Moe Lane

CD tray broke.

Guess that means that I have to go get that LG BD570 Network Blu-ray Disc Player that’s on sale over at the Best Buy, then.

Shucks.

(H/T: Hot Air) I like Charles Krauthammer, and he’s a smart guy. And I even see his point about how destroying Obamacare before it gets off of the ground will give the Democrats a talking point/excuse/whine about how the program was never given a chance.  So I can see the strength of his argument that letting Obamacare play out would pay dividends.

But… (more…)

…the trains ran on time:

Two days after slamming the tri-state, millions of people affected by a post-Christmas blizzard continue to dig out from a storm that shut down area airports, crippled commuter train and subway service and stranded thousands traveling during the holiday weekend.

The sixth largest snowstorm in the history of New York City dumped two feet of snow and left many, especially those living in the outer boroughs and small suburban side streets, feeling trapped or ignored as city resources went to dig out Manhattan.

“I’m furious at Mayor Bloomberg, he’s a rich man, so he doesn’t care about the little people,” said New Enrico’s Car Service livery driver Julio Carpio, speaking in Spanish. “I have to work, why aren’t people out there plowing? Why does the mayor always go on TV the night before to say, ‘We’re all set with a fleet of salt trucks,’? and then you never see a single truck. They always abandon Queens.”

That’s because Queens doesn’t have anything that interests Bloomberg.  If he could be just mayor of Manhattan he would be, and be quite cheerful about it, too.  Rudy, on the other hand… now there was a guy who could appreciate Brooklyn.  Hell, I even think that he kind of liked Staten Island, and that takes skill.

Moe Lane

(H/T Instapundit.)

God, I hate this Birther conspiracy theory crap – and don’t bother, Sparky; I screen first-time comments – but watching the talking head designated as “Chris Matthews” call for Obama’s birth certificate to be released is the funniest thing that I’ve seen all day.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

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Glenn Reynolds mentioned that the latest Kindle is selling like gangbusters.  Having gotten one as a Christmas present, I thought that I’d give it a bit of a review.

I’ve got the one without 3G web access, so I can’t really speak about that; but it’s a darn convenient book reader.  This Kindle is easier to read than I thought that it was going to be, holds a battery charge for a long time, doesn’t have problems with sunlight that I’ve noticed, and is easy to carry around.  So far, I’ve been using it to pick up various collections of pulp and Golden Age SF/fantasy books on the cheap: mostly books that I’ve read before, but either don’t have anymore, or don’t quite know where they are at the moment.  It’s easier to read while doing something else than a regular book is; no pages to randomly turn on their own.  Also: as a bathroom reader it’s pretty much ideal.

Lastly, speaking as someone who is left-handed I very much appreciate that they set up the page-turning buttons the way that they did (top button on either side: backward; bottom button on either side: forward).  That went a long way towards making the thing intuitive for me.

Bottom line?  If you’ve got the cash for one this is a pretty sweet gadget; I imagine that I’m going to wish that I had the unlimited Internet access, so you should probably fork over extra for that.  I expect that this will become a standard travel accessory for me.

That’s the implication, at least: Ms. Shea-Porter is going around telling people that the reason that she lost was because of all that dirty, dirty (and apparently foreign) special interest money.  The quote: “They’re in the halls of Congress everywhere, and it means, for example, that you sit on a committee and you say something about concern about Chinese influence or something, you don’t even know if in the next election, somehow or another, they manage to send some money to some group that now doesn’t even have to say where they got it.*”

Let us leave aside for the moment the minor detail of why the PRC would want to topple a fellow-leftist: has the woman no understanding of campaign disclosure rules?  It’s not as if the money’s being delivered in paper sacks: we are actually able to know who contributed to various campaigns.  For example – and to use her own election race as an example – incoming Congressman Frank Guinta raised a total of 1.53 million this cycle, 21% of which was via PACs (and none of it from, say, the US Chamber of Commerce’s PAC).  Ms. Shea-Porter?  1.64 million, 30% via PAC money. Business/ideological in Guinta’s case, labor/ideological in Shea-Porter’s: all perfectly obvious,  and all reasonably transparent.

What’s actually bugging Shea-Porter, of course, is that the aforementioned US Chamber of Commerce happened to allocate 149K worth of negative campaign ads against her in the last two weeks of the race; probably not all that necessary (her polling was terrible), but it certainly didn’t help the incumbent much.  It nonetheless does give a crumb of rationalization to any progressives out there not yet ready to face objective reality; which is why the soon-to-be-former Representative is implying as overtly as she dares that her election losses were all the fault of the Godless Chinese Hordes. It’s a more appealing narrative to the left than the truth, which is that being an open progressive in the wild is an excellent way to lose one’s election by double digits. (more…)

I’m facing the endpoint of one of the tombs.  I know the answer (lots of jumpy-flippy stuff); but I just don’t have the reflexes to execute the answer within the freaking time limit.  There’s no way to adjust the difficulty level, there’s no way to abort the mission, there’s no way to revert to a previous save and simply go do something else, and there’s no freaking cheat code to let me stop having to do a part of a game that I don’t, you know, enjoy.  After a couple of days I just gave up and fired up Mass Effect.  I’ve only finished that game once; I can still get enjoyment out of it.

I think that Assassin’s Creed 2 is the first Ubisoft game that I’ve ever played – and if they’re all like this in terms of customizing game play then it’s probably going to be the last one, too.

Nodwick makes one prediction of many:

9. George Lucas will announce his next movie, “Indiana Jones and the Saber of Light.” Nerds will eschew rioting and complaining, as they begin to look upon George as a demented relative who “just does that kind of thing, it’s sad, really.”

Given that prior to seeing this I spent five minutes explaining to my wife* how I would have redone a completely hypothetical prequel trilogy to the ONLY EXISTING STAR WARS TRILOGY… yeah.

Moe Lane

*I’d regale you with the details of said redoing, except that all of you could have written a better prequel trilogy in your sleep, too.

Obamacare?

Obamacare.

(Obamacare)

*Obamacare.

Speaking of The Empire Strikes Back, here’s the trailer for the 1950 version.  Quite clever.

(H/T: Instapundit) Claire Berlinski over at Ricochet is soliciting suggestions of where you would go on vacation if you could travel in time and spend a year there.

1980, of course.  I’m sure that Bill Gates would be happy to get a little venture capital, in exchange for stock options.  So would Nintendo.  And so would Sam Walton, and Steve Wozniak, and the McDonald’s Corporation…

What?  Dude: I exist in 1980.  Social Security card and all: I’ll just go on the grid, pay my taxes like I’m supposed to, and be long gone before anybody can get around to noticing that I’m not ten years old*.  And my parents weren’t idiots: I have even had the “How would a time traveling version of myself convince you two that I was for real?” conversation (this is what happens when you have a geek for a son).  We’d be able to put a suitable cover story together, particularly since I’d be establishing my bona fides early with some truly huge sports betting**.  And screw the timeline: in 1980 I’m alive, my sisters are all alive, my wife’s alive, everybody else can go whistle.

Also, I need to convince my father to quit smoking.  Which would be the larger reason for going, really.

Moe Lane (more…)