You simply cannot make this up.

How would you like to fly to Puerto Rico and spend six days with your family in the Caribe Hilton Hotel? The resort boasts “17 acres of lush tropical gardens beachfront” and is located on a private peninsula. Every room has an ocean view, and, of course, your stay includes meals and a rental car.

How much might such a wonderful vacation set you back? I’m not sure. However, if you are the Governor of New Jersey, it won’t cost you a dime.

It seems that the International Longshoremen’s Association, a large democrat party campaign contributor, is picking up the tab for this trip. It’s also paying for the hotel rooms of a Governor’s staff member and a couple state troopers.

All the Gov has to do to earn this free family vacation is to make a speech at the Longshoremen’s Association convention.

Of course, the Governor’s staff is already out there trying to put a positive spin on the trip – a trip that anyone with three living brain cells instantly knows stinks to high heaven. Get this: The Gov’s spokesperson said that the “trip is important to New Jersey because we have such a large Puerto Rican population. I think it’s important to have good relations because so many New Jerseyans still have familial and cultural ties to the island.”

What??? The Longshoremen’s Association is paying for this trip, and the Governor and his family are taking this trip, because New Jersey has Puerto Rican residents?? Did this spokesperson recently suffer massive cranial trauma?

What about the conflict of interest inherent in taking big gifts from groups with a distinctly political agenda (and, I might add, a most unsavory history)? Jersey’s conflicts=of-interest law clearly prohibits state employees from accepting gifts or any “thing of value.” Last time I checked, the Governor is a state employee, and also last time I checked, a six-day family vacation in Puerto Rico, with airfare, meals and car included is a “thing of value.”

No problemo. The Governor is relying on an exception to the law that permits the acceptance of “reasonable fees” for making speeches.

What??? The price of a six-day family vacation constitutes a “reasonable fee” for making a speech? Even granting that idiotic proposition for argument’s sake, do we want our Governor in the speech selling business? I think we have a right to expect the Governor to devote all his time to … well, …governing.

One would think that after taking a beating in the press for spending the state’s taxpayers money for a lavish trip to Ireland, which included a family reunion dinner party, he would have a little more sense.

I can only assume that he thinks this latest jaunt is O.K., because it isn’t the taxpayer, but rather a large campaign contributor that is footing the bill. Does he believe that we are dumb enough to think that he will not be beholden to the Longshoremen’s Association when future port-related legislation surfaces.

He most certainly does believe that, and the said thing is that he is right. The majority of New Jersey’s voters are that goddamned dumb. They elected him, didn’t they?

Yo Ho Ho and a Bottle of Seltzer Rum.
Craig at mtpolitics pointed to this site, where one answers a series of questions in order to have one’s pirate name chosen in a most scientific fashion.

Craig ended up with a cool name, “Dirty Jack Cash.” I wanted a cool name too.

I headed to the site and answered all the questions, including the one about the parrot and the one about penguins. Mind you, I took this test without studying even a little bit, which is pretty gutsy for me.

I finally reached the point where I was one click away from getting my really cool pirate name. I paused before clicking, hoping that I got a name as cool as Craig’s.

I clicked.

My pirate name? “Mad Morty Cash.” Morty??? A Jewish pirate? I can hear it now. “Oy, ye stinkin’ sea rats. I’ll keelhaul the next man who I sees eatin’ meat and dairy together!”

I suppose this could mean that Craig and I are related. Jack and Morty Cash sailing the seven seas in search of the perfect pastrami.

Oy.

Update:
After reading this, Craig (the seadog Mensch, a/k/a “Dirty Jack Cash”) took things one step further and wrote “The Adventures of Jack and Morty Cash, P.C.,” the story of the pirates who insist that everything be glatt Kosher.

Swallow your coffee before you start reading.

A Bit of Housekeeping.
What with the departure of Life After Fifty and Mean Mr. Mustard, I have removed them from my blogroll. I’ll keep a light on for them, should either decide to return.

I’ve added two new links, both of which have been bookmarked for a while. I think you’ll like them.

Side Salad. Regular doses of fun stuff, with creative use of images.

Bloviating Inanities. Great writing that is laugh out loud funny. Anyone who can find hilarious things to say about nose hair and gout definitely gets blogrolled.

Enjoy.

This just made me laugh.

Thanks to my friend Ron, the Brown Water Navy vet and retired cop.

Golf Outing.
I got to play golf today in an outing that was attended by a bunch of these guys. Matt Snell was in my foursome. Here he is (no. 41) about to score a touchdown in Super Bowl III. What a nice guy (and he can hit a golf ball a mile). Oh yeah, this guy was also there and still looks damned good.

People who know me know that I am not much of a sports fan, but it was quite something to be among these guys, all of them still friends and all of them gentlemen.

The outing was a fundraiser for Freedom House, an organization that provides a no-bullshit residential rehabilitation program for men who are addicted to alcohol and/or drugs. Many of the program graduates were in attendance, and they are living proof of the excellent work that Freedom House does.

I had planned to write some thoughts on golf from the perspective of a lousy golfer, but I’m a tad tired, so I’ll save that for another day.

Fore!

RSS Feeds and Aggregators –Talk about making my hair hurt!
The other night, a reader dropped me a line suggesting that I really ought to have an RSS feed. I bared my clueless soul and confessed that I had heard the term “RSS” before and I had even seen those three letters smooshed together on other people’s blogs, but I had no idea what RSS meant. How could I even begin thinking about having an RSS feed when I didn’t know what the hell an RSS feed is?

The patient (and by now sorry he mentioned it, I’m sure) reader wrote back and explained that, with an RSS feed people like him who have “aggregators” to get the RSS feeds can see instantly which of their favorite blogs have been updated, and they can even read a bit of each updated blog to see if it is “clickworthy” (my term – he was being nice). He even sent me a link about “aggregators.” This was a good thing, because “aggregators” are as foreign to me as are “RSS feeds.”

I figured, hell, I should just go out there on the web and get me one of those RSS feeds and one of those really cool aggregators.

I went to this site. The site has five pages, and this appeared on the first page.

For rss2html.pl to work on your system, you should have a recent version of Perl installed, 5.003 or better. 5.005 is recommended. You will also need the XML::Parser and XML::RSS modules installed.
To install the modules on a *nix system, type:
perl -MCPAN -e “install XML::Parser”
perl -MCPAN -e “install XML::RSS”
If you’re using a win32 machine (Win95/98/NT), you have a recent installation of Activestate Perl. If you don’t have a recent version, visit http://www.activestate.com.

What?????

I clicked my way through the next four pages, becoming more depressed and lost with each click.

I did, however, get the sense that in order to talk RSS, one must know what XML is. So, I went to this site, where I was enlightened by:

XML specifies neither semantics nor a tag set. In fact XML is really a meta-language for describing markup languages. In other words, XML provides a facility to define tags and the structural relationships between them. Since there’s no predefined tag set, there can’t be any preconceived semantics. All of the semantics of an XML document will either be defined by the applications that process them or by stylesheets.

You’ve GOT to be shitting me.

OK, so what about aggregators? Maybe if I got one of those, this RSS and XML stuff would make more sense. So, I went here and saw this:

First of all, before installing Syndirella, you will need to have the Microsoft .NET Framework runtime version 1.0 installed. This is a 20 Megabyte download. If you do not already have it, you can either install it through Windows Update or download it from the Microsoft web site.
The latest beta version of Syndirella is the version 0.9b beta, released on January 19th, 2003. You can download it here:
· Syndirella 0.9b (250K)
· Source code of Syndirella 0.9b (101K)
· List of changes in version 0.9b

On second thought, I think I’ll just go into the kitchen and put my head in the farookin’ oven. I don’t have to download anything to do that.

Oh no, Mr. Bean.
I survived this year’s cold rain-soaked, non-spring in Jersey.

Summer came like a sucker punch, bringing with it sweltering days with suffocating humidity. Finally, we were treated to a couple nice (albeit hot) weekends, and we are bracing for yet more hot days, possibly into mid September.

So, what comes in the mail a day or so ago? The L.L. Bean FALL Catalog.

Fall? Did you say Fall? No way, Mr. Bean. I’m just not ready.

Page 4. Long sleeve turtlenecks. Nice colors, but not now, please.

Page 14. Adirondack Barn Coats Coats?? Hell, I just broke out the sunscreen two weeks ago!

This baby goes to the back of the bathroom reading basket until the frost is on the punkin’.

Maybe then we can talk coats. Right now, I’m thinking shorts and tank tops.

Kapusta Anyone?
All the hoorah over the business of shooting-naked-women-with-paintballs (which now appears to have been 24 carat caca) got me to thinking of a story a good friend told me many years ago while he was a student at NYU in the sixties. You’ll see in a moment that the connection between the paintball-naked ladies story and the following is anything but obvious, but humor me, please. It’s just the way my cruller works.

So, this friend of mine told me (and swore that it was true) that there was a guy in Greenwich Village who would pay people to throw cabbages at his bare ass. My friend thought the guy was some kind of artist. I figured him to be a nut.

I often wonder whether he is still at it. He would have a pretty old ass now, and I’m pretty sure he would have to pay the cabbage throwers considerably more than he did in the sixties when a buck went a lot further. Now that I think about it, the cost of cabbage has probably also risen quite a bit. Art can be expensive, I suppose. So can being a nut.

I always thought the guy should have called himself “The Kapusta Kid.” It sounds great and would look swell on a tee shirt.

…And Some Return.
Well, we lost Mean Mr. Mustard and Life After Fifty, but the news isn’t all bad, because Spoons is back. I will happily put him back on the blogroll and even more happily read his stuff every day.

Some Have Gone…and Some Remain.
We read today that Mean Mr. Mustard, the ass-kicking, non-liberal who is being held hostage in Berkeley, is calling it quits, having decided to devote his blogging time to the study of law at Boalt School of Law, to which he was recently accepted. Recently we also learned that Gary at Life After Fifty has taken down his blog, having been hounded from the blogosphere by trolls

While we will miss them both and wish them the best, the contrast surrounding the circumstances of their decisions to cease blogging is painfully obvious. One voluntarily departed to explore new intellectual challenges, but the other was – to use an employment law analogy – an “involuntary quit,” which was caused by a “hostile blog environment.”

Rita, in her usual no-baloney fashion, has lamented the negative effect that trolls have had on the blogosphere, and there is no better example of that than the case of Gary at Life after Fifty. The vast majority of Gary’s recent posts were anything but controversial or confrontational (the kind that are most likely to attract the attention of trolls). Rather, they were deeply personal and moving observations – the kind that, some might say, reflect the wisdom and sensitivity born of the author’s having spent five decades on the planet. Gary wrote about his bittersweet re-acquaintance with any Army buddy who was terminally ill. He shared with us his devastation following the recent death of his handicapped son. He let us look in regularly on his wonderful grandchildren and made no bones about how much he loved them.

Nevertheless, he was targeted for harassment by a couple hate-spewing trolls. For the life of me, I cannot fathom how cowardly and evil one would have to be to get some sort of gratification from leaving mean-spirited and hateful comments in Gary’s blog. Did these wastes of oxygen celebrate when they learned that they drove this man off the internet? Could it possibly have made them feel good about themselves? Can we chalk it up to the foolishness and insensitivity of youth? I don’t know, because we have no way of knowing their ages. We do know that, whatever their ages, they are genuinely evil.

And, the thing I know for sure is that not one of them is worth the sweat off Gary’s ass.