Well…another night out in Ada, another win at pool and I don’t feel too bad today…and that’s good because I do have things to do today…yay! I need to get the car ready for winter with a complete cleaning from top to bottom…it has been bugging me to no end that I’ve let it go to as dirty as it is. I may have to take a week or so off going out since I’m running out of cash and I don’t want to use the credit card…so I’m glad I have Netflix and the bag o books that I got from T that I have been ignoring, it will help me see if I can go through a whole week without spending anything…I may have to buy groceries, though, to make that happen…we’ll see. Other than that, not much to do today..but I am going to try to get the last 20 miles in this aft after I get the car done…then everything over that will just be a bonus…might even get to 2200 or so…more later…
All posts by James DeVol
Life’s been weird..
Well…have been feeling out of sorts lately, even more than normal which is a lot for me. The peace that I had found a few weeks back has eluded me and I don’t know what to do about it…because I don’t know how it happened in the first place. Oh, well…I am glad to not have the filth in the political ads bombarding me anymore…damn…I don’t know if this is writers block or not but I can’t seem to get going…there were weird dreams last night…but all I can remember is giving all my stuff away…okay, this one is crap…need to take a break and try, try, again…
November 9th
Well…another Monday and another time that G blew me off…so I guess Mondays out are now going to be by myself..I did go out to watch part of the wings game to Peppino’s and they how have Keno so that made it a lot better…when the game went to OT though, I came home…and Hank won it on a deflection so that was cool. Last night was probably the crappiest night of sleep I’ve had in quite a while..up at 3:30 and then back up at 5…ugh….feel like crap today but since I never have anything to do..I can just take a nap later…and not a lot to do today..out to Ada later for pool…but that is about it…more later…
Okay, it’s later and I’m in the middle of watching “Dexter” but thought I’d come back for a minute and put down a couple of thoughts..or maybe just one, nope, the thoughts just left me…this is getting really frustrating…but I do have one about Boehner and the healthcare debate…but I don’t know if I want to go there today…I think today is more about musings than rantings…and there have been some things happen that I am still working out…the weather is nice, though and i may want to do the last thirty miles today…after Dexter, that is because it needs to go back in the mail today…more later…
Compromise as a political weapon….
Well…there is a new narrative coming out of the repubs that the reason that the dems lost the house in the mid-terms was that they didn’t compromise enough on their agenda, that they jammed the healthcare bill down the throats of America without talking to their repub counterparts. Okay, is anyone laughing as much as I am? Especially when related to healthcare, the dems went from their proposal for a single-payer system to the bastardized one that was passed…and the majority of the bill were things that the repubs had proposed just a few years earlier…so, the repubs get everything they want and then still run against the bill? But, you know their idea of compromise is that they get everything they want and then still bitch about it. They are so spineless that they won’t even support financial regulation of the guys that screwed up the economy if their idiot fringe (who doesn’t understand any of it…just listen to Michelle Bachmann) starts to howl. How can you, or why should you compromise when the only thing these guys want is a return to the robberbaron times of the early 1900′s? They’ve shown they have no good ideas and to give their stupid ones like tax cuts for the rich validity by compromising on them is the height of folly that the dems will have to get over…geez…
November 8th
Well…a day of watching the Lions lose again and the Napcar race yesterday and I think it’s time to go out and do anything versus just sitting here…but I’m trying to save cash so that puts me in kind of a bind…oh, well…it was a nice day and I did get out on the bike for a long one and hope to do another one today since it’s going to be near 60…not bad for November. And, I only have 40 miles left to get to 2K..yay! I’m also creeping up on 500 posts since I started this and that is some kind of a milestone but I don’t know what kind…I wonder if putting them all together would make a new book..after all, Keith did it with excerpts from his show. Not much to do today…I think I’m going to start getting the car cleaned and ready for winter…have to do the glass inside and out since dirty windows bug the hell out of me and it’s better to do it when it’s relatively warm….that’s about it for now…more later…
November 7th
Well…I need another cup of coffee…be back in a minute….okay, I’m back…I have been somewhat prolific this morning…this is the third one so I’ll say look down again…there are two others you haven’t seen. Not much of a day yesterday…just kind of going through the motions but I did get the kitchen cleaned….I hope I have all of the clocks reset with the end of DST…we’ll see in a couple of minutes…I did find the instruction booklet for the one in the car so I’ll tackle that one later. It was nice to have a running conversation via text with T yesterday…she always makes me laugh and we are both such big Michigan geeks…the Wings lost last night but they went two for three on the west coast swing so that’s not bad…but any time you let a team score 6 goals against you, there are problems with the defense….not time to be concerned yet, though.
Not much to do today…haven’t been on the bike in two days so I am itching to get out when the temp gets over 40…and there is the Lions, I guess, oh, and formula 1 at 10:30 so that will be something. Need to go check on some clocks so I’ll end here…more later…
I’m back for just a second….finally remembered that HULU exists..thanks, Tom, and signed up for it…it is nice to not have to remember to tape anything (yeah, still not into the DVR yet) and to be able to watch some stuff that I’ve never seen because it’s on opposite the few shows that I regularly watch…but we’ll see how much I use it…kind of like my twitter account…okay at first but a bore after a while…
67 points…in a football game?
Well…I’ve already gotten another post out before this one so look down if you want…or not if that is too much work. Boy that was kind of a strange day yesterday with the Michigan football team playing a basketball game…when was the last time you saw a score of 67-65 in a football game? I found it funny when one of the press columnists said that the Michigan defense won the game for them…really? Did you watch the same game I did? The Michigan defense made exactly one play…the last one that save the two point conversion in the 3rd OT. Other than that, there was no defense played by either team…I mean, c’mon…over 1200 yards of offense? Bo must be spinning at 10,000 RPM at that result…and I think Rich Rod should be gone at the end of the season…he has been a disaster for Michigan..not just for the crappy teams, but for his staining of the reputation of U of M…I think that may be the most important thing to me..it may be quaint but I feel that you can win even when following the rules…Bo did it, Lloyd Carr did it, and I don’t care how much college football has changed..honor is honor.
That said…it was one of the weirdest games I’ve ever seen…Go Blue!
Excuses, excuses…
Well…have been reading some of the postmortems of the recent election and there are a couple of things that I find striking about the election here in Michigan. First is the turnout…where only about 50% of the people in Kent country voted versus about 66% in the 2008 election…a drop that is significantly larger than normal for a mid-term. But, the second thing are the excuses and rationalizations that are being offered by the non-voters on why they didn’t vote this time. “It doesn’t matter who is in charge”, “I was turned off by the negative ads”, “I had too much to do”, “I forgot about it”….were just a few of the excuses that were offered in the Press this morning…and what this says to me is that apathy, not the repubs message is what lost this election for the dems.
But, what is more important than voting? What is more important than keeping this country on the path back to equality in economic possibilities…what is more important than voting in your own self-interest? What these excuses have done is to make certain that income inequality will get worse, that the richest one percent will continue to steal more an more of the economic pie that should go to the people that make the profits possible. We are now in an experiment here in Michigan where we go back to the bad old Engler days of unbridled capitalism and the god-like reverence that the repubs have for the “free market”…a market that is always rigged for their rich buddies while the middle class disappears with a whimper and not a bang…geez…
I think it was worth it…
Well…have been reading a lot of newspapers today, and over the last few days and a new idea has popped into my head…that whatever the cost in seats that the Dems paid in this election, it was worth it to get the legislative victories that they got in this congress. It was worth it to get started on reforming healthcare…and I don’t believe that the law as enacted is perfect by any means, but it is a good basis where the normal process of implementation and change that almost all legislation goes through can begin. It was worth it to get consumer protection where there was only big business dictates before….and it was worth it to get some little financial regulation back in place on the banks that ruined our economy.
Now, I don’t know if that was a political calculation on the Dems part; I’m sure no party wants to lose seats and give up control of any part of government they used to get these accomplishments, but, to me, it was certainly worth it to push the balance of power just a little ways back towards you and me….and lets hope that the repubs don’t waste the country’s precious time with the nonsense they are promising..or we’ll have the house back in 2012…
A Special Comment on Keith…
Well…a couple of thoughts on the suspension of Keith Olbermann from MSNBC for make unauthorized political contributions in the last election. First, if it’s in his contract that these donations have to be approved before they are made, then MSNBC has the right to do exactly what they did…in corporate owned America, even workers as well-known as Keith still have to honor the contracts they sign no matter how much they disagree with them. This kind of thing happens every day across the country and no one should be surprised at the flexing of the power of the modern corporation…and I might not be fair in castigating the parent company NBC for trying to protect the brand they have spent years creating; especially with the media’s false equivalency that MSNBC is just as biased as Fox….but there were no multi-million dollar donations to the Dems from NBC as Fox did for the repubs so that explodes that little myth.
One of the traps that I think Keith has fallen into is that he has gotten big and feels like the rules don’t apply to him…but, one other thought came to mind in my coffee fueled mind today…what if he did it on purpose? What if he did it to highlight the differences between his company and Fox…I certainly think he at least did NBC a favor..it gave their management the opportunity to put to rest the idea that MSNBC is the mirror of Fox on the left….and I feel that the old model where news was news and opinion was opinion is a better one than we have today…today’s news world makes it too hard to discern between the two and people don’t like to work that hard…making it easy for the demagogues to rule…geez…