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Drooling on the Pillow

Saturday, August 13, 2005

Lucky Thirteen 


Tillie's getting a reputation as he flies from relationship to relationship. Sluggo has a mature outlook and remembers our fling with fondness. Especially the plaid skirt. Very Cheerleaders Gone Wild. I'm not sure exactly what he's up to in this incarnation, but I hope, and am confident, he is happy.

All will be explained at Riehl World View where the 13th Carnival of the New Jersey Bloggers will be hosted on Sunday. Those bloggers of the Garden State persuasion are encouraged to get their submissions in to njcarnival@gmail.com by Saturday afternoon.

See you there.
Posted by: Sluggo / 1:20 AM
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Ya, Y'all 

IowaHawk gives us a peak at the script of The Dukes of Hazzard, as directed by Ingmar Bergman.

THEME (By the Kronos Quartet with vocals by ABBA)

Just the good ol' boys
Filled with guilt and ennui
They're bored, racked with discord
Just hangin' by the fjord
Scarred emotionally

Masking their pain
The only way they know how
Just a bit more existentialist
Than their souls will allow

Just them good ol' boys
Wouldn't change if they could
Psychically crippled
Like two planks of Danish teak wood

Yee. Ha.

Posted by: Sluggo / 12:09 AM
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Friday, August 12, 2005

Roosevelt Stadium 


I don't live in Union City and I don't follow the news over there too closely, so I was a little shocked on the way home today to see Roosevelt Stadium half knocked down.

It was a very cool looking structure on Kennedy Boulevard a few blocks south of 495. It was built in 1937 by the WPA. You don't see many Art Deco baseball fields and by tomorrow you probably won't see any.

It's being torn down to so that The New Jersey Schools Construction Corporation can build a school with a roof-top atheletic complex. This article at Preservation Online says that the new school will cost $366 million which has got to be wrong. This article in the Union City Reporter says $166 million which still seems an awful lot for a high school.
The school building will feature health screening and childcare centers;
recreational facilities including a 21,000 square foot gymnasium; a
performing arts auditorium that seats about 1,000; a 200-space parking
garage; and a 12,000 square foot media center.
Child care center?

A few blocks south of this site the NJSCC has a construction site for an early learning center that has been an empty lot and chain link fence for probably a year.

Roberto, at DynamoBuzz, squawked about this a month ago. I didn't take much notice of it until they knocked down one of my favorite buildings in the area.
Posted by: Sluggo / 9:45 PM
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Thursday, August 11, 2005

The Cindy Sheehan Problem 

The ugly saga of Cindy Sheehan parking herself outside of Crawford, Texas, 'demanding' that the president give her the answers she wants to hear about why her son, Casey, died fighting in Iraq is a very touchy subject, which the administration has, typically, so far, bungled.

Ms. Sheehan has been radicalized by her son's death and is a bitter opponent of the President and his prosecution of the war. But she is also a gold star mother and an American with the right to her opinions and the right to confront the President with them. Not, however, necessarily in person.

No one wants to beat up on a mother who lost her son to a war she doesn't believe in. But she puts forward a defeatist agenda shared by a significant minority of Americans and if we are going to have any hope of winning, she has to be answered.

Kid Various at The Idiom does as good a job as I've seen anywhere with Why Casey Sheehan Died.
Posted by: Sluggo / 3:59 PM
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Time Waster 

Kevan Choset, of The Volkh Conspiricy, poses this puzzle:

Length of Presidential Term:

Each of the following Presidents served exactly one full term in office (i.e., they did not start in the middle of the term by replacing someone else; they did not leave in the middle of the term through death or resignation; and they did not seek or win reelection). However, one of them served a different number of days than the others. Who, and why?

John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Martin Van Buren, James K. Polk, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, Rutherford B. Hayes, Benjamin Harrison, William Howard Taft, Herbert Hoover, Jimmy Carter, George H.W. Bush.

Each of the following Presidents served exactly two full terms in office. However, one of them served a different number of days than the others. Who, and why?

George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, Andrew Jackson, Ulysses S. Grant, Grover Cleveland, Woodrow Wilson, Dwight Eisenhower, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton.

(No google, no wikipedia, etc. These both can be figured out.)

The answers are in his comment section.
Posted by: Sluggo / 1:14 PM
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We Report, You Just Hush 

Props to Cox & Forkum.
Posted by: Sluggo / 12:57 PM
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Wednesday, August 10, 2005

Can I See Your Paddle? 

Anybody else who uses Site Meter notice that we've suddenly started getting much more detailed information about visitors? Like the cities and towns they live in?

Got a visit a little while ago from the office of the Sergeant at Arms of the U.S. Senate. He was looking at the Carnival of the New Jersey Bloggers #9, so he may be moving on to visit a lot of you.
Posted by: Sluggo / 12:54 PM
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Embracing The Geezer Within 

Sometimes I like to be way above everything and just think.

It may look like I'm contemplating doing a little gravity rainbow down to street level, but I'm not. The truth is, at least when I was young, I was something of an acrophiliac. Loved climbing ladders and trees, loved being on catwalks, loved flying. Being up high was comforting. I felt liberated and the world became about only two things: the air and my thoughts.

For various reasons, I haven't done much flying in recent years and last weekend I realized I was going to have to paint the rear of the house next summer and I began to strategize the placement of the 30 foot ladder and came to the mildly unsettling realization that I was not going to be happy up there.

Natural progression, I guess. As you get older you get fonder of your skin. The balance tips from sensation to consequence. You've got responsibilities tying you to the ground. The meaning of risk completely changes color.

In my trip to the Keansburg water park last weekend I was having a great old time. Always been a freak for rollercoasters and similarly low risk thrills. On one of the slides, though, I had an unfortunate take-off and banged from one side to the other all the way down. My arms, my head and my knees were all bruised up. I got out of the pool and my only thought was that maybe putting my $30,000 in knee surgery at risk in that way wasn't too smart. For the first time in my life I didn't want to go down again. And I didn't.

Drink your cocoa quietly, kids, Grampa Sluggo's taking a nap.

Compensating for all this is the fact that I've gotten much better looking.
Posted by: Sluggo / 11:37 AM
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Tuesday, August 09, 2005

Why We Will Win 

The quality of the emerging Conservative intern class is shown in an audition video submitted to National Review Online.

My only concern is whether actually having to do stuff will take the edge off his skills.
Posted by: Sluggo / 12:39 PM
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Um, What's The Rate On That? 

Shamrocketship tells a story about filing for unemployment online and getting a popup right at the end of the process for Travelzoo.

On the one hand, why not suffer the anxiety and humiliation of joblessness in Aruba, rather than North Jersey? On the other hand, maybe this is the beginning of meta-advertising, where Travelzoo is counting on links from other sites commenting on how dumb this is.

On the other hand . . .
Posted by: Sluggo / 11:13 AM
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Monday, August 08, 2005

Speaking Truth To Morons 

The 'Reverend' Fred "God Hates Fags" Phelps (I'd vote for Hillary Clinton before I'd link to that dirtbag) is, famously, a very sick puppy. Here's a man who stays up late every night thinking of ways to give Christianity, America and conservatism a bad name.

Lately he's been picketing soldiers' funerals, showing up with his zombie followers to accuse the dead heroes of being homosexual and, in general, making an ungodly ass of himself. His rationale is thus:

Thank God for IEDs killing American soldiers in strange
lands every day.WBC rejoices every time the Lord God
in His vengeance kills or maims an American soldier
with an Improvised Explosive Device (IED).

To most effectively cause America to know her
abominations (Ez. 16:2), WBC will picket the funerals of
these Godless, fag army American soldiers when their
pieces return home. WBC will also picket their landing
spot, in Dover, Delaware early and often.

According to Objective Justice, a group legal blog, two soldiers' wives have tried to turn Phelps' primitive obsession into a postive.
To counter-act these sick idiots, a fundraiser event has
been put together in a format that we're all familiar with
from grade-school fundraising programs. You may
pledge any amount that you want for every minute the
protesters are at the funeral. In this way the Phelps
Gang is helping to provide money for the family the are
desecrating.

Currently, they are taking pledges for Sgt. Christopher
Taylor. To pledge, just send an e-mail to Yoannon at
sgt.taylorfund@hotmail.com or you can reach her at
(706)366-0945. E-mail your name, phone number,
what you want to pledge, and whether you want it to
go to the "wife and kids" account or the "kids" account.
Objective Justice will also send $1 to the fund for every blog that links to their post.

Via Dean's World.

UPDATE: Mary, of Exit Zero, comments that Phelps is a life-long Democrat and one-time party operative. That was news to me and I feel like the Jewish woman who, when a crime is committed by Zimmerman, prays he's German. I also wonder why I assumed he was, if anything, a Republican. Am I a self-hating Republican? More likely I've just absorbed too much commentary on him that lumped him in with the standard leftists' betes noir. But, really, when you get that far out on the fringes the left and right begin to meld.
Posted by: Sluggo / 9:16 AM
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Sunday, August 07, 2005

Speed McGreevey 

Just got back from my first trip down the shore this summer to the water park in Keansburg. I like the amusement park at Keansburg for the same reason I like The Great Escape up in the Adirondacks. Small, old fashioned, a little run down, but not enough to keep you off the rides. And Keansburg has the advantage that half of the kids working there for the summer aren't French Canadian.

The trip down and back was amazingly swift. I have never in my life taken a trip down the shore on a summer weekend and not once stopped for traffic either way. That has to go on McGreevey's tab so I'm calling a moritorium on abusing the ex-governor on this site. I'm sure my friend Roberto at DynamoBuzz can take a few moments off from flailing Corzine to fill your needs.

This moritorium ends, of course, the moment he runs for something.
Posted by: Sluggo / 5:36 PM
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