I have loved the Mavericks ever since I began watching basketball - since their first foray into play-offs against the Jazz. I have liked Mark Cuban regardless of other people’s perception of the guy. I still think Mavericks are a great team - they are doing awesome so far - 61 wins with 10 more games to go…Dirk reaching the milestone of 15,000 points - nothing to hate about these guys.
Mark Cuban OTOH, has turned out to be something else altogether…the moron seems to financing “Loose Change”, a conspiacy theory laden fakumentary that has nuggets of information only the blindest conspiracy theorist can follow or believe.
I could forgive Mark Cuban’s antics on the sidelines of the arena - I could forgive his overwhelming need to make the Mavericks all about him - I can even forgive him for “The Benefactor” (OK, I will still laugh at him for that) - I cannot forgive him this. I thought he was more intelligent than this…As far as I am concerned, he stepped way over the line and the franchise and Mark Cuban’s pockets will not be getting another dime from me.
Puzzletime, folks! Point out the things wrong in the quote highlighted below….
NOW Demands Access to Program Geared to Fathers - washingtonpost.com
It’s called the Promoting Responsible Fatherhood Initiative, and the Bush administration doles out up to $50 million annually to fund its programs to build job skills and help fathers connect better with their children. But the National Organization for Women says the effort is illegal because it’s only about men.
Answer: Ms. Gandy, since we are all about equal access, why have an organization that is ostensibly serving only women, as in the National Organization for Women? Why not National Organization for Organisms? NOO?
I think any group that pretends to care about women needs to be jumping up and down with joy when there is an initiative to help men become better fathers. It only benefits the mothers in the lower-income groups who most of the time are burdened with the care of their children as single moms when fathers don’t take any responsibility. Of course, if NOW had it’s way all those babies would have ended up aborted anyways, so what is the need for fathers…my bad!
Would NOW also oppose this program till the day men are able to give birth? There is a reason why women of my generation would rather not be called “feminists”.
I finally did it - I abandoned “My Dog”. It was a hard decision, but it was one that had to be made. I was getting frustrated not being able to take care of “Dirk” (yep, that was his name - he was named after Nowitzki) the way I would have liked to - couldn’t feed him - couldn’t really look after him.
I was warned that after the 85 days I had spent caring for him, he would not be the same if I abandoned him. I still had to harden my heart and let him go.
Alright, by now if you have realized I am being coy about something, you are right. Dirk is my dog in the mobile game, “My Dog”. I downloaded the game on to my cell phone and tried the pet sim for 85 days before I gave up in frustration.
I am quite surprised by the many glowingly positive reviews the game seems to have garnered - just Google it. The game was also apparently endorsed by the SPCA for how much “bonding” it promoted between people and their pets.
Honestly, I think “My Dog” was a great concept ruined by stupid execution. The game essentially consists of a home with three areas - garden, kitchen and living room - and three out-of-home places - a grocery store, a dog show tent and “around the block” walk. You feed your dog, you scoop his poop and you take him out for walks around the block. You get rewarded with money and goodies when you keep your doggie happy and healthy - fun and games, right?
Not all the time! The problem with the game is that there is a lot of randomness built into it. My dog needed to be fed at least four times a day - if I didn’t, his health deteriorated and he camped in the kitchen begging for food. The problem is that the grocery store didn’t always carry enough good - sometimes I didn’t have enough money to buy the food - sometimes there wasn’t enough food.
The stocking process of the grocery store was so random that sometimes you could go several days in a week with only one edible thing for the dog available per day. I consider that animal cruelty. I was not comfortable with the entire thing - even a game gets you emotionally invested in when it lasts for 85 days and has you spend atleast an hour a day on the total. It was just way too high maintenance for very little payoff and too emotionally grating to be much fun. Just not worth it!
Here is a post at Althouse blog about her exchange with another lady on a bloggingheads.tv segment. The comments grabbed my interest a lot more than the post or the bloggingheads.tv segment. A lot of the comments were saying Ann should be “embarrassed” for raising her voice at the other lady and seemed to be attacking her.
My response? So what? As some other commenters pointed oujt very quickly, would this have been such a big deal if it were two men raising their voices? I bet if one man attacked the other one verbally, the attacked man would have been told to take it like a man and not complain. A really disgusting display of the double standards against women on display.
Men are allowed to be passionate and angry - apparently, it is their God-given right and makes them more likeable. A woman who dares to raise her voice? What an effing embarrassment to the entire universe!
I was driving the now almost-3-years-old little one to his day care this morning when he exclaims, “Mommy, XXXX is black!” about a dark-skinned classmate. I was a little surprised at the tone of that, and recognizing a theme for a lecture, asked him, “so, what color are you?”.
He looks down at his shirt for only a moment before he triumphantly answers back, “I am striped!”.
Looks like the Iranians got themselves a few British hostages this time (the link has a good roundup of reactions and reports). This is just so brazenly provocative towards England, I just cannot make any sense out of it. What are these people thinking? Especially dangerous is that this might exactly be the provocation the Bush administration is looking for to strike at Iran.
Think about it - if I were the Bush admin, I have a war in Iraq going badly, I have an ally in England trying to drop off from my war, I suspect Iran could be causing a lot of my problems in Iraq - this is the perfect excuse to not only strike back at an enemy, but to also turn British opinion and force against Iran.
Either the Iranians were incredibly stupid with this decision or incredibly foolhardy - something tells me they might have been both when they did something this open. I have a feeling at the end of the whole thing, Ahmadi-whats-his-name would have wished he had just stuck to organizing conferences for Holocaust deniers and weird fashion. He might have grossly miscalculated this decision.
I gues it is that time of the week again, when I am completely captivated by random things - like the search queries that lead to my blog….
Here is one that I bet is going to raise my hit count by a zillion%….(hint, hover over the link to find out what it is - I really don’t want people hitting my blog with those keywords…don’t want to have too many horny guys getting upset at me ifyouknowwhatImean ;)
This one was something I guess I can be proud of - my blog mom (who has since disappeared into the ether of the blogosphere) really approved of…before she christened me her “potty-mouthed” blog-child…heh!
Whoever was searching for “girl beating up guy”, please wait till we capture enough non-gruesome videos of me beating up on the poor husband ;) It will be posted in the “pay-per-view” section of the blog.
Rohan, if you are still googling yourself - I have bad news for you man…my post still comes up…
Also, no! It is not wrong to wear a bindi…unless of course…you are a multicultural nut…then, you are forbidden. Your penance is to go grocery-shopping in your bikini.
Oh, here is an awesome post I found in the referer list - “Forced to depend” - I might post a deconstruction of this ridiculously traumatizing poem (it sucked so bad and was so juvenile, I was traumatized reading it) tomorrow. Is it really worth my time talking about another H4 spouse who doesn’t have her shit together enough to not marry an asshole who apparently doesn’t treat her well? Let me think about it.
Via Althouse, comes this story of a polar bear baby being raised by the Berlin zoo keepers. Animal activists would rather have the bear put to death than be fed and kept alive by the zoo keepers…because, you know, activists obviously know what is better for everyone!
Stupid frigging morons! What a waste of precious oxygen and valuable food!
update: Real funny was this comment on the thread at Althouse’s blog -Using their logic (that it is inhumane to raise an animal among humans, and the humane thing would be to kill it): I guess they will come out with a new version of ‘Tarzan’ next. In it, Jane does the ‘humane’ thing and shoots Tarzan.
The family was out of milk this Sunday afternoon, so we dropped into a new grocery store that opened in the neighborhood called the “Carrollton Plaza Supermarket”. The place had lettering in some Asian language and considering the population and the Korean church next door, I am guessing this might have been a Korean grocery store. Well, needless to say there were plenty of interesting things I had never before seen in a grocery store…
For one, this was possibly the first place I ever saw that sold “chicken feet”…that was not all - there was a shelf full of intestines from a pretty wide variety of animals…gulp!
Top billing though, has got to go to…”Pig Rectum”! Now, I am all for multicultural sensitivity and kumbaya and love-makes-the-world-go and stuff, but I cannot in good senses buy my groceries from a shelf right by a pig’s rectum. Who eats that? This is a serious question - not rhetorical! Really, who eats a pig rectum? I am curious.
Wow - I hope India’s coach is paying attention. Either the sub-continent finds a worthwhile obsession, or the players are hung on rafters publicly - what comes first? I mean, I love the Mavs too - I cannot even imagine that Avery Johnson came close to being murdered by the Mavs for losing a series in the NBA Finals that his team should have won!
Well, last night’s loss to the Suns still hurts so much I cannot talk about it…Also, exhausted tending to the little one who kept waking up every hour on the dot in the night. Thank Goodness, the weekend is close :)
Oh, here is a cool new tool or an incredible annoyance depending on the way you look at it - they give you a unified phone number that links to all your regular phones and makes all of them ring when someone calls this one number. Makes it even harder to make an excuse to not pick up an unwanted phone. Gotta keep it away from the husband ;)
I am watching Tim Legler, Greg Anthony and some chick debate between Dirk and Nash for MVP and I think I just lost a few brain cells. Tim Legler has got to be kidding me, when he says Dirk doesn’t deserve MVP since he didn’t win the Finals last season. That is crazy, especially since he picks Nash for losing the Western Conference Finals…that too, only by a freakishly lucky bracket that let the Phoenix Suns coast to the Conference Finals while the Mavs had to battle through Memphis and San Antonio.
The woman on the show made some great points - she asked Legler who would make a bigger impact if transplanted into, let’s say, a Sixers team - Nash or Dirk? I am glad at least that out of the four people on the show, three said they will vote for Dirk.
Ultimately, I couldn’t care less if Dirk wins the MVP or not…for the regular season. I am angling for MVP of the Finals ;)
I was really bored yesterday, so we decided to get a movie on-demand - the concept of this indie film called “Pulse” seemed interesting, so we watched. Consider this a PSA - don not watch this movie unless you want something really funny instead of the horror movie the movie tries to be.
Briefly, the story is that some “hacker” kids working on a “telecom” project accidentally discover new frequencies that allow ghosts to escape and come back into our world. The ghosts then suck the spirit out of you and you get addicted to the internet….OK, I made up the last few words, but the subtext underlying the movie is that everyone is so addicted to technology, they are not relating to other humans…illustrated to an irnocally hilarious effect, when the heroine is being chased by demons coming out of her cell phone - the genius that she is, she keeps checking the cell phone for signal (lost signal means lost demons) instead of simply throwing it out of the car.
There are some hilarious incidents like a dead boyfriend sending IMs to the heroine…she suspects someone broke into his computer…huh? I had no idea I could use my IM account only on my computer…I was naive enough to think anybody could log in from anywhere with the right username/password.
Seriously, the movie is a “tech” movie made for people of two generations ago - it has a computer into which the hero downloads a virus…the computer then starts spewing…”system overload”…”system crashing”. Yep - apparently we just get the blue screen of death while movie computers actually warn people that they are in the process of crashing. Eminently forgettable, I say!
Here is a gem brought to us by Dr. Helen - Dr. Helen: The “Harmless” Habit that Turns Men off to You - who points out that Cosmo actually has to warn women that pissing off their prospective male partners by railing against the male gender in general is….gasp…counter-productive! Wow! Who woulda thunk that! Pissing off people doesn’t get them to like you…like, really deep, huh! You go, Cosmo!
This reminds me of the climactic scene of “Jerry Maguire”, where a bunch of divorced women sit together discussing how much the men in their lives sucked…right before the real suckfest that was the alien Tom Cruise saying to the retarded Renee that she completed him or something….
Man, the there are quite a few things I haven’t has a chance to talk about in the past few weeks…
1. Geek things first - there was the MT bug that I wrote about below, that kept me from blogging…I couldn’t really work too much on fixing that bug since, I was….
2. Too busy figuring out why the heck Spring Framework hates my adding elements to collections dynamically in a JSP. I know, I know…geek as it is, I hacked out a solution, so let me know if any of y’all are interested in it. This of course…
3. Did not keep me from watching my Mavs quietly grow into a monster only a proud fan like me could be proud of :) How about them Mavs, huh! Awesome! Bring on the play-offs, baby!
Oh Man, finally my stupid blog is upgraded and actually works. Here is something I found the hard way - if you are trying to upgrade your version of MT or trying to install the Plugin Manager and you run into the problem of “No permissions. Please contact your administrator for upgrading Movable Type. “, don’t waste your time checking permissions and error logs. Simply drop the mt_config table from your MY-SQL database and try to run the upgrade script again. Magic, I say!