Mary the Directions Bitch

On Sunday, the wife and I went to watch the Shamrock Shuffle, an 8k race here in Chicago. 30,000 people ran the race, and it was really a pretty cool sight. We had a couple of friends that ran so we watched from the 1k mark for awhile and then watched at the finish line. Maybe next year we will run in it. 4.97 miles is just a really long damn way to run. Anyway, maybe more on that later.

The important part of the day is that after the race we drove up north to grab pizza with everyone at Piece. Even though we know how to get there, we decided to play with the buggy's navigation system. You just type in where you want to go, and it will give you directions. One of the options is to have a voice come on and actually tell you when your turn is coming up, how far to go, and all that stuff.

The voice is English. As in from the UK. Makes sense, since it is an English car.

Anyway, we need a name for the directions lady. I wanted to go with "The Directions Bitch", but that seemed too long. Wife proposed "Bridgett," but I vetoed that. We agreed to temporarily call the voice "Mary" (after Mary Poppins), but would be open to any suggestions.

4 a.m.

Things I think I thought I thunk.

+ What a stupid fucking title.

+ Today is sister's last day at her job. I'm glad she is switching to a new place, and I think that she should eat her stupid going away cake.

+ Had a blast at Pothead's this past weekend. It was great to drive on gravel, tour the feed mill, see the little pothead, play with the dogs and just generally be away from the city and back in the country. Plus, I got to drink beer with Pothead.

+ Today I booked tickets to Boston for a presentation to clients later this month and to New York to meet up with Law School buddies and do some gambling in the middle of April. Also, the wife and I are buying tickets in the next couple of days for a trip to a wedding in California in May and maybe a short beach vacation sometime in the middle of all of that. The wife is going to Miami the same weekend that I go to New York. We travel too damn much.

+ I love the buggy. It was great driving it the 7 1/2 hours to Iowa last weekend. Figured out lots of fun things to play with. Favorite so far is the navigation system and 4 wheel drive system. Fun. However, it did take about 50 miles of the trip to figure out how to turn on the rear windshield wiper. And the mileage is shit.

+ I want a new gun. I want a Remington Tactical 870 with a folding stock.

You may ask, "But WHBH, why do you need a Remington Tatical 870 with a folding stock?". To which I would have to answer, "Shut the hell up you stupid hippy." See? It makes sense.

+ Pete Rose should be let back into baseball. So what if he bet on his team every night? He bet on them to win. And I hate Barry Bonds. He is an asshole.

+ For the hell of it:

Timetables and Such

In the news today, the House Democrats are proposing a timetable for pulling troops out of Iraq. They want to set the date in the Fall of 2008. Some quick thoughts:

+ I am all for getting out of Iraq. I don't want our troops there one minute longer than necessary, and whatever it takes to finish this up, I'm all for.

+ If the timetable passes Congress, why wouldn't insurgent groups sort of lay low for the next 12 to 18 months, gather their forces, and then when the US forces are gone, take over everything? If your enemy tells you when they are leaving, why not sit and wait for them to go, and then strike?

+ Why would the Democrats set the deadline right before the 2008 elections? Sure, they will say that the Republican administration couldn't meet the deadline, etc. when all the troops aren't out by then, but isn't the easy Republican response that the Democrats have been in power for 2 years and weren't able to meet their own deadline? After all, they have control of both houses of Congress, so if the deadline is missed, how is it not their fault?

+ How can a deadline for pulling out of Iraq help our troops? How does this help stabilize Iraq? There is absolutely no way that the US can leave Iraq without being able to claim a victory. If that would happen, and Iraq becomes another Vietnam, there would never again be a reason for rogue states to listen to the US or the UN, because they would know that there is no real threat of us ever taking military action against them absent their first strike directly against the US or maybe the UK.

Wednesday

I was thinking about writing a post about going out to see the Pothead family this weekend, then I wrote the words "Pothead family" and decided that would be a better topic. In college, people get nicknames. Sometimes they go away, sometimes they stick. Generally, the ones you want to go away stick. Just ask Pothead and Snot.

When Pothead's wife agreed to marry him, I wonder if she considered the fact that she could someday be referred to in a blog as "Pothead's wife" or that their family could be "the Pothead family." I'm guessing not.

Snot's nickname is slowly wearing off, but it is still hard to say whether it will be gone before he and his wife have a kid.

Some nicknames are pretty tame. Pappy will probably always have his, but there isn't anything inherently weird about that. Absent the whole perjury and going to prison thing, Lewis "Scooter" Libby did fine in politics with a nickname.

Every once in awhile, nicknames even work out. Like for Captain. What started out as "Captain Idiot" when he forgot the fucking trolling motor turned into an ok nickname. Probably won't help him pick up girls like Meat's or Dirk's nicknames will, but what the hell.

So the list gets longer.

As if my people to kill** list wasn't long enough, now I have to add more people to it. Namely, people like this fucking idiot who thinks that the reason that kids are fat is that Pizza Hut promises them a tiny little pizza as a reward for reading. Couldn't be a parenting problem or anything. Fucking idiot.

See the whole story on CNN.com at this link. The key part is this:

Book It, which reaches about 22 million children a year, "epitomizes everything that's wrong with corporate-sponsored programs in school," said Susan Linn, a Harvard psychologist and co-founder of the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood.

"In the name of education, it promotes junk food consumption to a captive audience ... and undermines parents by positioning family visits to Pizza Hut as an integral component of raising literate children," Linn said.

I liked Book It. I read books, they gave me pizza. It worked. I'm not fat, and don't have some inflated sense of entitlement. It is people like this Linn idiot that are screwing up parenting today -- not Pizza Hut. By pointing the finger at everyone else, they make it ok to suck as a parent.


**Disclaimer: Given the fact that politicians on both sides of the aisle are working as hard as they can to eviscerate any real meaning in the first amendment, I want to clarify that "kill" here is not to be taken literally. Rather, it should be taken to mean my desire to write a strongly worded letter expressing my great disappointment in these people's position and my genuine wonder as to how they manage to look at themselves in the mirror every morning without realizing that they are hysterical fools.

Tunnels, Light, Etc.

I have 9 e-mails in my inbox. To put that in perspective, you need to understand that I get a lot of e-mails everyday. For example, on February 22nd, I received 82 emails and sent 57. That is fairly common.

The main deal that I have been working on died on Monday, and that gave me time to do all of the stuff that I've been putting off. I've filed boxes and boxes of paperwork from past deals and discovered that there is an entire part of my office that I haven't seen since 2005. And I've been taking care of a lot of e-mails that I'd been ignoring.

I may not even come into work tomorrow. Then, maybe next week I'll get everything cranked up again. Or not.