The great Kinky Friedman is apparently trying to run for Governor of Texas. He’s actually quite an accomplished person. Musician, Writer, and now Politics. Thanks to Big Joe Duke for enlightening us to the man and his legacy (along with showing off the Love from Kinky Package he just received.
Here’s to non-traditional individuals for government office. I’m tired of career politicians. Just seems like a bad idea. Hulk Hogan for President in 2008…Vote or get body slammed, Brother.
I just came in from outside, and sure enough. I can see Jupiter from my house. How, you may ask, did I figure out which bright shiny dot was Jupiter? Elementary my dear Watson, I used a free open source program called Stellarium.
I just heard about it from a blog post by J Aaron Farr and had to give it a try. I must say that it is pretty amazing. I would love to get away from the city lights and give this a try with some good binoculars, but even from my home in the city I could make out quite a few constellations. Pretty impressive piece of software. And it is open source too.
You can’t beat the simplicity of this program.
Step 1. Install
Step 2. Set your location (this part kind of sucks, but I was eventually able to get Mobile, AL keyed in, just took some good coordination on my laptop touchpad, probably an easier way if I would RTFM)
Step 3. Take laptop outside and rotate it till it matches the sky.
Step 4. Marvel that the bright shiny dots now have names.
Here is a screenshot of Jupiter:
2 cool shows are coming to Mobile in June.
Wednesday, June 14, 2006 at Soul Kitchen
Blues Traveler (with opening act Joe Purdy) will be playing. The tickets go on sale this Friday and are $20 in advance.
Thursday, June 22, 2006 at 8:30pm at Soul Kitchen
Sister Hazel. Tickets also go on sale this Friday and are $15 in advance..
I’m definitely going to go to Blues Traveler. I’ve seen them a couple of times before at festival shows and they put on a great show. Not sure yet about Sister Hazel (that is a Picklefish night you know), so that one will depend on if anyone else is going, but $15 seems pretty reasonable regardless.
So if you are interested in hitting these shows with me, let me know. I’ll probably grab tickets Friday afternoon.
Senator Tom Coburn M.D (Republican from Oklahoma) is probably losing friends in D.C. left and right. He appears to be taking on the ridiculous spending on pork barrel projects in the Senate.
He came to my attention because he has been forcing each additional pork project being stuffed into an emergency spending bill to come up for a vote. Unfortunately so far only one project has been axed thanks to this vote (a multi-million dollar earmark for the Gulf Coast seafood industry). I’m sure the people in Alaska, Hawaii, and Maine are very pleased they aren’t going to be paying for marketing for the Gulf seafood industry with their tax dollars.
Senator Coburn’s website is very good as well. He has an RSS feed and a
podcast feed. He has pledged to only serve two terms and looks like he is really making waves by confronting the excessive spending.
Now if only we had more like him. Then we might actually spend less federal money than we take in (you know, like you and I have to do in our own personal budgets).
Keep an eye on this guy. Hopefully others will follow his lead (like some of my silly Alabama congressmen that don’t seem to care about cutting spending no matter how many letters I write). Unfortunately I have a feeling he will be black-balled and forced out in the end. But at least he is taking a stand.
Hooray Senator Coburn. Keep up the great work.
As many of you may know, you are entitled by law to a copy of your credit report from each of the 3 credit bureaus once per year. It is a good idea to spread these out and request one report every 4 months. This lets you keep an eye on your credit report throughout the year and makes it more likely that you will quickly notice any inaccuracies or problems with the report.
I just retrieved my credit report from Equifax and all is well. Another 4 months and I’ll check with TransUnion.
To request your free credit report go to: AnnualCreditReport.com
The credit report is free, but the credit bureaus try and convince you to pay for additional services (credit score, credit monitoring, etc). So be sure to say No to any of these items if you want a truely free credit report.
Now go ahead and pull yours and make sure everyting looks ok. It is a sad fact of life that your credit history is extremely important and can open or close many doors based on what information it contains.
