Jim Rittenhouse's semidaily journal of news, commentary and reports
If I’ve been quiet again, it’s because my main PC in my office downstairs (where I’m exiled to pending the doc saying I can go up and down stairs again) has been zapped by a nasty virus. It got past my Trend Micro antivirus, and started disconnecting various things on my PC (including the virus [...]
The latest on all of the medical stuff is that I haven’t healed enough on the bottom of my foot for the Doc to be able to let me really walk on it again, so he has basically told me that I will be off my feet until my next visit with him next Monday [...]
The local Sioux Falls paper notes that the voting percentage in the most recent school board election was 3.55% in an editorial asking for voting to be made easier by eliminating precinct voting in favor of at-large polling places scattered around the city. Personally, I think that’s more likely to confuse the heck out of [...]
We’re facing a foot of snow or better in the next 24 hours, and the phone and internet are *already* up and down like a windowblind today. Highly annoying. Comcast says it’s weather-related failures – which makes me worry about what we’ll do if we get first snowed in and then frozen with sub-zero temperatures! [...]
As some of you may have sussed out, since November of 2007, I’ve been working 99% of the time out of my basement office…with a huge long line of doctor’s excuses, bases on either my non-healing foot wound, or my weak response to infections casing raging problems on and off. The office finally said that [...]
I’m really tired of the rumbledy-toss of big banks buying small fry – and then going under due to hilarity at the home office. We use two banks and a credit union; the latter is WAY out of state, and I’d transfer over to that except that we’d never have a local bank. Bank #1 [...]
Discussion about a bailout bill for newspapers if they reorganize as 501c3 not-for-profits; the President had this to say about it: Obama said that good journalism is “critical to the health of our democracy,” but expressed concern toward growing tends in reporting — especially on political blogs, from which a groundswell of support for his [...]
(taken from the teabagger protest in DC this weekend) Lesson #1: Anyone who is not a Republican is not a Marxist. Really. Lesson #2: The last Czar in Russia gave up the throne in 1917, and the Russian Communists took over Russia in 1918; I don’t think you understand that there were no Czars in [...]
I have been listening to enough rants, hate and nonsense in the last year and a half to last me a lifetime or more, and I’ve been more than fed up with it all. But I started realizing that this sort of crud is endemic; uninformed people who choke off their sources of information to [...]
Various reports that the WPA wireless security systems have been broken pretty thoroughly, which is a big reason why my home wireless setup is top of the line on encryption. This is a problem because some older laptops won’t handle it, and in the *brief* time such laptops are around, I have to either come [...]
I am frequently dismayed by various Truthers out there who insist on a Grand Conspiracy theory of the universe; stories about how the moon landing was faked, the world is flat, that 9/11 was an inside job and how Obama is some kind of Manchurian candidate smuggled into the country as a very small baby [...]
I really hate it when I’ve been out of the ‘office’ for a while for whatever reason, and especially if it’s for two weeks; all sorts of OMG WTF BBQ emergencies that have happened in my absence that I could have taken care of in 15 minutes are common. In this case, I was out [...]
FOIA releases of a ton of emails to and from Governor Sanford of South Carolina’s office from various TV news types (most prominently MEET THE PRESS) offering all sorts of ‘we’ll act like we’re questioning you but we’ll make sure that you get all the softballs you want, and protect you from the nasties out [...]
Saw the trailer for 2012 at Harry Potter 6; I was going oh geeze and razzing the ridiculous POS. Maybe my present health situation has made everything-go-boom Novels and Stories a whole lot less interesting, but this one is just trading on the latest millennial fear nonsense. I say it’s spinach cilantro and I say [...]
ORPHAN: My readers quietly passed along some information on this still-yet-to-open movie that I trashed earlier…and a little more information on a personal note. Susan talked to Mere, and she got the impression from Meredith that the sheer scariness of the poster got to Mere more than anything else. Arthur passed along this article from [...]