The Nortons

thane December 17th, 2006

As the chairman of the “Just get something done” party, I am in favor of the Democrats new position on the congressional work week. While having a job that is Monday through Friday sucks, as their employer, I expect nothing less. Also, starting on the 4th of January instead of the end of the month is a positive move. One Republican in Congress made the mistake of saying: “Marriages suffer. The Democrats couldn’t care less about families — that’s what this says.” This was rebutted by just about everyone, but the members of the military I think had the best response.

Five-day work week will double Congress’s workload

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thane December 15th, 2006

Apparently, you, fair readers, are the only ones who can decide.

What kind of pirate am I? You decide!
You can also view a breakdown of results or put one of these on your own page!
Brought to you by Rum and Monkey

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thane November 30th, 2006

It goes from Jenel to Phil to Tom to Me to the Cleaners

“You go here, find the year you turned 18, then C&P the results. Bold the one’s you liked and strike the one’s that made your ears bleed.”

Adapting what Tom did, I have italicized those songs/artists whom I did not recognize.

1. That’s What Friends Are For – Dionne & Friends

2. Addicted To Love – Robert Palmer

3. Kiss – Prince

4. Walk This Way – Run D.M.C./Aerosmith

5. Living In America – James Brown

6. Take My Breath Away – Berlin

7. Burning Heart – Survivor

8. Walk Like An Egyptian – The Bangles

9. The Sweetest Taboo – Sade

10. You Give Love A Bad Name – Bon Jovi

11. Higher Love – Steve Winwood

12. Never As Good As The First Time – Sade

13. Greatest Love Of All – Whitney Houston

14. Tarzan Boy – Baltimora

15. Sledgehammer – Peter Gabriel

16. You’re A Friend Of Mine – Clarence Clemons & Jackson Browne

17. Manic Monday – The Bangles

18. Glory Of Love – Peter Cetera

19. Like A Rock – Bob Seger

20. I Knew The Bride (When She Used To Rock and Roll) – Nick Lowe

21. Word Up – Cameo

22. Conga – Miami Sound Machine

23. The Men All Pause – Klymaxx

24. In Your Eyes – Peter Gabriel

25. Live To Tell – Madonna

26. Dancing On The Ceiling – Lionel Richie

27. Venus – Bananarama

28. Typical Male – Tina Turner

29. Take Me Home Tonight – Eddie Money

30. Rock Me Amadeus – Falco

31. I Can’t Wait – Nu Shooz

32. If You Leave – O.M.D.

33. You Be Illin’ – Run DMC

34. Crush On You – The Jets

35. The Rain – Oran “Juice” Jones

36. Papa Don’t Preach – Madonna

37. Mad About You – Belinda Carlisile

38. R.O.C.K. In The USA – John “Cougar” Melloncamp

39. Danger Zone – Kenny Loggins

40. Words Get In The Way – Miami Sound Machine

41. Walk Of Life – Dire Straits

42. I’m Your Man – Wham!

43. West End Girls – Pet Shop Boys

44. All Cried Out – Lisa Lisa & Cult Jam With Full Force

45. We Don’t Have To Take Our Clothes Off – Jermaine Stewart

46. My Hometown – Bruce Springsteen

47. On My Own – Patti LaBelle & Michael McDonald

48. Everybody Have Fun Tonight – Wang Chung

49. All I Need Is A Miracle – Mike & the Mechanics

50. Tuff Enuff – Fabulous Thunderbirds

51. The Future’s So Bright I Gotta Wear Shades- Timbuk3

52. Love Walks In – Van Halen

53. Shot In The Dark – Ozzie Osbourne

54. The Next Time I Fall – Peter Cetera & Amy Grant

55. Move Away – Culture Club

56. Day By Day – Hooters

57. Rumors – Timex Social Club

58. I Wanna Be A Cowboy – Boys Don’t Cry

59. The Power Of Love – Jennifer Rush

60. One Step Closer – Gavin Christopher

61. A Love Bizarre – Sheila E.

62. Everybody Dance – Ta Mara and the Seen

63. Sex As A Weapon – Pat Benatar

64. Superbowl Shuffle – Chicago Bears

65. Live Is Life – Opus

66. Great Gosh A’Mighty – Little Richard

67. Jungle Boy – John Eddie

68. Crazay – Jesse Johnson and Sly Stone

69. More Than Physical – Bananarama

70. Baby Talk – Alisha

71. Pleasure and Pain – Divinyls

72. Don Quichotte – Magazine 60

73. Why Can’t This Be Love – Van Halen

74. Once In A Lifetime – Talking Heads

75. Caravan of Love – Isley Jasper Isley

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thane November 20th, 2006

Well, I couldn’t do it. When it came down to the wire, it seems that I chose my family over my blog. Just so you know, here are the things that conspired against me.

• Illness – Everyone has come down with a 14 day cold. Coughing, stuffy noses, etc. Nothing like a breastfeeder with a stuffy nose.
• Class – Even though I am without class, I am working on a masters and take classes for that. This one was going well, but I needed more time to work on the presentation.
• Tory – For some reason, Tory gets downright cranky if I come home from work and get on the computer. It’s like she thinks she has a god given right to a relationship with her father!
• Johanna – I enjoy spending time with my wife. So sue me.

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thane November 12th, 2006

Last night, as I was falling asleep, I enumerated some of my favorite things, in no particular order:

• The smell of Stuart
• The way Tory snuggles up to me after I move her when she is asleep
• Stuart’s laugh
• The way Tory tries to be all serious and bargain for the things she wants
• Various things about Johanna that I am not at liberty to enumerate

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thane November 11th, 2006

I hate pennies. They are a waste of natural resources, a waste of time,
a waste of effort, and (literally) a waste of money. I hold the nickel
in slightly less distain, but if it were not for the penny, I would not
have thought much of it. However, since I have thought much of it, and
I have come up with a plan. Oh yes I have. I’ve got a plan so cunning
you could put a tail on it and call it a weasel. This plan comes in
stages, each more dastardly than the last.

Part the First: Pummel the Penny

The US Mint stops production of pennies, and orders the return of all
stock. These are melted down and turned into decorative paperweights
and sold at flea markets around the nation. Pennies will still
circulate, but they will become fewer and fewer.

Part the Second: Nix the Nickel

The same is done for the Nickel, except that they are made into hip
flasks. These two parts will probably require an act of Congress,
directing that all public transactions be rounded to the nearest tenth
dollar.

Part the Third: Down with the Dollar

The dollar bill is much less profitable than the dollar coins. Their
cost to produce per year of circulation is around 10 times that of the
coin. Additionally, they are harder for businesses to count. Get rid
of the stop pressing dollar bills and ramp up the production of dollar
coins. This is the part of the plan that will encounter the most
objections. Or is it?

Part the Fourth: Create Coinage

Why, in the name of all that is holy, do we not have a $5 coin? That
has GOT to change. While we are at it, let’s start minting $2 coins.
This will be the longest part of the plan, since it will take years and
years to come up with a design that people can live with. Feel free to
leave design comments below.

Part the Fifth: Vi veri universum vivus vici

Once we have a $2 and a $5 coin, stop printing the bills. Oh, I can
hear the howling echo back through the ages. SUCK IT UP AND DEAL! This
is for the good of the nation. Give up the bills or the Terrorists win!
Your Grandparents seemed to do just fine with no bill smaller than $10
(equivalent value), and you can too.

P.S. How is it that we live in a nation that can take the ugliest money
in the world, spend millions redesigning it, and make it UGLIER!

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thane November 10th, 2006

Every time I see a school fundraiser, I think the same thing. “There is another school, a school in a poorer district, that cannot raise money for that.” That shouldn’t be the case. Poor kids deserve art and music classes as much as rich kids. They deserve to go on field trips and international trips. The problem, however, is even deeper than those.

I don’t know about where you live, but in Oregon, the funding breakdown is like this:

• 35% Local
• 57% State funding
• 6% Federal
• 2% Other

The only reason it is like this is because measure 9 limited property taxes. Before measure 9, it looked like this:

• 66% Local
• 26% State
• 6% Federal
• 2% Other

Left to their own devices, 2/3 of all education funding is derived from the families being educated. IMHO, this is exactly backwards of what should be happening. Funding should look more like this:

• 10% Local
• 20% State
• 70% Federal

My proposed solution is simple, and probably would never work. Average teacher salary, nation wide, is about $47k. With benefits, lets call it $60k. The ideal class size seems to be about 20. Therefore, the Federal government should be supplying $3000 per student to schools, pegged to inflation. In my system, this money could only be used to pay full time teachers, and no teacher could receive, in pay or benefits, the money from more than 20 students. With 81M kids aged 5-19, that is a total of one quarter trillion dollars, or about 5 times the Department of Educations discretionary funding and about half of the Department of Defense budget.

The benefits from this system are manifold. It encourages the hiring of full time teachers, and it encourages the reduction of class size to 20 students. It removes local and state funding problems from the picture, leveling the playing field for poorer districts and poorer states. It mandates that teachers get a decent wage and decent pay increases. It removes much of the federal wheedling about what needs funded and what does not. Lastly, it draws a bright line between what the Federal government needs to pay for and what the local governments need to pay for. The Feds pay for the teachers (plus or minus). The locals must pay for the books, the buildings, and the administrative staff.

But nobody ever asks me.

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thane November 9th, 2006

After watching the events of last week, I have some advice for this great nation. This is pretty much a rant, so brace yourself.

First and foremost, to the people who voted on DRE (Direct Recording Electronic) voting machines. ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR FREAKING MIND!!!! Get an absentee ballot and vote by mail! Then petition your government officials to sue the people who sold them to you. It surprises me still that there are voters using machines with no paper trail. Without a paper trail, elections will be rigged. It’s not a matter of if, but when. I can say that unequivocally, and for a number of reasons.

• The machines have bugs. If there is anything the last 50 years of computer science have shown us, it is that you can fix all of the bugs some of the time, and some of the bugs all of the time, but you cannot fix all of the bugs all of the time. (Sorry Abe) Additionally, the only way you can make bug free systems is to hermetically seal them (they aren’t), tightly control the access (we don’t), audit the source code (is hasn’t been) and educate the uses (riiiight).
• Next, elections get rigged no matter what you do. All we can is make sure we have some chance of catching the people who do it. With DRE machines, there is no chance. If there is little to no chance that the riggers will be caught, they will do it more often. It is just human nature.

Now, for all of you voters who do not live in Oregon, what is the best way to (1) maximize voter turnout, (2) minimize the effect of sudden news events, and (3) maximize available information to voters? Vote by mail. Y’all tend to call it “absentee voting.” Round here, we call it “an election.” All vote by mail, baby. I can take 2 weeks to do my research and mark my ballot. If I forget, I can still do my research in the comfort of my own home, and in the middle of the night! The next morning, I drop it off at any library and go off to work. No lines, no time off work.

So there you have it! Throw the machines in the ocean and vote by mail. Your electorate will thank you.

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thane November 7th, 2006

Given the events of the day, I thought I would share some articles that struck me as funny.

• Carter Center declares that Florida does not meet basic international requirements for a fair election.
• South Carolina Governor turned away from polls
• Missouri’s secretary of state asked for photo ID to vote despite law being struck down
• Kentuky poll worker chokes voter
• 77,000 Dead voters still on the rolls in New York
• Republican Senate candidate Michael Steele’s homeless campaign recruits pass out ‘untruthful’ fliers
• County in Utah has 4 more voters than residence
• Devil votes 12 times

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thane November 5th, 2006

Dear Internets,

It has been a busy day. Stuart is definitely teething (two on the bottom) and we have a lot of catch up to play around the house. Joh and I need to vote, bills need paid, etc., etc.. My point is, this is the sorry excuse for a post that you are getting Today. I will try and make it up to you next week. Honest.

the Storywhore

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