Posted 9:24 PM by Floyd

Why do Arab terrorists hate us? One reason I've heard is that the United States sponsors various unsavory regimes, thus motivating its inhabitants to lash out at us.

Well ... suppose you had heard that someone committed a murder because they hated the victim. Or were jealous of him. Or had a marital dispute with the victim. All those reasons would be believable.

But what if someone told you that he killed a man because he hated his neighbor -- and the man he killed was his employer?

Would that be believable?

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Posted 9:37 PM by Floyd

Nice To Have You Aboard, If Ever So Briefly

On Tuesday the jury for the murder trial of cross-dresser "Gwen" Araujo deadlocked, and the judge declared a mistrial. The Alameda County prosecutors attempted to try the alleged perpetrators for first degree murder; the jury could not agree whether the killing consistuted first or second degree homicide.

Yesterday, two members of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors sponsored a resolution urging Alameda County to retry the case. (No link; I heard it on the radio.)

How ... interesting to see the board get tough on crime! And how very helpful too. No prosecutor who aggressively tried to get the most serious possible conviction would ever think of retrying the case after a jury mistrial. Thanks for the tip, board of supervisors!

Last year, San Francisco had 62 homicides.

But then, it is always more satisfying to tell someone else how to do his job, rather than attending to your own.




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Posted 9:16 PM by Floyd

Why do so many websites try to cram so much data into their home pages? Look at Yahoo and tell me that you can find what you want in that mess. I've given up trying to find links on the Yahoo home page; if it's not a subpage I know, like my.yahoo.com or weather.yahoo.com -- I don't bother.

Furthermore, why do some sites punish people who don't have up-to-date chips and memory? Last week I was in a hotel that let its patrons use an old Windows 98 box. I tried to check my scores using the ESPN baseball page. ESPN's site was such a bloated, vile mess that it didn't matter that the computer had DSL; the page overloaded the poor box's 64 or 128 megabytes of memory, and each box score took up to a minute to load. I gave up, went to Google News, and soon found that USA Today has a day's boxscores all on one page, in a simple layout.

And how can Sun create this atrocity of a web page for its Java One conference? How dare Sun create this atrocity of a web page for its Java One conference? Click around; the site is like a slow, bloated web app -- you can see servlets futilely churning as you wait -- but it doesn't do anything. It is impossible to find out which technical sessions are being held at a particular time and date.

And Sun wants to charge developers two thousand dollars each to tell them how to use Java to create web pages! Physician, heal thyself.

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Posted 11:14 AM by Floyd

"Anyway, when I bang Peter Fonda, I'm the one doing the driving."

Jeff Goldstein participates in a Moonbat Hunt. With The Commissar. With pictures. With your beverage squirting out of your nostrils.

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Posted 11:28 PM by Floyd

One more quick hit: When exactly did Elephants in Oakland become a Jim Mecir excuse factory? And why?

Mecir is forced-into-the-closer-role? Boo-hoo-hoo! Let us know when he is forced to play shortstop. A's manager Ken Macha is a "jackass" who should be "cursed until he bleeds from the mouth?" I am not a Macha fan, but what exactly is the poor guy supposed to do with a bullpen full of pitchers who blow leads?

People pick on Mecir because he's a cripple? Yeah, and everyone who calls Arthur Rhodes "Queen Arthur" does so because they hate blacks. Free clue: No one cares his favorite team's players' handicaps or skin colors or religion or anything else. All they care about is whether they play well.

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Posted 10:19 PM by Floyd

My apologies for not posting much of late, but I spent the last week in Newark, New York, and Scranton. Sherry and I flew San Francisco to LAX to Newark on Tuesday and checked into a Ramada Inn near the airport. We spent Wednesday in Manhattan, seeing sights such as Central Park, the Metropolitan museum, and The Producers. Thursday we rented a car at the airport and drove two hours to Scranton. There we met up with my mother, sisters, and two very cute nephews. My sister Meredith got married on Saturday. This morning we drove back to Newark and flew through St. Louis. We landed in San Francisco at 8:45 and got home at 10.

Tomorrow I will post more about our trip. Right now I will make some observations about air travel:

Newark's airport has a bad reputation as an immense, lethargic, soul-deadening place. I did not find it so terrible. It looked reasonably modern, had some useful amenities, and featured a nifty elevated train to ferry passengers to terminals, parking areas, and rental car facilities. Newark's air conditioning did smell funny. So did our hotel. Is there some sort of foul-smelling coolant that is used only in the Garden State?

The St. Louis "Lambert" airport, on the other hand, is a vile dump. I have very low standards for airports. I don't care about their aesthetics; all I demand is that they satisfy these wants:

• Decent restaurants for when I have time for a meal.
  
• Decent fast food for when I don't.
  
• At least one bar with good beer.
  
• Good coffee.
  
• Power outlets in gate areas for charging my laptop.
  
• Terminals that are not too far apart, so that changing planes does not turn into a marathon.
  

St. Louis failed every one of these requirements. We arrived in Terminal C with an hour layover. The terminal map simply labelled the various shops as BAR, SNACK BAR, et cetera, giving the effect of a cheap board game. (Play "Stuck at Lambert" and see if you can spend the least amount of money on bad comestibles!) We moved toward Terminal B to see what they had, and found that we would need to run the gauntlet of airport security to get there. No thanks. So we went to a SNACK BAR which offered these choices:

• Prepackaged cold triangular sandwiches. If God had meant for me to eat them, at least one of my mouth or my stomach would have three sides. Fuckers.
  
• Hideous Pizza Hut single pizzas.
  
• Hot dogs.
  

And all at an exorbitant price!

To add insult to injury, the flight to San Francisco was full, and when we boarded there was no space for our carryons. Fortunately San Francisco, which is a good airport, spat our carryons out of the luggage carousel in record time.



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