Plans to overthrow Canadian government - pending funding, popular support, charisma.

Bring the Band

An old friend of my wife and I has a husband.  He plays in one of the MANY adult hockey leagues here in Minnesota.  Despite having an insane number of ice rinks in the area ice time is hard to come by so these guys often play on ice an hour drive away late at night on weekday nights and such for games.  It is a dedicated crowd.  Often they play with maybe one or two family members in the stands.  The friend is a high school band teacher.   She also organizes the pep band that plays for high school sports events.  You know where this story is going.

As a surprise for his birthday the wife asked if some of her students wanted to play for the game.  Strictly a voluntary activity, does not impact grade, you have to go home by 10pm (it was a Sunday night).  The kids thought it was a great idea.  She also called the other team captain and the refs to make sure they'd be cool with the band, but also told them not to tell the birthday boy.  The game was at the Minnesota state fairgrounds coliseum (apparently it was recently renovated and renamed but i forget the name now).  We met the wife before the game but after the unsuspecting husband went into the locker room.  We setup a table with cake and drinks for the folks who were coming and such.  Upon prepping before the game while on the ice you could tell the husband noticed there were a few more people in the crowd but as far as we know he didn't know what was up until the game started and the band began playing.

The kids played on and off with various traditional pep songs, "the hey song" (the real name is stupid) was played.  During the first intermission one of the opposing team skated over and asked

Do you guys always have a band when you play?  That's awesome!

Post game party involved eating cake, chatting with folks, while casually watching the next game.  a good time was had by all.

This Old House

We had a door added between the master bedroom and master bath (i'd rather not share some of that stuff with my sleeping wife and visa versa).  I swear the guy putting the door in is Richard Farnsworth.   Dude looks just like him.  No not just like him  JUST LIKE HIM.

Video Games: Dear Gamefly

Don't say a game has a high availability when I send a numerous games back and you never send me the high availablity game(s) despite them being at the top of my queue.

Video Games: John Woo Presents Stranglehold

I've been playing some John Woo Presents Stranglehold.  It's an alright game.  It's your standard third person shooter with The Bullet Time system from the Max Payne games tossed in it.  I guess John Woo Presents Stranglehold calls it something other than bullet time but it matters so little I forget what they call it.  Ok I remember now.  The main character is named Tequila and they call it Tequila Time, but really it is bullet time.  The rest of the story is ... well it doesn't matter because the game is basically a lot like Max Payne, but the story isn't Max Payne, so who cares about the story.

The shooting is satisfying and that is all that matters.  In short most everything you do is in bullet time.  You have a lot of it to use and unless you're insane you really can't run out.   They have a style system where you get stars for doing cool moves running up rails, shooting while diving and etc.   They even tossed in their own gameplay interpretation of those classic movie scenes where multiple people meet up with multiple weapons pointed at each other's heads in various directions.  Basically when the encounter occurs you face off in slow motion from a FPS point of view.  You then aim with one analog stick and dodge bullets shot at your head with the other analog stick.  If you don't kill the dude in time you then just move on to the next guy in the face off and when the face off is over (provided you dodge bullets) anyone you didn't kill is right there shooting at you.  It is still survivable if you don't kill everyone but it's fairly satisfying if you do.

Anyway it is a SOLID rental.  The number of opponents can at times feel more like the game is trying to stretch what is already said to be a short game (I haven't finished), but hey it is Max Payne action and . . .

Now if only there would be a Max Payne 3...  mmmmm

Comcast

I have two LCD HDTVs in the home.  I would like to know what cable packages are available to me and what HD channels those packages offer.  After no less than five calls and dozens of visits to Comcast's website.  I STILL DO NOT KNOW!

I could recount the phone conversations but oh it is too frustrating and painful to do.  Needless the people on the phone DO NOT KNOW anything.  Better yet if they don't know they don't say so, they just avoid the question by offering a different package.  I want to give Comcast more money (just not all of it) and STILL I can't get that done.  Argh.  The most surprising part of all this is that I'm bombarded with Comcast advertising and flyers that tout Comcast's HD linup but you get NO info from their website about what channels they offer in HD and if you want HD packages apparently you have to use an HD receiver box that costs extra.   Let me get this straight.  I can get some HD OVER THE AIR, so why on earth do I need a special HD box for getting it over coax?


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Sorry about this borked link that extend below, adding an img messed up the auto formatting.  It should be much smaller.

Minnesota Politics: Veto Overturned

Here in MN we haven't raised the gas tax that goes to transportation in 20 years (well I only arrived here in 1999 so it's a generic "we").  We also lowered license tab fees a while back.  In the meantime the state has been bonding for various construction and transportation work right and left.   Clearly this is going to work out for the foreseeable future as the state continues to grow.  [I mean our bridges are fine... (in fairness the NTSB says that was a design failure, and the feds picked up most of the new bridge bill).

Better yet the current Governor put his lieutenant Governor in charge of the Minnesota Department of Transportation the last few years despite having no experience in such a job (worked for FEMA...).  Honestly I suspect this was because he wasn't sure anyone else could do that job and not desperately demand more dedicated funding.  It has worked out great as one of the larger bridge projects (not 35W) has continually faced delays and actually turns out to have had a nice combo of shoddy workmanship and design flaw of its own and essentially was canceled and went back to bidding to fix the project.  The company that created the mess in the first place .... won the contract to fix their own mess.  Just as icing on the cake they won despite a currently legal battle between MN DoT and that company over recovering funds from the first attempt at the project.  Wow.

Anyway so the head of MN DoT has spent the last few years double talking about how she doesn't want to talk about where increased funding should come from or how much she may or may not need or really much of anything.  This lets the lieutenant governor and governor point her finger at anyone looking to increase the funds for MN DoT and say "You silly big government fools, we don't even want your money!" while her staff wonder if they might gather enough discarded lincoln logs from landfills to save some money on construction material costs.  In the meantime a third party review ordered by the legislature of MN DoT noted that the status of infrastructure and related funding was quote "grim at best".  Grim at best, ugh.

So after a few years of blockage from Republicans and vetos from the current governor only the 14th veto override in MN legislature history since the 1930's occurred on Monday.  This will raise the tab fees, gas tax, and toss out a few other taxes just for the metro area to provide them some special transportation funds, and of course some gas taxes to cover ages of rampant bonding.  It has been so long in coming that the bill even gathered support from the MN Chamber of Commerce and these dudes cry like they're all going to go out of business even at the hint of anything less than a total tax free corporate run state.  When those guys say "yeah I thing we need to raise taxes" you know something is up.

Leading up to this the rhetoric wasn't particularly vicious and surprisingly confidant on both sides.  The Governor and his fellow Republicans indicated that the bill would never survive the veto asked they hurry up and pass it while the Democrats noted they were confidant that after said veto they could override it.  Neither side did the usual childish flailing about as if they sensed they would loose.  Bill was passed first without enough votes, Governor vetoed quickly and the bill was up again for voting in short order.  In the end six republicans broke ranks in the house (democrats 0wn the senate here) and blamo bill passed.  FINALLY.

The Governor and Republicans seemed a bit surprised and the Governor went on his usual taxes crying spree recently claiming there would be some sort of "tax revolt".  Republicans not content to just cry over split milk have recently put the smack down on their Republican buddies who didn't vote with the party.  Niiiiiice.

I miss the days when I was at least under the illusion that my local Republican legislators were fiscally responsible.  I don't know if it was ever more or less true but damn.  You gotta pay for this #### somehow.  You can't borrow forever.  It isn't a difficult concept.  I hate to sit there every dang state election and have to pound one party out with my little pencil but with stuff like this what am I supposed to do?

Side note: I think the current governor's fervor over the tax increase is partly energy from being upset that he's spent all his time campaigning for McCain recently only to come to the most obvious of conclusions that he doesn't provide anything to McCain in terms of value as a V.P. other than being an anti tax drone.