TUSTIN, Calif. Chris Cassone was wearing a Ronald Reagan T-shirt when I spotted him at the Bob Hope Airport in Burbank. United Express Flight 6396 touched down Tuesday shortly before 2 p.m., Pacific Time. Sunny skies, palm trees, 75 degrees — yeah, the working conditions here are grueling.
A veteran musician who performed at the 9/12 March on D.C., Cassone is active in the Pasadena Patriots — they’re having an event Saturday in Altadena that I plan to cover — and he volunteered to be my chauffeur today.
How can anyone muster anything but forgiveness for Sullivan at the sight of this? (Emphasis mine throughout.)
Charles Johnson explains his concerns here. He’s particularly right about the kind of proto-fascist love of violence against “the other” that you see pulsating in the writing of, say, Michael Goldfarb or Robert Stacy McCain.
A. C. Kleinheider notes the danger of education not following enthusiasm:
Those caught up in tea party hysteria are the kind of voters Ross Perot captured in 1992. Two years later, without Perot, these foaming, vaguely culturally conservative, middle-income voters went Republican. Continue reading 18 Years and Fewer Hairs Later →
By the time you read this, I’ll be somewhere over the American heartland, cooped up in economy class on a United Airlines flight to California. With less than $200 cash in my pockets, my checking account overdrawn and overdue bills at the house, I’m flying to Pasadena to cover Alabama’s glorious championship. I’ll be lucky if they don’t shut off my cell-phone while I’m in Pasadena.
Robert Stacy McCain, 01 Jan 10. Location: Man Cave
Many people praise as virtues such qualities as being “spontaneous” and “non-materialistic.” They praise these qualities, because praise is cheap. And they’re not the ones who let Dan Collins double-dog-dare them into this crazy scheme. Trying to raise $2,000 in tip-jar hits in December? Madness.
As I calculated at the outset, that would require $70 a day, every day for 30 days. There were good days and bad days, but the sum total wasn’t $2,000. Nevertheless, we got close enough to the goal that I figured, “What the hell? Book the flight. The readers will come through. They won’t let me die in obscurity and poverty.”
Monday, exactly three people hit the tip jar for a combined total of $45. One of them was film producer Ladd Ehlinger, who has just about gone broke producing Hive Mind. A couple of regular tip-jar hitters — a guy named Mike and a guy named Chris — also gave money yesterday.
Well, too late to worry about it now. Crazy is as crazy does. I’ve got a carton of smokes, so I’ll manage to survive.
I’m writing this at 3 a.m. My flight boards at 6 a.m. My wife’s upstairs waiting for me to pack up the laptop so she can drive me an hour and a half to the airport. Say a prayer for me, and for her. She married me because, as she later explained, she knew I was going to be somebody some day. And I’ve spent 20 years trying to prove her right.
I ratcheted down my resolution to 800X600 and confirmed the email reports that, yes, this blog is slammed to the left side of the screen.
To work on this, I save the blog locally, open that copy in the browser, get out the BFH, and tweak the .css.
Except that there is enough voodoo in the .css for the page to thumb its nose at me. So your indulgence is sought. I’m still standing up my local LAMP stack so I can break this thing in a blatantly irresponsible manner without any anguished screams peeling down at me from out along I-70. One can blog or one can geek, but I know of none doing both simultaneously. Hats off to those who are more graceful task switchers than I.
This post will also test the WordPress 2.9.1 install to see if that godforsaken scheduling bug is really gone. Open Source: no whining, Smitty!
NOTE (RSM): Now readers see the source of my insane rage in “The Making of The Other McCain.” Smitty’s always talking this 2.9.1 IT code-geek stuff and forgetting the most important part: Hit the tip jar!
If we were pulling in $10K/month here, everything would be so much easier. To borrow a phrase from P.J. O’Rourke, we’d be farting through silk. Instead, it’s 2:30 a.m. and I’m about to leave for California with an overdrawn ATM card and less than $200 cash in my pocket to last until my plane gets back Sunday morning.
Less than 12 hours from now, I’ll be flying the friendly skies of United — economy class with a two–hour layover in San Francisco — to sunny California to cover the BCS Championship game.
The “friendly skies” are billing me $15 for checked baggage. Maybe one of our tip-jar hitters can fork over for that. I thought about just trying to do the trip with a carry-on bag — my laptop, socks and a change of underwear — but I figure the readers have gotten me this far, surely one of y’all could come up with a measly $15. ROLL TIDE!
UPDATE: Kay Bailey Hutchison will air a Senate campaign ad during the ABC broadcast. That’s got to be a bad omen of some kind, and not for Gov. Rick Perry. Hutchison’s an internecine Republican feud to a football game? When the Longhorns lose Thursday, Texas voters will blame KBH for jinxing them.
