Every now and then, I read articles like these, which confirm my opinion of the Republican Party. I don’t post all of them, since I don’t want my blog to sound like a skipping record. But, I’ll post this one, entitled “GOP brushing off abortion opponents“.
Liberals and plenty of Republicans have long questioned whether conservative leaders really want to make abortion illegal. Removing it from their culture war arsenal would be a blow to the GOP get-out-the-vote playbook.
In his 2004 bestseller, What’s the Matter with Kansas?, Thomas Frank argued that Republicans have convinced working class and middle class Americans to vote against their own self-interest based on cultural wedge issues to which the GOP ultimately only pays lip service.
(Found on Fark)
Posted on April 14th, 2006 in Tom | 1 Comment »
Since the kids have been asking to go treasure hunting again, I finally broke down and bought a GPS receiver, a Garmin GPSMap 60. We’re planning on going out today or tomorrow to go find some caches in Lancaster county.
For a small fee, I found out I can upgrade Google Earth to import data from my GPS. So, today I recorded my commute to work, imported it into Google Earth, and exported the data as a kml file. You can overlay it onto your copy of Google Earth by downloading and running the file.
Posted on April 9th, 2006 in Tom | 1 Comment »
Looks like some students at the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee conducted a dialect survey, asking questions like how do you pronounce “coupon” (the correct form is “coop-on”), or whether selling things in your back yard is a tag sale, a garage sale, a rummage sale, or a yard sale (again, the correct answer is “garage sale”). They then mapped out the answers to show how the version change by region.
The most important question they asked is what that long, deli meat sandwich is called. Hoagie came in second, but it was a way distant second to the #1 sub. But, as anyone who went to Subway can attest, it’s not the same thing as a hoagie.
Posted on April 6th, 2006 in Tom | 1 Comment »
My boss and I were sitting in the business class lounge at Narita Airport. We had been out the night before at a bar on Akasaka-Mitsuke playing darts, and had a great time. As often happens when I have a glass of Bailey’s Irish Cream on ice in my hand, an epiphany came over me.
We all know that there are two kinds of sports in the world… real sports and fake sports. Real sports include football, soccer, hockey, etc. There are sports where the professional athletes are specimins of physical strength, who’s athletic qualifications are obvious for everyone to see.
Then, there are the fake sports. You know… the “sports” like NASCAR and poker where there really isn’t much if anything physical going on.
The epiphany that came over me was that I realized I could not categorize professional dart players. Darts is not an easy sport. It’s amazing to watch these guys throw these needles into an area about two square inches in size from 7 feet away regularly. These guys are good… consistantly good, not “oi, I hit three bullseyes the other night down at the pub, mate!” good.
No one ever looks at a person and say, “wow… he looks good! He must play darts.”
