Terra Extraneus

I had to come to work today in downtown Oklahoma City — on the Monday that keeps the weekend now past and Independence Day tomorrow from being a leisurely four-day weekend.

I didn’t really give it any thought until I pulled into our downtown parking garage. It is a nine-level garage that fills to capacity on most mornings. This morning the garage was mostly empty and I had my pick of parking spaces. That’s what soured me a little on working today.

Of the Seven Deadly Sins, I guess my problem is not sloth, but envy.

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Speaking of good web sites, this one lists 450+ freeware utilities, all categorized and described with the phrase, “I want a freeware utility to…” (hat tip to Law Practice Tips).

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Dave at DaveTown recommends the Top Five Web Sites You Need to Know. One is Wikipedia, which is a truly amazing site that I use almost every day. Another is LibraryThing, which I have looked at before but have not really gotten into yet. Not sure I care about the other three. Do you have a truly outstanding website to recommend?

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Microsoft Office 2007 will be a “big, bold” leap forward from Office 2003. A significantly different look and feel will make the upgrade essential for most offices, but users may need some training to get comfortable with it.

Office 2007 remains on track for release at the end of the year, Microsoft said this week. It will be the first update to Office in more than four years. Microsoft also is racing to finish Windows Vista, the newest version of the PC operating platform since Windows XP in 2001. Although Microsoft would like to release Vista at the same time as Office 2007, all it is promising is that Vista will be released during 2007.

Office, of course, is Microsoft’s suite of productivity products, including, depending on which suite you buy, Word (word processing), Outlook (email and other tools), Excel (spreadsheet), Access (database), Publisher (page design) and PowerPoint (presentation). Although each of those programs can be purchased separately, many customers, especially business users, go for the package.

Microsoft intended to update Office in 2005, but the project has been pushed twice. Microsoft execs said this week the January 2007 release date remains firm.

One source estimates that about 40% of business desktops use Office 2003, and another 30% use Office 2000. That leaves 30% who don’t use Office at all, and another 30% who never made the last upgrade. But Office 2007 will include major changes to the package, and I speculate that at least half of business users and many home users will make the leap during 2007, 2008 and 2009.

What changes? The change getting the biggest attention is the replacement of toolbars and drop-down menus with the new “ribbon.” Rather than try to explain it, take a look. Here’s Microsoft’s preview of the Office 2007 ribbon. Here’s a 14-slide slideshow PC Magazine put together.

Purpose of the new look and feel is to make it easier for users to find and use the ever-growing arsenal of bells and whistles that Office offers. As Microsoft explains:

As we’ve added more and more features and functionality to the applications, it has become more challenging for people to find the software capabilities. For example, Word 1.0 had about 100 commands, and by using the menus you could see everything you could do. In comparison, Office Word 2007 has more than 1,500 commands. One of the things the new menus and toolbars do is help make those commands easier to find.

To make the myriad of tools and commands more functional, Office 2007 will use “contextual tabs.” (more…)

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Heavy cell phone use linked to brain tumors. The Swedish study defines heavy use as 2,000 hours or more cumulative lifetime — which equals an hour/day for 5-1/2 years.

I hate talking on the phone. Probably average 10 minutes a day tops on the cell phone. Even at that low level, I’ll hit 2,000 hours in 33 years. That’s OK for me, I didn’t get my first cell phone until my late 40s. But kids who start out at age 10 or 12 with their own phones and spend hours a day in the yakosphere may be in for trouble. An hour a day starting at age 12 will put a kid in the danger zone before age 18.

Kids (and other humans) need to yack less and blog more. Carpal tunnel is better than a brain tumor.

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Republican Congressman Ernest Istook is running for governor of Oklahoma. One of the hot-button issues Istook has raised is that Oklahoma should declare English its official language. The congressman also seeks such legislation at the national level.

If Istook succeeds, it will be none too soon. No news yet from Democratic incumbent Brad Henry or other Republican gubernatorial candidates on which languages they are supporting. English sure has my support, and I’m glad to know it has Istook’s, too.

Personally, I’m sick and tired of people crossing our borders, bringing with them their foreign cultures, foreign foods, and foreign languages. Melting pot, schmelting pot. Everywhere I go these days I’m surrounded by indecipherable foreign words. It boggles the mind. Let’s get this thing settled once and for all. We speak English here, thank you, and you can just take all those funny-sounding foreign words back where you came from.

I’m especially talking about French. Everywhere I turn, it’s French this and French that. We have let so many Frenchisms slip into our everyday vocabulary that I don’t know if we’re speaking English or Franglish. Come on, it’s not pants (short for the sissy French word, “pantaloons”), it’s trousers. It’s not gasoline, it’s petrol. And for English’s sake, it’s not French fries, it’s chips. Can you imagine how the British must feel when they come to America and see how the Francophiles among us have convoluted the Queen’s English on this side of the pond!

Don’t you just hate it when you hear someone order “a la carte,” or tell you they are “en route,” or ask you to give them “carte blanche,” or attempt to achieve a “coup d’etat.” Every business person wants to be an “entrepreneur.” Every cook wants to be a “gourmet.” If it’s good, it can’t just be good, it has to be “par excellence.” If it’s bad, it’s not just a mistake, it’s a “faux pas,” or even worse, a “gaffe.” Some of these words are hard to say, and they are all hard to spell. Who needs them! I’m with Rep. Istook. Why can’t we just stick to plain old English?

Of course, the place where the French have really got us in a chokehold is in the kitchen. With all their hors d’oeuvres and sautés and soufflés, everything slathered with mayonnaise and marinades. French toast. French bread. French pastry. French vanilla. French dressing. French fries. Man, those French love to eat.

The French have even infiltrated our military, so much so that I believe it has become a national security issue. Our men and women in uniform wear “camouflage,” carry “bayonets,” engage in “sabotage” and “espionage,” and have frequent “rendezvous.” (What’s the plural of rendezvous, anyway? Can’t the French get anything right?)

Even conservatives admit that they prefer it “laissez faire.” I guess the French really have won. Fait accompli.

Have you ever received an invitation to a party from some effete Francophile who noted on the card, “RSVP?” Wink, wink. Don’t think you’re fooling me, you cosmopolitan snob. I know what your little French abbreviation means. “Repondez, s’il vous plait,” my foot. It’s just another way of saying, “Only French-lovers need reply.”

The other day I was at IHOP, and the guy at the next table ordered an “omelette.” Give me a break. That’s an egg pancake around here, mister. Then the woman he was with ordered a “Spanish omelette.” Isn’t that so multi-cultural it makes you gag! This is the good ole U.S. of A. Have the Western omelette — err, I mean the Western fried egg – you French-lover.

I don’t want the soup “du jour” and I don’t want my potatoes “au gratin” and I don’t want my steaks “filet mignon.” I don’t want to wear cologne, I don’t want to watch films noir, and I don’t want to live on a cul-de-sac (well, actually, cul-de-sacs are kind of nice, but I’m no Frank, so I prefer to call them circle drives). I don’t want to be avante-garde or bon vivant or have panache or savoir faire. I just want to be a good old red-white-and-blue American.

Did you know that there are more than 13 million Frenchies, I mean French-Americans (I sure wouldn’t want to be politically incorrect) in the United States! Almost 2 million of them speak French as the primary language in their homes, according to the U.S. census. That’s right here in America! Is there any hope for our nation?

How many of them are even here lawfully? How many of them have illegally crossed the U.S.-Canadian border? When are we going to finally beef up our border security? Congress is talking about erecting a 15-foot wall along the U.S.-Mexican border, but they’ve got it all wrong. That’s not going to stop the French invasion. What we really need is a 4,000-mile wall running along the U.S.-Canadian border. It’ll cost a pretty penny, but it will be worth every dime if it helps to keep our families safe – safe from the French, and all of their French foods and French ways and funny French words.

Let’s be honest and call a frog a frog. They look different than us. They think differently than us. They talk differently than us. And they’re taking over our country, while we sit quietly by and do nothing. America is quickly becoming the Western States of the French Republic. You can’t watch TV or see a movie anymore without being bombarded with Frenchies. Robin Williams. Robert Duvall. Angelina Jolie. Ellen DeGeneres. Julia Louis-Dreyfus. Zooey Deschanel. Stephen Colbert. The list goes on and on. Back in the day, we all thought Shelley Fabares was cute as a button and we all loved Robert Goulet, but it’s gotten way out of hand.

We must draw the line somewhere, and Rep. Istook is exactly right about where. Let’s make English the official language and start cracking down on the use of all these French words in our government, our schools, and everywhere else you turn. If we don’t do something, one day all of our kids will be wearing sissy berets and going around saying “oui, oui” and “bon voyage” and “déjà vu” and “c’est la vie.”

This is America, doggonit, and as long as Lady Liberty continues to stand in New York harbor, as long as it still says “E pluribus unum” on our coins, and as long as this state is still proud to claim its Choctaw name, “Oklahoma,” then English is the only language for me. And that’s how I’m going to decide my vote in the upcoming gubernatorial election.

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For the first time, I’m getting telemarketing calls on my cell phone. What a nuisance. So I have just registered on the Federal Trade Commission’s Do Not Call list.

At first I wasn’t sure if this “Do Not Call” site was legit – or just another telemarketing scheme. So I checked on the FTC site, and as you see, the above site is referenced on this page: “Q&A: The National Do Not Call Registry.”

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AP news stories today declared that a federal court jury in New Jersey convicted an animal rights advocacy group and several of its individual members of inciting violence on its website against a company using animals in its experimentation and research. According to the news story, there was no proof offered by the United States, as prosecutor, of any violent conduct by any defendant, other than inciting it on their website.

In a second AP news story issued today, a school district suspended twenty middle school students for looking at a website in which a fellow student described proposed violent acts against yet another student, as well as some other inappropriate comments.

The thread in both stories was that those posting written communications on a website and those reading communications on a website might be punished. In both instances, too, the writer was punished for influencing, or causing, the behavior of the reader.

Normally, English and American common law and the resulting statutory law and judicial decisions have accepted as axiomatic that one person is not responsible for the criminal conduct, wrongful conduct, or tortuous conduct of another, absent a legal duty to moderate that conduct or a volitional conspiracy. Apparently, however, when the Internet is involved, the United States government and at least a school district in Costa Mesa, California, feel the writer is responsible.

Would the result have been the same if the Internet writers were, in fact, not writing on the Internet, but were writing on a billboard, or posting merely on a pre-Internet bulletin board made of cork, or using a mimeograph machine? The violence described or even promoted by the web writers, if as described in the news accounts, was certainly reprehensible. But do we dare make it illegal or criminal?

Historically, the crime of sedition was abolished by the First Amendment. The First Amendment was enacted because the common law did not go far enough in guaranteeing freedom of expression. At common law, profanity, obscenity and gross libels were illegal because they were immediately harmful to the individual. The First Amendment was supposed to preserve an equally serious societal need: that truth was more important than silence, and that identification of truth was too important and fragile to leave to unilateral government definition.

The Internet will terrify many people with its reach and scope. The right to freedom of expression, if it means anything in the 21st century, will have to stand for the proposition that because truth is more important than silence, the latest and greatest platform for expression, access to the Internet, and even abuse of the Internet will have to be protected. It is unnecessary to protect the Internet at all costs, of course. But it is necessary to protect the system of freedom of expression on the Internet as vigorously as it would be protected anywhere else.

The government and the courts should not react to the Internet like primitives reacting to a flashlight. Criminalizing speech, or Internet communication, that could have been dealt with by a restraining order while court review or appeals progressed, is a naked abuse of power that does violence to the First Amendment. For middle school students, running a few laps, writing lines, or even an apology, would probably be better than suspension for looking at a website.

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CNSNews.com reported that inquiries are being conducted about possible incursions into the United States by either regular Mexican military personnel equipped with Humvees and fifty caliber machine guns or by imposters yet similarly equipped. If the military hardware is owned by the Mexican government, then it is either stolen or rented under very loose terms, uniforms included. Moreover, the military appearing Mexican troops appear to be escorting illegal drug convoys.

I have no doubt that there are those that believe our porous southern border is hopelessly so. But, it seems more likely it is a matter of money. In the 21st century, we should be able to place satellites in geosynchronous orbit capable of monitoring our southern borders. We should be able to afford to fly squadrons of A-10 Thunderbolts, better known as Warthogs, up and down our borders from several air bases in Texas, New Mexico and Arizona. If the Warthogs can find and destroy tanks, escort troops and have a range of 800 miles, coordinated with squadrons of helicopters, they could close the border, if need be. A couple of squadrons of Abrams M1A1 tanks running up and down the border on live fire training exercises might tighten things up, too. The point is deterrence. Most likely, a couple of shots over the heads of these invaders would likely end the problem. Photographing them would also assist conventional law enforcement.

The U. S. Border Patrol is not trained or equipped to confront foreign military units, especially rogues, nor military weapons. The Patrol is not large enough to protect our northern and southern borders, nor the coasts, from penetration by any determined group. The Patrol should have the support of the military and the military budget would only need to be increased incrementally to sustain such an effort.

The U. S. Border Patrol has more than enough to do regulating entry by individuals. Our thousands of miles of border can only protected by the military. That is the only source of technology, weapons and trained manpower necessary to deal with the issues created by terrain, rogue military incursions, and terrorists traveling enmass supported by foreign militaries.

The alternative is to ask conventional law enforcement forces to under take major new investments in equipment, weapons, technology and training. While it is true we do not want to try and use our military as policemen, we do not want to be forced to convert our para-military police forces into actual military units. Not only is that not cost effective, it has other negative implications, as well, in confusion of mission and tactics.

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Category: Mental Health
Something profound from an arts and crafts teacher answering a question in a radio interview. The question: at a time when we all complain that we are busier than ever, why is the popularity of arts and crafts on the upswing, and how do people find the time. Her answer:
“The busier you are, the more important it becomes to do things that can’t be rushed.”
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Category: Left-Wing Conspiracy
High of 71. That’s the forecast for today, Dec. 27, 2005, in Oklahoma City. Those left-wing conspirators are so sinister in their machinations that they have found a way to actually increase the temperature by several degrees, just to fool us into believing in global warming.

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