Anyone still buy it?

I own a bridge you might be interested in.

I rent an apartment from a buddy of mine and it is a bit “under construction.”

Which is fine because he’s my buddy; and I lived like a squatter for years, so no big whup.

But I recently re-remembered an old bit of squatter know-how called, “turn off the friggin lights.”

Primarily because light attracts insects. And if you leave the lights on in the bathroom and there’s a bit of open wall in your house… it will fill with flies.

Which isn’t a big deal either, but it reminded me of a good repressed memory.

This was about six or seven years ago and I lived in one of those creepy awesome 100 year old houses on Young. One of my roommates had this disgusting, hateful monitor lizard, and he fed it mice.

(Never in my life have I had such an overt animosity with an animal. That thing would start hissing at me whenever I entered the room. The feeling was completely mutual.)

One day Bob fed it too many mice and it killed one and stuffed it under a rock.

I’ll spare you the biological details, but that dead mouse turned into about 10,000 flies.

I walked into the bathroom that morning; and while today’s little surprise was mildly annoying, that was like something out of the twilight zone.

There were thousands of flies covering the walls and the ceiling. Big green meat flies that are all slow and stupid and don’t even move when you swat them.

I walked out of the room and shut the door. I was about 40-45% sure what I had just seen wasn’t real. (It happens.)

I opened the door again and looked inside. There they were, a shifting green curtain of bugs.

I thought “Well… nevermind.”

Then I went back to bed.

The end.

Sorry that’s the best story I could think of today… if you have a better one I’m standing right here listening.

Some people go to work smiling in the bright sunshine and think about all the great things they are going to accomplish that day.

I am not one of these people.

It’s not that I don’t like my job, I do. I like my job more than I think most people like their jobs.

But it’s a different deal. I slip into this office in the dead of night and turn on the police scanner like a vulture watching a migrant train pass through the desert.

Someone is going to fall; it’s just a matter of time.

I listen to this thing and hear all manner of urban dystopia nightmare stories. And then again some calls are quite simple.

Heart attacks, brain aneurisms, strokes. Some people just stop breathing.
It happens all the time.
And I get to hear it all. Like the ever aware autistic kid in a Stephen King novel.

Are these stories less important than a young man being shot in a botched robbery or drug deal in South Memphis?

Not really. It’s still someone’s dad, or someone’s daughter.

It all makes for pretty bleak fare to go with your cheerios…

But not today.

Not one person was hurt on my brief watch today, on “good friday” morning.
Not one. Not one I heard, anyway. And I usually hear em.

Seriously. That’s amazing.

I had thought that I wasn’t very emotionally invested in what comes across my little squawk box here. It’s not like I have any control over it.
And that’s professionalism, right?

Well… I’ve been wrong before.

Go tigers.

I think that I’m doing a very good job of listening to the president’s speech and not throwing anything at the television this morning.

I’m not even parroting back the more illogical (or… let us say, factually challenged) statements, as I typically would.

I DID have to pace around for a second, but the majority of the online department is more or less trained to ignore my strange behavior.

I am, however, attempting to the draw the line at dialog or violence with inanimate objects.

I took a brief hiatus from “contributing” (which is, I suppose, debatable) to the M3mphis blog for a minute.

People absorbed by their own issues tend to talk about themselves. Which is generally lame.

And not that I’m going to stop doing just that. I’m just going to be better at it.

I carried over this flawed mentality somehow that the readers here are people I know. And you are not.

And I am a normal person who sometimes thinks dumb things.
And I also sometimes “say” dumb things. You yourself have probably said at least one thing that is really stupid.

But the people that do know me already know EXACTLY what I think about EVERYTHING anyway.
So we can put the megaphone down, I suppose.

And push on a bit. I’ve been given a tiny little soapbox here, and with it comes the old monkey and the machete analogy.
Once the monkey gets the machete, he’s not always willing to give it back as easily as you’d hoped.
I think that’s how it goes…

Anyway, I’ve decided I want to share something with you very fine people, many of whom I don’t know, this morning.

I have red hair.

I am about the redhairedest dang person on the planet. At least top 10.

And I exhibit a large amount of those traits typically associated with such. The Scotch/Irish ancestry, the temper, the weakness to sunlight, the instilling of terror in babies and small animals… all that.

I don’t know if it’s a recessive gene thing or what.

But here’s the kicker.

It is March 17th.

And I don’t feel like drinking in the slightest. Not even a quiver.
Nor is there a merry caper in my step nor a twinkle in my glassy eye.

Now THAT should be illegal. I’m sure somewhere it probably is.

Could be that it’s only 9 o’clock in the morning…. but I still feel really guilty.

I’ll be sure to let you know how this BREAKING NEWS develops!!!

You guys be careful out there today. Don’t do anything stupid.

Over and out.

-Bret

Wrong.

Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

Here’s a fairly concise overview of Superdelegates (dant da daaa!!!) published on Commondreams.org yesterday.

Cheers.

The Superdelegate ‘Firewall’
by Sean Gonsalves

At the heart of the Democratic Party’s nomination process is a decidedly undemocratic creature known as the superdelegate.

What are superdelegates, aka unpledged delegates? Key word: unpledged.

Superdelegates - mostly members of Congress, governors, party officials and grass-roots activists - can back any candidate they choose. While ordinary delegates are technically committed to a candidate, superdelegates can change their allegiance whenever they feel like it.

Former President Clinton, for example, is a superdelegate - hence his vital importance to his wife’s bid for the White House. The Washington Post reports: “Clinton, former president Bill Clinton…and their allies have been working aggressively for months to court the superdelegates, drawing on old loyalties to open a huge advantage for the senator from New York in total delegates amassed.”

Al Gore’s 2000 campaign manager and superdelegate Donna Brazile, describes the essence of this elitist practice. “One person, one vote? Forget about it. Some votes are worth more than others. You have to know the rules.”

Those are the “rules.” And this is the way the game is being played: “Of the nearly 300 superdelegates who have committed to a candidate, out of a total of 796, Clinton leads Obama roughly by a 2-to-1 ratio, according to numerous counts. The lead is so substantial, her campaign asserted before Super Tuesday, that even if Obama pulls ahead in pledged delegates after Feb. 5, (as he did) Clinton will probably retain a modest edge in the overall delegate tally.”

Tom Foreman of CNN.com provides a super brief history of the superdelegate. “A few decades ago, Democratic leaders felt that sometimes, Democratic voters were choosing poor presidential candidates: campaigners who couldn’t win elections, or even if they could, they didn’t please Democratic kingmakers.”

“Jimmy Carter, for example, was an obscure candidate who developed so much popular appeal that he essentially forced Democratic Party leaders to accept him as the nominee, even though not everyone was thrilled by it.”

“They made the superdelegates: a super class of super Democrats, each of whom could vote at the convention for a candidate of choice - in effect, giving each of these Democrats the power of tens of thousands of average citizens.”

So, with delegates-on-steroids as the Democratic Party “rule,” it explains why Obama can be getting more votes and ordinary delegates while Hillary Clinton leads in overall delegate count. This is what the Clinton campaign refers to as their “firewall.”

Think 100-yard-dash (I ran track in the pre-metric system days) with Clinton starting 20-yards ahead of Obama. To mix metaphors - that’s not exactly a level playing field. But like Donna said: those are the “rules.”

Lots of journalists are starting to wonder about superdelegates - to the point where the Democratic National Committee held a teleconference on Friday to answer some of our questions.

The idea of superdelegates was born out of a desire to avoid a “brokered convention” in which no candidate wins the party’s nomination on the first ballot. The last time that happened was the 1952 Democratic Convention when 11 names were nominated in a nail-biter that included Adlai Stevenson, who became the party’s third-ballot nominee.

This year, the winner will need 2,025 delegates - half the total number of delegates who will be seated at the upcoming convention. And though the DNC isn’t keeping an official Clinton-Obama delegate score, they did say there were still 1,435 delegates up for grabs.

Another interesting number was also revealed: Of the 796 super delegate slots, 76 of them have yet to be picked.

No future speculations were entertained during the Friday’s Q & A session, which, of course, will only fuel more speculation, especially during an election season with tremendous popular appeal.

What if Clinton and Obama are neck-and-neck on the delegate count going into the convention and the superdelegates aren’t just a deciding factor but THE deciding factor? What if the Clinton super delegate “firewall” trend continues and these super delegates end up crowning Hillary king, even though Obama gets more votes?

True, all the candidates knew the “rules” going in. So, Hillary’s delegate advantage can be considered “fair play.” But if this undemocratic “rule” should happen to beat a more popular Obama, there’s going to be lots of folks, inside and outside the party, rightly crying foul.

To live in a state won by Mike Huckabee.

The man wants “to change the constitution to better reflect the bible.”

Hello? ….anyone?

We join our intellectual contemporaries of Arkansas, West Virginia, Iowa, Georgia, and Mississippi in nominating the former pastor…

I’m going to ask you folks that voted for Huckabee to do a little exercise with me.

Imagine for one second that you are not a Christian.

I know it’s hard. But try it anyway. It’s called empathy.

Better yet, imagine a candidate who said he wanted to change the constitution to better reflect the Qur’an.

Would you think that a Super Idea?

No, of course you wouldn’t. That’s why we have, say it with me.
The. separation. of. church. and. state.
It’s in the c-o-n-s-t-i-t-u-t-i-o-n.
We are a Constitutional Republic.

And don’t tell me this country was founded on Christianity. It wasn’t. The founding fathers knew very well the dangers of theocracy. And took necessary precautions against it.

But we, apparently, do not.

Just look over to the Middle East if you want to see how well that system works.

But of course, I’m a heathen. You probably won’t listen to me, anyway.

If I didn’t like my job so much I would move away from here.

Cheers.