My Top 10 Blog Posts - Evah!

I started this blog on January 23rd, 2006. So I've been at this for almost 5 years and have over 1450 posts up.

I've never been concerned about how many readers I have or how many hits I get. That's not why I'm here.

But I recently clicked on my Stats according to Blogger.com and found the results somewhat interesting.

Strictly in terms of Page Views, these are my Top Ten Posts of All Time.

10. "Guest Blogger" April 18, 2007: 726 Page Views - I copied and pasted a diatribe from Lee Iacocca. Virtually no original content.

9. "Speaking of Ice" December 10, 2007: 980 Page Views - My review of Dan Simmons book 'The Terror'.

8. "WWI Museum" November 11, 2007: 1,062 Page Views - My appreciation of our incredible World War I Memorial and museum. It is an international treasure.

7. "Beer Can Chicken" November 27, 2010: 1,183 Page Views - This recent post got a boost from this mention on The Pitch's Fat City blog.

6. "Beneath The Temple of Quetzalcoatl" August 7, 2010: 3,157 Page Views - Just some cool archaeological research results from Central Mexico.

5. "Soccer Is So Incredibly Gay" June 18, 2010: 4,969 Page Views - This was my lamest post ever. I just Google Imaged "Soccer is gay" and posted the images without comment. I credit the popularity of this post to all of the closeted gay, pretentious, American, Anglophile soccer fan wannabes who get wood whenever they hear someone say "Manchester United" or "Arsenal".

4. "Das Boot" January 27, 2009: 5,102 Page Views - This was a post about my fucked up feet. Seriously?

3. "Gay Marriage Finally A Reality" June 16, 2008: 7,383 Page Views - Strong on subject and visuals, light on original content.

2. "Business Travel" December 19, 2007: 10,344 Page Views - My build up to tell the Tonto Kowaslki joke. Really, people?

My most popular post ever? Drum roll.....

1. "Tattoos and Piercings" July 26, 2008: 33,360 Page Views - Wow. I should post more about tats. Something I know absolutely nothing about. LOL! You fuckers are funny!

This is precisely why I don't craft my posts to generate traffic.

I think I'll keep writing about whatever the fuck I want and let the stats be damned.

An Environmental No Brainer

I don't normally write about environmental issues. I don't even recycle so I don't have any standing to be pontificating on the virtues of being green.

But a couple of recent inputs came together to generate some thoughts.

I watched a documentary the other day about the Great Migration that takes place in the Serengeti.

"The extraordinary annual Great Migration of wildebeest and other grazing herbivores across the Serengeti-Mara ecosystem is one of the greatest spectacles in the natural world. Over two million herbivores partake in this journey, with about 200 000 zebra and 500 000 Thomson's gazelle behind the main players... one-and-a-half million wildebeest!"

It was absolutely fascinating. It is the last great migration left on the planet. American Bison used to participate in a similar migration before the Europeans showed up and, well, ya know, killed them all and built all kinds shit like highways, railroads and fences that prevented any mass land migrations by any animals.

Then I saw a news story tonight about plans to build a huge highway straight across the Serengeti to handle commercial mining traffic from newly discovered Rare Earth Element deposits in Tanzania to shipping ports at Lake Victoria.

"REEs are widely used in emerging "Green" technologies. Each hybrid Toyota Prius is reported to contain 66 lbs of REEs. REEs are used in wind turbines, compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs), flat panel displays, catalytic converters, motors and magnets. Military uses include radar and guidance systems."

So the demand for the natural resources that allow us to be more "Green" threatens to destroy one of the greatest, open ecosystems left on Earth by disrupting their natural migration routes. African wildebeests, zebras and gazelles would suffer the same fate as American possums, skunks and raccoons. Roadkill.

Building a highway across the Serengeti would put in place an incredibly expensive piece of environmentally destructive infrastructure that would need continual maintenance and repair while allowing polluting diesel trucks to belch poison into the fragile ecosystem.

The need to get the REEs from mine to port can be accomplished faster, cheaper and with absolutely no impact on the Great Migration or the Serengeti ecosystem by using cargo airships.





You put an Airship Port at the REE mine.

You put an Airship Port at Lake Victoria.

You transport the REEs across the Serengeti without impacting the environment below. In fact rather than building a drive-through highway for poachers, you could equip the Airships with high-tech surveillance equipment to scan for poachers and serve as wireless communication hubs to link law enforcement and park rangers.

The Airships could be the equivalent of Serengeti AWAC units protecting the area by coordinating government resources.

This is so obvious. Just fucking do it.

Reader Alert Redux

Hey folks! Remember a couple of weeks ago when I had to lock down the comments with Comment Moderation to keep all you lovely folks from getting hit with spam comments?

Of course you do. I however, had mostly forgotten about it and the blog had become severely constipated with unreviewed comments.

Good news for you, the cyber-sphincter has been relaxed and the backlog of comments have been released.

Thanks to my buddy Jools for alerting me to the blockage. It's all cleared up now.

Henceforth, if you post a comment and don't see it, shoot me an email so I can release it. In the subject line of the email, type "Shit Or Get Off The Pot" so I know what its about.

The Death of a Moustache

This moustache was OK, because Oliver Hardy was funny.



This moustache was OK because Charlie Chaplin was funny.



Then this fucker had to go and ruin the moustache.



It's hard to see how that moustache can ever make a comeback, what with the Holocaust and all.

Fucking moustache killing bastard.

Net Neutrality. What Does It Mean To You? A Primer.

Today, the FCC approved Net Neutrality rules governing how your Internet provider can control bandwidth based on the content and the source.

What does this mean to you?

Thankfully, absolutely nothing because the FCC put rules in place to keep things exactly as they are today. That means that everyone is an equal content provider and we are all equal content receivers.

Which is why conservatives, republicans and greedy corporate fucktards have their panties in such a twist! THEY FUCKING HATE EQUALITY! They are screaming that this is another over-reach of Big Government into the private sector! It's more Socialist Obamalism!

Corporations don't want equality. They wanted to ease us into a tiered/metered Internet instead of the flat rate model we enjoy today.

Let's say you pay $30 a month for broadband Internet access from your Internet service provider. Whether you only use the Internet to check your email twice a week or whether you sit at home 24/7 streaming movies, you still pay the same affordable rate for access.

The Suits don't like that. The Suits want to charge power users more than they charge casual users. That's not such a foreign concept. People who consume more electricity have a higher utility bill than people who consume less electricity.

That's metering.

But it's a false comparison. If an Internet service provider wants to offer users streaming video, they have to put the infrastructure in place to accommodate it. If they don't, users who want that broadband service will find another provider. Bandwidth is a commodity. There isn't much in the way of service differentiation.

So they tell you it's all about the users, but it's not. It's about the deep pocketbooks of the content providers.

Comcast, AT&T, Time Warner, all of The Big Suit Internet Providers have huge corporate content providers. What they really want to do is give "preferred bandwidth" to their own content and choke out everyone else through tiered access.

So lets say your Internet service provider is Time Warner and you want to get streaming video via Netflix or Hulu.

Time Warner wants to be able to reserve the largest bandwidth and highest speeds on their Internet service to content owned by Time Warner. All other streaming video providers would have to pay fees for tiered bandwidth that would all be below the Time Warner level.

So ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, FOX and all the major networks might be able to afford Tier 1 and be equal with Time Warner.

Local outlets like KMBC, KSHB might only be able to afford Tier 2 access so their content would be slowed down.

Public outlets like YouTube might not be willing to pay for anything higher than Tier 3 access so their content would only be delivered after the Tier 1 and 2 level content had been delivered.

But if you are a blogger and want to provide your own content over the Internet, you would be at the bottom of the barrel. Tier 4,5,6 or 7. What ever the structure was. The average Internet user would never, ever get to your content unless you were willing to pony up Big Money to get the Tiered Access controlled by your Internet Service Provider.

What the FCC did today was guarantee that corporate greed cannot silence you on the Internet.

The content that you offer on the Internet is treated in exactly the same way that content from CNN or Time Warner is treated. As completely neutral bandwidth with no regard to content or source.

The FCC made the right call.

How Many Dark Ages Were There?

Lost Civilization May Have Existed Beneath the Persian Gulf

The Dark Age we all learned about in school was the period that immediately followed The Fall of Rome.

For 6000 years of recorded human civilization, mankind has grown from a common core and spread a cultural legacy. Sumerians, Persians, Greeks, Egyptians, Romans had all grown strong, conquered, expanded, enslaved and spread a more or less common spiritual and cultural inheritance.

The first Big Change to this dynamic was the birth and spread of Christianity in the 1st Century of the Common Era.

The second Big Change was the Fall of Rome.

When the "barbaric" Germanic tribes sacked Rome and brought down the Roman Empire, there was nothing to fill the vacuum. These were the Dark Ages we learned about in school. When civilization as we had known it for thousands of years was absent and much knowledge and wisdom was lost.

It wasn't until the next Big Change, the Islamic expansion several hundred years after the Fall of Rome brought translations of ancient wisdom and the Muslim's own discoveries in mathematics and astronomy that the dregs of Europe were re civilized.

1,2,3,4,5. Know what those are called? Arabic numerals. They're what we use today.

Know what we don't use? I, II, III, IV, V. Those are Roman numerals.

My point is, the Dark Ages that resulted from the fall of a major civilization just 1500 years ago, only lasted a couple of hundred years, but had a profound impact on our modern society.

Now we learn that

"Veiled beneath the Persian Gulf, a once-fertile landmass may have supported some of the earliest humans outside Africa some 75,000 to 100,000 years ago, a new review of research suggests.

At its peak, the floodplain now below the Gulf would have been about the size of Great Britain, and then shrank as water began to flood the area. Then, about 8,000 years ago, the land would have been swallowed up by the Indian Ocean, the review scientist said."

"The study, which is detailed in the December issue of the journal Current Anthropology, has broad implications for aspects of human history."

"The Gulf Oasis would have been a shallow inland basin exposed from about 75,000 years ago until 8,000 years ago, forming the southern tip of the Fertile Crescent, according to historical sea-level records.

And it would have been an ideal refuge from the harsh deserts surrounding it, with fresh water supplied by the Tigris, Euphrates, Karun and Wadi Baton Rivers, as well as by upwelling springs, Rose said. And during the last ice age when conditions were at their driest, this basin would've been at its largest.

In fact, in recent years, archaeologists have turned up evidence of a wave of human settlements along the shores of the Gulf dating to about 7,500 years ago.

"Where before there had been but a handful of scattered hunting camps, suddenly, over 60 new archaeological sites appear virtually overnight," Rose said. "These settlements boast well-built, permanent stone houses, long-distance trade networks, elaborately decorated pottery, domesticated animals, and even evidence for one of the oldest boats in the world."

Rather than quickly evolving settlements, Rose thinks precursor populations did exist but have remained hidden beneath the Gulf. [History's Most Overlooked Mysteries]

"Perhaps it is no coincidence that the founding of such remarkably well developed communities along the shoreline corresponds with the flooding of the Persian Gulf basin around 8,000 years ago," Rose said. "These new colonists may have come from the heart of the Gulf, displaced by rising water levels that plunged the once fertile landscape beneath the waters of the Indian Ocean."

"The most definitive evidence of these human camps in the Gulf comes from a new archaeological site called Jebel Faya 1 within the Gulf basin that was discovered four years ago. There, Hans-Peter Uerpmann of the University of Tubingen in Germany found three different Paleolithic settlements occurring from about 125,000 to 25,000 years ago. That and other archaeological sites, Rose said, indicate "that early human groups were living around the Gulf basin throughout the Late Pleistocene."

We have clear evidence how far human knowledge was set back by one Great Civilization collapsing for a few hundred years before another Great Civilization came to the rescue with rediscovered wisdom.

Think about how much knowledge has been lost and what a small fragment of it has been rediscovered if human civilization dates back not a mere 6,000 years, but 75,000 years or 125,000 years.

All of a sudden the Mystery of the Pyramids isn't how Ancient Egyptians 4,000 years ago managed to build such magnificent structures (without the unlikely intervention of alien technology), but what fragments of even more ancient human technology the Egyptians, Incas, Mayans, Aztecs, Toltec's and Polynesians had access to that allowed them to accomplish their myriad wonders.

There are perfectly rational answers to all of the mysteries of the universe. Science will give us those answers.

Reader Alert

Blogger recently implemented a new feature to filter and minimize spam comments.

As a result of Blogger's eternal vigilence, I have been FUCKING INUNDATED WITH SPAM COMMENTS!!!!

I already had word verification in place, but I have now had to start comment moderation in the hopes that this will stop the assault on your in boxes.

Hopefully this will fix the problem. If not, I might have to go to a membership model.

Goddamn fucking useless taintsucking asslicking knobgobbling fucking spamming motherfuckers!

Burning Bridges

My 2nd wife and I were married for almost 10 years. From 1993 to 2002.

The life-long friends that I brought into the marriage, friends dating back to high school and even grade school, became part of our network of shared relationships.

When she betrayed the trust in our relationship with one of the members of that network, our marriage imploded and never recovered. We divorced.

In my opinion, you only get one shot at trust. When it's betrayed, it's gone forever.

In the aftermath of the divorce, I made a conscious decision to make a clean break with everything and everyone in my life that had existed prior to that.

The only exemptions were my daughter and my first wife.

Everyone else was dead to me.

Occasionally, someone from the Old Days will find me and want to reconnect.

Sadly, it's generally people who had nothing to do with "The Unpleasantness" and are innocent.

But a clean break is a clean break and I have no desire to reconnect with anyone and take any walks down Memory Lane.

So here's the rule.

If we were friends prior to 2002, we're probably not friends any more and we never will be again.

It's not your fault, you didn't do anything wrong, it's just a personal choice I've made.

I have new friends now.

I'll never go back.

Good Bye, Good Luck and have a nice life.

Americans Are Stupid

That's not my opinion. That's a fact. And it doesn't surprise me one little bit.



Americans have been willfully dumbing themselves down for many, many years.

Our Founding Fathers were polymaths. They were educated and well read in mathematics, philosophy, literature, art, physics, geography, geometry, history, theology and political science.

If they were alive today they would be derided as "intellectual elitists".

Americans in 2010 don't want to know anything, they don't want to think about anything, they don't want to scrutinize the world around them and they sure as fuck don't want to examine their own lives.

Fuck, a significant number of Americans can't even find the United States on a map of the world and view any effort to get them to do so as "gotcha, drive by, journalism".

Americans in 2010 want to sit back on their fat white asses and have some television talking head tell them what they should think and believe.

Beck. Olberson. O'Reilly. Maher. They're all the fucking same.

Granted, I find some more entertaining than others, but I feel obligated to sample them all. Not as a source of actual information, but as a way of bookending the boundaries of extremity in the country.

Holy Fuck!

As that great, liberal, intellectual Statesman once said, "Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts."

To which Karl Rove countered "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

Our leaders today (and yes, I include President Obama and our Democratic Leadership)think they can just make shit up, call it real, and Americans will accept it as True.

After all, there's a precedent for that! That's what Americans do every Sunday when they go to church! "Oh! That guy up there in robes said something that's written in a really old book so it must be true! OK! I believe that!"

We live in a country where a significant number of people actually believe that a blithering, rambling, idiot, quitter from Alaska who reneged on her obligations to her constituents because she couldn't stand up to close scrutiny from the press and would rather get rich spewing venom and selling books should be within arms reach of the nuclear football!

We're doomed. Learn to speak Chinese.