Left Behind: McCain’s Ex-Wife Misses the Rapture

mccain.jpgSome of my oldest friends have asked me to never again say anything bad about our dear, honest, never-made-a-mistake, never-told-a-lie President Bush in the emails I send them, so I’ve laid off that poor misunderstood Christian patriot-in-the-White-House in recent writing.

But hey, doesn’t mean I can’t snipe at McCain 🙂

See, it’s okay because everybody knows we brainless liberals hate America and don’t understand normal values. So, this just in — A senseless hate-filled liberal attack piece on that valiant war hero John McCain.

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Upcoming Carnival of the Godless

I’m hosting the Carnival of the Godless on June 22.

If you have a blog post in the atheist/agnostic/humanist vein you’d like to submit, get it to BlogCarnival before — that’s BEFORE — June 20, and you’ll see it introduced and linked here.

An answer to David

mad.jpgIn reply to my post about a yearned-for speech by Barack Obama, David Harmon made a couple of worthwhile points in the comments. I started to reply to them, and — typical for me — I couldn’t seem to express my thoughts in just a few words. My answer ended up being post-length rather than comment length, so I decided to just make it a separate post.

David said:

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Barry Obama’s Speech

obama.jpgIn some happy alternate universe, this is the speech given by Barack Obama on the night he formally accepts the Democratic nomination to be the party’s presidential candidate.

Barack Obama:

One of the major issues of this presidential campaign, for all of the candidates, has been the war in Iraq. Yet in speaking of the war, and of so many other issues – issues of security, economic issues, issues of the global environment – we have continued to react to emergencies now before us, rather than taking a more thoughtful, proactive approach, to foresee and avoid potential emergencies to come, and to foresee and help create the countless opportunities which may lie in our future.

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Charley & Me – Part 3 (end)

charleyx.jpgFalling Rock was never seen again. Black Deer questioned Grey Owl and Running Wolf when they returned with the trophy, and became suspicious. He delayed his decision and sent all the tribe’s warriors out to look for signs of the missing brave. They came back with no sign of him, but expert trackers believed Falling Rock may have been attacked, had escaped, and might return.

So they waited, but they also continued to search. Years passed and Black Deer died, but Shining Fawn never married. Braves who had liked Falling Rock continued to search – to find even his bones would satisfy the tribe’s desire to know what happened to the well-liked young hunter. They traveled north and south along the rough mountain range, and to the east and west of it, meeting other tribes and telling the story, asking for news, and never finding anything.

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Charley & Me – Part 2

charley1.jpgCharley’s not a very big guy, but he’s solid, and every inch of him you can see is either burned a deep tan by the sun, or covered in tough hide from a lifetime of hard outdoor physical labor. Below the neck, everything inside that hide is either hard muscle, rawhide-strong tendon or solid bone. And there’s this: Charley has a reputation. He’ll fight anybody, anytime, and he’s never been known, in any town within a day’s drive, to lose. If you catch his hands still for a second, you can count the scars on his knuckles from those fights. As I found out later, even the local cops would back away from getting into a physical dispute with him.

Anyway, about 20 seconds into this male-dominance dispute, Danny-boy picks up his plate with as much grace as he can muster, and quietly moves to another chair.

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Charley & Me – Part 1

charleyx.jpgI’m going to try this storytelling thing again, this time in three installments. This post didn’t start out to be three separate posts, but it got overlong, so … here we go again.

Touchy-feely time.

I’m actually a little nervous about what I’m about to write. It’s not one of those “guy” subjects a man gladly talks about. It’s not a neutral subject either, like the weather, or geology, or politics. No, it’s definitely one of those girly-girly, Oprah and Dr. Phil subjects.

Yep, I’m gonna talk about my feelings.

I have it figured you should never lie to yourself. You can tell all the lies you want to other people (I’m not condoning it, I’m just using it as a rhetorical counterpoint), but you should never, never, never tell yourself a lie.

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Semiconductor Love Affair

love.jpgMan, I love computers!

Today I manipulated some photos one of my clients sent me, massaging them in Photoshop to make a background for a business card. I created the business card, with all the lettering.

I printed out a color flyer I’d created in InDesign. I wrote a marketing letter to prospective clients in MS Word. I typed out a mailing list in Excel with 40 addresses I got out of my local Chamber directory, then used Word’s mail merge feature to merge the addresses and salutations with the letter. After that, I used the Avery Wizard on the same list, to create mailing labels, which I printed out on several sheets of Avery labels I had on hand.

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The Adventures of Captain Goosebag & Peabody ….

peabody4.jpgIt was a funny idea, that the ‘engine’ of your body might quit. That you had a fuel tank of sharply limited size, and if you got between distant gas stations and ran out, you were just … gone. That from the day of your birth, you have to frantically keep fueling yourself, and you dare not take chances about it.

Nobody ever told me about that. And I hadn’t learned it for myself because I’d never been capital-H hungry or capital-T tired.

I knew stalled bodies could occasionally be jump-started, but I also knew that the appropriate tow truck and mechanics – ambulance and doctors – were well out of our reach. Once our engines quit and cooled, we were headed for the junkyard.

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The Adventures of Captain Goosebag & Peabody …

peabody3.jpgIn five minutes we were smothered in swirling, blinding snow. I could see about four feet in front of me. I could make out my partner’s tracks in the snow ahead, but absolutely nothing else.

Kurt was the stronger of the two of us, and he strode perpetually ahead, vanished in the gray wall ahead of me. Every ten minutes or so, his attenuated voice would drift back from the cold silent distance: “Peabody!” and I would yell back “Captain!”

For hours at a time, I was totally isolated – only our occasional voices shouted into the night , and our frequent breaks to stoke up our body’s fires, kept us in touch.

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