The Evil Eyebrow

Congratulations to Jenn and Tim for completing the 2010 Disney Marathon. More on the trip later.

I hate squirrels. One block diet agrees.

Today I began something that I should probably have been doing all along. It might have averted the little tiny problem I had last fall. That thing is: core workouts every day.

Don’t misunderstand me; I don’t plan to put in a 45 minute abs-back-hips intensive crushing exercise session every single day. What I plan to do is devote at least 15 minutes to doing basic strengthening exercises to stabilize my core. I know I can come up with 15 minutes every day for a basic set of poses. If I don’t manage to get up in time, I can do them at lunch. If I don’t do them at lunch, there’s at home. 15 minutes is easy. I can do it!

If the marathon training underway knocks my fat percentage down any more, I might even have a six pack! I won’t hold my breath, though.

15 minutes a day (or more, depending). Jenn might even get me back into Yoga. We’ll see.

It’s invariably a bad thing when you read an item on Pharygunla and it clicks through to your home region’s newspaper. We’ve had a bit too many of those here in Georgia.

Apparently a married couple in Summerville decided to tatoo their children so they could be a part of the family. Law enforcement ensued.

I’ve made it a goal to carry my camera more and take pictures frequently. Last calendar year was spotty. This year will be helped by my new phone which has a reasonable camera on it.¹

In order to facilitate that goal I’m going to try and post a “picture a day” here on the Eyebrow. This will probably be the format: batches. Perhaps I’ll explain what’s going on. Perhaps you’ll have to click through to Flickr or twipic. It will depend on my mood.

Here we have the first seven days of 2009

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¹: The T-Mobile Dash is a sucky piece of equipment that never took a good picture. The Blackberry 8900 is decent. My Digital Rebel XT is excellent

An excellent point is made in this Indexed about ideas. If only we had infinite time and resources to pursue things.

People who use social media because a marketeer has told them “You really should be on Twitter” shouldn’t.

Why? It leads to embarrassing moments. John Oxendine, prospective governor of Georgia, has been caught using Twitter for the sake of promotion but without actually caring what Twitter is all about, or accuracy for that matter.

This is quite amusing to me because Twitter is by its nature exactly what you the user want it to be. It can be anything from a method of keeping friends and family up to date with your schedule to a poetry forum to a running log. It can be anything, limited only by your imagination and the 140 character limit.

But when you use it because you “must” then you tend to flub up and make an ass of yourself. Good job, Mr. Oxendine.

Our Jetpacks are closer than we think. I want to live in the future, and talks like this tell me that we’re getting there, fast.

I will never be a politician. One of the reasons is because if I were, I’d have to say stuff like this:

The process used to get this bill to 60 votes was unlike anything I had never [sic] seen before. Deals were cut behind closed doors for individual senators and their states at the expense of taxpayers across the nation – and that’s just not right. The majority leader also made a compromise on abortion – where, morally, there can be no compromise – to get his 60th vote.

Saxby Chambliss’ (R-GA) full statement about the health care bill senate passage can be found at GeorgiaFrontPage.com. As an amusing aside, I would have preferred to link directly to something on Chambliss’ website, but there’s nothing there. How do you let people scoop you with your own statements?

Why won’t I ever be a politician? Because statements like that would really stick in my craw. It’s unbelievable (yet existent, so it must be believable) pandering to his Republican base which is entirely understandable, yet the wording is insane.

It’s understandable because the base is what elected him. He needs to make sure the people who don’t look deeply into things know that he’s not into this back-room deal-making fiasco that is Washington Politics nor does he support abortion. I can just hear Joe Six-Pack sitting in his barcalounger shouting “Fuck Yeah!” at Fox News, but as I just said, that statement is insane.

First, “The process used to get this bill to 60 votes was unlike anything I had never [sic] seen before.” Really? I doubt it. This might be factual in the sense that he’s never seen precisely this sort of sausage being stuffed, yet when he was elected to the Senate in 1994 the Democrats held a 56/44 majority in the Senate. There must have been similar struggles. This statement is just so much bumph I don’t want to think about it. When has politics not been about back room deal making? Like or hate it, that’s the truth.

Second, “The majority leader also made a compromise on abortion – where, morally, there can be no compromise – to get his 60th vote.” This statement is also factually true yet fundamentally false. The Majority Leader made a compromise that moved the abortion issue closer to where a Republican like Chambliss would like to see it: No Federal funding. So, yes, Harry Reid compromised abortion by moving toward the Republican end of things therefore quote-mine the word “compromise” out of that and beat the Democrats over the head with it in order to pander to the voters. I’m not going to even discuss the rectitude of “no compromise” with respect to abortion or any other thing.

Third, I personally understand exactly why Senator Chambliss said what he said. I also understand that if I were in his shoes, I would be doing exactly the same things because that’s how the game is played. And that’s why I could never be a politician. While I see how the partisan process functions, I have no desire to twist my ethics into the knots required to make statements such as that above. It would be nice if we lived in a country where every citizen took the time to know the issues and become involved rather than repeating talking points on major items that have been ingrained into us by ideologues, however that is not the country we possess. Unfortunately.

What’s really amazing is how much it cost. $300! (plus time)