aubreyturner.org

There was a Cabela’s circular in today’s mail touting their big gun show/sale this weekend.  While they had the usual complement of regular and synthetic-stocked hunting rifles, there were also a few in camouflage, such as the Remington Model R-15 VTR:

If there’s an aesthetic trend that I can’t stand, it’s camo on a gun.  It’s the ordnance equivalent of nails on a chalkboard to me.  I generally prefer wood stocks, although I don’t mind synthetics (and in some cases, some guns just cry out for synthetic stocks).  But as far as I’m concerned, camo is right out.  The only way I’d have a camo gun is if someone gave it to me.  And even then I’d probably have to think about it for a bit. 

Compare the above to this Remington Premier Competition STS:

I can’t help but find the STS much more pleasing to the eye.

I’ve noticed lately that spammers are hitting my contact form about twice a week.  What’s weird about it is that it just says something like “Buy <drug name>” or “Cheap <enhancement drug>”.  The notes don’t give any information about who is selling it or where to get it. 

And the comment spam I’m seeing is just about as useless.  Spam filtering techniques have gotten to the point where just about the only things that will get through are genuine human messages and complete garbage.  I’ve seen a few where it appeared people typed them up and just used the URL field to try to advertise their sites.  Others were filled with what appeared to be random gibberish with copious links to sites with URLs that looked like they were created by hitting a bunch of keys on a keyboard all at once.  What kind of sucker would click one of those links?

So if most of the spam lately doesn’t provide any good ways of getting the spammers into a search engine because it’s gibberish, or they can’t even list their site because of the filters, you really have to wonder why the spammers even bother anymore.  Is it sheer cussedness?  Are they up to something that they think will pay off in the long run?  Or are they just being annoying buggers for the heck of it?

My doorbell rang yesterday afternoon and when I opened the door I was confronted with a gang of four young moppets seeking donations for a walk-a-thon to benefit something-or-other to do with the local schools.  My first thought was that they obviously aren’t teaching reading since these girls ignored the giant “NO SOLICITORS” sign.  Or perhaps they don’t see it as soliciting.  My next thought was that I’d already given at the (tax collector’s) office, and rather generously at that.  But I just couldn’t bring myself to crush these eager young students with such thoughts. 

At this point I learned that I could either pledge a certain amount for each lap they walked or give a fixed amount.  I decided it would be simpler to just give them the money up front and the figure of $10.00 popped out of my brain as a seemingly reasonable figure.  Unfortunately, as I scanned my wallet, I determined that I had a couple of $20’s and a few $1’s.  I asked the lead moppet if she had any change and she replied that she did not.  So as I handed over the $20 I couldn’t help but think that not carrying any change is an effective strategy for driving up collections.

I once was told that I sounded like a radio announcer on a conference call, but today someone said I sounded like Gary Sinise.  I would have never thought of that, although frankly I couldn’t tell you one way or the other, since I’m trapped in here with my own voice and it never sounds the same from the inside as it does outside.  Of course, with all of the fungus and ragweed in the air lately there’s no telling what kind of voice will come out when I open my mouth to speak.

After weighing my choices as to whether to sit out the presidential vote or not, I’ve decided that for the first time since 1992 I am going to vote for the Democrat on the ticket.

Some of you may be gasping right now.  That’s OK.  It took me a while to come around to the decision to vote for McCain.  Oh…. you thought I was talking about Obama?  Heh.  He never had even a snowball’s chance in hell that I’d vote for him.  Now I’m not being completely facetious when I call McCain a Democrat.  He sounds a lot like the Democrat party of 20 or 30 years ago.  Not the quasi-socialist fringe leftists we are faced with today.  So it’s not so much that I fully support McCain but that I cannot sit by and allow Obama to gain access to the Presidency.  That way lies madness.

I’m not sure there’s a single policy of Obama’s that I agree with (or that doesn’t have me yelling expletives whenever I hear it), but of all his quasi-socialist baggage, it’s his anti-freedom, anti-gun stance that I find the most offensive.  Of course, Obama has been careful to try to work around his history on this, with weaselly statements about how he’s not going to take your ‘hunting guns.’  Which is double-speak for the fact that he is coming after everything else. 

I’ve noticed that both he and his supporters are quick to change the subject when guns come up.  I’ve been particularly fond of their tactic of insinuating that it’s stupid to care about guns when the economy is in such bad shape (Oh, but Obama supports the Second Amendment…. hey look… it’s a bank collapsing!).  But I use the issue of the right to keep and bear arms as the primary test of how a candidate views his fellow citizens, and whether he thinks them capable of any semblance of self-governance.  Only after he or she passes that test do I then consider all of the other issues. 

When anyone asks why I place so much emphasis on the right to keep and bear arms, I always end up referring back to an old essay by L. Neil Smith, entitled Why Did it Have to be … Guns?:

Over the past 30 years, I’ve been paid to write almost two million words, every one of which, sooner or later, came back to the issue of guns and gun-ownership. Naturally, I’ve thought about the issue a lot, and it has always determined the way I vote.

People accuse me of being a single-issue writer, a single- issue thinker, and a single- issue voter, but it isn’t true. What I’ve chosen, in a world where there’s never enough time and energy, is to focus on the one political issue which most clearly and unmistakably demonstrates what any politician—or political philosophy—is made of, right down to the creamy liquid center.

Make no mistake: all politicians—even those ostensibly on the side of guns and gun ownership—hate the issue and anyone, like me, who insists on bringing it up. They hate it because it’s an X-ray machine. It’s a Vulcan mind-meld. It’s the ultimate test to which any politician—or political philosophy—can be put.  (Emphasis added)

So, of the choices available to me, I’ve decided to take Mr. Squishy Loophole over Mr. Evil Ban-it-all.  It was really the only choice someone like me could make.  So, given that, I will make my one and only political call-to-action of the season:  If you’re a gun owner, or you believe in freedom, and you vote for Obama, you are essentially cutting your own throat.  Don’t come crying to me in the middle of an Obama administration when he gets another AWB passed, or finds a way to hamper or encumber concealed carry across the country to the point where it’s practically useless.  I’m not going to exhort you to go join a campaign or to join a party or to do canvassing or phone banking.  I’m not a joiner and I’m not going there.  But whatever you do, don’t vote for evil.  No matter how smooth, slick, and enticing it may be.

I’m going to revive something I did for the 2006 general election and list all the candidates running in the current election along with links to their websites (if available). This list is based on the Tarrant County generic sample ballot, customized for my own districts and leaving out all uncontested races.

• President and Vice-President of the United States
  • John McCain / Sarah Palin – REP
  • Barack Obama / Joe Biden – DEM
  • Bob Barr / Wayne A. Root – LIB
• United States Senator
  • John Cornyn – REP
  • Rick Noriega – DEM
  • Yvonne Adams Schick – LIB
• United States Representative, District 26
  • Michael C. Burgess – REP
  • Ken Leach – DEM
  • Stephanie B. Weiss – LIB
• Railroad Commissioner
  • Michael L. Williams – REP
  • Mark Thompson – DEM
  • David Floyd – LIB
• Chief Justice, Supreme Court
  • Wallace B. Jefferson – REP
  • Jim Jordan – DEM
  • Tom Oxford – LIB
• Justice, Supreme Court, Place 7
  • Dale Wainwright – REP
  • Sam Houston – DEM
  • David G. Smith – LIB
• Justice, Supreme Court, Place 8
  • Phil Johnson – REP
  • Linda Reyna Yañez – DEM
  • Drew Shirley – LIB
• Judge, Court of Criminal Appeals, Place 3
  • Tom Price – REP
  • Susan Strawn – DEM
  • Matthew E. Eilers – LIB
• Judge, Court of Criminal Appeals, Place 4
  • Paul Womack – REP
  • J.R. Molina – DEM
  • Dave Howard – LIB
• Judge, Court of Criminal Appeals, Place 9
  • Cathy Cochran – REP
  • William Bryan Strange, III – LIB
• Member, State Board of Education, District 11
  • Patricia “Pat” Hardy – REP
  • Bruce Beckman – LIB
• State Senator, District 12 — N / A
• State Representative, District 98
  • Vicki Truitt – REP
  • Nancy Moffat – DEM
  • Stephen M. Smith – LIB
• District Judge, 17th Judicial District
  • Melody Wilkinson – REP
  • Randy Turner – DEM
• District Judge, 67th Judicial District
  • Don Cosby – REP
  • Warren H. Gould – DEM
• Criminal District Judge, Court No. 2
  • Wayne Salvant – REP
  • R. Maureen Tolbert – DEM
• Sheriff
  • Dee Anderson – REP
  • Hank Pope – DEM
  • Charles Hibbler – LIB
• County Commissioner, Precinct No. 03
  • Gary Fickes – REP
  • Jerry Lee Phillips – DEM
  • Mark F. Frohman – LIB
• Keller ISD (sample ballot)
  • Proposition No. 1 – “The issuance of $142,340,000 of bonds for construction, acquisition and equipment of school buildings in the district and the purchase of the necessary sites for school buildings and levying the tax in payment thereof, including the costs of any credit agreements executed in connection with the bonds”
  • Proposition No. 2 – “The issuance of $25,600,000 of bonds for a new district multi-purpose stadium and levying the tax in payment thereof, including the costs of any credit agreements executed in connection with the bonds”

My method for finding websites was to enter the candidate’s name in Google and scan the first page for a result. If nothing looked likely (i.e. the candidate has a very common name), I added the title of the office being sought to the query and tried again. For incumbents without a campaign page I linked to their “official” bio, if one was available.

To find your own districts, look on your Voter Registration card that you should have received in the mail. If you registered recently and don’t have a card, you can look up your registration online via the Tarrant County Voter Lookup application.

Early on Tuesday morning something on my web host caused all PHP apps that used the flock() function to hang.  This meant that Expression Engine was essentially dead and that all I could do was add some info to the page that showed up when the internal server error finally came up (this would happen when the process was eventually killed by the web server). 

Dreamhost support couldn’t figure out why the hang was occurring, other than to note that my home directory was mounted from one of their filers and that they are moving away from this configuration to one which uses local disk space for web files.  They suggested moving my account to the newer servers and I agreed, just to get the site back up.  It seems odd to me that they couldn’t fix the hang issue, but by then the site had been down for three days and I just wanted it back up. 

So, the site is up on a new, faster, server.  Which is good.  Unfortunately the move has broken my email and I haven’t been able to receive anything since late yesterday afternoon.  I’ve heard from some that they get errors sending, but from my tests the emails appear to be going into a black hole (which is the worst possible outcome, since they appear to have been sent, but have instead been discarded without error).

So, if you have need of reaching me, leave a comment.  I will check back here from time to time to see if anything new has been added, and I’ll update this post when email is back up.

UPDATE:  Full service has been restored.  If you sent an email between approximately 4:00pm Friday and 8:00pm Saturday, please resend it.

I’m currently ensconced in a hotel in Kearney, MO for the evening and plan to complete my trip tomorrow.  I drove up through Gilmer and East Texas into Oklahoma and Missouri (here’s the route). 

The Indian Nation Turnpike was nice and scenic (not to mention fast at 75MPH and with very little traffic), but by far the most interesting site of the day was the giant Bo Pilgrim head just outside of Pittsburg, TX.  You absolutely must click that link to see the picture.  There is no description I could give it that would do it justice, other than to say that it’s even more creepy in real life.

I’ve got a work meeting in Minnesota next week.  My area typically does one of these meetings once per year, and mid to late September seems to have become the norm.  However, instead of flying I’m driving it this time.  It will cost me an extra day each way, but it has the advantage of not having to deal with the hassles of the TSA, lost luggage, flight delays, rude people, and canceled connection flights (the year before last I got to spend a night in Chicago O’Hare thanks to a late arrival combined with the cancellation of the American Eagle connecting flight).  The flying experience has been deteriorating over the years, but it wasn’t the bad service or increasing fees that finally pushed me over the edge; instead it was TSA’s installation of body scanners that did it for me.  It’s a strip search, just without bothering to remove your clothes.  I find it offensive and I will not use it.  And unless I have to fly overseas, I will be driving as long as those machines are in place.  Further, I won’t be flying overseas unless I have to do so for work.  I certainly won’t be taking any personal trips.

Anyhow, rather than leaving and returning directly from Keller, though, I will be basing the main body of the trip from my mother’s place in East Texas.  She has agreed to keep the dogs for me while I’m gone, which will save me a substantial amount of money in kennel fees (it would have been over $500 to kennel both of them for the entire time).  So today I will head for East Texas and I will begin the main part of the trip tomorrow, driving up through Oklahoma, Missouri, and Iowa on the way to Minnesota.  It’s about 920 miles so I will spread it over two days and spend Saturday night just north of Kansas City. 

I should be back late on Sunday the 28th, so if I don’t post again before then you’ll know why.

I was watching one of the local TV stations this morning.  Their reporter was reporting on the current DISD funding crisis and he was trying to explain that the district was $64 million in the hole because someone didn’t record the costs of hiring a large number of teachers last year.  He kept saying that the teachers were hired to reduce “classroom sizes” when he should have said they were hired to reduce “class sizes.” 

This really grated on my nerves, because unless the teachers were busy building new walls to reduce the sizes of the classrooms, they really weren’t reducing “classroom” sizes.  The unnecessary addition of ‘room’ to the word ‘class’ changes the meaning of the sentence such that it no longer makes sense.

Language matters, people!