The Empty Soda Can

First of all, let me be perfectly clear. Rush Limbaugh is an idiot. I don’t like the guy, I never have, and the fact that he recently made some sexist statements doesn’t enamor me any more to his cause. I’m also not a fan of Sarah Palin, whose name will also appear in this post. Now, that being said, I just received an email that makes a very good point: what’s good for the goose is good for the gander. I honestly don’t have time to run down every one of these statements, but every one I checked is indeed legit. If you happen to find any that aren’t, please let me know. So without any further ado… Rush Limbaugh's words have given the… left the opening [it] needed, and they have pounced. Rush has apologized. But the radical left will never accept it because they despise him and want him off the air. To the left, this is simply an opportunity to put their attacks on religious liberty in a feminist frame, and an opportunity to try and shut down Limbaugh and end his career. It is...

I remember when I was a kid, a new pizza place opened up in our area. It was about half an hour away, but we’d heard it was really good, so we made the trek to try it. It lived up to the hype: their delectable pan pizza was completely different than the same old genuine New York–style pies at all nine Italian- or Italian-American–owned pizza/sub shops in our tiny New Jersey hamlet of 15,000 people. It was also expensive, but it was so delicious that we’d drive up Route 46, every few months, to take advantage of that wonderful place called “Pizza Hut.” A few years later, they opened another store—their second, in my young mind—about 10 minutes from our house. Now it was easier to get there, though our weekly pizza night continued to come from locals like Cosmo Bella or Bachagaloop’s. Still, when the craving came, we’d still head out to Totowa to get a Pizza Hut pizza and a side of cheesy garlic bread. Definitely great stuff. On the other side of the coin were burgers. Sure, we could...

Well, long-time readers, it’s finally happened: I got a new computer! After years of agonizing over which would be best while waiting for it to finally become necessary, I settled on a solution: get a cheap Mac mini to use as a server, plus a MacBook Pro to use as my main machine. Along with the MacBook Pro, I plan to get two 27″  Thunderbolt Displays . Those grandiose plans aside, though, we’ve only received a small portion of our tax refund due to some government red tape. My new client, however, has specific needs that require me to have something newer than my 8½-year-old Power Macintosh G5. As such, I took the plunge: I picked up a cheap Mac mini—as planned—and a single Thunderbolt Display. (It’s actually pretty neat, going from a 20″ and 17″ to a single 27″ display, but to be honest, the biggest difference is Mac OS X v.10.7 Lion and the things it does differently. Not badly, just differently. I’ll adjust.) :-) Of course, amidst all this, I had to retire my old d...

I’m in a world of hurt right now. There’s a person in my life who I work with on a regular basis who obviously doesn’t even begin to appreciate what I do. It doesn’t matter how hard I try; it seems that nothing I do can ever live up to this person’s expectations. This person is constantly deriding me, telling me that I’m slow, that I’m lazy, etc.; my accuser, on the other hand, is hard-working and consequently spends most of the time cleaning up messes caused by other, ostensibly lesser people (myself apparently foremost among them). I don’t know what to do. I don’t want to cut this person off because I really do benefit from our relationship, and I even enjoy it, when I’m not being lambasted. Furthermore, doing so would be extremely detrimental to both my personal and professional life. And yet, whenever I confront this person with my feelings, I’m made to feel even worse. There’s never any acknowledgment of the very deep hurt I’m feeling, just reassurance—generally in the form o...

So I’m going through some old photos that my dad scanned in and I come across some shots from my maternal grandparents’ Hawai’ian vacation, circa 1968. As I stepped through, I found a picture with a rather… um… interesting guy in the foreground: And I’m like, seriously? Seriously? I guess it could be like Grecian Nº 40 or something, but either way, he’s like 150 years old! Who does he think he’s kidding? Seeing this, I don’t know whether to be glad or disappointed that the ’60s are over. What do you think?

I just received an email from my mother with the subject line “Fwd: World’s worth ethnic joke pun.” Apparently they’re hoping to mock people with a lithp as well. Anyway, it bears repeating: An Englishman, a Scotsman, an Irishman, a Welshman, a Frenchman, a Latvian, a Turk, a German, an Indian, several Americans (including a southerner, a New Englander, and a Californian), an Argentinean, a Dane, an Australian, a Slovakian, an Egyptian, a Japanese, a Moroccan, a Frenchman, a New Zealander, a Spaniard, a Russian, a Guatemalan, a Colombian, a Pakistani, a Malaysian, a Croatian, an Uzbek, a Cypriot, a Pole, a Lithuanian, a Chinese, a Sri Lankan, a Lebanese, a Cayman Islander, a Ugandan, a Vietnamese, a Korean, a Uruguayan, a Czech, an Icelander, a Mexican, a Finn, a Honduran, a Panamanian, an Andorran, an Israeli, a Venezuelan, a Fijian, a Peruvian, an Estonian, a Brazilian, a Portuguese, a Liechtensteiner, a Mongolian, a Hungarian, a Canadian, a Moldovan, a Haitian, a N...

First of all, if you haven’t read the Introduction to this post, please do so. It’s not absolutely necessary, but it will help you better understand our search for the perfect printer. :-) After years and years of purchasing printer after printer—some good, some bad, some so horrible you’d prefer a poke in the eye with a sharp stick—we were finally happy with our Brother HL-4070CDW for printing, Epson CX5200 for flatbed scanning, and HP OfficeJet 4315 for sheet-feed scanning. We also had our worse-than-a-sharp-stick Samsung SPP-2020 for photos, but since that only worked once before being in the shop for three years and then coming back still broken , we hardly even counted that. But the one thing we still required was a functional CD printer. I hopped online and, lo and behold, Staples just happened to be running an awesome sale on the Epson Artisan 835. But did I want to risk another Epson all-in-one? Sure, my CX5200 was great, but it wasn’t a CD printer. The only CD-printing al...