Oh, yeah. I just found a new toy with which to torture my body.

Freebord has got to be the coolest thing Ehhh-Vahhhhrr. It’s basically a long-board style skate board engineered to ride like a snowboard, except on pavement. Schweeeeeet.

You can see their whole web site, which is pretty cool, or just check out the video to see just how real the feel is on this thing.

Have you ever looked at the world today and thought, “Wha..?”

Believe it or not, somehow, children have survived for at least 6000 years without any form of government interference in their lives. When I was a kid (Okay, enough with the old jokes.), a “car seat” was just that, the seats in the car (usually made of naugahyde that would melt your Umbro shorts in the summer). Now kids are in some kind of special restraint until they’re old enough to shave. In my day, as the youngest kid, my place in the car on family vacation was the back window deck. GASP! The way I remember, you were “high strung” and so you didn’t get much sugar. Now, you’re ADHD and get drugged into being a zombie. When I rode my bike, the only wore I helmet was when I was pretending to be Evel Knievel. Now kids wear helmets anytime they travel faster than a brisk walk. The way I remember it, when we were on the play ground at school… WE PLAYED!!

But not anymore. Today, kids are not allowed to be kids. Get a load of this story from California.

An 11-year-old girl in West Covina, Calif., was suspended from her school from doing “dangerous” cartwheels and hand stands during lunch time…

Administrators at the school said they were concerned about safety of their students. They said gymnastics on the playground creates an unsafe situation.

Great googly-moogly people! Why don’t you just lock your kids in the basement until their 18. As long as you throw them some Happy Meals and the latest XBox game every week or so, they come out as perfectly well adjusted obese psychopaths. They’ll fit right in! GAH!!

(Link borrowed from Drudge. I’ll give it back, I promise.)

Remember when you were in 8th grade and you and two other buddies got the great idea of starting a rock band? You pooled your allowance money and bought a cheap guitar and amp and started writing 8th-grade-angst-ridden songs? Aren’t you glad that grew up before you had the chance to record that junk?!

For me it was “The Shady Denizens”. Galyn, Marks, and I were going to be a grim metal-ish band with poignant, Christian lyrics. We had stage names picked, album covers drawn, the whole nine. I was going to play keyboards, and can still plink out a couple of the songs we worked up in Galyn’s parent’s spare room between games of Double Dragon and Castlevania. Ahh to be young and stupid again.

The reason I bring this up is that my favorite web cartoon, PVP, has a rant on the web site about a garage band that should never have left the garage. They were booth-neighbors at a recent comic convention here in Dallas and butted heads all weekend because the band, Court Jester, was blasting their music (The term is used loosely.) the whole time. The band’s web site is hilarious. You can download their music, with thought provoking lyrics like:

I’ll be a good boy, that’s no lie.
I’ll be a good boy as long as I don’t die.

I literally laughed out loud when I listened to their tribute to Mike Meyers (ala Halloween slasher movies). It’s got this ridiculous audio effect voice that interjects little gems between the lyrics, like “the emperor of evil” and “the devil’s son”. It eventually breaks out in some ooh-so-scary back masking.

I swear I’m not making this up:

Sweet little sister I saw her smile.
Right away I knew her dark desire.

Umm… Smile doesn’t rhyme with desire and please do not tell me what your little sister’s “dark desire” was. Seriously, I beg you.

It would be funny if these guys were teenagers, but a visit to the band’s bio page reveals just how sad the truth is. They don’t give their ages, but from the pictures, I’m guessing these guys are in their late 30s. One of them has a master’s degree, though it doesn’t say what discipline. (I’m guessing Automotive Repair.) I’m still wondering who’s ex-girlfriend was blackmailed into posing for the album cover.

Now you can see how this reminded me of those pubescent rock-star dreams. What can I say, some people follow their dreams, even when they really really really shouldn’t.

Wow. I knew that the liberal powers that be were an angry stuborn lot, but I have to say I am truely surprised at the militaristic furvor with which some of them are taking up arms against the Bush administration.

Read this article in the New York Times and tell me that liberalism still has a shread of compassion for real people. All they seem to care about is destroying the “Religions Right”.

What is truely remarkable about this anti-convervative, anti-god rhetoric in the libral left is how closely it resembles Al Qaeda’s own fist shaking (as evidenced by this article at Reuters).

Well, let me just say this. If ya’ll is lookin’ fer a fight, yer gonna git one! Let’s get it awwn! My God is biggern’ yer hate any day.

Why don’t we all send two or three hundred emails to that effect to the author of that NYT article, Mr. Paul Krugman. krugman@nytimes.com

Do they not teach math to journalism majors? Granted, I’m an ubber-anal-retentive engineer type. Granted, I just finished working out the election results using complex formulas in an Excel spreadsheet. But still. Come on people. 2+2 does not equal 5.

At this hour, the media (at least Yahoo News and CNN) can’t decide who’s won New Mexico. How about some numbers.

Precincts not yet reported: .80%
Bush leads by: 2.06%

So, if John Kerry can win 256% of the votes not yet counted, he could win New Mexico. Ummm. No.

At this hour, they can’t decide who’s won Iowa. How about some numbers.

Precincts not yet reported: .29%
Bush leads by: 1.06%

So, if John Kerry can win 366% of the votes not yet counted, he could win Iowa. Seriously, people.

At this hour, the media can’t decide who’s won Ohio. How about some numbers.

Precincts not yet reported: 0%
Bush leads by: 2.49%

So, if John Kerry can win… well, divide by zero and you get infinity… If John Kerry can win infinity votes, he could win Ohio. GAAAH!!

Okay, okay. I KNOW that there are provisional ballots and all that silliness. I just think it’s funny that the liberal media is clawing and chewing and gnashing their teeth rather than admitting that they’re stuck with a conservative, Christian president for another four years despite all their back-stabbing, libelous, boorish efforts.

I have one word for you, Dan Rather…. NAA-NAA-NEE-NAA-NAAA!!

Have you ever heard a joke or story that implied that Macintosh users were stupid? They’re not, but sometimes they make it hard to know that for sure.

Here is an actual Support Article on Apple’s web site.

How to pick up and carry your iMac G5

---

Don’t know how to pick up and carry your iMac G5? It’s easy.

Before moving your computer, make sure all cables and cords are disconnected.

Pick up the iMac G5 by grasping both sides of the computer. Carry it to wherever you wish.

Ohhh! And here I was trying to pick it up with my teeth.

Fox News reports that Nicole Kidman’s new movie “Birth” is causing a real stir.

The premise of the show is that Kidman’s dead husband is reincarnated and comes to visit her as a 10-year-old boy. Okay, weird, but certainly within the scope for Hollywood.

The problems arrise when the 37-year-old “rekindles” her relationship with her husband, played by 11-year-old Cameron Bright. This includes some “tender” kissing and a nude bath scene. Eeeeew.

The film was actually booed at the Venice International Film Festival (See, I knew Italians where good people.) and several religious groups (including my Sunday school class) are asking for upstanding folks to boycott this film. This will, of course, cause more people to go see it, but those people aren’t the upstanding ones, now are they?

Personally, I’m boycotting this film. True, that would be like me boycotting space travel or eating cottage cheese (both things I would not normally do anyway), but it’s the principle that matters.

This just in, China thinks we are too big for our britches. Reuters quotes a Chinese official saying that the problems facing America are due to the “Bush doctrine” of “arrogance and cocksureness.” (Can you say cocksureness in a PG rated blog?!)

“The current U.S. predicament in Iraq serves as another example that when a country’s superiority psychology inflates beyond its real capability, a lot of trouble can be caused”

(Excuse me while I chortle. China is always good for a laugh.)

So, I guess that displacing a few million people to build the worlds biggest disaster… er… dam (which incidentally, has a long list of serious problems) would not be seen as cocksureness in the superiority psychology inflated eyes of the Chinese government.

After years leading Palestinians in their struggle against Israel, Yasser Arafat has decided on a new career. He has accepted an appointment to lead a small, blue race in their own struggle. Arafat will be crowned the new Papa Smurf early next week.

“Smurfs have lived under the thumb of that Semite Dog Gargomel long enough. Under my guidance they will finally live free,” the former PLO leader claimed.

The former Papa Smurf, whose real name is Karl Lafargue, was on hand when Arafat received the news of his appointment. Lafargue has served as Papa Smurf since 1981 and is stepping down from the post citing his failing health. However, inside sources claim that Papa Smurf is bowing to political pressure from militant smurfs who seek to gain independence from Gargomel, a regional war lord.

What happens when you use a WYSIWYG editor to build your web page, and then you click one of the format buttons over and over? You get code that looks something like this:

<BIG><BIG><BIG><BIG><BIG><BIG><BIG><BIG><BIG><BIG><B><BIG><BIG>
Home Building Manual
</BIG></BIG></B></BIG></BIG></BIG></BIG></BIG></BIG></BIG></BIG></BIG></BIG>

Nice, huh? Well, what happens when you view it? IE incorrectly ignores the extra tags, thus encouraging bad code. Here’s the page in a 1024 x 768 window in IE.

But view the same page in FireFox, which correctly and dutifully obeys the rotten HTML code, in the same 1024 x 768 window, and you get something like this.

To be precise, that’s 814 px font. Now, THAT is BIG!

Here is the actual page. See for yourself.

(Link via Randy Pants.)