Inaugural celebrations from Washington, DC to St. Paul, MN

President Obama gets out of limo - screenshot
Originally uploaded by Kathlyn Stone

As President Obama stepped out of his limo to walk for part of his symbolic approach to the White House via Pennsylvania Avenue on Jan. 20, hundreds of elementary school students at St. Paul's Expo for Excellence Magnet Elementary were concluding their own inaugural march along Randolph Street and Snelling Avenue.

View slideshow of some happy children and adults celebrating the day.

Come One, Come All. Get Your New People Parts

by Sandy Sand

For more than forty years physicians have been replacing worn out knee and hip joints.

Internal organs are replaced even though they are riddled with rejection problems.

External flaws, the ravages of aging and excess fat have people lining up at the body sculptors’ workshops.

According to CNN

http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/tech/2009/01/03/connery.uk.bionic.knuckles.cnn
Scientists have perfected bionic knuckles made of space age materials that prevent rejection by the body to give new life to old hands that are ravaged by arthritis.

All this body part replacement needs some reconsideration.

I rather like to compare our bodies to automobiles.

Put a new engine in an old car and it puts stress on the older un-replaced parts and they conk out.

Give a person a new efficient pump and it will put stress on weak old kidneys that can’t keep up.

Therefore, once our bones have finished growing and we’re fully matured adults (yeah, like that ever happens to our brains, anyway).

Brain transplants, anyone? But then you wouldn’t be you; you’d be him or her.

We should have all our body parts replaced at the same time before they all conk out like old auto parts.

Why put up with the crummy ones nature doled out to us?

Being Dead Broke is a Grave Situation

by Sandy Sand

It’s no secret that the economy is bad for most of us, while others have fallen into a black hole of debt.

Where yesterday they could pay their bills; today they can’t, even after selling off everything of value that they possess.

That is…until they remember that long forgotten, dusty deed to a burial plot.
From ashes to ashes; from dust to dust, and for some the dust on the deed is a safety net to buy them a little time to recover from their economic ills.

So it is in Southern California where the price of land has always sold at an inflated premium.

More and more people in California, as well as across the country, are selling off their burial plots make ends meet or to keep their heads above drowning in indebtedness.

Like all over-inflated acreage, burial plots in Southern California before the economic downturn were selling for between $3,000 and $21,000, with a mean price of $12,000.

The average plot is 6-feet by 3-feet or 18-square-feet, and there are 43,560 square feet to an acre, which if laid side by side and not allowing for walk-around room, means every acre could accommodate 2,420 plots.

If the plots were to sell for the average price of $12,000, each acre would be worth $2,904,000.

In any man’s pocketbook that is a lot of money.

In a bit of irony, for one Los Angeles woman, who found herself suddenly evicted with the distinct possibility of being forced to live on the street, her grave situation was her lifeline, but at a heavy cost in the deflated value of all real estate.

According to Baron Chu, owner of Plot brokers, plots are selling for 25-cents on the dollar.

The burial plot she owned was originally purchased for $6,800, which she sold for a paltry $500.

“ But,” Chu said, “it allowed her to move into a hotel for a month where she can live and look for work. It kept her out of Skid Row."

There was no follow-up in the Daily News story, so there is no way of knowing if a month and $500 was enough time and money to allow her to dig her way out of her financial mess.

For her sake, and the thousands of Americans like her, who managed to be productive citizens up to now…let us hope so.

Source: http://www.dailynews.com/news/ci_11364444

OMG, How Could I Live Without My MTV?

by Sandy Sand

OMG, How Could I Live Without My MTV?

Very well, thank you very much even if Time Warner and Viacom reached a temporary agreement.

Viacom and Time Warner reached a temporary settlement that will keep Dora Exploring, Sponge Bob doing whatever he does, Jon Steward and Steven Colbert punching the pols.

Most of the 17 channels Viacom was threatening to pull from Time Warner Cable I never heard of, and like MTV, would be clicked right past even if I did know of them.

In what sounds more like an attempt at extortion by Viacom in these tougher that tough economic times, Viacom used the threat of pulling the channels if Time Warner didn’t come up with and additional four percent for each channel they subscribe to.

Time Warner estimated the cost to them would be an additional $39 million a year.

Home entertainment is the cheapest thing we have to temporarily escape from the pressing problems of keeping home and hearth together, and worrying from day to day if our jobs will be there tomorrow.

This is the time for Viacom to rein in the greed, practice good public relations and NOT raise their fees.

Source: http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-viacom1-2009jan01,0,519565.story

California Astronomer to Leap Into 2009 at 3:59:60 p.m. PST

by Sandy Sand

This might be the last time to celebrate the adjustment of atomic clocks if scientists, who think it’s a waste of time get their way.

The quiet high desert town of Valencia in Southern California won’t be so quiet around the home of Skip Newhall this afternoon.

Seventy-year-old retired astronomer Newhall plans to celebrate with a number of friends to equal his age when the clock strikes it’s 60th second at 4 p.m. PST, which is midnight Greenwich Mean Time.

"We are going to have some fun with it," Newhall said while pictured (in the Daily News) sitting next to four digital clocks in his home that will display the “leap second” when it happens, but don’t blink.

The purpose of the leap second is to adjust timekeeping to be in sync with the Earth’s rotation which varies with tidal friction and lunar gravitational pull.

This is the 24th time since atomic clocks have been adjusted since the practice began in December 1972.

A time-tracker since childhood, and fearing that this might be the last time the adjustment takes place, because the scientific community is divided on whether it’s a waste of time or not, Newhall plans to make it the best Leap of Time party ever.

Source: http://www.dailynews.com/news/ci_11340442

Armageddon: How to Know When to Bend Over and Kiss Your Derriere Good-bye

by Sandy Sand

Ya gotta love end of days speculation; it’s safe and so much more fun than the really serious stuff that’s going on.

It was “off with their heads” in the bad ol’ days in China for the emperor’s weather predictors when they were wrong. Drastic, but fitting wun’t ya say?
We could try the same thing with the predictors of Armageddon or end times, who are always wrong, and either really believe what they’re saying or they’re fabulous scam artists.

After reading many of Tim Cerantola’s postings on opednews.com about this subject, which seems to be one his favorites from which he draws many of his humorous, if not down right funny commentaries.

I’m pretty agnostic on end days theories, except that one day it all will end on Earth -- like in about 7.5 billion years, give or take a bill -- because everything in the universe has life cycles.

Given my end of time druthers, I vote for a comet hitting the Earth, but my head better be its target, because I don’t want to be around for the aftermath of the Yellowstone caldera blowing up; Kevin Costner’s world of water; or the desperately miserable world of Mad Max.

It’s going to be difficult enough to cope with California’s long overdue “big one” if it happens in my lifetime, no matter how many earthquake preparedness kits I have -- including one for the mutt.

Voila!

I figured out how we’ll know when the end of days are here so we can do the “kiss our butts good-bye” thing.

It’s really so simple and we don’t have to rely on bible predictions, the impossible, riddle-ridden quatrains of Nostradamus, the Mayans, the dreamy enlightenments of Edgar Cayce, or any other self-professed prognosticator.

Surprisingly, the answer to this quandary of when the world will end was supplied by none other than the people at the Discovery channels, and they don’t even know what a valuable service they did, because my theory wasn’t mentioned in any of last weekend’s shows when they devoted a couple of days to UFO and USO (Unidentified Submerged Objects) sightings.

The answer lies deep within the beings who inhabit the depths of our oceans and lakes.

G‘head, laff

But this is one mysterious sightings I can sink my cynical teeth into.
For millennia people have been reporting seeing mysterious lights and ships diving in and out of the depths.

Those kooks include Christopher Columbus, who documented several days worth of sightings in his ship’s log, and the Canadian Navy, which tracked a USO for a couple of days until it finally disappeared.

Assuming that USOs exist and have been visiting or living in our deep seas for ages, I figure the beings who are flying them are pretty smart.

Smart enough to avoid real, trackable detection, pretty much avoiding the paparazzi and are definitely savvy enough to not have been caught, because they know damn well what will happen if they are caught by Earthling idjuts.

They’ll be killed and dissected. Heaven forbid we should try to make nice and maybe learn something from them.

For all we know they were here long before us, and if they really exist, so far their intentions appear to be benign, because we can’t pin any mischief on them.
Well maybe the pyramids, the mysterious art work high in Peruvian Andes that can only be seen from the air, or the mysterious heavy-weight statues on that far off island in (I think) the Pacific.

Their existence could explain a lot.

Also, their avoidance of inter-action with us it another sign of their highly developed intelligence.

I’m mean, if you were a space alien, would you really want to bring one of us home to meet the parents?

Written in man-made stars

Here’s how we figure out the exact end days date.

In addition to the hundreds of satellites we have circling the planet along with all the space junk that’s destined to fall on our heads someday, we form a web of spy satellites to do nothing but monitor the oceans and lakes.

When we see the hundreds of USOs leave the safety of the watery depths for universal points unknown, we’ll know it’s not safe to stay here, and we should duck, run for cover and kiss our asses bye-bye.

For the fun of it: http://www.opednews.com/articles/The-End-of-the-World-Quiz-by-Tim-Cerantola-081227-567.html

Obama to Use Lincoln’s Bible for Swearing In: It’s Not the Book That’s Important, It’s the Oath

by Sandy Sand

The oath of office isn’t about the book it’s sworn on; it’s about upholding the Constitution of the United States of America -- the document that has made us unique from every other country in the world.

It’s an irony that a Democrat is the first to use Lincoln’s bible since Lincoln.
One would think that a Republican president would have used it long ago.

After all, they're the ones who love to boast of being of the Party of Lincoln, who remains our greatest president to date, and there's nothing Lincolnesque about today's Republican party.

Frankly, I don’t care if Obama takes the oath of office on a bible, a dictionary or Dr. Suess.

If a book has to be used to take the oath of office, I’d prefer that it be a dictionary; it has all the Bible words in it.

It’s not the book the oath is sworn on that’s important; it’s the sacred and solemn swearing to uphold, preserve and protect the Constitution.

George Bush and Dick Cheney could have taken their oaths of office by swearing on a library filled with nothing but bibles, and it would not have meant a damn thing.

Their swearing to uphold the Constitution was a criminal lie; they did everything in their power to subvert the Constitution and all the laws that protect us.

The might as well have cut it up into little squares and used it for toilet paper, because they turned it into nearly meaningless crap.

Rather than using bibles for the swearing in, future presidents should put their hands directly on the U.S. Constitution and swear to protect and preserve it.

That is what the oath of office is all about.

Source: http://www.dailynews.com/news/ci_11298938