GateGate-Gate

You may have heard: the head of the CIA, Porter Goss, is stepping down after a notably brief career. A related story hasn't been getting as much ink, but plenty of bytes & pixels are being filled in the blogosphere.

It's Hookergate. Oh... wait... no. I mean, "Hookergate".

Clearly it's a scandal, because the bloggers have chosen to add the suffix "gate" to the dirty word "hooker".

First of all, Watergate is the name of a hotel that was burglarized by Nixon's cronies searching for dirt on the happless DNC. You can read about it in the wikipedia (thank god for the wikipedia) if you need to, but clearly the scandal that drove Nixon out of the White House did not involve him using excessive amounts of water.

If only the hotel had been the Hilton/Best Western. Then we wouldn't be saddled with this meaningless suffix.

My second gripe about the name is that it puts the emphasis for the scandal on the hookers that were supposedly sometimes used in the influence peddling. As though influence peddling not involving prostitution would be fine.

Can't we have moral outrage stemming from the fact that Bush appoints lackies to key positions in government. And then those unqualified hacks, demoralize and deflate the angencies they're supposed to be leading. Which leads us to a disaster.

Isn't it enough that Porter Goss may have done to the CIA what Michael Brown did to FEMA?

But his swift and surprising resignation wasn't due to the fact that he was incompetent. It was because Bush & company couldn't keep this story under wraps any longer. (The scandalous behavior has apparently been going on for a decade or more)

So how about a new scandal? You can call it Competencegate.

The Rav Saga: Epilogue

So on our trip to Lewes, DE this weekend, Nelly and I finally caught the Rav making some funny noises at the gas station and had a chance to investigate. It turns out the muffler was rubbing up against the rear mudflap, and had actually burned a hole for itself through the hard-plastic.

Last night, after we got back, I removed all the mudflaps. I think that a lot of the odd noises that the Rav has been generating over the past 2-3 years are due to these crappy mudflaps. The screws and bolts used to hold them on were rusting or had already fallen out or had been removed and improperly replaced over the years. So taking them off led to a startlingly smooth and quiet ride in the Rav.

I'm hoping that removing the mud flaps will increase the fuel efficiency of the car (at least a little bit). I know that the weight + drag of the flaps isn't that significant, but I have to wonder if we removed all the mud flaps from all the SUVs that never go offroad in this country, maybe we'd save some gas.

Ah well, just pie in the sky.

As a bonus, here's a picture of the bottom of the Rav after I removed the flaps. Note where the plastic has bonded to the muffler.

He's a trooper, that Rav o'mine.

The Soreness Begins

It's spring-time once again. The birds are signing, the trees are blooming, and the children are behaving like animals. Also, ultimate season has officially started for Nelly and I.

This weekend, we went down to Delaware to play in the Beth Coltman Memorial tournament in Lewes, DE. We went down with my old team "Your Mom" because they were going and they promised that no one on our team would really try that hard.

Now, one might argue that half of the team drinking heavily on the sideline is not a recipe for success. In this case, that argument would have been the correct one. We lost all our games, getting blown out in most of them. Our last two games we made close, so it wasn't a complete travesty (except if you were to look at just the win-loss column).

Cape Henlopen State Park is right at the horn of Delaware's northern coast. It's pretty, um, windy there. Which makes for some ugly ugly ultimate. Mostly involving trying to throw the disk as far downfield as possible and then setting up what basically amounts to a wall of people to stand in front of the throwers. Nobody was winning any pretty points. But it was good cover for the fact that everyone on our team was out of shape and hadn't practiced in months.

So, now it's monday morning. I am exhausted, my face is sunburned, my hands are sunburned, my back is sore, my neck is sore, my legs are sore and my entire right arm is sore. And I feel great!