The Evil Eyebrow

In at least one way, following the Georgia Legislature is easy: If a bill only has Democratic sponsors, it’s dead and won’t go anywhere. For example, Senate Bill 517 which would specifically exclude breastfeeding from “lewd, lascivious, indecent, or unlawful conduct” is going nowhere. I don’t need to spend any real time on it.

Likewise, many of the bills that I’ve highlighted this session have been categorized in the “interesting, but this won’t be taken up” bucket.

However, the thrust of this posting is about tomorrow. Tomorrow, March 7th, 2012, is this session’s Crossover day. Crossover day is day 30 of the 40 day legislative session and by rule, any bill that has not been approved by one chamber and sent to the other for consideration is dead. If this were last session, which was the first year of the two year legislature, the bill would have been carried into the next session, but there are general elections in November so all the dead bills will be discarded. Someone will be able to start afresh with HB 1 and SB 1 come next January.¹

Crossover day and the days leading up to it are filled with a flurry of action. You can see this by looking at the number of PASSAGE votes by date on the House or Senate voting registers. There are many more as you get closer to day 30 (3/7 this year).

After Crossover day, I’ll do a roundup of what I had been looking at and what’s been passed over to the other chamber, and what’s been passed entirely. There have been a few bills, beyond procedural ones, that have coursed all the way through to the Governor’s signature already.

1. And it won’t be Bobby Franklin because he died this year. [↩]

On the left is a pie chart made in Microsoft Excel, for the express purpose of copy/pasting into Microsoft PowerPoint.

On the right is the same, after the copy/paste operation.

I will now go get coffee.

I can now add it to the collection.

The square-cube law says that as volume goes up, surface area goes up more slowly. My current application of this principle is devoted to hair.

Exhibit one, the culprit:

This cat, which is one half of the current feline-american population of my residence, has grown in mass by approximately 2.2 times. Similarly, the other feline-american in the house has grown in mass by approximately 2.3 times.

Utilizing the square-cube law, I should be getting approximately 1.7 times as much hair as a cat that has grown in mass by 2.2 times¹, however I seem to have about 80 times as much hair as a month ago.

Either my cats are shedding like freaking mad or we have a new postulate to include in the sqaure-cube law. Someone call Galileo and alert him.

1. I’ll let you go do the math to prove I’m right [↩]

In case you aren’t paying attention, Super Tuesday, the conglomeration of several different states’ primaries where the largest individual lump of delegates are awarded, is this coming week. I happen to live in one of those states, which leaves me a quandary:

1. Do I vote for a republican candidate that I could actually see being in office? -or-
2. Do I vote for the worst possible contender who would get so smeared in the general election that Abraham Lincoln would burrow out of his grave to smack around the GOP?

If the one, then I’ll try and give Romney a leg up. If the other, than it’s Santorum.

I’m sure I’ll figure it out by Tuesday.

This is also the day that a number of different jurisdictions around Metro Atlanta will be voting on whether to allow Sunday Sales¹. I will be voting in favor. That way I can get my beer and wine when I do my normal weekly shopping trip, which happens to be on Sunday.

1. Hah! Actually, “after church Sunday Sales” [↩]

Pro Tip: When you set a document backup program to backup a directory to an external hard drive, it should not take the files from the external hard drive and overwrite the directory you’re trying to backup.

This happened to Jenn yesterday.

I have not told you (yet) what the software package is because I’m not (yet) 100% certain that this wasn’t operator error. However, I’m 99.44% certain this was a fuck-up on a grand scale by the software so stay tuned for me to throw them under the bus like they deserve.

A ticket has been submitted and if they cannot answer satisfactorily, we’re done with them and might even explore a lawsuit.

I will be the first person to acknowledge that we here in the United States are entitled to freedom of speech. I will also be the first to acknowledge that not everyone agrees with my own personal opinions regarding social justice or foreign policy or whatever. I will also acknowledge that some people find worth in listening to someone else rant about things they agree with.

To that end, I’ve always lumped Bill Maher, Sean Hannity, Michael Moore, and Rush Limbaugh into the same pile. They’re basically the same thing: entertainers who stretch the truth and embark on hyperbolic adventures to keep themselves employed.

However, I’ve never understood how people can listen to Rush Limbaugh and his hateful bile. The man doesn’t have opinions, he’s merely a parody of a conservative nut job. He has admitted as much by saying that his job is to make the listener mad.

Now he’s come out and called a woman a slut for being on birth control. He has officially moved beyond any possible reconciliation or apologetic explanation. The man is a cancer and I wish to hear no more about him. The best thing that could happen would be that I heard tomorrow his show was cancelled and he descended into obscurity, a footnote on the acerbic rancor that has so marked politics for the last 20 years.

Good night, Rush. So long. Don’t let the door hit you on the ass. And the rest of you who listen to his show, please stop.

Everyone enjoy your February 29th. For me, I’m looking forward to February 31st. Every four years I cancel March 1st (or March 2nd, in this case) and have a bit of a shindig. This year will be pretty low key, but if you like, please join me in giving February it’s long lost days and celebrate the leap year!

Today I relearned something I already knew, but learned two things that I desperately wanted:

1. Adobe Acrobat is the worst editing tool in the whole world
2. If you use any of the comment and markup functionality, then hit ctrl-e, you’ll get a nice set of controls that let you set your size, weight, & etc. of text
3. You still can’t rotate text, but you can rotate the whole sheet, insert the text, then rotate it back

Thank you. Have a nice day.