I’m wondering if there has been any research done on the change in behavior patterns of women who have just turned 40. My wife of nearly 13 years always seemed to scoff at my strange sense of humor. She would shake her head and express dismay at much of what I found funny. The tide seems to be turning. Lately, I can be in some part of the house, and suddenly I’ll hear a booming “Get in my belly” come from my normally sedate wife. For some reason, she has gotten a big kick out of the commercial that is running with Mike Meyer’s Fat B*****d character from the Austin Power’s movies. Whenever the commercial comes on now, whoever is watching it will crank up the volume so that everyone in the house can hear it. I guess sense of humor can be impacted environmentally and that it’s not all genetic.  

Wow, I couldn't publish the real name of the character the first time, quite the language filter on this site.

From Fox News web site’s ‘Out There’ section:

Goose on the Loose? Call in the Collies

GREENWICH, Conn. (AP) — Annoyed by the mess that geese leave on town beaches and park lawns, the town has hired a company to harass them until they move elsewhere. Geese Relief, a Norwalk-based company, is receiving $5,000 under a preliminary contract, and town officials are drawing up a full-year pact. Company owner Chris Santopietro's border collies have spent the past few weeks finding and chasing the Canadian geese out of town parks and off beaches. The work will take place nearly year-round, except in winter's coldest months. The idea is to harass the geese until they return to Long Island Sound. "You have to be more persistent than the geese and it's not a quick cure — it's an ongoing thing," Santopietro told The Greenwich Time. Last year, Greenwich started using border collies to control the non-migratory Canadian geese. But the college students in charge of the dogs returned to school, so the town decided to hire the company as a longer-term solution. "We want them indoctrinated, to continually think that they're not safe here," Town Conservation Director Denise Savageau said of the geese.

Hmmm. Do you think this tactic might work with liberals? The next time Cindy Sheehan and her ilk start camping out around the President, just send in the border collies. Or, the next time a large group of law-breaking illegal aliens gather together to stomp on our laws and the constitution, send in the border collies. Or, when you get a group of PETA nutcases standing outside a KFC restaurant bemoaning the horrendous life of chickens, send in the border collies.

The good news, judging from the blue/red state maps, is that we wouldn’t need to have these collie patrols all over the country; but we could concentrate them in certain areas in the beginning. I’d say we could start with a team in the Berkley/San Francisco area of California; and a second major patrol in Massachusetts. It’s possible we might be able to force a boatload of liberals to leave for Canada, Cuba, Syria, or any other terrorist supporting nation that would welcome liberal thinkers with open arms as their comrades.

We sure picked a lousy weekend to go camping. All the pertinent weather stats pointed to stay at home in your central air conditioning and veg out with a good book or movie. We decided to go for it; and I, unfortunately, paid the price. The case of heat exhaustion was not too serious, but enough that I felt fairly crappy over the last few days.

Although we are not very experienced campers, my wife and I learned a very valuable lesson on camping very early in our relationship---why travel seven hours to a state campground when you can go ten minutes from home and enjoy all the same benefits at a county campground? Yes, we had actually driven about 7 hours to this state park; then, sat in our tent as it rained for 2 straight days. We eventually just threw everything into the back of our Bronco and drove home. The vow has held; now we just go ten minutes to Baker Park Reserve and camp out. The trees are just as green and lush, the facilities are first class, the lake is just as beautiful as any other, and the camp fire is just as mesmerizing as if we were hours away.

So far we’ve only camped out 1 or 2 days at a time. Our real test will be coming up at the end of August. We plan to visit Custer State Park in South Dakota and camp out for 5 days. We’ll see how hardy our family is then.

Remember Samuel L Jackson’s great line (I can’t remember the movie, but I loved the line) “Don’t make assumptions, when you do you make an ass out of you and of umption.” I thought about my last post and realized that I could not be positive that the idiot letter writer was actually a liberal; but, let me explain my reasoning.

It was in the Star Tribune, which generally prints a ratio of about nine liberal letters to one conservative. The guy was whining, and in particular about some trivial matter, so that would immediately point to a liberal. His logic seemed to be that the couple of hundred hot dogs eaten during the contest could have saved all the starving people of Africa; so, flawed logic is another positive indicator of him being a liberal. Then you have the concept of messages being sent; a liberal definitely loves to send messages, such as---I am tolerant, but you’re a racist, hate-filled, homophobic pig if you don’t think exactly like I do.

Anyway, the guy may have been a conservative; but, I doubt it. Speaking of the Star Tribune editorial board---I’ve sent in a number of letters to the editor stating a conservative position and have had 3 published; in each case the content of my letter was so butchered and edited down that my main point was unrecognizable. That’s the way the Star Tribune provides opposing viewpoints to their left wing agenda.

I just read in the “Out There” section on the Fox News web site that a Mr. Anthony Salaz just won the World Championship Buffalo Chip Toss, which is held in Chaldon Nebraska; my heartfelt congratulations and kudos to Mr. Salaz.

The reason I bring this up is because there was a recent ‘letter to the editor’ sent in to the Minneapolis Star Tribune in which a person complained about the show of gluttony and the bad messages being sent during the annual Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest.

What is it with liberals? Can’t they ever lighten up? Is life so miserable for them that the thought of seeing other people enjoy doing something off-beat and fun, especially if it involves some sort of competition, will send them off the deep end?

I can see this guy sending in a letter to Chaldon’s newspaper. Didn’t they use to use these chips as some type of fuel source; he’d probably complain about the waste of natural resources and how this could possibly be a replacement for oil and then we could get out of Iraq. He’d probably go on to demonstrate how George Bush and the administration were holding back on using buffalo chips as an energy resource because they’re part of a conspiracy to make billions for themselves and big corporations.

Next he’ll be complaining about the Betty Crocker Bake-Off; then it will be tirades against the Pinewood Derby because they’re using wood and destroying our forests; then it will be, God forbid, egg-toss competitions at community picnics, what a waste of our fowl resources.

Studies show that conservatives tend to be happier and live longer than liberals. With examples like this bozo, and many, many others like him, I can believe it.

Minnesota, what does the state conjure up in your mind? Lakes, the Vikings, Hubert Humphrey, Liberals. My guess is that many people around the nation view MN as a die hard Blue State, but they could not be further from the truth. Unlike Massachusetts, which has punished the rest of America by subjecting us to decades of Kerry and Kennedy ( I think MA voters should receive a lifetime idiocy award by some organization), at least MN voters have voted in a Republican now and then to the Senate.

I can go even further to prove we’re not as blue as most people think, including a lot of Minnesotans. Let’s look at the last election. My county, Wright (ergo the blog name), voted for President Bush in the last election, along with 61 out of 87 other counties in this state. Kerry won Hennepin County, which includes Minneapolis, by 128,000 votes; but, he only won the state by 98,000 votes. That would indicate to me that the president won the rest of the state by 30,000 votes. John Kerry basically won one major county in the state, and Minnesota liberals were drooling over themselves about how proud they were that the state went to Kerry.

Well, Minneapolis is basically filled with your typical urban liberals, i.e. race-card playing, intolerant, anti-Christian, heterophobic twits. The rest of the state is basically filled with tolerant, right-leaning, hard-working, conservative families that have nothing in common with the Minneapoltwits.

All right, we did vote in Jesse Ventura as governor for one term, even Einstein probably did some stupid things in his life; but, we did bounce back and elect a republican again right after that. Anyway, when you think about Minnesota in the future, think about great hunting and fishing, the beautiful Norwegian Riviera along the shore of Lake Superior, Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox; anything but the fallacy that we are some bastion of liberalism in the Great White North.

Fine Lines---you find them everywhere in life. There are fine lines between amusing and annoying, confident and arrogant, and between daring and dead. (or brain damaged, or paralyzed) I am referring to the situation of Pittsburgh Steelers QB Ben Roethlisberger, who just had a motorcycle accident and needed seven hours of facial surgery.

Evidently Ben was not wearing a helmet, and this accident occurred after admonitions from his coaches and friends that if he was going to ride he should wear one. Terry Bradshaw actually told him to put off riding his motorcycle altogether, at least until he was done playing pro football. Now, the point of this is not to accuse or defend this guy on any level---my concern is how it relates to raising our own children, and the fine line between being cautious and overly-cautious in how we let them live their lives.

I admit I have struggled with the helmet wearing issue with our kids. My wife is adamantly in favor of the helmet rules, and she enforces it strictly with our kids—whether they’re on their bikes, or the new electric scooters they got from grandma and grandpa. I will back her up with this rule; but I don’t get quite as worked up about it if I catch them not wearing it. I never wore one when I was a kid; of course we did a lot of things when we were kids which are frowned upon in this day and age.

I remember loving to jump off the 12 foot diving board at our local swimming pool. It was actually a rite of passage. When I climbed that ladder up to the top and made my first jump, there were about 10 of my friends there to watch, and the congratulations and celebrating afterward was great. I had a friend of mine who actually fell off the board one day and broke his arm. His parents took him to the doctor, they put a cast on it, and probably told him to be more careful. They didn’t sue anyone; the irresponsibility was put on their kid. You don’t see 12 foot, or 3 foot, diving boards at pools anymore; why, because some idiot parents sued a whole community because their kids were stupid enough to get hurt.

I remember leaving in the morning to play baseball, and coming home six hours later to eat something. Today, we send our daughter out with a walkie-talkie and tell her to check-in and let us know exactly where she’s at; and that’s when she’s just going a few blocks from home.

I could beat this into the bushes; but you know what I’m talking about. We all want our kids safe and unharmed from dangers in this world; but it’s a fine line between keeping them safe and not allowing them the freedom to explore and overcome fears and succeed in those little rites of passage that we enjoyed when we were kids. It was scary seeing my son climb up 20 feet into the tree next to our house; but what a joy it was to see the look on his face when he made it back down and took that final giant leap for mankind that brought him into the company of millions of kids who climbed trees before him.

Little League Baseball---hearing those words conjures up great memories from my childhood. My summers were consumed with baseball from the age of 5 to 18. This year my son decided to play again after a 5 year hiatus; he hasn’t played since t-ball. Well, after 6 games I’m a lot less enthusiastic and almost to the point of finding it excruciatingly painful to watch.

My son is doing great as far as I’m concerned. He’s made some nice fielding plays; he has struck out a number of times, but man he’s aggressive and takes his whacks; he’s shown a great attitude in the disappointments. The problem is that the team has no wins and has been outscored about 180-30. The frustrating part is that of the 180, about 150 of the runs scored have been in this mode: walk-stolen bases-passed ball-score. His team does not have one kid who can throw the ball over the plate consistently. Every other team has at least one or two kids who can at least keep it in the catcher’s range.

Naturally, my recollection is that we played a whole lot better back when; of course playing baseball was all we had to do growing up in Apple Valley in the 60’s. We were a housing development surrounded by a sea of corn fields back then. My son is turning 11 and has played 6 games and has 4-5 practices under his belt. When I turned 11, I had probably played about 150 games of organized ball, and probably about 2000 hours of unorganized ball. We played hardball, softball, mushball, whiffleball, rubberball; if it was round and we had a bat, we played ball with it, that’s what we did every day of the summer.

This summer my son is playing baseball; then he’s going to play some soccer, he has Boy Scouts on Monday and will be going to camp for a week in July; he has church group on Wednesdays and they’re going camping and rafting; we have him enrolled in YMCA day camps throughout the summer; he has flute lessons on a weekly basis; he’ll be going to library at the park activities; there’s a swimming pool two blocks away, and he loves to swim; he has his PS2 and is on about the 15^th level of flying an F16 in combat. There’s certainly no shortage of things to fill up his days.

I’m just going to continue to go and cheer my son and his team on; even though deep inside I’m wishing I was 11 again. It’s like the Springsteen song—Glory Days; they pass us by, but they still live in our minds.

Did Saddam Hussein have WMD’s stockpiled prior to the invasion? Should we consider amnesty for the up to 12 million illegal aliens currently residing in the U.S.? Will Al Gore be remembered as a modern day Paul Revere, warning us of the impending doom of global warming; or, is he a total nutcase and more likely to remembered as the Chicken Little of our time?

If you want answers to these questions and cutting edge analysis of modern events---go visit Hugh Hewitt, Powerline, or any of the other thousands of blogs where people are more intelligent than I am. What I want to know is, “Why do birds suddenly appear, anytime you are near?”

I don’t spend my time thinking and worrying about whether CO2 emissions are going to kill off the lemur population of Indonesia over the next 10,000 years. I do however spend time thinking about things such as how the songwriters came up with such a goofy phrase, and why is it that some human beings love the song---Close to You, and others may absolutely detest it.

In my humble opinion, the gulf that exists between a liberal and a conservative is not nearly as wide as the gulf between people in regards to their taste in any of the arts. Case in point—Crucifix in a glass full of piss. On one hand, you have some snob who can give a twenty minute recitation on the underlying theme and cultural impact that this great work of art has wrought upon humanity. These people consider themselves culturally superior to the vast majority. On the other hand, those of us who do spend most of our lives on planet earth look at this piece of junk (art), and wonder what kind of drugs this artist was taking, and how could this con-artist possibly make money doing something that a six year old might come up with on a boring summer day.

To paraphrase that great entrepreneur, PT Barnum, there’s a liberal art lover born every minute. I haven’t decided on the exact theme of this blog as of yet, but you can bet your sweet bippy that highlighting the insanity and inanity of the left is going to be foremost in a lot of my writing.