Haiku

The Drew is in town
He is drinking with Plucky
But I have to work

Top ten reasons I’ve lived in Worcester too long:

10. Chirping birds sound more out-of-place than gunshots
9. It’s not surprising to me when there is a car coming at me the wrong way on I-290
8. I have lived in more than 2 different places
7. I know where Danker square, Electric street, and Tahanto Road are
6. The police wave to me
5. The water tastes good
4. I drive up college hill for fun during snowstorms
3. I had a party in my dead suicidal neighbor’s apartment
2. I get worried when it hasn’t snowed in 24 hours
1. Local news is interesting!

Understanding the World through Cow Management

DEMOCRATIC

• You have two cows.
• Your neighbor has none
• You feel guilty for being successful.
• Barbara Streisand sings for you.

REPUBLICANISM

• You have two cows.
• Your neighbor has none.
• So?

SOCIALIST

• You have two cows.
• The government takes one and gives it to your neighbor.
• You form a cooperative to tell him how to manage his cow.

COMMUNIST

• You have two cows.
• The government seizes both and provides you with milk.
• You wait in line for hours to get it.
• It is expensive and sour.

CAPITALISM, AMERICAN STYLE

• You have two cows.
• You sell one, buy a bull, and build a herd of cows.

BUREAUCRACY, AMERICAN STYLE

• You have two cows.
• Under the new farm program the government pays you to shoot one, milk the other, and then pours the milk down the drain.

AMERICAN CORPORATION

• You have two cows.
• You sell one, lease it back to yourself and do an IPO on the 2nd one.
• You force the two cows to produce the milk of four cows. You are surprised when one cow drops dead. You spin an announcement to the analysts stating you have downsized and are reducing expenses.
• Your stock goes up.

FRENCH CORPORATION

• You have two cows.
• You go on strike because you want three cows.
• You go to lunch and drink wine.
• Life is good.

JAPANESE CORPORATION

• You have two cows.
• You redesign them so they are one-tenth the size of an ordinary cow and produce twenty times the milk.
• They learn to travel on unbelievably crowded trains.
• Most are at the top of their class at cow school.

GERMAN CORPORATION

• You have two cows.
• You engineer them so they are all blond, drink lots of beer, give excellent quality milk, and run a hundred miles an hour.
• Unfortunately they also demand 13 weeks of vacation per year.

ITALIAN CORPORATION

• You have two cows but you don't know where they are.
• While ambling around, you see a beautiful woman.
• You break for lunch.
• Life is good.

RUSSIAN CORPORATION

• You have two cows.
• You have some vodka.
• You count them and learn you have five cows.
• You have some more vodka.
• You count them again and learn you have 42 cows.
• The Mafia shows up and takes over however many cows you really have.

TALIBAN CORPORATION

• You have all the cows in Afghanistan, which are two.
• You don't milk them because you cannot touch any creature' private parts.
• You get a $40 million grant from the US government to find alternatives to milk production but use the money to buy weapons.

IRAQI CORPORATION

• You have two cows.
• They go into hiding.
• They send radio tapes of their mooing.

POLISH CORPORATION

• You have two bulls.
• Employees are regularly maimed and killed attempting to milk them.

BELGIAN CORPORATION

• You have one cow.
• The cow is schizophrenic.
• Sometimes the cow thinks he's French, other times he's Flemish.
• The Flemish cow won't share with the French cow.
• The French cow wants control of the Flemish cow's milk.
• The cow asks permission to be cut in half.
• The cow dies happy.

FLORIDA CORPORATION

• You have a black cow and a brown cow.
• Everyone votes for the best looking one.
• Some of the people who actually like the brown one best accidentally vote for the black one Some people vote for both.
• Some people vote for neither.
• Some people can't figure out how to vote at all.
• Finally, a bunch of guys from out-of-state tell you which one you think is the best-looking cow.

CALIFORNIA CORPORATION

• You have millions of cows.
• They make real California cheese.
• Only five speak English.
• Most are illegals.
• Arnold likes the ones with the big udders.

Werrd

Gotta love out-of-context quotes.

work at WAM today:

8-year old to her grandmother: "...and I was only touching it for like 2 seconds and it started getting all hard..."

When they step up to yo' face what you gon' do?

Evil cows and their plans to take over the world

I seem to have gotten food poisoning from a simple glass of milk. Granted, I was drinking it on March 21st, and it expired on the 18th, but I figured all would be well. I just couldn't stand to see that much milk go to waste...

Spited for my frugality! Ah, well.. time to eat saltine crackers and Pepto.

EU-3, Iran, U.S.: Talks Clear the Way for Military Action?

From Strategic Forecasting:

Summary

The United States has indirectly joined the ongoing European-Iranian nuclear talks. Far from representing a policy change for the Bush administration, however, the change indicates that the talks have failed and the path to direct U.S. action against Iran is clearing.

Analysis

Various leaks March 11 indicate that the United States has agreed to indirectly join ongoing European-Iranian negotiations and offer economic incentives to defuse Iran's nuclear program.

Washington has agreed to throw its support behind Iran's World Trade Organization bid should Tehran fully and permanently abandon its uranium enrichment program -- a condition that Tehran is unlikely to agree to. In exchange, the United Kingdom, France and Germany (EU-3) have agreed to refer the case to the U.N. Security Council (UNSC) for possible sanctions or military action against Iran should Tehran refuse to drop its enrichment program. In essence, the talks have failed and the path to potential U.S.
military action against Iran is being cleared.

The core problem with the European-Iranian negotiations is not so much that everyone approached the talks from different positions and with different outcomes in mind, but that all sides did not consider discussing the nuclear issue to be the point of the exercise.

For Iran and the United States, the talks were an indirect means of debating the future Iranian role in Iraq. Tehran wanted at best to achieve dominance there -- after all, Iraq does have a Shiite majority -- or at least secure its western border. The ups and downs of U.S.-Iranian relations were mirrored in the ups and downs of the Iranian-European dialogue.

For the EU-3, the negotiations were about, well, themselves. France and Germany had just seen their efforts to forge a common European policy go up and smoke. Stymied by an inability to challenge the United States independently, they decided to pool their efforts with the United Kingdom in order to prove that Europe could still matter on the international stage.

Berlin and Paris felt it was critical to demonstrate that Europe could successfully negotiate away a problem without resorting to force, U.S.-style. For them, it did not really matter what the topic was, so much as that they were seen at the forefront of dealing with it.

Such disparate views of what was important have led to the talks' failure.

The United States has now decided that it does not need Iran much at all. In an effort to force Washington back to the table, Tehran declared March 8 that it has been hiding a nuclear program from international inspectors for
18 years. The EU-3, which now realizes that the Iranians did not care a whit for its belief that this was all really about Europe's place in the world, was embarrassed, to say the least. So, the EU-3 has changed its position.

The next few steps are almost locked in stone.

Iran is extremely unlikely to give up its nuclear card. For Tehran, this is about Iraq and regime survival. In order to maintain a strong bargaining position, Iran must keep the United States on its toes -- thus the admission that it has had a nuclear program for two decades. Tehran already knows that the Iraqi strategy of hide-and-seek will not dissuade Washington from pulling the trigger, so it needs to try something else.

That something else means the Europeans almost assuredly will agree to refer the case to the UNSC. They realize that they have been played the fool and are looking to come out of this with as little egg on their faces as possible. They path they have chosen is to ask the United States to indirectly join the "negotiations." The Bush administration, satisfied so long as the path leads to the UNSC -- and to possible military action -- was happy to oblige. The White House, hoping to thaw recently frigid U.S.-European relations, also is being uncharacteristically gracious about "accepting" the European strategy of negotiations.

The EU-3 can show the world that it can bring the United States on board.
The United States can show Europe that it can be "reasonable" and engage in "negotiations."

Once the issue reaches the UNSC, however, all bets are off. The Chinese and the Russians are as likely to veto any call for action against Iran as they are to abstain, and the Europeans certainly do not want to see the United States run roughshod over another Middle Eastern state -- particularly such a large one whose market they would like to tap.

But for the United States, simply having the issue on the UNSC table will be enough. On March 7, Washington appointed John Bolton to be the top U.S. dog at the United Nations. Bolton is a firm believer that the United Nations should put up or shut up. Iran's activities have had the effect of moving the country outside of the U.N. system and so, in Bolton's view, making the issue one not just of Tehran's nuclear program, but of the credibility of the United Nations itself.

The Bolton/U.S. argument will be that if the UNSC will not take steps to rectify such defiance of international norms, the United Nations' time has passed.

That will leave the Bush administration having achieved two foreign policy goals. First, the United States will either have made the United Nations an arm of U.S. policy, or it will have freed the United States from needing to deal with it at all (the White House will be happy with either path).
Second, the United States will have partially cleared the way for Washington to deal with Tehran as it sees fit -- a way which could possibly involve military action. Such action would most likely involve airstrikes against key nuclear facilities, such as the heavy water reactor site at Arak, Iran's primary uranium enrichment facility at Natanz and the Bushehr nuclear power plant.

As to time frame, it will likely be at least several weeks before the Europeans agree to forward the case to the UNSC, but the United States could be working to speed things along a bit. Two U.S. aircraft carriers, the USS Theodore Roosevelt and USS Carl Vinson, already are in Atlantic and Indian Oceans, respectively, steaming their way toward the Middle East. They potentially will join the USS Harry S. Truman, which already is in the Persian Gulf. The United States does not put multiple carrier groups in close proximity lightly.

Plows are assholes! Fuckers makin our roads all safe and shit!

On the masspike yesterday afternoon, I'm just getting ahead of the three plows we've been stuck behind going 20 for the past 15 miles, and three more come out of fucking nowhere, and bunch themselves so close there's no way I'm getting around. Still, I pull up real close behind them to see if I can't find a hole, and this guy in a yellow pickup from the DPW comes all up on my shit and gives me a real dirty look as he swerves closer to me. So, I backed off a little. Everyone else on the road was getting around the last set of plows, and now were coming up behind me to try what I did. The merciless plows gave us no chances of passing. Luckily, there was a toll coming up. I knew they couldn't fit through the toll booths. So, I breathed a sigh of relief as I drove into the seemingly deserted toll plaza (remember, we've been going 20 for a while) but as I pull away, I see the plows coming out again to screw us all over. I think me and maybe one other car made it through before they blocked the road up again. Sweet, my own private masspike!

Let's Set The Record Straight

The Only Good Album that 50 Cent made

"Get Rich" is loud but I dunno if I'd call it "Good"

Boobies!

Speaking of mundane aspects of my life....

I recommend Semperit SportGrip snow tires, purchased at Tire Warehouse. They are no-name brand, granted. They cost me under $300 for the set of 4, and my car is now the Ultimo-Destructo Saab, capable of leaping tall buildings in a single bound... or maybe just getting out of deep snow. Deep nigga !! I drove circles around dza's f350 which was parked in some deep white powder.

And listen to Crunk Juice while you do so

Journalist?

So, the almighty news said that we folk (bloggers) can be viewed as journalists. Hmmm. I suppose this means that the everyday, mundane details of our lives have been promoted to newsworthy material.

Actually, I see nothing wrong with this. If a squirrel riding waterskis is news, who's to say that someone we know getting the clap isn't news? I mean, damn. If Clinton's elective surgery makes national news, why shouldn't my broken car?

Thanks, humanity.

New Phone

I got a new phone, the Samsung SPH-A620 (VGA1000). It has a camera. Neat



Much better than my old N400 (even though the first N400 I had that got friggin eaten was pretty nice)

Shifter fixed

I found a new shifter at the junk yard for $15. It is nice and functional, yay!