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Political exploratory committees are no longer run as private businesses, instead they must follow the same laws as any active campaign committee. Money raised must be spent on actual research, and neither the candidate nor candidate’s family may receive any money from the committee’s coffers directly or through a company they own. Any money raised and not spent by the time of declaration or the lack thereof must be returned to donors or given to charity.

Why?

Because Newt Gingrich pays himself a few million dollars every four years by “forming an exploratory committee”, which is exempt from regulation. He gets to pay himself 90% of the incoming funds for “research costs” and walk away with it.

Need another reason? How’s “fuck Newt Gingrich in general”, if this specific case isn’t enough, as well as “fuck anyone else fake running for money.”

Fox News never baits people with loaded questions to blame liberals.

Never.

Pie is better than cake.

Cake has little bits of deliciousness mixed in, but mostly on top and bottom. The rest is mediocre, like the middle of a trilogy.

Pie is 100% delicious. Crust, filling, optionally crust again. There’s no weak spot. And if that’s not enough for you, let me describe pie and cake.

Cake is a baked bread product. It’s fluffy and generally iced, without crust for the most part. Pie is a crust with a filling laid into it and sometimes a crust on top. The outside is crispy as opposed to soft and frosted.

You know what has a thick, crunchy crust and a sweet, rich filling? Cheesecake.

Cheesecake is a pie. Cheesecake is with the pie eaters, and so is God.

Conveniently enough, it’s also Spring Break. More people are probably excited about that. More people are probably pissed off about the former, come to think of it.

On the upside, Spring Breakers have extra time to adjust to the difference. Unless they’re in Arizona and there is none. They just get to enjoy being on Pacific time again, which is obviously better than Mountain.

Fuck yeah, Pacific Time!

To be fair, we’re always rather doomed, it just isn’t ever quite as impending.

Quakes in Japan and Hawaii, tsunami warnings on the entirety of Japan and the US west coast, and presumably Canada, Mexico, and Chile. I’m not sure why I’ve not heard about those, though, if so, but it seems likely. Once LA is underwater, though, maybe we can call it global warming practice? It seems like a good time to prepare.

Waves hitting 500MPH are sweeping over parts of Japan, post quake. That’s apparently the equivalent of a jet engine, though what kind I don’t know.

I can tell you, though, what a 737′s engine can do from my airport time. The safety video we all watched showed jetwash hurling a bus. Damned impressive, that. I personally saw a 20 foot high wall of dirt get swept away in seconds once. Someone, I don’t know who, was taking a jet out to the taxiway. He turned wrong. The engines, spun up but certainly not at full, sprayed luggage everywhere. Everyone in the area took cover behind something, and the engines got pointed toward the airport building, which meant the wash was sent toward the construction going on.

Everyone dove behind the dirtwall or into a ditch. I’m not really sure how wide the wall was, but I can guarantee it was at least twenty feet, and this was a fairly standard dirt pyramid shape, just elongated. It was gone in an instant.

One cubic yard of dirt weighs around one ton. This was at least 66 tons of dirt, and it took no more than the jetwash passing over it to blast it away. It didn’t stop turning, it didn’t linger, it passed smoothly and rather quickly over the whole thing, and it was gone.

That just washed across Japan. Strength enough to move tons as if they don’t exist, in a crashing, moving wall. So when you see that bus “floating” across the street, remember that that’s only a fraction of the power of what did it.

More importantly, why no jumper cables?

I know I see a group of people trying to push start a car of varying size once a month at least on campus. Every one of them asks the same question when they can’t push fast enough.

“Does anyone have any damn jumper cables?!”

Why am I the only person who ever does? I’m a cartard. Completely and utterly. I know siphoned gas and a screwed up master cylinder, that’s it. I’m probably the last person you’d expect to have jumper cables in a lineup, and yet there I am-the least qualified person to have them whipping out the blue box with the idiot proof Michelin smart cables.

I got lucky spotting the cables for $10 on Woot, certainly, I think they’re $40+ normally. But I’m sure there’s plenty of cables with a similar system out there, and isn’t it really worth spending the $40 instead of having to wait forever for someone with cables, or finding enough people to help push the car fast enough to get it going, or the ridiculously high price of a tow?

Spend $40. Be responsible. Be self-reliant. Be capable of performing good deeds over the course of two minutes!

Ironically, this time. I made the extra effort to start early on a project not due until the period before Spring Break, aka, next Wednesday. I’ve had a long time to start, admittedly, but a week is a long time for me to work on something. Still, a solid week for this, that should be easy.

And then I learned Spring Break is next week, and the paper is due Wednesday.

So close to improvement, yet so far.

No matter how many computers I build, there’s no part more annoying, more time-consuming, more likely to make me cut myself than wiring it all up. Putting big parts in place is easy. Hooking up USB ports, power switches, audio ports, and every other random wire within a case takes at least twice as long as any other part of the operation, for no apparent reason. It’s not like I have more things to connect, nor that it’s much more difficult to work out what goes where.

But for some reason, it’s always at least twice as long as the rest of the job.

I suppose it follows the same rule as cars, home theatres, and everything else ever to exist that contained wires.

Okay, listen. When an ad for “HD Vision Sunglasses” uses cheap knockoff of Highway to the Danger Zone, I’m okay with it. I expect it in some way thanks to being bookended with quotes like “I can see better with them than without glasses!” and “Now I see life in HD!”

But when UFO Files on the HISTORY CHANNEL uses a knockoff of the X-files theme song? Not so much. I know it’s not exactly high standards educational documentary, but god damn it, it’s supposed to be more than trash TV. At least hold yourselves to the same standards as SIGHTINGS of all things did. Hell, Sightings at least was one of the first outlets I know of to talk about Xenu, way before everyone learned the deal on South Park.

If you’re calling yourself documentary but can’t manage to stay at the level of Sightings it’s time to pick a new label.