Waiting for the weekend!

I’m swamped with to-do’s. I won’t even start listing them… but one is to get our new Watkins Glen pictures up on my gallery (and by extension, Flickr… or vice versa). I also need to “discover” craigslist and put a bunch of furniture on there. Oh yeah, and upgrade WordPress to 2.6 on all seven WP sites I maintain!?

Dallas city council is an intellectual black hole!

A black hole that sits on the Dallas city councilI can’t let this go without commenting on it. For those who haven’t heard (and you are the lucky ones) there was a recent controversy on the Dallas city council over one commissioner[white] using the term “black hole” to describe the city’s central collection office… because paperwork goes in and never comes out. Another commissioner[black] and a judge[black] who sits on the council took exception to the “racially offensive” term. (!?) Re-read that however many times you need to… it reads right and it did happen. Surely, the Dallas city council is an intellectual black hole.

From the Dallas City Hall blog:

A special meeting about Dallas County traffic tickets turned tense and bizarre this afternoon.

County commissioners were discussing problems with the central collections office that is used to process traffic ticket payments and handle other paperwork normally done by the JP Courts.

Commissioner Kenneth Mayfield, who is white, said it seemed that central collections “has become a black hole” because paperwork reportedly has become lost in the office.

Commissioner John Wiley Price, who is black, interrupted him with a loud “Excuse me!” He then corrected his colleague, saying the office has become a “white hole.”

That prompted Judge Thomas Jones, who is black, to demand an apology from Mayfield for his racially insensitive analogy.

Mayfield shot back that it was a figure of speech and a science term. A black hole, according to Webster’s, is perhaps “the invisible remains of a collapsed star, with an intense gravitational field from which neither light nor matter can escape.”

Other county officials quickly interceded to break it up and get the meeting back on track. TV news cameras were rolling, after all.

How stupid do Price and Jones have to be? And you’d think that after being educated on what a black hole is (and its common colloquial use) Price would have said “Oh… okay, my bad.” Nope, instead he stands by his opposition to black holes, and also throws “devil’s food cake” and “angel food cake” under the bus. Mr. Price, sir, are an idiot!

If you visit the city hall blog post and read the comments, you’ll see the overwhelming majority of folks angry at Price for being an ignorant windbag. Of course, you’ll see a few folks inexplicably defending Price, and then you’ll see a few idiots attributing Price’s ignorance too ALL black folks - and that’s obviously a gross error, too.

Here’s a few of my favorite comments from the town hall blog:

Price needs to learn the difference between a “black hole” and a “black a-hole”…the former is a figure of speech; the latter describes jerks like him.

It’s not like they called it a nappy-headed hole. Now THAT would be outrageous.

My goodness, it seems that Mr. Price needs sum edumacation vout the compression and densifications of stellar ojcectifacations. Go back to schoo; bozo and try this time to pass 5th grade science instead of making a career avout demonizing whitey

Bwahahaha! It’s like on the first Apprentice show when Amorosa got her nose out of joint when someone used the old expression “the pot calling the kettle black” that has nothing to do with race, but with someone accusing someone of something they are also guilty of. Beauty and color are only skin deep, but stupid goes all the way to the bone.

Sounds like Commissioner Mayfield is getting blackballed. He may even be blacklisted over this! This whole affair is a bonafide black cloud over Dallas politics. You might even say they’re suffering from a common sense blackout.

No, no ,no - the politically correct term would be “hole of color”…

Wait a minute… how can anything “black” be “of color”, since black is the absence of incident photons having wavelength in the visible spectrum?! People “of color” would actually be THE OPPOSITE - people WITHOUT color… while the lighter your skin is, the more diversity of photo-wavelengths are reflecting off your pearly sheen into the darkened eyes of others. :-)

[if you can't see any sarcasm in the previous paragraph, don't respond - just kill yourself]

Price and Jones should apologize to Mayfield, then immediately step off the council pending an upgrade in civility AND in elementary science.

Back From Vacation

Back to the grind - don’t make me go back to work!? I’ll have have plenty of pictures and reflections from the heartland (of New York) very soon.

I can’t blog this!?

I have a new Samsung Instinct phone through Sprint… and despite decent internet connectivity this is no way to blog. Pages take forever to load and the screen res is just too small. :-|

Independence Day Prayer

For those sincerely appreciative of this great country, and the relatively cushy care-free lifestyle they’ve been blessed with, may they be granted further blessing. For those who are not… may they be cast out into the darkness where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. For our troops, grant them safe travels until they reunite with family. God Bless America!

Who’s Discriminating Now?

There was a time when a ballot measure banning race discrimination would have received the whole-hearted support of civil rights organizations. My how their principles change once the race discrimination is in their favor. I hate bigotry and hypocrisy equally.

Awww, isn’t dis wittle guy so… offensive!

Scottish Police Dept ad with little black puppy

Can you find what’s so outrageously offensive in the above ad? Well, duh… of course it’s got to be the puppy. This little guy is Rebel, a German Shepherd police dog “recruit” who’s been featured recently on police fliers in the Scottish town of Tayside. Now the Muslims in the nearby Dundee community are outraged because of how offensive and insensitive this ad is. Huh?

The advert has upset Muslims because dogs are considered ritually unclean and has sparked such anger that some shopkeepers in Dundee have refused to display the advert. Dundee councilor Mohammed Asif said: ‘My concern was that it’s not welcomed by all communities, with the dog on the cards.’

WTF? Are you kidding me? The West has quite a love for canines, and dogs have also found worthy service in many parts of our society. So if you don’t like it perhaps you should go eat dog crap. Any shopkeeper from that town that refuses to put up that sign should be sentenced to community service cleaning the police kennel.

Seriously, anyone offended by a puppy should kill themselves. Really.

A spokesman for Tayside Police said: ‘Trainee police dog Rebel has proved extremely popular with children and adults since being introduced to the public, aged six weeks old, as Tayside Police’s newest canine recruit.’

[...]

‘We did not seek advice from the force’s diversity adviser prior to publishing and distributing the postcards. That was an oversight and we apologise for any offence caused.’

Why is this wimp apologizing?! A puppy is not offensive… so if someone decides they are offended by it, who the heck cares? Good! I’m glad they are offended. Perhaps being offended will help them out… in a therapeutic way. Maybe I’ll draw a cartoon featuring Muhammad the Sheltie - it can be my weekly comic in their Sunday paper.

This whole brain-scraper is the typical, wreaking, leftist, multiculturalistic approach to social appeasement… bereft of any principles or logical thought. If you took their “tolerance” and “sensitivity” to its logical conclusion (oops, that takes thought) the town would ultimately have to remove all dogs, including police dogs, as to not offend any Muslims. After that all non-mosques would have to be torn down, too, because they are filled with infidel swine. Oh yeah… all pork products should be pulled from the store shelves.

You see… I’m spun up now.

No Celtics On the Olympic Team!?

Celtics Big Three

The 2008 NBA Champion Boston Celtics apparently had no players worthy of being sent to China to play for the US… despite spending the 2008 season wiping the court with the rest of the league. Oops… have I forgotten how successful our more flashy players can be in international play. We wouldn’t want to put in Kevin Garnett, Ray Allen, or Paul Pierce… who collectively surrendered their individual games in favor of a cooperative team-centered style… would we? Do we really want to start winning against those other big-name basketball countries… like Greece, Argentina, and Puerto Rico? Countries who would gladly shove that basketball up your rear if they could score soccer tickets out of the “exchange”. Team-centered play… what’s that nonsense about?

Bless my soul, I thought basketball was a still a team sport!? Instead of sending the so-called all-stars to showboat, trip all over each other and screw up another year of international play (a far cry from the Bird, Magic, Jordan days)… why not send an actual team? Why not send the NBA championship team? That’s what I’m talkin’ ’bout. China baby! Someone said tea… I heard you ask for a little Boston 3 Party to march all over your misshapen paint! ;-)

Fetchr4SSP v1.3 // Combining Flickr and SlideShowPro for Photo Gallery Goodness!

Fetchr4SSP logoFetchr4SSP(TM) is a Fetchr(TM)-based PHP script that will fetch photos from Flickr to display as albums inside the awesome gallery software SlideShowPro!

  • Allows you to fetch all of your Flickr photosets as albums inside your gallery
  • Allows you to fetch any Flickr user’s public photosets, recent photos, “favorites”, and/or “most interesting” photos (according to Flickr) and load them as albums inside your gallery
  • Allows you to fetch an album of photos from a Flickr group
  • Allows you to fetch an album of photos filtered by specific tags
  • Allows you to fetch photos at any resolution that Flickr supports
  • Allows you to fetch both public AND private Flickr photos that you have READ access
  • Allows you to fetch photo descriptions from Flickr to use as photo captions inside your gallery
  • Allows manual and programmatic refreshing of your XML images file, or your entire cache of Flickr API calls

The final result is a Flickr photo gallery wrapped in a premiere Flash-based slideshow interface that is delightful to your web visitors.

Visit the official Fetchr4SSP homepage!

Background

This project started for me just trying to finagle my own way of getting all my Flickr photos organized into album photosets and all available in an easy-to-use interface on one of my WordPress-driven websites. A tall order… but I knew it was doable. After fumbling with some WordPress plugins and such, nothing really worked smoothly enough. A Flash solution was needed, so purchased a license for SlideShowPro (SSP) and I couldn’t be happier! :-)

The next task was putting together a PHP script that would build the complex XML needed to properly load all my Flickr photos organized into photosets into SSP. I tried an existing one with some success, but it lacked a few vital functions I needed… and it wouldn’t handle certain SSP abilities. Soooo, I coded my own. And after some polishing decided to put together a sharp website to peddle my fine creation to the masses. :-)

Shot Heard Round the World

The US Consitution dodged a bullet today… and socialism took it in the gut. In a landmark 5-4 ruling the US Supreme Court recalibrated the anti-gun wingnuts. The high court repeated to us the 2nd Amendment - using small words we ALL could understand - which secures the citizen’s right to own firearms for personal use. Somewhere the president is looking down and smiling. America is a little brighter today. Viva la liberté!