One Reason Not to Vote McPain

McPain finished 894th out of the 899 in his West Point class?
So, which is he -- lazy or stupid?

Just the Facts, M'am

Did you know that ALL recessions since 1900, have taken place under republican presidents or directly the result of policies of republican presidents, save one?

True fact.

The single exception occurred at the conclusion of World War II during the Truman administration and it was one predictable consequence of ending a war.

It was also the shortest, as well as the shallowest.

Contrast that with the fact that we are now enduring our SECOND recession due to the shrub thugs.

As BartCop is fond of saying ...

“It’s the Republicans’ job to crash
the economy so the super-rich can swoop in and buy companies and assets for pennies on the dollar.”

Now, this is a bit on the simplistic side, but in essence, it’s EXACTLY what they do!

And another one:

“Never trust a Republican. It’s their job to crash the economy so their billionaire friends can buy once-healthy companies for pennies on the dollar, fire the employees and sell the assets for profit.”

Hunt for the "Kill" switch in microchips

The Department of Defense is freaked out that the commercially-manufactured microchips in their tech might contain "kill switches" that bad people could use to remotely knock the devices out of operation. So at the end of last year, DARPA launched its Trust In Integrated Circuits program to develop methods for sussing out chips with "malicious" circuitry hidden inside. IEEE Spectrum writer Sally Adee looked at the technicalities of the controversy. She told me, "I think interviewed every electrical engineer in the country so I could wrap my head around 1) why that's a big deal and 2) how it would affect me (I'm selfish that way.) From IEEE Spectrum:

Feeding those (fever) dreams is the Pentagon's realization that it no longer controls who manufactures the components that go into its increasingly complex systems. A single plane like the DOD's next generation F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, can contain an “insane number” of chips, says one semiconductor expert familiar with that aircraft's design. Estimates from other sources put the total at several hundred to more than a thousand. And tracing a part back to its source is not always straightforward. The dwindling of domestic chip and electronics manufacturing in the United States, combined with the phenomenal growth of suppliers in countries like China, has only deepened the U.S. military's concern.

Recognizing this enormous vulnerability, the DOD recently launched its most ambitious program yet to verify the integrity of the electronics that will underpin future additions to its arsenal. In December, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Pentagon's R&D wing, released details about a three-year initiative it calls the Trust in Integrated Circuits program. The findings from the program could give the military—and defense contractors who make sensitive microelectronics like the weapons systems for the F‑35—a guaranteed method of determining whether their chips have been compromised. In January, the Trust program started its prequalifying rounds by sending to three contractors four identical versions of a chip that contained unspecified malicious circuitry. The teams have until the end of this month to ferret out as many of the devious insertions as they can.

Vetting a chip with a hidden agenda can't be all that tough, right? Wrong. Although commercial chip makers routinely and exhaustively test chips with hundreds of millions of logic gates, they can't afford to inspect everything. So instead they focus on how well the chip performs specific functions. For a microprocessor destined for use in a cellphone, for instance, the chip maker will check to see whether all the phone's various functions work. Any extraneous circuitry that doesn't interfere with the chip's normal functions won't show up in these tests.

“You don't check for the infinite possible things that are not specified,” says electrical engineering professor Ruby Lee, a cryptography expert at Princeton. “You could check the obvious possibilities, but can you test for every unspecified function?”

*****

Can you say Paranoia?

Ok, there can be legitimate concerns here, but come on - the solution is obvious ... manufacture your own microchips, DUH!

Wind in Your Face

Residential wind power is the too often forgotten little brother of the wind power industry that builds turbines on the scale of jumbo jets. But it's starting to grow up and come out of the shadow of its bigger sibling. "improved generator technology [lighter magnets in the generators, blades that adjust to wind conditions, and units that wirelessly report how much power they're making], more financial incentives, rising electric rates, and energy-security concerns have opened the way for small-wind power to bloom in unlikely places."

That's right, they aren't just for the farm anymore. You should see more and more small wind turbines in suburbs and urban settings as time goes on. Of course, we're still talking small potatoes compared to big wind power, on the order of only 3 megawatts in 2007 according to the American Wind En ergy Association (AWEA), but that's triple the generating capacity of 2006. A few more years of tripling and doubling, and the power of exponential growth will be felt.

*****

This wind thing could be very interesting, very interesting. I will keep a watch on this and see where it goes.

U.S. Consumers: "Get the cheap stuff"

So much for healthier eating ...

Lambert, Getty Images

I had a faint hope that the rise in food prices might lead people to buy more carefully, perhaps cook more from scratch instead of buying prepared food, or even cut back on meat and eat more vegetables. No such luck; according to the IHT, Americans are just buying more crap, because the cheap calories come from the most processed, corn-based foods. My favourite quote:

"In Ohio, Holly Levitsky is replacing the Lucky Charms cereal in her kitchen with Millville Marshmallows and Stars, a less expensive store brand." Pizza sales at Domino's are down, while Wal-Mart says that sales of peanut butter and spaghetti are up. On the other hand, so are the sales of packaged food.

Donna Dunaway, a homemaker, used to splurge on the ingredients for homemade lasagna, her husband's favorite, before food prices began to surge this year."Now he's lucky to get a 99-cent lasagna TV dinner, or maybe some Manwich out of a can," she said. "I just can't afford to be buying all that good meat and cheese like I used to."

So much for hoping ...

We don't forget.

Concentration camp doctor tops list of 10 most-wanted Nazis

Former SS doctor Aribert Heim tops a list released Wednesday of most-wanted suspected Nazi war criminals. He is a man so brutal that witnesses remember him as the worst they saw, though he was only at Mauthausen concentration camp for two months.

Heim would be 93 today, but "we have good reason to believe he is still alive," said Efraim Zuroff by telephone from Jerusalem. Zuroff is the top Nazi hunter for Simon Wiesenthal Center, which published the list.

Still, despite a $485,000 reward for Heim's arrest posted by the center along with Germany and Austria, he has managed to avoid capture for decades.

He is only one of hundreds of suspected Nazi war criminals that the center estimates are still at large.

After Heim on the center's most wanted list are: John Demjanjuk, fighting deportation from the U.S., which says he was a guard at several death and forced labor camps; Sandor Kepiro, a Hungarian accused of involvement in the wartime killings of than 1,000 civilians in Serbia; Milivoj Asner, a wartime Croatian police chief now living in Austria and suspected of an active role in deporting hundreds of Serbs, Jews and Gypsies to their death; and Soeren Kam, a former member of the SS wanted by Denmark for the assassination of a journalist in 1943. His extradition from Germany was blocked in 2007 by a Bavarian court that found insufficient evidence for murder charges.

But the nature of Heim's alleged crimes are what catapulted him to the top of the list.

Karl Lotter, a prisoner who worked in the hospital at Mauthausen concentration camp, had no trouble remembering the first time he watched Heim kill a man.

It was 1941, and an 18-year-old Jew had been sent to the clinic with a foot inflammation. Heim asked him about himself and why he was so fit. The young man said he had been a soccer player and swimmer.

Then, instead of treating the prisoner's foot, Heim anesthetized him, cut him open, castrated him, took apart one kidney and removed the second, Lotter said. The victim's head was removed and the flesh boiled off so that Heim could keep it on display.

"He needed the head because of its perfect teeth," Lotter, a non-Jewish political prisoner, recalled in testimony eight years later that was included in a 1950 Austrian warrant for Heim's arrest uncovered by The Associated Press. "Of all the camp doctors in Mauthausen, Dr. Heim was the most horrible."

But Heim managed to avoid prosecution, his American-held file in Germany mysteriously omitting his time at Mauthausen.

The hunt for Heim has taken investigators from the German state of Baden-Wuerttemberg all around the world. Besides his home country of Austria and neighboring Germany where he settled after the war, tips have come from Uruguay in 1998, Spain, Switzerland and Chile in 2005, and Brazil in 2006, said Heinz Heister, presiding judge of the Baden-Baden state court, where Heim was indicted in absentia on hundreds of counts of murder in 1979.

Born June 28, 1914 in Radkersburg, Austria, Heim joined the local Nazi party in 1935, three years before Austria was bloodlessly annexed by Germany.

He later joined the Waffen SS and was assigned to Mauthausen, a concentration camp near Linz, Austria, as a camp doctor in October and November 1941.

While there, witnesses told investigators, he worked closely with SS pharmacist Erich Wasicky on such gruesome experiments as injecting various solutions into Jewish prisoners' hearts to see which killed them the fastest.

But while Wasicky was brought to trial by an American Military Tribunal in 1946 and sentenced to death, along with other camp medical personnel and commanders, Heim, who was a POW in American custody, was not among them.

Heim's file in the Berlin Document Center, the then-U.S.-run depot for Nazi-era papers, was apparently altered to obliterate any mention of Mauthausen, according to his 1979 German indictment, obtained by the AP. Instead, for the period he was known to be at the concentration camp, he was listed as having a different SS assignment.

This "cannot be correct," the indictment says. "It is possible that through data manipulation the short assignment at the same time to the (concentration camp) was concealed."

There is no indication who might have been responsible.

The U.S. Army Intelligence file on Heim could shed light on his wartime and postwar activities, and is among hundreds of thousands transferred to the U.S. National Archives. But the Army's electronic format is such that staff have so far only been able to access about half of them, and these don't include the file requested by the AP.

Eli Rosenbaum, director of the Justice Department's Nazi-hunting Office of Special Investigations, declined to comment through a spokeswoman.

"I don't believe there is anything appropriate for Mr. Rosenbaum to add," said Justice Department spokeswoman Laura Sweeney in an e-mail.

Heim was relatively well-known, however, having been a national hockey player in Austria before the war, and there were plenty of witnesses from his time at Mauthausen.

Austrian authorities sent the 1950 arrest warrant to American authorities in Germany who initially agreed to turn him over, then told the Austrians, in a Dec. 21, 1950, letter obtained by the AP, that they couldn't trace him.

What happened next is unclear, but in 1958 Heim apparently felt comfortable enough to buy a 42-unit apartment block in Berlin, listing it in his own name with a home address in Mannheim, according to purchase documents obtained by the AP. He then moved to the nearby resort town of Baden-Baden and opened a gynecological clinic - also under his own name, Heister said.

In 1961, German authorities were alerted and began an investigation, but when they finally went to arrest him in September 1962, they just missed him - he apparently had been tipped off.

Heim continued to live off the rents collected from the Berlin apartments until 1979 when the building was confiscated by German authorities.

Proof that he is alive may lie in the fact that no one has claimed his estate. Heim has two sons in Germany and a daughter who lived in Chile but whose current whereabouts are unknown.

Ruediger Heim, one of the sons, would not comment when telephoned at his Baden-Baden villa.

"All I can say is that it has been implied that I am in contact with my father, and that is absolutely false," he said. "The rest is speculation, and I can't enter into that.

*****

Although I am not jewish and I believe some of the 'wanted' are wanted just out of nothing more than petty spite (yes, even jews can be petty and spiteful just like any other human), there are some who should be boiled in oil for their crimes.
The neo-cons in this country would do well to remember the fact that we do not forget.

Mystery Solved

• World News

DNA confirms IDs of czar's children

DNA tests carried out by a U.S. laboratory prove that bone fragments exhumed last year belong to two children of Czar Nicholas II, putting to rest questions about what happened to Russia's last royal family, a regional governor said Wednesday.

Bone fragments dug up near the Ural Mountains city of Yekaterinburg are indeed those of Crown Prince Alexei and his sister, Maria, whose remains had been missing since the family was murdered in 1918 as Russia descended into civil war, said Eduard Rossel, governor of the Sverdlovsk region.

"We have now found the entire family," he told reporters in Yekaterinburg, 900 miles east of Moscow.

The confirmation could bring the tortured history of the Russian imperial family closer to closure and end royal supporters' persistent hopes that members of the czar's immediate family survived the massacre.

Nicholas II abdicated in 1917 as revolutionary fervor swept Russia, and he and his family were detained. The czar; his wife, Alexandra, and their son and four daughters were fatally shot on July 17, 1918, in a basement room of the merchant's house where they were being held in Yekaterinburg

The remains of Nicholas, Alexandra and three of their daughters were unearthed in Yekaterinburg in 1991 as the Soviet Union was collapsing. After genetic tests convinced forensics experts of their authenticity, they were buried in 1998 in a cathedral in the imperial capital of St. Petersburg.

The Russian Orthodox Church canonized Nicholas and his family in 2000, even as it expressed doubts that the remains were indeed those of the czar's family.

The remains of Alexei and Maria, however, had never been located, leading to decades of speculation that perhaps one or both had survived.

Last summer, researchers dug up the bone shards near Yekaterinburg and enlisted Russian and U.S. laboratories to conduct DNA tests.

"The main genetic laboratory in the United States has concluded its work with a full confirmation of our own laboratories' work," Rossel told reporters. "This has confirmed that indeed it is the children.

It was unclear which laboratory Rossel was referring to but a genetic research team working at the University of Massachusetts Medical School has been involved in the process.

The press service for Russian Orthodox Church said no one could comment on the discovery.

As hippies mourn world wide ...

Albert Hofmann, who first synthesized Lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), has passed away. He was 102 years-old.

"I believe that if people would learn to use LSD's vision-inducing capability more wisely, under suitable conditions, in medical practice and in conjunction with meditation, then in the future this problem child could become a wonderchild." -- Albert Hofmann (1906-2008)

Hard Lemonade Debacle

7-year-old boy removed from father and placed in state custody over mistaken order of hard lemondade

Christopher Ratte took his 7-year-old son to a baseball game at Comerica Park. He ordered a lemonade from a vendor and gave it to his boy. Unbeknownst to Ratte (a professor of classical archaeology at the University of Michigan) it was "hard" lemonade, meaning it contained alcohol. When a guard spotted the boy sipping from the bottle, the police were called in, the boy was taken from his father, driven by ambulance to the hospital, and put into foster care.

The 47-year-old academic says he wasn't even aware alcoholic lemonade existed when he and Leo stopped at a concession stand on the way to their seats in Section 114.

"I'd never drunk it, never purchased it, never heard of it," Ratte of Ann Arbor told me sheepishly last week. "And it's certainly not what I expected when I ordered a lemonade for my 7-year-old."

But it wasn't until the top of the ninth inning that a Comerica Park security guard noticed the bottle in young Leo's hand.

"You know this is an alcoholic beverage?" the guard asked the professor.

"You've got to be kidding," Ratte replied. He asked for the bottle, but the security guard snatched it before Ratte could examine the label.

... it would be two days before the state of Michigan allowed Ratte's wife, U-M architecture professor Claire Zimmerman, to take their son home, and nearly a week before Ratte was permitted to move back into his own house.

*****

Ok, the vendor should be hung for not specifying that the "lemonade" contained alcohol in the first place. Secondly, the over reaction on the part of the officialdom was not warranted if the prof was truly unaware of the very existence of hard lemonade - something I doubt, given the bombardment of advertising for it (I am an Archeaologist as well and even I know it exists), but I can believe he had no clue that the lemonade he was getting for his son was just such a lemonade ... the thought of an alcohol laced lemonade would not have crossed his mind when getting a 'soda' for his child.

However, if he deliberately got a alcoholic drink for his 7-year-old son ... let me know where the you want the hole dug to bury him in - alive!

The RNC Can't Handle The Truth

The RNC Can't Handle The Truth

This is really is too rich.

The Republican Party, who has spent years either sponsoring or cheering on ads that relied on distortions or outright lies to win elections, are outraged that the Democratic National Committee dares to use facts in an ad about John McCain.

Here are a few excerpts from the cease and desist letter that the RNC is sending out to various television station managers.

It has come to our attention that your station is currently or will soon begin airing a false advertisement sponsored by the Democratic National Committee ("DNC"). The advertisement in question falsely and maliciously accuses Senator McCain of stating that prolonging the Iraq war for "100 years" would be "fine" with him.

Actually, the ad doesn't accuse John McCain of anything. But one must wonder if it occurred to the RNC that if they think John McCain's own words imply that he's fine with war in Iraq for 100 years, then they've just endorsed what the DNC ad shows.

But it's not just the words coming out of John McCain's mouth that has the RNC frothing at the mouth, it's:

...the accompanying visual images in the advertisement, which show explosions, burning military equipment, and on-screen text stating "Over 4,000 Dead."

This of course clashes with the RNC version of war, which features freshly painted schools and waving purple fingers, rather than its ugly realities.

But this has to be my favorite line:

...the DNC has no right to knowingly and willfully spread false information in a deliberate attempt to mislead the American people.

You can almost hear them screaming, "That's our job!"

For the love of Pete!

Oh, for the love of Pete!

Shelby County, TN Sheriff: watch out for photographers and radical greens, they might be terrorists

The Sheriff's Office in Shelby County, Tennessee, is warning locals to turn in anyone who takes too many pictures of bridges or shopping malls, because they might be scouting for Al Qaeda, who are clearly slavering at the opportunity to make a gigantic media splash by getting up to some serious naughtiness on the "iconic Hernando DeSoto Bridge."

The Sheriff also asked environmentalists to look out for anyone "a little bit radical" who might be a terrorist provocateur hoping to exploit the trusting, gentle hippies to turn them into deep green Unabombers.

"You may think a guy is just shooting pictures, but if you report it to us, we'll send it on to the FBI and they may have four or five other reports of the same thing," said Richard Pillsbury with the Tennessee Fusion Center, a collaboration between the Department of Safety and the Department of Homeland Security.

Shelby County sergeant Larry Allen warned attendees at the meeting to look for people who appear to be doing surveillance outside public buildings, such as shopping malls.

"One of the things discussed in the al-Qaeda manual is conducting surveillance of your target," added Eric Jackson with the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force. "That could mean looking at a building to see how security is established."

Malware gets EULA

The criminals who sell the Zeus malware have added an end-user license agreement to their "product," setting out a bunch of terms controlling how the criminals who buy their products may use it, and threatening dire technological reprisals for violations:

Symantec security researcher Liam OMurchu has details on this latest development. The help section of the latest version of the Zeus malware states that the client has no right to distribute Zeus in any business or commercial purpose not connected to the initial sale, cannot examine the source code of the product, has no right to use the product to control other botnets, and cannot send the product to anti-virus companies. The client does agree to "give the seller a fee for any update to the product that is not connected with errors in the work, as well as for adding additional functionality." Modern license agreements take a great deal of (deserved) fire for being absurdly draconian, but even the likes of Adobe and Microsoft don't claim that purchasing a version of their respective products locks the user into buying future editions.

It's obviously difficult for the manufacturers of an illegal product to threaten legal sanctions against an infringer, but the Zeus authors give it their best shot. According to the EULA, "In cases of violations of the agreement and being detected, the client loses any technical support. Moreover, the binary code of your bot will be immediately sent to antivirus companies." Frankly, "We'll blow your kneecaps off and feed them to you," might be a bit more effective as a threat, but I suppose it's a bit hard to carry out that threat over the Internet.

Squid Again?!

New Zealand scientists thaw 1,000-pound squid corpse

Marine scientists in New Zealand on Tuesday were thawing the corpse of the largest squid ever caught to try to unlock the secrets of one of the ocean's most mysterious beasts.

No one has ever seen a living, grown colossal squid in its natural deep ocean habitat, and scientists hope their examination of the 1,089-pound, 26-foot long colossal squid, set to begin Wednesday, will help determine how the creatures live. The thawing and examination are being broadcast live on the Internet.

The squid, which was caught accidentally by fishermen last year, was removed from its freezer Monday and put into a tank filled with saline solution. Ice was added to the tank Tuesday to slow the thawing process so the outer flesh wouldn't rot, said Carol Diebel, director of natural environment at New Zealand's national museum, Te Papa Tongarewa.

After it is thawed, scientists will examine the squid's anatomical features, remove the stomach, beak and other mouth parts, take tissue samples for DNA analysis and determine its sex, Diebel said.

"If we get ourselves a male it will be the first reported (scientific) description of the male of the species," Steve O'Shea, a squid expert at Auckland's University of Technology, told National Radio. He is one of the scientists conducting the examination.

The squid is believed to be the largest specimen of the rare deep-water species Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni, or colossal squid, ever caught, O'Shea has said.

Colossal squid, which have long been one of the most mysterious denizens of the deep ocean, can grow up to 46 feet long, descend to 6,500 feet into the ocean and are considered aggressive hunters.

At the time it was caught, O'Shea said it would make calamari rings the size of tractor tires if cut up - but they would taste like ammonia, a compound found in the animals' flesh.

Fishermen off the coast of Antarctica accidentally netted the squid in February 2007 while catching Patagonian toothfish, which are sold under the name Chilean sea bass.

The squid was eating a hooked toothfish when it was hauled from the deep. Recognizing it as a rare find, the fishermen froze the squid on their vessel to preserve it. The national museum, Te Papa Tongarewa, later took possession of it.

The previous largest colossal squid ever found was a 660 pound female squid discovered in 2003, the first ever landed.

Researchers plan to eventually put the squid on display in a 1,800 gallon tank of formaldehyde at the museum in the capital, Wellington.

Colossal squid are found in Antarctic waters and are not related to giant squid found round the coast of New Zealand. Giant squid grow up to 39 feet long, and are not as heavy as colossal squid.

This is a follow up to the blog I posted last year on this Squid.

Psych Exam

S.C. teen accused of school bomb plot may get psych exam

A Florence, South Carolina teen accused of plotting to blow up his high school may have to undergo a psychological exam.

Prosecutors plan to argue in federal court Tuesday that 18-year-old Ryan Schallenberger (pronounced: SHALL'-ehn-burger) should be checked for mental problems that could prevent him from helping his lawyers defend him.

Schallenberger was arrested April 19. Authorities say he bought materials to make several bombs and had written a journal detailing his plans to attack Chesterfield High School.

The teen faces several state and federal charges, including attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction. That charge carries a possible life sentence if he is convicted.

*****

Like Duh!? Psych exam, phooey, the kid's nuts!

Questions for the Deniers

Are you saying there's no such thing as global warming?
Are you saying state-sized ice chunks aren't breaking off Antartica?

Or are you saying that's "cyclical," and the polar caps will someday become colder and freeze?
Do you realize the consequences if your guess is wrong?

Or are you agreeing that global warming is real,
and we are entering our final days - but God will protect us?

Or are you saying there's nothing we can do about it - whatever the cause - so we might
as well quit and surrender because that's the kind of spirit that built this once-great country?

Or are you saying... well, ...what the fuck ARE you saying?
Does the GOP have ANY coherent strategy on the subject?

Lastly, if you're wrong, and you stop us from reversing this, we're all dead,
and so are your children and the grandchildren who never had a chance to survive
because oil bastards like you wanted a few extra dollars instead of a stable planet..

But if we're wrong, what's the worst that could happen?

Our air would be cleaner?
We'd import less oil, which means fewer dead soldiers?
We'd only create 50M tons of plastic bags a year, instead of 100M tons?

We know what's the worst that could happen if you're wrong - a dead planet.
What's the worst that could happen if we're wrong?

Helpful Hints:

Subject: How to spend your rebate check

As you may have heard, the Administration said each of us would get a rebate check to
stimulate the economy. If we spend that money at Wal-Mart, all the money will go to China.
If we spend it on gasoline it will go to the Arabs, if we purchase a computer it will go to India,
if we purchase fruit and vegetables it will go to Mexico, Honduras, Chile, Argentina and Guatemala,
if we purchase a good car it will go to Japan, if we purchase useless crap it will go to Taiwan
and India and none of it will help the American economy.

We need to keep that money here in America. The only way to keep that money here at home
is to spend it at garage and yard sales, since those are the only businesses still in the U.S.

Lush Dimbulb Ranting

Rush Limbaugh (R-Heroin-addicted Child Molester) is sparking controversy again after he
made comments that appear to call for riots in Denver during DemoCon 2008 this summer.

He said the riots would ensure a Democrat is not elected as president, and his listeners
have a responsibility to make sure it happens.

"Riots in Denver, the Democrat Convention would see to it that we don't elect Democrats,"
Limbaugh said during Wednesday's radio broadcast. He then went on to say that's the
best thing that could happen to the country.

*****

It appears the Lunatic Fringe is still the Lunatic Fringe.

A New Level Of Stupid

File Under: Where do these people come from?!

Was talking to a friend today and he was relating a story of another friend of his who works at Food Lion who witnessed what I am terming a new level of stupid.
It seems the Deli Manager at a certain Food Lion store did not show up for work three days running and when she did show she told the district manager at the store the reason she did not come to work was that she had OD'd on Crack.
She was fired on the spot. Duh, you think?!
One: it was way beyond stupid to even partake in the Crack in the first place.
Two: telling your boss you missed work because you partook in Crack - in excess, no less ... is not the most intelligent thing to do.
Three: ok, there is no three the first two covered it.
Like I said a new level of stupid ... it's not called Dope for nothing.
Also, it further proves the idea that Food Lion is not the place I want to shop - and the idea needed no further proof in the first place.

You Know You Are Old When

Last night a cute blonde girl bought me a drink. She knew me because she’s my grandkids’ summer camp counselor. This incident got me thinking about how you know you’re old ...

So I decided to start a list:

You know you’re old when…

1. A cute blonde buys you a drink, and she’s your grandkids’ summer camp counselor.

2. You have to leave the place where she bought you the drink because the music is too loud for your tinnitus.

3. You leave by jumping in your filthy minivan.

4. You stop on the way home to buy something and forget what it was.

5. You cancel your babysitter because you’re too tired to go out at 9:00 pm.

6. The only CDs that you buy are from Starbucks. (My wife thought of this one.)

7. When you spell words correctly and use full sentences in text messages.

Please add your ideas to this list so that we may commiserate!

How to be happy.