Something I’ve noticed from the various firearms magazines I read: their online presences suck. The various publications from Harris, for instance, only show the latest cover and table of contents, and a link to subscribe. No links to articles listed in the TOC. Nope, nothing from that issue available online. Guns Magazine fares only slightly better, giving you the feature story from each month to read. Whoever is uploading the accompanying pictures for those features needs to be fired (no pun intended); they are abhorrent. Granted, nothing would compare with the high-resolution glossies in the paper mag, but these are ridiculous.
Come on, guys, get it together. I can sort of understand not putting up anything from the current month’s magazine; you don’t want to gut your off-the-shelf sales. At the very least you should be uploading all of your back issues, with all of the articles and columns, not just the monthly “feature.” If you want to charge a nominal subscription fee, a la Consumer Reports, Playboy, et al, then go for it, but give us a chance at more content than a solitary article and a cover picture.
Tag: rant
Jerry Jerk, er, Jones, has released the NFL’s all-time leading rusher from the Dallas Cowboys. Players take note: this is how Jerry rewards your (well-paid) service to his organization. After 13 years, 3 Super Bowl wins, and the rushing title, Emmitt is now out in the cold. The only reason Jones kept Smith around for the 2002 season was so Number 22 would break the league rushing record in a Cowboys uniform; again, glorification for Jones’ ego.
In case you haven’t guessed, I’m not a Cowboys fan, and have not been since we moved to Dallas. I remain, however, an Emmitt Smith fan, and I hope he gets what he wants: a shot at another Super Bowl as a team’s number-one back.
Everyone in Dallas will be in tears that Jerry let Emmitt go, but they’ll spin it as simply a financial matter, that Smith is costing the team too much money. Jerry has long hinted that he doesn’t think Emmitt has what it takes any more to be a number-one running back. Gee, Jerry, maybe if Emmitt had an offensive line that could block elderly grandmothers, much less Pro Bowl linebackers, that would’ve helped the past three seasons. And a quarterback that could throw accurately and consistently wouldn’t hurt either.
Burger King has joined McDonald’s on my places of never to eat again.
So, back in January, the New York Times’ editorial page headline screamed “The War Against Women,” the letter therein lambasting the Bush administration’s moves with regard to the right to life. The Times chose to use the term “anti-choice” in the editorial, rather than “pro-life.”
This fails to honor the news-writing custom of adopting a group’s preferred terminology in referring to its aims. Therefore, I (while not a newsperson, per se, but at any rate…) shall no longer refer to the opposition as “pro-choice,” but rather as “pro-death,” since that’s what they really are. Coke or Pepsi is a choice, the life of a child is not.
You know that annoying Nike Shox ad with the guy running across the soccer field wearing only his Shox shoes and a scarf? Reebok, with the help of Terry Tate, has effectively nuked it, and good riddance. Kudos, Reebokkers!!
(registration and QuickTime or WMP required — click on “Streak This, Baby!”)
Well, after taking a couple of sick days, I’m beginning to feel normal again. The anti-nausea and anti-spasmodic drugs the ER doc prescribed for me have been helping immensely. I can feel my appetite coming back as well, eating 2 bowls of chicken and relatively bland stuff (water chestnuts, celery, white and green onions) at Genghis Grill, before dropping my sister off at the airport for her flight home.
Yesterday, for kicks, I got on the scale, and discovered that I had lost somewhere between 7-10 pounds in about 48 hours. I say 7-10 because I generally float within a 5-pound range when I weigh myself.
Plenty of rest has gone a long way toward recovery, and I should be back in the saddle at work tomorrow. For those that knew, thanks for your kind words and thoughts.
And it really, really, really sucks when you end up at the ER at 11:45 on a Saturday night because you’re so dehydrated and you can’t get fluids in by drinking water or Gatorade because you keep puking it up. Two IV bags of fluids, 3 blood samples, 2 x-rays, and 1 urine sample later, we learn I’ve got some kind of nasty virus because my white cell count is over 20,000. This is not a good thing.
I was released about 3 in the morning. After stopping at the 24-hour Tom Thumb pharmacy nearby and getting my new drugs and a 2-liter of Sprite, we crashed into bed some time around 4.
Steady improvements all day today, no more throwing up, which makes me happy because I really, really, really hate that. Bland food is all I can eat, so it’s been dry toast, crackers, and rice. I’m feeling tons better, though not still 100%.
While we had talked about what kind of fun, exciting things we could do with my little sister while she is in town visiting, this little adventure was the furthest thing from our minds. 🙂
My friends know that in general I detest Dennis Miller, but he made an excellent point regarding the ACLU on the Tonight Show this week:
“The ACLU spent this entire holiday season protesting public displays of the nativity scene. Yeah, that’s the problem with America right now: Public displays of Christ’s birth, that’s the problem. It’s unbelievable to me. The ACLU will no longer fight for your right to put up a nativity scene, but they’ll fight for the right of the local freak who wants to stumble onto the scene and have sex with one of the sheep.”
Hmmm. Maybe I’ve misunderstood Dennis throughout the ’90s, but I always got the feeling he never took a stand on either side of the political aisle.
If a ban on partial-birth abortion, decidedly a conservative issue, is a “sop to the far right,” why isn’t a campaign finance reform bill, decidedly a leftist issue, a “sop to the far left?”
I know several folks out there, even some I call acquaintances and friends, believe that the United States, and specifically President Bush, is acting as a bully against Saddam and that world opinion is not with us. Sorry to say, but France, Russia, China, and far-left peace protestors do not constitute world opinon, no matter what their apologists in the mass media would have you think.
My friend Michael reports that on MSNBC just a while ago, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi stated, “When I see the American flag, I don’t just see a symbol of the United States, I see a symbol of freedom and democracy.”
Berlusconi gets it; our fight with Saddam isn’t purely about weapons of mass destruction, though that is the most significant reason. It’s not about controlling Iraqi oil reserves, either, despite what some conspiracy-minded leftists would have you believe. Beyond Saddam’s WMD threat, our fight with Saddam is about the freedom from oppression of the Iraqi people.
And if you think I’m wrong, then you need to check out the open letter sent to The Wall Street Journal, the Times of London and other newspapers today, by, respectively, the prime ministers of Spain, Portugal, Italy and Britain, the president of the Czech Republic and the prime ministers of Hungary, Poland and Denmark.
They get it. Each of these countries was touched in some way by oppression in the 20th century, namely Nazism and communism, and they note this. As nations, they speak from experience. As nations, they know what the Iraqi people are suffering; and they are willing to assist in the regime change necessary for Iraqi liberation. They get it. Why do so many Americans not?
Jordan’s King Hussein has apparently stated the U.S. can use his country as a staging area. At a press conference, Spain announced unconditional support for the United States with regard to handling Saddam. Other nations are rallying to America’s call to end Saddam’s tyrannical and threatening regime. I wonder how Jennings, Rather, and Brokaw will spin these developments in “world opinion.”