I have reached the end of my rope. I mean it. Do you have any idea what horrors I have been through this weekend? I mean, really?

I have blisters on my hands (get your minds out of the gutter) and none on my remote finger. Sex in the City is getting dangerously close to being unavoidable. I have entered into the sporting wasteland. The dog days. My raison d’être is nullified. I have been reduced to finding excuses to watch college softball and with no Cat Osterman or Jennie Lynch insight, it is interminable. Add to this the fact that the wife is not stupid and I am in big trouble.

It started innocently enough. I broke the cardinal rule of being male in a marriage; or war. Never volunteer. The wife is redoing our floors, tearing up the old wood floors in favor of travertine and we have an understanding that has worked for 20 years; if she wants to refurbish, build porticos, install satillo tile patios, paint, scrub, replace or any thing of the sort, I bitch and moan about the cost, give in, lay down on the coach and stay out of her way. She’s happy. I’m happy. Volunteer to do NOTHING.

Saturday she is finishing laying down the first of the travertine in the laundry room and asks me how to get up the threshold from the door that leads from the laundry room to the mud room where the dogs bed down. Instead of giving my standard “I’ll look at it in a minute” then promptly forgetting, and given the fact that I am tired of Sponge Bob “the gayest” of all the aquatic sponges, I, shudder, volunteered. I jumped up off of the couch and said “Oh, yeah, I can probably take care of this for you”. Problem one, I have to revive the wife: 20 minutes. Problem 2: the threshold was screwed into the cement over 30 years ago which of course means the head will strip at the first pass of the screw driver or will break off completely. All four did exactly that. Well, that means I get to breakout a tool that I have that has little to no value except to model plane enthusiast and boy scouts building pinewood derby cars; the Dremel rotary tool kit. I was thinking it would be a quick and easy job for the Dremel cut wheel to slice off those nasty screws level with the concrete and begin afresh. Thirty minutes and four broken cut wheels later, I get out a pair of needle nose pliers and easily rotate the broken screws out of the concrete within 30 seconds. I avoid throwing the Dremel in the garbage convincing myself that “Someday, by all that is great and small, I will find a use for it” and proceed to pry the threshold from the door frame. No good. The whole damn door falls apart. Brushing myself off and picking myself up, I make mistake numero dos, I volunteer again. “Hey, honey I am going to head up to Home Depot (I’ll take that $20.00 endorsement in coupons Josh) to get a new door, do you want to go?” “Sure just let me grab my purse” After waiting an hour I am finally standing in front of the new door. Oh, but wait, the wife has an opinion on the type of door, surprise, surprise. “Do you really want the one that is $88.00?” “Yes” I tell her, “it is a fine, well built door”. “But this $168.00 door is so much better” I am informed. So, with my new “168.00 door and wife in tow I head for the checkout, when I get the “oh, wait, can we look at light fixtures?” question which is not really a request. Another hour and we now have a light fixture for the breakfast area ($123.00) and other assorted odds and ends ($39.00).

I am now ready to hang the door but since the wife is laying the travertine in there for now, she “requests” (there’s that word again), that I hang the light. She’s figured it out. I am trapped. She knows that I have nothing better to do and since I volunteered, it is open season. Now, I can usually figure out how to install various electrical fixtures just by looking at the picture on the box, but not this one. Not even the directions, which I never read, are any help. I am not kidding when I tell you it took me over 2 hours and three tries to get the light hung correctly. Well, by this time she is ready for me to hang the door. I pull out the directions and breakout the french to english babelfish translator, since that is the only directions that came with the thing. Pictures help, but only so much. I have never had much luck when it comes to framing and hanging doors. It never goes as it should and I always end up shimming this and cutting that until I basically rebuild the entire frame. So I am amazed when it goes together with relative ease. I do end up shimming out one side of the door frame but even so it only took 5 hours and it is well into 10 pm before I am finished. One threshold: $378.22 and 11 hours. Priceless. By the way, do you have any idea how much damage a keyless chuck drill can do to your hands after spending 5 hours changing out between drill bits and screw drives? I have blisters that I have given names to, I love them as my children.

Let this be a lesson to the couch potatoes out there, If you find yourself in the midst of the football drought, do anything, take up golf, learn a new language, take guitar lessons, do anything but one. Do not volunteer.

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President Barack Obama has, almost from the time he entered office, taken a hostile position towards American companies. He prefers to deal with them from where crisis entreaties him to adopt a paternalistic and patronizing stance that requires government intervention into privately held companies not realized except by third world tin horn dictators like Fidel Castro and his sycophant Cesar Chavez.
His virtual takeover of General Motors, taking advantage of its crisis in light of a collapsing economy, poor management and crushing debt brought on by iniquitous union contracts and handing over the lion’s share of General Motors ownership to the same self dealing unions over the rightful debt owners, the stockholders and investors, is remarkable. He goes on to deflect criticism and responsibility from the pseudo private government entities Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac who arguably caused the housing markets collapse which began the current crisis, shifting blame instead to the banks and mortgage brokers and Wall St. investment firms who certainly do bear some of the blame but hardly all of it.
BP has been blasted by Barack Obama, and rightly so, but where is the self criticism beyond a perfunctory “the buck stops here” comment that was immediately nullified by the excuses that followed? If BP is to be blamed for the initial spill and the follow-up, where is the examination and hue and cry for congressional probes of the government officials involved? There has been none.
So we can only conclude that in Obama’s world the equation goes something like this: Business bad, Government good. Business reckless and irresponsible, Government cautious and practical. Which makes it all the more puzzling that he would promote the virtual dissolution and handover of one of the few shining examples of a successful government program into private hands.
NASA, or the NATIONAL Aeronautics and Space Administration, which began life as a government program in 1958 and continues to send men into space, is at a crossroads. It has been hampered by lack of vision due to infighting and dueling philosophical differences for years until President George Bush proclaimed that its next mission was to the moon with the ultimate objective of reaching inter-solar planetary systems within the next generation. One would think that is a vision that Barack Obama could embrace wholeheartedly. You would think that he would hold up this shining example as government at its best. Instead Obama overturns that vision and sends NASA into a tailspin right back into the morass of backbiting and tumult that has plagued it for years when he proposed to turn over the space program to private companies. Unspoken is not the how, but the why? We need this, more now than ever before. If we are to become a lasting dynastic country the likes of Rome, rather than a centenarian blip on the radar as Portugal or Prussia, we need this more then we have the prescience to currently envision. Riches in minerals, medicine, and technology have always been realized in exploration. I am not advocating that we divest ourselves from private industries involvement, quite the contrary, but without an overarching vision and overarching administrative structure, we will find NASA and possibly the future of the United States, languishing.

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just wanted the Afghanistan war because of the mineral rights???

WASHINGTON — The United States has discovered nearly $1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits in Afghanistan, far beyond any previously known reserves and enough to fundamentally alter the Afghan economy and perhaps the Afghan war itself, according to senior American government officials.

NY Times Article

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This is hilarious stuff:

Texas A & M as Ruprecht:

Texas: And, finally, I’m afraid to ask. A&M?

Texas A&M: I want to join the sex conference.

(Texas puts his face in his palms…)

Texas: Do you mean the SEC conference?

Texas A&M: Yeah, I want to join the sex conference.

Oklahoma: I think we should let him go.

Texas: We can’t. The state legislature says he can’t go anywhere without me.

(Texas A&M puts his mouth over the microphone in front of him on the table and tries to swallow it…)

More here:
SB NATION SPORTS BLOG: ADVENTURES OF THE BIG 12

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in the American zeitgeist.

1. YatPundit

   ohmygod, they’ve killed #failwhale! you #BP bastards! http://yfrog.com/5oys1g (@enderfp design) about 3 hours ago via Seesmic

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2. enderFP

   @disservice Uh-oh! No more #failwhale thanks to BP – http://yfrog.com/5oys1g (@enderfp design) via @emilysandford about 2 hours ago via Twitterrific in reply to disservice

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   disservice: RT @thesecretdaily “Love and gratitude will dissolve all negativity in our lives, no matter what form it has taken.” Not if we have a say. #

3. Elissar

   save the whales! twitter should replace its #failwhale w/ something that deserves to be hated. a fly, a mosquito, a BP logo? 15 minutes ago via web

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When I was young, awards and other honors, like the naming of roads or buildings, was done posthumously. This was not done without some thought. The thinking by our forebears was to wait a given period after someone had died in order to see if something untoward came out following the death. We are all human, and even great men and women have their share of secrets. I first noticed an unsettling and perilous change in this discreet practice when Congress, in 1972, named the newly built FBI headquarters in Washington D.C. the J. Edgar Hoover building just two days after Mr. Hoover’s death. What seemed like a no-brainer turned into an embarrassment when it came out later that Mr. Hoover had a less than stellar and untarnished past. This should have been a signal to the public and government that we should heed our antecedents caution in these matters. We didn’t and in fact we did just the opposite and descended a slippery slope leading to further embarrassment and chagrin.

In a bit of irony, Ken Lay of Enron had his name expunged from the YMCA in Katy,Texas posthumously. And its not just the naming of buildings after people that can be a source of discomfiture. Enron Field, Home of the Houston Astros, was renamed Minute Maid Park after the whole Enron fiasco. One can only hope that Minute Maid keeps it’s nose clean.

The latest argument for thoughtful postmortem interval and evaluation is Helen Thomas, a veteran reporter first for UPI and later as a columnist for Hearst publishing. She has had the honor of sitting in the front and center seat during Presidential press conferences, and in fact has a brass plate on the seat ( I can only speculate in order to keep newbie cub reporters from claiming the seat for their own).

Last month during a Jewish heritage event at the White House, Helen Thomas, when asked to comment on Israel was caught on camera infamously responding “Tell them to get the hell out of Palestine… Remember, these people are occupied, and it’s their land; its not German, its not Poland’s.” She was then asked where they should go, to which she replied: “they should go home” to “Poland, Germany.” Then, after another question she added, “America and everywhere else.” Now the venerable 101 year old Society of Professional Journalists must wrestle with the thorny question of what to do with the Helen Thomas Lifetime Achievement Award, an award that was first given to it’s namesake in 2000. It wasn’t as if they didn’t have any warning signs and were caught off-guard. Helen’s views on Israel and Palestine have been well known and voiced in public and private for years, although perhaps not in such strong and colorful language that uncomfortably conjured up the Holocaust in the public conscious.

I can also imagine a late night janitor quietly and without fanfare removing a brass plate from a chair in the White House Press Corp. briefing room.

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