Hokie Nation

The shootings at the Virginia Tech campus were a really bad thing.

I needed to get that out of the way.


Much of the coverage and the concurrent coverage of the rest of the world makes me a bit loopy.
Sure, lots of people were hurt or killed. I am sure they are/were very nice people.

There were the same "experts" that say the same things about the people who shoot people. The exact same rap we heard after Columbine, the various Post Office shootings, the McDonalds that got shot up, the Washington sniper shit.

Sometimes, in spite of expert opinions, people shoot people. There are probably more than 40 violent deaths where you live a year, aren't their? Maybe not. There are here.


There is a lot of that going on in other parts of the world, too. There are those college age kids over in Iraq and Afganistan, the ones who maybe couldn't afford to go to Va-Tech and signed up for the GI bill.

There are about 4000 of them dead. There are quite nearly as many who are double amputees.
I have never seen coverage of their struggle as graphic as what we have seen from Virginia.

I wonder if people think about what we are, as a nation, engaged in. I wonder if we would so casually address the wars we have started - if we saw the kids getting shot up, on the news every night...

Obit. - Kurt Vonnegut

My words are propped up, I will let those of Mr. Vonnegut provide you with things to ponder and remember him by...

"How is this for a definition of high art?... Making the most of the raw materials of futility."

"I like 'Howl' a lot. Who wouldn't? It just doesn't have much to do with me or what happened to my friends. For one thing, I believe that the best minds of my generation were probably musicians and physicists and mathematicians and biologists and archaeologists and chess masters and so on, and Ginsberg's closest friends, if I'm not mistaken, were undergraduates in the English department of Columbia University. No offense intended, but it would never occur to me to look for the best minds in any generation in an undergraduate English department anywhere. I would certainly try the physics department or the music department first -- and after that biochemistry. Everybody knows that the dumbest people in any American university are in the education department, and English after that."

"Mobilize the reserves! Privatize the public schools! Attack Iraq! Cut health care! Tap everybody's telephone! Cut taxes on the rich! Build a trillion-dollar missile shield! Fuck habeas corpus and the Sierra Club... and kiss my ass!"

"I think you guys are going to have to come up with a lot of wonderful new lies, or people just aren't going to want to go on living."

"for many years now, right on the package, Brown and Williamson have promised to kill me. But I am now eighty-two. Thanks a lot, you dirty rats. The last thing I ever wanted was to be alive when the three most powerful people on the whole planet would be named Bush, Dick and Colon."

"if Christ hadn't delivered the Sermon on the Mount, with its message of mercy and pity, I wouldn't want to be a human being. I'd just as soon be a rattlesnake"


sourced from various places

One... by one.

Today is the day.




Sweet poster, huh? You can almost skip the whole movie by following the illustrated narrative.
It does leave you wondering how it is that everybody dies horribly.

That would be how they get you.

Word up, my Peeps

It is that time of year, my peeps are everywhere. By everywhere, I mean that Peeps are available at the store, for purchase, for a limited time.

The seasonal nature of the Peep make them elusive. Their association with the resurrection of Christ, though dubious, relegates the Peep to novelty status through availability.


Or so I thought.





It seems that the unholy fun-makers at Wham-o actually developed and retail a DIY Peep Maker. You could, for a small investment, have the power and ability to create your own delicious marshmallow Peep snacks in the comfort of your own home, in minutes.

The technology involved boggles the mind. Luckily, I do have a contact with insider information regarding the operations at Wham-o. Perhaps said operative can also provide internal details on the Peep Maker device.

April Fools!

That's it, it's April. Fool.
Another month flushed down the crapper, eh...
March. Time marches on.



So, how have I been celebrating, you ask. I have been trying to maximize my interaction with fools, in the spirit set forth at the start of the month.

I keep waiting for somebody to look me square in the eye an scream "April Fools!"
I am nearly positive the joke is on me.



After some DMV fun, getting tags for the truck, I was left with a temporary tag and a list of things required by the state of the Golden Bear. That list expanded with a trip to the DEQ.
Some douchebag smashed the back window out of the truck, to steal the temporary tags.
Window replacement has been added to the list of fun - along with whatever the steps are to get a replacement temporary tag - so that I might drive to various tasks that I am required to complete - to get permanent tags - for a truck that is not really in use at the moment.



It's tax season, too.