This weekend, Tammy and I found a book store going out of business at our local mall. Tammy bought the “last” Harry Potter book, hardback, for $7. I picked up Steve Martin’s autobiography “book on tape” (actually, it’s 4 CDs) for just under $10.

I’ve always had a warm spot in my heart for Steve Martin probably because he was my brother’s favorite comedian back in the late 70’s, when I was just a little guy. I snuck out of bed once and watched Steve on Saturday Night Live with my brother.

I’ve had this Steve Martin quote in my quip database for ages. Now, I’m inspired to post it. It’s from his comedy album that I bought about ten years ago.

Some people have a way with words… others not have way.

I haven’t really taken the time to talk about my theatrical pursuits lately. Time for some catching up.

In early December, I played Joseph, Mary’s betrothed husband, in Stage Right Theatre’s* presentation of “Christmas Heirlooms”. For me it was a tough role to play. Not only am I physically incapable of growing a beard, it was the first time I had role with so much emotional depth. In Heirlooms, Joseph hears of Mary’s pregnancy from a friend and is forced to confront her about it. He runs the gamut from rage, to heartbreak, to shame, and finally reconciliation. I also had to sing, but only a little.

On February 8th and 9th, I’ll be part of an ensemble cast in Stage Right’s dessert theater show, “You Know the Old Slaying.” It’s an “interactive” murder mystery in which the cast and audience work together to figure out who done it.

As an actor, this requires me to stay in character and improv throughout the show. In order to separate our own personas from the roles we are playing (since 90% of the audience will know us outside of the theater) most of the cast will learn new accents for their parts. I’ve always been pretty good at doing foreign accents, but I had to pick one that no one has heard from me before. That is to say, I had to learn a new one. I went with a North Plains, Minnesota/Wisconsin accent (think “Fargo”) and I think I’ve pulled it off.

This show is going to be amazing and the best part is that the audience, for the most part, gets to decide how it ends. If you’re going to be in the area, I strongly recommend attending. We’ll get started at 7:30 PM both nights. Tickets are $7.50 each and desserts are served during the intermission. I can hold tickets for you if you let me know. You can also use my PayPal link at the bottom of the sidebar to pay in advance.

See ya there!

*I continually rib Stage Right’s founder Michael Winters about misspelling “theater.” He insists that the correct spelling, if you are serious about it, is “theatre.” Then I follow with something like, “So if you want to be hoity-toity, you spell it wrong on purpose?”

Normally, if I don’t get a new WBQotW posted by Tuesday, I just let the week slide and post a new one the following Monday. It just doesn’t seem fair for a white board quip to get short changed, spending only four or five days on the board rather than seven.

But today is Wednesday. I didn’t post a new quip last week and if I don’t post one this week, our current quip, clever as it is, will have been on the board three weeks, and that’s just not right.

Thus, I present a “short week” white board quip.

Why is “abbreviated” such a long word?

Get it? Ahaa… Ahaa ha.

Tuesday, January 22nd, at 10 AM, I’ll be observing a moment of silent prayer.

It was on January 22nd, 1973 at around 10 AM that the supreme court sided with the plaintiff in the infamous Roe vs. Wade case. I didn’t know until recently that the Roe case started out right here in Dallas, Texas.

Jane Roe was the pseudonym for Norma McCorvey, a 9th grade drop-out and runaway who was taken under the wings of a couple of feminist attorneys. She was a pawn in the political battle over abortion. Those attorneys had Norma sign an affidavit and from that point on, Norma, as Jane Roe, was no longer welcome in the feminist, pro-abortion movement. All they needed was a name and a piece of paper to trot before a liberal court. They didn’t care about Norma just like they don’t care about the tens of millions of women who have suffered the physical and psychological effects of abortion. And they certainly don’t care about the incredible number of lives that have been stolen thorough this barbaric practice.

48,589,993 abortions were performed between January 1973 and December 2006.

That means that as of this writing there have been over 49 million American’s executed on the alter of our “modern” culture.

What’s really amazing is that the woman who’s name is forever associated with those 49 million deaths, the helpless pawn, has been speaking out against abortion since 1997. You can read Norma McCorvey’s testimony here. Please do. It speaks not only to the madness of “abortion rights”, but also to the love and grace of a mighty God.

Clicky clicky.

It has only recently occurred to me that I never blogged about our apartment flood that happened back in March of 2007. Well, our apartment flooded. So there. Now I’ve blogged it.

We had always had low water pressure and complaints were answered with, “We can only give you what the city gives us.” Then, one day I turned on the water in the shower and it almost knocked me over. Seems someone had figured out the problem. About a week later, the increased pressure blew the fittings off the back of our dishwasher when no one was home and the adventure began.

We lost a fair amount of “stuff” when the water rained down from our second story apartment into our garage and storage room. But having just returned from our mission to New Orleans, we were mentally and emotionally prepared for that.

After almost a year we were still dealing with some of the issues created during the flood. By using our lease renewal as leverage, I convinced the management to install new carpet and baseboards. We tried to plan the work to have minimal impact on our lives. Tammy’s business trip to Wisconsin dovetailed nicely into this plan. Also, a friend of ours was looking for some cheap, first-apartment furniture and after about nine years we were ready to replace our living room set. Perfect! All these things coordinated pretty well and the last couple of weeks have gone swimmingly.

We moved all of our furniture into our garage. Then, Tammy headed out. The new carpet was installed on Monday, the new baseboards on Wednesday, and the new furniture arrived Saturday. In the mean time I vacuumed the new carpet over and over, trying to get all the fuzz out before we had to move back in. It literally overpowered our vacuum, require a couple of “trail repairs”. I collected the fuzz in a separate trash bag and it now has the size, shape and weight of a small dog. I am not making that up!

We are about 95% moved back in. Tammy and I have both decided to lower our “stuff factor”. It’s truly amazing how much stuff you can accumulate over time. Tammy culled her clothes once before the carpet arrived and then once more while moving back into her closet. She produced four (Yes, four!) 30 gallon trash bags full of clothes that either don’t fit her physique or don’t fit her fashion. I am so not making this up. There must be 200 pounds of clothes in our garage waiting for a ride to Goodwill.

In that same spirit, the couch and love seat that we planned to give away have now been joined by a badly weathered computer desk, a recliner, and a heavily abused coffee table. We’ve cleaned out all our “junk” drawers, our kitchen, our pantry… the list goes on. The large boxes in which our new pub table and chairs arrived are now overflowing with cast offs.

Culling the cruft from your house can be a liberating experience. We actually have room now! Our tiny kitchen no longer has drawers that won’t quite close. Our walk-in closets can actually be walked in. And for the first time in months, my desktop computer has a desk top surrounding it, rather than piles of things I would never “get back to” no matter how much I wished I could.

It’s like I can breath again. Now, if only we could keep it this way. Wish us luck. Or better yet, pray!

P.S. Is anyone in the market for a wedding gown? Seriously.

Remember when I said that I was puzzled by the buoyancy of our current economy? I just had another thought, one that I’m ashamed to say I should have thought of a long time ago, but allow me this “duh” moment if you will.

Despite off-the-chart oil prices, despite the over-inflated housing market, despite two ongoing wars, the economy is still pretty good. (Not as good now as it has been the last couple of years, but pretty good nonetheless.)

What keeps an economy growing is basically spending. As long as people are spending money, the economy grows. The conservative notion is that lowering taxes and keeping people employed results in more people with money to spend. So, more to spend, more people spending it, good economy. But when gas prices are high and mortgage payments are high there is less money to spend. When a large chunk of the population is out of the country getting shot at, there are less people to spend their money. Less money, less people spending it, bad economy.

I just couldn’t fill in the gaps. That is until today.

In the last two years, I’ve gotten completely and angrily sick of seeing the same commercial on cable TV fifteen times a night. It seems like not a single commercial break went by without that fatherly looking guy in the sports coat telling me I my life would be better if I refinanced my home with Country Wide. Totally aside from the fact that I don’t like commercials in general and even more so when they’re repeated over and over, there must have been a heck of a lot of people out there following fatherly sport coat guy’s advice. Otherwise, Country Wide would have changed their marketing tactic.

Smart people refinance their home to get a better interest rate or to roll in some other existing debt for tax purposes. But there are very few smart people out there. The rest of the populous refinances their home in order to pull their equity out and buy “stuff” they don’t really need. Lately the Fed has cut interest rates every time the economy quivered thinking that the big crash was just around the corner. Lower rates encourage people to take our more loans and spend more money, thus propping up the economy. But what happens when people (the less smart ones) get comfortable living a lifestyle they can’t afford by living on credit and mortgaging their home way past it’s actual worth?

The economy has not been propped up by tax cuts. It’s been propped up by people living on credit. “Duh!” And now, the Fed can’t cut the rates much more than they already have. People have mortgaged themselves well beyond the real value of their homes (thus the housing market is artificially inflated) and now the banks who wrote all those nut-case mortgages can’t collect because the people can’t pay their mortgage payments with their maxed out credit cards.

This is pretty scary when you look at it in historical perspective. The people were living beyond their means and playing the stock market with borrowed money in the Roaring 20’s lead up to the 30’s “Great Depression”. When the stock market slipped, people owed more on their stocks than the stocks were worth and they lost everything. Admittedly that’s a very simplistic explanation, but it does mirror nicely the current housing market situation.

Anyway, I just thought I should correct my earlier grim forecast with an even grimmer one after I had my head-smacking, “duh” moment.

Ok, so the post title is a little sensational, but let there be no mistake: the tree-hugger-centric world view sees humanity as a virus. And this AP article makes it as clear as glass.

The story covers last years rise in birth rate in the the US. We’re having more babies while Japan, Canada, and all of Europe are struggling with birth rates that are not keeping up with mortality rates. Long story short, those golden idols of Liberal socialism are having fewer and fewer babies, so why is the world’s only super-power having more babies? Here’s the AP‘s take on it.

“Experts believe there is a mix of reasons: a decline in contraceptive use, a drop in access to abortion, poor education and poverty.”

Are you kidding me?! The Liberal media is so completely out of touch with reality that they can only assume the higher birth rate is due to more poor, stupid people and the evil Conservative Conspiracy taking away the poor, stupid people’s access to abortion!?!

It couldn’t possibly be due to the fact that life in America is good. The economy is good. People are healthy and prosperous. Conservative capitalism works. NO!! It CAN’t be THAT!!!

What’s even more infuriating is that after the AP writer gives us the “expert” opinion, none of the actual experts quoted in the article say anything that comes close to that pile of putrescence.

GAH!!

Read the whole article… IF you’re not going to be operating a vehicle or heavy machinery or have access to a fire arm lest you go postal afterwards.

With all the cleaning and reorganizing going on at our house, I found a radio that I could take to work. I’ve been listening to the day-time political talk shows when I can and I was surprised at how tough they all are on Huckabee. Limbaugh and Hannity both came down pretty hard on him for some issues where they say Huck is too far left (meaning too far away from the Republican platform).

I view these guys first and foremost as entertainers. You have to evaluate all their talk through the lense of sensationalism. But at the same time, they do have full staffs that spend hours and hours sifting through interviews, articles, and historical reports that I just don’t have time to do. So, when these guys say stuff like Huck is against school choice, or Huck is a big-government tax-and-spender, I have to at least check the facts.

Like I said many times in reference to spiritual matters, blind faith is deadly. You have to know what you believe before you can believe what you know. I like Huck, but it is my responsibility to know for certain why I like Huck and make sure it’s all true.

I won’t even bother arguing the whole scholarships for illegals thing. Huck’s answered that one over and over. I don’t see any real evidence that Huck is soft on immigration.

Nor will I bother arguing about Huck being “soft on crime.” To be honest, I haven’t seen enough evidence to call this one, so I’m deferring on the issue for now.

I am for school choice. If you don’t like the way your local public school does things, if you don’t like what they teach or how they teach it, you should have options. One option is private school. That’s expensive and not everyone can afford it. Then there’s home schooling. Obviously this has requirements that some families can not meet. Then there’s vouchers, the hotly debated idea that you should be able to use your tax money to send your kid to another district. Here’s were sound-bite politics have come to hurt Huck. But rather than explain it all here, I’ll just like to some others who’ve already explained it quite well.

Kevin Tracy changes his stance after a phone interview with Huck.
National Review Letter to Ed explains Huck’s stance on vouchers in Arkansas.

I am against big-government. But here we have to split some hairs. One of the main causes for problematic, big government is federal involvement in state and local issues. There are very few issues in which the federal government should be involved. National security, international relations and interstate affairs are pretty much it.

Gay marriage is a federal issue because all 50 states need to have the same standards for what constitutes a marriage (interstate affairs). Otherwise you could be married in one state but not in another. Likewise, federal involvement makes sense for uniform driver’s licenses (and IDs) to insure that all states agree on who can and can’t get a driver’s license and how to prevent fake IDs.

I feel pretty strongly that education is a local issue, not a federal one. I (like Huck) do not believe that the federal government should mandate school vouchers. Educational standards, like “No Child Left Behind” are great, but only for creating a standard measure against which the states can compare their own educational performance.

Some people are put off by the fact that the NEA (a very big-L Liberal organization) endorsed Huck. But in this article you’ll see that they endorsed Huck based on his track record for improving education in Arkansas, even though they don’t agree with him many issues. Keep in mind that as governor it was Huck’s job to manage education. As president, his role will have to be different.

Now, when I say I’m against big government, you can infer that I’m against raising taxes to fund unnecessary government programs. (That’s tax-and-spend.) Huck did get beat up pretty bad in a report by CATO. They gave Huck a D overall based on his tax policies in Arkansas.

Huckabee earns an overall grade of D for his entire governorship. Like many Republicans, his grades dropped the longer he stayed in office. In his first few years, he fought hard for a sweeping $70 million tax cut package… He even signed a bill to cut the state’s 6 percent capital gains tax—a significant pro-growth accomplishment.

But nine days after being reelected in 2002, he proposed a sales tax increase to cover a budget deficit caused partly by large spending increases that he proposed and approved… In response to a court order to increase spending on education, Huckabee proposed another sales tax increase.

I believe that most of the attacks against Huck on this issue come from fiscal-first conservatives. Fiscal-first conservatives (like Dick Chaney and CATO) reject any candidate that supported any tax hikes ever. However they will push for close relations with China or immigrant amnesty because these things are “good” for the economy. This is a major dividing line in the Republican party. To me (a social-first conservative), the rule of law, and the sanctity of life are more important than the economy, so China and illegals lose and necessary taxes can be forgiven.

This comes down to defining unnecessary programs. It’s the governor’s job to keep roads and infrastructure up-to-date. It’s the president’s job to keep national defense up-to-date. Would you be willing to pay more federal taxes to keep our soldiers properly equipped? I would. Would you be willing to pay more state taxes to keep highways and bridges safe? I would.

So is Huck a tax-and-spend guy? I’m not convinced either way yet. I still haven’t found any details on Huck’s 2002 spending package. Thus, I can not make an honest assessment of this issue yet.

Apparently, the Cowboy’s fulfilling my playoff expectations was not the only big event that happened yesterday. It seems that in a mundane hotel conference room somewhere in L.A. Hollywood finally threw the kind of award show they deserve.

My contempt for the self-congratulatory circuses is well documented. I’m very glad to hear that the writer’s strike has hit Hollywood where it hurts the most, their pride!

I’ll bet you didn’t even know that the Golden Globes took place this weekend. I sure didn’t. I just happened to catch a link to the non-story on Drudge. It would seem that without the writer’s guild’s blessing, the show that is usually a red-carpet, super-extravagant, over-produced, back-patting showcase was instead on par with an Amway sales pitch at the local Holiday Inn.

The hotel ballroom, which should have been filled with famous nominees cheek-to-cheek at cozy tables, instead was given over to risers holding TV cameras and an audience of reporters and anonymous others.
…
Lacking Hollywood’s trademark famous faces and manufactured excitement, the awards … were missing any magic or meaning – an emperor stripped of his designer duds.
…
TV viewers – those who bothered tuning in – had to forgo any celebrity sightings and settle for the likes of Billy Bush of “Access Hollywood” and Mary Hart of “Entertainment Tonight” fame. They read a laundry list of winners, supplemented by clips from nominated film and TV shows.

Now that’s what I call entertainment!</sarcasm> I only hope the guild’s snub of the Oscars has the same effect.

Some industry pundits are taking this to the extreme. One even forecasting, “Hollywood’s end is near.” Oh, if only ’twas true. I’m honestly excited to see Hollywood and her elitist twits served a large helping of humble pie when they find out that we cretins out in “flyover country” will live on as happy as ever without the bilge they call “entertainment”, but I’m not so naive as to think that their pedestal will actually be toppled. Then again hope springs eternal.

Since it’s “that time of year” and I’ve got my own health, diet and exercise on my mind, this post from “You Had Me At Idiot” really made me laugh.

Rated PG for some mild “poo poo” language. You have been warned.

When Trolls Sweat

And if you must know, I’m down to 231.8 as of this morning, down 14.2 pounds from when I first signed up for WeightWatchers.