Jersey Roads.
The Department of Transportation has put together some statistics, as reported here, about New Jersey that some may find interesting. Then again, maybe not. Anyway here they are:

A driver is twice as likely to be involved in a fatal motor vehicle accident in Idaho than in New Jersey. Only Rhode Island and Massachusetts have fewer traffic fatalities per 100,000 drivers than New Jersey.

I think this statistic is traceable to our learning to drive with lunatics from the get go. Besides, we don’t go for the kill. We are satisfied with significant maiming of the other guy.

Only three miles of highway in Jersey are considered by the federal government to be in “very good condition.” Most of the roads are rated “fair.” By contrast, Georgia has 864 miles of road along its 1,243 miles of interstate that was rated “very good.”

Picky picky. I don’t live anywhere near those three miles, and my tires, shocks and jangled nerves show it. As for Georgia, I figure they probably get about three cars per day on that “very good” stretch of road.

New Jersey’s gasoline tax (10.5 cent per gallon) is the third lowest in the country, beaten out only by Georgia (7.5 cents per gallon) and Alaska (8 cents per gallon).

And, we don’t have to pump the stuff ourselves!

Jersey has 6.366 bridges, 2,350 of which (37%) were identified as being either “structurally deficient or functionally obsolete,” and we have to pay tolls on 27 of them.

Does anyone manufacture a floating car?? Thirty-seven percent isn’t all that bad when you figure that 66% of the bridges in Washington D.C. need work. Bad news for Teddy Kennedy.

Let’s break it down.

Democrat Governor, Democrat Senators, Mostly Democrat Congressmen — Shitty Roads. Nah, probably no connection there

.

Beyond Apalling.
It is reported that, in North Korea, the famine is so bad that people have resorted to eating children. Meanwhile the “leadership” funnels the country’s resources into making nuclear weapons. Sick. Sick. Sick.
via On the Third Hand.

New Link.
No time for much of anything today, except for Life 101. Good thing too, as BlogSpot was completely down for a while. Anyway, I wanted to be sure to recommend that you check out The Mudville Gazette. Sharp, witty, and very creative. This one will be a daily read.

Rainy Saturday Reading Time.
It is yet another rain-soaked Saturday here. Other than getting an all-too-brief peek at the sun a day or so ago, we have had rain for days and days. It, therefore, is a good day for reading and poking around on the internet. Accordingly, here are a couple things that I passed some time with, and I trust that they may interest some of you as well.

FBI Files on Famous Persons and Events
This site offers the reader a wealth of documents assembled by the Department of Justice in response Freedom of Information Act requests. The opening page provides background, but the links are where the interesting stuff is. Some of the people who were of interest to the FBI are Abbie Hoffman (more than 4,000 pages), Hell’s Angels (233 pages), John F. Kennedy (178 pages), .Aristotle Onassis (4,296 pages), Frank Sinatra (2,403 pages), and Mickey Mantle (29 pages – relating to threatening letters the “Mick” had received). Interesting stuff.

Hallowed Ground.
Anyone with even a passing interest in history will enjoy a visit to Arlington National Cemetery. The site contains a wealth of information about the national cemetery, including a great collection of historic photos and current images of the burial sites of American Heroes. When I first came upon the site, I did not pay attention to the URL, and I had assumed that it was a government site. It is, in fact, privately run by a person who clearly has spent a good deal of time on it. Definitely worth a bookmark.

Guaranteed Laughs.
Several months ago, I linked to The Emails of Donald Lancow. (I tried to find my original post, but BlogSpot is in a particularly bad state of disrepair today.) Mr. Lancow writes absolutely hilarious prank e-mails to various companies and governmental entities. The e-mails and the replies he receives are posted on the site. There have been a few added since my last post. I also have a feeling that many current readers may not have seen the original post and this will be your first exposure to Mr. Lancow’s e-mails. There is NO WAY you can read these things without laughing out loud. Here is a sample from his letter to the Rembrandt Toothpaste manufacturer:

“I’ve been searching for a new toothpaste recently, and I decided to try your whitening toothpaste. I bought a tube on the way home from work Friday. Loved the taste and it gave my mouth a happy little feeling. I had one problem, however, that I am quite concerned about. Friday night as I laid down to sleep I noticed my teeth had a “glow” to them. This was not a trick of light or my imagination. My teeth are actually glowing. The darker it got the brighter the glow got. It got so bad I could not sleep ( I have very sensitive eyes). I work twelve hour shifts in a chemical repository. Is it possible I’ve been exposed to something that would react with your toothpaste? We’ve had some pretty big spills lately, but the haz-mat team assured me that none were dangerous to my health. I don’t know what to do. …”

You can also read the reply he received to that one.

Enjoy – particularly if it is raining where you are.

The Caregivers.
“For us, it’s a job. For them, it’s family.” Da Goddess, who is often irreverent and wonderfully wicked, puts on her nurse’s cap to write an absolute must-read about those who find themselves camping out at the hospital bedside of a sick family member and what other family members can do to help.

InstaRoyalty – King for a Day..
This past Tuesday, I was puzzled by the several visits to this Site I had received from The Truth Laid Bear (“TTLB”). I popped over to TTLB to see what was going on, as I had just registered to participate in the “Blogosphere Ecosystem” the night before. (For those of you even less geeky than I, the “Blogoshpere Ecosystem” is a list that ranks blogs, using an algorithm that presumably is based on the number of inbound links …blah, blah, blah.)

I scrolled through the long, long list of the “Blogosphere Ecosystem” and was unable to find my site (I had forgotten to use the “find” function on the browser – duh). I, therefore, chalked the whole thing up to some sort of techno-accident, well beyond my ability to understand. This kind of thing happened to me once before when I received dozens and dozens of hits from Blogger, even though my recently updated site had appeared for a couple minutes in the “Fresh Blogs” Section of the Blogger Page but had long since disappeared.

I figured…Go figure.

A while later, I took another look at my hit counter, and there were dozens more hits from TTLB. Huh?? I returned to TTLB and scrolled again – no sign of my site. I was then convinced that the hits I was receiving must have been somehow misdirected to my site. (If that was a stooopid assumption, you must remember that this stuff is all magic to me.) Then it dawned on me, as my cursor sat somewhere in the middle of the list of a couple thousand sites, to use the “find” feature. However, even that failed to find my site. Aha! I realized that the “find” feature had searched down the list from the middle. I set it search up the list, and it found my site.

I damned near fainted.

No wonder I didn’t find my site while scrolling around in the Crawly Amphibians, Flippery Fish or Slimy Molluscs. No wonder I didn’t find my site by searching from the middle of the list to the bottom of the list.

I was number one.

I stared at the screen, not believing what I was seeing. There it was — “Parkway Rest Stop” appearing above InstaPundit. I must have fixated on the screen for a full minute. Remember, I was brand new to this list and the whole blog-ranking thing.

I drifted out of my stupor and clicked the “details” link next to my site and a couple other sites (Did I mention that I was new to this?). Even Mr. Computer Doofus figured out that somehow I was being credited with EVERYONE’S links, and that’s what accounted for my InstaRoyalty status..

Yikes!!

Not wanting to look like a con artist or some kind of hacker (Me? A hacker? What a ridiculous notion that is), I immediately e-mailed the site owner, pointing out the mistake, and silently hoping that I did not somehow inadvertently mess up someone’s site, or, worse yet, derail the entire farookin’ “Blogosphere Ecosystem.”. After the e-mail shot into cyberspace, I wondered What should I do now??

I decided that, having advised the site owner that I was aware of the screw up, I should immediately post the same kind of information for those most-certainly incredulous bloggers who were popping into my site in droves to see what the heck was up.

Of course, Blogger picked that very moment to not come up on my screen. Damn. The frustration was akin to the agony one feels when stuck in traffic thinking that you will miss an important appointment. It was damned near put-fist-through-screen-time.

Finally, Blogger came up, and I dashed off this post. Blogger, of course, then took forever to publish the damned thing. After a few more aggravating minutes, the post finally appeared. I thought the problem would be fixed right away, but the list stayed the same for the rest of the day, although the hits quieted down, as the word spread that my reign as King was the result of a techno-fart of some kind. Of course, the experience TTLB users must have figured out immediately what had happened and never even bothered to visit my site.

Well, a few days have passed and now the dust has settled. I checked today, and I find myself among the Slithering Reptiles in the Ecosystem. Quite a plunge. That’s O.K. I’m in good company here.

But it sure was nice being King while it lasted.

The Answer to Ben & Jerry’s.
The Star Spangled Ice Cream Company is targeting those who “enjoy ice cream, but do NOT like seeing your money funneled to wacko left-wing causes.” The company offers mail order ice cream that it describes as “an exquisitely delicious hand-crafted super premium ice cream featuring a smoothness, texture and taste you simply cannot find in supermarkets.” The manufacturer states that it donates ten percent of its profits “to charities that support the men and women of our armed forces.”

Ya gotta love the flavors. Currently available are:

I Hate the French Vanilla
Iraqi Road
Smaller GovernMINT
Nutty Environmentalist

The flavors under development are even better:

Cowardly German Chocolate
Irrelevant Belgian Chocolate
Dutch (Reagan) Chocolate
Donald Rum Raisin
US Army Tank Crunch
US Navy Battle-Chip
US Air Force Over-The-Rainbow Sherbet
US Marine Tough Cookies & Cream
School Prayerleens & Creme
Gun Nut
Clinton Im-Peach
White House Fundraiser Coffee
Peanut Malaise

Damn, it’s great to be an American.

Thanks to Mark at Not Quite Tea and Crumpets for finding this gem.

Info For Those (of us) Who are Frustrated with Blogspot.
Jay Solo is soliciting tips from more experienced bloggers about the kinds of things one should know in order to effectively move off Blogspot. The information sought concerns software, hosting and other important things such as migration of archives to a new site. I hope it works out. I’ll be watching.

Note: How absolutely fitting. Because the permalink is not working, look for the June 3 entry, entitled The Great Rat Race.

Some Mistake!!
Something must have gone haywire at The Truth Laid Bear, as it has this site listed as Number One(19,022) in the Blogosphere Ecosystem, when it belongs way, way, WAY down on that impressive list. I immediately sent an e-mail to the site about this, so I have no doubt that the mistake will be fixed right away. In the meantime, I kinda like looking at it.

“My name is John Steele. I’ve been called ‘Jack’ at various times in my life.”

Those were the opening two sentences of an absolutely amazing e-mail I received last night. It seems that I received an e-mail from a real John “Jack” Steele.

Now get this:

Like Sergeant Steele, this John Steele is an Adjunct Professor of Law.

and

Like Sergeant Steele, this John Steele is a graduate of Georgetown University Law Center.

So, there I was reading an e-mail from John “Jack” Steele, who is an Adjunct Professor of Law and who is a graduate of Georgetown Law School. What a farookin’ coincidence!! You could have knocked me over with a feather.

He noted in his e-mail, that he had learned about the Master Sergeant John “Jack” Steele stories from a professor at the Law School, who presumably was also taken with the coincidence. We have since exchanged several e-mails, and I learned, among other things, that this John Steele practices in law in a San Francisco law firm when he is not teaching Legal Ethics (Please, no oxymoron jokes – I get those as a lawyer and a former military intelligence guy). Here’s another kicker. He teaches at UCal Berkeley! (Boalt Hall Law School).

In response to his question asking how I settled in on the character’s name, I explained that I wanted a one syllable last name (one syllable rolls nicely after “sergeant”) that connoted something hard. I may have been influenced by my memories of a boyhood friend who was a reader of “Sergeant Rock” comic books. “Steele” was a natural. As for the John “Jack” part, I explained that in selecting that name, I paid a bit of a tribute to Cousin Jack (real name – John – but he was and is always called “Jack”), who is a Law Professor at Lewis and Clark Law School and who got me blogging in the first place. (As I was writing the e-mail, it occurred to me that I never shared that fact with Cousin Jack. So, now he knows.)

This John Steele noted that other writers of fiction have been fond of the name “John Steele” for their macho characters. For example, he pointed me to a one-issue comic book with the title, “John Steele, Secret Agent,” and to a couple “B” movies, “Steele Justice” (John Steele, Vietnam Vet, returns to Vietnam to seek revenge against the corrupt Vietnamese politician for killing Steele’s friend), and “Steele’s Law” (John Steele, this time a detective, travels to Texas to hunt down and kill a crazy assassin whose weapon of choice is a sword). Equally as macho is the “action figure” Corporal John Steele of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

Oh yeah, I learned one more amazing thing. I assume that you are familiar with the story of the paratrooper who, on the night before D-Day, parachuted into the French village of Ste Mere Eglise, only to end up dangling from the church steeple in the middle of the village (Red Buttons played the part in the movie “The Longest Day”). To this day, there is a parachute and a dummy on the church steeple commemorating the event. The paratrooper’s name? Yep. John Steele.

I am most happy to report that this John “Jack” Steele, Adjunct Professor of Law enjoyed reading about Master Sergeant John “Jack” Steele, the gott-damned Adjunct Professor of Law, and even suggested having Sergeant Steele teach a class at Berkeley. Verrrry interesting idea, there. There even has been talk of getting together for a beer the next time my job takes me to the Left Coast. I look forward to it.

Of course, I’ll be checking to be sure that his gott-damned gig-line is squared away.