The 2006 Congressional Pig Book is the latest installment of Citizens Against Government Waste’s (CAGW) 16-year exposé of pork-barrel spending. This year’s list includes: $13,500,000 for the International Fund for Ireland, which helped finance the World Toilet Summit; $6,435,000 for wood utilization research; $1,000,000 for the Waterfree Urinal Conservation Initiative; and $500,000 for the Sparta Teapot Museum in Sparta, N.C.

I’ve got an idea for “wood utilization”… and it’s tied very closely to the United Armenian Guitar Fund. [NOTE: I'm Armenian and I play guitar]

For as much as our political system is better than others, I still shake my head most of the time. It pains my mind to comprehend how obvious this all is… that our self-serving “representitives” (please hold all laughter to the end) use our dollars to keep their careers moving, rather than using their careers toward us keeping more of our dollars. And it isn’t just one political party who’s to blame… they all graduated from sheister-school (well, the vast majority of them anyway).

When we ram through a gigantic bill, spending hundreds of billions of taxpayer’s dollars with little or no debate because we want to go home for Thanksgiving, we send the message to the American people that we are not serious enough about our jobs. We essentially accomplish little almost all year long because everything requires 60 votes, and then, at the very last minute, we scramble around and throw together a 1,632 page bill like the one before us today.
- John McCain, from his statement on the FY 2005 Omnibus Appropriations Bill

As I was saying, my new 250 GB backup storage device is being used to house my games. I finally got around to installing and playing Call of Duty 2, an FPS set in WW2. The graphics are incredible! My system isn’t top-of-the-line for gaming machines sold today (I have an AMD64 2.8 GHz – 1 GB RAM – Radeon 9600 Pro), but this game’s graphics are fluid as gasoline. I’ll throw on here some of my own screenshots when I get into some fun areas. I just started and I’m a Russian soldier defending Moscow from the oncoming German assault. This has some special meaning for me as I was in Moscow about a year and a half ago and got to see the WW2 monument they have their marking the high-water mark of the German advance. This picture on the left is the best one I could find of it. The article I grabbed this pic from had the following excerpt:

Anti-tank Hedgehogs :: a memorial to Moscow defenders. Erected in 1966 on the 23rd km down the Leningrad highway. The authors are architects A. Mikhe, A. Agafonov, I. Yermishin, and engineer K. Mikhailov.

The hedgehog is what they called these caltrop-like devices you see three of. They were designed to slow advancing tracked vehicles (and they worked pretty well). Way cool stuff!