I hope no one subjects themselves to Glen Beck's show, so you'll just have to trust me on this... this is no crazier than they stuff Beck has actually been doing on the air:



http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/thu-november-5-2009/the-11-3-project

Seeing Peter Gabriel live...

My favorite song at the moment...

To all you people allegedly following me on Twitter... stop it. It's not me. And get the hell off my lawn.

Peace. Out.

I'm getting birthday wishes from all over the Internets!

Seriously, thank you everyone. Considering some of the emotional things I've been going through lately, the out-pouring of well wishes is REALLY great to receive.

This was a great weekend.

On Saturday, delazan and I got up and motored to Pooley's, the local sports bar where we take the bus to the Badger football games. Downtown we ate a quick brunch on the triangle of Regent/Monroe/Breese Terrace (I had a Big Red's cheesesteak, with cheese whiz, delazan had a hotdog from Silky's cart). Then we went in to watch the Badgers thoroughly dominate (the 38-30 final score is misleading, the game was over at 38-17) Michigan State to go to 4-0 on the season.

Then we hit the only low spot of the weekend. The UW Police doesn't seem to know that if something isn't broke, don't fix it. So they decided to "fix" the pedestrian/bus traffic problem. Unfortunately their "fix" makes the problem far worse than it's ever been before. For a city that tries everything it can to discourage the use of personal vehicles in the downtown area, the UW Police did the one thing that will almost certainly lead to more personal vehicles and less use of buses. Starting this past weekend, if you take a bus to the stadium and you want to take that bus back to your car, you will not be allowed to leave the stadium area (you can sit on your bus if you want) for 30-45 minutes after the game. So if you want to go to a bar and drink all afternoon/evening, you're good. If you've got a life you want to get on living, you're out of luck for 30-45 minutes. Personal vehicles are allowed to leave the parking lots along the same street though. Thus I can only surmise that the UW Police want more personal vehicle use, thus more drunk drivers, thus more accidents. Oh, and much of that pedestrian traffic is headed to personal vehicles which then clog the streets and highway. Brilliant! If this is going to be the way it is, the Atheletic Department should get on the stick and have the soda vendors outside the stadium after the game as they've got a captive audience. Delazan and I have been taking the bus from Pooley's for three seasons... the next home game might be the last time.

But we eventually got home. TIME FOR A HOOTNANNY!!!

We had friends over for a Rock Band birthday party for yours truly. bipagan , madisondork , blupe , and several non-LJ/Facebook folks were there. And the rocking out was epic. The ghost of George Harrison may forever haunt me for what we did to While My Guitar Gently Weeps. But did perhaps the most kick-ass rendition of Jethro Tull's Aqualung ever! Mt. Dew, strawberry cheesecake, shrimp, spring rolls, Doritos... it was awesome.

Sunday morning (afternoon, really) Delazan made scramblers (a delicacy we discovered at Mickey's Dairy Bar on Monroe Street in Madison) and then we watched the Packers handily defeat the St. Louis Rams.

I then went out and bought a couple of new games for my PS3 (Thanks, Mom and Dad) and returned home to watch my weekly TV shows, which I record on my DVR so Blupe (who doesn't have cable) and I can watch them together. The most fun to riff on at present is The Vampire Diaries (aka Vampire 90210, or Degrassi: The Undead Generation).

This week I also checked out The Forgotten, which I am lukewarm towards (but I'm glad to see Christian Slater getting more work after his terrific My Own Worst Enemy was cancelled last season). It was also time for Dollhouse (bad episode; who knew Lee Adama was such a jackass), Heroes (excellent episode, that circus idea is freakin' cool as hell), and Criminal Minds (the best written show on television) to return. Not to mention Castle (love Nathan Fillion), Two and a Half Men, How I Met Your Mother, and The Big Bang Theory (funniest show on television). And I'm sorry to see Crusoe, Eleventh Hour, My Name Is Earl, and The Unusual not return (especially The Unusual, an incredibly fun and funny cop drama). And I see The CW's The Beautiful Life has been canceled after two episodes... well, it's one more than Viva Laughlin managed.

Peace. Out.

For purposes of this post, I am using "appeasement" to mean compromising with unreasonable opponents (like Chamberlain did with Hitler).

It's late summer 2005 and US Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist has just died. The relatively unknown John Roberts, originally nominated to fill the vacant seat of Sandra Day O'Connor, had his nomination withdrawn and was re-nominated for the now-vacant Chief Justice seat. Unknown to most is that in 2001 Roberts "advised" Florida governor Jeb Bush regarding the presidential election recount of his brother George W. Bush. The nominations can easily be seen as repaying the favor.

Bush appeals to the Congress for an expedited confirmation of Roberts in light of the court's impending October start to the next session. Do the Democrats, in the minority in the Senate, threaten to filibuster as Republicans would do with Obama's nomination of Justice Sotamayor? No. They decide to respect presidential prerogative and give Roberts a speedy hearing and confirmation vote. He is approved a mere 26 days after the death of his predecessor. A very hasty process considering it is a lifetime appointment to, perhaps, the most powerful jurist position in the world.

But this is back in 2005. Bush had just won re-election and the Republicans had held on to a slim majority in both houses of Congress. The Democratic minority chose to appease the Republicans by not fighting the nomination of man whose confirmation would assure a rightward lean to the court for decades to come.

Now look what that appeasement has bought.

John Roberts stands poised to do greater damage to the cause of democracy than any justice to ever serve on the high court. It can hardly be argued that any concept has done as much damage to our system of elections, and had as much to do with the HUGE rift we currently see between left and right in our politics as "corporate personhood". Roberts and Scalia seem poised to try to actually raise this Frankenstein from the table and set it loose on the village.

Exxon-Mobil (purely as an example) shouldn't have free speech rights. Exxon-Mobil isn't a person, it's an artificial construct. It doesn't have a mouth. And it should not be allowed to put words into the mouths of it's shareholders and employees. Those shareholders and employees already possess the right of free speech and can contribute to political campaigns and candidates as the please. They should not be extended a second incarnation to exert influence disproportionate to those who are not part of a large corporation.

When it was Hitler and the Sudetenland, Chamberlain appeased. When it was Alberto Gonzalez, Democrats said "Well... he'll be better than Ashcroft" and appeased.

Democrats appeased with Roberts too. And now we have to reap what they have sown.

Peace. Out.

Yes, it is my world and I do make the rules.

New Rule: When attending a live event (concert, sporting event, etc), if you arrive more than 1/4 of the way through the event, you forfeit your seat. I don't give a crap if you paid for your ticket. Things start at a given time for a reason and if you can't be remotely close to "on time" then you really don't want to see it that bad.

New Rule: You are no longer allowed to invoke Hitler or the Nazis until you know the difference between fascism and communism. If I have to hear one more ignorant half-wit confuse the two, I am going to murder them.

New Rule: You are no longer allowed to speak in public about health care reform until you demonstrate that you know what the Hyde Amendment is and can explain, exactly, where current legislation under consideration would repeal it.

New Rule: You are no longer allowed to speak in public about the bailout of the banking industry or the government take over of certain financial institutions until you understand the full meaning of the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment.

New Rule: You are no longer allowed to refer to the alleged government take-over of private health insurance because: a) the proposed "public option" is not a take-over, it is a government provided alternative to private insurance; and b) there is no actual legislation that proposes such a public option pending before either house of Congress at this time.

New Rule:You are not allowed to speak publicly about "socialized medicine" until you acknowledge that Medicare, Medicaid and Tricare are all government-provided, socialized medicine programs.

New Rule: You are not allowed to opposed a public health care option as evil, socialist, whatever, unless you are also willing to go on record as favoring the elimination Medicare, Medicaid, and all aspects of Tricare.

New Rule: You are no longer allowed to question President Obama's citizenship or right to hold the office of President of the United States unless you are also willing to conceed that there is equally insufficient proof that George W. Bush completed his commitment to the Texas Air National Guard.

New Rule: If you are an elected public official and you support, endorse, or fail to correct anyone violating any of the rules above, you shall also be deemed to be in violation of said rule and subject to having primate feces flung at you.

Peace. Out.

I am in Oakbrook Terrace all week for training. I don't want to be here. I want to be home with my wife, cats, and puppy.

When did I get to be such a home-body?

Peace. Out

I took the $199 plunge and bought a "lifetime" subscription to Champions Online. Now I only hope "lifetime" doesn't mean I expire when the game goes bye-bye.

I figure if I play it once a week for a couple of hours, it'll be worth it.

Like I said yesterday, I'm not a big MMORPG guy, but if it's 10% as fun as WoW was for those couple of months I played it, then that's cool. Plus, I have the chance to do some online gaming with friends like Lucien, Kris, and other folks I normally only get to see once a year at GenCon (when I get to go to GenCon). Plus it's some mindless fun when I just want to unplug from the world and "blow some shit up." Hopefully I get to beat up Oculon every once in a while.

On the not so digital front, The Hero System 6th Edition came out at GenCon. I hear Steve Long finally reached the limit of bindery technology and what was once a simple, less-than-100-page rulebook has now become a two volume behemoth. The PDF for "Characters" looks to be over 400 pages and a hardcopy will run you $30. "Combat and Adventuring" will suck another $50 out of your bank account.

That's right. The rules for a role-playing game, just the rules alone, now costs $80! Sheesh.

Oh... I'll buy it. Because I'm a dork. I'm Steve Long's bitch.

And I don't begrudge Steve the money, because I know how expensive publishing is. It's just that I remember paying $9.95 for my first edition Champions rulebook at Pope's Hobbyland back 30+ years ago.

And of course I'll buy 6th Edition. I've owned every edition except 3rd (which was really just a repackaged version of 2nd edition), and this edition is actually a pretty major re-write (or so the discussion forums seem to indicate). The only real question is do I buy the print-version books, or the print plus PDF bundle directly from Hero? I'm not buying the PDF-only version because unlike most PDFs, it'd cost me a fortune to print the damned thing. I only want the PDFs so I can cut and paste certain sections of the text into documents for my games.

I guess I'm in no rush to decide.

Peace. Out.

So I played Champions Online yesterday. Very nice.

While I'm not a big MMORPG fan, I have played EQ, WoW, and CoH and liked them all. Each generation of this genre gets better and better.

What I like about CO is that instead of going for complex 3D modeling, they went for a more 2D-like look so it looks more like a comic book than CoH. I also like the fact that with the costume designer, it saves your designs as image files that you can then use outside the game. It's pretty sweet.

The controls were a little hard to get used to. If it were ever to come the consoles, I'd get the PS3 version because I think a controller would be much better than the keyboard controls it defaults to. I have a Microsoft Game Pad (but I'd need a joystick to USB converter) so I might try that. Otherwise, it's just getting used to having my hands in an unfamiliar position on the keyboard.

Also, without a manual to explain everything, the controls are a little hard to grok at first glance.

But the good news is my new (March 2009) PC completely kicks the ass of the system requirements so I can turn everything up to 11 and play in all it's anti-aliased, multi-poly, textured glory.

For my first foray into Millennium City, I recreated my first ever Champions character, Hornet. At least I did as much as I could without really exploring the full depth of the character generator. And then sent him off to fight the invading alien horde. I got knocked out a couple of times, but generally gave better than I got. And I even met Foxbat, which was cool.

The open beta doesn't last long (just until the 26th of this month), then goes dark until the game debuts for real on Sept. 1. I've already hinted to the wife that a $199 lifetime subscription would be the ideal early birthday present for a husband who turns 44 on Sept. 29.

Next time I play, I'll try to take a screenshot of my character in-game.

Until then... uh... "Go get her, Ray!"

Peace. Out.

I had an appointment with my doctor today. And, as usual, the first thing I had to do was stop at the "registration" desk and tell them that I hadn't moved, I hadn't changed my phone number, and I hadn't changed jobs or insurance providers. Then I was allowed to proceed to the receptionist area for my clinic and tell them I had arrived.

As I sat waiting for my appointment, I thought about what I had just done. It's not new. This is how my medical appointments have been for three or four years now. And I recalled seeing the "We're changing to serve you better" signs when they implemented the new procedure.

How, precisely, does requiring me to answer the same five questions every two weeks (I have a lot of medical appointments) "serve (me) better?"

It doesn't. It serves the clinic better.

They say that it's to make sure their records are up to date. It's not. The medical profession got by for decades without requiring these bi-weekly updates and I don't think people are any more prone to suddenly changing jobs or phone numbers or addresses now that they were back in the 70's.

The real reason is so that if you don't have insurance, they can ask you how you intend to pay for your visit that day. The number of people without insurance has become so large, that it's actually more efficient for them to hire extra staff to waylay each patient and see if they are going to have to make "alternate arrangements" to pay their bill.

I don't begrudge the clinics for doing this, they need to get paid for the services they provide otherwise the cost gets passed along to everyone else in the form of generally higher charges. In fact this happens despite these new measures because, in general, the most they can force you to do is sign a form stating that you promise to pay when they send you a bill. They're not going to refuse to let you see your doctor. That exposes them to much to high of a risk that someone might sue them if something should happen to you after they turned you away.

No, it's the insurance companies with their policies of denying coverage and jacking up premiums for the sake of higher profits that has led to this situation.

I'm lucky. I have a job where my employer offers health insurance. And believe me, my employer hits me over the head with how lucky I am to even have a job every day. When I ask about why my wages have not, over the last decade, come even close to keeping up with inflation, I am informed of the "dollar value" of my benefits and how that has increased. Except that the cost of my benefits has increased not because of the cost of benefits actually paid out, but because of the increase in premiums which have come with lower paid benefits and enormous corporate profits.

I am also lucky that I wasn't diagnosed with diabetes until after I got my job. If I had been diagnosed previously, I likely wouldn't be eligible for coverage because my diabetes would be a "pre-existing condition."

So if the health care reform bill that emerges from Congress next month includes a "public option", it likely won't benefit me. My insurance is actually pretty good. But I support the creation of a public option anyway.

Why?

Because it's the right thing to do.

We don't limit police or fire protection to only those who can pay for it (although that's what he Libertarians would like to do). We, as a society, have agreed that there are certain functions that increase the public good and that the government should provide these things. Law enforcement and someone to try to stop your house from burning down are two of those things.

We have also decided that there are things the government can provide more efficiently and equitably, like national defense and a monetary system.

Health care is both of these things.

If people don't get sick as often, then society benefits from increased productivity, reduced risk of the spread of infection and disease, and less of a burden on the existing public health system. People who receive their primary medical care in the emergency rooms are placing a double burden on the system. First, they are displacing actual emergency cases. Second, the often are unable to pay for their treatment and thus, charges go up to recoup the lost resources. So keeping people from getting sick and caring for them in an appropriate manner when they do is a good thing.

And if the system that provides that good isn't equitable, say you don't receive as good of care in California as you do in Arizona, then those states with superior coverage are going to be unfairly burdened. So they system that provides coverage has to do so at a national level.

And, surprise, we already have such a system... it's called Medicare. And ask anyone who has it if they want to give it up.

But if you never get sick, I can see how it'd be easy to say "Hey, why should I pay someone else's way?"

How about "Because it's the decent, humane thing to do?"

Peace. Out.

My wife (delazan ) has her hair done by her aunt (we'll call her J). It's way more than a haircut should cost, but it's only every three months so it's a battle I long ago chose not to fight.

Anyway... during her recent trip to see J this past Monday night, apparently J expressed her dislike of what she thinks the current health care proposal is. Never mind that she, nor anyone else, really has any idea what the final proposal will look like, J said something to the effect of "Whenever the government tries to do something it ends up costing three times what private companies would charge."

Really? Three times?

Let's look at just one thing. Something we probably all take for granted. Water.

Most of us live somewhere that the water we drink, wash with, etc is provided by the local government. Oh sure, in some cases the service is provided by a contractor, but they're government regulated (i.e. they can't change their rates without government approval, etc). In Madison, it's the City of Madison Water and Sewer Department. In Sun Prairie, it's Sun Prairie Water and Light.

According to the American Water Works Association, the average cost of a gallon of water provided by water utilities is less than 1 cent. If you consider how much of that water is used purely for drinking, it's way less than a penny per gallon.

How much do private, bottled water companies charge for a gallon of water? On average about $1.50, one hundred and fifty times as much. Even if you remove 90 percent of the cost, which goes into the bottle itself, the label, and cap, you're still left with 15 cents... more than 15 times what your local municipal water company charges.

"But wait... isn't bottled water better than the water I get from my tap," you ask.

No one really knows. In most cases, bottled water is just tap water, albeit from a different tap in a different city. Most bottled water companies do nothing more to the water than your local water utility does. And the procedures they do subject the water to are often 'trade secrets', a fancy way of saying "we don't want to tell you we just fill it with a hose in our bathtub." Check out this video from Penn & Teller's Bullsh*t.

So for the most part, bottled water is no better that water directly out of your tap. So what could possibly justify the 1500 percent increase in the price for bottled water? Profit.

Local water utilities, for the most part, don't operate on at a profit. What profit the do derive is, again, government regulated.

So, if anything the government does costs three times more than private business providing the same thing, why does bottled water cost so much more than tap water?

Peace. Out.

I can't wait to finally watch the Packers on my 52" HDTV! Life is good.

Democrats... get a grip. Health Care reform is not "on the brink" of failure. No one has negotiated away anything because there is no "bill" yet.

There are a number of disparate, competing proposals in both houses of Congress. There are presently three in the House and three in the Senate.

House rules require certain kinds of legislation to be approved by certain committees before they can move on to a vote by the whole House. The three competing bills are each being/have been considered (one has been voted out of committee already) three different committees. Once all three bills are passed the the whole House, they will be reconciled into one bill on which the House will vote. It will pass. The Democrats already have enough votes to pass even the most liberal of the three measures. They only have to have 50 percent plus 1. At last estimate Pelosi has about 18 more than that. That compromise bill can and probably will contain parts of all three competing bills. Including the doomsday "public option" (Pelosi has already said she will not allow a bill without a public option to come to a vote on the floor of the House).

The Senate is a little trickier because they don't operate under the same rules as the House. There the three bill have been introduced into three different committees when it could have been five, or a dozen. But like the House, once those three bills are out of committee, which will happen in September in all likelihood, they will be reconciled into a single bill, again probably containing elements of all three bills including the public option. That one bill will then be voted on by the Senate, where there is a slight chance that it could face a filibuster. That appears unlikely to succeed because the Senate can resort to the budget reconciliation process, which doesn't allow for filibusters, in which only 51 votes are needed to pass.

The two bill will then be sent to a Conference Committee consisting of both House and Senate members, who will have to reconcile the differences between the House and Senate bills. That conference bill will then go back to both houses to be approved before being sent to the President.

The downside to the budget reconciliation route is that it requires that certain portions of the legislation expire after a certain amount of time. I believe this is the means that the Bush administration used to get it's tax cuts passed in 2002. I don't think that's all bad though. After a number of years of operation, the argument that a public option will put private insurance out of business (a claim which the non-partisan CBO says is untrue) will either be proven true or false, and the effectiveness of a government run program will no longer be pure speculation.

We have a dog.

Our should I say, a dog has us.

My wife (delazan) and I adopted a 9 week-old Pekingese/Pomeranian/Chihuahua mix (small, small, small...) who we have named Nibbler. Or, more properly, Nibbler Nanook Curley, Eater of Dirt. He got the epithet because when the owner of the rescue place went to get him, she said she found him digging and eating dirt. Lori and I both agreed, it was only fitting for our dog.

Here are two slightly out of date pictures of him (he's a little bigger now, not much).  We've got new pictures of him, but the wife is the keeper of the official photos so I'll have to wait for her to post something. But trust me, he's so cute it's criminal. He's all white, except one really pale tan patch around his right eye which makes him kind of reminiscent of Pete the Pup from the Our Gang comedies. He's a little fuzzy butt.

I don't think Lori has ever had a dog before, and I haven't had one since I was 6 or 7 years old. And they're a BIG change from cats. Cats are like wash and wear clothing... you do certain things for them but pretty much they maintain themselves. Dogs are more like hand-wash, delicate knit sweaters. We have to train Nibbler that when he needs to go pee or poop (all the literature uses the more sterile term "evacuate"), he needs to let us know. I think he knows where the door outside is and I think he's getting the whole "We're out for a walk" thing. And I think he's starting to identify Lori and I as the "alpha dogs".

And last night he got his first bath. He wasn't really dirty, he just smelled of being kept in a rescue facaility with a lot of other dogs. So we put him in the kitchen sink and bathed him with the puppy shampoo we bought. He was pretty good. He didn't try to get out of the sink too much, But he looks really pathetic when he's all shivery and wet. But he seemed to like being dried with the towel, and then going to sleep on Dad's lap after his bath. Later in the evening, when he was dry, his fur was soft and cottony.

He's very affectionate with the kisses. Except he seems to want to eat my beard, or thinks it's a chew toy. Speaking of toys, he's got a Puppy Kong and the chew sticks that go inside them. I'll probably pick up a rawhide chew for him tonight too. And he's going to go to Puppy School ASAP.

We're trying to crate train him, but it's really hard. He doesn't like being separated from us, even if we're sitting right outside the crate. So we've done a bad thing... we've let him sleep with us the first two nights. On the plus side he hasn't pee'd or pooped in the bed, and he's woken one of us up both nights when he's needed to "go".

The hardest thing was this morning... we had to leave him home alone (well, the cats want nothing to do with him at this point, so he might as well be alone). It broke my heart to hear him behind the pet gate we bought, whining for me to come back.

I'm going home at Noon to let him out, then I have to come back to work so I get to go through the whole "You're abandoning me..." thing twice!

But I love the little guy. I really do.

Peace. Out.

You know... I really don't think the current debate over legislation to allow carrying firearms across state lines is that big of a deal. I don't think the law will change much either way. If I were in law enforcement, I'd certainly be opposed to it. More guns would make my job harder. I can't really think of a reason why I'd be in favor of it, but that doesn't mean there aren't any.

I'm pro-gun control. That doesn't mean I think guns should be illegal. I think we should place reasonable restrictions on firearms to reduce the incidence where violent situation get escalated to extremely violent situations.

I don't think guns cause the problem. I think guns tend to exacerbate the problem. I think guns turn "seriously beaten up" to "dead". Not always, obviously. But I think there's ample evidence to suggest that the odds of a situation getting out of control are higher when firearms are involved on one or more sides.

Guns are just to simple... to easy to use. And if you've ever taken a firearms safety course, one of the things they told you was don't even point a gun, much less fire it, at someone or something  unless your intent is to kill it. In other words, shooting to wound, while cute for detecitve buddy movies, is a fantasy.

Now swords... it takes some effort and time to kill someone with a sword (unless they're completely unaware, in which case it's pretty much a wash, and even then I'd guess swords are a little less lethal). And that extra time gives the brain the chance to scream "Do I really want to do this?" And the physical effort required might just dissipate the anger that fueled the decision to try and kill.

Maybe we should all go back to carrying swords.

Think about it...

One of the reasons cited for concealed carry is that you'd never know when someone you were thinking of robbing was carrying a gun. A non-concealed sword of any size... message received. If you don't know how to use the sword, carry it anyway. Unlike a gun, you're almost always better off trying to use a sword unskilled than trying to defend yourself barehanded (unless you're highly skilled in unarmed combat, or you're Superman).

So... swords... everyone can see that everyone else has one. You have to get pretty close to use it, so you don't need to worry as much about being hacked down by someone a block away. Once you do get close it's not very easy to conceal that you have your sword out and ready to use it (unless capes and billowing cloaks make a comeback). And most of all, it's comparitively difficult to kill a lot of people quickly with a sword, so massacres at McDonald's or the Post Office would go way down. Plus with all this physical exercise from hacking at one another, we'd probably (as a nation) be in better physical shape.

Now we'd need to change a few laws to make this work. For instance you'd need the require the blade to be at least 16-18 inches long in order to be legal - knives are too concealable and re-introduce many of the problems swords solve. We'd probably need some kind of peace-bonding requirement in most communities - merely a formality; if you know what you're doing you can tie a knot that unties with a single tug, but the existence of the knot says "I'm not obviously intending to start any sh*& right now."

Yeah... if we could get law enforcement behind a "broadswords for Bulldogs" exchange program. I bet crime would go way down. And accidental homicides would probably fall off the table.

And I'm only slightly kidding...

Peace (knot). Out.

EDIT: The amendment was defeated, failing to get 60 votes. Here's what I find rich...

from CNN.com:
"The measure would have required each of the 48 states that allow concealed firearms to honor permits issued in other states."

So we can (or wanted to) require states to honor firearms permits issued in other states, but we allow states to refuse to honor marriage licenses issued in other states (i.e. a married same-sex couple from Massachusetts is not legally married in Wisconsin)? And before you try to tell me that the Second Amendment trumps state law, so does the Equal Protection clause of the 14th Amendment. And know that just as the courts have identified forms of speech that are protected under the First Amendment and forms that are not protected, the Second Amendment is not absolute. It does not say that no limits may be placed on how and when someone may keep and bear arms (for example convicted felons are not allowed to possess firearms in most states), merely that the right cannot be taken away completely without due process.

Back in 1985, I was a DJ at the UW-Platteville radio station WSUP. My good friend Darrell and I were "Spike and Kyle" (I was Kyle) and we did an alternative-punk show one night a week.

For you youngsters who don't remember the first time music was sold on 12" diameter vinyl records that played on a turntable and were general called LPs (for long play) as opposed to "45's" (because they had to be played at 45 rpms, as opposed to LPs which played at 33 1/3 rpms) which were about 8", or EPs was were 10" (sometimes 12") records that contained only a few songs, and also played at 33 1/3 rpms.

Anyway, at WSUP in our Thursday Night Alternative collection we had an EP by a never-was band named Rapture of the Deep entitled Under Quabbin. To be honest, I can't even recall what they sounded like. I just remember that I really liked that EP, especially a song called Pink Sheets.

Over the years I'd every once in a while search in vain for something from the band or the album on YouTube. No luck.

Today I decided to Google "Rapture of the Deep Band" (I added band to skip all the pages which refer to rapture of the deep as an alternative term for nitrogen narcosis). First hit... a guy on Ebay selling the EP in VG+ condition!

Needless to say I bid on that puppy. You don't pass up the chance when one of your "Holy Grails" smacks you in the face!

Peace. Out.