On the other hand, I’m trying to give her the benefit of the doubt. What did she mean by that statement? It could be that there was a huge amount of pomp and circumstance for the flag, and her reaction was akin to saying “Wow; this ceremony is huge… This is just the flag part?”

Not that that’s a whole lot better, but man, she’s going to have a hell of a time explaining that statement. I’m really trying to give her the benefit of the doubt, but I’m having a hell of a time doing so in that I can’t seem to come up with a context in which that statement is one a First Lady should be making.

And the eye roll / look of disdain at the end doesn’t help much, either.

Don’t worry.  Stability is coming.  They promised us!

Here’s the post in question:

Gordon and Stageleft have been duking it out lately over Stageleft’s non-retraction-non-apology-retraction-apology.

Well, Gordon is having none of it… Stageleft seemed to think that being posted about on Dogsnot was an honor…

As for the honor of my time and energy, in the last week I’ve blogged about Eating Maggots for Dinner, Richard Bradford Hall the Glory Hole Commando, and your blog.

Yes, an honor indeed.

For long time readers, you all know that Gordon The All Knowing and Omnipresent (among many other names he used over time) was a real pisser in the old days. He had a way of getting under people’s skins, and this post was no different.

Anyway I get a comment that says the following.

Dear Mr. Ferrari, I’m not sure how you’re connected to this site. In 2005 Gordon posted an unflattering post regarding me. It still comes up when one Googles my name. This is the url at this site:

http://www.insignificantthoughts.com/2005/05/18/gordon-gets-to-the-point/

May I ask that you remove it please?

Your assistance in this is appreciated.

Richard Hall

IP address: 71.184.51.64

So I wrote back:

You’re not even mentioned in that post, but even if you were, I still wouldn’t take it down.

Of course I totally missed his name. Bonehead move on my part.

Anyway, this time I get an e-mail:

Look again: http://www.insignificantthoughts.com/2005/05/18/gordon-gets-to-the-point/

My full name is mentioned in that post. I quote; “As for the honor of my time and energy, in the last week I’ve blogged about Eating Maggots for Dinner, Richard Bradford Hall the Glory Hole Commando, and your blog.”

I’m doing as instructed to do as the first in a series of protocol steps by MSN as the proper way to do this thing. I’ve asked you nicely to remove it and now you’ve refused for reasons known only to yourself. We don’t know each other. But you have jurisdiction. I can advise you that it would be in your best interest to remove it. I’m following MSN internet instruction in my request for you to do so as the honorable thing Mr. Ferrari.

Since my name is written there in a slanderous reference, MSN asks that I follow their lead. It’s just that simple.

Do us both a favor and be a nice man. I bear you no rancor and there’s no reason for you to bear me any. I ask you kindly to please remove it.

Richard Hall

To which I replied…

No.

And that was that. I don’t remove content. I’m not that kind of person. If you have something to say, say it. If someone else says something, go after them. If I post something and quote someone else, not my problem. Whatever the rationale, I don’t remove content. Period. I feel very strongly about that. For all intents and purposes, this site is an archive to me and that’s very important, so I’ll be damned if I’m going to remove a post because some random person doesn’t like that the first google result for their name is not exactly flattering.

Anyway, I considered the issue dropped.

Not quite.

I got an e-mail about an hour ago from a friend who moderates a certain site I used to be the Executive Editor for. See, when you’re nice to people, they watch your back. This is the post that was left there:

The IP is: 71.184.51.64
And the email address is: rachelmylove@hotmail.com (I am POSITIVE I have seen that email address before!)

Your poster, Vincent M. Ferrari, runs an internet blog called insignificant thoughts

I think you should be advised that he lives in the Bronx and is a Registered Sex Offender. The man is unhinged in a variety of ways.

Note the IP address. He didn’t even have the common sense to use a proxy.

Oopsies.

See, now here’s the thing. I could go after him hook line and sinker. He slandered me in an online forum, and I know it’s him because his IP matches. I have no interest. Instead, smart boy, this post will also hit Google (and I imagine it will do so relatively quickly) so now when people search for your name, they’ll see two posts on this site that show the kind of person you are.

Not smart.

See, Ben Franklin once said you never argue with someone who buys ink by the barrel. I may not buy ink by the barrel, but I do have some pagerank clout. It’s probably not a good idea to piss me off if you want to keep your name out of Google.

And I have a lot of friends with some pagerank on here and on Twitter. I’m sure they’ll repost this with a link that says his full name, Richard Bradford Hall, so that we can pretty much take over the search results for this no-name no-public-persona-having nobody.

That, my friends, is how I buy ink by the barrel.

Richard Bradford Hall just made a big mistake. I hope you’ll help me demonstrate to him just how big it was. I’m sure he’ll appreciate it.

Why put it out to the public, then ignore what they have to say?

Ever notice how these campaigns always do that? They put the idea out to the public, and then they proceed to ignore what the public actually says. “We’re all about the people! Let the people choose! Wait, they chose that? Well, of course their choice isn’t the final choice.”

People want Harry Baals. I say let them have Harry Baals.

President Barack Obama said Wednesday that heavy-equipment maker Caterpillar has informed him it will rehire some of the thousands of workers it has laid off in recent weeks if Congress passes an economic stimulus bill.
“The time for talk has passed,” Obama said.

The president’s travel to pitch the urgency of the stimulus plan was his third day in a row to leave Washington. On Thursday, he goes to Peoria, Ill., to visit a Caterpillar manufacturing plant.

The world’s largest maker of mining and construction machinery announced more than 22,000 job cuts last month amid waning demand for its products.

But Obama said the company told him Wednesday it would hire back some of those workers if the legislation passes. As House and Senate negotiators worked to reconcile differences between competing versions of the legislation, Obama spoke during a visit to a highway construction site here just outside of Washington.
“You don’t need to travel very far from that debate to see why this plan is both urgent and essential for our recovery,” he said.

September, 2010:

Caterpillar, the world’s largest manufacturer of construction equipment, will build a factory in China to produce mini hydraulic excavators, the company said in a statement.

Construction will begin in Wujiang, near Shanghai, at the end of 2010 and the facility should be ready in 2012 to begin production of mini excavators of less than eight tons, the company said Tuesday.

Caterpillar did not say how much the project will cost.

It is part of a long-term plan for investments in China that will make Caterpillar one of the leading manufacturers of construction equipment in the country.

“China is the world’s largest market for excavators in the below eight ton class, and the development of this new facility will better position Caterpillar to provide our customers in China with solutions that will help them succeed,” said Mary Bell, a Caterpillar vice president.

Yet another company takes the stimulus money and runs.

Thank you so much, Mr. President.

Maybe I’m missing something, but if you’re at a speech, how does a video of it trick you into acting in a way you wouldn’t have or didn’t want to act…

Again, I’ve seen the Justine and Ray William Johnson vids, and neither are as salacious as the titles, but it just seems kinda weird that YouTube would pull those vids and feature them, titles included, on the front page, particularly when you look at how quick they are to pull content, let flaggers win, and so on.

Oh well.

I’m a big fan of Om Malik. I read a few of the GigaOm blogs and trust what he has to say. That doesn’t mean, however, that he gets it right all the time, and sometimes he makes a miss so catastrophically bad I wonder if he’s asleep at the switch.

Today there’s a post on GigaOm that has a retrospective of Apple’s key milestones for the decade, and a chart meant to demonstrate why he believes Apple is the company of the decade.

Here’s the chart.

I can’t help but feel something is missing from this chart… It seems that there’s a big gap there, right around October 23, 2001…

A little something called… Oh, I don’t know… The iPod?

Now granted, he does have a video embedded of the announcement of the first iPod, but can we be realistic for a minute here? The iPod, more than any other device, technology, achievement, or acquisition changed Apple’s fortunes from a mediocre computer company that was for artsy people to a technology company that was designing products consumers wanted.

More than the Intel transition, more than the insanely popular iPod Mini, and even more than the iPhone, the iPod changed Apple forever. To make a chart of key milestones and not include the most important product that, even up until now, Apple has ever produced seems to me to be a bit like making a company history of Ford and ignoring the Model T but focusing on how great the Taurus is.

He pays short shrift to the iPod in an article meant to highlight a company over a decade. To me, that’s an unforgivable mistake, especially when you call yourself an analyst and make people pay to hear what you have to say.

The Race-baiter Al Sharpton has done a magnificent job of shoehorning himself into the Michael Jackson spotlight. At his memorial, Sharpton (much to the hooting and hollering of the dopes in attendance) gave a stirring speech filled with racism and inaccuracy. At one point, addressing Michael’s children, he said the following…

Now look… Whether or not you believe that Michael Jackson molested children, if you argue that he wasn’t “strange,” I may have to submit you for a psychological evaluation.

First, let’s talk about his face. Look at it. Look at it really closely. Notice how much it changed over years? His eyes got bigger, his nose got smaller and thinner, his skin got lighter, his cheeks got thinner, his chin got a nice groove in it… How much more plastic surgery could he have? Depends on how much time you have because those are the surgeries that are visible to the naked eye and anyone with a working brain.

No one that obsesses about plastic surgery that much isn’t strange. No one would look at Joan and Melissa Rivers, a mother and daughter team who can’t even blink any more as not being strange. No one would look at Jocelyn Wildenstein whose face is so far beyond normal at this point as anything less than strange. The woman who’s been spending her life trying to look like a real-life Barbie doll? Absolute madness. And don’t even get into the insane porn women who grow their boobs to sizes incomprehensible to mere mortals. That’s nothing if not strange.

Plastic surgery obsessions are, to say the least, strange.

What about his strange obsession with being white? The perfectly straightened white hair and the removal of anything representing a black feature isn’t strange? The man went from black to white over the course of his life. While he claims it was vitiligo, just look at this logically. Have you ever seen a person with vitiligo? I have. I went to school with two. Both of them had the characteristic patches of a typical vitiligo case. While vitiligo universalis is a known disorder resulting in the complete depigmentation of all skin (or large portions of it) on the body, it’s not a very common form of the disorder. Vitiligo also takes time to overtake an entire body and you don’t lose your pigmentation overnight.

Another factor to consider in Jackson’s case is that as late as Bad, in 1987, Michael was still mostly black. Somewhere suddenly he started turning white from vitiligo at age 32, something that’s highly unlikely and becomes less likely as his age progressed. In a famous photo of Jackson, he’s shown having facial hair on his white face that isn’t white or gray, a common side effect of vitiligo.

Maybe I would believe it was vitiligo if he didn’t spend so much time trying desperately to not look like a black man, but as it stands, I refuse to believe it was a disease and yet another example of his strangeness.

Then, of course there’s his white women obsession. Debbie Rowe? Lisa Marie Presley? And his kids? Well, look at them. Do they look like him? We’ve already found out they aren’t biologically related…

He has nice white (or at the very least not black children. I don’t care what color their skin is, and I don’t even care if they’re biologically his, but you’d have to acknowledge that it is a bit odd for an otherwise healthy black man to have three white children and two white wives.

They’re beautiful children, and I wish them all the best, but come on.

Then there’s the painkillers and drugs. Thousands of pills ingested in large quantities on a daily basis. Oh, and if that wasn’t enough medication, he also traveled with an anesthesiologist who would knock him out on command. After all, why take an over-the-counter or prescription sleep med when you can have a professional medication dispenser give you knockout gas? Oh sure, that isn’t strange. Not at all.

And it’s perfectly normal to walk around in plain daylight with an umbrella and a surgical mask. Yep, nothing strange about that.

And it’s perfectly normal to let children sleep in your bedroom with you when you’re not a child yourself. Yep, nothing strange about that, either.

And it’s perfectly normal to indulge in some porn consumption with a young child staying in your home. Nothing strange about that.

And of course it’s perfectly normal to dangle your child a few stories over a square as the paparazzi takes pictures of you and yells in horror for you to stop treating your kid like a steak being thrown from Caesar to the lions at a gladiator arena.

Again, none of this makes Michael a child molester. I’m pretty much convinced that the man was the victim of some folks with money on their minds and that’s why they settled out of court. I’ve heard reasonable arguments about parents not wanting to put their kids through the trial, but frankly I don’t buy it. If I was a parent, you couldn’t stop me from working my ass off to see him behind bars if I thought he may have molested my child, but that’s me.

But let’s not be ridiculous. Michael Jackson was quite possibly the most talented person to ever step on a stage or record an album. His achievements in music will never be matched. That’s just the way it is. For all his accomplishments, though, he was strange. Not in a quirky interesting way, just outright strange. I know Al Sharpton, for all his bloviating, was just trying to be nice to the Jackson children, but he’d have been better served saying nothing than outwardly lying, particularly since his lie was so easily disproven.

Unless of course you think that none of what I’ve presented here equates to being strange.

Is she hinting? I wonder…

[tags]katrina, conspiracy, cookoo cookoo[/tags]

Details of the deaths of pro wrestler Chris Benoit, his wife and their 7-year-old son may seem “a little bizarre” when released to the public, a prosecutor said.

Authorities were investigating the deaths at a secluded Fayette County home as a murder-suicide and were not seeking any suspects outside the home.

Fayette County District Attorney Scott Ballard told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, “The details, when they come out, are going to prove a little bizarre.”

Those details may emerge after the completion of autopsies scheduled for Tuesday.

Investigators believe Benoit, (pronounced ben-WAH,) killed his wife and son over the weekend and then himself sometime Monday. The bodies were found Monday afternoon in three different rooms of the house on Green Meadow Lane, in a subdivision off a gravel road about two miles from Whitewater Country Club.

The autopsies were scheduled to be done at the Georgia Bureau of Investigation Crime Lab in DeKalb County.

Ballard told The Associated Press a gun was not used in any of the deaths. But he declined to say how the three died.

“We’re pretty sure we know, but we want to confirm it with the crime lab,” Ballard said early Tuesday.

Jesus Christ, Chris. If you’re gonna off yourself, do the world a favor and off yourself, but why take your family with you?

It’s going to be interesting to see what the bizarre part of this whole thing is.

Man, I hate stories like this. There’s always some innocent kid in the middle of it.

[tags]chris benoit[/tags]

A mother of two who reportedly ran a dominatrix dungeon in her Gallows Hill, Boston basement is facing a prostitution charge after allegedly agreeing to perform a sex act on an undercover detective.

Paula Webb, 42, was arrested Wednesday night in the basement of her house on Albion Street. Police said her husband and children were upstairs at the time.

According to a report in the Salem News, the investigation began on March 16, when police responded to a call about a domestic incident at the house. According to the report, the Webbs had been arguing after Paula Webb complained that her husband hadn’t cleared the snow off her car.

According to the report, she told police she wanted to leave and departed while they were still at the house. After she was gone, a still ticked-off Stephen Webb, 54, told the officers he had something to show them and led them to the basement. There, the patrolmen got an eyeful – the room was set up as a dungeon, with eye hooks screwed into the ceiling beams and an assortment of whips, chains, ropes and other items.

According the report, Webb told the officers his wife had a Web site advertising dominatrix services, but when that was slow, she would resort to posting free ads on the Internet offering to perform sexual services. He told the officers the couple had been having financial difficulties.

via KUTV in Salt Lake City

[tags]sex, crime, prostitution, dominatrix[/tags]

via This Is Broken

[tags]broken, sign, strange[/tags]

Schools are dropping the Holocaust from history lessons to avoid offending Muslim pupils, a Governmentbacked study has revealed.

It found some teachers are reluctant to cover the atrocity for fear of upsetting students whose beliefs include Holocaust denial.

There is also resistance to tackling the 11th century Crusades – where Christians fought Muslim armies for control of Jerusalem – because lessons often contradict what is taught in local mosques.

The findings have prompted claims that some schools are using history ‘as a vehicle for promoting political correctness’.

It almost seems so ridiculous that it can’t be true…

I don’t know… What do you think?

[tags]holocaust, crusades, history, england, denial, teaching, pc[/tags]

I had a story here a few weeks ago about a City Manager in Florida who was ready to take the plunge and become a woman. As it turns out, he was fired for job performance-related issues.

No, I’m not kidding.

After a six-hour hearing, the commissioners decided to fire 48-year-old Steve Stanton after his announcement that he planned a new life as a woman. The move came after the commission voted 5-2 last month to suspend him with pay.

Commissioners contended Stanton was being fired because they lost confidence in him, not because he wants to be a woman.

“I think we’re pretty well convinced,” Commissioner Gay Gentry said. “You have to believe us, you have to trust us, it is not about transgenderism.”

Stanton, 48, triggered the debate in the city of 76,000 west of Tampa last month when he announced his plans at a news conference. Commissioners said Stanton’s announcement caused turmoil and work disruption in the city. His contract says he can be fired without cause at any time.

Stanton has not decided if he will sue over the firing.

“I was optimistic, but I knew it would be very difficult to slow down the train,” he said following the hearing.

Heh… The whole transgender thing is just a man behind the curtain sitting next to an all-knowing floating head. Nothing to see here. No discrimination. Move along.

In fact, speaking of his job performance, here’s an interesting tidbit:

The city commission had given Stanton generally good reviews and a hefty raise last year for his management of the city’s $130 million budget and roughly 1,200 employees. But since commissioners put Stanton on leave, some have criticized him for hard-nosed treatment of employees.

Sure… He went from a fantastic manager worthy of a pay raise to a disruptive influence that needed to be terminate to ensure the smooth function of the city government; it happened to coincide with him wanting to become a woman, and it had nothing to do with that decision.

Now about that bridge I’m selling…

COLUMBUS, Ohio (AdAge.com) — It’s been a year since the first Red T-shirts hit Gap shelves in London, and a parade of celebrity-splashed events has followed: Steven Spielberg smiling down from billboards in San Francisco; Christy Turlington striking a yoga pose in a New Yorker ad; Bono cruising Chicago’s Michigan Avenue with Oprah Winfrey, eagerly snapping up Red products; Chris Rock appearing in Motorola TV spots (“Use Red, nobody’s dead”); and the Red room at the Grammy Awards. So you’d expect the money raised to be, well, big, right? Maybe $50 million, or even $100 million.

Try again: The tally raised worldwide is $18 million.

Ouch! $18 million?? You have to wonder what in the hell is going on with that, especially considering the absolute overflow of ads, marketing, not to mention the backing of enormous companies like Amex, Motorola, and Apple. Considering the chatter over the campaign, it’s really weird that it has translated into so little.

Mark Rosenman sums it up up thusly (and accurately, I might add):

“There is a broadening concern that business is taking on the patina of philanthropy and crowding out philanthropic activity and even substituting for it,” he said. “It benefits the for-profit partners much more than the charitable causes.”

AdAge via Drudge

[tags]product red, bono, aids, charity[/tags]

IT CAME IN the mail – the old-fashioned mail with an envelope and stamp delivered to a box outside your home or through a slot in your door – and sounded like it could be a good deal.

So Mary Ellen Ehly called Vonage in the fall of 2005 to see if the company really did offer better phone service for less money.

After spending 10 to 15 minutes talking with the woman from Vonage who answered her call, Ehly knew the deal wasn’t for her. Vonage sells a service that routes phone calls through the Internet. Ehly didn’t spend much time on the computer and had never even used e-mail. The customer service representative told her billing statements were sent by e-mail.

“I said, you know, I don’t think this is going to work for me,” said Ehly, who had already given Vonage her name, address and bank-account information.

The woman at Vonage sounded peeved about that, but Ehly insisted she didn’t want to switch her phone service. A few days later, Vonage shipped some equipment to Ehly. She refused the package, sending it back to Vonage.

Fifteen months later, Ehly bounced a check and wondered why. She checked her records and found Vonage had been charging her $28.75 a month since November 2005.

Of course, the writer jumps immediately to the conclusion that fraud was involved, which it may very well have been. My question, and the one thing I don’t seem to understand, is how does someone get a bill for something for 15 months and not realize it?

I was paying the infamous AOL bill for a long time before I decided to cancel it, but I was well aware that it was out there. I find it hard to believe that anyone with even half an inch of common sense can pay a minimum $15 bill every single month and not realize that they’re paying it.

Sounds fishy.

Also sounds fishy that she put the order in, gave all the information, and then cancelled the order when she found out that they bill only via e-mail.

It also sounds fishy that a random hotmail account was created for her.

It sounds fishy that Vonage can’t go back and find out who took the call, particularly since up until right before this whole thing blew up, they were still billing her.

I’m just confused.

Lesson learned: Don’t be stupid. Check your bank statement every once in awhile. You might be surprised at what you find!

Philly.com via Consumerist

[tags]vonage, customer, fraud, consumerism, weird[/tags]

Bush says that a British pullout from Iraq is a good thing because it’s a sign of progress, he also says that an American pullout is cut ‘n run, and an escalation in American troops is needed because there hasn’t been enough progress.

I’d say that just about covers it. Well put, Stageleft.

[tags]bush, blair, iraq, strange[/tags]