Happy Halloween!

Tonight I went to the book store at the mall. After that I went over to the food court. My treat to myself was Rocky Rococco's pizza and a cinnabun. My cashier at Cinnabun was wearing a bee costume. I think I saw a spider too but spiders don't have wings so I'm really not sure what I saw.

Yes or No

This is all over the blogs aready but I just couldn't pass up posting about this myself anyway.

I didn't watch the entire debate but just by chance I happened to tune it in just at this was happening. I thought that was awesome that Tim Russert threw her a tough question. As you can see here she simply would not answer it directly, instead choosing to throw in a slam on the current administration and dance around the issue on both sides. The last 45 seconds are golden. I was yelling at my TV, "It's a yes or no question!"

I can't help but smile inside when I see stuff like this. Hillary's out of her element if she's not taking softball questions from those that don't or won't ever challenge her answers. Put her on her heals and you end up with results like these. If a candidate can't answer tough questions and take a clear position how are we to support that candidate? Tim Russert tried to pin her down to a position. She clearly resisted being pinned down.

I've often thought that too much is made of candidates who change their positions. The so called flip-flop. Certainly I agree that a person can change their opinions and positions over time. I know I have held to positions in the past which I no longer agree with. What I can't understand is taking opposing positions within weeks or months of each other or expressing different opinions depending upon who the audience is or what the polls are saying. That either means your pandering or it means you don't have a core value system with which you base your beliefs upon. In either instance it's not a characteristic of a leader. While some issues can be nuanced, this issue of giving licenses to illegal aliens is anything but. The answer to the question as it was presented was "yes or no", not "yes and no".

Hotair calls this Exhibit A in the case against Hillary for President.

Can I Afford It?

A while back I was surfing channels and I got sucked into watching part of a Suze Orman show. Ordinarily I cruise right on by when I see her annoying presence on television but I stopped anyway. In the same way I can't stand Keith Olberman on MSNBC I still can't help but stop at it now and then. Maybe to remind myself how repugnant he is I don't know. Anyhow as annoying as Suze Orman can be (and mind you it's not anywhere near being in the same league or flavor as Olberman) I got sucked into it watching this segment called "Can I Afford it?". It was actually rather interesting because people call in with all these ideas in mind for things that they want to buy. Then they say what their income is, what their savings are, and how much debt they have if any. Suze then reviews the situation and gives them her approval or a denial. Most of the time she denies people and most of the time it's pretty obvious why. I felt better about my financial position in life after I watched this. A lot of people out there have a lot of debt and not enough savings. This one guy wanted to buy a horse for 6 grand I think and she denied him. If I remember all this right I think he was 58, he had 7K/mos income and debt-wise I think a mortgage. Then he says that he has $2000 in stocks and didn't mention any retirement savings. What the heck? Your 58 dude! Your in serious trouble if you want to retire anytime soon and now you want to buy a horse that cost more money than you have saved?

In don't need Suze Orman to tell me if I can afford stuff or not. I could buy everything on my wish list tomorrow if I wanted to but it wouldn't be a very responsible thing to do. I labeled it "materialistic" for a reason. I'm going to buy the stuff I can afford and save for the rest or maybe just forget about buying those items altogether in the short term. It's called priorities and thankfully I have mine straight.

Materialistic wish list

#1 Cell phone - I sometimes think I'm the last person in America that doesn't own a cell phone. My plan right now is to get rid of my land line and use only a cell phone with hopefully an inexpensive service plan.

#2 Bike - I don't really NEED a new bike but I can easily see that the bike I have isn't particularly suited to the longer distance rides I've been doing. This one and #1 will be knocked off the wish list first as they are both long overdue purchases.

#3 ipod - I'll probably get just this basic ipod shuffle. I use headphones at the gym all the time and my current one is sooooooo 20th century. I mean I actually have to put the mp3 files onto a CD and carry the bulky thing around with me. With one of these I could just load it up and all I have to do is clip the thing onto my clothes or slip it in my pocket.
#4 Mattress - When I went to Disney this last January I slept on the most comfortable mattress I have ever slept on in my entire life. The tag said Sealy Posturpedic Encore 720 Plush. I've done some research and that specific model name is only distributed to hotels but equivalent models are sold all over the place. I'd like to get a new bed frame and a queen size mattress. I really don't need the queen size but one never knows what the future holds. #5 LCD television - along with a new entertainment center to put it in. My folks just got a new 32" Samsung and it looks great. Darn if I don't want one of those High Def TVs too. This one is a bit further out of reach when I consider what I allow myself to spend with respect to my disposable income. #6 Laptop - I really could use one when I travel. I like to write down my thoughts in a notebook whenever I travel and keep track of everything I did and where I went and all of that. I think a laptop would be more convenient and on top of that I could access the Internet and keep up with email and the news and my portfolio and so on. Plus I could also unload all of my photos onto it and look at them in full size at the end of the day rather than on that tiny screen on my camera. I take a lot of pictures when I travel. The only thing is I only travel about once a year so for 50 weeks out of the year it would probably sit around and collect dust. #7 CD player for my car - I only drive my car 5 months out of the year and during that time I have it out of storage I drive it maybe 25% of the time I go anywhere. My Trans Am is a luxury of sorts already but I only have a cassette deck in it. I put it in there when the factory stereo quit. It was at a time before CDs were something you could burn at home. I used to dub mix tapes for myself from my CDs so it was logical at the time to get a just a cassette deck. Now things are different and I'm stuck listening to tapes whenever I drive my car. I always seem to have the same couple of tapes and I'm getting real sick of them.

Easy Money

Nothing like makin money without lifting a finger. A bit of research is necessary but a stock like FCX which has clearly been a winner for me wasn't that hard to find. Sunpower I can't claim as my own find, but it has been totally rockin just the same.

My cost basis in Freeport McMoran Copper and Gold is $71.82. The resistance point on this stock is around $120 now. This one's going even higher short and long term. I have no doubt about it.

My cost basis in SPWR is $38.18 and it has recently been on a breakout up over $100. It could easily pull back a bit and even when it does, the stock has still more than doubled for me since I bought last November anyway. Sweet!

So what's the plan? As long as I continue to have stocks like this...and believe me they aren't all this great...to counterbalance some of the not so hot ones I'll retire from work as early as possible. I'll do some traveling and I'll drink wine and eat steaks and shrimp, chocolate cake and ice cream until my arteries can't take it anymore and I die of heart failure.

Or maybe not exactly that but I'm sure I'll come up with something good to do. Right now I'm spending more time learing the ropes of investing than I am planning out an endgame. The name of the game now is invest, reinvest the gains, then reinvest those gains and so on.

Huh?

Buckethead

No comments just great music.

Mary Katherine Ham

Where has this woman been all my life? She has an open invitation to dinner anytime. Smart, attractive, and conservative. I don't really know what collards are or why I should eat them on New Years but she looks great in this video making them and going on about politics the whole time. Now that's my kind of woman for sure.


I think I first saw her on Glenn Beck's show but now I see her more on the O'reilly Factor. There a segment on there maybe once a week called "Policing the Net". I don't know if it's on the same day every week or what but I should try to figure that out.

Totally free Saturday

I have a totally free Saturday with absolutely no plans. I didn't go to the gym today but I did have some great sandwiches for lunch. Among other things I'm gonna catch up on some posts since I've been posting here relatively infrequently lately. Most of the things I've been thinking about lately are just trivial. Most of the other things I've been thinking about for posts are just the same political things already posted about all over the internet anyway. I think a lot more about politics than is reflected in my postings here. I highly recommend the checking out the "other blogs" listed on the right of my page. For now it's a short list but I should expand it to include other blogs I visit. There are a lot of good ones out there. Whether I need it or not my almost daily visits to them remind me how messed up liberals are. Jessica McBride's blog has a more local flavor but I like to keep track of both local and national politics.

On television I generally watch bits here and there of The O'Reilly Factor, Hannity and Colmes, and Glenn Beck. Mainly because the channel MSNBC is on is between Fox and Headline Prime where Beck is I sometimes run into Keith Olberman or Chris Matthews. That Olberman guy is completely unhinged. I just can't put to words how over the top that show is. It's an hour of completely unfettered and unchallenged far far left liberal views. And how may times is he going to give Bill O'Reilly his "worst person in the world" title? I think O'Reilly can be a bit of a windbag sometimes too but on balance he's a fair guy. I somewhat prefer watching Glenn Beck though. He's more entertaining. It's rather alarming sometimes to watch and learn what's going on in the world and what it is that the enemies of the US are up to and what they are saying openly. Things that aren't on your local or network news channels. A lot of it is what liberals would rather minimize, deny, cover up, or just label those that don't as fear mongers.

Here's Glenn Beck video from a while back (10 minutes).


Thankfully the universal health care package he's talking about in the last 5 minutes of the video was dropped from the WI state budget thanks to Republicans. Unfortunately I live in a blue state where this type of nonsense is proposed and would become reality if it weren't for Republicans. Gov. Doyle and state Democrats should suck rotten eggs for proposing a pork laden state budget that increased fees and taxes by 1.7 billion dollars. The one that passed isn't great either but at least it only increases taxes by a few hundred million (I don't seem to be able to find the exact number at the moment). My personal assesment is that the Republicans gave in to too many of the new taxes/fees just to get a budget passed. They were getting pretty handily slammed in the press which as usual distorted the facts. The truth of the matter is that the previous budget could have remained in effect indefinitely until a new one was passed. Nothing would've shut down (govt agencies, state schools etc) as the Democrats and the press would have had you believe. I think I would have preferred to keep the previous budget to this one.



Now on to things a little more cheery...

Stupid Stats

I keep all my biking stats in an excel file on my computer. After each outing I take down all the numbers from the computer on my bike (distance, ave speed, time, max speed and cumulative miles) and enter them into a spreadsheet. At the end of the season I make up tables with relevant stats to see what I've done over the year. This year I pretty much blew away anything I've ever done before. I wasn't that far from tripling last years total mileage but I ran out of warm weather before I got that far. This chart shows my cumulative miles for each of the past 3 years.

There's a long flat, inactive period of about 2 weeks in August. I was out of town during the first week and when I got back it was raining for an entire week after that. I remember at the time I left for my trip thinking that I had already beaten my total 2005 mileage even though it was only the middle of August. After I got back and after the rain finally ended I made up for the downtime. According to my file I did about 275 miles in the 2 weeks that followed.

Additional stupid stats...

Out of 47 total outings my average ride was 26.32 miles. My shortest was 8.75 miles and my longest was 52.38 miles.

• 0-9 miles: 2
• 10-19 miles: 10
• 20-29 miles: 19
• 30-39 miles: 11
• 40-49 miles: 2
• 50+ miles: 3

My total riding time was 77 hours, 51 minutes, and 26 seconds. That's about 3.25 days. That only includes time I was actually in motion, not the time waiting at street lights or any rest stops.

Overall I think I did pretty good. I could've been in better shape to start the year. I was a bit on the heavy end of my range in the spring. I lost around 8-10 lbs over the summer but I could stand to loose another 5-10 before I'm in my ideal range. Maybe next year I'll finally get myself a new bike. My current bike is heavier and has much fatter tires than are necessary for the type of riding I'm doing. I can't remember how many times this year I thought about how much the charactaristics of my bike were holding me back.

Looking forward to next year it's hard to predict if I'll beat this or not. A lot will depend on what shape I'm in next spring, the weather, and if I get a new bike. It also turns out that 1200+ miles is a huge time commitment. I don't really have anything else planned. I enjoy the challenges and this keeps me in good shape. I don't have any regrets about having spent my time this way this year but on the other hand there are a few projects that I did not get at over the summer.

My Past DVD Rentals

Since I can never seem to remember the movies I rent I started keeping my Blockbuster receipts. This is a chronological list of all the movies I've rented since July of 2005 with IMDB links. There are a lot of good movies I haven't seen yet and looking back over this list, a lot of garbage that I have. My standards for judging a movie's worth aren't very high. If it holds my attention and is at least somewhat entertaining for the 90 minute or so duration that's enough for me. That said there are a few on this list that don't meet that standard. I watched them and by the time the end credits rolled or even before I wished that I hadn't. Those movies are marked with a *.

Pathfinder
Crank *
The Hills Have Eyes
Children of Men
Smokin' Aces *
Turistas
The Descent
The Protector
Saw 3
Slither
Star Wars Ep. III
Wedding Crashers
Lucky Number Slevin
Rest Stop
Hulk
The Sentinel
The Exorcism of Emily Rose
The Matador
Super Size Me
Underworld Evolution
Running Scared *
Underworld
Blade: Trinity
Hostel
National Treasure
The Bourne Supremacy

Seems like a short list...maybe I lost some of the receipts or something. Unfortunately every one of these was rented from Blockbuster. They have a monopoly on DVD rentals where I live. As far as I know there isn't another video store within 20 miles that isn't a Blockbuster. There was one independent store for a while but the guy closed up 3 or 4 years ago now. I boycotted Blockbuster as long as it was possible. I did that because every time I went in they claimed I owed late fees which I know were bogus. I guess now that late fees are non-existent I won't have that problem anymore. I've considered using Netflix but usually renting movies is a spontaneous event. I don't know if I want to have to plan this stuff ahead of time and get my DVD's in the mail and all that. Maybe I'll try it and see if I like it. I still feel the less business I give Blockbuster the better.

Maywood 2007

Yesterday was the annual Maywood Earth Ride. I couldn't be less committed to the cause really. The earth? The Ellwood H. May Environmental Park? I don't care about that at all, I just like doing the bike ride. This year I did the 50 mile route again. They have 12, 25, 50, 65, and 100 mile routes. Some year I plan on doing the 65 but it wasn't this year. They call that 65 mile route a metric century. This year again it was windy as usual. The wind was primarily from the NNW and I'd say somewhere in the 10-15 mph range. Most of the first part of the route goes to the North and West. On top of that it was much colder this year than all 3 previous years that I've done this ride. I think I overheard someone at the start say that it was 45 degrees. I'm not usually out there biking in anything less than 60 degrees but I wasn't about to skip this just because it was cooler out. The last two weekends I've done some longer routes to test myself. Last weekend I did a 40 mile route on Saturday and a 50 mile route on Sunday just to see what it felt like. It felt pretty good. Saturday's route in Sheboygan has much more difficult hills than my 50 route but the wind was comparable. My average speed was 14.6 mph across 50 miles yesterday and a full 1.4 mph slower when compared with my 50 mile route from last Sunday. I felt at times like I was crawling along at 10 or 11 mph up some of those hills. Still I was smoking a lot of other riders. I got to one rest stop and wondered where everyone was. Then within a couple minutes the rest area was flooded with other bikers. I'm sort of left with the feeling that I could have gone further or taken a quicker pace. I could've done better. On the other hand if I compare myself with others I'm near the front of the pack. Someday when I get a lighter bike with thinner tires I'm really going to be out in front and kicking butt. Although I expect that if I move up to that 65 mile route I'll be with another class of bikers altogether.

DJ Sara

Does this kid do birthday parties? I got a birthday comin up in October.

The War on Zombies

Slowpoke Rodriguez

Occasionally my blog will be informative. Today's bit of knowledge that I am choosing to highlight is that the popular Speedy Gonzales Loony Tunes character has a cousin known as Slowpoke Rodriguez.
If what I read is accurate Slowpoke and his cousin Speedy are not shown on the Cartoon Network because the characters were deemed to be "offensive ethnic stereotypes". Well what is Elmer Fudd then?

Here is a Slowpoke clip from YouTube.

And here is a Speedy clip from YouTube.

Bobblehead #2

I got my second bobblehead of the year Friday. This time I got the more common pinstriped home uniform and not the powder blue visitor uniform like I did last time. The left fielder Ben Oglivie was the 9th of 13 bobbleheads given out throughout the year at Friday games.

We tailgated before the game and then sat in $7 nosebleed seats that were 8 rows from the very top. I thought it was actually pretty cool to be up that high. You can't exactly see the seams on the baseball or the laces on the player shoes but do you really need to to enjoy a game? I don't think so. Brewers won 2-1 and the hot dog won the sausage race. It was a good time.

Flavored Bread

This better not be from the Home Pride factory.


Home Pride is my bread of choice. Butter Top Wheat just like in this image. Just one mouse and that would be it. That would be enough for me to switch brands forever. My mom found a fly at the bottom of her coffee cup at a KFC somewhere down south once. Now she won't ever go to any KFC anywhere ever again. It's irrational. I could see if it was a beak, some feet, or an entire chicken head maybe, but a fly at the bottom of a coffee cup could happen anywhere. I'm not sure even if I found a McNoggin in my McNuggets that I'd stop eating at McDonalds. I'd at least make sure I got some sort of golden pass or something that allowed me to eat free at any McDonalds worldwide for the rest of my life.

Jogger's Nipple

I haven't posted my cumulative miles cycling this year yet, but without doing that now I'll just say that I'm really outdoing myself this year.

One side effect of that I'm experiencing is nipple soreness. I've noticed this before after some of my longer Saturday workouts I do during the winter at the gym on the cross trainer. I just shrugged it off and figured it was because my shirt rubbed. I never knew this had an official name until I recently looked it up on the internet. They call it jogger's nipple. It happens to marathon runners and joggers mostly but I guess anyone else really that's doing something athletic that would cause their clothes to rub. Even if the movement of my shirt across my chest is slight I can attest to the fact that it's enough after an hour and half or two on a bike that it gets to be irritating. I'm not bleeding like the dude in this picture but it's no picnic either. I'd call it relatively low intensity pain...maybe 1 or 2 on a 10 scale unless I forget about it and rub my towel across my chest after my shower. Then it's more like...I don't know...a 5 on a scale of 10.

The guy in this picture switched to NipGuards and I'll bet he's glad he did. I think I'm going to give the petroleum jelly method a try. I don't like the idea of slapping an adhesive anything to that part of my body.

Photo Dump

Since my last post didn't have any photos I decided I should throw up a post with a few.

This is Manuel Uribe. I think this is a "before" photo when he weighed 1234 lbs. I've seen this guy on TV on Sunday night on The Learning Channel a couple times. There's an entire one hour show about when he went on the Zone Diet and lost 440 lbs. I wonder what effects all that fat has had on his skeletal structure. From what I've seen on TV it appears that the way he sits is like doing the splits. His exercise is rolling around on his bed. Toward the end of the show he goes outside for he first time in years. A friend gets his bed up on a flatbed with a forklift and they go cruising around in his tiny little Mexican town. It's a big party.

It's amazing to me that this guy is still alive while at the same time there are sometimes athletes out there that die from heart defects that go undiscovered until it's too late.

This photo gives new meaning to the old adage, "You mess with the bull you get the horns". You can see the horn in there clear up to his knee. Once the adrenaline wore off that must've hurt like mad. Remind me never to go running with the bulls.

This is a wet cat. I don't have much to say about this other than I think that it's hilarious. I recommend a visit to to Google's image search page and conducting a search for, "wet cat".

Dark Stain

So from a post about a professor I never had, but maybe wish that I had, to a post about a professor I consider a dark stain on my experience at UW-Whitewater. I've always been a believer that your education is, in large part, what you make of it. Talented, knowledgeable, and respectable professors are good things but I think it's possible to come away with something from a course even if the professor sucked.

Doug Eamon is a dark stain on UW-Whitewater. This guy was the least objective professor I ever had. I first had him for a statistics course which I bombed. I wasn't able to overcome his crappy teaching. I later retook the course with another professor and had no problems at all with the material. I think about a year later I had professor Eamon again for a course they called "Experimental Psychology". The course was about conducting experiments, using statistical methods, and writing up papers with the results. It was a 5 credit course rather than the usual 3 credits. We had lab hours to conduct our experiments in addition to the lecture hours. During the 16 week semester we had 3 experiments to run and 3 papers to write about them. This course was essentially the "big one" that all psych majors needed to complete in order to graduate as a psych major. It must've been that he was the only professor that taught this or I'm sure I would have scheduled it some other way.

At the start of the semester he gave a real serious speech about cheating. He said he was going to do everything in his power to get anyone he perceived to be cheating expelled from the University. So this is where my story begins. About midway through the semester I got my second paper back and it didn't have a grade on it. I think it said "see me" on the second page somewhere and it had a big line on it. So I went to his office and he asked me where I got a portion of my paper from. He was accusing me of plagiarizing the entire introduction page of my paper. Since I couldn't give him an answer to his satisfaction he requested copies of all of my sources with highlighting on the areas that were pertinent.

His logic, as he explained it to me, was that my writing style was different than that of my first paper that I had turned in for his course. So my question was always this then....how did he know that I wrote my first paper? Of course neither of them were plagiarized, but I was learning first hand that logic wasn't one of professor Eamon's strengths. The fact of the matter was I had written my paper over a matter of weeks and the intro was one of the first items I had written. My writing process went from the beginning of the paper to its'end, and each day as I progressed I began by tweaking the wording around for everything I had previously written. By the time my paper was done I was very much satisfied with the beginning portions. I considered them to be very clear and concise. I had spent a great deal more time on this paper than I had my first. I agreed that they didn't have the same style. But why did that equate with being written by a different person in my professor's mind? Nevermind that he had never read any other papers of mine. Two writing samples was enough for him to come to the conclusion he had.

After I turned over all of my sources and explained how each of them did or did not relate to our experiment and what informational aspects of them ended up in my paper he still was not convinced. He continued to attempt to pressure me to confess to something I could not. At one point he said something to me like, "So I guess we've reached an impasse".

I spent some time familiarizing myself with the procedure that was undertaken when a student is accused of misconduct. I don't recall the details of it now anymore, but it involved the department head of psychology, a student representative...some sort of panel and so on. It never did get that far. Perhaps he got a second opinion and was laughed at. There was no way on earth he ever would have prevailed in such a setting. His position wasn't based on facts and since evidence simply couldn't exist, he would've had to fall back on this foggy logic about 2 papers that didn't seem to have the same writing style...and therefore must not have been written by the same person. I looked forward to the panel and to humiliating him but alas I was denied the opportunity.

Sometime before my third paper was due I requested feedback from him on my second paper so that I could proceed in proper form for my third paper. Eventually as the semester end was coming up he gave me a grade on my paper. There was something illegible written on the side near the beginning of the paper. If I had to guess what it read it may have been, "mistake". I think he said he graded my paper without regard to the portion of it he viewed as questionable. If I recall correctly he gave me a B or a B-.

I've discovered in recent years that the staff at UW-Whitewater can post webpages which I presume are hosted on University servers. The content of most of the pages relates directly to courses taught by the professors....course materials, the syllabus, etc. Some pages go further. One look at Prof. Eamon's page and it is apparent where he stands in the political spectrum. To the left would be an understatement. I shouldn't be surprised. To my recollection this was never apparent in the classroom, but then again that would have been back in 1995...smack in the middle of the Clinton era and long before Haliburton was a household name. I wonder where he stood when Ward Churchill came to speak at the Whitewater campus a few years back. Was he aware of the academic misconduct his ideological co-hort was involved in? Misconduct which ironically includes plagiarism. Only it's the real kind with evidence and everything.