Sunday, September 18, 2011

Weekend Update - Beware "The Cloud" Edition



(So we finally had to take the old number 2 cat, Alex, to the vet the other day. He'd been losing weight and throwing up a lot, and was drinking a hell of a lot of water. But he's 15 years old, and I was thinking the inevitable was about to happen, and the wife began her depressed mope. They ran a bunch of expensive tests and it turns out he's become diabetic. Just like me, how sweet. Now every morning and evening someone in the household, me, has to give the old boy a shot of insulin, and he's on a very special expensive diet. Did I say this all is expensive? Now mind you I'm not what you would call a "cat person." But for some reason we have amassed a herd of two old cats, and an emergency back-up young one. Some people think cats are really smart, but I know for a fact that most of them are dumb as posts. And I also know that there is no such thing as a free one. But I digress ...)


  • So you struggled with learning how to operate a computer, finally got it and could send E-mails. Hooray. Then came Google and all the weird stuff you could find on the Internet. Cool. Then we suffered through TVs with 3-D and Internet ready toasters, and toilets that monitored our "output." And now, dear friends, there's something called "The Cloud." It's frightening, and upsetting to older people like myself, and it may keep me from using any electronic device in the future. Mark Morford tells us all about it. Be afraid, be very afraid.

  • Rick Perry, from the West Texas town of Paint Creek, is no John Wayne, even though he has a ton of executions notched on his belt. But he wears a pair of cowboy boots with the legend “Liberty” stitched on one. (As in freedom, not Valance.) He plays up the effete-versus-mesquite stereotypes in his second-grade textbook of a manifesto, “Fed Up!” One of our favorites, Maureen Dowd comments on politics from the right. Recommended reading.

  • The anniversary of September 11, 2001 passed by recently with big fanfare, since it was the tenth year since it happened. I sat dreary-eyed at the TV watching the rehashing of all the drama, and actually still shed a tear or two about it all. Pretty much like all Americans, I suppose. But it occured to me that after ten years have passed we still don't know much more than we did a couple months after it happened. Oh there's all that conspiracy stuff, and you gotta give it some weight, like do we really know who killed JFK for sure? No, not really. But it kinda grates on some of us. Did BushCo and Darth Cheney really ignore all the warnings for a reason? Should we just let this go and get back to see no hear no speak no? Well it just keeps going.

  • I've said it once, and I'll continue saying it: Rick Perry is full of crap. Rick Perry is dangerously full of crap. It worries me that 99% of the American people don't realize this fact already. Here's just a sample.

  • When one thinks about a corrupt Supreme Court Justice, one always thinks of Clarence Thomas first, doesn't one? I'm not saying he is, gawd knows I wouldn't want the feds coming down on Bad Hat for evilspeak, but gimmee a break on this pompous pubic-hair-in-the-coke-can pervert. And now there's this: If Clarence Thomas was hoping that liberals might just forget about his cozy ties to a Dallas real estate developer, or his failure for a decade to disclose the hundreds of thousands of dollars his wife earned from a conservative think tank, well, he would be wrong. Can you say, "Impeach?"