Research Disclosed About My Ancestry
New Position in the Office of the Vice President
Originally posted in The Secret Diary of Joe Biden
SolarNail Removal
Two species we're dealing with here!
collection of 400 breyers for sale give or take a few...Im haing trouble parting w/ them :(
Capitalism at its finest
"You got kicked off PERV?! What in the world could you have done to get you kicked off a dimension like Perv?" - Aahz, to Skeeve (Robert Asprin)
From 2001 to 2008, Cindy and I ran one of the internet's most customer-friendly e-stores. It was a great run while it lasted ... :- )
We sold high-end, gently-used men's suits, buying Armani suits that had been worn once or twice for $20, and selling them for $50. We sold, I don't know, 15,000 or 20,000 of these in six years, with a satisfaction rating of 99.1%.
Our store policies were simple: the customer is always (A-L-W-A-Y-S) right. It had a spot in the lining that we missed? No problem, full refund, and we'll give you your shipping back -- both ways. LOL. Guess what? We'll refund you 110% plus shipping BEFORE YOU SEND IT BACK.
We were verrrryyyyyyy careful to try to send out the super-sweetest blazers and suits. We genuinely wanted our customers to be thrilled. We wanted to make friends. My wife wrapped the suits in colored crepe paper and tossed candy in the USPS box. She thought of them as presents for friends.
Doesn't fit? Send it back. We'll e-refund you 5 minutes after we get your letter.
Don't like the color quite like you thought you would? Your wife doesn't care for it? You left it on the sofa and your doggy wet on it? Send it back. 90 days later? Send it back. Here's your 110%, brother.
Does Nordstrom do that for you? :- )
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It was a beautiful business: we loved our customers, and they loved us. The one thing is, we were swamped with orders like President Obama swamped with confetti at a DNC convention. It's just my wife and me, so the shipping times ran 7-10 days.
Our auctions said this, clearly: we are swamped, because we're selling you a $2,000 Oxxford suit for $89, and a lot of people want them. It'll take a week or two to get there. It would be a lot more than that from Nordstrom. It would be months from Oxxford. A week or two is the ship time here. If it runs late, we'll give you 50% of your money back and you keep the suit.
95% of buyers judged this to be a neat deal. Others, buying a suit for the first time and used to 1-day turnarounds on CD orders, complained via e-mail. Our response? Hey, very sorry, here's some $$$$ back and it's in the mail tomorrow.
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Though we got 99% positive ratings, the downfall was that (mostly new) buyers had our shipping time rated at 4.1 out of 5.0. The appropriate response to this, we discovered, was to prevent us from doing e-business. Banned from selling.
We sent everybody in the company :- ) e-mails trying to reason with them. We called at least five decision-makers. "When you rate a restaurant 4 of 5 stars, do you mean that they FAILED?", I asked one manager. "Do customers who give us 4 stars want us BANNED?" He swallowed hard, paused a long time, and said, "Me, personally, I don't think so." Ah, well.
I'm a capitalist, but when one company owns all the telephone lines, a capitalist government does turn its head over in that direction. People's lives can get seriously messed up.
Cheers,
Jeff
* footnote: six months later, we sorted it out. But that's another post... :- )
Noisy Roosters
His Dark Materials - no Switzerland in this culture war
As we noted in part two:
The grim fate of the Authority emerges in the final book. Lyra see the Authority; He is a bedridden, sick old man who knows nothing of anything (!). God dies, apparently from simply being too old and fragile to come to Earth.
Breaking from (more-)objective description to offer our own Compass on these moral premeses ...
We might say that this is where the series breaks down into self-parody. It typifies the Dershowitzian-style arrogance that can find a way to presume the creature to be far more intelligent than the Creator. Who designed this DNA stuff, anyway? If a Transcendent Being invented the Periodic Table and the EMP wavelengths, and tuned the gravitational constant to enable the Big Bang, could his IQ feasibly be lower than that a college professor?
Let’s say that Pullman’s IQ is 170. The Being who tuned the gravitational constant to one part in 10 to the 14th power has an IQ of 140? How, precisely, does an intelligent man like Phillip Pullman possibly conceive of a Transendent Being as a senile old fool?
Many of us reading this have IQ's that have to be tested with targeted metrics. How many of us -- soberly and advisedly -- have concluded that ours would exceed that of a Transendent Being's?
Also as we noted earlier:
So Pullman posits simply that God was the wrong answer; that humanity’s own passions were the only forces that ever really meant anything; and that those self-oriented passions would be the foundations for a new heaven; a right heaven.
Lewis’ foundation for a meaningful existence was the photo-negative of this: he proposed Love — rather than self-absorption — as the basis of a meaningful eternity.
A Christian can admire certain aspects of humanism, such as self-reliance, passion for self-development, and insistence on intellectual freedom. He (she) shares these ideals.
Where a Christian believes that humanism falls off the stool, is in its premise that self-absorption can provide contentment in the long term. Interested scholars might investigate King Solomon's answer to this in the Book of Ecclesiastes: "Who can eat, or hasten thereto, more than I?" Solomon that found every answer of life wore thin, over time -- except one.
Love, in the sense that Jesus Christ offered it, is the one commodity that the Christian believes can increase contentment in an open-ended, eternal context.
Humanists scoff. The reader judges.
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The Christian is befuddled by humanists' assumption that he would love to see a hyper-fascist society such as that portrayed in The Handmaid's Tale. It never seems to occur, that for a long time "Christians" were in fact the hugely dominant majority in the United States.
Did George Washington or Abraham Lincoln cast the nation in the horrific terms suffered by Natasha Richardson's Handmaid? Do humanists imagine C.S. Lewis to be a closet bully who would laugh maniacally if he were able to strap Antony Flew onto a torture table?
It's the obligation of any serious rhetoricist to attack the actual positions of his opponent, and the strongest positions of his opponent. Consider carefully: Hollywood's, and the literary world's, relentess caricaturization of Christian ideals persuades nobody in Middle America. The game is up with Joe MainStreet before it begins, because Joe MainStreet knows his pastor. And Joe knows that his pastor has much more in common with the gentle C.S. Lewis than he does with the hyper-fascists cast as the villains in the Ultraviolets of literature.
"His Dark Materials" will affect people’s lives worldwide, driving controversy because of its intent. It perhaps is not the Formalist’s duty to declare the meaning good or evil, but it is within yours and mine. A series like The Dark Materials forms a litmus test for our moral orientation. There is no Switzerland in this culture war.
Respectfully, JeffWashington Wine Regions
There are hundreds of wineries in Washington state, though many of them are tiny artisanal wineries producing limited quantities of hand crafted wines. Here's a list of the major wine producing areas of the state, with a sampling of wineries from each. Keep in mind that some wineries are not open to the public, or have limited tour and tasting schedules, so check the Web site before beginning your private tour— or take a list to your local wine shop.
Seattle—In the western half of the state of Washington, Seattle is a commercial, cultural and technology hub of the Pacific Northwest. Seattle sits on Puget sound, and is surrounded by mountains and water. Although not the Washington capital, Seattle is the largest population of any city in the state. And Seattle has several wineries, many of them tiny but amazing artisan wineries. A few of the Seattle wineries: Cadence Winery, E. B. Foote winery, Fall Line Winery, Owen and Sullivan Winery, Stomani Cellars, Wilridge Winery.
Woodinville—A suburban city about 18 miles NE of Seattle, or thirty minutes by car, with a number of wineries. The larger wineries include Chateau Ste. Michelle, Columbia Winery, Domaine Ste. Michelle, maker of sparkling wines, but there are a number of small boutique and artisanal wineries in the Woodinville/Redmond area.
Yakima Valley—Yakima, with cool weather, and volcanic soil is an agricultral paradise in Eastern Washington. In additional to numerous orchards, there are many wineries, large and small. Prosser- In the eastern half of the Yakima Valley, about three and a half hours from Seattle, Prosser is the home of a number of wineries, including some of the state's oldest. A few of the more easily found vintages include Covey Run Winery, Hogue Cellars, Kiona Vineyards and Winery, and Snoqualmie.
Colombia Gorge—An area that runs along the Columbia River and between Washington and Oregon, three or or four hours from the Seattle area depending on traffic, but quite reasonable from either Portland, Oregon, or Prosser, Washington. There are a number of wineries, large and small, as well as vineyards. Columbia Gorge (an official appellation) Washington wineries include: Columbia Crest and Klickitat Canyon.
If you want to create your own private Washington wine tours, make sure to visit the Washington Wine Commission's site, where you can generate your own tour map.Randy Moss
source: Planetfun
Check the year-by-year receiving TD leaders. Moss had (roughly) enough touchdowns in 2007 to LEAD! ... L-E-A-D the NFL for BOTH 2005 and 2006. Moss didn't just put up two seasons' worth of performance in one year. Moss put up two (2) GREAT seasons' worth of touchdowns -- in one season. Combine Steve Smith's sensational scoring in 2005, with Terrell Owens' superstar performance in 2006? And Randy Moss did both of those things in one year. …………………. Moss isn’t a freak of nature; he is Steve Largent with more athleticism. It is Moss’ concentration and his field vision that make him who he is. His essential attributes are suburban Larry Bird, not inner-city Shawn Kemp. Moss knows where the defenders are, when other WR’s do not, and that is precisely what allows him to go around or over them for the ball. He is not just grabbing for the ball hoping to get lucky; he is picking the ball clean like an NBA guard who flashes his hand to the inside of an opponent’s hand for a steal. Moss hangs on to the leather with one hand when he is being rocked, why? … because he chooses to pay attention to the leather, and he chooses not to pay attention to whether he will get poked in the eye or not. Moss throws no-look laterals because he is aware of where teammates are, earlier than other players do. The incredible leaping ability camoflages Moss’ real talents, which are talents of the mind. We shouldn’t pigeonhole black players as being athletes first when it is just as possible that their work ethic, toughness, and will to win are the keys. It is true that Moss was physically blessed with huge, strong hands. It's also true that Michael Jordan was blessed with very long lower legs. For a long time in the 80’s, people thought Michael Jordan’s essential attribute was his body. It was not. Jordan's essential attribute was a determination to impose his will. That is precisely what you are seeing when Randy Moss wrestles the ball away from two defenders. It's the NFL version of MJ thundering around the corner to dunk over a center. ……………. Personally don’t prep for NFL roto drafts (much) any more, but there is a field-level view that is much MORE important in football than it is in baseball. Now we can understand why Salisbury gets so frustrated with Clayton sometimes. Clayton is a work fanatic though. Gotta love the guy. Glad he’s in the HOF. …………… Rice, Largent, and others were stars well into their 30's. I expect Randy Moss to be a great receiver for the next six years, at least. The Patriots may become the NFL's greatest modern dynasty. ………………… Chuck Knox once said, "when one of theirs beats two of yours, there isn't a thing you can do about it, from a coaching standpoint." :- ) So imagine yourself preparing for Moss and Brady. It's just about as hopeless a situation as you could face from an X's and O's standpoint. ……………. You wonder why GM's in all sports gamble on players with injury and character issues? It's because you can wind up with a Randy Moss by taking a player nobody else would. One hit like that makes up for an awful lot of swings and misses :- ) 2007 was a whale of a fun year to watch sports in Boston. Sometimes a dice roll comes up box cars. Cheers, jemanji