I just read this post by my pal, Dr. Bacchus. And I must say that there was a time, not so long ago, that I would have vehemently disagreed with his premise.

But no longer...

As I've gotten older I am so much more pragmatic than I have ever been - and I was pretty pragmatic to begin with. And while I don't agree that NASA is totally unnecessary, I do believe that missions like this - to go look at things that will have no real impact on anything other than budgets and some people's notion that they are [……]

I know I'm behind the curve on this but, oh well. You get what you pay for, eh?

Seems that Hasbro has become the Junior Marketing Division of Visa with the latest version of The Game Of Life. Seems that the Twists & Turns Edition replaces cash with a Visa card.

This is on the relative heels of the new Monopoly Electronic Banking Edition which uses a Visa debit card in place of the cash. So much for using game play to reinforce your kids' math skills and teach them how to [……]

From right here in my lovely state comes this story in which people with absolutely no common sense are rewarded for displaying that fact for all the world to see.

The backstory can be found here so I won't repeat the entire thing. Read up on it if you wish.

Frankly, I don't care one whit whether McDonald's has to pay anybody anything or not. They're in for $7.2 million - frankly Jim Skinner sneezes more than that in a year. My issue is that the two plaintiffs in this case are idiots.

While I understand that company managers [……]

In a story that touches me on a deep, personal level, Mars, Inc. has announced that it does not support the proposal to redefine the legal definition of Chocolate and will not use any substitute ingredients in its manufacturing.

Thank you, Mars, for standing up for the quality of your product. Although that picture on your website with a package of M&Ms next to a bag of Whiskas is a bit disturbing...

In a much more chilling follow-up to the humorous story about the Disneyland knock-off in China comes this story from the AP about a kid's show on Islamic television.

Raise up a child to blow up busses and when he is old, he will not depart from it.

Addition (05/11/2007): In this follow-up article in the Telegraph, Al-Aqsa TV refuses to change its programming. My favorite quote is "We have our own ways to educate our children and any criticism of this approach is shocking interference in our internal affairs." Of course, when they criticize the US for its support [……]

This was originally going to be a comment to this article by Dr. Bacchus but I could tell it was going to get too long. The root of the matter is that Fujitsu-Siemens now has to pay a per-machine levy on computers sold in Germany because they might - might, mind you - be used to violate copyright.

I'm going to leave the whole ridiculous thing about levying a fee because of possible misuse for another rant. That can be taken to such extremes that there could be fees, fines and levies imposed on just about everything. [……]

I'll be following this case and I suspect that Dr. Bacchus will too.

I have little use for money grubbing nitwits.

Those were the words that Ambassador Paul Bremer used to announce that Saddam Hussein had been captured in an early morning raid just south of his hometown of Tikrit.

Operation Red Dawn involved about 600 US troops acting on good intelligence that a high level target was located in a specific area of about 2 square kilometers. They cordoned off the area and performed a search.

In what has come to be called a "spider hole" next to a small hovel, they found Hussein. He was with 2 other people, had 2 [……]

I've been following the Terri Schindler-Schiavo case, albeit in bits and pieces, since I first heard about it over a year ago. It saddens me that we have reached such a depth that some people are willing to literally starve this woman to death. And that's exactly what began less than an hour ago.

Make no mistake - this isn't some "pull the plug" scenario that plays like a bad made-for-TV movie where death comes in seconds or even minutes after life support has been cut off. Terri is going to starve to death, which may take two [……]