Mark Knows It All

My officemates have all of a sudden gotten religion, and decided that it was time that we went broadband. For those of you not computer savvy, that means fast internet service, not the Sweet Sue’s Society Syncopators A ll Girl Band from Some Like It Hot . Words like wireless cards, servers, security codes, and routers (pronounced like the word Ouch) have entered the lexicon. Of course, I have been sitting with a dial up modem for a number of years just waiting for these guys and gals to come to their senses and realize how much time we spend downloading online stuff, but I digress. The long and the short of it is I had to buy a new computer for my office. As I write this, my wife has left town and my son has left the house, both seeking shelter from the stormy blast of my computer buying. $2,000.00 and 15 hours later of attempting to set the dang thing up , I am right back where I started. I'm not sure, but I think I was intimate with the service guys from Circuit City and Armst...

I have been hearing a lot of commentary as of late relating to global warming. It certainly has been interesting to contemplate global warming in the middle of a cold snap with temperatures hovering around zero, and snow up to the proverbial whazzoo. AlGore is apparently going to win an Academy Award for his political documentary An Inconvenient Truth . He has been nominated for a Nobel prize for his environmental work. The United States has been chastised for our greenhouse gas emissions and failure to ratify the Kyoto Accords. How thoughtless of us. I think Bill O’Reilly got it right on his program a few weeks ago when he said we ought to clean up the gunk in the air just because we should. I don’t like living in a dirty house, and I do my best to try to keep my office in relative good order, although that is open to debate by some. Burning less oil means less dependence on energy supplies from extremely volatile parts of the world. That is where George Bush dropped the ball. That sh...

It’s tough these days to figure out what is important, and what is not. It’s fairly clear the news media hasn’t figured it out. 24/7 saturation coverage of the death of Anna Nicole Smith shows that titillation (no pun intended) trumps more serious news any day of the week. But does the news media actually have it right…..at least as to what our culture deems important? After all, they wouldn’t show it if we didn’t watch it, and ratings is the name of the game. The death of Anna Nicole and the subsequent media coverage clearly demonstrates our culture’s priorities. If the media is the message, the message is clear: we are in trouble. Here we have someone who was a stripper and a gold digger, whose claims to fame were her implanted bust size, Playboy layouts, and pole dancing. By marrying a rich, dirty old man, she stood to inherit a ½ billion dollars. She contributed nothing to our society; not one life was saved nor one child fed or educated because she came this way. She represented c...

I don’t know about you, but my mail has become increasingly more voluminous. Each day I find my mail box filled with all sorts of things, most of which I haven’t asked for nor do I want. I generally stick the pile on the desk in the kitchen, and by the end of the week, or month sometimes, the pile becomes unmanageable and I have to clean it. That becomes almost an imperative if we have company coming. So last week, prior to my choir party, my wife gently suggested that I “get all of that s_____” (c’mon, you know she said “stuff”) off of the kitchen desk so people don’t think that we live like slobs. I dutifully got out a 40 gallon garbage bag and went to work. What a treasure trove of “stuff”. Here is what I found. Did you know that there are at least three companies that will allow you to lock in your natural gas prices for the next three years so you don’t have to worry about increasing natural gas prices? I made some inquiries as to how this works, and I was told that if natural gas...