A spam comment I got sometime in the last few days said this:
I agree, this is a great article.A successful blog needs unique, useful content that interests the readers
Uh-huh. Looks like whoever wrote that made a huge mistake because my blog is not unique or useful or have any sort of content and I doubt any readers.
Exactly 7 years ago today, I published the first entry on the old version of this blog. Um, let’s see. Something profound. I got nothing. Other than I think rarely in human history has someone written so much that’s been read by so few and yet the author remains completely full of himself and full of shit. So there. Profound. I think.
Also in my laziness and my appreciation for the scheduling feature on this fancy new blog I added last winter, I wrote this Saturday night. Um, yeah, Wednesday night, we’re probably busy right now with the beans or getting the corn started. Well, not this late at night. I’m probably half asleep and I don’t think I could write anything coherent after all that work I probably did today.
Since I started the Pirates have been 478-654. The Steelers have won two Super Bowls. The Penguins won the Stanley Cup once and lost it. The Chicago Bulls finally returned to the playoffs for the first time since the Jordan era and they luckily got the first pick in the draft. The Iowa Hawkeyes have started this year 9-0, although their basketball team still sucks.
I’ve had a girlfriend or two or three or something. I’ve been dumped once. I’ve had one of those there mutual break ups. And I got just completely ignored. I guess she’s with someone else now. I don’t know.
Of course if you really want to, you could start counting from March 15, 2001. That’s when I started saving all those things I wrote. For about a year before that I wrote something and then deleted it when I wrote something new. So the 9 year anniversary is a few months away, but I don’t count those really old ones. It’s like counting abbreviations in scrabble.
UPDATE: 11:05 PM: I actually was sleeping when this went up. I guess I was tired. Also on my twitter account, I almost correctly predicted the score, but had it backwards on who would win. Fuck.
So I went along and got a twitter account. I only did it because I wanted to ask John Perrotto a question about the Pirates. I can’t imagine that I’ll be putting Twitter to much use. Although I did just add a twitter widget to the blog here. So in case I ever tweet something interesting (yeah, I don’t see that happening. I mean when was the last time I blogged something interesting? 2006?) the one or two regular readers of this blog will be able to keep up with my twittering.
Oh yeah and the Pirates lost 1B coach and infield instructor Perry Hill so I can imagine that the infield defense will be terrible next year with Pedro at 3B, Andy LaRoche at 2B and Ronny Cedeno at SS, unless they find someone just as good as Perry Hill who everyone said was the best in the business. Maybe they can find a new infield instructor who’s best in the business. Yeah…
First there’s this cheery happy article from Paul Begala, one of the guys on that show Crossfire a few years ago when Jon Stewart went on the show and called him and Tucker Carlson “dicks”. Hasn’t changed much for him, he’s still a dick. Oh, we’re supposed to be happy and glad to hand over money on tax day, it’s patriotic. Barf.
Then there’s this much more analytical article about the tax rates during the Reagan-Bush II years. It’s pretty fascinating. For nearly a decade now, we’ve heard that Bush II has only cut taxes for the rich, well turns out that was a big stinking lie. Well here’s some of it incase clicking on the link is too much work:
During the Reagan years, the top bracket was lowered from @70% to 50%. But he also lowered the lowest bracket from 14% to 11%. In his second term, he lowered the top bracket to 28%. When Bush I (“no new taxes”) came in, he raised the lowest back up to 15%, but he eventually also raised the top to 31%. When the “Liberal,” “progressive,” Clinton took over, he kept the lowest (i.e., poorest laborers) bracket at 15%, but he raised the top from 31% to 39% (as he said he would).
Now here’s the kicker: Bush II (“Dumbya”) lowered the bottom rate from 15% to 10% (33% decline), yet only lowered the top bracket from 39.6% to 35% (@10% decline). In other words, while the lying Left claimed that Dumbya only gave the “rich” tax breaks, he actually lowered (percentage-wise) the lowest bracket by 3 times what he lowered the top bracket.
Yep, Bush II was ok on taxes. Too bad he never cut spending or else the economy would probably be a lot better off now. Also restoring the gold standard would have been a big help as well.
In other news, this blog has been hit by spam, since I have to approve comments, the very few loyal readers that are here haven’t noticed them. I’ve decided to add users in order to fight the spam man.
I put the stats thing in here in the site admin section and was looking at the stats just now. They are mind boggling, I mean my mind is just so completely boggled. So get this, the other day there were six people looking at this blog. Un-fucking-believable. The most popular entry so far is one titled “Pizza, beer and tits.” Of course.
I just checked out the Pirates TV schedule for the year. No mention on which games are in HD and which aren’t yet. However, the Spring Training TV schedule is pretty thin, just three games. One game on FSN, One on both FSN and MLB Network and then one game on MLB Network. Oddly enough, the two on MLB Network are against the Phillies and Rays. The two World Series teams from last year. So the regular schedule is pretty good until September when FSN Pittsburgh stops broadcasting games. There’s 11 games after September 1st. I wonder if the Pirates are really good again some day, they’ll actually show more games from September. I wonder if there’ll be any nationally televised games on MLB Network during the season. They should. I mean, FOX and ESPN already ignore the Pirates, it’d be nice to see one national TV network pay some attention to them.
I guess that’s it.
So I’m looking at the weather channel’s 10 day forecast and it says that my birthday will be sunny and 30-something with no chance of snow. Awesome. Now let’s see if they keep it that way for the next ten days. I’m skeptical that it will stay that way. I learned recently that the restaurant that had free birthday meals has ended that practice. So I guess I won’t stop there for lunch before I drive to St. Louis. Oh well, no big deal. I’ll just stop by Starbucks before I leave and pay too much for coffee.
In other news, I have decided to add a Favorite Posts section off to the right there. It was just another link category I added. I wanted to have a section I could go to and find my favorite entries through the years. So far I’ve thought of two. I’d have to look through and find some more.
Wow, I just spent the last 6 hours copying over everything from the old archives to the new one on Word Press. The archives is just crazy. i mean that’s a whole lot of archives there. I also finished the About page and put up a baseball game page. The about page just has a hastily thrown together history of this blog and website. The baseball games page just has a list of every Major League baseball game I’ve been to. Towards the end, I had trouble focusing on the task at hand and kept falling asleep. Oh well, that long task is finished and I’m happy about it.
Well it’s up to February 2005. So still another almost four years of this to go. I got up about two hours ago (after falling asleep at 9:00) and couldn’t get back to sleep so I decided to do a little work here. Well I’m tired again now so back to sleep. Enjoy.
Ok, I got another six months worth of archives in today. Up to August of 2004, meaning there’s 52 months worth of archives to add until I got everything transfered to the new blog. 40 months down, 52 to go. Yikes. And most of the first 40 months were short and easy. This is gonna take a while…
So Christmas Eve was pretty boring this year. Basically we stayed home and two uncles and an aunt showed up. By that point I was a little tired. For some reason, chores just took it out of me that day. I don’t know why. I fell asleep on dad’s recliner around 9:45 and woke up later on to see them leave and open presents. Christmas Day was way better. Grandma and Grandpa’s place is pretty much the highlight of Christmas. It’s amazing to me how many of us are still going there for Christmas Day. We just don’t get that on the other side of the family.
Overall, it was a nice set of gifts. I got $55 worth of iTunes gift cards, two of the new Futurama DVDs and some Steeler stuff and a big thick pair of socks. The one thing I was expecting but didn’t get was a new printer, but more on that later. Even better, everyone seemed to like my gifts, nobody has asked for a receipt yet.
So last night, since I didn’t get one for Christmas, I went out and got a new HP. The reason was that the old one quit working on me. The printer head wouldn’t move very often. And there were lots of paper jams and several times where the paper was in the printer but the stupid thing couldn’t find the paper, etc. But I guess five years is the maximum life span for cheap Lexmark printers. So instead of a Lexmark I got an HP this time since I don’t have to worry about it not working with the Airport Extreme base station and the HP printer looks better than the other kind.
Oh yeah, the transfer from the old blog to the new one has hit a snag. Mostly it’s that I’m too busy sometimes and other times too lazy to actually keep going. I mean, there’s a hell of a lot to transfer here and I had no idea how long it was going to take. I wanted it to be all done in time for New Year’s but that’s not gonna happen. I now want to set a completion date of January 31st. Mostly based on the idea that if I do two months every day, it’ll probably take about that long to finish. The sucky part is that each month takes a long time. It’s very tedious work and I’m not sure of any other way to do it. I’ll eventually get all caught up. There are lots of things I like about Word Press so far and it’s the reason I’ve done almost three years of archive transfers. I haven’t used any other kind of blogging software for a long time, but if the others were any indication, I couldn’t imagine being this far along with them.
That’s about all for now. I think.
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