My Sick Mind

I bought a new Tokina 12-24mm zoom lens with money that Uncle Sam repaid me from my income taxes, and decided to take it to my favorite city for a spin. For those of you who still like the ranting, go back a day . Others of you can take solace in some photos I took today, and visit my Flickr stream (whatever that is) for the whole set. As usual, if you click on the photo it may enlarge, but I have no idea how this stuff works. I always start at Independence Hall. It's what Nevada Weir would call "creative inertia." Take a photo and the rest will follow, like inertia. A body that is in motion remains in motion. It's a nice way to think about working. Start using the camera, even if the photo you are taking isn't particularly interesting, it helps to start. A dogwood tree (I think, I'm not up on trees) near 3rd and Chestnut Street stood out among the cityscape. The pinkness caught my eye. Elfreth's Alley is a residential alley. It is one of the olde...

Fear mongering (or scare mongering) is the use of fear to influence the opinions and actions of others towards some specific end. The feared object or subject is sometimes exaggerated, and the pattern of fear mongering is usually one of repetition, in order to continuously reinforce the intended effects of this tactic, sometimes in the form of a vicious circle . These are high times for fear mongering. Not since the great Swine Flu scare of ... oh, 6 months ago have we experienced such a spate of nonsense coming from people who profess to know something about nothing. It's the latest epidemic. They call it "Obamacare" and talk about us living in the "USSA," because they are afraid that what is going on now in politics will ultimately be bad for the country. These are the same people who stood by over the last 8 years and watched a complete nincompoop run us into the ground. Where were their words of warning then? Afterward, they watched John McCain pick a dim...

Attention Mothers: If you have a small child tagging along with you on your daily errands, please do not allow that child to use something complicated like a bar code scanner or anything with numbered buttons because you think it's "cute" or because you think Junior will "learn something." He won't learn anything, it isn't cute and it slows the pace for adults (like you) who already know how to use those gadgets. Teach Junior at home.

Fear is a great motivator. Some can use it in a positive way, while others choose to use it to panic and violence. Unrest over sweeping federal health care legislation has turned to vandalism and threats, with bricks hurled through Democrats' windows, a propane line cut at the home of a congressman's brother and menacing phone messages left for lawmakers who supported the bill. The FBI is investigating the instances, which include shattered windows at four Democratic offices in New York, Arizona and Kansas. At least 10 members of Congress have reported some sort of threat as of Wednesday, and no arrests have been made . Some narrow-minded people think that flinging bricks and screaming equals social commentary. And for some strange reason, those people are always on the side of the Republican right. Why do you suppose that is? Could it be that rage and violence represent their best ideas? The brick flung through the window of a county Democratic Party office in Rochester, ...

A 2009 survey conducted for the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children found that 19 percent of teens had sent, received or forwarded nude or nearly nude photos through text message or e-mail. When I was a kid we passed paper notes to each other. I remember a girl in my freshman year of high school that used to look up "dirty words" in the dictionary, write the definition down and pass it around to us. Words like penis, vagina and breast. They weren't really dirty, but we were kids with AM radio, 6 channels on the TV and a repressed sex drive. A product of our times. At 52, the list of people willing to send, receive or forward nude or nearly nude photos through text message or e-mail is noticeably small. I didn't have a telephone in my bedroom until I was 17, so I can't imagine having a cell phone at that age, but kids are running around with smart phones with text message plans and Internet access. I'm guessing that their parents don't k...

Face it, if it weren't for the fact that most of us have money riding on this NCAA basketball tournament, we wouldn't give a tinker's damn if Ohio beat Kansas or Purdue beat Pittsburgh. We like lotteries, and this is the biggest one in the country. It's even better because we don't have to declare taxes on the money we win (if) and we get to tell the people at work how smart we are, even though we don't know a wit about whether Kansas State is better than Baylor. All we know are the numbers. A three-seed is supposed to beat a ten-seed and there's no way a 12 seed can beat a 5, unless you're Cornell - then you're a genius if you picked Cornell. However, if Ohio beats Kansas it's some sort of anomaly because there is no way Ohio should have won that game. Unless, of course, the NCAA committee who picks the seeds has made a grievous error, which is what we will claim, since we are too smart to think that Kansas could possibly lose. We get wrapped ...