Hurry! Before it's too late!

It's free until Sunday. After that, you can buy it through iTunes. The first two are really funny, and it's got Doogie Howser. How could you not click on the link above?

A buyers' market

If the mortgage bailout doesn't go through, maybe banks should consult this website before trying to turn their foreclosed properties.

It's Lovely! I'll Take It! is "A collection of poorly chosen photos from real estate listings. With love." A couple of them (1, 2) are right here in Lincoln, but this one is probably my favorite.

HT: Challies

Coka-coka-coka-coh

…worth two in the bush

In the good old days, if a city council wanted to trim back some overgrown landscaping in a public area, all they had to do was conduct an environmental impact study done, hire a proportionate number of women and minority landscapers to handle the job, and face toward Mecca while filling the Weed Whacker with E85 fuel. Oh, that it were still so simple.

According to the Telegraph, the City Council of Bristol (U.K.) set out to "prune bushes and remove cover from an area known as the Downs to improve the landscape and encourage rare wildlife." Huzzah for green spaces and rare wildlife, right? To quote the legendary Lee Corso, "Not so fast, my friend!" Apparently the word "wildlife" can have multiple meanings, because gay rights activists are claiming that the city council's plans are "discriminatory" because the spot is, um, well, a popular spot for homosexual "outdoor recreation", so to speak. Although these outdoor escapades are illegal, these activists believe they have a right to a government-provided space to engage in them. Cutting down some bushes would violate this right, see?

So, work on the area has been stopped while the council seeks "to make sure any work we will do is sensitive."

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In other news, the Association of Unauthorized Bank Asset Procurement Specialists (AUBAPS) is claiming that their members' rights are being violated because banks in all of England are equipped with security cameras. This is, of course, a violation of their right to privacy while engaging in their behavior of choice. The Central Bank of England is considering how they might be more sensitive to the concerns of bank robbers who might be offended by the current videographic arrangements most banks have in place.

Movie Line Monday Tuesday

After a crazy day at work, biking home, enjoying a delicious meal, bathing the kids, working on on the Missus' new blog, and watching two episodes of Arrested Development, Movie Line Monday got overlooked. So, let's play catch up.

While I'm glad that Jared finally weighed in with a guess, he submit a website address (not a quote), thereby disqualifying himself. The Wife submitted three different quotes, so she's also disqualified. That makes Drew the winner with a gutsy, though slightly off-color, response. Welcome to the winner's circle, Drew. The movie, of course, was Anchorman.

Let's do things a little differently this week. Instead of me providing the quote, it's up to you to comment with a quote from your favorite movie. Then, next Monday I'll go through and have to guess which movie each quote is from. I'll pick the winner based on the quality of the quote, multiplied by the quality of the movie, divided by the quotability quotient of said movie. Just like in Apples to Apples, you gotta know your judge.

Best of lucky!

I didn't, but I should have.

My job has been keeping me pretty busy lately, and I've been going in early to try and keep up during one of the busiest parts of the year. One side-effect is that I also get up early (unintentionally) on the weekends. Saturday morning I woke up around 5:00 a.m. I worked on Amanda's new blog for awhile, and then decided to go on a bike ride before everyone else woke up.

I left the driveway around 5:50 and headed for the bike trail that winds from about 40th and Normal to the dam at Holmes Lake. When I rode past the apartments just north of 56th and Van Dorn I smelled smoke, and it kind of looked hazy back between the buildings. This would have been right around 6:00 or a little after. I slowed down a bit and looked to see if there were any flames or anything, but I decided that I didn't really want to interrupt my ride to go investigate and, besides, if there really was a fire I thought the local authorities would have everything under control.

When I looked at the paper Sunday morning, there was an article on the front page of the local section about a fire that had destroyed a 24-unit apartment building near 60th and Van Dorn. At first I thought it had probably burned down in the middle of the night, and that there was still smoke in the air when I rode by that morning. I read through the article and found out that "A resident called 911 and activated a fire alarm at 6:17 a.m. after hearing a smoke detector." 6:17 a.m. About 15 minutes after I had passed by.

The fire started outside, on a 3rd floor balcony. I would guess that the smoke detector didn't go off until the fire had reached the inside of the building. If I would have ridden over there to see what was going on, I might have been able to get somebody's attention before the fire got out of control. Fifteen minutes is a long time when you're talking about a building fire.

I can't stop thinking about this. Why didn't I just go check it out? What if somebody had died? Could I have helped to stop this fire that ended up causing almost $2.5 million in damages?

That's what that song is about???

Yesterday I was in an 80's kind of mood, so I tuned in the 80's tag radio channel on last.fm. At one point I got to hear Phil Collins (In the Air Tonight) and Genesis (Jesus He Knows Me) back-to-back, which brought to mind one my favorite 30 Rock quotes:

Tracy Jordan (Tracy Morgan): "I'm gonna make you a mix tape. You like Phil Collins?"

Jack Donaghy (Alec Baldwin): "I have two ears and a heart, don’t I?"

If you don't watch 30 Rock, you should.

Anyway, not long after that Europe's The Final Countdown came on (check out the YouTube video. It's totally rad!). While I'm sure I've heard the opening to that song in dozens of NBA playoff games, I don't think I'd ever listened to the whole thing. Were you aware that this song is actually about the crew of a spaceship that will be traveling from Earth to Venus? Yeah, that seems normal.

So, the next time your favorite NBA thug is getting ready to take the floor in search of a game winning buzzer beater, you better hope the sound guy queues up this 80's glam-rock/sci-fi classic. I mean, nothing can get an athlete pumped up like a man-who-looks-like-a-woman singing about his impending space travels.

Manly tears

The folks over at The Art of Manliness have compiled a list of 15 great men that cried, plus 5 "dishonorable mentions" to round it out. The list includes men raging from Lou Gehrig to Dwight D. Eisenhower to David Letterman. The list spans two pages, so be sure you don't miss the second page.

I hope you like cucumbers

I mentioned awhile back that I was going to try and grow a garden for the first time in my adult life. I also mentioned the rain barrel system I had constructed to keep the garden a-growin' all summer. My dad warned me up front to not over-plant the plot, as it only stands about 6' x 12'. Sensible advice, I thought. So, I planted two tomato plants, two cucumber plants, and three green pepper plants. I think I even used the spacing directions from the plant tags, but I can't remember for certain.

So, this is what I've got going on back there now. The cucumber plants (which are covered with yellow buds) have taken over the world, and are now growing over and through the rabbit fence. The two tomato plants have grown out of the tops of their cages, and I have a third "volunteer" (?) tomato plant that's doing well without a cage of its own. The pepper plants, which look sickly to me, produced a pepper that Amanda picked this afternoon.

I'd like to be able to claim that I did something special to produce these results, but the only thing I've put on the plants is the rain water from the barrel system.

Unintended consequences

It's one thing to say you care about helping people, another thing to actually do something to help people, and yet another thing to do something that actually does help people in the long run. We should all rebuke the man who says he cares for the poor, but never offers them a loaf of bread. He's a hypocrite. But, don't forget that we should also rebuke the man who says he cares for the poor and then invents programs that will guarantee that they will always be so. This man is also a hypocrite, perhaps even more so because he likes to remind us all of how cold and calloused we are for not jumping on his programs-for-the-poor bandwagon.

Borrowing heavily from Doug Wilson's thoughts, we need to not only care about the needs of the poor, but we need to care enough to offer solutions that will actually help them. It's one thing to have good intentions, but what if the measures we take to "help the poor" actually make things worse? In such a case, everyone would be better off if we had done nothing at all. To borrow again from Wilson, what if our shipments of "relief" to an impoverished community in Africa are diverted to the local dictator and his armies, keeping him in power and assuring that the people under his tyranny will continue to starve? Are these people better off because of the so-called aid we've provided? What if sending out government checks to those "less fortunate than us" encourages them to not get married, not find a job, and to have more illegitimate children? Are they better off because of it? Judging by the progress in the War on Poverty (which, I should mention, has gone on much longer, and at much greater cost, than the war in Iraq), I would say that we're teaching people to be less responsible, and more dependent on their governmental ATM, which will most certainly run out of cash at some point.

While this shouldn't be misconstrued as an excuse to not do anything, it should serve as a warning that we should evaluate the potential consequences (intentional and otherwise) of any governmental (or social, for that matter) intervention before we launch the latest and greatest new program to solve everyone's problems for them. I say we employ this novel approach before the proposed legislation bailing out mortgage lenders and "distressed" home owners gets through Congress. The legislation is "meant to save hundreds of thousands of troubled homeowners from foreclosure. The legislation would create a government-backed mortgage insurance program with the power to refinance as much as $300 billion worth of failing home loans."

Hey, that sounds great. I mean, think of the CHILDREN! Think of their PETS! Don't we have a responsibility–nay, a duty–to protect people from the consequences of their decisions? Continue reading this post »