Instapundit:

“41% favor Congressional health care plan,” huh?

Well, if I could get the same health care plan that Congress gets, at the price that a Congressman pays, I’d be in favor of it, too.

Oh wait...

Posted by: Old Grouch in In Passing at 19:38:31 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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If you scroll way down the sidebar... no, keep scrolling... there!... you’ll find some Monthly Traffic stats that our host kindly makes available to us Mee-Nuvians.

As the goings-on on this page have always been primarily for my own amusement (besides being a device for keeping the old blood pressure under control), I’ve never indulged in any of the fancy traffic analysis tools that the web makes available. The idea of doing so seemed to present a risk taking things entirely too seriously^[1]; not to mention offering the disturbing potential to discover things that might be better left undiscovered^[2].

Still, the reported 52,000+ pages served over the last 30 days is a bit of an eyebrow-raiser.

Who are all those people?

For a long time that monthly number has hovered around 30,000... say 1,000/day. And I know from looking at other sites’ information that one-half to two-thirds of that is most likely search engine spiders, botnets, spammers, and other miscellaneous automated rabble.  Deduct a reasonable amount (say 50%) of the remainder to account for obsessive refreshing of the main page by the author, and that still leaves several hundred real-live viewers who drop by on any given day.  Who appear to be a taciturn bunch, given that in just over 2½ years they have made just under 300 comments (by probably 30 unique commenters).

So for these last hours of November, I’m gonna call “ollie ollie oxen free,” and encourage you hitherto silent ones to test Mee-nu’s comment functionality.  Tell a bit about yourself, or just say, “hello.”  No registration or personal info required, just click the “Add Comment” link in the footer below and make yourself known, if only for today.

(But if you’re peddling handbags, athletic shoes, or replica watches... forget it.)


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Posted by: Old Grouch in Meta at 18:50:04 GMT | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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John Lunde (quoted by Glenn Reynolds):

What male reader of Ann Rice hasn’t exclaimed at some point, “Damnit, man, shut up and bite someone!”

Posted by: Old Grouch in In Passing at 19:53:11 GMT | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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Did David Frum really say this about Sarah Palin? ...

This is a woman who has got into a position of leadership by sending very powerful sexual signals.  And we see that in the way that men like her much more than women do.

...
(By the way, when I saw her campaign in N.H., I was surrounded by moms with strollers.)

Oh, now I get it.  It was because the popular girls didn’t let you sit at their table during lunch.

Posted by: Old Grouch in In Passing at 17:40:16 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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Posted by: Old Grouch in Linkage at 15:42:14 GMT | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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After this...

and this...

BOLO for this:

I love you guys, each and every one. I'm going to drive around and give everybody a great big hug...

Posted by: Old Grouch in In Passing at 15:25:23 GMT | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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What with loose connections (not to mention all of last week’s breast- (and.brow-) beating^[1]), come Sunday afternoon shortly after 3pm I showed up at the Infamous Brewpub to discover... well, nobody; excepting me, a few traditional Ripple types, and the Pub staff.  “Well, OK,” said I, “no bloggy conversation today, but [checking list] hmmm... there’s a stout which needs sampling.”  Which produced a decision to adjourn to the taproom (with its leaded-glass windows looking into the brewery) for a late lunch/early dinner.

The other customers were couples obviously uninterested in conversation with strangers, and, as the staff hadn’t yet turned on the football,^[2] I found my moments sampling the stout^[3] and waiting for the soup^[4] accompanied by staring into space and half-listening to the Pub’s background music (played loud enough to listen to, but not so loud that it’s impossible to ignore).

Well:  “I know that.  I know that one, too.  That’s...  Which you segue into...Hey!”

Late 60s Top-40 radio.

Now a part of my radio experience includes almost-daily shifts at a top-40 operation from early 1967 to late 1969.  So it’s with a certain amount of confidence that I place the Pub’s playlist at 1969 (including some recent goldies).  The scary thing is that every track I heard for the hour or so I was there were ones that I’d spun on 45s, back when:  Happy Together.  Pleasant Valley Sunday.  California Dreamin’.  (Except for American Woman, they used the album version for that one.)  One after another, including some I hadn’t heard (or thought of) since the 70s.  But all recognizable, despite the Pub’s (or, more likely, their music service’s) strange audio processing (Did you know Creeque Alley is really a capella?  Sure sounded like it!)

After a while, it turned into a bit of a game.

If someone wanted to create an “Auld Hippie” channel, they could do a lot worse than start with the Pub’s playlist:  Add a touch of the psychedelic stuff, say Incense and Peppermints, a track or two by Donovan (Wear Your Love Like Heaven?); some post-White Album Beatles, the Fifth Dimension’s Age of Aquarius/Let the Sun Shine In (but not Up, Up, and Away).  Oh, and Light My Fire.^[4]

I wonder about what it’s like for the Pub employees.  When I was their age, it would have been like working in a place that played Glenn Miller records all the time.

For me, well, it left me feeling 40 years younger.  And I’m seriously considering going back to see if I can con some sucker body into a “name that tune” contest.


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Posted by: Old Grouch in Dear Diary... at 20:10:44 GMT | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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The Federation is “a non human NATO type organization”, of Greys, Reptilian, Insectoid, Moth men, (recessive beings like the ones in the movies…There are about 42 different type species of military males in various bases in the United States).  Some of the reptilian bases are in the USA AZ, NM.  You can find more information on these Orion beings and non earth, non humans discussed in thousands of contact books, and thousands of internet sites, (I’m not the only one who has been abducted).  These humanoid beings lie, and manipulate you until the point of near mental and physical breaking.

Posted by: Old Grouch in Linkage at 17:34:10 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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