Don't turn around, uh-oh

KCMeesha today has a fascinating post about the revisionist propaganda and photographic falsification employed by the post-revolution USSR.

The post includes a discussion of the book “The Commissar Vanishes” and some very interesting photos.

In fact, the photos were so interesting that it prompted me to do my own ad-hoc internet photo search. I was amazed by what I found.

Evidently, our Russian friend is not only the sole survivor of Lenin's core braintrust, he's also some kind of Jewish/Russian/American Highlander.


tagged: Russian, Lenin, photo, photoshop, The Commissar Vanishes

Hey, there's risk in everything

So yeah, like I said yesterday I taught my kid to make coffee for me in the morning. No big whoop, right?

Well, I received this email today from Phillips, makers of the Senseo single-serve coffee machine I use.

Dear Valued Customer:

SENSEO® COFFEE MAKER

Philips has identified a safety problem which affects a number of Senseo® coffee makers produced between July 2006 & November 2008. Philips is committed to the well-being of its consumers and has decided to voluntarily recall the affected Senseo® machines and offer a replacement unit.

Affected units can be identified by model type, manufacturing location and production date. Please refer to the information below. Only units that meet the criteria in all categories are under recall:

Models: HD7810, HD7811, HD7815, HD7820, HD7832 and HD7890.

Manufacture Country and Date: units made in Poland from 0627 to 0847 and units made in China from 0727 to 0847

Colors: Black, Blue, Silver, Red, White

Unaddressed calcification in the coffeemaker from use of hard or medium water, when combined with an external electrical fault, can lead to obstruction of the overpressure release system causing boilers to suddenly separate possibly leading to injury. Per year, the risk is less than three per million and there have been no reported cases in the United States.

Philips would like to advise consumers as follows:

1 Please look at the sticker on the base plate of your Senseo® machine to identify the model number, manufacturing location and production week.

2 Please visit www.senseoexchange.com or call the toll-free phone number 1-866-604-0051 to register your product and receive further instructions and how to receive a free replacement unit. We intend to replace affected units with the same model product.

We wish to thank you for your cooperation and apologize for any inconvenience.

Kind regards,
Philips Consumer Care

Okay, so maybe it's a little more risky that I thought. On the other hand, when has anyone ever died from an exploding pressure chamber?

Sure, there was that time my cousin Jeffrey (who works for the NYC Parks & Rec department, btw) was seriously injured in a boiler explosion. In fact it blew the entire left side of his body off. Don't worry though. Jeffrey recovered. He's all right now.

tagged: coffee, Senseo, recall

YouTube Tuesday: Nunchaku besuboru

I'm still trying to decide whether this is awesome or lame. Right now I'm leaning toward two parts awesome to one part lame.




tagged: movie, YouTube, video, baseball, nunchuck

This having a kid thing is finally starting to pay off

I know some of you out there are completely anti-kid. And I must concede that in theory you have a point.

Who needs the staying up all night taking care of a hungry screaming baby. Or the added expenses of childcare and tiny socks and booster seats for cars and special biohazard trashcans designed for radioactive diapers.

But I can tell you that after a few years, these things start to pay dividends as you begin to reap the reward for all of the time you spent on the rigorous child training program.

For example, our kindergarten-age kid is becoming a convenient time-saving device for me. About a week ago I taught her how to make me my morning cup of coffee.

Since I'm the only coffee drinker in the family, I have one of those single serving coffee makers from Senseo (that I got virtually for free). And using a Senseo is so easy a child can do it -- which is kind of the point here.

So I walked the kid through all of the coffee making steps. I showed her where the coffee pods are kept in the upper cupboard and how to avoid being impaled on the rack of steak knives while climbing onto the counter to retrieve the pods.

I showed her how to fill the water reservoir on the coffee maker with scalding hot water from the kitchen sink.

I showed her how to place the pods in the coffee maker and clamp down the locking lid, how to press the appropriate buttons and set the coffee mug under the steaming streams of coffee, and how to carefully carry the mug of hot java to me without burning her fingers.

So for the last few mornings, I've had a nice hot cup of coffee ready for me when I get to the kitchen.

Child labor, ain't it grand?

tagged: family, coffee, Senseo, labor, parenting

Cupini's

Finding good economic news these days is about as easy as finding a chick at a Star Trek convention.

Even in my lower-upper-middle class neighborhood in the JoCo, several businesses haven't been able to ride out the rough times and have had to close (a restaurant and a camera shop).

That's why it was a nice surprise last week when, during a trip to the local grocery, I saw a new restaurant open in the shopping center at 95th and Mission Road.

I took the family to Cupini's the next night. The Italian deli has been a hit in it's other locations around the metro, notably the Westport spot that we're familiar with. We arrived at about 7 p.m. on Wednesday evening, and the house was packed with a pretty long line up to the counter.

If you've never eaten at Cupini's before, you should expect a deli-style experience. You walk up to the counter, give your order, then go grab a table or booth and wait for your order to be delivered. A lot like Jason's Deli.

The long line was good for two reasons. One, it showed me that this is already a popular place and that a lot of people like the food. Two, it gave me a chance to look through the extensive menu of pastas, sandwiches, pizzas, salads, soups and all of the options and combinations thereof.

Unfortunately, it eventually became apparent that the staff was still shaking down their kitchen routines. The wait in line began to feel a little long, and I found myself ordering about 10 minutes after it felt like I should have.

After finishing the order I joined by Supermodel Wife and kid back at the booth the had staked out. Again, the combination of a kitchen staff in training and a super busy restaurant made for a rather long wait.

I think the long waits will be temporary and go away after a week or so. Luckily, the wait staff was very friendly. They stopped by to chat, recognized out kindergartner was starving and offered some complimentary bread sticks.

We also exchanged friendly words with fellow diners, all of whom seemed to be happy with the restaurant and patient with the opening week snafus.

The food itself, when it arrived, was delicious. I had the Chicken/Prosciutto Tortellini. It came as a large portion with a cheesy tomato sauce. The noodles were perfectly cooked and the prosciutto/chicken filling was delicious. My Supermodel Wife had a custom pizza. I don't remember the toppings she chose, but I do remember that it was delicious two day's later when I ate it as leftovers for lunch.

Cupini's also serves breakfast. I haven't sampled any of their breakfast sandwiches, though we did grab a blueberry scone to take home for breakfast the next day. It kept well overnight, so I'm hoping to hit them up for a more substantial breakfast in the future. Hopefully I'll have better luck that my neighbors.

tagged: food, restaurant, Cupini's, Johnson County, review

Protesters are sore losers.

After an afternoon and evening of drinking heavily, I accidentally let myself watch the local news last night on KMBC.

I was Larry Mooretified to see a propaganda piece about a group of corporately backed local "activists" as they were "protesting" the "closing" of a KCK "school."

These "schoolbaggers" as we shall call them, are suddenly all up in arms and picketing because they don't want the school district to close their neighborhood school, Morris Elementary.

As one "concerned" parent put it, "We feel that we need our school, our students need our school, our community needs our school."

To which I reply, "Yeah. Right."

Where were these people four years ago? They're late to the party. If they want to save their school, they should have been protesting two, four and six years ago when the school district was working on its budget.

Today, these selfish, greedy parents are overestimating the attendance of other selfish, greedy schoolbagger zombies at their inherently racist "School protests."

Ostensibly the parties protested the use of taxpayer money to not bail out a local school in danger of financial collapse.

Just ask yourself why they waited to do these protests when a black man was president. It's obviously racist.

If you want to demonstrate to save your school, then fine. But they should’ve done it under President Bush, too. That they waited tells you what the protests were really about.

tagged: protest, Kansas City, politics

YouTube Tuesday: Mean Janeane

Today's YouTube Tuesday is brought to you at the suggestion of Xavier Onasizzle, who pointed out what a mental giant Janeane Garofalo is.

Not only is she versed in the finer points of pseudoscience she also very capably demonstrates that pontificating on the partisan cable news media need not be brain surgery.



Personally, I maintain that the only value of shows like Olberman's and O'Reily's is to try to perpetuate the myth of the two-party system. The hypocrisy demonstrated here pretty much supports my point.

tagged: YouTube, Olberman, Janeane Garofalo, O'Reilly, hypocrisy, policy

TEA P.O.'d

Maybe you guys can help me understand something here. (I doubt it. I'm pretty thick-skulled about a lot of things. But when you need enlightenment, what better place to turn to than the anonymous Inkernetz).

Hold on a sec while I finish listening to this Springsteen song on my iPod. (Ah yes, at some level everybody DOES have a hu-hu-hung-er-y heart). Okay, now back to our regularly scheduled blog post.

So Tax Day 2009 was quite the event this year. Finally after years of liberals and Democrats telling the country we're wasting money, some people from across the political aisle listened and came out to peacefully demonstrate and to agree and to say that, hey maybe we need to take a look at what we're spending our kids', grandkids' and great grandkids' and their great-great grandkids' money on.

Seems sensible to me. Seems like finally a lot of people are getting on the same page.

To be honest I was surprised by the demonstrations. It gave me the teeniest, tiniest ghost of a shred of hope that maybe our society might not go completely down the crapper.

(Of course, I still maintain that it's too late, that we've already passed the event horizon into the black hole of cultural decline. We already have achieved the critical mass of people in our country who have learned that it's easier to vote themselves somebody else's money that to take personal responsibility for themselves and their community.)

But a lot of the responses to the Taxed Enough Already demonstrations kind of surprised me when I read them. I'm not talking about the unclever, sophomoric sexual innuendos. I completely expected those from the Internet. Hell, I applaud them. I think that sort of thing is the highest calling of Internet self-publishing.

What I didn't expect was for people who for years complained about runaway spending when it comes to fake wars, have suddenly gone quiet when it comes to wasting an order of magnitude MORE money.

Did I say they've gone quiet? Let me correct myself. They're actually criticizing the very people who are agreeing with them.

Today, these selfish, greedy conservatives are overestimating the attendance of other selfish, greedy, brainless Fox-Zombies at their inherently racist "Tea Parties".

Ostensibly the parties protested the massive expansion of government, the accompanying growth of the federal budget and, not least, the use of taxpayer money to bail out private individuals and businesses in danger of financial collapse. These events may well be worthy of protest — and vigorous dissent is a vital, necessary part of the American tradition — but they were happening five months ago. Conservatives were not massing in the streets then, however.

My suspicion is that, as usual, this comes down to partisan politics. The partisans on one side are pissed at the partisans on the other side for doing the exact same thing they used to do. The sides are interchangeable.

It's noteworthy (but not surprising) that despite Mr. Obama's promises to "change the way things are done" and the blind faith placed in him by so many back in November of last year, nothing has changed except for the all-too predictable role reversal.

Anyway, I'm trying to figure out what is the point of people who ask "Where the fuck were these people eight years ago? Seriously, these tea-baggers are late to the party." (This seems to be a standard talking point for one side of the partisan coin).

My first response is "Who cares!" As long as they are now upset enough to say something...

The other answer I would suggest is that the issue might be one of scale. Perhaps the people who were only disgruntled at paying $670 billion for a war that accomplishes nothing have crossed into outrage at ponying up $11.6 Trillion for all of the various bailouts, kickbacks and scams that have come out of the last six or seven months.

FYI, that $11.6 Trillion is enough to pay for SEVENTEEN IRAQ WARS!

Ah yes. It all comes down to money for the partisans. Not how much there is, but who gets to spend it and from whom they take it.

Perhaps The Boss was right after all. Lay down your money and you'll play your part. Everybody's got a hungry heart.

tagged: Iraq, Tea Party, Tea bagger, tax, Obama, Bush, bailout

Tax advice

tagged: taxes, America, tax freedom, government, pork spending, satire

Proud to pay my taxes

I had this post planned for a couple of weeks, but that crafty Kansas Jackass kind of beat me to the mule kick. But I decided to go ahead and post it since it's so important.

As most of you fine citizens know, today is an important day for our country - in fact, I think it is probably THE most important day of the year. It's the day when all of the good people of our Republic can celebrate their participation in society by giving back to our Awesome Government the money that it so graciously allowed us to use over the previous year.

I know it has become kind of a fad recently in some circles to look at Tax Day in derogatory terms, to try to view taxation as a burden rather than the privilege that is.

As KJ rightly points out, it is an honor for us as citizens of a great nation to work so hard day in and day out for our Awesome Government's beneficent bureaucracy.

It's true that due to recent economic troubles, Tax Freedom Day came early this year. Unfortunately, this means that we worker bees only contributed everything we earned through April 13 to our Awesome Government. Luckily, as our Awesome Government commits more and more money to various projects, our children and grandchildren can look forward to the satisfaction of contributing much more of their earnings to our Awesome Government.

And even though only three and a half months of our hard work went to our Awesome Government this year, it's important to remember, comrades, everything that our hard work and effort pays for.

Think of all those poor, destitute investment bankers who, but for the support we give them through our Awesome Government, face the prospect of a harrowing life without multimillion dollar performance bonuses.

Or, consider the plight of the U.S. auto industry. Without government money provided by us, we might have to go without a source of overly priced, low-quality inefficient automobiles. My friends, that's not the America I want to live in.

And I hate to even consider where the citizens of less-fortunate countries would be without the good people of the U.S.A. and it's totally Awesome Government looking out for them. And closer to home, thanks to such a kind and caring Awesome Government, we don't have to worry about taking care of the poor and hungry people in our own community, because the Awesome Government has programs to take care of them as well.

There are many other examples of worthwhile contributions made by our Awesome Government on our behalf:

• $1.7 million sent to Iowa to determine why pigs stink
• $4.4 million for a military grade stereo (for the Army Center of Excellence in Acoustics)
• $2.4 for a vacuum packed life raft

When I think of all the great things our Awesome Government does with the money I earn for it, i get teary eyed. It may sound trite and platitudinous to say it, but I'm proud to live in a country where so much is taken from so many to pay for so little.


tagged: taxes, America, tax freedom, government, pork spending, satire