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Overheard at the Hospital

I just returned to the hospital from running a couple of errands, and I came in through the cafeteria entrance, which has a nice outdoor dining area. There was a group of people unpacking their cooler (white bread, baloney, mayonnaise, and Lay’s potato chips) and I overhead the following statement:

“He’s got four warrants out, owes $14,000 in back child support, and he ain’t even lookin’ for a job.”

That’s funny.

Have you ever noticed that most of the people at the hospital look really unhealthy? I don’t mean the people that are in the hospital, I mean the people visiting. There are tons of overweight people (haha), and most of them are standing outside smoking. I’m not talking about heavy people–I could lose a few pounds myself. I’m talking about really obese people puffing away. It makes you wonder if the people they are there to visit are there mostly because they share a similar lifestyle.


Worse than the friends and family doing this outside are the nurses.

Is this what our money would go to support with nationalized health care? It’s no more fair for them to chip in and pay for my knee surgery because I chose to play a collision sport with a bunch of 20 year old kids than it is for me to chip in to pay for their health problems due to their lifestyle.

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This Week on The Dukes of Newport

Revenuers come to Hazzard, err, Newport to investige a mini-casino, cock fighting, and moonshine production that is all being orchestrated by Boss Hogg under the protection of the ultimate dirty cop–Roscoe P. Coaltrain.

Of course, Boss Hogg and Roscoe try to pin it all on Bo and Luke. Enos, a pawn in their game, is forced to arrest the Duke boys. Luckily, Uncle Jesse and Cooter are able to give Daisy a ride to the jail, where she is able to distract Enos. This gives Bo and Luke just enough time to get Flash to bring them the keys to the jail, climb into the General Lee, jump a creek where the bridge is out, beat up Boss’s cronies and turn them over to the revenuers and the state police from Capital City.

Of course, Boss Hogg denies all knowledge of the vice operations, and gives all of the money confiscated to the Cocke County orphanage. Then everyone gathers down at the Boar’s Nest, where Loretta Lynn sings one song in exchange for having a bogus speeding ticket ripped up.

Sometimes I scratch my head and wonder why everyone thinks we are all stupid rednecks.

***UPDATE***
They also shot some arrows with dynamite taped to them. The Duke boys aren’t allowed to have guns because of previous convictions for running shine, so they are forced to use dyanamite instead.

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Lobster for Lunch in Knox County

KNS has the story about our mayor’s executive administrative assistant, a commissioner, and an unknown third party feasting on $37.98 each lobster tails, then grabbing a couple more to go, for pre-tip bill of $198.56, Luckily for the taxpayers (I guess), they basically stiffed the waiter, only tipping him $29 (14.6%).

Frugality and class! So the total bill was $227.56–FOR LUNCH.

Good thing we had a 100% increase in our wheel tax a couple of years ago (hope you are enjoying the new library).

“Clearly, while we consider business meals legitimate expenses, we certainly feel that expense was excessive,” Norwood said.

See, that’s the problem. County government is not a business. Businesses sell products and services to customers on the free market. In business, customers have a choice to buy from someone else or not to buy at all. The business then has a choice on how it spends this money and is accountable to shareholders.

“While we can’t tell our guests what to order,” Norwood said, “we discourage people from ordering unusually expensive meals.”

Obviously.

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This Freaks Me Out

I’ve been a little worried about this whole Ron Paul thing for a couple of days, and today it only got worse. It started with the realization that one of my biggest fears has started to come true lately–this is starting to look like a Ron Paul blog. I haven’t been posting much stuff recently about rasslin’, getting held up at gunpoint by the gov’ment, or local porn stars. I remember how annoyed I got earlier this year with the “Run Fred Run” hype that was going on in the Tennessee blogosphere, and I don’t want to be doing the same thing with regards to Ron Paul, even if it is relevant.

Then my world really came crashing down. I had a conversation today with a friend of mine that has made me question everything in life I know to be true. To give those of you who know him a frame of reference, it’s that guy you’d least like to face in the front row. So I’m sure you can actually hear him saying, “I been readin’ yer website. You like that Ron Paul fella don’t cha?”

For those of you who don’t know him, he’s among the most reliable, solid, stand up guys you could ever know. He’s also very set in his ways. I wouldn’t go so far as to call him close-minded, but that is mostly due to the fact that doing so may put me in danger of having him choke me with my own small intestine. Let’s just say that he defends his own views strongly and leave it at that. Imagine what Fred Thompson would be like if he ate nothing but raw meat laced with gunpowder for a few months, and you’ll be close to understanding this guy.

Anyway, I was extremely shocked when he said, “I like that guy the best out of all of ’em. It kinda scares me that you like him too, ’cause you got some fv(ked up politics.” Believe me, it is just as scary to me as it is to him that we actually agree on who we’d like to see as the Republican nominee.

This Ron Paul thing may just work out after all. Hopefully I was wrong!

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Barbie Cummings Misses Court

All she had to do was show up and her ticket would have been dismissed. Now she’ll have to pay it. 🙁

Since her old site has been taken down, she has a temporary blog. According to that, she’s been pretty busy lately, traveling to the West Coast for some business engagements and even getting married in Las Vegas.

It states there that she’s moving from Knoxville to L.A. soon, so I guess the court date completely slipped her mind.

***UPDATED 7.25.07
You COULD read about it in her own words, but Blogger deleted her site…probably because there was extremely explicit material on there. You can always depend on me to stay well informed on this story. 😛

What a truly strange story to be cumming (sorry, had to) out of sleepy old Knoxville!

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Fairness on Talk Radio

Diane Feinstein is “looking at” pushing the fairness doctrine for talk radio broad casters in the United States. The conversation was brought about mostly by the public outcry over the proposed immigration bill that has been getting slammed on talk radio, which is by and large right leaning.

For the record, I’m hardly a fan of Limbaugh, and Sean Hannity is an even bigger self-promoting jackass that Rush is in my opinion. Savage is a nut, but entertaining. Neil Boortz is the only one of these guys I can listen to for more than an hour or so. Nevertheless, what isn’t fair about the current state of talk radio? These guys put out a product, people listen, advertisers buy ads to reach these people.

In contrast, the left started a radio station, no one listened, no one bought ads, they embezzled money from at least one charity to keep it going, still no one listened, they didn’t pay their “talent”, their talent quit, and they folded.

By the way, isn’t it funny that “spreading the message” isn’t so important when you aren’t getting a paycheck? I’m a little disappointed that Al Franken wasn’t willing to stay on the air for what he believed is right, not just for the money. Hell, even Coolio said that if hip hop didn’t pay he’d rap for free–that’s real commitment to your cause.

It seems pretty cut and dry. If someone wants to make things “fair”, they can sink millions more dollars into a leftist radio station that folks who drive to work and back and are out all day on sales calls–the people they propose stealing from–will continue not to listen.

That sounds fair to me.

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Should Villa Collina Raise My Asking Price?

All I can say is that it is really nice to own a property that is right across the street from a $40M mansion. Hopefully this will be taken into account when I put my condo on the market this month. I can just hear my real estate agent now explaining what a bargain my place is compared to the other homes in the neighborhood.

Sorry. This house just doesn’t make sense in Knoxville. I mean, I LOVE living in Knoxville and East Tennessee, but if I ever live in a $40M home it will be on a beach in Hawaii, not on a dirty lake in Knoxville.

The big spider on the wall at Halloween is cool though. 😉

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Barbie Cummings and the Highway Patrol

Could it be the title of her next movie?

Barbie Cummings is a clever, clever girl.

The porn star based out of Knoxville was pulled over by a Tennessee Highway Patrolman outside of Nashville and engaged in an exchange of favors with the officer. Actually, she still got the ticket, so there actually wasn’t an exchange.

This genius took photos and videos and bragged to his fellow patrolmen about it and has subsequently been suspended. All Barbie did was write about it on her blog.

Very clever. Hope all of you SEO masters are paying attention. This is TRUE viral marketing. The story has caused such a stir in Tennessee and presumably created so much traffic to her blog that it, ahem, went down last night.

No worries, they got it up again. 🙂 I was able to go there and do some fact checking. Don’t visit it from the office, but if you want to see free speech in action, it’s worth a look.

Maybe you’ll read it, maybe you won’t, but this girl is lucky that my friend BGE no longer lives in Knoxville. Their lives are about as parallel as the two rails of a train track. If they ever cross, look out!

Story about the incident in the KNS

***UPDATE***

Obviously, demand for information is high. Subscribe to this feed and I’ll update with news…

I just checked out her site to see if there were any updates since this story went national. Apparently she either got a nice offer for her domain name or she’s put her own Barbie store on her site. I’d guess the former. Unfortunate for all of you who were looking to get a firsthand look/read. I’m sure her site will surface again at a new address. Stay tuned.

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A Simple Grammar Reminder

Conjugating “to be”

I am. You are. He/she/it is. They are.

The last example leads us to the correct conjugation for expletives with plural subjects. For example:

There are many reasons to construct grammatically correct sentences.

not

There’s (there is) many reasons…

This simple nugget of knowledge should be especially helpful for those who want to add a little legitimacy to their assertion that immigrants to the US to learn our language.

**4.6.07 UPDATE**

Apparently there are several other issues that need to be addressed as well.

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Google’s PPA Program

Search Engine Journal has a great article on this program, which is still in beta–typical Google.  This should be a huge boost as a money maker for bloggers, and provides even more incentive to push good, original content.

More content should mean more links and more money.  Site owners will have the ability to create text based blogs, just like the ones you can create as an Amazon affiliate.  This will allow the ads to be integrated right into the content instead of as a separate section of the site, so it shouldn’t be as difficult to draw the reader’s attention to the ads.