Ghost of BiB

I'm still waiting for the "Darin's Minions" post....

Made a lousy Ahab, IMO.

Not if it has a deck.

Nope, not I...we ARE talking about Darin here. He wears little blue smurf jammies.

Hello Dave...

I was only repeating what I heard from you.

Hey! Who deleted my name calling post!

It's still going strong. Has to be the most durable plant on earth. You guys chose well, for me. I'll take a picture and send it to Kristy to prove it's alive.

And, I know nothing about gardening. I can kill a plastic fern. Is this a GREAT country? Or what?

I don't do anything....but I get paid for it anyway. Just ask Canal Guy in Illinois.

You just showed your young punk age...us old drunks look for bread and grease, like White Castles or Crystals. Gotta get rings AND fries with a Pepsi. Couple of Advil and a Xanax...good to go.

Yup. Alchoholism does cut down on eating. Great way to lose weight.

WTF knows or cares? I just work on where they're going.

Is there ANYONE not doing computer support? I'm getting frightened again...

We actually have some, but maybe the method to the madness is it would make each bullet cost $143,176.78

...................zits...huh?.........

You have too cute a girlfriend to do that.

True, but you're late. There actually was a time here when one could discuss wines, cigars, cognacs, good scotch, good bourbon... - and not be beaten down and be told one was stupid by not discussing what was on TV last night. I guess all that kind of conversation belongs in the "Animal Husbandry" forum now. Hey Fezmid...maybe there should be an addition to the recipe section? Libations? Does a nice Montrochet go with baloney sammich? Baloney sammiches are good. So is a nice wine.

I do like what New Zealand is doing with their Sauvignon Blancs. But that's not exactly OZ, is it?

That's the "few exceptions" I was talking about. An 18 year old guy with a 16 year old girlfriend is called High School. But, just a guess...how many normal relationships of that nature get prosecuted as statuatory rape? Hell, half of us would be in prison were that true. If the "due process" system is supposed to be so infallible and wonderful, as many here have implied in other venues (Cough...Campy... ) There should be enough common sense in it to separate the wheat from the chaff. If one wants to, they can write or change laws to accomodate that. I don't like the idea of predators getting ANY protection based upon the maybes and the hypothetical what might happen that dilutes our "criminal justice" system. Justice? Michael Jackson is going to walk away from his latest media event. If he's found guilty of having a hangnail, he'll beat it on appeal. I'm obviously not a lawyer, and it's an old argument...but sometimes the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few (or the one... ). There is a thing in war planning, defense planning, strategy (for lack of better terms), called acceptable risk. There is no perfect system, or solution. You can't cover every base all the time. One writes a plan knowing that if A, B or C happens - it happens. You try to mitigate against it, you adjust to it, you have thought about the areas where, if you are in charge, you are willing to accept the risk of things not going your way in the interest of achieving the objective. The objective is the goal. In war, it's defeating your adversary. Here, it's keeping fellow citizens, family members - maybe people we care about - from being violated and killed. "Oh, the lab botched the DNA split? Your defense was supposed to get three samples and only got two? Sorry about the rest of the evidence, go forth and do well!" In a purely uneducated just layman's view look at where our great system has travelled, legal-wise, it seems like the concept of acceptable risk has long since gone by the wayside. Any number of lawyers here will be welcome to set me straight. I'm sure some can and will. So what? Think I care? Maybe it's a moral question. Is it better to let 2% of possibly innocent people get convicted? Of anything? Or is it better to allow 10% of those everyone knows is guilty, go? Because of that damn 2%. Crap, if I go on any further...

Your avatar's off the wrong coast today.

The tobacco settlement seems to have paved the way for an entire genre of class action mentality as well. Do you actually think someone would have sued McDonalds for cheeseburgers making them fat before the tobacco deal?

FWIW, IMO - ANY convicted sex offender, with VERY few exceptions needs the maximum anything possible. Brand them on the forehead, for all I care. I'm disturbed by the female legislator qualifying "young" offenders as being unduly punished by stricter systems. WTF? Somewhere along the line, common sense is going to have to rear it's ugly head over 300 pages of ways to both get and skirt "due process". I would also think that even though there are sick SOB's who are going to do whatever anyway, totally stigmatizing the CRAP out of someone who decides he's going to nail 12 year old girls, or boys may act as some deterrent to at least a few.

Not a whole lot of people 'round these parts think too highly. That includes many who worked with him.

But you have to admit it's good for some really cool stories...