Socialist or…

I love this cartoon that my brother sent me because I’m so sick of the allegations against Obama that he’s advocating Socialist policies (i.e. redistribution of wealth). What the hell is Medicare? I pay money into it every paycheck but all that money goes to other people; that’s but one example of redistribution of wealth in this country that you don’t hear Republicans complaining about.

Tom the Dancing Bug

Tom the Dancing Bug

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Sara’s Back

I can’t believe how busy we’ve been since Saratoga came home three weeks ago; so busy I forgot to post here. She doesn’t have full use of her back legs yet but with the 3x/day physical therapy that we’re doing with her she’s improving just a little almost every day. She can already hold her weight on her back legs for several seconds which is huge considering she barely had any feeling, let alone muscle control or tone in her back legs when she first came home.

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Talesworth Arena flash game

I found this Flash-based lite RPG/combat game through my favorite geek clothing vendor J!nx today and it’s quite fun considering the small amount of effort needed. Try out Talesworth Arena and you might like it. Using that link will add my user as a friend on Kongregate (the host site) but MrJinx is the account for the game’s creator.

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Our sweet Saratoga is in the hospital

Our sweet little Saratoga (who is only about five years old) has been in the hospital for five days now with a spinal cord injury. She had premature calcification of her backbone and something caused multiple discs to herniate and damage the spinal cord. The news was grim and we ended up driving an hour away to get an MRI the second day and the results from that were so bad that the next day we decided that the kindest thing for her would be to let her go to a better place. She had no feeling in her back legs and no bladder or bowel control.

We went to say good-bye yesterday and it turns out that we missed a phone message from the surgeon saying that she had improved dramatically since we had last talked. She had regained her deep pain sensation in her back legs which we were told was a night & day improvement so she actually stands a chance of walking normally again. She will stay at the hospital a few more days for observation so they can (hopefully) watch her get better day by day.

We miss you Sara and need you to come home soon. Keep fighting girl, you can do it.

Saratoga at the beach (including a sandy face)

Saratoga at the beach (including a sandy face)

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New Owen & Beru action figures?

Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru (after)

Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru (after)

Somebody at work forwarded a link to this picture of the new Uncle Owen & Aunt Beru Lars action figures from Star Wars Episode IV. I should have guessed what it would be from the names of the characters. This would be an easy one to make at home: scan an existing card, tweak the text & picture and add a couple of melted figures of your choice. The original image is from smugbaldy.com by the way.

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Texas: before and after Ike

I got this link on a technical e-mail list where several of the members are located in the Houston area where hurricane Ike went through recently. These are before & after aerial photographs of the Bolivar Peninsula area of Texas. Pretty dramatic although not as bad as the before & after photos of the big typhoon a few years ago (I think that one was in the Indian Ocean).

http://coastal.er.usgs.gov/hurricanes/ike/photo-comparisons/bolivar.html

Boliver Peninsula, TX before and after hurricane Ike

Boliver Peninsula, TX before and after hurricane Ike

 

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Poor dog, this is just wrong

I understand that if your dog has injured feet or is a resuce dog working on hostile terrain that you’d put boots on for protection (the dog, not you) but these people bugged me with all their laughing at their poor doggie flapping around trying to get the boots off.

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Battle College for Warmachine

I have found that the Battle College site has some great information for Warmachine players. Lots of reviews of units as well as faction tactics (including specific counters against other factions). Oh yeah, it has Hordes info too which is nice because probably close to half of my games have been against Hordes armies so far.

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$400 LEGO Death Star Kicks Ass

I ran across this $400 LEGO Death Star kit at Gizmodo, it looks simply awesome. Too bad I don’t have that kind of money to drop on a one-time build that would probably just sit on my shelf. Dare I say it’s actually cooler than the action figure-scale Death Star I had back when I was a kid (although nothing will compare to the rubber Dianoga (trash monster to us kids back then) and foam-rubber “trash” in the trash compactor of that playset).

$400 LEGO Death Star

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Monopoly Sucks

While I was at GameInk I had to laugh when I came across this one:

Monopoly Suck shirt

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Gygax Memorial t-shirt

Even though I haven’t played D&D in about 20 years I really liked this shirt at GameInk:

Gygax Memorial Shirt

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Geek Item of the Week: Campaign Coins

Is tracking your cash loot on paper just too boring for your RPG sessions? Then you can drop $70 on a set of copper, silver, gold & platinum gaming coins at Campaign Coins. You can buy smaller packs by metal & denomination (1, 10, 100, 1000) but to run a campaign I’m sure you’ll need a full set.

Campaign Coins starter set

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MST3K 20th Anniversary DVD Set

I don’t have time for a full Comic-Con write-up just yet but I did see the tin box for the MST3K 20th Anniversary DVD boxed set (4 discs). They told us at the booth (where I bought one of the 400 special 20th anniversary t-shirts with the same logo) that we could pre-order cheaper at Amazon now and then it will ship in October when it’s released. Sure enough, list price is $70 but the pre-order is only $49 at Amazon. I’ve already ordered mine, what are you waiting for?

One downer was that I missed out on the 20 year reunion of the original cast at the Con. Turns out after the fact that they cut off the line three hours before the panel and I only went about an hour ahead. Oh well, I had fun doing other stuff during those hours.

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Oh no, the website is down!

I forget which one of my buddies linked to this site but if you have any tech support background (or even deal with dumb sales people) you should enjoy it. Warning: audio is NWS and there is in fact a crude facsimile of a penis somewhere in there so be careful where/when you click on that link.

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Saratoga makes the TV news

Yesterday my wife and I took our dogs Saratoga and Milo for the Walk a Mile for the Animals charity walk to support the Rancho Coastal Humane Society (which is where we got Sara and Milo). We saw a cameraman from local News 8 filming there and as we were leaving he had his camera at ground level just as Sara walked by. Imagine our surprise when we watched the news that night and saw a few seconds of Saratoga towards the end of the story! I had tried to guide Milo into the picture but all you can see is two of his feet showing in between Sara’s feet. Look about 20 seconds into the video to see Saratoga checking out the camera (she’s the black & white Corgi mix).

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