Haven’t seen this in the MSM yet. It’s one thing for the son of the athletic director to be charged with operating a boat while impaired. It’s another thing that he was a former Duke athlete. What angers me is that the father, the athletic director himself, was in the boat and allowed his son to operate the boat while impaired. Of course I don’t know all the facts. But Joe Alleva is the guy in charge of the Duke athletic program. The buck stops with him when it comes to misbehavior within Duke athletics. But there’s the appearance that he condones such reckless behavior with his own son. How can he be trusted to clean up the behavior of scores of other young people?

[Yes, another Duke rant from Toastie. How can I trash the institution that gave me my education and now my employment? It's really quite easy.]

Anyone know of any good bumper stickers that make an intelligent progressive point without being too offensive? A lot of people at work know which car is mine, so I don’t want to ruffle anyone’s feathers (too much). I got rid of the “F The President” sticker long ago when I was commuting to South Carolina; didn’t want to get shot. Besides, most of the “W The President” stickers have finally disappeared. I wonder if there are any parodies of  “The Power of Pride”. But I don’t want to piss of the couple of cars in the parking deck who’ve got one of those.

I don’t just want a bumper sticker for the sake of having one. I’ve had a nasty dent on my bumper for about a year, a result of someone rear-ending me, and I was too stupid to get his insurance info because I didn’t see anything wrong, as it was dark.

Back on May 12, I wrote about my disgust with Arm & Hammer Multicat litter.

Today, I received this email:

Hi Toastie,

Best,
Maureen

So I wrote back and gave my address so I can get some cat litter coupons. I neglected to tell her that I’m already using Fresh Step, but that I don’t find the product she mentioned suitable enough for my cats. I actually get Fresh Step Scoopable Cat Litter with crystals because the crystals seem to be the last piece of the puzzle that makes for the only cat litter I’ve ever bought that really works. Mo, if you’re reading this, I should still get the coupons, because I am discussing Fresh Step’s fine products in my blog.

The Senate rejected the proposed constitutional amendment on desecrating the American flag by one vote

14 Democrats voted for it. I’m at a loss for words… Burning a flag impinges on whose rights exactly? It offends people who fought for this country or people whose loved ones died fighting for this country? Fighting for WHAT exactly? Our “way of life” perhaps? Doesn’t our way of life include Freedom of Speech and the ability to peacefully demonstrate against our government? That’s not the same as conspiring against the government or committing treason, although righties are hurling all sorts of ridiculous allegations at The New York Times for that right now.

Now the ten minutes of pondering I do while I contemplate whether to post a controversial opinion such as this. Sometimes, I’ll say “forget it” and save it as Private. Sometimes I’ll post it and an hour later make it Friends-only. Whenever I have an opinion like this, I think for a long time about potential reactions. Someone could argue that a local ordinance can ban large signs, and that’s a violation of free speech. Or a home-owner’s association could ban garden gnomes, even though the display of a garden gnome on one’s property should constitute free speech. The federal government simply wants to make a rule about flags, and by the very definition of a constituional amendment, it is constitutional by virtue of being ratified. Ok, now I’m not so sure it’s worth getting upset over this. There are consequences if my gay friends can never marry or if my female friends don’t have a legal right to an abortion. If my godless liberal friends who hate America want to demonstrate their solidarity with the terrorists, they can burn…effigies of Bush (or can they?) or carcasses of bald eagles (no, that’s just wrong) or…dammit, a flag is probably the best thing to burn to show that you’re pissed at the government, but I’m sure they (okay, we) can think of something other than a flag if need be.

And this is why I don’t like arguing with people. I don’t see things in absolutes, so I’ll never be 100% certain in my convictions… *sigh*

In-depth article from SI

Regardless of whether a rape was committed, the images of many people who did not commit a rape and the image of Duke and of Duke athletics have been greatly tarnished. It sucks to be Mike Pressler. I sucks to be a lacrosse player who wasn’t even at that party.

Yet, I’m still not able to muster sympathy for Pressler or any of the players.

Now I hope he gets retired by Ned Lamont. And this new campaign aid from Lieberman’s camp is one of the most ridiculous political ads I’ve ever seen. Even if you have zero interest in this Connecticut senate race, the ad will awe you.

Do we live in the 21st century? Does science mean anything to our government? Are people so insecure about their heterosexuality? WTF?
(Rhetorical questions)

I’m reading about the advancements that society around the globe has seen over the last fifteen years, the “flattening” of the globe, as Thomas Friedman calls it. And yet no computers, no networks, no blogs can stop some of the horrors that are going on in the world.

A mainstream news story on a terribly overlooked problem

And all the costs and sacrifice of that struggle has been worth it because from Latin America to Europe to Asia we’ve gained the peace that freedom brings. In this new century, freedom is once again assaulted by enemies, determined to roll back generations of democratic progress. Once again, we’re responding to a global campaign of fear with a global campaign of freedom. And once again, we will see freedom’s victory.

- George W. Bush, 10/6/05

I’d like to see George W. Bush stranded in a Ugandan refugee camp for a week and see if the sphere of his global campaign of freedom changes at all.

I promise not to do this too often. I have a feed on my netvibes page of Flickr cat pics. Much cleaner on the screen, far less cluttered than the LJ kittypix group. I just saw a picture of a cat in a crockpot, and it’s just so so cute.

It’s been evident that in the past few weeks, I’ve been going crazy with my web-surfing, finding all sorts of new sites. I thought I had reached the point, for a couple of years actually, where I had seen the whole internet, or at least all that might possibly interest me. I know that sounds naive, considering the internet is about is infinite as the universe itself. But I found myself basically toggling between CNN.com, LJ, and Gmail endlessly. It’s safe to say that I’ve broken out of that routine. Here’s a summary of what I’ve been surfing lately:

Flickr – I’ve had a decent photo album platform with the gallery I’ve got on captaintoastie.com. But I like the feeling of at least potentially being connected to others with my photos. My gallery is an island. My Flickr photos are part of a community. I want people who have a Flickr cat RSS feed to see pictures of Aremid and Zellouisa when I post them. And I really like tagging. Last night, I tagged all of the pictures of Zellouisa where she’s on her back and then watched what I call a “tummy show” of her. Lots of people like Smugmug, and there are plenty of other sites for sharing pics, but I prefer Flickr.

Zooomr – This is the photo site I played with Saturday, but I lost patience with it. What’s impressive about it is that it was founded by a 17-year-old. Other than that, it is a bare-bones Flickr clone with the added feature of geo-tagging, which allows you to associate your photos with a point on a Google map. Some articles say that geo-tagging is the next big thing. I don’t see the appeal personally. While a much-improved Zooomr 2.0 is supposed to be launched any day now, I didn’t feel like waiting.

Last.fm – It’s a music community site where I’ve met nobody. But the usefulness is that it can track all of the music you play, and it generated charts of your most-played artists and tracks. So I use it to track everything that’s ever played on Toastie Radio. I think it will be interesting to look at my data a year or two from now to see what I was playing in the past. Theoretically, you can find people who share the same music tastes as you, but in my case, those who share my musical tastes are middle-aged and will never use this website.

Lala.com – It’s another music site. At lala, you list your CD collection and then specify which CDs you want. From there, you trade CDs, for $1.50 per trade, shipping them in Netflix-like envelopes. This is a legal way of obtaining new music cheaply. What is not legal, I presume, is keeping the MP3s you have of a CD that you’ve just traded away. I keep forgetting to delete those MP3s…

MySpace – Not worthy of a link. The last three friend requests I’ve gotten have been spam from girls with webcams.

LiveJournal – A link for this would be silly. I wish I had more connections via LJ. But I don’t write well enough to be able to compose anything worthwhile regarding the state of the world, so mostly I just post links. And my friends-only stuff is too negative and whiny to have any mass-appeal. As for what I read, I wish people would share more of their thoughts, but I appreciate that we all have different purposes for our LJs and different comfort levels with what is shared and with whom we share.

Google – I’ve looked into lots of Google apps/sites recently, and I suppose that overall, I’m disappointed, mostly with my lack of need for their products. Google Calendar is cool, but I don’t find myself with many things to schedule. Google Notes is cool, but I haven’t been noting a whole lot. Google Spreadsheets is something I intend to use. I have a few spreadsheets I use at home, and I’ll convert them to Google. But I don’t have many. Google Trends can be fun for looking at the popularity of search terms over time. Google Base has not been promoted by Google at all yet, so it has almost no content. It could be better than Craigslist if they put some effort into it, but right now, most search results are from non-Google websites. It doesn’t seem particularly useful. Google Reader is a feed aggregator, but I think there are probably dozens of better options out there. Google’s personalized homepage has a lot of potential, but for now, I’ve found a much better one.

Netvibes – This is a very cool personal homepage site that I’ve started using. You can stick any old feed on here, and you can have multiple tabs, so you can really put a lot of information on here. There are lots of modules for popular websites, like for gmail, box.net, and flickr. I’ve found some of their default feeds very interesting, like Boing Boing and TechCrunch, the latter of which has given me lots of info on other cool websites to discover.