A Modest Opinion

Just a quick note to let you know about an addition to the site. And no, the hypocrisy still does not escape me.

i have added a tumble log to A Modest Opinion. You can find it at tumble.amodestopinion.com.There I’ll be posting quick links, one liners, and the such. You can also find links to the right under Quick Bits.

If you don’t have a tumble log yourself, I highly recommend it. I’ve been using it for a couple of days now and am finding it to be a lot of fun.  I use the self-hosted gelato variety, but you can get one real-quick-and easy-like from tumblr.com.

I’ve also updated my About Me page so you can get a good luck at my ugly mug and find links to all my social pages. Add me.

Well, hopefully this will be the most uninteresting thing I post in a while. Please be sure to let me know how bored you are in the comments.

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As I mentioned before, I’m quitting smoking.   You can read all about my method in the earlier post on the matter, so suffice it to say that I’ve put myself on a smoking schedule.

Before, I would smoke essentially when I got bored. That means I might go 3 hours without a cigarette, or I might smoke 3 in an hour.  Now, I have a minimum time between cigarettes.

Last week, that time was an hour.  It was fine, really. I only really noticed it when I got bored - other than that, I would often let myself go beyond the hour if I was wrapped up in something.

This week, I’m bumping it up to 1:15 between smoke breaks.  While it may not seem like much, it’s 4 fewer cigarettes a day.

As for my primary reason for quitting (money), I estimate that I saved $7.50 this week. That’s based on 26 cigarettes a day (a fairly educated guess - I never counted) at 15 cents a cigarette. This week I was down 16 cigarettes a day. Next week it will be 12.

And yes, that means I’ll be smoking half as much. I can’t wait.

I really wish I had kept track of how much I smoked before I started my program. I was scared to know exactly how much of my money I was burning up a day, I guess. It’s easier to just buy a carton every once in a while than to lay out the cash every day.

Well, wish me luck.

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At right, you can see a picture of my bookshelf on a good day. What may stand out to you immediately is exactly how few of the things on the shelves are, in fact, books.

In fact, on the top two shelves, a pair of brave books did manage to infiltrate clutter’s territory, only to be slain in the heat of battle. You can see the results of their incursion - two lonely books under a pile of smugly triumphant junk.

If anything is going to break up my marriage and destroy my happy home, it’ll be this bookshelf.

I myself have precious few books on there; mostly reference and things I’m going to read Real Soon Now. I believe that most books need to be read once and then gotten rid of. How many times can one person read The Guy Not Taken?  Is this such a classic that it gets pulled down every autumn to be enjoyed in the fading light of a cool afternoon?

I submit no. The aforementioned book is nothing less than damning evidence of a packrat mentality. Let your eyes wander downwards in horror to the shelf of photo albums; photo albums, I say! We live in the 21st century - we have such modern convienences as a digital picture frames, a “My Pictures” folder, and large trashcans, yet my poor Wal-Mart Deluxe $20 bookshelf is tasked with holding these memories that are so trifling they don’t even merit a 10-second slice of LCD time.

But do not point your blaming finger at me, good sirs and madams, for I am not the one offloading my recollections to unstable furniter. Verily, it is my bride, my apple, my raison d’etre who is holding on to what amounts to little more than bundling kindling.   She believes that books hold sentimental value - laugh not - and that it is worthy to possess an overflowing frame of pressed particle board.   She tells me that she cannot dispose of The Lord of the Flies because I gave it to her as a gift, and that she simply cannot part with The Awakening because it was the copy she read when she fell in love with feminist literature, and we simply must keep Jennifer Weiner’s oeuvre because, well, what if Jennifer Weiner came to visit?

I yearn for long-ago days when households possessed but two books - the Bible and a dictionary, and they couldn’t read either.

What am I to do? I suppose the first step is to ban from my bookshelf anything that is not actually a book. That includes coffee mugs, iPods, and a certain object that is either a bathroom tile or a forgotten slice of toast.

Stage two would be a nice, understanding sitdown in which we discuss the miracles of modern photograph storage and cardboard boxes.

Finally, and only as a last result, would I point the center of my existence (the aforementioned wife, if you’ve lost track) to this post about uncluttering bookshelves. And while she’s distracted with that, I’m going to take a large black garbage bag and fill it with everything I don’t need.

Remember, dear readers, that in marriage it is important to let the little things slide. And the loss of a 10-year-old copy of Dracula is certainly a minute matter, wouldn’t you agree?

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Came across this today:

PARIS (AP) — A military demonstration drill in southern France on Sunday left 16 people wounded, including children, when real bullets were used instead of blanks, officials said.

I like this story because it really brings out emotions that straddles two aspects of my personality. On one hand, it’s hilarious. I mean, the French military jokes write themselves, right?

On the other hand, however, It’s terrible. Here are people who presumably had no idea that they were in any danger. Sixteen people, 15 of them civilians, were injured, including at least one 3-year-old.

Times have changed for me.  I’m not the 14-year-old kid who would give this story his best Beavis laugh. I now empathize with the parents of the little children who were shot by what were supposed to be blanks. What if it were my little girl who was shot, either by accident or malicious intent? What if I were crying in the hospital, praying that she comes out of surgery alive?

Stories like this one really throw the effects of parenthood into sharp relief.   Numbers in news stories aren’t just numbers anymore. They’re people; people who, somewhere out there, someone else would give anything to have them back.

No, this story isn’t funny. If you think it is, I don’t judge you. It’s all right if you let a chuckle out. But please remember, somewhere, there’s someone who isn’t laughing at all.

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photo credit: xlordashx

I’ve deciding to quit smoking. Not for health reasons - for money. Smoking costs a lot of it, and I’d like to keep a little more.

To get you up to speed, I was smoking just over a pack a day, more if I were bored.  A carton of cigarettes contains 10 packs. My wife also smokes a pack a day. That’s a carton every 5 days. Cartons cost $30. Do the math.

(For those of you who don’t want to do the math, that comes about to about $200 a month for smokes.)

To help me quit, I bought a $10 watch. This particular watch has a feature that I’ve never seen in a watch before: a countdown timer. So I’ve got it set to for an hour. When it beeps, I can smoke. Then I reset it and wait another hour. Every week I plan on adding 15 minutes to the time. So, for example, in a month I’ll be waiting 2 hours and will have halved my smoking.

I, like most smokers, have quit before. It’s easy. But this time I’d like to stay quit. So instead of going cold turkey, I’m going to ween myself off of cigarettes until it’s just pointless to buy them.

If any of you have any tips for quitting smoking, I’d sure like to hear them. The last couple of times I’m put the smokes down, it didn’t take.

Wish me luck and will-power.

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photo credit: lisaschafferphoto

It’s things like this that make me sick: A lawyer is arguing against capital punishment on the grounds that a convicted murder and rapist felt pain as he was executed for strangling, raping, and setting fire to a woman.

You know what? Good.

I find it absolutely mind-boggling that we are giving one iota of thought on how much pain someone whom we believe doesn’t believe to live anymore feels in the last five minutes of their life.   If they were so considerate to their victims, they wouldn’t be in the situation.

I’m not vehemently for or against capital punishment, depends on the day and the crime, but once we’ve gotten to the point where we’ve said “You know what, we’d be better off without you”, let them squirm a little bit.

May we should execute them in the same manner that they took their victims lives. Make the punishment fit the crime, eh?

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photo credit: yogasanft

I have often heard said that we should abandon all scientific advances and return to our roots. For want of a better term, I shall call those professing these opinions “tree-hugging hippies”. (“Morons” seems too harsh.)

I hope that we can all accept that body fat above a certain percentage is unhealthy, no matter what particular shape we may be in. So nature, wanting what is best for us, has provided us with a mechanism that, should we acquire a certain amount of body fat, creates more fat.  This creates a feedback cycle (from the Latin, feedback - “Mother nature”, and cycle - “is a vicious whore”.) which makes it difficult to maintain a healthy figure.

The underlying problem is that our bodies are not suited to a modern, first-world lifestyle. Look around next time you leave the house and count the sheer number of places you can get food. On my daily commute, I pass two grocery stores, five convenience stores, 7 fast-food restauraunts and several slow-moving people. I can eat anytime I want. But my body is terrified that I may never eat again, and therefore stores whatever calories it can just in case.

Having established that nature has programmed into our bodies an elaborate and effective self-destruct switch and having an abundance of other evidence in support of my thesis that I would be glad to produce if I could be arsed, let’s move on to all the things you will lose without scientific progress:

• Bananas
• White rice
• Farming
• Reading
• Clothes
• Hybrid automobiles
• Fishing
• French kissing
• Living past 20

I could easily go one, but that is a long parade of terribles already. Instead, I’ll make a list of things we can keep:

• Ridiculously high infant mortality rate
• A host of diseases cured in the modern age
• Dysentery
• Hunting for every bite of food
• Telling every generation everything you know because you can’t write it down
• Being back at the bottom of the food chain
• Doing everything with your bare hands because you don’t have tools

“But, but, but,” you protest vainly, as I have ceased to listen, “we won’t lose all those things. Even primates use tools.” Sure they do, but you can’t. Because tools are progress, tools are science. It’s a short trip from using sharp rocks to kill your prey to cell phone radiation giving you brain cancer, doncha know?

So let’s all put down the granola, pick our cement trucks and take the fight back to Mother Nature. As my dear friend once said, if someone tries to kill you, you try to kill them right back.

If you don’t have any cement trucks handy, you could accept that our neocortex is, in fact, natural and therefore the reasoning ability that allows to move from poking dirt with a stick to poking Martian dirt with an extremely elaborate and sophisticated stick in therefore natural. Then we could all move on and deal with the issues that are really important, such as teaching the media that there is a difference between Obama and Osama.

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From the not-written-by-me department:

These thunderheads are brewing over the midwestern United States, a region where thunderstorms can whip up pretty damn fast. Courtesy of NASA, this image is one of a series running on the Boston Globe’s website to celebrate the work done by the International Space Station. Want to see what this kind of cloud looks like a little closer?

This image is of a cumulonimbus cloud over Africa. It has a similar shape to that of the thunderhead, though it doesn’t necessarily have to cause thunderstorms. Often it will, however.

You can see a ton of other images in this series at the Boston Globe.

The Sky, From Above [Boston Globe]

[Comments: 0, Via: io9 ]

Visit the source

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photo credit: color line

Language changes. I can handle that. In fact, I applaud it. Without English’s dynamic nature, we’d be left without words such as computer or airplane.

That being said, I cannot abide with the perversion of carrot on a stick to carrot and a stick.

Carrot on a stick has a wonderfully nuanced meaning: namely, to offer an ever-unreachable reward to elicit favorable behavior. Parents of small children understand this. “One more bite of broccoli and you can have ice cream. Ok, one more bite. One more …” etc. The idea comes from dangling a carrot tied to the end of a stick in front of a mule. The mule will keep walking forward, trying to get that carrot. Of course, it can’t, because the carrot moves with it.

Carrot and a stick, on the other hand, simply means to reward favorable behavior and discipline unfavorable behavior.This is not a concept in need of an idiom. This is common sense.

Alas, I’m afraid I’ve lost this battle.

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From the not-written-by-me department:

Record your own or Listen to other Audio Clips!

EGAD! We’z been spelling cheezburger rong!

u noe hao 2 spell bath tho.

picture: dunno source, via our lolcat builder. lol caption: Lunacte

» Recaption This

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