Every once in a while, I stop to think about how much has changed in the relatively short time that has been my life (so far). Oh, there’s bad shit, yeah, but there’s good shit, too. Or pretty interesting shit, at least.

I mean, when I was a kid, TV was black and white, and there was only AM radio (now, there might have been FM at the time, but not up here that I recall). When FM finally rolled around, there weren’t many stations, but damned if there wasn’t a hell of a lot more to listen to. The best around here was WOUR, 96.9 in Utica, They played the kind of stuff you hear on the Technicolor Web of Sound (except, as we moved into the 70’s, we started to get into punk and ‘new wave’ and what was ‘alternative’ music before they coined the phrase), and lots of other nifty shit that you’d never have heard on AM (like anything longer than 3 minutes). Now, of course, radio mostly sucks here. That’s part of the bad shit.

But, check it out. Communications satellites were basically born when I was. If you wanted to have satellite communication, you had to do it when the bird was above the horizon in both places. Until they managed to get geostationary satellites in the air. Now, I get my teevee from a satellite (actually an array of four or five satellites). I get bummed out if I can’t get a decent wireless Internet connection, and I can’t remember the last time I was out of cell phone range.

Amazing how far things have come. But I still miss those early days of FM.

I was gonna just post Paris Hilton’s response to the McCain ad, but Soupy beat me to it last night. So, I got nothing. Speaking of Paris Hilton, it’s hump day. Go hump something.

Oh, what the hell. In case you missed it….

Well, let’s see…. I have to be careful what I write, ‘cuz if I write something nice about the wrong person, all hell will break loose. And we wouldn’t want that.

I could tell you how shitty things have been going for me lately, and how I really don’t need any additional bullshit in my life. But that would be boring and self-indulgent, and while I’m perfectly happy to be one or the other, I’d prefer to not be both at the same time.

So, instead, I’ll just wish my wife a Happy Birthday. Hard to believe she’s 29 already. Doesn’t look a day over 25.

Happy Birthday, Granny. :cake: I don’t know what I’d have done without you the past 11 or 12 or whatever years it’s been.

Leo and Scorpio. Either a match made in heaven, or a scary, scary mix. Sometimes both, all at the same time (mamas, don’t let your babies grow up to be Scorpios).

Oh, and Happy Birthday to my brother Tim, too, who is exactly one year older than Granny (which makes him 30, I guess). :cake:

Today is the 47th birthday of Barack ‘Barry’ Hussein Obama, the presumptive (presumptuous?) presidential nominee of the Democratic Party for 2008. I hope it is a great one for him. It just might be his last for a while.

I do wish that it might not be the last great one he has for 8 years because his own wish for himself is for something I expect to be demanding and thankless and maybe impossible. He wants to bite off a huge challenge taking the helm of a once great nation that has been plundered and violated and driven into a ditch by a bunch of thugs and gangsters who will likely be long gone, unreachable, and held unaccountable when Presumident Obama and the rest of us try to see what we have left, what can be fixed and saved, or what the hell we can do.

I hope he has a good one today. I hope after 8 tough years he will be leaving the office intact with a tremendous amount of pride and deserved adulation and thanks for having saved the country and maybe the world. He will only be around my age then with a couple of teenage daughters and wife Michelle. He seems to like to take care of himself so maybe the presidency will not exact the same toll on him that it has on others. Then he can just move on to that organic arugula farm and drink exotic teas and hopefully the rest of us will be in higher cotton.

I wish him well in all of his Obamagance as I also hope for the best for all of us.

Thanks to the R’n’R Historian in Berlin for pointing to the artist Juke for this image.

:cake:

Today on Press the Meat, it’s whiny little conniving piece of crap Joe Lieberman, acting as head cheerleader (that’d be the one with the knee pads) for Grumpy old John McCain, and John Kerry. Plus, at the roundtable, it’s Andrea Mitchell (cutting her a little slack this week), piece of crap Mike Murphy, Chuckie Todd & Judy Woodruff.

Over at Faze the Nation, Bobby Schieffer hosts somebody who know something about economics (Robert Rubin), and somebody who doesn’t know shit about the economy (McCain ecoomic adviser, Carly Fiorina).

On Fux News Sunday, Weaselface Wallace gets li’l Lindsey Graham to come out of his closet for an interview, along with Tom Daschle, and this week’s Power Player, Ashley Judd. Plus the usual fuxheads, of course.

At the Goebbels network, George Snufalufagus hosts fancy Nancy Pelosi and rigid Tom Ridge. Plus there’s a roundtable of David Gergen, ABC News hack Jake “the snake” Tapper, political mastermind Donna Brazile, and of course George :jerk: Will.

CNN’s Late Emission includes on-again/off-again Democrat Claire McCaskill, Ohio organized crime members Rob Portman and Kenny “why isn’t this guy in jail yet” Blackwell, Maj. Gen. Mark Hertling (commander of U.S. forces in northern Iraq), Israeli foreign minister Tzipi Livni (great name), James K. Glassman, undersecretary of state (not a position I’d care to be in) for public diplomacy and public affairs, and one shill each from the Obama and McCain campaigns.

Later, on 60 Minutes, Steve Kroft does a double-length segment on the Kingdom of Dubai, and Morley Safer does a story on some guy who does statistical analysis for the Boston Red Sox. Oh boy.

Have a good Sunday. Damn, these weekends go too fast.

Ah, thanks to Melina and Vernon for giving me three days in a row off from trying to think of something interesting to say. You might think that would mean I’d be able to jump in with something witty and charming today. You would, of course, be wrong.

Among all the other things that went on this week, you may or may not have noticed the launch of Cuil (pronounced “cool”). It’s an attempt by a bunch of ex-Google engineers to “out-Google” Google. They had a pretty successful pre-launch marketing campaign, I guess. So successful that the site crashed and burned when reviewers and other curious folks went to the site to see how it matched up to the other search sites out there.

I have my own methods for testing search sites, so I set out to evaluate Cuil. Up first, the weaselface wallace test. Search for that at Google, and you get, well, this site first, and then links to other sites where people apparently posted Booblehead threads to other blogs and whatnot (rather flattering, actually). Search at Cuil, and you get, well, it says 32 hits, but it only provides one, which appaears to be a rip-off of the 6/18/07 booblehead thread, but when you click the link, it’s to a domain that’s not longer active. Not terribly impressive.

Next, I tried a search for ‘cokie “the hag” roberts’ on both sites. Google returned about 350 hits (we came in numbers 2 and 3). Cuil?

No results were found for: cokie “the hag” roberts

OK. So maybe Cuil doesn’t do subtle. I figured I’d try something obvious: morning seditionists.

Google returned 9,270 results, with us (as you’d expect) at the top of the list. Cuil found 2,125 results, with lots of sites linking to ours, but, alas, didn’t actually return the site itself.

So, while I certainly think that competition is a good thing, I am quite sad to report that Cuil is not all that cool. In fact “cuil” returned over 2.5 million results at Google and less than 125,00 results from Cuil, while “google” gets 517 million results returned at Cuil, and over 2.7 billion (with a “b”) at Google.

For now, Cuil fails to get our seal of approval, and Google remains the Morning Seditionists’ official unofficial search engine.

Enjoy your Saturday.

It’s already August, the beginning of that last month of summer and a quick look reveals an interesting array of musical b’days today including AAR 1.0 great Chuck D, psychedelic music and cultural icon Jerry ‘Captain Trips’ Garcia, a fellow friend of the devil and my old brother of the new hip Ramblin’ Jack Elliott and latter day bluesman Robert Cray. Also rapper hair victim Coolio and Crow Counter Adam Durwitz as well as Oh Say Can You Francis Scott Key, Mother Jones and Moby ancestor Herman Melville. That reminds me, Yvonne DeCarlo was born today as well.

Progeny of the coolest Beatle Dhani Harrison was born on August 1 and for some reason seems to be releasing a debut album today of his group thenewno2, apparently only via iTunes which means that I won’t be getting it anytime soon. Hopefully someday…

PJ has thrown the floor open and I am answering the siren call as best as I can, which may leave a bit to be desired these days. First of all, it’s good to be back here after a crazy year plus of insanity, ending in…Well, it’s not over yet, is it? Check RIPCoco or Brilliant at Breakfast for some of my recent exploits and pursuits, saving lives and balancing needles on my eyeballs while leading the entire Ringling Brother’s Circus through the midtown tunnel on a unicycle. Suffice to say that I’ve suddenly got high blood pressure (due perhaps to Yaz, which is presented as a happy little pill and had this very dirty underside of brain explosion and all sorts of bad things that don’t look to be curable with oregano capsules,) so excuse me if I try to stay still so as not to throw a clot or something.

First of all and most importantly, this week all week, Brilliant at Breakfast is the featured blog feed on Sammy’s AAR Front page , so give Jill and the rest of us, (especially Sammy,) some hits and love, even if you have to hold your nose to do it. What a mess over there, huh?

Sunday Barack Obama appeared on the post Russert Press the Meat, featuring Tom Brokaw and a much more level headed discussion of world events than we have seen since Timmeuh decided to make it a regular brunch- with- McInsane showcase. I have to say that I don’t miss old Tim one little bit. Now if the other hyperbole oaf Tweety would fly away, we might start again to get some sort of news. Tho we may need to send Scarborough packing too (yes, I am an MSNBCoholic…is there any other news channel, except on weekends when we get legends and history and lockup 24/7?)

Obama is looking more and more presidential to me and also to grandpa, who even though he remains a bit confused from all the craziness of late, can still pick ‘em…., and he also has some answers to some of the hard questions, which leave McCain hemming and hawing. I’m disgusted by the press, as usual and always on the edge of calling it all a day and moving to VT or some liberal enclave, where I might build a solar house and hide out with my chickens and the boys until…well, forever, I guess.

The Maron man seems to be touring still though his page calendar is still back in May. I saw him in DC in the spring and he is doing just fine, in his way, though it’s surely his way…which is never the easy way.I hear a whisper of New York in August, so we’ll see… I am so hoping that something comes up on radio for him, because he is so fantastic at it; Sammy too. I really can’t put into words my deep disappointment in what has gone on. But I have to say that both of them are so talented that they will be working…it’s just that it may not be in a public forum where we can listen and interact with them. It seems to me that Sirius should hire them both. They have a dearth of good hosts and the only best thing I’ve heard there lately, besides Maron filling in for Hartman, was Ron Silver getting smacked down by Phil Donahue today. Someone really needs to take Silver off the radio. He is a freak!

And finally, yes Tweety did show this clip on his show Sunday, but its well worth posting here because it was one of the first things that grandpa and I have laughed at in a while. As an elderly Jew, Hi has battled back from the brink of death to, among other things, give Obama his vote! There is no upside to being 98 years old, but at least he should be allowed to see that he is able to leave some sort of future start taking shape after all hes seen in the last 100 odd years…

Today beloved Molly Ivins is 64 years old. Probably older than that but that is all I have to work with right now. I sure wish she was still hanging around and blessing us with her brilliance but she did plant enough seeds that we can try to imagine in our own minds and in our own ways. I particularly loved her description of Phil Gramm as a thumb with a face.

You can run your own searches on YouTube or Google and find a lot of great Molly memories so I will just try to insert this remembrance here.

Happy Birthday, Ms. Ivins!

I’ll be hoisting a couple of beverages with you today and shaking my head and rolling my eyes and hoping for the best.

So, the big exciting news from yesterday is that Syracuse, NY is officially on the list for HD locals before the end of the year. Hopefully in August. Other than that, another day in the life came and went. For something like the 17,434^th time.

Here’s to getting number 17,435 the hell over with, too.