I just want everybody to understand that there's a lot more going on here than news about Laura Ingraham's baby girl. We have a series of human interest stories about the Chicago Force women's football team, movie reviews by Peg-Eye Nate, and informative articles about accounting and economics that political candidates from both parties would benefit from reading.

Oh, hell. Yesterday, Laura reported on her show that Maria Caroline really likes Pepperidge Farm goldfish crackers.

Part of being a superior life form is being realistic about the marketplace.

Respectfully submitted,

Ferdinand T. Cat

Respectfully submitted,

Ferdinand T. Cat

Nate drives a van for a living, and traffic safety school is an occupational hazard. Essentially, when they catch you going over the limit twice in one year, they'll dismiss the charge if you agree to attend an 8-hour class. The theory is that the classes are so humiliating that people will drive under the limit just to avoid them. It's a reasonable idea, but it does not seem to be working. Chicagoans still drive like maniacs.

This futile attempt to get Illinois residents to slow down does not ordinarily bother me, except that in this case it means that Nate is going to miss the football game. I understand that the politicians who come up with these rules are operating with the best of motives, but do any of them understand what it's going to be like for me to have him moping around the house for another week?

So, if you live anywhere in Illinois, call your legislators right now and let them know that traffic safety school during the women's football season is simply not acceptable. I'm all for safe driving, but when it starts to mess up my life then somebody's priorities are seriously screwed up.

Respectfully submitted,

Ferdinand T. Cat

I mention this because most Macintosh users think Bill Gates is the antichrist. Yet, the dominance of Windows machines over the Mac in the Eighties was not the result of a diabolical Microsoft marketing strategy. It was a result of the fact that a Windows laser printer cost $500 and a Mac laser printer cost $5000. The greatest desktop publishing software in the world is useless if you can't print anything.

No matter how rational a person is in daily life, once they've purchased a Mac they turn into an instant religious fanatic. A Windows user stays on Windows because they're more familiar with the tools, or they absolutely have to be able to use Netflix Instant and Amazon Unbox, or because they like having a lot of hardware choices. A Mac user stays with the Mac because only a crazy person would use anything else.

This is a very human psychological reaction. It probably stems from spending $2000 for a MacBook Pro that's almost as powerful as a $700 Toshiba Satellite. Worrying about that sort of thing is just silly. When you buy a Macintosh, you're paying a premium price to get a hassle-free machine. Some people would rather endure the hassle so they can keep the extra money. The whole point of capitalism is to allow people to make their own choices according to their own values, dollar values especially.

So if you're a Mac user, just relax and enjoy what you have. That's all us Windows folks are doing, and it's actually kind of fun.

Respectfully submitted,

Ferdinand T. Cat

The movie starts with Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) being given a military escort out of somewhere in the middle east where he had just finished showing his company's latest weapon (The Jericho Missile) to the US army. Just as he was making friends with the stern faced soldiers the convoy comes under attack by a group of terrorists who call themselves the Ten Rings. As Stark is about to call for help, a missile labled "Stark Industries" explodes next to him and knocks him unconscious. The movie then jumps backwards in time about 36 hours to establish Stark's character. He comes across as a stereotypical rich playboy: he can turn any situation into a party, he can get the most straight-laced person to loosen up, and he even gets a reporter to go from accusing him of being a soulless mass murder to mauling him in the bedroom. We get the impression personal responsibility has never really been his forte. If it weren't for his personal assistant Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow) he'd fall apart at the seams. He rushes over to the middle east accompanied by his military liaison Jim Rhodes (Terrence Howard), which brings us to where we were at the start of the movie. The Ten Rings have stockpiled Stark's weaponry, and they want Stark to build them their own Jericho missile; however, with the help of a fellow captive (Shaun Toub) he designs a suit of powered armor that lets him fight his way free of the terrorists, and make his way home where he dedicates his life to righting the wrongs caused by his weapons.

This movie is very percussive: lots of explosions, lots of heavy impacts, and a respectable amount of collateral damage. The music fits the action perfectly, and the decision to stick to heavier metal and rock tunes was a very appropriate choice^{[see disclaimer]}. Robert Downey Jr. manages to pull off a wonderful mix of dead-pan smart-alec-ness and iron-hard sincerity that really drives home the character of Tony Stark and his alter ego. I can't really say how close the movie stayed to the comics, not having read them myself, but the story in and of itself is compelling and suspenseful without keeping the audience waiting too long. I was a little disappointed by Stark's decision to stop all weapon production within his company after he got back from the middle east, but it did seem like the right choice after a while.

Overall: Soul-searching and character development will lure in that one highbrow friend, with plenty of hard-core action for the rest of us.

Respectfully submitted,

Ferdinand T. Cat

Respectfully submitted,

Ferdinand T. Cat

Anyway, expect a lot of photos of Maria Caroline to show up here real soon, and in the meantime, best wishes to Laura and her daughter from all of us here at Conservative Cat.

Respectfully submitted,

Ferdinand T. Cat

Respectfully submitted,

Ferdinand T. Cat

The new machine was a Hewlitt-Packard HDX 9300. Visually, it's gorgeous. I can say that with confidence because The Girl thinks so, and she's the closest thing we have in this family to an arbiter of good taste. It runs Windows Vista 64. When Bruce ordered the machine, he had a vague memory of reading somewhere that something didn't work with Windows Vista 64, but all his major applications claimed to be Vista 64 compatible, so he figured it was just another memory glitch. It turned out the problem wasn't applications at all. Two of his device drivers were 32-bit only. One of them was for the Palm Centro phone, and a workaround was available. The other was the VPN program that allowed him to get inside the firewall at the lab where he works. That was a deal-breaker.

Bruce had an option. He could downgrade the machine to Vista 32. Hewlitt-Packard tech support did not recommend this. Nonetheless, he was able to get everything working but the display. Vista 32 treated the display as a generic VGA device, which meant Bruce would be unable to connect it to a projector at the office. When Bruce attempted to install the recommended Vista 32 driver, he got a message that the file was corrupt. While discussing the problem with HP tech support, they suggested he do a BIOS upgrade as a safety measure. The BIOS upgrade did something terrible and the machine will no longer turn on. This is why it has to go back.

It occurred to me during the post-mortem of this whole disaster that a lot of people would take this opportunity to complain about Hewlitt-Packard tech support for being incompetent, or rail against Microsoft for the whole idea of Windows Vista, or chastise Bruce for climbing too far out on a limb. But the truth is that the Hewlitt-Packard people were extremely understanding about Bruce's dilemma. If you want a computer that will survive for four or five years, you can't be buying the previous century's operating system. And despite his initial skepticism about Windows Vista, he claims it has an inner beauty, and now that he's seen it there is simply no going back.

So, he's disappointed, but he's not bitter. And the thing is, bitterness is expected. When a tech support person is baby-talking you through the steps of removing a battery, it's perfectly natural to get pissed off and inform them that you were getting your Ph.D. in Computer Science when they were in kindergarten. But it's also possible to sympathize with the fact that they can't see what you're doing and that makes everything ten times harder. What Bruce chose to take away from the experience is that they kept on trying to help even after he ventured into uncharted territory.

As conservatives, it is our job to be the opposite of bitter. Bitterness comes from the liberal idea that the world is perfectable, and when it's not perfect, we need to increase taxes or sue somebody so we can fix it. The truth is that we all have lame days, and we all have to make trade-offs, and the whole point of the book of Genesis is that even God can't always get what he wants.

We need a President who understands that, and we're not getting one this year. Anybody else would be pretty bitter about that.

Not us.

Respectfully submitted,

Ferdinand T. Cat

I mention this to explain why a simple incident with Boots the cat has him curled up in a corner giggling uncontrollably and talking about Creatures Who Walk Through Walls.

Here's the thing: Boots finds the whole concept of water coming out of the shower head to be fascinating. Bruce prefers not to have a yowling cat wandering in and out of the shower while he's getting ready for work, so when he takes the shower he closes the bedroom door. Now, it turns out the latch on the door is not aligned properly, so it's fairly easy for a cat to get through it. This happened today, so after a stream of curses Bruce left the shower, wrapped himself in a towel, and went to shut the door to get his privacy back. As far as I can tell, the blood-curdling scream occurred at exactly the moment he discovered the door was already closed. From this evidence he concluded that Boots had walked through a solid door without opening it. I mean, look at it from his point of view: what kind of cat would bother to shut a door?

The answer, of course, is the same sot of deranged feline that likes to sit in a running shower.

Respectfully submitted,

Ferdinand T. Cat

I do what I do. He does what politicians do. So that what happened in Philadelphia where he had to respond to the sound bites, he responded as a politician.

The obvious interpretation here is that Obama actually agrees with Wright's views, but has to hide his real feelings to keep from losing votes. Obama saw it that way, and he promptly threw Wright under the bus.

[Obama] said he was most angry that Wright seemed to suggest Obama's rejection of his remarks was only political. "If Reverend Wright thinks that's political posturing, as he put it, then he doesn't know me very well,'' Obama said. "I may not know him as well as I thought.''

This is serious stuff. If Obama is wrong about the man who was his pastor for all those years, he might be wrong about Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Obama intends to negotiate with Ahmadinejad when he takes office, and I'm pretty sure that Obama knows Wright a whole lot better than he knows Ahmadinejad.

It's serious stuff because, as you can see in the above image, the Obama campaign is entirely faith-based. It's about believing in Barack, rather than in any specific policy initiative. Even if you like Barack Obama as a person, and I do, the Wright problem is one more indication that he's not up to the requirements of the job he's seeking.

There's really no candidate currently in the running that I can whole-heartedly support. Still, in my mental list of least awful to most awful, Obama has been at the bottom of the list for a long time. The Wright affair merely confirms that I've put him in the right place.

Respectfully submitted,

Ferdinand T. Cat