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Imagine my surprise to find out that Janine Turner (yes, that Janine Turner) has joined PJ Media.

Her first foray into the world of PJ Media delves into the daunting topic of How To Convert A Democrat.

One of her first points: Do not remain silent when Democrats start stating outright untruths. Silence is taken as agreement with a position, even if it is blatantly wrong. She also gives us a list of things to remember in our efforts to "convert unyielding and uninformed liberals". Among them, reason and knowledge.

To enter into this battle, one must be armed, agile, sharp, and resolute.

Here are some tools. When the Democrats start ranting, use the GIRLFRIENDS acronym to forge through the storm.

As the saying goes, Read The Whole Thing, including the comments.

Welcome to the blogosphere, Janine!

It's been a few days since I've sat down in front of the keyboard. I have a good excuse.

In reference to my previous post, my post-op status is good. The surgery I had was to remove a cataract from one eye. The surgery went well, however the adjustment from my previous 'just OK' vision to my new and improved vision has taken longer than I expected. While before I was severely myopic I now have clear distance vision. My close-in vision, however, has changed. This was not unexpected.

In order to be able to see the computer monitor correctly requires a new set of glasses, something I have not yet acquired. Until then I am using a set of not-all-that-great reading glasses that let me see the monitor well enough, but not so well that I want to sit in front of the computer for more than 15 minutes or so. That won't stop me from blogging. It's just that I may not go into as much detail (or semi-polite invective) as I might otherwise.

Blogging may be non-existent over the next day or two as I am due for surgery Wednesday afternoon. It's not major surgery by any means, but my ability to think straight and/or type may be impaired until the meds wear off. Then again, that might be a feature and not a bug!

As you dozen or so regular readers know, the LCD monitor on the new Official Weekend Pundit Main Computer went on the blink 14 days ago. According to the fine folks at HP, I was supposed to receive the replacement monitor by yesterday. (I even have the e-mails with the expected delivery date stating the December 28.) Last night around 8PM I received an e-mail from HP stating my monitor was shipping today. That means it won't get here until January 5^th at the earliest.

Almost three weeks to ship a replacement monitor under warranty? I can order a new one from them and get it here in less a week by ground! HP has to do more work on its customer service, particularly in regards to warranties on new equipment.

Here it is, I thought I was past the effects of the stomach bug that hit on Christmas night, but early this morning I was up again paying a visit to the bathroom about every 15 to 20 minutes. This precluded me from joining Deb and BeezleBub for a trip down to the WP In-Laws.

This being sick shtick is gettin' old real fast.

UPDATE: Deb and BeezleBub got home from the In Laws around 8PM. Apparently BeezleBub got sick just a couple of miles from home and has been vomiting and suffering from diarrhea ever since.

Poor kid. I know exactly what he'll be going through for the next 24 hours or so.

UPDATE 2: We ended up having to take BeezleBub to the ER at the local hospital at just past midnight. We couldn't keep him hydrated and the cramps were excruciating. (As bad as I was during my bout with this, he was far worse. I got alarmed when his lower back started aching, a symptom that he was so dehydrated that his kidneys were shutting down.) After 2 liters of saline, dilaudid, anti-nausea/vomiting meds, and 3 hours on a bed in the ER, he was feeling much better. We got him home about 3:30AM.

I guess it was one of those days today.

I got home from work after a busy day and a treacherous trip home (quite a few of the roads were quite slick). BeezleBub rolled in from school just after 6PM.

About an hour after that we were both asleep on our respective chairs in the living room.

I just woke up a short while ago, allowing me to clean the dinner dishes and stoke the woodstove for the night.

And now I'm going to bed. I'm beat despite the nap and don't have the gumption to post anything more profound than this mea culpa. I guess I'll have to post twice tomorrow to make up for it.

It isn't that I have had nothing to blog about or haven't wanted to do so. On the contrary, I have wanted to but have had to deal with computer related problems since yesterday afternoon.

First, there was a UPS failure that caused problems because of issues with bypassing it. I had the choice of running the cable modem and router or my computer. The modem and router won that one.

Then, after replacing the defective UPS, I found that my monitor would no longer work.It would turn on, the menu showing the which input was active would display (and it did detect the computer and show the DVI input was active), and then it would go to sleep because as far as it was concerned there was no reason to remain on. I cannot even call up the monitor's menu to force a reset to factory defaults, nor have I been able to find any information on the 'net about how to do that. (Unless HP decided to forego that option, almost every piece of equipment containing a microcontroller has a means of forcing a reset to its default setiings in case it unminds itself and gets stuck in a configuration that makes it useless.)

I had this problem with the monitor once before but I can't for the life of me recall what it is I did to restore it to a useful state. Until I do blogging might be light as I have to share the remaining operational computer with Deb and BeezleBub.

It only took a few weeks, but we finally took possession of the new Official Weekend Pundit Snowblower. The local BBH/A/L/GS finally called, informing us the snowblower we purchased three weeks ago was finally ready for pickup.

The timing couldn't have been better considering we're under a Winter Storm Watch at the moment, with a still unspecified amount of snow expected tomorrow.

I know how this works - now that we actually have the new snowblower not one flake of snow will fall. (Not that I mind it. Any snow I don't have to move during fall is good snow...at least not until the end of December. Then it's OK.)

Since we weren't sure how much snow we're going to get and we didn't want to chance having to dig our firewood out from under the snow, BeezleBub and I moved about a cord of wood into the garage and covered the rest still outside with a tarp. I still have to stack the wood we moved into the garage, but at least it's under cover.

It is with heavy heart that I must announce the passing of Bagheera The Magnificent. He died late this morning in the arms of my wife Deb.

He was an opinionated, stubborn cat, a leader of the feline members of the Weekend Pundit Household. He was also an occasional contributor to this blog, covering topics of import...to him.

As snooty as he was, he was also a great companion, a comfort during troubling times, and generally an all around "Gu' Boy". He helped Deb raise BeezleBub from the age of 5. He managed to decimate the chipmunk and mouse population around The Manse over the past 6 years. He lulled us to sleep with his purring, curling himself around the tops of our heads like a cat hat as we fell asleep. He would dry BeezleBub's hair after his bath because "he couldn't do it hisself!" He tolerated the other felines in the house, but personally I think he liked having the others around if for no other reason than to show his magnificence by comparison.


It's never easy losing a member of the family, even if they have four feet and fur. Bagheera was a sweet lovable cat, his curmudgeonly online persona notwithstanding.

Sleep well, old friend. May your supper dish always be full and your bed filled with catnip, Big Kitty.

Tonight's previous post was a cheat, I admit. That doesn't make it any less profound. But I have an excuse, sort of.

I've been spending time configuring the new Official Weekend Pundit Main Computer, transferring files over from the old computer, and getting things squared away on both.

So far my biggest problem has been getting Thunderbird to actually run on the new machine as it keeps telling me it can't connect to my ISP's mail server. If that's the worst thing that happens while I'm getting everything the way I want it, then that's just fine with me.

As I mentioned earlier, the new machine is by no means a bleeding edge computer, but it does have a lot more horsepower than the old one, along with about 10 times more storage space on the hard drive and eight times more RAM. It's also using 64-bit Windows 7 and will also use the 64-bit version of Ubuntu Linux, once I get the second hard drive mounted.It makes for a pretty quick machine for some operations. For others there's no difference, such as download speeds from the Internet.

The old machine hasn't been set aside yet as there are still a number of files and programs to be moved to the new one.

The first half of the new Weekend Pundit Official Main Computer arrived earlier in the week, that being the new LCD monitor. I wasted no time removing the old 19" CRT and replacing it with the new monitor. It was far better than I had thought it would be, with even illumination and crisp, clear images.

Poor Minnie misses the old monitor as she is used to jumping up on top of it and keeping warm from the heat generated by it. Imagine her surprise when she tried to jump up on the new monitor and there was nothing but thin air behind the screen!

A check just a few minutes ago on the FedEx tracking website shows the second half of the new Weekend Pundit Official Main Computer has made its way all the way from El Paso, Texas to Willington, Connecticut in four days and is presently on it's way to a FedEx facility closer to The Manse. With the holiday intruding upon normal business hours, it looks like FedEx's estimated delivery date will be correct, which means it should arrive here shortly after Labor Day.

Woo hoo!!

As you can see, there was no Thoughts On A Sunday post. It wasn't from lack of trying. Instead, blame Irene.

Power went out at The Manse at 1PM Sunday afternoon and as of 8:30 this morning it was still out. The TOAS post is stuck on the rather unreliable Weekend Pundit Official Main Computer, and I won't know if I will even be able to retrieve it until I get it up and running again.

Until then...

When I read this quote in an article about phone technology, television, and how much the Internet has changed everything, I realized I fell well within the age range of the fellow saying this:

"I'm so old, I can remember when phone calls came on wires and television came over the air."

And to add to that, phones had dials rather than buttons. (How many kids even know how to use a dial phone these days?)

It used to be pay phones were on just about every street corner, convenience store, restaurant, most gas stations, hospitals, and hotels. Now you see them rarely, if at all, and then mostly in films and television shows set in the 20^th century. The cell phone has supplanted them. (That's not necessarily progress when people are oblivious to the annoyance they create when they use their cell phones in inappropriate places, disturbing everyone else around them because they can not put them away and pay attention to their surroundings and the people they're with.)

Not that I am lamenting the fact that all these things have changed. I am not. Instead I am merely engaging in a bit of nostalgia, significant of nothing.

Sort of.

A follow on to yesterday's cartoon rant about the riots in England is this video rant by one of my favorite Brits, Pat Condell. For those of you who have never seen any of his video pieces I must warn you that he does not pull any punches and calls it exactly like he sees it.

You'll have to excuse a lack of a meaningful post tonight as there were some minor computer problems that required my attention to correct.

Regular blogging will resume tomorrow.

It appears Maggie's Farm believes any comments I write are spam, so nothing I post in the way of comments ever makes it onto their site. This is what I see when I click on the 'Submit Comment' tab:

Spam Prevention: Invalid message.

Your comment could not be added because comments for this entry have either been disabled, you entered invalid data, or your comment was caught by anti-spam measures.

What the hell? Of course there is no 'Contact Us' information, so I can't even ask them what's going on or why my comments are considered spam. This is not the first time I've had this happen, as I haven't been able to comment for quite some time.

In this case my comment was in response to this post about teens and summer jobs.

My comment:

Here in central New Hampshire it's not a question of kids not looking for work (though I have no doubt that's a small part of it). Instead it's a dearth of jobs.

Many of the jobs normally filled by teens have been taken by adults, some taking the jobs to supplement income, and others taking any job they can get in order to pay the bills.

That has made it more difficult for teens to find jobs, particularly since most of the adults are more conscientious about their jobs.

My son works at one of the local farms, as he has since he was 12. This year many of the field hands are adults. Most are doing it because it's the only work available. (Some of them have problems taking orders from my 17 year old son, but as the owner of the farm tells them "He knows what he's doing. You don't He's a farmer. You aren't.") But they do the work and they do it better than many of the teens who worked there in the past.

Would any of you out there consider that spam? And it isn't like this is an old entry considering it was posted just yesterday. I even tried commenting on an even more recent post and got the same response.

I got a little sidetracked on another writing project and didn't realize how late it was, meaning I didn't write my usual almost daily posts. Regular blogging will resume tomorrow.

I've been working on a rather lengthy post, the subject of which was suggested by way of one of my regular commenters (Thanks, Paulina!).

However, doing the subject any justice has taken me quite a bit longer than I had thought it would and I don't want to do a half-assed job of it. (I prefer a whole-assed job, to be quite frank.) It isn't that I've been lazy. On the contrary, I've found a lot more information than I bargained for and it's taking me a lot more time to sift through it, verify it, and make sure I am holding my admitted bias in check...sort of.

So in the mean time let me leave you with this small bit of entertainment while I continue to toil away.


EMBED-Mission Impossible Squirrel - Watch more free videos

I've been busy and I'm tired, so it's off to sleep I go!

Regular blogging will resume tomorrow.

I missed Week 10 last week, an oversight on my part. Not that any of you missed anything as it appears Skip and I have reached a plateau, with no change over the past two weeks. That's not unusual, but neither one of us likes being here.

Here's this week's results:


Click on image to actually read it