Cain

Now playing The Tall Stump. Fun!

State laws differ on this, so I can't be 100% sure, but I'm pretty certain that a vast majority of states' "statutory rape" laws have exceptions for consensual partners who are close in age. Also, just because it's legal for minors to get it on doesn't mean that it's legal to distribute sexual images of them. Entirely different area of the law. I'm pretty sure that nekkid pictures of anyone under 18 are grounds for prosecution, nationwide. Doesn't matter how old the people taking/looking at them are.

The Who -- Overture from Tommy Okay, so that's an odd follow-up.

Charlie Parker -- Bloomdido My shuffle function is on a fabulous streak.

Robert Johnson -- Come In My Kitchen So good it makes my knees weak.

Obligatory:

Sun Ra -- Street Named Hell More jazz compositions should have timpani solos.

I've been thinking about what I want to play when I wrap up my MotB run in another week or so. I think I want to branch out a little from my RPG/TBS corner. I honestly can't recall the last PC game I played that wasn't an RPG or some kind of Civ variant. Given the current state of the marketplace, though, "branching out" generally means shooters, and I really haven't been following much in action games since I decided that DOOM was boring and gave me a headache. (My rig is certainly capable of handling all the newer stuff out there, though.) I'm currently thinking I'll start with Portal, since everything I've seen seems to agree that it's brilliant, and I've always liked puzzle-ish games. Plus, it's short, which is good for someone like me with limited gaming time. Not sure if I'll just download it by itself ($20) or grab the whole Orange Box ($50), though. I can't stand multiplayer, so I'm certain that TF2 would bore me to tears. Thus, the question is whether it's worth $30 to see if I enjoy Half-Life 2.

I'm not sure I agree. Giving up a password is different from giving up a tangible key. Tangible objects can be demanded via subpoena. Reasonable searches and seizures are permitted under the 4th Amendment, but part of the point of the 5th Amendment is to establish that a "search" or "seizure" of information from a suspect's brain (i.e., compelled testimony) is always unreasonable. Just because this wouldn't amount to an outright confession doesn't exempt it from constitutional protection. The 5th amendment protects the accused against being compelled to be a witness for any purpose that might be against his/her interests, not just compelled confessions. I don't see how "you have to tell us your password" is significantly different from "you have to tell us where the bodies are buried."

I overheard someone mention the word "pre-flight" earlier, and as a result, Elton John's "Rocketman" has been running through my head for the past 3 hours.

That may have been true for the last 20 years or so but it is absolutley trending away from that. For example, ballot intiatives banning same sex marriage and abortion have been soundly defeated in six southern and republican dominated states (FL, AR, AL, TX, GA, NC all old confederate states) in the last 4 election cycles. The current crop fo GOPers including the President have been tried and true on social conservatisim since the 2002 elections and have utterly abandoned economic conservatisim with the exception of tax cuts. And you will note that they are so out of favor with rank and file republicans that most stayed home in 2006 and allowed the dems to sweep into congress. The social conservatives are becoming a small albeit vocal minority without the votes to actually influence an election. It is economic conservatisim that motivates republican voters. That is why the repubs are so out of favor with their base. The average american conservative thinker does not give a damn who marries who but gets very agitated when the federal govenment begins to suffocate the economy with taxes and regulation or tries to commit economic suicide by cutting taxes without fiscal discipline. McCain has a very conservative voting record on most social issues including favoring banning PBA, flag burning, and gay marriage. But he is also a Rockafeller-esqe "government is here to help you" type. THAT is why he is out of favor with the base. And that is why those who will vote for him (like me) will do so only because the alternative is so much worse. The 2006 election example is interesting, but that certainly wasn't the only thing out there repressing GOP turnout. (Hint: it begins with an "I" and ends with a "q".) You may be right about the trends, but I still don't think that a purely economic conservative platform would command many majorities if it didn't also have support from people who vote primarily on social issues. Sure, everybody hates paying taxes, and general talk about "small government" gets cheers, but if you pair those tax cuts with the cuts in government programs necessary to keep the budget reasonable, it gets a lot harder to pull a majority together. People like to talk about eliminating a few well-publicized but minor examples of government waste (bridges to nowhere, $500 hammers, Reagan's mythical 'welfare queens driving welfare Cadillacs'), but when it comes to the big-ticket spending items where government-shrinking would probably have to start (Medicare, Military, Social Security, etc.), most people don't want to see cuts. As for McCain, it depends on which base you're talking about. Social conservatives aren't too happy with him for being part of the "Gang of 14" Senators who brokered compromise on Bush's judicial appointments (which, in their eyes, was caving in to the pro-Roe crowd). The only conservative base that's really happy with him as the presumptive nominee are the foreign policy hawks. Mike Huckabee has a pretty weak background as an economic conservative, but he still managed to give the McCain campaign a scare here in Virginia yesterday (some of the early projections had him winning; he ended up with 41% of the GOP vote).

Well, there's the south, and there's the South. There are certainly stretches of the old confederacy where the stereotypes do ring fairly true. But the growth and economic productivity you're talking about isn't happening there. It's happening in the Atlanta metro area, in the big cities in Texas and Florida, in the research triangle in Raleigh-Durham, and along the Beltway in northern VA. Heck, I live in Arlington, Virginia, and, despite being the former home of Robert E. Lee, my neighborhood has a lot more in common with Massachusetts than it does with Alabama. (I do enjoy a good beer-swillin' from time to time, though.) I would argue that the right's social conservatism is at least as important in maintaining its dominance in the South as its economic conservatism is. Probably more-- it's not as if the national GOP'ers they've been electing lately have done much to slow the growth of the government!

I've never been to Australia, but from everything I've read and heard, I don't think it's possible to survive there if you're incapable of walking into a bar and ordering a drink.

That may well be true, but I don't think it dimishes Pop's point about winner-take-all elections. Local elections are often exceptions to the first-past-the-post nature of American elections. For example, there may be 5 town council seats open, with 10 candidates running, and every voter gets to put 5 names on their ballot. A setup like that, which is pretty common in American county and local government systems, is quite accommodating to non-mainstream parties (especially if it allows voters to use all of their votes on one candidate). I don't know the numbers, but I'd be willing to bet that most of the 3rd-party elected officials in the country are in positions like that.

Lol, same here. Whenever American Idol, Extreme Home Makeover or Biggest Loser come on, I dart off to go play WoW. In my case, it's usually one of a dozen different shows that help people find, clean, improve, decorate, or flip their homes. To get back to the topic, it's nice that they're re-working the inventory interface. Hopefully it will be better than the clunky console-ish system that KotOR ended up with.

Cool. I'll buy it. (Although I could afford to grab a 360 to play it now if I wanted to, my video gaming time is usually my fiancee's watch-stuff-I-don't-like-on-TV time, so switching to a console would have disastrous relationship consequences.)

Voted in the primary this morning. Unfortunately, the silly election officials had only 1 set of voter registration books, so we were all in 1 line. They had 4 voting machines lined up, but were only ever using 1 at a time. I had to wait on line for an hour.

The way to peace is economic integration. Securing normal trading relations with China was a coup-- now their economy is so entwined with the rest of the world's that they simply can't afford to be a military aggressor. Yes, there are still human rights issues, but more progress is being made on that end via peaceful commerce than there would be through militaristic hard-line blustering.

I got a new piece of furniture in my office today. As I work in a government office, nobody brings furniture in from home, but there is a stock of supplementary office furniture (i.e., everything beyond desk, office chair, some built-in shelving, and 2 chairs for visitors) that generally gets passed around among the occupants and is the subject of many office political disputes. It's a small bookcase (roughly 4' high, 3' wide, 18" deep) with glass-paned doors. A co-worker had moved to a new office near mine to get a window, but it was smaller than her previous space, which meant that the bookcase wouldn't fit. Since my (non-window) office was nearby and has extra space, she offered it to me. The finish is damaged in a few places, and the magnetic clasp to hold the left-side door shut is broken off and missing, but it already looks a lot nicer than the conspicuous empty space I had before it arrived. Now I just need to accumulate some stuff to put inside and on top of it. And I really would like to snag a coat rack from somewhere to put in the corner...

it's a really interesting idea. A shame in some ways that you can't have coalition presidencies. I sometimes think half the problem is being 100% one way or another. But I wouldn't have even thought of putting it this way. We tried it. It didn't work very well. We then amended the Constitution so that it would not happen again.

Clark, Richardson, and Vilsak are all more attached to the Clintons. They'd be near the top of the list if Hillary were the candidate, but I don't think the same goes for Obama. Some other names to think about: Tim Kaine. He was one of the first major elected officials to endorse Obama, and is a popular governor of a formerly-red state that Dems think they can pick up (VA). Odds go up if he wins tomorrow's primary. Tom Daschle. Lots of Barack's staff used to work for the former Senate leader. Kathleen Sebelius. Very popular second-term governor of Kansas.

I did end up making the "White Lady" I mentioned above, and I'm enjoying it right now. It's a satisfying drink that really doesn't deserve such a lousy name. That may well be the girliest drink I've ever heard of. I'm sorry, but I think that various laws of masculinity require that you chug a fifth of Jack Daniels before you can reclaim possession of your testicles.