Me: “Do you always pick people’s flowers?”
Her: “No, just today.”
Me: “That is pretty darn rude.”
Her: “Oh, sorry”

And she left with a smile. I wasn’t smiling.

While speaking with friends the other day, we came up with a term to describe these sites. They often contain no real content, and just referrals to other sites. Thus the term “Vacuous Destination” (along with its abbreviation “VD”, which has a whole different connotation, but I think appropriate as well) was hatched.

I hesitate to give examples of this stuff, as I don’t want to generate ANY revenue for them. If you have misspelled web addresses before and ended up at some odd search site, you might have seen one flavor of them. Another more obnoxious variety is the type that “hires” writers to provide “articles” so they have “content”. The articles are usually just a bunch of fluff, surrounded by advertisements. The best way to eliminate this sort of content from the internet is to not visit it AT ALL. Don’t certainly don’t click on any of the advertisement links on the sites.

Only you can prevent the spread of internet VD.

The food was decent, but there were several strikes against it: there were ants crawling around on the table, flies buzzing around our heads, and the food seemed expensive relative to other Indian places we have eaten. Georgia was a well behaved, which made things more pleasant, but Lisa was not at all happy about the critters on the table and wondered to herself (and out loud to me later) what the kitchen was like if there were ants running around the dining room.

I’m a little forgiving, the restaurant is in an older Portland home that has been converted, so I would expect a few idiosyncrasies. We had a nice selection of food, with three dishes, and an appetizer, a beer for me, and a mango lassie for Lisa all came to ~$50, which seemed a bit steep. Maybe I’m just getting old.

Maybe Henry Waxman will be successful in bringing the EPA back into the role of actually protecting the environment.

You can encourage your representative to take a different stance on the bill by going here.

President George W. Bush and seven of his administration’s top officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, made at least 935 false statements in the two years following September 11, 2001, about the national security threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Nearly five years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, an exhaustive examination of the record shows that the statements were part of an orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public opinion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses.

In short, the Bush administration led the nation to war on the basis of erroneous information that it methodically propagated and that culminated in military action against Iraq on March 19, 2003.

These arguments are along the same lines as HR 333. which calls for the impeachment of Vice President Cheney.

The election process needs to be reformed. If the Democratic Party wants to become the party of the future, they should abandon the current nomination process and adopt a uniform process for the whole country. It should be a popular vote, conducted across the country at the same time. No state should have an undo influence on the results, and all the candidates have to make their case to everyone.

A Nevada judge said Monday that Democratic presidential candidate Dennis J. Kucinich must be included in today’s candidate debate in Nevada.

Senior Clark County District Judge Charles Thompson said if Kucinich was excluded, he would issue an injunction stopping the televised debate. …

This is great news for a man that has been unfairly treated by the mainstream press.

I was surprised to see all the boats in the Willamette considering how many logs, trees, and UFOs (Unidentifiable Floating Objects) there were going downstream at a good clip. The water was chocolate brown, and as high as to be expected during this time of year. A bit of excitement occurred when a guy out in a boat seemed to have lost his motor. Steam started pouring out of it pretty close to the mouth of the Clackamas, and everyone watched him as he drifted downstream trying to get it running. He drifted out of site, about that time the police were contacted, but eventually he managed to come back upstream on his own.

There were only two fish landed (almost 3, but the guy’s leader broke when he was hauling the fish on shore) in the 14 hours I was there for the two days. Of course, none of the fish were on my line. This is not the sort of fishing you want to take your kids unless they have infinite patience and you don’t mind them learning a bunch of new four letter words. There is also one guy who thought Hamms is good for breakfast (well 6:30 am, I suppose he could be working nights), so eating habits might be better learned elsewhere…

I tried to make observations about all the different plunking rigs I saw there, and I’m going to put a posting together that shows pictures of all the different ones I saw.