kapgar

Just as they play your favourite song...

Before I dive into my top albums of 2007, I wanted to share this article I found yesterday. It's one of those "where are they now" sorts of follow ups with this one all about former figure skater Tonya Harding. I know, I know... who really cares, right? Well I was one who didn't. But I read it anyway, and Kansas City Star reporter Sam Mellinger does a very nice job with it. You almost begin to feel some sympathy for Harding by the end. That's the mark of a good writer... humanizing the demonic.

On to the meat and potatoes... Kapgar's Top 10 Albums of 2007!

As much work as these lists can be, they're still a lot of fun because they give you a moment to sit back and reflect. Maybe you can already tie one of these albums into some event in your life or maybe you just think about the first time you listened to it. Whatever the case may be, I love how music just carries you back.

Let's hear it for the man...

Today's post is dedicated to my buddy Karl. And I'm sure Hilly will join in my celebratory mood, too!

Merriam-Webster has added the new Word of the Year to its dictionary. The word? w00t!

Some of you may be wondering "what the hell," so here you go...

Basically, "w00t" is a combination of letters and numbers that are known as l33t ("leet," short for "elite") speak. In this case, they form an onomatopoeia of sorts for the tendency of some people to cheer by going "woot woot woot!" This was used most popularly by Julia Roberts' character in Pretty Woman as well as by former talk show host Arsenio Hall.

Maybe you're still wondering "what the hell." I wouldn't blame you.

So here it is straight from the horse's, er, M-W's mouth...

"It shows a really interesting thing that's going on in language. It's a term that's arrived only because we're now communicating electronically with each other," said Merriam-Webster President John Morse. Apparently, they also liked it because it represented a blending of whimsy and technology. Okay, whatever.

Yeah, occasionally I've been known to w00t it up in the blogiverse. But to add it to the dictionary? I'm not so sure about that.

Yet, it still won out amongst a class of 20 nominees.

Those other words must've sucked something fierce.

But I do think visiting Karl's site and leaving him a comment of congratulations on this verbalistic accomplishment (of which I'm sure he's very proud) is very much in order.

Totally Unrelated Aside (TUA): The walls are coming along in case any of you were wondering what has been happening with that project. They have all been stripped and plastered and are mostly primed right now. We hope to start painting the ceiling and maybe even the walls this weekend. Please pray for us as this project has proven to be a severe bitch. But it's certainly looking good. It feels like we've got a whole new living room.

When the lights go down in the city...

How about some snippets for my first second day in a row of blogging in quite some time?

NBC-Ya-Later
NBC has now officially removed all their TV shows from iTunes. Well, you know what I have to say about that? Screw ya, NBC. I'll watch your shows on TV and if I miss them, I miss them. I will no longer make an effort to watch any of your shows if you're not going to allow me TO PAY YOU so I can put it on my iPod! You're saying no to my money... the one thing, aside from ratings (which should result in money anyway) that you like most. I was about to purchase an episode of Law & Order from last season to watch on my iPod, but since you don't want my money, I won't give it to you. Eat my shorts, NBC.

Protection
I have to thank Yet Another Girl for this one. The township of Manalapan, NJ, is demanding that Google hand over the identity, e-mail address, associated e-mails, blog drafts, and and other information they have regarding a blogger who uses the name "daTruthSquad." Apparently this person has written some critical comments about a township lawsuit and the town thinks it was actually written by the defendant in the case. The Electronic Frontier Foundation is stepping in to defend the First Amendment rights of the blogger and of Google in their protection of this information.

Favre
I know I'm a Chicago Bears fan and our natural adversary is anybody donning the green and yellow of the Green Bay Packers. However, Packer rifleman Brett Favre was just named Sports Illustrated's Sportsman of the Year and I am having trouble thinking of a more deserving guy. After a couple seasons of subpar play from him and his team, the man has come back in a big way this season at 38 years old, an age when most NFLers have hung up their spikes. Plus he has consistently been the top scorer on one of my fantasy teams and I drafted him as my backup. He was bumped to starter very early on. Maybe I'm supposed to hate the guy, yet I cannot help but respect him. He's amazing. Damn him for being a Packer.

Frosty
I was given an early birthday present from a friend in the form of a six pack of special winter brew by my buddies over at New Belgium Brewery in Fort Collins, CO. It is the Fat Tire 2° Below winter ale and I am so jacked about trying it. From what I'm told, it can be a very hard beer to find as it sells out rather quickly upon arrival in stores.

Birthday
Nice segue, eh? Yep, tomorrow I turn a pair o' threes... 33 years old. I admit I'm old. But I'm still younger than you, Hilly! Hah! Yeah, that was mean. But she's constantly teasing me or expressing her disbelief that I'm not older than her. So she deserves the poke... um... yeah. I only wish ThinkGeek had a gift registry. Oh the fun I could have! Or maybe they do and I'm just too lazy to look. Oh well.

Power
The area I live in here in the Midwest is expecting one heckuva winter storm today and tonight. If you live in the area, please be safe. Stay home, put on pajamas, find emergency candles, and hunker down with someone you love. Best advice I can think to impart unto you.

It’s old scruffy teddy, he’s been around for years...

This is one of those news bits that tends to push me ever closer to the proverbial precipice... just teetering between sanity and pure lunacy. God only knows what it would take to tip me that final bit over the edge.

Gillian Gibbons, a teacher from Liverpool, England, UK, working in Khartoum, Sudan, was arrested recently for committing blasphemy.

the Sudan, like many Middle Eastern nations, takes religion deadly seriously. And, I suppose, it's their right to do so. I, as a citizen of the United States, do not have to take it quite so seriously. I can choose to accept religious thought, discount it entirely, or pick and choose as I please. But my willy-nilly approach would not likely fly in any Middle Eastern country.

My big beef, though, is with the action that Gibbons performed that was deemed to be blasphemous. She had introduced a Teddy bear in her classroom of seven year olds and gave them the opportunity, as a group, to name the bear. One child suggested the name Muhammad, not just because it is one of the most popular names in both Sudan and the Middle East as a whole, but also because it was his own name. The children voted and Muhammad came out the winner.

One child told his parents of what transpired in class and the proverbial shit hit the fan. Apparently, the name is so sacred that it is considered blasphemy to use it as a name for an inanimate object such as a Teddy bear.

Now this poor teacher, if convicted, could face 4o lashes, a fine, or six months behind bars... FOR NAMING A TEDDY BEAR!!!!!

What the holy hell is wrong with this world??? The woman made a mistake. Actually, it wasn't even she who made the mistake. Her pupils, having been raised in that culture, should have known better and advised against what was happening. But no. Now she will pay the price for what is, ultimately, just plain idiocy. It's not as though she was intentionally trying to offend anyone or a whole region. She was just engaging her students in an act of childhood innocence... the naming of a stuffed animal. If officials would give her the chance to apologize, I'm sure she would do so without even thinking twice about it. And the rest of the world would have learned a lesson as well. And you might gain the respect of people around the world for having used a more positive form of reinforcement.

Give the lady a break.

P.S. I think I'm going out to buy a Teddy bear and name it Muhammad. That's my show of opposition against this stupidity.

Workin' 9 to 5, what a way to make a livin'...

Katie and I were watching the news the other day and they had a special about successful women in the workplace and how difficult their personal lives are as a result of their professional ones. It was so bad, in fact, that one of the five or six women that were part of this panel interview had actually started a Web site dedicated to successful women attempting to find meaningful relationships.

This floored me. I know that there are many men who are threatened by successful women. They look at it as though their manhood is being trampled.

But I had assumed that the tide had been changing for a while now so that, ideally, maybe it would be a 50/50 split between those guys who are threatened and those who are not. From the sound of things, though, it doesn't seem as though this is the truth. It sounded as though none of the women interviewed had been able to find men who could deal with what these women represented.

Now, clearly, five or six women is not a truly representative sample of the full population of women in the workplace. In fact, it's likely that the panel members were screened ahead of time to get a sampling that was skewed in favor of the viewpoint that the news channel was hoping to present.

But, even so, you have to figure that there is still some truth to it all. And I find this sad. I find it sad that men can't handle the concept of a woman having greater success than them.

Why is it such a sin for a woman to make more money?

Katie and I decided a long time ago that, when we have kids, the one of us that is making the least money with the fewest benefits or who has the greater chance at being able to work from home would stay at home. We're both fine with this decision even now. We talked about it after the news report and we're still find with this choice.

Have any of you made this same decision? How has it worked out? Or have you been in situations similar to these women? This can be answered by the men reading this post, too. Let me know how you would feel if you were in this position.

BTW, got a meme for you in the extended post...

I just wanna live my life...

I really have a problem with censorship. It can be any sort of censorship, but most specifically when one person, group, or organization tries to enforce their views on others thus restricting their ability to take part in some activity.

This time around, the object of my rant is a parents' group (and the school board) in Tuscola, Texas, who had a ninth-grade English teacher placed on paid leave because he allowed a student to read Cormac McCarthy's Child of God for a pre-Advanced Placement English course.

The teacher, Kaleb Tierce, had a list of books available from which students could pick one for a reading project. This one freshman chose the book and read it. Then the student's parents picked up on it and made the complaint. Now the teacher, who also doubles as an assistant football coach, is being investigated for allegedly distributing harmful material to a minor. If charged, he could be charged with a misdemeanor and receive up to a year in jail and a $4,000 fine.

WTF?!?!

This booklist was compiled by all the English teachers in the school and approved by administrators. Yes, it features themes including rape and murder and sex with corpses that may not be appropriate for all, but that's why there are several books on the list. The students have a choice. They don't have to read this book. He didn't force it into this student's hands; they chose it and asked for his approval to read it. Bear in mind that the legal charges aren't likely to come and few people actually want anything to happen the teacher. They really just want the book removed from the list, which it was in response to this complaint. However, a DA is currently examining whether a crime was actually committed.

I just don't understand rationale like this. Especially in this day and age. Do you really think removing a book from a list is going to stop young people from checking it out? No. This might make them want to read it even more. I hope it does. I hope students spite the ignorance of those trying to stop them and go read it anyway.

So there you have it, the inaugural book in the Kapgar Featured Pages Club... Cormac McCarthy's Child of God. Go read it and, while you're doing so, remember that a teacher's job and freedom are at stake because of it.

The sky's the limit but my plane won't fly...

Paid Time Off...

Floating Vacation Days...

Personal Days...

Basically all are just different ways of noting that I have days off coming to me at work. But they're all designated differently. Some roll over from year to year, some expire at the end of a calendar year. With all this terminology, how is one supposed to keep it all straight?

I looked at my pay stub a week ago and discovered that I have one day's worth of personal days and three days worth of floating vacation days and they have to be used by the end of the year or I will lose them. Wait a second. I went on a five-day vacation at the end of May to Las Vegas. Why weren't they used up then?

Seems in my confusion over all this terminology, I marked the wrong box on my vacation request. I made the mistake of chalking up my time off to the only option that does not expire at the end of the year. D'oh!

And now I'm in the, I suppose, enviable position of forcing myself to take four days off before December 31. I know some of you are probably wondering why I'm whining. Wouldn't we all like extra time off? Well, yeah, and I've got plenty to do at home to keep me busy what with our wall project and everything. But I've got plenty to keep me busy at work as well. And trying to plan days off around my projects is never easy.

But I'll be damned if I'm going to lose these days. That's why I'm home today. I got to sleep in and, for the first time in a long time, was actually home while Katie was leaving for work. She's usually still asleep when I leave, so this is quite the change.

So I'll do some work on the walls, surf a bit, maybe watch Hot Fuzz since I got it from Netflix, meet Katie for lunch, work out, etc.

This grand list of potential accomplishments, of course, means I might get one of the above done. Probably the one about surfing.

Totally Unrelated Aside (TUA): I was in a Starbucks the other day and I noticed a sign by the register advertising a recall on children's mugs. The notice claimed that if the mug fell, it would likely shatter and, thus, create pieces with sharp edges.

Well duh.

Are we going to recall all ceramic, glass, wood, Plexiglas, and plastic products now? They all create sharp edges when broken.

Does anyone else think the Consumer Products Safety Commission is going a little overboard these days? A lot of these very same problems existed throughout my childhood and I like to think I turned out okay. I almost think the CPSC exists so people can be slack-ass parents.

Call me...

More snippety goodness...

Caffeinated
There was regular coffee in the breakroom today! Yay me!

Cub-boom
Here's a quick note to anyone who knows that I am a Cubs fan and would like to tease me over the fact that the Cubbies are now down by two games to the D-Backs... yep, I realize it. And no, it doesn't phase nor upset me in the slightest. I am so desensitized by disappointment that any Cubs failure really does nothing to me. My expectation for success is about as high as my expectation that a Will Ferrell movie won't annoy me. Yeah, pretty low.

Now you know.

And knowing is half the battle.

Freebies
I love how the Apple iTunes Store gives stuff away for free. Most of the time, it's a B-side to a new album, or a music video, or some song by an artist or new TV show you've never heard of in a hope to give them a popularity boost. Whatever. The key is that it's free.

However, when the freebie is something that I know and love, it's all the better. Take, for instance, the free episode of American Dad that is currently being offered. It was this past Sunday's "Vacation Goo" episode which I thought was brilliant and left me in stitches. And to make it free? Score!

Overlay
I know it's common for areas to be "redistricted," for lack of a better way to word it, in terms of area codes for phone service. Heck, since I've lived in Illinois, I have had four area codes. The reason for this is because the proliferation of new technologies like fax machines and cell phones over the past couple decades has necessitated more numbers within an area code and, thus, the coverage area must shrink and new area codes must be added.

But what I hate is when overlay area codes are applied. This occurs when a single geographic area has two area codes working in it rather than redividing the area. This has already happened in other parts of the Chicago suburbs and now it will affect my area as well. We will soon see the 331 area code work in our 630 zone and all phones, faxes, cells, etc., must be reprogrammed because we must now dial the full 10 (or 11, if you need to use the 1, but cellphones don't need them) digit number to make a local call.

GRRRRRRR!!!

Redesign
I'm pretty sure I mentioned this on here somewhere recently, but I am going to make the jump to WordPress pretty soon. My hope was to have all this done by the middle of this month, but it doesn't seem to be happening. I've got so much crap going on that doing anything to my blog other than posting is just an impossibility. Heck, I haven't even transferred my domain over to a new host yet and that's really the first thing I need to do to make it a reality.

But I do think I finally have a photo in mind for my banner. That's one baby step in the right direction.

Speaking of redesign, I have two sites that I worked on in the past for friends and family to which I need to make some stylistic tweaks. Imagine my chagrin when I discovered that all the source files for these sites are nowhere to be found. Original raw images? Nothing. Layered Photoshop images? Nada.

This ticks me off. Now I have to recreate the images from scratch. So not fun.

Tell me more, tell me more...

When you learn to write for the news, there are certain tips you are given that you should really live by no matter what. For example, if it's a press release, all the pertinent information should be conveyed right in the opening paragraph. Then, of course, there is the five Ws rule... to cover the who, what, when, where, and why (and how, too, but that's not a W).

But one of the most important rules, and one that is continually violated, is to make sure your headline grabs the reader. With attention spans as short as they are, it is important that you use your headline to draw a reader in. Sadly, in the age of the Web, when news needs to be turned around immediately, the thought process with regard to headlines isn't really there anymore. Take, as a random sample, some of the headlines on my Yahoo homepage at this moment...

Five dead in Colorado power plant accident - yeah, tragic for sure. But do I want to read more? Not really.

Isiah Thomas sexually harassed executive - any surprise here? Guess it takes the heat off his coaching inability.

Nic too cagey for home invader - boring.

Diesel, Walker reteam for new "Fast and Furious" - NOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!

However, once in a while you find a gem of a headline. One that is almost too perfect. It leaves you wanting to read because your mind becomes flooded with imagery regarding the substance of the article. It grabs you, shakes you awake, and makes you need to read it. This headline came from an Associated Press reprint in yesterday's Daily Herald...

Brain-eating amoeba killing more as lake waters get warmer

Say whaaa??? Who, in their right mind, wouldn't want to read about a mutant amoeba that chows on gray matter? Not me! Especially when the article comes from Phoenix, Arizona, making it that much closer to home! I want to read! Tell me that when you read this headline, you don't suddenly become bombarded with snippets from old 50s black and white horror films. Oh the possibilities elicited from such a graphic headline. This could be the start of the zombification of America! I LOVE IT!!

Before you all get on my case, I realize this is a tragedy and six people have died from it this year. That's a horrible thing, for sure. And I shouldn't make light of it, right?

Don't make light of it...

Resist temptation...

Don't say it...

Oh-no, here it comes...

It certainly does explain a lot of the people I encounter on a daily basis, though.

I tried. I really tried.

Darkness imprisoning me...

Just some snippets today...

Darkness
It never ceases to amaze me how quickly Mother Nature shifts her tune for the seasons. It was pretty warm to hot last week and dropped massively in a matter of 24 hours to the point where I had to find my sweatshirts again this weekend. It did warm back up a little bit yesterday, but dang.

Also, it seems like yesterday that I was complaining about how much brighter it was in the morning. Now it's pitch black again in the morning. No warning whatsoever.

I was stumbling around in the dark this morning trying to remember where everything was so I wouldn't wake Katie up while trying to make my way downstairs to type this. I jammed my foot a couple times. It's weird how much we come to rely on a single sense and then to see -- or in my case, feel -- how tripped up we are when that sense is taken away.

O.J.
I find it funny that the legal system failed so miserably at convicting O.J. Simpson in the murder of his wife and now here he is busted in Vegas and "booked on suspicion of armed robbery, assault with a deadly weapon, conspiracy and burglary" (much easier to just quote the article).

I like to think that this will stick. It is Vegas, after all, and if Ocean's Eleven taught us anything, it's that casino owners will go to hell and back to screw over those that try to screw them over.

Being a Chicagoan, I, of course, liken this to how Eliot Ness finally managed to bring Al Capone to justice. Not on any of the charges you might expect, but on income tax evasion (I almost typed "invasion"; how would one manage "income tax invasion"?). We can't get O.J. on murder, but we get him for all this Vegas tripe.

Well, whatever it takes to get his worthless ass rotting behind bars, I suppose.

TiVo
Hilly started a fun little DVR survey on Snackie Teevee. Go check it out!