Aahhh The Onion...

I love robot stories...



Pentagon's Unmanned Spokesdrone Completes First Press Conference Mission



In The Know: Are We Giving The Robots That Run Our Society Too Much Power?

Bill Moyer's Journal

I am just going to come right out and say it: I love Bill Moyers. I recently started watching Bill Moyers Journal on PBS and I am kicking myself for not have ever watched it all these years. I have only seen a handful of shows and I can already easily say it is hands down the most informative, important, well done show on television period. Every show I have seen has been nothing less than enlightening.

The last show addressed the business of poverty: payday loans, JD byrider, hospital debt collectors etc, the economy in general, the offshore drilling debate. Concerning the offshore drilling thing, I was unsurprised to learn that it will take 10 years to reap anything, at best meet 0.2% of our oil needs and have zero effect on gas prices now... So why are McCain and Obama still even discussing this as a point of contention?, because the media wont do its job which is pointing out the idiocy of this whole thing to the people... Well Bill Moyers did it.

Here are some quotes from the last show concerning the economy:

I am lifting these directly from the website I hope they dont mind (I doubt they will since I am in essence advertising for them).

Okay...They are all discussing how Walmarts recently told its managers to vote and promote Republican candidates because they are less likely to support unions which would be bad for business.. Bill Moyers (playing devil's advocate) said this: "Every time guys like you talk like this.. people like the wall street journal would say, 'You're fighting a class war.'"

Bob Herbert: “The class war is over, and we lost... Over the past 30 years or so, Americans’ wages have remained relatively flat. But women went into the workplace, wives and mothers started working. People started putting things on their credit cards. There was a stock market bubble there for a while. We had a housing bubble. People refinanced and stuff. Now, they’re coming up against a wall. They’re not finding a way now to get some extra money to power the consumer economy.”

Wow! you wont hear honest clear cut commentary like that on the evening news chronicling the Olympics, the latest missing co-ed or Brangelina's twins.

Here is another awesome nugget from another commentator, Dean Baker concerning the sub prime mess etc. :

“All the people who should have been looking out the last six, seven, eight years are all going ‘oh, well, who could have known? Who could have known?’ And they’ll put Alan Greenspan here on a pedestal, because he’s [saying that] he had no idea this was going on. You had to try not to know this was going on. Certainly, someone like Alan Greenspan, our reserve board chair, had all the data I have times a thousand. He absolutely knew what was going on. And he was doing his best to look the other way because you had a lot of big interests who were making a lot of money.”

Public officials deliberately failed to protect ordinary Americans... where is the outrage?... a better question is what can we do with the outrage?... this I sadly cannot answer, but blogging is a good, yet probably ultimately ineffective outlet.

Give this show a watch, I will admit it seems boring on the outset, but it is awesome.

Black Deer

Austin is overrun with deer. When Roxanne and I go for walks at dusk we ALWAYS see deer, sometimes 1 or 2 sometimes 20-30. Louie enjoys stalking them and then charging to scare them, although the last time he did this the deer held his ground and stomped his feet at Louie...Louie became confused at that point.
Anyway, our friends Mark and Kelly have even more deer in their neighborhood. Anytime of the day or night there could be anywhere from 1/2 a deer to 10 deer in their yard (yes they actually found 1/2 a deer in their yard one day, but that is a whole other story). The deer I like the best (other than the 1/2 deer) is the black deer. I have lived around and hunted deer for my whole life and I have never seen a black white tailed deer. It is kind of shiny too.. it looks like it rolled around in grease or shoe polish.

Here is a regular whitetail (and a white dog) for comparison.
Black deer evidently has a non-black baby. weird

UPDATE: Evidently... they are called melanistic deer as they overproduce Melanin. They are very rare indeed, although more common in Texas according to this informative article.

Wow, how the baby is growing! We had our 3 months check up today (well, "11 weeks and change" according to the doctor). We got to hear the baby's heart beat on doppler. It was an exciting moment for us. HR 160 just like it should be. I took this picture last night and measured him/her....right on track at 5.1 cm!


I think I just might have a baby growing in my belly!

Good times...

We got lazy for the final Madison post.... here goes:








We are pretty sure we just found a house to move into... stay tuned for more details...

Mad Food

One of the things we missed most about Madison was the food. On the way to Madison we got hungry and bought a cheese curd sausage conglomerate thing at the Pine Cone in Johnson Creek. I dont know if it gets more Wisconsin than curds and sausage in a plastic sealed bag (maybe if it came with a bottle of Schlitz).

When we got to Madtown we went to Kabul on state street. It was delish!
Kabul is great although something about their logo seems a little racist or maybe just odd.Throughout the weekend we hit many of our other favorite haunts. Taj of course, our favorite Indian place, Monty's Blue Plate, Hacienda, Great Dane, and Mark and Carol's house for some grilled goodness.



At the Big 10 we got our fill of fried cheese curds I included this one also because it is a very flattering picture of David.

At the terrace we got some orange custard chocolate chip ice cream.. It was awesome!!

We missed the big farmer's market on the Cap square, but made it out to the North Side Farmer's Market and enjoyed fresh strawberries, donuts, and corn.
Here are the ladies shuckin corn for grillin @ Mark and Carol's
Good times... I am hungry now.. damn!

Mendota memories

We just got back from a great trip to Wisconsin. It has been almost 11 months since we left! Wow how time has flown. It was so great to see all our friends again, by the end of the trip we were certainly questioning why we ever left. We miss everybody more than ever now. We certainly feel very blessed to have all of our Madison friends.

Instead of making a mega-post with all our ~150 pics of the trip, we decided that we would make a few vignette posts about different activities over the weekend and spread them out over the next week or so, not necessarily in chronological (or regular logical for that matter) order.


On Sunday we decided a fun activity was in order so we headed down to the Union Terrace for a little canoeing action. Surprisingly, in our 6 years in Madison we had never ventured on to Mendota in a canoe, even though it is convenient and cheap.


Here I am all ready to go waiting for the tide to come in and take us out.
The canoe seemed stable enough at this point (on land), but when we first got in the water it was a little tippier than other canoes I have been in (this is foreshadowing).

Matt and Jessica came with their trusty Kayak.

Soon Mark, Carol and Kirk came and slipped their canoes into the slightly green water.
We then proceeded to join up with the other members of our canoe crew Dave and Marta (for a parallel account of events please check out their post on our sister blog)

We headed east to meet D & M as they were struggling against a good headwind. After getting almost to James Madison Park (in the background of the pic below) we spotted their little red canoe about 200+ yards from shore.. we headed out to meet them.

Merriment was had upon our meeting, but almost as soon as we turned around into the headwind in the middle of the lake we noticed things were getting a little bumpy. The calm Union Terrace waters were no more and we were popping up and down on some big waves... The aluminum bottom of out boat was smacking on the bottom of the water in between waves and we would occasionally get sprayed.... at this point all I wanted was to head in to shore.

We looked over and saw that the kayak and 2 canoes hanging out.. we looked again and the Kirk/Carol/Mark canoe was overturned in the water... As soon as we verbalized this to eachother we too were overcome by a rouge wave and overturned in the water... Dave and Marta (the only canoe afloat) came to assist us while Matt and Jessica offered moral support to the other 3 in the water.

We were in the water for like 5 minutes tops struggling to get back into the canoe when we noticed a boat coming to assist us. Evidently we had overturned directly in front of the UW rescue boat tower (lucky us). We found out later that the elegance and grace of our overturning drew applause from the people in the tower. We were happy to see them for certain. No more struggling to get back into a waterlogged canoe!

They picked us up first... we had our camera in a dry bag and for posterity's sake Roxanne photographed the second rescue. I think with some effort we may have been both been able to get back into ours as it didnt turn fully over, but I think Mark Carol and Kirk had little chance of righting their vessel, as it was completely submerged.

Below, Mark is seen handling the rescue pole.

They got us all on board and offered to relaunch our canoes for us or take us back, we opted for the latter option. We had all the canoeing we needed for that day.

Back on shore we ate a couple of brats and laughed about the whole thing.

There was only 1 casualty a chunk of my toenail came off as I was thrown from the canoe..and alas a chunk of my pride too.

Inside a Cheney brainstorm meeting

Wow... all I have to say is wow. Please watch this video. I cannot believe these guys are running our country.