EckerNet.Com

Sweet it would only take 210.96 cans of Mountain Dew for me to die by caffeine overdose. Which considering the amount of caffeine I’ve drank to stay lucid today…I’m not too far away.

Find out how much it would take for you to die by caffeine.

You gotta love when columnists accidentally reveal their all too obvious bias’ in their “news” articles. For example, take this from an article about a “transgendered” chick that was trying to run for Prom King at her High School.

The would-be king, Cinthia Covarrubias, considers herself transgender, a term for people whose gender identity or expression differs from the sex they were assigned at birth.

You get that all you public school graduates?? We aren’t actually born a certain gender according to whether we have a penis or not. We’re “assigned” a gender. I’m envisioning this complex quota system, and if you’re assigned “male” they take a state-issued penis and stitch it on, in an amazing feat of cosmetic surgery. How this might have been accomplished back before modern surgical procedures is not yet known.

However, in the utopian world of liberals this is roughly how I see the modern delivery room working

Mom-To-Be : ARGH!!!! John I’m gonna kill you!!! You did this to me you bastard!!!

Dad-To-Be : Sorry dear. Now breath, push, go team!

Doctor : Ahhhh, there we go….your baby.

Mom : What is it doc??

Doctor : I’m not sure yet, I have to consult my chart

Dad : Don’t suppose I could slip you a fiver for a son eh??

Doctor : I’m sure that could be arranged. For a ten spot I’ll make sure it’s a big one

Dad : Sure thing

[ Doc pulls a government-approved penis out of cold storage ]

Doctor : Here we go, now let’s get this monster attached

[ Hospital Administrator rushes into room ]

Administrator : Doc, did you assign their baby yet???

Doc : Well, sorta, I just started stitching this thing on

Administrator : Damn! First of all we’re already at our government approved quota of boys. Plus, I just got a call, our penis delivery truck overturned in Pittsburgh. More dicks on the road than usual in that city now.

Doc : Well shit, what do you want me to do?? I already got this thing almost attached.

Administrator : Well, could we make it into a hermaphrodite? At least we don’t go over out quota then.

Doc : Sure thing!

[Mom and Dad faint ]

You know, one almost wishes this whole “gender assignment” thing was true. Then under China’s “one child” policy, families wouldn’t have found it tempting to kill their daughters. They could have just asked the hospital to “assign” them a son instead. How convenient.

It’s Back!! The Rankings Are As Follows:

• Triple “I Whine Like A Child” A : 5
• Dan S : 3
• NightWriter : 3
• Aelfheld : 2
• Sola-Man : 2
• Mall Diva : 2
• Bobby_B : 2
• Harvey : 1
• Bogus Doug : 1
• tommy g : 1
• spurringirl : 1
• Drunkguy : 1

For this contest you get to make up your own answers!! That’s right…just pretend you’re a real life journalist and just make shit up. Post answers in the comments. They will be judged on creativity, plausibility and humor.

Question : What dangerous foe is about to be vanquished by the heroic CD Knight?

Previous contests:

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10, Part 11, Part 12, Part 13, Part 14, Part 15, Part 16, Part 17, Part 18, Part 19, Part 20, Part 21

Today was dedicated to working on some Senate District stuff, which was made easier by the fact that it’s been raining all day.  Honestly I had meant to accomplish more today, but I’ve been meaning to do a complete redesign of the SD37 website.  The current one was really just a temporary placeholder and I’ve never really been happy with it.  But I wanted to wait until after the 2007 convention so I knew who the new officers were and what our plans were for the future.  Knowing that I’m trying to move ahead.

Unfortunately, for what I have in mind, a simple website wasn’t gonna do, so Wordpress, static HTML, and anything else I’ve familiar with wasn’t gonna work.  I decided to go with Joomla, a platform I’m entirely unfamiliar with.  And apparently it’s also not entirely intuitive as it took alot of research to answer some simple questions.  I’m getting the sense that the programs motto should be “If you don’t already know the answer, you shouldn’t be asking the question“.  If anyone is real familiar with this platform, by all means let me know.

Plus I had to do some some work on the Shelley Madore site and general stuff.  Quite a few things came together on that front this week.  I literature drop was completed, plus a range of material went out in the mail.  The topics were varied and I won’t go into it, but the end result being that I had to have the Shelley Madore site in better condition than my 60+ hour work weeks have allowed lately.

Hopefully my time will be my own again soon.  But until then I’ll keep you all occupied with the return of the EckerNet Super-Cool Exciting Contests!

I’ve purposely refrained from commenting on the Virginia Tech shootings because in the first 24 hours, pretty much anything you hear from anybody is suspect. It takes time to put a coherent picture of what the hell happened together. I think we’re just starting to see the beginning glimpses of that coherent picture….or at least news reports are starting to contradict themselves slightly less.

Now while the tragedy is disturbing enough, I can’t help but be a little unnerved by the inevitable “what now” conversations. I understand that it’s only natural to ask how this happened, and from there it’s only logical to ask how to keep it from happening again. But just as it’s wise to wait until a coherent picture is formed of what happened, it’s also wise to wait until emotions calm down in order to make conclusions on where to go in the future.

Currently the scapegoats appear to be the police and the university dean. And I see lots of “experts” evangelizing ideas on what we should do to prevent it from happening again. I got news for those people.

If we truly want a free society, where individual liberties are secure and plentiful. If this is truly the model of society we pursue, there is little or nothing we can do to prevent this sort of thing.

It’s a sad truth to face, but life is rarely fair and seldom easy.

Those of you that need the government to run your life for you and make all the difficult decisions and care for your from the cradle to the grave, that was your cue to panic.

For the rest of you, hello. Sit down, I have a suggestion…..personal responsibility. It’s time to accept the fact that the government can’t protect you from everything and to make preparations with that idea in mind. Let’s examine every major tragedy in your lifetime…they all have a common theme. The authorities weren’t able to prevent it, but they were around afterwards to help clean up the mess. Until that time you’re on your own. Internalize that for a second.

In tragedies, there are frequently cases where victims, knowing this, took their fate into their own hands and sought to improve their situation. It’s worth noting that there have been more than one mass shooting, similiar to Virginia Tech, where individuals took up arms and defending those around them. In the February mall shooting, an off-duty cop with his gun took out the shooter. In 2002, the shooter at Appalachian Law School was killed by a student with a gun. In 1997, at Pearl High, the killer was subdued by a vice principal with a pistol.

There will be those who claim we need less guns, not more! Might I remind that that at Virginia Tech they already had rules preventing guns on campus. As a result the only person with means to take action against a shooter, was the shooter himself. Had just one student in this building been armed and had the cahones to act, the death toll could have been significantly reduced.

There will be those who claim that only police should have the guns. Well, the police aren’t always gonna be there. And even when they get there, it takes them time to figure out what has happened, what is going on, and what to do about it. Or sure as shit they will have people criticizing their actions….for evidence of that, turn on the TV.

However, there are people that are already on scene, that are well aware of what has happened, what is happening and what needs to be done about it. That’s the victims. And to a criminal there is nothing more dangerous than an armed victim.

….almost literally….

Wow…

Asked about abortion, he said, “Our party has to get beyond issues like that.”- Rudy Giuliani

Yes because life and death is something we can just “get over”….smooth Rudy, smooth.

Sorry, but you’ll have to make do with what I put up tonite. EckerNet took a impromptu night off.

First of all, I left work early….which after many weeks of mandatory overtime was a welcome reprive. Then we had a rather successful Senate District meeting tonite that accomplished quite a bit and it was nice to see things starting to pull together. Then we managed to convince most of our district to stick around and stuff 11,000 envelopes. Nice! Then a couple of us stopped off at a local pub and watched the Wild kick the crap out of the quackers. Then one of my fellow Senate Districts officers played the role of the evangelist and had an audience at the bar virtually eating out of his hand.

Altogether I could think of worse ways to spend my evening….for example, how I normally would have spent it….at work in an underground lab trying to figure out things like client ring overflows and other such technical BS.

Now most people I know don’t read legal briefs or pending legislation for fun. I know a few that do but for the most part I also consider their mental stability on par with a drunken Kennedys driving ability. There are a multitude of reasons, but mostly because they are boring and they are written in legalese that most people can’t decipher.

Hell, I know some lawmakers that aren’t entirely certain what they are reading on some occasions, which I’m not sure makes me feel any better when I have difficult figuring out the raw text of pending legislation, rather then the mass media’s summary of it.

With that in mind, I am 100% behind this judge and hope that his idea catches on….as soon as humanly possible.

Odds are good Judge Mark Painter is the nation’s only judge whose recent legal opinions quote Humpty Dumpty, the movie “Office Space” and a comedian known to his fans as “Tater Salad.”

“My passion is improving legal writing,” Painter said. “Too often, judges and lawyers just write for each other. They use so much legalese, you get to the end and you don’t know what happened.”

Like-minded lawyers and academics have dubbed their campaign “The Plain English Movement,” which favors footnotes, shorter sentences and the elimination of at least some centuries-old terminology.

“A lot of legal writing is done by using forms that were designed by people who died many years ago, and deservedly so,” said Steven Johansen, a board member of the Legal Writing Institute.

If humor helps make the point, Painter said he’s all for it. Still, he doesn’t want that to overshadow his goal of changing the way lawyers write.

“Every case involves people, lay people,” Painter said. “I think they should be able to understand what’s happening to them.”

God bless you sir!! Common sense and public service have finally merged. What oh what could possibly happen next.

Oh look!!! A flying pig!! That might seem strange but I just heard that four horsemen were just spotted in Times Square and they were bitching that Lucifer is looking for a deal on a furnace.

How nice would it be if you could finally read an opinion and have it be perfectly 100% clear? And you might even enjoy reading it?? For example, one of my favorite lines from his opinions…

A quote from comedian Ron “Tater Salad” White in reference to a drunken driving case: “Clearly (he) had the right to remain silent, but not the ability.”

Cartoons kick ass…