The Wandering Minstrel

One of the things I do as a hobby is amateur internet web design. My professional occupation is remotely related to this, but I get endorphins when messing with scripts and web tools. One of these tools allows me to generate Flash™ animations for my websites. You can see one of those above as the second amendment text scrolls by. In the right sidebar are interactive banners for Home Defense and Neighborhood Watch.

As for the Home Defense poster animation, I intended to make it an interactive banner that I could share with other home defense advocacy websites. I would still like to do that, but I need some assistance.

First, I need your opinion about the content of the banner; tell me what you like and don’t like about it. Click on it and watch the show. Second, I would like for other websites to install the banner and give me feedback about how to improve the installation package. If you’re interested, leave me a comment here and we can take the next step. Alternatively, you can email me at the address below.

Thanks in advance.

As the 2008 Presidential Campaign enters it’s last few weeks, the Obama Distortion Machine cranks ups the ante with intimidation and threats to the First Amendment in his quest to conceal the truth about his record on the Second Amendment . . .

From Wayne LaPierre:

Is Obama Anti-First Amendment Too?

The Obama campaign is now actively trying to silence your voice. They’ve sent a cease-and-desist letter to television stations in the battleground states of Pennsylvania and Ohio, telling them to stop airing an NRA ad that truthfully points out some of Barack Obama’s anti-gun positions.

Let me say that again. There is nothing false or inaccurate about the TV ad. The Obama campaign knows they can’t win without deceiving gun owners, and the only way to do that is to stop NRA’s voice from being heard.

We’ve sent our own letter to these television stations, defending the ad and fact-checking the Obama campaign. It’s sad but not unexpected that Obama would try to shut us up.

He’s already shown he’s no friend of the Second Amendment. Now he’s showing he’s no friend of the First, either.

Each football season, we play a game where we pick winners and losers from a list of football games to be played that week. This page automatically picks the 16 games and the winner/loser tiebreaker score for the football pool. The GAME letters A through P represent the sixteen games and the 0/1 in the PICK box represents either home (0) or visitor (1) game winners. The winner picks are the equivalent of a coin-toss, but the tie-breaker feature that picks scores uses an algorithm based on likely winner and loser scores.

Of course I pick the teams I think will win and play that in addition to the picker. So far for the season, the picker is ahead of me in points.

I suck.

Click the button to run the AJAX script again.

A six-foot tall mummy greeted the better half and I as we entered the local Lowe’s to get stuff to fix a leaking toilet fresh water valve. The mummy moaned and wailed when anyone would come in proximity of it’s infrared sensors, I guess. Its eyes would light up and a cacophony of guttural tortured soul noises would stream out from it’s narrow bandwidth transducer. It was sorta funny, and actually affordable at under $80. We passed on it though, and enjoyed the rest of the day fixing broken plumbing.

Ahh - the joys of home ownership.

The better half took this photo as we were pulling into a little grocery store in Cameron, AZ. We were on US 89 near the east entrance to Grand Canyon. I got curious about this whacky bus, so I finally googled up LAFCO and found that four young women were taking the bus on a summer odyssey through the southwest.

Looks like they had as much fun last summer as we did. Click for larger view.

California does not equal Texas when it comes to strict gun laws, taxes and regulation. Yet, California does equal Texas when it comes to gun shows and their effect on homicide and suicide rates.

The joint University of Michigan and University of Maryland examination of gun death data in the weeks surrounding more than 3,400 California and Texas gun shows concluded tighter regulation of the flea market-like operations did nothing to reduce firearms-related deaths in the following month.

Researchers compared gunshot death data surrounding every known gun show in California and Texas between 1994 and 2004. California has some of the most stringent gun sale rules in the country. Texas is among the least restrictive.

“To the extent that 33 regulations such as those in place in California reduce any deleterious effects of gun shows, one might expect to detect a larger effect in a relatively unregulated state such as Texas. Our results, however, provide no evidence to suggest that gun shows lead to a substantial increase in the number of homicides or suicides in either California or Texas.”

I support the right of citizens to own guns. I don’t want to take them from you. I just want to embrace a few common-sense laws that will prevent firearms from falling into the hands of the wrong people.

Laws like one gun purchase per month, reinstate the assault weapon ban, require universal background checks, regulate and tax gun shows, allow the use of BATFE data to be used in reckless lawsuits, national gun registration and owner licensing, eliminate right-to-carry, levy impossible requirements on ammunition, close 90% of all gun shops, increase federal taxes on guns and require federal gun fees for registration, and, finally, appoint federal and Supreme Court judges who will ultimately do away with that pesky second amendment.

Really - that’s all I want to do.