CowboyNeal

http://www.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/04/28/regular.flu/index.html

If you don't have swine flu yet, take heart! The REGULAR FLU has killed thousands more Americans since the beginning of the year. And really, if you're neither very young nor very old, or you have access to health care, or enough money to buy a dose of Tamiflu, the swine flu isn't very scary either. The symptoms are (bizzarely) exactly like the regular flu, with perhaps more vomiting and diarrhea.

Maybe I'd be more worried, but when's the last time you heard of someone coming down with smallpox, or polio, or rickets? That's because this is the USA, where our CDC has mostly eradicated those diseases, and when there's fewer diseases going around to drone on about, the media has to resort to the little guys. So, swine flu, bottoms up, you might have only killed a couple dozen people, but that counts as the big time in this modern age. May your media-backed fearmongering campaign be a huge success, the stock prices of everyone who makes hand cleaners and face masks is riding on it.

I suppose if I had ever come close to dying in the over 20 times I've had the regular flu, I'd be worried about the swine flu. I never got the bird flu or SARS either. And I've managed to somehow avoid smallpox, polio, and rickets.

Think your neighbors are bad?

http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/us/2009/04/13/pkg.big.purple.garage.komo

My favorite part is the dumb busybody neighbor who is so brilliant, she's on film with the telescope she uses to spy on her neighbors right behind her in the frame.

Well look at who's been in all the news lately!

http://www.cnn.com/2009/SHOWBIZ/Music/04/10/peta.pet.shop.boys/

http://news.mmosite.com/content/2009-04-08/20090408013803869.shtml

http://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation/story/991490.html

For a group that purports to want to improve the condition of life for animals everywhere, they sure waste their time doing a lot of bullshit instead. No one ever decided to eat a hamburger because the Pet Shop Boys happened to be named the Pet Shop Boys. Their anti-seal clubbing protest, was held INSIDE OF WORLD OF WARCRAFT, and I challenge you to find a game that promotes genocide, wholesale animal slaughter, and the harvesting of animal hides moreso than WoW does. There's a third story in there too, but the idea PETA had was so fucking stupid I purged it from my memory immediately because I'd rather remember exactly which episodes of Dukes of Hazzard featured Cooter and which didn't.

For years these assholes have masqueraded as a bonafide charity, while all the time it was Cunty McDumb's Haven for Insane Bitches. Over the past few years this is becoming apparent even to people who formerly were PETA supporters. You wanna care about the animals? You wanna make things better? That's great, now stop fucking grandstanding, roll up your shirt sleeves, and get into the trenches. Now, I'm sure a lot of people could say to me, and rightly so, if you're so smart, what would you do better? Luckily I have an answer. I'd be the ASPCA. No one can argue that in the over 100 years since it's founding, the ASPCA hasn't helped improve the quality of life for animals in the States, and before that, the Royal branch which preceded it was doing the same thing in Great Britain. The ASPCA, after being given the right to enforce animal cruelty laws, does just that, and it keeps its clothes on while it does it.

When did PETA burst onto the scene? Not until 1980. If the party's already full, I guess you can always heckle the Pet Shop Boys instead, for whatever good it'll do. I'm aware of their "Meat is Murder" stance, but I don't see them holding a naked protest in front of a pack of wolves either. Most anthropologists now believe that it was the increased consumption of red meat over eons that enabled the growth in our frontal lobe, giving most of us the increased cognitive capacity that we now enjoy, when we're not destroying that same frontal lobe with bourbon. That's not to say that we have to continually eat meat or we'll go dumb, but without it, we probably wouldn't be where we are now as a species.

And lastly, my trump card. PETA paid over 100 grand to help defend a domestic terrorist, convicted of arson. What did he burn down? An MSU research lab.

For those that don't know, MSU is a Big Ten University with long-standing agricultural condition. The campus is fucking huge, because it has a central campus with everything you would expect from a modern institution of higher learning, and then there's Farm Lane, which connects central campus to the crop fields and livestock barns. Now sure, not every last one of those animals may be living in the Ritz-Carlton, but I don't think many of us are either. We could just go and release them all into the wild, and then in turn tell every farmer everywhere he has to release his herds into the wild and give up his career. And then, those animals would all die, because they've been bred in captivity for over millennia, they have no way to survive in the wild anymore. How the fuck is a cow going to defend itself from predators? It's not, because it has never had to, and no longer can. At this point in history, keeping a cow locked up and fed every day, is actually more humane than letting it roam free where someone is going to hit it with a car, or coyotes or cougars come and kill and eat it. Of course we've been farming here in Michigan far longer than 1980, a lot of this trivial shit is immediately obvious to people with our experience.

I've conveniently left out the part here that when some of these animals reach a certain age, they're slaughtered and their meat is processed and eaten. I'll admit, that that is a cruel part of life, but it's also necessary to sustain life, and if we weren't slaughtering animals, we'd be out slaughtering plants, and plants don't have vocal chords so PETA can't hear their cries. Scientists however, can, and they tell us that the plants feel just as much pain as we do, so maybe we shouldn't eat them either. What's left? Fungus? I think I'll just stick to being an omnivore as always.

The other day I got a Max DePree quote via fortune. This surprised because I was not aware that Max DePree was known outside of west Michigan. He was the founder of the Herman Miller corporation, a home and office furniture manufacturer with its worldwide headquarters in Zeeland, MI, but with now more locations scattered around the globe. Or at least that was the case when I still worked there, during college. The current economic crisis may have taken its toll on them just as it has on everyone, but that leads me to my point. While I cannot remember the particular Max DePree quotes, it was along the lines of many of his quotes, which say something to the extent that understanding, compassion, and love need to also be a part of a business relationship, and how a business contract is not some immutable thing, but rather should be a common understanding between two parties that facilitates them working together to benefit them both. After hearing PM Gordon Brown's address to Parliament on Tuesday, where he said, to paraphrase, that the marketplace does not breed virtue. It is the virtues that we bring to the marketplace that enable it to work for the betterment of everyone. In these times, Max's quotes seem more relevant than ever.

And now for a story. The only reason the name Max DePree struck a bell with me when I first saw the quote, other than working for Herman Miller at one point, I mean, since I had managed to forget most of that, was a story my father told me of when he was a young boy still on the farm. Somehow, Max De Pree and my uncle Jacob were friends. Not even my dad remembers how they met, if they were classmates at some point or if attended the same church, or what. At any rate, Max would come to the farm to visit Jake from time to time, which was a fairly big event out in the country, since they didn't get visitors that often. The farm my dad grew up on, only had one small utility tractor, and they used horses for most of the heavy work yet. This was fairly common in the area. Not even everyone had cars yet, and electricity was still making the rounds in the neighborhood and had not gotten to everyone yet. So when Max DePree comes to visit my uncle, it's a big event on the farm, and my dad even to this day recalls how things came to a halt, and everyone stared at his car, because no one had ever seen a Studebaker before. Sure, there were plenty of Fords and Oldsmobiles in the neighborhood, but the name Studebaker was unheard of.

If this sounds like a rambling story an old person tells, it's because I'm repeating it from my father, but there it is.

The good time is approaching,
The season is at hand.
When the merry click of the two-base lick
Will be heard throughout the land.
The frost still lingers on the earth, and
Budless are the trees.
But the merry ring of the voice of spring
Is borne upon the breeze.
-- Ode to Opening Day, "The Sporting News", 1886

"Imagine, a perfect, cloudless day, the sun is warm, welcoming. And on the horizon they appear. Like knights of yore, armed with bats of ash and hickory. Their name, the Capital Congressmen, their purpose, to make you, dear America, revel in the joys of sport and sunshine. If only for an afternoon."
-- John Henry Eden, President of the United States of America, President of Your Heart

I read/heard these and it made me think about when I still cared about baseball. About how this should be the most exciting time of the year. And I'm totally disinterested. Thanks steroids. I don't know that I'm even personally against the use of performance enhancing substances, but the end result, this giant spectre that looms over the entire sport, has pretty much killed it off for me. Also, I doubt I could remember how to fill out a scorecard properly, and I mean pitch-by-pitch, I used to have my shit down.

A story:

Guy buys web domain. Guy posts wry, pithy autobiography to web domain and lets it languish for several years. Until now. Now guy installs blogging software on his web domain and finally begins to use it in place of his livejournal.

This is quite possibly my last post to livejournal. I'll still be around checking my friends list and posting the occasional comment, but I've decided to put my random thoughts, daylogs, etc. where they really belong, on cowboyneal.org. The new cowboyneal.org is still pretty bland, but I'm hoping that'll motivate me to fix the place up. Check it out if you like, ignore it if you don't.

[16:28] --- Looking up irc.aniverse.com..
[16:28] --- Connecting to irc.aniverse.com (66.207.164.23) port 6667..
[16:28] --- Connected. Now logging in..
[16:28] --- *** Looking up your hostname...
[16:28] --- *** Checking Ident
[16:28] --- *** Found your hostname
[16:29] --- Closing Link: pcp04083023pcs.wanarb01.mi.comcast.net (No more connections allowed in your connection class)
[16:29] --- Disconnected (Remote host closed socket).


I took aniverse out of my autojoin list. No idea when I'll be back.

Shadows of Undrentide, the expansion to Neverwinter Nights, has gone gold. I post this now so that when I get it and no one sees me for a week, it'll be clear where I am. Also I know that some of you who read this like NWN a lot. A really real lot.

Old photos are so much fun to look through. Occasionally you find a random silly picture that makes you smile or laugh. As an example, I will voluntarily embarass myself and show this one off:



...and I won't even hide it behind a cut tag. Reckless abandon! Hide the silver! Happy Friday!

I fell through the deck this afternoon, or at least one of my legs did. No permanent inury, just a whole lot of scrapes. I didn't think it was that badly because I went on to mow the lawn, but now it's really starting to ache. I think it's gonna be time to take some alleve and lay down soon. At least the grass is cut now, and the neighbors don't think we're quite so shifty.