Kay -N- Kay

Three kids died a couple of miles from my house yesterday.  Two of them lived right in my small Detroit suburb.  Any one of them could be my son in 10 years.

Three teenagers in a car, on their way to another friend’s house.  For whatever reason, the driver decides to pick it up a notch.  And then another.  At 90 mph, I imagine he’s thinking, “Fuck yeah.  Gunna hit a hundred.  Just 10 more.” The passengers may have been scared and telling him to slow down, but I think they were more likely laughing wildly.  At 18 you’re immortal and 100 mph is something to be experienced.  Something to tell your friends about later, like a badge you can wear saying, “I drove 100+ mph”

I don’t know how anyone survives their youth.  I think it’s got to be more luck than anything else.  When I was 18, I remember a dozens of times eerily similar to what I described above.  Not all in a car, screaming towards fate at double or triple the speed limit.  There are plenty of other ways for a teenager to die live.  But at least one time was 5 of us in a car, driving too fast, even though we knew it was too fast.  The country road was slick as it had just rained, but when you’re a teenager, you love to go fast.  We should have been able to slow down for the turn, but it was wet and we were going too fast… like we knew it was and we were.  We were laughing and clutching at the seats, handles, and sides inside of the car, just wondering when Chris would start slowing down for the curve ahead.  Loving the moment.  The wheels slid… because it was wet… we went off the road instead of turning with the curve… because we were going too fast… and hit a telephone pole at probably 35 – 45 mph.

No one died.  We hit the pole on the front corner of the car which allowed some momentum to be redirected elsewhere.  In fact, the only one who was hurt was myself with a minor cut on my leg.  We all walked away from the car and shakily called the police from a nearby home.  Someone said later on that another 6 inches towards the center of the car and we’d all have died.  That may or may not have been true, but even if it wasn’t, we were courting death for those few seconds and instinctively, we knew it.

The three teenagers in the wreck yesterday were not so lucky.  They didn’t hit the brick and cinder block sign on just the front corner of their car.  The only place to which their momentum was redirected was straight into their bodies.  From 100 mph to 0 in under a second is a lot of force to absorb…

…even when you’re immortal.

I had a conversation with a friend of mine this morning over IM.  She’s leaving for vacation tomorrow, so I was asking about it…

Kyle: Where are you guys going?
M: Charlevoix (about 45 min north of Traverse City)
Kyle: What do you do there?
M: go to the beach a lot…it’s right on lake michigan
Kyle: Just the 3 of you are going?
M: yeah…well, sort of…my mom, aunt, and cousin will be up there too. we rent a house for all of us
Kyle: How is that “sort of”?
Kyle: That’s like double the 3 of you

She got drunk last night.  On a Thursday.  That’s not relevant to anything, but I just want a lot of people to know that she’s a work today, drunk.

Gotta love your friends, eh?

Reposted from Meltinyourmouth.

Well gosh darn, golly-gee-willikers, those friendly folks down home at Max Motors are giving away guns with every purchase of a new truck!

No, I couldn’t make this up.  Every time you buy a truck, you get a gun.  And not just any gun, mind you… oh no.  You get an AK-47, just what every God-fearing Christian American needs for home defense!  Just in case those darned pinko commy liberals start getting all uppity, you know.

Just look at this happy customer!

Remember that scene in the original Star Wars movie where Luke, Han, and Lea are in a shoot out with about 80,000 stormtroopers?  Then in the middle of it all, R2 just strolls across the hangar to change the course of history?  All those Stormtroopers are shooting around R2, probably thinking, “OMG, get the #^%@ out of the way, I’m trying to shoot some rebel scum here!!!”

Do you ever wonder what goes through the minds of those stormtroopers after the fact, once it’s sunk in that all they had to do was just ONE time, aim at the slow moving trash can instead of the well fortified jedi-in-training?

The parts I ordered for my new computer arrived two days ago.  It was a Wednesday afternoon, when the sun was at it’s zenith and song birds filled the air with acoustic radiance to rival the sun’s splendor.

I was at work.  :-/

Two hours later, after counting down the last 30 minutes one at a time, I was racing home to two wondrous boxes of joy and happiness.  All the buyer’s remorse that consistently plagues me with purchases over about $1.50, was now gone.  It was like Christmas in July and Santa had mistakenly penned my name onto the “nice” list.

Just as one cannot just fill a stein with Meursault Clos de la Baronne and quaff it down like a Pabst, you can’t just start slamming together computer parts.  They must first be… savored.

After first laying everything out for proper admiration, I started on the assembly.  I’ll spare you ALL of the geeky details… I documented the process in pictures… but it was a long process.  At the end, my back screaming from hours of bending over the table, I was yanking out hard drive cages and adjusting cable layouts to fit in the monstrously huge video card.  From the back of the case to the front loaded hard drives, it has maybe half an inch to spare

After over 6 hours of labor, my brand new, bouncing baby computer was brought into this world.

Ooooh, pretty blue lights.  Hee hee.

Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t hate Sarah Palin herself.  I hate her supporters who for some reason think that her down to Earth idiocy, still should hold any office above that of a City Clerk.  But I do not hate her… aside from being a republican, she seems likable enough.  Someone you may want to have a beer with.

Of all the people I’ve ever shared a beer with, there isn’t a one of them I would want to be president of the USA.

Despite having quit her job, she still can’t seem to refrain from reiterating how important it is that she not be allowed within the city limits of Washington DC.  When asked to explain why as president she wouldn’t be subjected to the same ethics investigations that compelled her to resign as governor of Alaska, (ABC News interview, July 7, 2009) she said:

“I think on a national level your Department of Law there in the White House would look at some of the things that we’ve been charged with and automatically throw them out.”

Department of Law?  Did she think “President” meant the president of University of Alaska?  What is the Department of Law?  I’ll give her the benefit of the doubt and assume that she did not mean the Justice Department of the USA.  No one would really think that the Justice Department exists to protect the president from being accused of ethics violations.  No, really… no one could possibly think that.  So she must have meant the president’s legal council and for some reason decided to grant them the title of “Department of Law” in her own head.  Ok, but even so… how are they just able to “throw them out”?  That’d be a great lawyer, wouldn’t it?  Someone who could just look at your case and decide on their own to have it thrown out.

This is the same former vice presidential candidate who thinks that the vice president of the USA runs the senate.

This is the same Sarah Palin, who when asked by Katie Couric, how Alaska’s proximity to Russia gives her foreign policy experience, (CBS News interview, Sept. 24, 2008 — Watch video clip) said:

“Well, it certainly does because our — our next door neighbors are foreign countries. They’re in the state that I am the executive of. And there in Russia … We have trade missions back and forth. We– we do– it’s very important when you consider even national security issues with Russia as Putin rears his head and comes into the air space of the United States of America, where– where do they go? It’s Alaska. It’s just right over the border. It is– from Alaska that we send those out to make sure that an eye is being kept on this very powerful nation, Russia, because they are right there. They are right next to– to our state.”

So last week, my computer went *poof*.  I’ll pause for a moment of silence…

Ooooooh

This was the computer I “treated” myself to over 3 years ago.  Previously, I’d always purchased semi-reasonable computers with an eye to performance vs. affordability.  But this time, I went almost all out and bought an Alienware machine of near Earth shattering power.  In short, I was never really all that happy with it.

Now, it was as good and better than anything I’d ever gotten before, but my expectations were considerably higher.  It just never quite lived up to the hype, even though that hype was mostly in my own head, heh.

Last week, the computer had a series of unusual, but benign, “occurrences”.  Things that no one but a computer geek like me would notice, like locking up at an unusual time.  A Blue Screen of Death on a file that hadn’t occurred before.  A faint disturbance in the force.  Then, it just up and died.  I came back into the room and noticed the screen was blank.  I powered it off and it simply never came back on.  /cry

Everything seemed to still be getting power as the DVD drives would spin, all of the lights came on, fans spun and gizmos whirred.  But the damn thing just wouldn’t boot.  Nothing ever displayed on the screen and the beep that occurs when it starts reading the BIOS (or at least that’s the way I interpreted it) would never beep.

So what’s a nerd to do when his toy breaks?

Yep.  I took the whole thing apart.

Not just the normal things like video and sound cards and memory.  Oh no… out came the power supply, off came the cables, motherboard yanked, and oh my, is that the CPU?  Pop.  Everything came apart and surprisingly, it all went back together again.  But still no beep.

So what’s a nerd to do when he can’t fix his broken toy?

Yep, I’m building a new toy.  Better than before.  Stronger.  Faster… MORE POWERFUL THAN ANYTHING EVER BEFORE MUHAHAHHAHA.

Going the complete opposite direction from my last computer, this time I’m just ordering all of the individual pieces separately and will commence jamming them together where they seem most likely to fit.

• 1 x Intel Core i7 920 Nehalem 2.66GHz LGA 1366 130W Quad-Core Processor Model BX80601920 – Retail
• 1 x ASUS P6T LGA 1366 Intel X58 ATX Intel Motherboard – Retail
• 1 x ZALMAN CNPS9700 LED 110mm 2 Ball CPU Cooler – Retail
• 1 x ZALMAN ZM-CS4A Socket 1366 Clip Support Kit for CNPS9500/9700 – Retail
• 1 x ARCTIC COOLING MX-2 Thermal Compound – Retail
• 1 x CORSAIR DOMINATOR 6GB (3 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) Triple Channel Kit Desktop Memory Model TR3X6G1600C8D – Retail
• 1 x EVGA 896-P3-1170-AR GeForce GTX 275 896MB 448-bit DDR3 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready SLI Supported Video Card – Retail
• 2 x Western Digital Caviar Black WD1001FALS 1TB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5″ Internal Hard Drives – OEM
• 1 x Antec Nine Hundred Black Steel ATX Mid Tower Computer Case – Retail
• 1 x ABS DARK BERET series DB850-M-BRZ Continuous 850W@50°C ATX12V/EPS12V 80 PLUS BRONZE Certified, SLI Ready, CrossFire Ready, Core i7 Ready, Single Strong 12V Rail, Modular Flat Cable Design, Active-PFC – Retail
• 1 x Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate SP1 64-bit for System Builders – OEM

For those of you who actually dated in high school, have friends that exist in a real 3rd dimension, and like to go outside for longer periods of time than just walking to your car:

• Intel’s newest Pentium CPU that doesn’t cost as much as New Zealand’s Gross National Product
• An ASUS motherboard to go with the CPU.
• Aftermarket CPU cooler
• 6GB of performance RAM
• nVidia GTX 275 video card
• Two 1TB hard drives. (1 Terabyte = 1,000 Gigabytes)
• A mid-tower case to hold it all and an 850 Watt power supply to, well, power it.
• Windows Vista, 64 bit version

And for those of you still confused, likely due to an unfulfilled life of fermented hops and one too many ‘wake-n-bake’ breakfasts lasting past your mid twenties when the rest of us realized that fat drunk and stupid really wasn’t the way to go through life:

• Fast box with pretty blue lights that makes solitaire play really fast!  Hee hee, look at the cards bounce across the screen, hee hee hee hee…

Naturally, the parts all arrive today, except for one.  Oh, the humanity of it all!

Topping today’s list of breaking news that everyone already knew is the annual report on whether or not America is still fat.

We are.

Not only are we still fat, thanks to drawing it to everyone’s attention and really focusing on improving overall health… we’re even fatter than before.

“Obesity rates among adults rose in 23 states over the past year and didn’t decline anywhere, says a new report from the Trust for America’s Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.”

Wow.  Not a single state lost any weight.

Here’s an interesting tidbit for all you crazed smoke-Nazis out there complaining when someone lights up 100 yds off in the distance:

Studies show Medicare spends anywhere from $1,400 to $6,000 more annually on health care for an obese senior than for the non-obese.

Your turn is coming.  How long before Fried Chicken is banned in the work place?  “Welcome to Money, Inc, Ma’am, now step up on the scale to see how much your health insurance will cost.”

However, the future is not completely bleak.  Krispy Kreme may be going out of business, soon.