musing minds

{column1} this green bud {/column1}

{column2}turned into this beautiful bloom {/column2}

UPDATE: NC voters chose Barack Obama to be the Democrat nominee for President. What does that say to you Mrs. Clinton?

Hillary Clinton said today,

By the time the polls close tomorrow, North Carolina voters will have helped to pick the next President of the United States of America.**

Actually, that won’t happen until 183 days from now, Tuesday, November 4th, 2008. That’s the day that North Carolinians will have “helped to pick” the next president. Right now, they’re helping to choose the democrat nominee for the office…

**transcribed off Fox News Channel.

There was a tragedy at the Kentucky Derby this weekend. The second place horse, a filly named Eight Belles, broke both her ankles and had to be put down on the track. Big Brown won and will go on to the Preakness. Now PETA is calling for the suspension of her jockey.

Friday was a very rainy day here in the Chicago area. Around 6 pm after a short but strong downpour, we saw a beautiful rainbow. Saturday was cold and rainy, a good day to stay in, but we had to take the truck to the body shop and pick up a rental to use while the Yukon is there. We are using a Mazda 6. It’s a nice car and with the Hertz rental is Hertz Neverlost, a GPS system. Of course we’re playing with it. We went to an IHOP for brunch on Saturday and then programmed in the Barnes and Noble at the mall across the street. It gave us good directions for the bookstore that was only .2 miles away… 😀

Yesterday was a bit breezy, but in the 60’s and sunny. We got the lawn mowed, but I was concerned about doing that because the Swiss are looking into the ethical treatment of plants… Eugene Volokh has the story and a lot of good commentary.

We saw a couple of DVDs over the weekend as well.Walk Hard – The Dewey Cox Story (Two-Disc Special Edition) story was raunchy and full of double entendres as might be suggested from the title, but it was very funny. We watched the unrated Director’s Cut version. John C Reilly was great in the movie and he can sing. The other movie was Lars & the Real Girl. It’s a story about relationships, family and friends. It’s also a story about love. The love that an entire community has for this one man. Ryan Gosling’s performance was brilliant.

This tulip fully ‘ripened’ only recently.

In my Monday Morning Musings post this week I noted that XP SP 3 was supposed to be deployed yesterday. Apparently there was an issue with machines running something called Microsoft Dynamics RMS (Retail Management System) software and Microsoft has delayed deployment until it can add filtering to the updates. This same problem with RMS applies to Vista SP1 as well.

If you go read all about it at Windows IT Pro, you can find a link to get the download.

{column1}This one is not as ready{/column1}
{column2}This one is almost ready to bloom.{/column2}

The government will start sending out the economic stimulus payments today, a few days earlier than previously planned. Those who had their refunds direct deposited will get their stimulus payments first. VK has a discussion going on about what the payment might be used for…

We have to use it for some car repairs. The driver’s side seatbelt will lock up sometimes even when the truck isn’t even moving and back in January the truck was hit in the parking lot at Dunkin Donuts. I had been to the grocery store and the bumper was fine, then I drove a mile to Dunkin Donuts for a Box of Joe and then another mile home. When I got there I noticed that the bumper was all smooshed (I love technical terms) when I went to take the groceries out of the back. Luckily, the liftgate still opened and it wasn’t damaged. Insurance will cover that but we still have to pay the deductible. The passenger restraint is not covered by our extended warranty. We’re only getting the body work done now because we can be reasonably certain that there won’t be any more snow… I did not want to give up a driveable four wheel drive vehicle for a sedan in the snowy winter we had. We even had a foot of snow for Easter this year!

Via Instapundit, as reported by C-Net News, tomorrow will be the long awaited SP-3 to Windows XP. Robert Vamosi there says it’s a quick and painless upgrade and ought to be done right away. He says:

Starting April 29, all Windows XP SP2 users should upgrade to SP3, if only to get a complete set of Windows XP patches installed.

Shark (CBS 9pm EDT/8pm CDT) and Women’s Murder Club (ABC 10:02pm EDT/9:02pm CDT) return tomorrow night. They are both good shows.

I’m reminded of this because of a conversation going on at Althouse’s regarding the 60 Minutes interview with Justice Scalia that will air on Sunday. From one of the sound bites that CBS has released in advance of broadcasting the interview, Justice Scalia speaks about Bush v Gore:

“It was Al Gore who made it a judicial question…. We didn’t go looking for trouble. It was he who said, ‘I want this to be decided by the courts,'” says Scalia. “What are we supposed to say — ‘Not important enough?'”

Coming back to the present and near future, let’s look at the Democrat convention in Colorado in August.

Neither candidate has enough pledged delegates to cinch the nomination.

Two states’ delegates were reduced to zero as punishment from the Democratic National Committee for holding their primaries prior to Iowa and New Hampshire.

Hillary Clinton has said that she has the lead in actual votes versus pledged delegates, but that counts votes in Florida and Michigan where Barack Obama wasn’t even on the ballot.

The vote count also doesn’t include the counts of people in caucuses where Barack Obama did better than Hillary Clinton.

The nomination will come down to the Super delegates, those professional politicians who were designated to be the “choosers” to avoid another McGovern debacle.

In the end, the Democrat nominee will be selected, not elected.

That’s me! It’s been great. I used laser acupuncture and it worked like magic. I even emailed Barack Obama last year and recommended it (and the people that I went to). He never wrote back and it seems he didn’t try it.

It was a pricy treatment, but it was well worth it and with the price of cigarettes only going up and the good things quitting has done for my health I have saved far, far more than the treatment cost in the first place.

Another great benefit of quitting smoking is that after a year your life insurance premiums go down! Yay!