Posted 11:03 PM by Robert Ronald Smith

Raise the gas tax to fix bridges?

President Reagan vetoed a transportation bill in 1987 that contained 121 earmarks, saying,

'I haven't seen this much lard since I handed out blue
ribbons at the Iowa State Fair.'

In 2005, Congress passed a transportation bill that included 6,371 earmarks at a cost of $27.3 billion."

A newly released report by the Department of Transportation's inspector general identified 8,056 earmarks totaling $8.5 billion in the fiscal year that ended in October [2007], or 13.5% of the Transportation Department's $63 billion spending plan. That bill was passed 6 weeks after the bridge collapse in Minneapolis.

Posted 11:52 AM by Robert Ronald Smith

Big fish, small pond

Secret you may not be aware of: SMITH.MN, which appears to be, as I sometimes claim, the only SMITH in Minnesota, is in fact, the only SMITH in Mongolia. The MN domain is the national domain for the Republic of Mongolia, just as .US is for the United States, and .RU is for Russia. But MN also stands for Minnesota, so I purchased my domain name in MN. I'm not the only Minnesotans to do so... such as the SE Minneapolis website, NE Minneapolis, and New Hope.

But... SMITH.MN is one of the most popular websites in the MN domain, as shown below



Notice that if I didn't use both SMITH.MN and WWW.SMITH.MN my standing would be even higher... higher than even the official Mongolian National Chamber of Commerce website.

Mongolia is an interesting nation... the 2nd largest landlocked nation on the planet (see if you can find out which is the largest). Historically, the Mongol Empire, under Genghis Khan, was the largest contiguous empire ever. Smack-dab between Russia and China (talk about looking over both shoulders) Mongolia has had a lot of influence from both over the years. It was at one time a communist, but independent, puppet of the Soviet Union, but is now a democratic republic.

Posted 10:43 PM by Robert Ronald Smith

Human capabilities

In these times of obesity scares, unending diets, magic weight-loss pills, and exercise facilities, it is appropriate to take note of a man who pioneered much of it... Jack LaLanne. He invented many of the machines found in health clubs, and had the first exercise show on TV. What is even more amazing is that LaLanne is not only alive and well, but working out hard every day... at age 93. If you're not impressed by that, check out this recent photo of Jack, then just try to assume the position he's in.

Posted 9:16 PM by Robert Ronald Smith

A small public convenience

You may, like me, be looking forward to watching "The War", a seven-part series by Ken Burns, about WWII. It will be shown on the local PBS affiliate, TPT, Channel 2. I've collected the times the 7 parts will be shown or repeated, and placed them into an online single-page Word document.

Posted 11:13 PM by Robert Ronald Smith

I loves it!

First, Ron Paul had Fox News stammering and stuttering when he won their own viewer poll during the first GOP candidates debate... when they would have preferred he hadn't even shown up.

Now, Fox, broadcasting the Emmy Award show, had to resort to censoring Sally Field for her anti-war comments. Go here to read about it and listen to her full statement when accepting her Emmy. You might also notice that she may be the best-looking 60-year-old woman on the planet.

Posted 10:23 PM by Robert Ronald Smith

You may have missed this...

Yesterday, the 15th, saw a huge War Protest march in Washington, D.C., with a turnout of nearly 100,000. That's a lot of people.

Posted 9:39 AM by Robert Ronald Smith

Labor? Day

Always the strangest of our official holidays. Originally pushed by labor unions as yet another way for them to squeeze the profitability of the firms they negotiate with, I've never been comfortable "celebrating" it. Matter of fact, it seems to me that I've always worked on Labor Day; most years as an employed (salaried) geek, we were expected to put in extra hours making computers do things we could all do without. Later, self-employed and always scrambling to make money. Because so many other things were shut down for the holiday, Labor Day was often an unusually productive day of work.

Now retired, nothing seems to have changed. Working out in a vain attempt to retain the last vestiges of youth, and taking care of 5 cats for a friend... oh and blogging and blogging, and maybe even blogging (sayeth one who doth have 3 blogs).

There is one nice part of Labor Day. Mondays usually find me swamped with emails as everyone else goes back to their jobs and has the time to do personal stuff... the holiday hath stilled my inbox.