It’s that time of year again.  The gloriously hedonistic annual jaunt through that labyrinth filled with religious land mines called XMAS.  As I get older I have noticed that I loath xmas more and more each year. I find that as soon as the turkey is all gobbled up, my mind begins an old internal struggle.  Should atheists ignore xmas or celebrate It? I know that many do generally because they always have and don’t want to change....

    The pledge of allegiance was written by the socialist minister and magazine editor Francis Bellamy in 1892 for a nationwide public school celebration of the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s landing. Bellamy had hoped that the pledge would be used by citizens in any country.  Bellamy was a well-known ”Christian Socialist” whose beliefs involved some pretty unsavory bents.  I will leave you with one of...

     Today I want to rant a bit about the ridiculousness that retail shopping has become.  I like to shop.  Hell, who doesn’t?  Watching TV, news and reading the ads in newspapers I often wonder how utterly stupid advertisers and retail marketers think we as consumers are.  I mean they keep coming up with more and more outrageous ploys to get us to buy their stuff, and they must be some nuts that actually believe the rhetoric...

    Well this is going to be short but I just wanted to rant a bit about how cable companies in general always seem to give you the shaft.  My particular story goes like this.  I bought an HD TV a year ago.  I immediately wanted the DVR to go with it.  Worked out great, all except my bill ended up going up 50 bucks a month.  I was able to eat that for a year but now I need to scale back.     I decided to return the DVR and just...

    Oh, how I hate my fellow man.  Well, sometimes anyway.  Doing phone support all day can sure make a man jaded when it comes to having any kind of confidence that there is actually intelligent life on this planet.  I have a wall poster in my office that has several clever saying regarding technical support truths, but one in particular kind of sums up all the others.      “Can you help me with this” usually means...

Dirty Little Matt is sitting in the back of math class, obviously not paying any attention, when the teacher calls his name. “Yeah teach?” he replies. “If there are three ducks on a fence and you shoot one of them with a shotgun, how many are left?” asks the teacher. Matt answers “Well, teach, if I shoot one of them with a shotgun, the loud noise is gonna make them all fly off.” “No, Matt, there...