Schedule and Spelling

Two points:

1. I plan on updating the blog monday through friday at least once a day. It will probably come up around noon, and always by midnight. Saturday and Sundays will be surprises, but will most likely be prep for the week.

2. I can't spell. Mk, learn to deal.

3. I can't count.

4. The office premier(e) was super amazing. Dwight is far and away my favorite character now.

5. I shaved my head.

6. It's awesome.

7. Way more awesome than MK.

The Office Premier

So, The Office premiers tonight, and I am getting ready for it. I will post pictures later. Pictures of awesomeness. And pictures of me. (BTW, I'm going with the Dwight for now.)

Congress, 1, President, 0

So, I just wanted to bring this to everyone's attention: The Senate just attached a Hate Crimes Bill to the Pentagon spending bill. That's pretty much awesome, because Bush already looks kinda like a dick (and by kinda, I mean he does) for threatening a veto of it. Mainly, though, it means that if he wants to veto this bill really badly, he's going to have to veto the defense spending bill.

Touche, Senate. Touche.

"The defense authorization is about dealing with the challenges of terrorism overseas...This (bill) is about terrorism in our neighborhood," said Sen. Edward Kennedy ... the chief Democratic sponsor. "We want to fight terrorism here at home with all of our weapons." Full story.

I just want to say, when Kennedy isn't womanizing, drinking, or being pretty much an awful person, sometimes he sure can rock.

This Week in Tools, Week One

This week in tools is a special spotlight on a tool, one who has been making headlines for quite a few months already:

Freddie Thompson

Freddie “Fred” Thompson is running for the Republican nomination for president. While this alone pushes quite a few steps towards tooldom, Freddie is a special case. Why, you might ask, should Freddie Thompson be picked out from the vast red sea and picked apart in such a merciless fashion?

Simply put, he’s ruining America.

I can already hear the chorus of Freddie fans screaming out! “No, he’s a very qualified candidate. He was in the Senate for eight years! He worked on Watergate! He’s been a district attorney since 2002.”

These are legitimate claims. And true, he does have experience in the Senate, but according to pundits his time there was spent mainly goofing off and not doing jack shit. He didn’t do anything.

True, there have been many boozing losers in the Senate (Ted Kennedy, anyone?) but most of them tended to get a lot of stuff done while being blitzed out of their mind and fondling young girls (Ted Kennedy, anyone?). I don’t think Thompson even tried.

Now, I do have a list of concerns I have with Freddie boy, and here they are:

1. His resume reads like a conservative play book. Seriously, this guy has done nothing but kiss party ass for years. I’m not going to beat around the bush (get it?) here and say that I’m bipartisan or any other crap. I am liberal on most issues, and definitely on the ones that matter to me. That said, I can respect some Republicans and conservatives, but the problem I have with Freddie is that his conservativeness comes out only when he’s positioning himself for a run. He is shallow and see through.

2. He left the senate to act in Law and Order. Does anyone still even watch Law and Order?

3. He’s convinced people he’s a legitimate choice for a presidential nominee. No offense meant, (Actually, screw you Freddie) but your at best tepid work in the government for the past few years pretty much sucks.

4. He was a lobbyist. Now, I’m sure at some point I’ll have some sort of rant on lobbyists, so I don’t want to steal my own thunder, but lobbyists rank just slightly above cockroaches in the hierarchy of life. Would you elect a cockroach to be president? No, you wouldn’t.

Anyway, that wraps up my spotlight on Freddie, but I do have an honorable mention or two to hand out this week.

First up:

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Ahmadinejad is the current President of Iran. This week he was giving a speech at Columbia, followed by a speech at the U.N. Besides saying that the Holocaust is just a theory, he also said:

In Iran, we don’t have homosexuals like in your country. We don’t have that in our country.

Thanks, Ahmadinejad. Luckily, the Pentagon has just the bomb for your country: The Gay Bomb.

To be fair, Ahmadinejad did call President Bush retarded, so he’s not a total tool. Just almost. (Note to Bush: If someone like Ahmadinejad is calling you retarded, you may want to seek professional help. Or else just shove him and say "Nu-uh. You smell!" because that is what diplomacy has apparently devolved into these days.)

Second this week:

Heroes

I quite enjoy heroes. I watched the first season, and was there for the premier this week, but I do have one thing to say:

“Ohmigod, I get the ROGUE!”

Now, product placement has been bad with Heroes in the past (I’m looking at you, Hiro Nakamora) but this was over the top. It was almost as bad as the “Where’d you get that shredder?” “Staples.” Exchange in last season’s the Office. The difference is that the Office than followed it up with a great joke riffing on their own product placement. Heroes followed it up with two solid minutes of Nissan Rogue commercials.

Well, that’s it for This Week in Tools. Let me know what you think, and this series will be back next Wednesday, before midnight.

New Series: Coming Tomorrow

I’m starting a new series, entitled “This Week in Tools.” It will be posted every Wednesday by midnight. I will re-cap the week and have some new tool news for everyone. I may also do a spotlight on a special tool, a tool dear to my heart.

Two Tickets to the Gun Show

One morning recently after a long sleep, I woke up. I tend to do this after sleeping; it comes naturally to me. Upon waking, I went to the bathroom and began to go about the business most people tend to while in the W.C. Standing there in front of the urinal I had a brilliant bathroom epiphany: I had figured out gun control.

Gun control is a touchy issue with me and I really have to take aim and let loose with my own personal opinions. I should explain: in my house I have one gun, and it only shoots little plastic pellets to keep squirrels away. (I hate squirrels.) Between my father, my brother, and me, we only have that one gun, a replica Braveheart sword, and a Samaria sword that couldn’t cut butter. Maybe warm butter, but that’s pushing it. The only gun show I’ve been to is the kind where I roll up my sleeves and then girls laugh at me because I don’t have any muscles and my arms are pasty.

Not only do I not have any guns in my house, guns scare me. I fired a shotgun when I was eleven and it kicked so hard I got a bruise. The next time I fired a shotgun I was seventeen and I had to for a competition at church camp. They made me… at church camp. I fired a twenty two every once in a while. I understand that numbers mean something, but I really don’t have a clue what that is except that a twenty two isn’t really good for anything besides being divided by eleven and two. I really didn’t even like shooting the twenty two.

I’ve never been hunting. I think that it would be a good experience, but I don’t know if I could actually kill something. Well, I think I could kill a duck. Quack. Deer would be another matter.

My ‘hood is anything but. I might be the scariest person in my neighborhood, sporting my Mohawk and eyebrow ring. We’ve never been robbed (dang it, I might have just jinxed it there) but the biggest crime happening around here is going 40 in a 25. All this is to say my Braveheart sword is going to deter crime as much as keeping a pistol around would.

I have no need or want for a firearm in my house. I don’t want to go all secret agent and get a permit to conceal and carry. I don’t want to be packing. I don’t need to have a gun.

Gun control does not affect me.

“Amendment II: A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.” That is in the Bill of Rights, right after freedom of speech and religion and right before quartering a soldier in a house. It is antique and vague and is included by a group of people who had slaves and possibly used ‘thou’ in everyday conversation. I can’t prove that, but that’s was the case in The Patriot and I trust Mel Gibson.

This broken English passage is the basis for one of the continuing debates in the country, one that might not draw as big of crowds as gay marriage or abortion but has consistently been an issue in almost every election across the country.

Man, the Bill of Rights. That’s huge. The rest of the constitution only got the thumbs up on the assurance that the Bill of Rights would be passed. The framers of the constitution saw these ten amendments as extremely necessary to the newly formed country. Maybe they could have cleaned up their grammar a little bit.

Guns kill people. Millions of people have died because of guns. The Civil War, lots of people got shot then. The World Wars, not a ton of Americans got shot then, but a lot of Europeans did. The last five hundred years have been filled with wars that people killed people with guns.

Sure, people killed people before guns, they could just do it in greater numbers. It has been the strive of civilization to invent new ways to kill the barbarians. The Greeks were smart and had that democracy thing going on, but that only came about because they were the best warriors in the world for almost a millennium. (Seriously, the Greek middle class came about because the only people who could be soldiers were those that could afford the shield and spear, and since the rulers were asking them to die, they said “Hold up, we want a say in this.” And democracy was birthed into the world on the end of a spear.)

Okay, so guns just let people kill more people. Luckily death and democracy go hand in hand. There still is all of the problems of school shootings, and the center piece of that anti-gun battle cry is Columbine. Seven years ago, two boys killed fifteen people in a school in Colorado. Across the country there are around 10,000 gun murders a year.[1] Guns enable people to kill other people. But are guns really the source of human murder? Is there a place where we could find evidence that murders were prevalent before the invention of guns? What about, I don’t know, the Bible? Let’s flip it open and see if there’s anything in there about murder. What’s this? Genesis? Cain and Abel? The first story of three major religions after humans leave a perfect place is about murder. (If we want to hop back to the Greeks for a moment, Socrates told a story about Oedipus who rose to fame for something other than murdering his father, but that was a decent part of the story as well.) I guess what I am trying to say here is that murder had been a prominent fixture of human life long before guns were invented.

Alright, so, murder happens anyway. Kind of like war. Guns help, but controlling them wouldn’t really change anything. People will find a way to kill each other. It is a common theme of human existence.

But the founders knew that people would use guns to kill people, but why on earth would they keep guns in the hands of the common people. Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, they all hated the common people. They felt the vulgarity of the commoners could not be trusted.

But in light of this knowledge, nay, in spite of this they still elected to have guns in the hands of these people. Why?

“A well regulated militia,” it begins. This phrase is could be taken multiple ways. A militia in current times leads the mind to picture a group of men hunting through the Minnesotan wilderness with semiautomatics. At the time a militia could have meant a state militia manned by local levies controlled by the state government. I wanted to look up how the word was used back then, but as my last name is not Scalia, I don’t keep an 1789 Webster’s near by, nor do I have a time machine so I could go back and ask the actual Webster what it means.

“Being necessary to the security of a free state,” it continues, and this does shed some light on the first clause. The militia is necessary to the free state, implying that the well regulated part comes from the state training and running the militia. This makes the militia a de facto army. The first two clauses of the amendment are designed to describe the fact that any state in existence needs an army to defend itself and maintain its freedom. The framers understood that specifically the United States would need to maintain a standing force to insure that Britain or another European power would not be able to conquer the U.S.

“The right of the people to keep and bear arms,” is the third clause of this complex sentence. This refers to “the people” that permeate the constitution. These people are the citizens of the U.S. The clause describes a right. The preposition states it is of the people (the citizens) and the right is “to keep and bear arms.” This clause describes what the right is. It has a series (keep and bear) and so it separates the next clause to connect to the right.

“Shall not be infringed.” The right shall not be infringed. This is opposed to the army described by the first two clauses. It could be simplified as such: Because of the military, which we have to have to keep those crazy Brits out, the right to keep a Glock next to the bed shall not be hampered by the government. Okay, that wasn’t simplified, but the main point is that the country needs a military, and thus the people need to be armed.

The people, the citizens of the U.S., need to be armed. The framers wanted guns in the hand of the people to keep freedom around. This was because without the guns that the colonies had had on hand, they would have been at the mercy of the British. The framers wanted to insure that the government would always fear the governed.

Jefferson wanted a revolution every twenty years. Every generation. We have failed. And we’ve lost the reason behind second amendment. Charlton Heston had the right idea when he shouted “From my cold dead hands!” at the NRA convention. Maybe he was misguided but we should always fear the government when it attempts to take away the right to keep a gun.

I could imagine a situation where the common people would need to rise as one to defeat a controlling government. A world much like 1984 is the fear a lot of people have, but that is much too late for any armed resistance. I guess we really need to be wary, and possibly take action when one group controls the Presidency, the Congress, and the Supreme court, and is clearly abusing that power. We would really need to be on the look out if they started to subtly take away civil liberties. The problem is that people might not notice this situation if it happened slowly over ten years or so.

The current state of things a revolution is not needed. As a country we are doing fairly well and while the government is infringing on liberties a little, the time has not come for a revolution. But we aren’t far from that step. But if every person was armed and willing to do something then any president would think twice before making a move on our liberties.

We are the final check on the government.

I don’t own a gun, but maybe it is my civic duty to keep one around. Not to deter a criminal, but to remind the president that I am not at the mercy of the government but the government is at the mercy of me.

---

[1] I’m just guessing here, but it sounds pretty good, doesn’t it?

My New Haircut

So, I think it's about time for me to be getting a haircut. I did get one about six weeks ago, but the shag is slowly reclaiming its dominance over my scalp and the time has come to put it in its place.

I have a few options, which I will put here for everyone to view. (Don't be alarmed, ladies, my hair hasn't been cleaved from me yet. I know this image is convincing, but it's just special computerized graphics, like they use in hollywood.)

Option one: The Old Stand-By. This is the one from the days of old. I go into Proway's local Sports Clips and ask Susie, my long time sports friendly stylist to make it shorter all around. She then attacks my head with clippers, occasionally hitting my chin area as well. I emerge with a clean cut head that lasts until a shower, and then that shit goes wild again.

Option two: The Complete Shave. In this haircut I would have one of my many friends, of which I have many, shave my head. I would then shave my beard and 'stache and be completely clean shorn.

Option three: The 'Hawk. I've done it before, but the ridiculously colored mohawk is another of my options.

Option four: Mullet. Business in the front, party in the back. I'm pretty sure this one speaks for itself. Also, I can get into way more dirt racing conventions. While I've never been turned down, it is a great fear of mine to be shunned while attempting to enjoy a good ole dirt bike rally. This would merely be an innsurance policy against such a tragic event.

Option five: The Ceaser. Ringlets of bronzed hair circling my bared scalp. The main problem is that as my favorite past time is a board game centered on betrayal I would soon be saying "Et tu, Dan?"

Option six: The Manly Man. This haircut, sporting trendy side burns and a come hither goatee would be devestating to the female population of Morrison College. I fear that this hair style should never see the light of day 'top my brow.

Option seven: The bleach blond(e). The basic premise of this hair cut is that I would dip my head into some noxious brew and hope for some sort of super special power. I would be willing to risk turning into a super villian; its the chance some people have to take. Also, I'd like to appoligize for the picture: it was an off day that time, and I didn't have enough make up to hide that horrid zit. Please do not look at it.

Option the Dwight: The Dwight. This would be my homage to Dwight Schrute, pretty much the greatest man alive, bar none. It is not exclusive, as I could move on to all but option one after recieving the Dwight, so I may do it anyway. You comments on this pressing matter are deeply appreciated.

Something Clever This Way Comes

So, I guess this is where I start off my uber-clever blog post. I don't really know why I created this, to be perfectly honest. I guess I can just start with who I am.

I'm me.

I go to college.

I have an animatronic robot pirate skeleton roommate named Skelly. Currently he is dressed like Jim in preperation for the Office Premier which happens Thursday.

I am majoring in Politics with an emphasis in bullshitting. (Can I curse on here? Is that kosher?)

I like to put spaces inbetween thoughts when I write. This aids in people reading it, although I am probably being way too forward in using any sort of plural noun there.

I write plays, short stories, screenplays, and other sorts of creative fiction and non-fiction, but not poetry. Fuck poetry.

I'm really regretting putting that "I'm me." at the start of this description. I think its kind of lame.

This really isn't that funny, is it? Well, I don't know exactly what I'm planning on putting on here, but hopefully essays or commentaries. I know I have a couple I'll put up here from my various writings and such.

Maybe I'll put my The Santa Clause Cometh play on here. We'll see how this goes. Also, I do plan on putting some cartoons / comics on here once I have the chance. Like things I make. With my own two hands. Or Microsoft paint. 'Cause that's whats available.

My playwriting teacher tells me that openings are hard. They are slow, difficult, and tend to need to be rewritten. Consider this my opening, and its just a slow build... that kinda sucks.