The Land of Ozz

Achieve American Dream and then Give It Back

A short note to the rich and famous.  You may soon be required to start refunding movie tickets, CD sales, MP3 royalties, book sales, and concert tickets.  The method of refund will be delivered to your faithful fans by way of the Obama success tax.

One thing that has struck me about the robin hood philosophy of Barack Obama is that it is the enemy of the core reason many people flock to this great country of opportunity.  Obama’s promise of taxing the rich means that if you actually achieve the ultimate American dream and become rich and famous then you will not get to keep all that you worked so hard to obtain for very long.  Your success will be limited to $250K or less per year to remain free from what I call the Obama success tax.

Our family hosted a pizza party this passed weekend. The party was very family friendly and did not have any beer, but did end up with a deer. More on the deer in a minute. We had about twenty five friends over for lunch including their children. It was a great time to celebrate the beginning of a New Year. The weather was great for grilling the pizza. Sherry and I have decided to make this an annual event. We intended to have the party on New Years Eve, but ALL of our boys ended up sick enough to be put on antibiotics a few days before the big event. Our two oldest, Riley and Caden were even put on breathing treatments due to wheezing. The big plan was to have a mock up of the “ball drop” at 7PM on New Years Eve in celebration of Zulu New Year. The Zulu New Year was an idea some of us dad’s came up with we would not miss out on the coming in of the New Year…somewhere.

Anyway, about the deer. The big event of the day for me came when I sat down with my good friend Chad after most of the guest had departed. Chad and I were enjoying the cool breeze on the screened porch as we looked out over our backyard into the wetlands protected area behind our house. Chad asked if I had ever seen any deer in my backyard or in the wetlands. I told him no, but I had seen deer tracks. He went on to tell me about the deer he saw in his backyard a few days earlier. Well, it was about 5 or 10 minutes after Chad asked me about the deer when we both just happened to be looking in the same direction at my next door neighbor’s yard. My neighbor has a privacy fence and we were entertained by the leaves swarming up over the hight of the fence as he used his leaf blower. Then, in the flash of an eye, a full grown whitetail doe came flying through my yard (front to back). I could barely believe my eyes. I told Chad that I was so glad we were both looking in that same direction at that moment because he would never have believed me if he had not seen it for himself. I have lived in this house for six and a half years and never once seen a deer. I had not five minuted earlier told Chad as much and then there comes a deer out of my front yard.

A few minutes later my new neighbor from three doors down came walking up. He introduced himself and asked if we saw that deer run through the yard. He said it came running right past him as he was sweeping his driveway and then it took a hard turn into my yard. I think he was as surprised by it as we were and maybe he just wanted someone to verify that he was not crazy.

It was an unbelievable end to a great pizza party to see a full grown deer run through the yard at 2pm. I think the next time Chad comes over, I would like for him to ask me if I have ever seen bags full of $100 bills fall from the sky into my backyard.

I meant to post this a couple of hours ago, but could not get to it until now. I guess some sailors in the mid Atlantic will be turning the calendar over to 2008 in a few minutes.

For all you non-military types, Zulu is the equivalent of Greenwich Mean Time.  We are in Romeo Time also known as EST which is Zulu minus five hours.  So the New Year celebration would have happened at 7pm if I had been on my game.

All joking aside. I do wish all of my readers a very happy and safe New Year and many blessings.

A tip for you die hard shopping fans as we approach Black Friday.

Planned Cost - Sale Price = Savings

No plan to buy - Sale Price = Impulse Buy

A sale price on any item is only a sale price if you were planning to buy the item anyway.

My friend Danny Kaye over at nothingtoimportantto.us has tagged me.

Below are 8 things (plus one) that regular readers of The Land of Ozz might not know about me.

A few of them (2,3, and 5) are very similar to what Danny Kaye posted.  Weird huh? Especially since he and I have never met face to face. Oh well, maybe someday.

1. I love peanuts. I helped grow peanuts in our garden when I was a kid. By the way, I do not like tree nuts at all.

2. This one is nearly the same as Danny Kaye’s #2. I knew within a tenth of a point what grade I needed on my last final exam to graduate high school. I was in the top 10% of my freshman year, but finished HS in the bottom 30%.

3. The only “B” I earned in my first two years of college was in English 101. Caint ye tail frum weading my bwog? After the less than perfect English 101, I went on to complete my AS with a 3.95 GPA. I have a good excuse for that “B”. I was taking 23 semester hours during my first semester back to college in nearly nine years. I have no excuses for my lazy performance with my BS.  I graduated with a 3.65 GPA.

4. I am one of a handful of men on this planet that would prefer a cat as a pet over a dog. You don’t have to walk the dog, and a cat will eat bugs, snakes, and mice.

5. I have dislocated my right knee four times since the 11th grade in high school. The last time was over fifteen years ago. Each time required someone else to put my knee back in joint for me. The first time when I was 16, the PE teacher drove me to the hospital with my knee out of joint. The doctor took x-rays at several angles while my kneecap was still out of place. I am guessing those x-ray pictures have become a part of some doctor joke spam since then. It is probably listed as 1 of the 10 weirdest things the local hospital has ever treated in the emergency room.

6. I spent much of my childhood on a pig farm. We had as many as 150-200 pigs at times along with chickens, goats, a couple of calves, rabbits, one horse, over twenty cats, and several dogs.

7. With exception for NASCAR races, Food Network is the ONLY channel I watch on TV anymore. Alton Brown and Good Eats is my favorite show. I also like the shows where they try to pick the next Food Network star. It is the best reality type show with good clean competition. The competition does not show the lying, bashing, and do whatever it takes to eliminate the others type of mentality you get on network TV reality shows like Survivor, Big Brother, American Race, etc.

8. I can pick a standard household deadbolt lock. My fastest time ever was 14 seconds.

Bonus – One of my favorite foods is popcorn. I like it with butter and lots of salt. This is probably more salt than most people can handle. I can eat the salt directly out of the shaker. I often like my finger and collect the excess salt granules off of my plate after dinner, when my wife is not watching. Unfortunately, my oldest son has seen this trick and now does the same thing. Here we are with our favorite NASCAR racing snack. Well, we also like some butter pooh to go with the popcorn. You know, a little sweet to go with the salt.

What is this all about?  These are screen caputure from my browser at about 9am on Wednesday 12/6/06.  I know weather forcasting is not that accurate, but this is funny.  Maybe we were having solar flares or something that interfeared in weather data communications. One image (left) is from my custom Google home page and the other (right) is from my “My Yahoo!” page.

There are two things that make these weather feeds funny to me. The current temperatures are definitly out of sync from each other and both show that the current temperature at time of these screen captures as lower than their own forcasted lows for the day.  I don’t know what the temperature was this morning, but I am guessing the Yahoo!/Weather Channel feed was a little more accurate.

Here is some suggested basic logic for weather feeds.

ForcastLow < = CurrentTemp

ForcastHigh >= CurrentTemp

The WayBackMachine Internet Archive is way cool. It is great for a laugh or too drudge up some views of the days of old. I even laughed at my own sites in this archive. Below are a few notables that you might find interesting. I think that Drudge Report has got to be the least changed web site format that I pulled up. Below shows the Drudge Report site back on December 6, 1998 as a sample of what you will see over at WayBackMachine.com.

Other notables that you can click to see their archive listings led me to find that La Shawn Barber and Glenn Reynolds were once Blogger users. The Instapundit seems to have held his own for the longest. The Michelle Malkin archive of 3/1/00 led me to a story at the Jewish World Review. Below is the first paragraph from that story.

“WHERE HAVE ALL the churches gone? From Oregon to Florida, houses of worship are getting zoned out of their neighborhoods by government regulators who put high-priced sod above G-d.”

I wonder why she could not spell out God?

Welcome to the open trackback Monday. Here are the the links to track this post.

Post URL:

http://www.hoei.com/blog/archive/2006/02/13/217/

Trackback URL:

http://www.hoei.com/blog/archive/2006/02/13/217/trackback/

Check out these other blogs: Mark My Words, Freedom Folks, RightWinged, Don Surber, Blue Star Chronicles, Quietly Making Noise, and Conservative Cat.

I am a Network Security Engineer and it is a good thing since my answers to this quiz say I should be an Engineering major. My actual major in college (night school) was a BS in Computer Science. I had just been accepted into a double major program in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Clemson when I found a woman in Charleston who I could not live without. We have been married for 5 1/2 years and have a beautiful family. I still get to do fun Engineering stuff for Uncle Sam to bring home the bacon.

Thanks to Danny Kaye who got this from The World of Stuff.