Here’s an interesting economic recovery plan. Those Republicans are really on the ball.

Susan Sheybani, an assistant to Bush campaign spokesman Terry Holt said this of people who don’t like their new, low income jobs: “Why don’t they get new jobs if they’re unhappy — or go on Prozac?”

Yes, that’s right. If our economy has produced a bad job for you, then tough. Take some pills and shut your mouth. Oh, and vote for Bush.

If you there there is underhanded Bush bashing at the Democratic Convention, you haven’t seen anything, as Slate pointed out.

Two days ago, Fidel Castro gave a speech to commemorate the 51st anniversary of the birth of Cuba’s communist revolution. He said Bush is either an unacknowledged alcoholic who continues to imbibe on the sly, a “dry drunk” who, because he never went through rehab, is given to grandiosity and intolerance, or is an addict to medication he takes to wean himself from booze.

If you ask me, he could substitute the name of Ted Kennedy in there, and probably be right on all three accounts. Regarding Teddy boy’s speech at the convention, I haven’t heard that much slurring and mumbling since since I used to play the X-Files drinking game in college. And I’m talking season one of the X-files, before it jumped the shark.

The Dem’s have opened up their convention with a bang. Too bad part of Clinton’s speech extended past the 11pm hour. I’m guessing most casual viewers turned off at that point.

But as many media outlets cover the Clinton Effect, they are overlooking the single best moment of the night, when Al Gore said:

“I’ll be candid with you. I had hoped to be back here this week under different circumstances, running for re-election. But you know the old saying: you win some, you lose some. And then there’s that little-known third category.”

There seems to be a rising controversy over some recent comments by Patrick Keane, Google’s head of sales advertising. At the last AD:TECH, someone asked Mr. Keane how valuable SEO really was to increased ranking. His reply was that there is no way for an SEO to increase any site’s ranking in Google and that the claims of SEO people (like me) were false.

———-

Note: I modified this post and moved it over to a new blog dedicated to open discussions on search engines. EngineBlog launched on July 30 and will be a growing resource for information and conjecture over the SEO and SEM world.

If you would like to see the rest of this post, please read it SEOs: Evil Magicians or Benevolent Interpreters? at that link.

I’m sure you have all noticed by now, we have new clothes again. In the past few weeks we (once again) moved our site to a new host. This time we’re staying put. About 6 months ago we were tempted away from our host and offered a better deal elsewhere. Since we pay for everything out of our pockets, we went with it. It turned out to be a mistake in the long run as some site features were hampered. We are now (happily) back with our previous host.

As a result, over the coming weeks you’ll see some new features come online. I’m in the process of moving the LlamaTails over and will get busy updating them. The forums may come online right after that.

Probably the biggest change you’ll see is the eventual addition of advertising. Yes, we did swear many times that we’d never fall to the dark side, but after 5 years of paying for this site out of our pocket it has added up. We promise to keep any advertising low-key, like including some Google ads and maybe a banner or two. There will be NO pop ups or unders or hit the monkey with the hammer-type banners. We just need to offset a few expenses before wives revolt and toss our PCs in the trash.

More details to come. Until then, keep reading. And let us know what you think!

If Bush can hand over authority to Iraq by June 30th, in the midst of daily bombings that are killing soldiers and civilians, then they can hold the Presidential elections on November 2.

Delay the election and it will start a revolution.

Under no circumstances should the vote be taken away from the people. But I can see why they think they can do it – they did it in Florida in 2000.

Homeland Security evidently has the authority to delay the Presidential election in the face of a terrorist attack. That is exactly what Bin Ladin would love, the voice of the people being taken away by the very president that said he was trying to establish democracy in the Middle East.

This talk of delaying the election will encourage Bin Ladin to attack, not stop him. He would love to think he could have that power over our election cycle.

What we should do is hold our elections no matter what. Put our noses up to Bin Ladin and push democracy forward. That would be the proof that he can’t influence our elections.

But it does fit into the new campaign tactic the Bush camp is employing: Keeping the John-John’s out of the news cycle.

After John Kerry announced John Edwards as his VP pick, the John’s had a positive grip on the news cycle for two whole days. That was until Tom Ridge held a press conference about a terror event.

But when you deconstruct it, you can see there is no terror threat, unless you consider how terrified the Bush campaign is getting. Ridge could offer nothing: no dates; no times, no idea of what Bin Ladin might try to do, or where he might try to do it. Then he said he would wasn’t raising the terror threat color (what is it now, Puce?). Ridge even said he had no specific or credible information about threats to the political conventions. In other words, someone had to do something to end the Kerry news cycle so they send Ridge out on TV. How dare they play these games for their campaign.

Now the talk has shifted. Ridge can delay the election. Is this how far they will go to keep the monkey in power? If they delay the November 2nd election, they’d have to announce an alternative date. Then what? Bin Ladin will try to disrupt that election.

Saddam was a dictator, for sure. But I wonder what country will invade us to reestablish democracy here.

What’s the size of tomorrow? Can you get your head around the possibilities that exist each and every day?

Too often, it seems that we get complacent in our comfortable and not-so-comfortable existences. We simply accept the “givens” thrust upon us, taking each day as a specified and tacit truth that cannot be altered. Like a sacred text of diurnal existence, we drift through the currents and eddies that never move us downstream but keep us in constant swirling motion.

That’s when the fight or flight response comes into play. We retreat further into our cave and though we can build our fire a little bigger, there’s no other entrance to the cave. So, at some breaking point specific to each individual, we dash out of the cave in a desperate, headlong, and berserk attempt to ram ourselves into some higher plane of existence.

This then is my berserk Viking charge out of Iceman’s cave. I am dropping the rather comfortable career I had built in the technology world. I am becoming a high school English teacher.

Luckily for me, I have the opportunity to go back to my alma mater and teach along with some of the faculty that I admired, and perhaps feared. It’s a boarding school and I met my wife there, so we both feel a little as if we are going home. We did spend our truly formative years there and it hasn’t quite occurred to me how lucky we are to be able to go back and relive and expand the memories we have.

Today was my last day at my former career. I will miss the people I worked with. I will miss some of the freedom and free time I had in that position. I will miss some of the learning opportunities which were available to me, but I know tomorrow is something the Hubble would be lucky to capture.

The next year of my life hangs in the sky, at once rushing toward me and away from me in 360 degrees of Big Bang-fueled possibility. I can dance and swirl and flip in the nebulous gas cloud of my future. I feel the same way I felt when I made the trip to the school for that first day, knowing that my life would never be the same. I knew that this was one of Mr. Frost’s infamous forks, and while I’m not sure I took the one less traveled by, it will still make all the difference.

My dear mother sent this by email. While some I know to be true, others I find difficult to believe. I suggest you all get to Snopes and report back.

• A dime has 118 ridges around the edge.
• A cat has 32 muscles in each ear.
• A crocodile cannot stick out its tongue.
• A dragonfly has a life span of 24 hours.
• A goldfish has a memory span of three seconds.
• A “jiffy” is an actual unit of time for 1/100th of a second.
• A shark is the only fish that can blink with both eyes.
• A snail can sleep for three years.
• Al Capone’s business card said he was a used furniture dealer.
• All 50 states are listed across the top of the Lincoln Memorial on the back of the $5 bill.
• Almonds are a member of the peach family.
• An ostrich’s eye is bigger than its brain.
• Babies are born without kneecaps. They don’t appear until the child reaches 2 to 6 years of age.
• Butterflies taste with their feet.
• Cats have over one hundred vocal sounds. Dogs only have about 10.
• “Dreamt” is the only English word that ends in the letters “mt.”
• February 1865 is the only month in recorded history not to have a full moon.
• In the last 4,000 years, no new animals have been domesticated.
• If the population of China walked past you, in single file, the line would never end because of the rate of reproduction.
• If you are an average American, in your whole life, you will spend an average of 6 months waiting at red lights.
• It’s impossible to sneeze with your eyes open.
• Leonardo Da Vinci invented the scissors.
• Maine is the only state whose name is just one syllable.
• No word in the English language rhymes with month, orange, silver, or purple.
• On a Canadian two dollar bill, the flag flying over the Parliament building is an American flag.
• Our eyes are always the same size from birth, but our nose and ears never stop growing.
• Peanuts are one of the ingredients of dynamite.
• Rubber bands last longer when refrigerated.
• “Stewardesses” is the longest word typed with only the left hand; “lollipop” with your right.
• The average person’s left hand does 56% of the typing.
• The Bible does not say there were three wise men; it only says there were three gifts.
• The cruise liner, QE2, moves only six inches for each gallon of diesel that it burns.
• The microwave was invented after a researcher walked by a radar tube and a chocolate bar melted in his pocket.
• The sentence: “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” uses every letter of the alphabet.
• The winter of 1932 was so cold that Niagara Falls froze completely solid.
• The words ‘racecar,’ ‘kayak’ and ‘level’ are the same whether they are read left to right or right to left (palindromes).
• There are 293 ways to make change for a dollar.
• There are more chickens than people in the world.
• There are only four words in the English language which end in “dous”: tremendous, horrendous, stupendous, and hazardous.
• There are two words in the English language that have all five vowels in order: “abstemious” and “facetious.”
• There’s no Betty Rubble in the Flintstones Chewables Vitamins.
• Tigers have striped skin, not just striped fur.
• TYPEWRITER is the longest word that can be made using the letters only on one row of the keyboard.
• Winston Churchill was born in a ladies’ room during a dance.
• Women blink nearly twice as much as men.
• Your stomach has to produce a new layer of mucus every two weeks, otherwise it will digest itself.

……………….now you know everything!

Now playing: Tool - Ticks & Leeches

Since the recent round of kidnapping and beheadings by the Islamic extremists, and the media seemingly runing out of every other angle in which to play the story, they are now presenting a new twist.

The US press is now flooding the airwaves with Quran experts debating if beheading is permitted.

Let’s think about this a second. And let’s look back into America’s past when we were inflicted with Christian extremist.

The KKK was a Christian extremist group, just like Al-Quida. The KKK sited religious reasons why blacks and whites should not mix or inter-marry.

Did people in the early 1900s look into the Bible to see if hanging was permitted? I doubt it. And I’m guessing it’s because when someone mentions the KKK, it’s clearly understood that they are/were an extremist group not associated with normal, rational thinking.

Yet each time an “expert” is presented on TV, radio or print, stipulating on whether or not the Quran permits beheading, it is presented as if the behavior of these extremists is somehow associated with Islamic law.

When did we, as a country, get so damn stupid?