Whew! Deadline!

And made it! Or as one of my co-workers put it, "Ship it!". (That's a joke, BTW -- the joke being that whenever we prototype a new product and demonstrate the initial alpha prototype to Marketing, Marketing's inevitable response is, "Ship it!" and we have to break it gently to them that it still needs refinement, a usability study, a beta test period, etc. :-).

Anyhow, my mom is spending her retirement travelling nowdays, and asked me what a good laptop computer would cost her. I told her around $1,000. She was quiet for a moment and then said she'd have to think about that (she and her husband are travelling around the country in a Honda car, staying at relative's houses, so they're not exactly spending lots of money). So a day later she called me back and said, "What if I give you $500 for your current laptop, and you buy a new one?"

Hmm, okay. I've been looking at the 13.3" laptops to make it easier to carry on a train or plain (my current 15.1" won't fully open in a normal airline or train seat, and it's a nuisance typing on a half-opened laptop!), and saw the Apple Macbook. I tried out the keyboard at Fry's Electronics, and it works for me. Apple had a problem with the thing randomly shutting down, but it appears that they found the problem (a sensor wire wearing through and indicating to the software that the CPU was overheating and had to be put to sleep immediately to prevent damage), and have fixed it with a new heat sink redesigned so it doesn't rub that wire. In addition, it runs Unix, so I wouldn't need to dual-boot Linux anymore to run my favorite Unix software.

The other laptop that I'm looking at is the Sony SZ series. It is the only other 13.3" laptop that I've tried out whose keyboard works for me. It has more USB ports, a memory card reader, a PC card slot, and other goodies. But it is also around $400 more expensive than a Macbook. Of course, once I bought a legal version of Windows XP for the Macbook, that price difference would be gone...

So it looks like I'm going to go ahead and get the Macbook. Comments?

-- Badtux the Maybe-Mac Penguin

You lose the war with the helicopters you have, not with the helicopters you want

While the U.S. has a Humvee shortage, the Brits are doing even worse -- they're down to a total of 8 (yes, EIGHT) Chinook helicopters, and are reduced to hiring private helicopters to ferry their soldiers around in Afghanistan. The roads are so bad in Afghanistan, and the terrain so rugged, that it really isn't feasible to transport and supply their troops via truck. It might take all day to make 20 miles by truck. So this is a Big Deal(tm).

What is the American response, when asked whether they have any helicopters to spare? "Dude, we ain't got enough for ourselves, much less you!" is their response.

It makes a penguin wonder just how bad the situation really is. It sounds like the Coalition of the Willing is more the Coalition of the Illing nowdays...

- Badtux the Military Penguin

Crossposted in expanded form at Mockingbird's Medley

Happiness is a warm lap

Somebody said, regarding a prior story, that everything sucks and we need more cat photos to keep our sanity. So here we go: Yes, the world sucks. But the curmudgeonly Mencken allows himself to forget for a few seconds that he hates everyone and everything, thanks to the kindness of a stranger's lap and an ear massage...

- Badtux the Cat-petting Penguin

Where's the party?!

As promised, my review of the "Totino's Party Pizza".

I typically shop for groceries late at night. My feeling is that the time before 9pm is too precious to use for such trivial things.

So I went shopping for the usual -- herring, tuna, noodles, you know the deal -- and they bagged my groceries and I paid for them and they put my groceries into the cart and I pushed the cart to my truck and started taking groceries out and putting them behind the seat (extended cab model). About halfway through, I pick up this bag with five square things in it... hold it, I didn't buy any square things!

So I slid the bag down and... Totino's Party Pizza? WTF? I didn't pick up any Totino's Party Pizza! I looked at my receipt to see whether I'd been charged for these things. Nope. This stuff is so bad that they're giving them away?!

Anyhow, I went home and went to sleep, and a few days later decided to try one of these things. The first warning sign was the nutrition label. Lots of fat but ... not much protein? Huh. So I popped it in the oven and cooked it until it met the requirements for being cooked, then sliced it and served.

Bleh. Just bleh. Utterly tasteless. Just lard, and lard, and lard. Apparently the "crust" of this thing is pure lard. The "pepperoni" is just a sprinkled garnish on top. The "cheese"... I don't think it qualifies to be cheese, maybe "processed cheese-lookin' pseudo-food" qualifies. Bleh bleh bleh bleh bleh.

Lesson: There ain't no party with Totino's, just bleh. Avoid. The other four "pizzas" are now officially dumped in the trash.

Note: If you want a good pizza, any of the Red Baron brands are good (Red Baron owns three different brands, from their "base" Red Baron brand which is pretty good, to their top of the line stone baked stuff sold under the Freschetta name which is darn good). Top with jalapeno of course :-). But avoid this cheap crap like the plague... saving a few pennies over the better brands just ain't worth it.

-- Badtux the Pizza-lovin' Penguin

You lose the war with the Humvees you have, not the Humvees you want

Ma, they've broken the Army!.

Every single Bradley and Humvee not in Iraq or Afghanistan is busted. Every... single... one of them.

I cannot understate the scale of the disaster that this is. First of all, if anybody anywhere else in the world starts making trouble, there's no troops to send there, unless we're going to send light infantry walking on two feet as cannon fodder. We don't have enough troops to use them as cannon fodder. But worse of all is the effect upon training: There isn't any.

One of the thing that has traditionally differentiated the U.S. Army from potential adversaries during the post-Vietnam era has been the professionalism and training of its soldiers. The first Gulf War in 1992-1993 is a perfect example of how well the U.S. Army can function when clicking on all cylinders. Desert Storm was a perfect example of using airpower to immobilize an enemy, then using maneuver and concentration to cut him to pieces. Yes, the U.S. had better tanks than Saddam, but not by that much. What the U.S. had was a huge edge in training and operational capabilities not to mention morale.

Now, morale is in the pits, and there's no equipment to use to train all the gang bangers, autistic kids, and just plain dumb recruits that are being accepted under new lower standards. So even if the recruits were as high a calibre as in the past, the Army's effectiveness as a whole is much reduced over what it was in 1992.

As the war goes on, things are going to get even worse. The Army is caught in a war of attrition in Iraq. But the Army isn't set up for a war of attrition. None (zero) of the Army's major weapons systems are still in production, with the sole exception of the HMMWV, which AM General has the capability make approximately 4500 of per year. 4500 HMMWV's isn't even replacement rate for the ones being destroyed in Iraq. The M1 tank hasn't been manufactured since 1993. Its gas turbine engine has been out of production since 1992. The Bradley hasn't been manufactured since 1994. Because we had enough Bradleys and M1's for Ronald Reagan's 18 division Army, it was felt that we had plenty for any war that we'd ever fight, and thus no need to make more. But that was before George W. Bush sent so many of them to be ground into shards in the sands of Iraq for years at a time.

If this goes on, the U.S. Army stands a good chance of simply disintegrating -- becoming completely ineffective, with military units that lack the skills, training, and equipment to even defend themselves, much less embark upon offensive operations against an enemy. The last time this happened was in 1972, when a drastic military withdrawal from Vietnam occurred because the U.S. Army units there simply had ceased to exist as viable military formations, with recon patrols turning into trips to the local coffee houses to smoke heroin, and Army sergeants and lieutenants being frequent victims of fraggings if they tried to order their men into combat. Only a complete withdrawal and re-organization of the Army succeeded in rebuilding it into a usable military force, but as a result when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan and the Iranians rebelled against the Shah, President Carter had no Army to send even if he'd desired to do so. It took over ten years to rebuild the Army after the disaster of Vietnam... and unfortunately, my suspicion is that it'll take another ten years to rebuild the Army after the disaster of Iraq. Or else we'll simply cease to have a viable Army. Which, I suppose, would make the rest of the world breathe in relief, but is hardly a "good" thing for America and Americans...

-- Badtux the Military Penguin

Confessions of a stoner penguin

One of the interesting things about boomers is how they justify their drug usage. Stuff about "opening the doors of perception" and so forth. In that vein I have a confession to make: I was a high school stoner.

When I was in high school, it was well known that I was a druggie. I had that "stoner stare", people said, and kept asking me for my "connection". Reality was that I didn't even use alcohol. My testosterone-clouded mind had enough problems processing sans interference from other chemicals.

The doors of perception are controlled by one's mind, not by the drugs one uses. He who wishes to perceive, perceives. Drugs have nothing to with it. A willingness to think beyond what one is told to think, a desire to see beyond what one is told to see, a desire to listen beyond what one is told to hear, that is all it takes. And sadly, said willingness and desire is as uncommon today as it was in my youth xx years ago (let us just say that I voted for Jimmy Carter, and leave it at that).

- Badtux the Stoner Penguin

Sunday recipe: Red beans and rice

Sundays are a great day to cook red beans and rice. My boss at the office gave me three fresh habernero peppers out of his garden, so it's time to use them before they go bad. But no, I'm not going to put all three into my red beans and rice, that'd be just plain crazy!

Here's the basic recipe for my version of this simple but delicious dish:

• 1 pound red kidney beans
• roughly one pound of seasoning meat (smoke sausage, andouille sausage, ham, tasso, Spam!, etc.).
• 1 habernero pepper
• 1 tablespoon Tony Chachere's Cajun Seasoning to taste (a teaspoon more or less depending on how salty you want it)
• 1/4th cup Tabasco

You can make it fancier, with fresh garlic and celery and onion and etc. rather than the pre-packaged Cajun seasoning. But it doesn't taste any better that way.

Once you're done cooking the above, you have enough beans for a small army. You then cook some rice and serve over rice. Optionally, you can serve with French bread or cornbread on the side to help stretch it even further.

First thing you do is, on Saturday, put the beans soaking in a big pot of water. Leave them there overnight in the refrigerator to help tenderize them.

On Sunday after you get home from church, drain the beans into a strainer, put 5 cups of water into the pot, bring the pot almost to a boil, then dump in the beans. Bring to a boil, then simmer for a couple of hours. It's important to *not* put the seasoning in at this time, because you need to get the beans tender first, and salt toughens the cell walls. You can go ahead and mince the habernero and put it in at this time, though. It needs to be tenderized too. (note: Use latex gloves while handling the habernero, and carefully rinse the cutting board and knife afterward! Voice of experience here!). Depending upon your tolerance for heat, either discard the seeds, or put them into the pot with the rest of the pepper. (I recommend discarding them unless you are hard-core).

After a couple of hours the beans and habernero should be pretty much tenderized. Put in the meat and other (non-habernero) seasonings, put in enough *HOT* water (bring it to a boil in a teakettle on another burner) to cover the beans, and simmer for another couple of hours.

Cook some rice, cook some cornbread if you want the Prairie Cajun version vs. the Swamp Cajun version (the Prairie Cajuns used cornbread, the Swamp Cajuns used French bread) or slice your French bread, then serve.

Simple, filling, cheap, will feed an army. You'll have to provide the army though.

-- Badtux the Recipe Penguin

Cough cough cough... just finished cutting up the habernero. Had me coughing, eyes running, etc. even though it was just one habernero. My suggestion: Unless you're hard-core, leave out the habernero, and if you ARE hard-core, just put half the habernero -- no seeds -- into your chile or red beans or what have you. That stuff is *HOT*!!!!!

Afterward #2: Yep, half the habernero, no seeds, was *PLENTY* of high-register hot. Complemented the low-register heat of the Tabasco perfectly. This recipe, simple as it is, is *GOOD*, I just finished making a pig err fatter penguin out of myself!

The problem with democracy

By and large, we do not have democracy in America. When Benjamin Franklin, upon leaving the Constitutional Convention in Philidelphia, was asked what sort of government had been created there, ole' Ben replied, "A republic, if you can keep it." And for that, we can be thankful. If you think the current republic misrules this nation, democracy would have been a thousand times worse.

To illustrate the fundamental problem with democracy, here is exibit one: The absentee ballot I just received for the upcoming California elections. It is two legal-sized pages (that's the *BIG* pages, roughly the size of a laptop computer), front and back, in tiny print. One page is candidates. The other page is ballot initiatives.

Let's look first at the candidates pages. Now, I'd like to think that I'm a fairly well-informed person. I have no problem with figuring out which of the gubernatorial candidates I want to vote for (the Governator or Phil Who? Hmmm). Same deal with the local mayor's race and my local city council race. But then there's all these other wierd offices on the ballot. Fire district? Community college district? District judges? Appeals court judges? Board of Effin' Equalization?!!!! Hey look, what I need is someone with views compatible with mine who has a full-time staff that does nothing but look at all these little local offices and figure out who the best person is. I don't have a staff to do that. Hmm, but I know some people who do... they're called "the governor" and "the mayor". Whoa, what an idea, have my elected officials actually WORK FOR ME in finding the best people for these low-level staff positions, what a revolutionary (pun intended) notion!

Same deal comes to the ballot initiatives. Two pages of small print?! Look, there's a couple of high profile initiatives that have been properly dissected by the local press, and I know what to do there. But past those, it's all a blur. I need someone with views compatible mine who has a full-time staff that does nothing but look at all this small print and figure out which ones are a good idea and which are not. I could call this person, hmm... oh, I know! I could call him CONGRESSMAN!

Sans such a person with a full time staff, what am I to do? I know what most people do. They just vote according to who has the best ads on television, or what the guy at the water cooler said, or whatever. But that's no way to hire the best people to run the local community college, and that's no way to make sure that the laws being passed aren't going to have the sort of dire consequences that Proposition 13 (which destroyed California's educational system) had. What I want is a person (call him governor, mayor, or congressman) who has views similar to mine who has a full-time staff to look at these things and thus can make more informed decisions than I can. I'm just one man, and I have a full-time job and I don't have the resources to hire staffers and lawyers to look at all this legal gibberish. How the hell, without having a full-time staff and lawyers on retainer to decipher all this legal gibberish, am I supposed to be able to tell which of these five competing proposals for improving the schools is the best one to vote for?!

And that, my friends, is why the Constitutional Convention in Philidelphia created a Republic, not a Democracy. Democracy means that governing decisions are made by people who do not, and cannot, have enough information to make informed decisions, and the inevitable result of democracy is bad laws and bad governance. Of course, it can be said that the same is true of our current "representative democracy" (republic), but as we might put it in computer science land, that's a problem of implementation, not a problem of fundamental algorithm or structure. Implementation can be fixed. Democracy, on the other hand, can't.

-Badtux the un-democratic Penguin

Regrets

A sweet father-daughter story over at Minstrel Boy's place. Recommended.

One of the major regrets of my life is that, as a penguin in a time of chimpanzees, I will never have similar stories to tell. I never was any good at playing those chimpanzee mating games, much less 4x worth of them. Ah well, I am getting whiney and maudlin and that is never good for a penguin. Which brings me to the subject of guilty pleasures.

For some reason, Death Cab for Cutie's album Plans is playing on my CD player. If every shallow "high school" show had a theme album, this would be it. One reviewer said about it, "It is an album-length version of 'The OC'". It is all about chimpanzee mating games, and is part of a society-wide indoctrination of our youth in how those chimpanzee mating games are supposed to work (it is rather hilarious comparing how it works in India and China when talking with my co-workers with how it works here, it becomes utterly clear that all this "true love" stuff that we talk about here is an entirely social construct). Yet it has good poppy hooks in many of the songs, and the vocalist has a spare style that manages to make even the most banal of lyrics seem fraught with meaning.

Next up: A review of Totino's Party Pizzas. It ain't pretty...

-- Badtux the Maudlin Penguin

Two cats

Okay, so since my last attempt at cat blogging was a turkey (literally!)... Mencken and the Mighty Fang hanging out in the hallway, wondering why their penguin is flashing lights at them.

A dark photo with a black cat in it is perfect for Friday the 13th, doncha think?!

-- Badtux the Cat-owned Penguin

Note: Blogger's image posting software is bloggered again, thus why my photos are so, uhm, bloggered. Blogger bloggered? What else is new?!

Republican culture of corruption

Rep. Bob Ney pleads guilty to accepting bribes from Abramoff.

Republicans bring honor to our nation's government. The honor of the Bonanno Family, perhaps.

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

Funny looking cat

Hey, how did THIS picture get onto my Friday cat-blogging post?!

-- Badtux the Confused Penguin

News of my annual migration has been greatly exaggerated

Some folks apparently think I'm about to leave on my annual migration. Silly people. Penguins don't migrate in October!

And yes, I do carry my PDA cell phone with me, but it's generally not that useful for blogging, especially when I'm a hundred miles from the nearest cell tower ;-).

Badtux the "That is All" Penguin

Germans still just following orders

Right into a sandpile, in this case, when a driver followed the orders of his GPS system right past "Construction ahead" signs...

- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

Preparing for my migration

I am preparing for my annual migration. I am working on getting my motorcycle ready for the trip, including new tires and a new clutch cable (the old one is looking a bit shabby), and getting my camping gear all straightened out for camping along the way. While doing so, I came across this stuff:

Yes, fold-flat plastic origami tableware by Orikaso.

Previously I've been carrying paper plates. But they were rather inadequate for a number of reasons, one being that they weren't re-usable (easy to clean tho -- just toss them on the campfire :-). I just went to REI and got the three-piece set. The whole set, flattened, is smaller than the small bundle of paper plates that I carried last year during my migration -- and doesn't soak through, and isn't floppy like those paper plates.

Man, this is going to be the bestest migration ever! I'll be able to create culinary masterpieces on the road without having to carry bulky aluminum tableware that was easily bent and hard to fit into my motorcycle's paniers, woohoo!

-- Badtux the Migratory Penguin

Uhm, you didn't know that us modern high-tech birds ride motorcycles to migrate, rather than do it the old-fashioned way?!

I am *SO* going to Hell...

because I blog.

Oh well. I'll get to meet my hero, Mark Twain, there, as well as all my other fellow bloggers, so I guess that's not a *bad* thing. Boy, I sure am glad to find that you can bugger teenage boys, kill 600,000 Iraqis and 3,000 Americans, cheat on your wife, steal money from poor people, and otherwise behave as total savages and still go to Heaven, but if you blog, well, uhn-uhn, you're going to that other place!

Well fine. The class of people you meet down there has to be better than the child molesting, wife cheating, money-grubbing Republicans who apparently are going "up there". It'll be great meeting Groucho Marx and Mark Twain in person....

-- Badtux the Vacation-planning Penguin

Props to Ole' Blue, Mimus Pauley, et. al. for getting there first...

Mmmm... coffee!

The European contingent at the office finally brow-beat Operations into buying real fresh-roasted coffee beans to their specification and a coffee grinder to turn it into grounds for the coffee maker.

Good coffee. GOOOOOD coffee. I'm not sure whether I'm going to go thru the trouble of switching from my favorite coffee at home, it tastes better than Community Dark Roast but not *that* much better, but it is a 10000% improvement at work.

Question: What gift should I give to the European contingent for getting us some decent coffee? I thought about cooking them some Cajun food, but their coffee is the gift that keeps giving every morning, and a one-shot deal of red beans and rice or gumbo just isn't the same. New coffee mugs? Naw, we already got too many free ones around here. I'm stumped. Anybody?

-- Badtux the Coffee-lovin' Penguin

Wal-Mart knows their customers

In my inbox (due to me buying tires from there): An offer for a five-CD set of Garth Brooks' greatest hits.

Yee-haw! Hey, y'all think they got thems a sale on them thare wife beaters too?!

- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

Wishful thinking

Bush has announced that he's unwilling to live with a nuclear North Korea.

I'll throw in $5 towards the funeral expenses. Anybody else?

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

The Hermit Kingdom

One reason why Preznit Coo Coo Bananas hasn't managed to accomplish anything with his counterpart in North Korea is simple: The Koreans are nuts.

This is hardly a new thing. In 1871, modern American warships were sent to Korea in order to ask about the fate of an American merchant vessel, the General Sherman, and to query them about their bad habit of boiling alive missionaries and sailers who washed up upon the shores of the Hermit Kingdom. The Koreans refused to talk. They instead fired upon the American vessels using 15th century technology -- brass cannons and matchlock muskets, all of which of course just bounced off of modern armored warships. The American vessels pounded the Korean fortresses into rubble with their modern rifled artillery, and sent in the Marines. The first fort the Marines entered was empty -- the crazy Koreans had decided they wanted nothing to do with the Americans, and left. So the Marines tossed all its brass cannons into the mud flats and moved on. The second fort the Marines entered was empty. Same deal. The next Korean fort, however, had several hundred Korean soldiers in it, armed with those 15th century matchlocks. The Marines, armed with modern repeating rifles and machine guns and artillery, slaughtered them, of course, with minimal loss of life on the part of the Marines -- less than a dozen killed or injured. Then they looked upriver at the next fort... and the next fort... and realized they'd be years hopping from fort to fort slaughtering Koreans but never really accomplishing anything because a few hundred Marines weren't enough to occupy the whole country. So they went back to the ship, tried talking to the Koreans again, the Koreans continued to refuse to talk, and eventually they gave up and left.

To this day, the Koreans -- North and South both -- celebrate this as a glorious military victory.

That's crazy, you say? Well, how about this. In 1920, Korean guerillas fighting the Japanese takeover of Korea raided across the Yalu River from China and occupied several Korean villages. the Japanese, of course, didn't take this sitting down -- they'd already slaughtered a million or more Koreans since taking over in 1910. So they sent three divisions to drive these guerillas out of the border towns and chase them down and kill them all. The Korean guerrillas saw the Japanese coming, and ran like hell, and didn't quit running until they'd made it all the way to the Soviet Union, where Lenin had just died and the new Soviet leader, Stalin, slapped them all into gulags. The Japanese lost a total of a dozen soldiers in this entire campaign. To this day, the Koreans -- North and South both -- celebrate this as a glorious military victory.

Crazy enough for you?!

There isn't anything we can do to North Korea that's going to make them behave rationally. You can't threaten Koreans. They simply won't care. You can't bomb their facilities. They will beam with pride at being so singled out. You can't kill bunches of their soldiers. They'll celebrate that as a glorious victory. In the end, the joint Chinese and South Korean policy of bribing them to not do something crazy is probably the only reasonable course there is.

And now I hear you say, "but what about South Korea?" Yeah, what about them? They're nuts too. They're just nuts in a different way. The South Koreans, in reaction to first the Japanese occupation then the North Korean invasion, have gone major coo-coo-bananas religious nuts.

We all know about the Rev. Sun Myung Moon and his Moonies, of course. What is less known here in the West, except amongst evangelical circles, is that the South Koreans have gone Christian in a big way. And I'm not talking tame Methodist or Presbyterian either. I'm talking full blown all-out babble-in-tongues Pentecostal and Assemblies of God snake-handlin' you name it coo coo. South Korea, a nation with 1/10th the population of the United States, now sends more Christian missionaries to the Third World than the United States does, despite the many fundamentalist congregations within the United States such as the Jehovah's Witnesses and Mormons where missionary work is a fundamental part of their faith.

The same applies to all their modern technology. They've just gone nuts there, working themselves to the bone to become the world's #1 builder of ships, the world's #1 builder of RAM chips for computers, the world's #2 builder of consumer electronics... the list goes on and on. T

Then there's their military. South Korea's regular military, at 600,000 strong, may not have the numbers of the North Korean military. But if South Korea invaded North Korea, they'd whip North Korea's butt. Their military has all the latest and greatest military technology. Their Hyundai tanks aren't quite as good as the M1A1 but are much superior to the antiquated Soviet-era tanks possessed by the North Koreans. Their Air Force is armed with F-15's and F-16's equipped with all the latest electronic warfare gizmos that Samsung can fit them with, and can shoot down North Korea's antiquated Mig-21 fighters at ranges where the North Korean fighters wouldn't even be able to detect the South Korean jets on their radars. South Korea has five million military reservists that are better trained than North Korea's entire "million man Army". South Korea is six weeks from an atomic bomb, if they decide they want one -- they possess both uranium enrichment capability and several Canadian CANDU plutonium production reactors (currently being used to produce electricity instead, but they could easily be put into use creating plutonium), and it recently came out that South Korea even has the machinery to extract Pu-239 from fuel rods, although it's all currently in storage. These guys are far more potent in reality than North Korea could ever hope to be.

Frankly, this is not the kind of mess that anybody needs to be rushing into precipitously. If you're dealing with a couple of crazies, the last thing you want to do is take any kind of hasty action. I know from experience dealing with mentally ill youngsters that you want to de-escalate, not escalate. Nine times out of ten, you can talk the crazy kid down and get him to do something reasonable. The 10th time, of course, he goes nuts and you have to call for the "here squad" to restrain him and haul him to isolation (i.e., sanctions, if we're talking in international terms), but (shrug). Why make trouble when you don't have to?

Of course, what with President Coo Coo Bananas being crazy and all, it's not likely that the sane course of action is going to take place regarding North Korea. Having President Coo Coo Bananas in charge is like looking at a dorm room with a couple of crazy kids in it, and seeing that one of them is misbehaving, and deciding to send in the craziest kid on the floor to go in and break it up. No good can come of that. Alas.

-- Badtux the "I know crazy" Penguin