Hiya, hiya, come on down.  Pull up a chair.  Unlax.

Take a load off.  Loosen that tie.  Hell, take it off and throw it away.  Grab a brewski.  Or a Scotch.

Coz U in the Basement now.

See, we not gonna talk about the high and mighty.  Not too much.  Down here, see, we can talk about other stuff.  We gonna talk about stuff that's "beneath" your regular Townhall faire.  Stuff they wouldn't stoop to talking about.  Beneath their dignity.

We not even gonna worry too much bout sin-tax -- oops, I mean, syntax.  "Sin-Tax" is the kind of thing other folk like to put on your hobbies.  We don't do that here.  We're not gonna talk about all the stuff you can't do.  You can do it here.  We won't tell.

So, this is gonna be my first experiment with this "blogging" thingie.  I didn't invite anybody over -- but I ain't dis-inviting anybody neither.  The door is open, wide open.

Right now, for this introductory notice, I don't have much in the way of topic.  So I'll topic in and out as I think of topics.  Without a topic I guess I can kvetch.  (For those of you not "in the know", the word "kvetch" has a similar meaning to "witch" with a "b", and I think you know what I mean, and I don't mean "female dog".  But this way I can say "it" without incurring the wrath of the censorship boards.)

Kvetching

So I can kvetch.  Today I want to kvetch about a lot of stuff.  In particular I want to kvetch about the New and "Improved" Townhall.com website.

Qualitie Asssuranze

Was it so important to unveil the thing on July 4th that they couldn't give it just a little bit more testing?  I mean, COME ON!!  When the HOME page gives you a "404 page not found", that's GOTTA mean SOMEBODY has dropped the ball BIG TIME!

Ok, that's forgivable.  They're still trying to get their act together.  There's no such thing as bug-free software.  All programs have at least one more bug, and can be reduced in size by at least one more instruction, which by induction proves that all programs can eventually be reduced to one single instruction that doesn't work.

Advertising

But those POP-UP ADS! Those POP-UNDER ADS!  NO!!!!!  TOWNHALL, PLEASE, TURN THOSE OFF!!

Ok, I know you gotta make an honest buck.  But don't do it by bugging the snot out of your customers, ok?  Sheesh, that's annoying as all dickens, and believe me, dickens is pretty dammed annoying.  Just ask Charles!

God, you got ads to the left of me, ads to the right of me, ads under me, ads over me -- give it a REST already!

Font Size

All right, you might have noticed -- you can actually READ THIS!  YES!!  Ok, maybe for some of you this is too big.  Too noisy.  Too much like SHOUTING.  Tuff snot.  Go suck eggs.

Because for some of us, we're tired of getting EYESTRAIN trying to read that teeny tiny micro-font that they use for all the commentary.  Grrrr!

Ah hah, now I'm sure some wiseacre will suggest I bump up the font size on my browser.  Well, guess what.  TRY IT why don'tcha?  What happens?  Huh?  NOTHING LINES UP ANYMORE!  The whole thing is DESIGNED and TESTED to be VIEWED at a PARTICULAR SIZE.  Any other size will virtually destroy the entire website.

And it's not just Townhall, it's practically every web-site with textual information.  Then it's the e-mail that everybody sends.  Everything requires an electron microscope to read.

Yah, go ahead, laugh it up whipper-snapper.  God willing and the crik don't rise, you'll be my age one day, and you'll have the same problem.  It's a medical fact -- everybody's vision goes bad as they age.  THEN you'll wish you were on MY side NOW and gotten these punk kid programmers to use a READABLE FONT SIZE.

Browsers

Speaking of pop-up ads, I use Firefox most of the time, instead of Internet Explorer.  I can selectively turn off Javascript on whatever web-site happens to annoy me with pop-ups and crap.  It's a mixed blessing.  Sometimes you need to have the Javascript on the page to do useful things.  Most of the time, tho, they've only got two things they're interested in.  The first one is to dazzle you with a "Wondrous Web Browsing Experience".  (cough! gag! choke!)

In other words, the programmer wants to show off all the wonderful tricks he learned in school yesterday.  Nevermind whether the wonderful tricks do anything useful, they're NEAT-O!!!  "Whooooo, lookit the floating letters!  Ooooohhhh, Aaahhhhhh!"

The other thing they use it for is to display pop-up ads and track your web-surfing habits.   Oooooooh, evil capitalists!!  "BAD capitalist, BAD!  No scooby-snack for you!"

So, in Firefox, I turn all that drek off, except for places I trust, and/or know that I can't get the information I want without it.

But then the problem here is, I CAN'T EDIT MY TOWNHALL BLOG IN FIREFOX!  Grrr!  Grrr!

Don't tell me it's an "ActiveX" thing or something magic in Internet Explorer.  I can do all this wonderful editing stuff in Yahoo in Firefox, so I know it can be done.  It's just the Townhall programmers (have I picked on them enough today?) are TOO LAZY to set it up for Firefox!

Post Topic

If you've read this far, clearly you have nothing worthwhile to do.  Me too!  But one more thing to kvetch about is the "Post Topic".  So where would you put this "article"?  "Budget & Government"??  "Immigration"??  "Tax Relief"??

Hmmmm.  Probably not.

So, I left it in "A Culture of Life", the first one to come up.  That don't fit neither, because I think it means you're s'posed to be against Roe v. Wade.

I expect my topics will wander all over the map, and probably off the map, off being my preference.  I've already got a favorite political topic that's nowhere on the list.  It's not the kind of things Conservatives like to discuss for the most part.  But it's important to our Society, and Conservatives should discuss it more than they do.  So I'll discuss it.

And I won't tell you what it is yet -- I'll tell you after the commercial!

Don't you just hate it when they do that?  Especially on the news radio -- they spend 1 minute telling you the headline summary, 2 minutes telling you what they're going to tell you after the commercial, another minute after the commercial to tell you again (but they still don't tell you), then another 2 minutes to tell you (the same again) that they'll tell you after the next commercial -- and when they finally get around to TELLING you, the WHOLE STORY IS ONLY ONE MINUTE LONG!!

ARRRRRRGH!!!

Wow!  Another kvetch!

Well, it's not about Townhall, so we'll leave it be.

Feh

Well that's enough for now.  Hopefully, a little later on I'll have something a little more coherent to post.  Or not.  We'll see.

But make no mistake.  At no point am I expecting to be a "Journalist" -- I'm not going to catch Dan Rather passing off phoney documents and stuff -- and I'm not going to uphold any sort of "high standards" for anything.

So don't be disappointed if you don't see it.  Coz you won't.

But with any luck at all, we'll have some fun -- or at least I will, screw you, get yer own dammed blog!