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Posted on 01.27.09 by Danny Glover @ 11:57 pm
Filed under: Business and Technology and Video Comments: None |
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Posted on 01.27.09 by Danny Glover @ 11:24 pm
I’m 42 now, so I can say this without shame: What is it with kids these days? You give ‘em their own cell phones and they go lose control. First came the news that 13-year-old California girl Reina Hardesty sent more than 14,500 text messages in one month. That breaks down to 484 messages a day. Assume she’s awake 16 hours a day, and that means young Reina sent about 30 messages an hour. How could she possibly have done anything but text all day? What an utter waste of a young life (as opposed to, say, blogging your mid-life crisis away on a site like The Enlightened Redneck). But that’s not the craziest teen tech story of the month. That dishonor goes to an unidentified 16-year-old girl from Delaware who flipped when he father confiscated her cell phone:
Something tells me that girl never should have had a cell phone in the first place. Not every spoiled child brazenly steals from her parents or pulls knives on them, but odds are good that a child who will go to such extremes probably hasn’t been told “no” very often in her youth. Filed under: Culture and News & Politics and Technology Comments: None |
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Posted on 01.27.09 by Danny Glover @ 9:40 pm
Ed Driscoll seized on the recent brouhaha over a possibly faked CNN news report from Gaza to revisit plenty of news stories in the past several years that we know have been faked. I’ve been a journalist for two decades now, and I can tell you that this kind of shoddy work is the exception to the rule. But phony news reports bring reproach upon the entire profession. The people who perpetrate these frauds deserve every bit of scorn directed at them. Filed under: Media and News & Politics and People and Video Comments: 1 Comment |
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Posted on 01.27.09 by Danny Glover @ 8:46 pm
You may be asking yourself that question if you’re new to this blog, so this post is designed to give you the answers. You can find the same answers in the category titled “An Enlightened Redneck …“, but I thought it would helpful to new readers to pull all of those links into one post and feature it more prominently. So here, then, are my answers to the burning question on all of your minds: An enlightened redneck …
Filed under: An Enlightened Redneck ... and Spotlight Comments: 19 Comments |
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Posted on 01.27.09 by Danny Glover @ 8:32 pm
A case in point is this Bill Clinton “draft dodger” that I bought years ago as a Christmas gift for Grandpa Tumblebug. Hang it on your doorknob until winter, and then lay it in the gap between the floor and the bottom of the exterior door to dodge the draft of cold air. Grandpa and my uncle Howard kept it on the door of their electronics shop for years (the yellow stains from all of the chain-smoking in the shop bear witness to that fact). Soon after Grandpa died in 2006, my mother gave Clinton back to me. He hangs on the back of our front door to this day, except when the kids hide him to tease me. I also display the macaroni and cheese I got at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. It’s in the same office where I display the picture I took of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher when I went to the White House in 1988 and the controversial “Obama Waffles” I bought at the 2008 Values Voter Summit. My other goodies include a deck of cards that features all of the presidential candidates on the ballot in New Hampshire in 2000 from my visit there. That mix of political souvenirs, along with my memorabilia from West Virginia University and Guatemala, no doubt would leave visitors baffled about me. Republican or Democrat? Redneck or enlightened one? But newcomers rarely see my treasures. My wife begs me to hide them when we have friends to the house for the first time so as not to shock them with my politically incorrect interior decorating techniques. I usually oblige. Filed under: An Enlightened Redneck ... and Family and Friends and History and Just For Laughs and News & Politics and West Virginia Comments: 1 Comment |
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Posted on 01.27.09 by Danny Glover @ 6:18 pm
That’s a blogworthy milestone if ever I heard of one, so I decided to capture the final board on film. The leftover “U” is mine, and all of the big words are hers — “leaked,” “killer” and “squad.” Kimberly used all of her letters first, too, even though I played the first word in the game.
In addition to the “Q,” she also had the “Z,” “X,” “J” and “K” in this game, not to mention two “G’s” at once. I, on the other hand, had a never-ending supply of vowels to play. I had six at one time. It’s amazing that the final score was only 289-230. Well played, Better Half! Filed under: Entertainment and Family Comments: None |
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Posted on 01.27.09 by Danny Glover @ 2:49 pm
In the past decade, America has seen the bursting of investment bubble after investment bubble. The dot-com stock crash came first, teaching people that as a general rule, you’re more likely to lose a fortune than get rich by jumping on the bandwagon of overvalued companies. More recently, the U.S. economy has been hobbled by real-world lessons about real estate, the downward spiral of the stock market as a whole, and the sudden rise and fall of oil futures.
Can you say gold bubble? Wake up, America. If you weren’t investing in gold before 2008, now isn’t the time to start. The bullion market, like dot-com companies, real estate, the stock as a whole and oil futures before them, seems ripe for a crash. The same is true for silver. If I had money to spare — and I don’t — I wouldn’t be buying gold or silver with it. But I do wish I had bought some earlier this decade when prices were relatively low. Shoulda, woulda, coulda. Filed under: Business and Coin Collecting Comments: 1 Comment |
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Posted on 01.27.09 by Danny Glover @ 12:16 pm
My Dad forwarded this video to me, thinking that I might be able to decipher the riddle before watching the video because I make my living with words. He was wrong. Watch and learn, as I did. Filed under: Family and Video Comments: None |
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Posted on 01.27.09 by Danny Glover @ 11:09 am
A private school in Texas whose girls’ basketball team contended for a state championship last year has fired the team’s coach days after the girls defeated a winless team of students at a school that caters to people with “learning differences.” The score was 100-0. Good for Covenant School. The coach, Micah Grimes, is the poster child of unsportsmanlike conduct. He shouldn’t be leading any team of impressionable youngsters. As the coach of my son’s recreational soccer team, I’ve had the unpleasant experience of putting a team of inexperienced players on the field against talented opponents trained by a coach like Grimes. That they easily defeated us never bothered me; that their coach and players made sure they won by the largest possible margin allowed by league rules did. And if not for the league rules, I’m certain that the coach would have scored as many goals as possible. Even worse than the coach’s determination to run up the score was the behavior he tolerated in his players. In one game, the coach’s son hooted like a monkey while chasing our players on defense — and that happened after the opposing team had the maximum five-goal lead. The players acted the same way as a team after the post-game handshake. In competitive sports, there is nothing wrong with winning and even winning convincingly if there is a good reason to do so — having a wide enough point margin to get into the playoffs or win home field advantage, for instance. But the best coaches in any sport are those who teach their players not only how to play the game how to be decent human beings. Coaches like Micah Grimes, who did not try to “kill the clock” or stop his girls from shooting 3-pointers late into the fourth quarter, teach exactly the opposite. They should be shown the door. Filed under: Sports Comments: None |
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Posted on 01.26.09 by Danny Glover @ 11:03 pm
I posted my blurb about the mother of all inaugural photos to my Facebook account a while ago, and one of my classmates from high school zoomed around the crowd a bit. He spotted Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas apparently “resting his eyes” as Barack Obama delivered his inaugural address. I captured a screen shot on my computer. Take a look.
The address didn’t get rave reviews, so maybe you can’t blame Thomas. What else can you readers spy in the photo? Do tell in the comments. Filed under: News & Politics and Photography and Technology Comments: 1 Comment |
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Posted on 01.26.09 by Danny Glover @ 10:24 pm
Filed under: News & Politics and People and Technology and Video Comments: None |
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Posted on 01.26.09 by Danny Glover @ 10:08 pm
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi wants the federal government to stimulate the economy by spending hundreds of millions of dollars on birth control. She has been catching grief for saying that contraception will reduce costs to the states and the federal government. If she gets her way, good ol’ West Virginia boy Don Surber of the Charleston Daily Mail has a great idea for a stimulus-inspired t-shirt: “Obama spent $825 billion and all I got was a box of condoms.” Filed under: Culture and Just For Laughs and News & Politics Comments: None |
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Posted on 01.26.09 by Danny Glover @ 8:26 pm
If you attended Barack Obama’s inauguration, you may be able to find yourself in a super-cool, panoramic crowd photo taken by photographer David Bergman. You can zoom in from a great distance and still see high-resolution snapshots. The high-tech story about how the photo came to be:
Bergman is selling prints of the panoramic shot. You gotta love it — capitalism at its best, even in the Obama administration. (Hat tip to AmSpecBlog) Filed under: News & Politics and Technology Comments: 2 Comments |
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Posted on 01.25.09 by Danny Glover @ 5:31 pm
You may have heard the story of a “human Statue of Liberty” created by members of the Iowa National Guard at Camp David in July 1918. It’s true, and it’s amazing. Behold. Filed under: History and Human Interest Comments: None |
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Posted on 01.25.09 by Danny Glover @ 4:30 pm
Back home in West Virginia, we catch catfish the old-fashioned way, with stink bait, dough balls, nightcrawlers or any other number of meals that catfish love. It never would have occurred to me to use myself as bait like these guys did: Apparently it’s a rather common practice in some parts of the South to go “noodling” for catfish by letting them latch onto live human bait rather than a hook. Also known as catfisting, grabbling, hogging, gurgling, tickling and stumping, the practice has its roots in American Indian lore. People also noodled for their food during the Great Depression. “It’s like puttin’ your hand in a vice and tightenin’ it down,” one practitioner of the technique said in the video story below. Another said, “I don’t think we’re crazy; we just like to have fun.” Hey, if you can get a reporter for The New York Times to try his hand at it (pun intended), noodling must be fish-in-a-barrel fun. Filed under: Fishing and Video and West Virginia Comments: 3 Comments |
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