Hiatus

Sorry, from this point on we are on hiatus until we are not.

Ghana 0 - Ghana 1

Ghana defeated Ghana!
Wow, what a game! Ghana was a way better team but could not win, even after getting a penalty kick.

And Brazil, a shadow of its former great self, was defeated by the Netherlands.

One prediction that I might regret: Germany pulverizes Argentina today...

Mundial 2010

Portugal 7
North Korea 0
Wow!

Even though it sometimes seems this way, there are no truly awful teams on Mundial: there are a few great teams, couple of good teams and a bunch of "less good" teams, but no god-awful teams. Well, any team, even the greatest, has on occasional bad day but the North Korean team had a really frigging dreadful day today when it lost seven to nil to Portugal. High scores are as rare in soccer as hen's teeth, and even rarer on Mundial, so this one truly stands out…

Too bad that the unfortunate North Korean players (and even more so their managers and coaches) as their reward for “exemplary” performance on Mundial may be forced to contribute to the North Korea’s nuclear program and carry radioactive isotopes with their bare hand if the Korean despot-in-chief (pardon me, Exalted Leader) Comrade Kim Jong-Il, flies off the handle.

Huh..?

All I could utter was a very loud WTF...

In a stunning move by the Vatican, the classic Dan Aykroyd-John Belushi comedy film "The Blues Brothers" was declared a "Catholic classic" alongside more pious films such as "The Ten Commandments" and "The Passion of the Christ."

Read more: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/international/mission_accomplished_vatican_blesses_gex4vIBiJ78B9Pgukel42I?CMP=OTC-rss&FEEDNAME=#ixzz0rJdb6nd1

José Saramago

José Saramago, the first Portuguese writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature (in 1998) passed away in Spain at 87. Loved by many (including yours truly) and despised by some - a great human being and a wonderful writer.

British Petroleum (BP) oil spill 2010

Here is something from the land of the truly stupid...

Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas) called the BP escrow fund for cleanup a “shakedown” and a “$20 billion slush fund” then apologized to BP during the congressional hearing today.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0610/38665.html#ixzz0r8tIApql

British Petroleum (BP) oil spill 2010

As quoted by The Daily Beast, Mr. Carl-Henric Svanberg, the Chairman of BP said that his company cares for the "little people" affected by the spill. Now, he's a Swede so that might be just a lapsus. On the other hand most educated Swedes speak excellent English so there is an outside chance that his choice of words wasn't accidental and that Mr. Carl-Henric Svanberg is simply a common asshole.

American Airlines and common sense

Read here about American Airlines offering discount prices of formerly free services. Yes, you pay actual dollars for formerly free services and it is called discount..! I admire their semantics (I do, I really do, it is evil but oh-so creative use of words!) employed to justify price increases and nickel-and- diming of the flying public:

“American Airlines Introduces ‘Your Choice’ Services to Give Customers More Options, Greater Control Over Travel Experiences.”
“It allows people to tailor their purchases and buy things that have value to them.”
“American Airlines Streamlines Its Airport Processes.”

Lavatory use is still free (?) on American Airlines so pee away!

British Petroleum (BP) oil spill 2010

(...)Journalists struggling to document the impact of the oil rig explosion have repeatedly found themselves turned away from public areas affected by the spill, and not only by BP and its contractors, but by local law enforcement, the Coast Guard and government officials.(...)

Read more on the New York Times site (may require a logon and a free account.)

Sir Elton (openly gay) John and common sense

Fact: one million dollar wedding of a very conservative radio commentator Rush Limbaugh, 59 (to Kathryn Rogers, 33) in Florida. Sir (openly gay) Elton John performed for a cool six figure fee. More at the Daily Beast.

Here's a typical Limbaugh's comment about gays:
When a gay person turns his back on you, it is anything but an insult; it’s an invitation”
(More of the kind here.)

No comment, of course...

British Petroleum (BP) oil spill 2010

ABC News reports that
(..)A simple Google search of "oil spill" turns up several thousand news results, but the first link, highlighted at the very top of the page, is from BP. "Learn more about how BP is helping," the link's tagline reads. (...)

Read more at ABC News

Rental cars

2010 Ford Mustang Convertible (soft top.)

Rented from Alamo in Denver, Colorado at the end of February. Why did I rent a rear-drive convertible in winter? Why not..? I drove it around 1000 miles in 6 days, including two trips over the La Veta pass, without a problem save for a few fishtails on a packed snow.

While the Mustang is nothing spectacular in terms of performance, a fine sports car wannabe nonetheless, it is a nice car to look at, with pleasant and pretty comfortable interior. Ride was a bit on the “sofa on wheels side” (esp. in tighter turns) but bearable nonetheless. But... the fit and finish can be easily described as a piece of automotive crap. Literally, no interior component fits properly! Gaps and misaligned plastic parts are everywhere. A herd of Orangutans with screwdrivers would have put it better together! The convertible top would go down smoothly but got stuck during my attempts to put it back up (it was cold or perhaps it was my fault, these contraptions are sometimes finicky.) The trunk space with the top down was OK for a convertible (but miniscule comparing to an average sedan) but quite spacious with the top up. The ride was quiet – for a soft top convertible - with the top up, but noisy with the top down with strong wind buffeting above 60 mph. I didn’t use it with the top down for long, though – it was freaking cold!

Would I rent it again – perhaps, it’s a fun car to drive for a week or two with the top down. Would I buy it? Hell no!!! Judging from that rental, Ford in the US has a long way to go before their cars can remotely approach even the cheapest European and Japanese imports in terms of fit and finish.

Example (highlited in red) of "fit and finish by Ford" on the Mustang.

Photo credit, both photos: Copyright © 2010 Michael Liczbanski

Passings

Italian screenwriter Furio Scarpelli passed away on April 28, 2010 in Rome. He was 90.
He wrote or co-wrote many classic Italian movies including two of my favorites, the Sergio Leone’s spaghetti-western classic “Il Buono, Il Brutto, Il Cattivo” (“The Good, the Bad and the Ugly”) and “Il Postino”.

It is illegal to be illegal! WTF..?

The Legal Arizona Workers Act, aka the “Employer Sanctions Law,” went into effect January 1, 2008. You can see it here.

“The Legal Arizona Workers Act, as amended, prohibits businesses from knowingly or intentionally hiring an “unauthorized alien” after December 31, 2007. Under the statute, an “unauthorized alien” is defined as “an alien who does not have the legal right or authorization under federal law to work in the United States.” The law also requires employers in Arizona to use the “E-Verify” system (a free Web-based service offered by the federal Department of Homeland Security) to verify the employment authorization of all new employees hired after December 31, 2007.”

WTF? Someone has to employ the undocumented workers in Arizona or they wouldn’t be there, so instead of simply enforcing the existing law Arizona has now elected to enact new statues making being illegal illegal. Oh yes, enforcing the existing law would mean alienating their Republican electoral base (the small, blue-collar, business owners likely to employ undocumented workers seem to be mostly Republican…)

Passings

Alejandro Robaina, famous Cuban tobacco farmer, known as the "godfather of Cuban tobacco" passed away today at his home in the Vuelta Abajo region. He was 91 and apparently died of cancer.

Gone fishin'

Sorry, from this point on we are on hiatus until we are not.

Immortal words

"It was a dark and stormy night."

Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton, "Paul Clifford" (1830)

Moss gathering

Mick Jagger is 66.

Departures this week

Heinz Edelmann, a graphic designer. Art director of the Beatles animated film Yellow Submarine, 75 (Tuesday July 21, in Stuttgart, Germany, of an undisclosed illness.)
Frank McCourt, the author of Angela's Ashes (which won the Pulitzer Prize,) former NYC public school teacher, 78 (Sunday July 19, in New York City, of cancer.)
Gordon Waller, half of the British duo Peter & Gordon famous for their 1964 hit A World Without Love, 64 (Friday July 17 - reported this wek, in Norwich, CT, after a cardiac arrest)

Bye bye Northwest...

Used to be Northwest Orient then just Northwest then Northwest Airlines shortened to NWA and now simply Delta...

At times called "northworst" because their service was uneven at best and downward lousy at worst: I vividly remember a spring sticking up from the seat cushion of the first class cabin and firmly wedged against my ass on a flight from Chicago to Seattle 10 or so years ago... Oh well, NWA has improved since then, its fleet is very modern and, even though some flight attendants are grouchy as usual, it's been a joy to fly recently. And then there is (was..?) their wonderful partnership with KLM (and with Air Farce, pardon me, Air France...) allowing pretty much seamless jetting all over the world.

Well, the red NWA livery will soon be exchanged for the Delta (pretty indistinct and rather drab) colors and the flying public will be charged $50 to carry a laptop and a purse on board...

I'll miss ya, NWA!

Photo credit: Copyright © 2009 Michael Liczbanski

Orwell turns up in 2009.

Yep, friggin' Big Brother rears his ugly head...
Amazon Dot Com remotely nuked two George Orwell novels, Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm, from its Kindle eBook readers last week when their publisher decided that they no longer wanted to distribute the books electronically.

Hey, all you contemporary Adolf Hitler types, once I pay for it, the book is mine and you can’t just burn it at the stake even if it’s only a virtual stake on the electronic wilderness. And no post-mortem apology does any good, by the way…

Pull a Nancy Reagan and just say no to Kindle!
Pull a Nancy Reagan and just say no!
Pull a Nancy Reagan!

Hmm...à propos space...

The toilet on the International Space Station craps out...
For the 13 astronauts from Russia, Canada, Belgium, Japan and the US currently on the International Space Station, the things could have not gone much worse in terms of personal hygene after the shit hit the proverbial fan when one of the two Russion-built multi-million dollar space toilets on the space station went out of commission. (Yes, you don't always get what you pay for...)

I can almost hear that urgent Ну, давай, давай, товарищ..!

Space plumbers pulled some serious OT on Tuesday and both toilets, in the US lab Destiny and the Russian Zvezda, are now operational and suck well (yeah, that's what they are supposed to do...)

One big step...

Moon landing - 40th aniversary. Regardless of what the "we-never-landed-there" idiots say.

Landing: 4:17 PM EDT (20:17:40 UTC. Forty years ago this minute...)
First moonwalk: 10:56 PM EDT.

I was glued to a b&w TV in the middle of the night July 21...(it was night in Poland) and loved every minute of it and every murky picture transmitted from the surface of the Moon. And knowing that the Americans had just kicked the Soviets where it hurts the most felt simply delicious!

As an aside, thanks to the decision made personally by the First Secretary of the Communist Party Władysław Gomułka, Poland was the only Eastern/Soviet Bloc country with the live TV coverage of the event.

Recent departures

Henry Allingham, World War I veteran (RAF) and the world's oldest man, born June 6, 1896, 113 (Saturday July 18, in England, presumably of old age.)
Walter Cronkite, former CBS news anchor, the most trusted man in America, 92 (Friday July 17, in New York, of cerebrovascular disease.)
Leszek Kołakowski, Polish philosopher and historian of ideas, 81 (Friday July 17, in Oxford, England, of undisclosed illness.)
Julius Shulman, famous architectural photographer, 98 (Wedensday July 16, in Los Angeles, of natural casues.)
168 passengers and crew of the Caspian Airlines flight 7908, operated with the Soviet-era Tupolew Tu-154 plane (Wednesday July 15, near the Iranian city of Qazvin.)
Zbigniew Zapasiewicz, Polish film and stage actor, 75 (Tuesday July 14, in Warsaw, Poland of cancer.)
Sir Edward Downes, conductor of the first-ever performance at Sydney's Opera House, 85 (Friday July 10 - reported this week, in Zurich, Switzerland at an assisted suicide with his wife Joan, 74.)