Charles Stricklin

I’m all on board for a good meme.

• Four Jobs I’ve Had
  • Draftsman
  • Military enlisted (Sailor)
  • Waiter
  • Programmer
• Four Films I Can Watch Over and Over
  • The Patriot
  • Braveheart
  • Rudy
  • Monty Python and the Holy Grail
• Four Places I’ve Lived
  • Shreveport/Bossier City, Louisiana
  • Dallas, Texas
  • Pearl Harbor Naval Station, Hawaii
  • Starkville, Mississippi
• Four TV Shows I Enjoy
  • NCIS
  • How I Met Your Mother
  • South Park
  • House
• Four Places I Have Been on Vacation
  • Des Moines, Iowa
  • Maui, Hawaii
  • Kauai, Hawaii
  • Shreveport, Louisiana
• Four of My Favorite Foods
  • Pizza
  • Chicken Scalloppini
  • Ribs
  • Chicken Enchiladas
• Four Sites I Visit Daily
  • My blog (Duh!)
  • Tempus Fugit
  • Google
  • MyWay
• Four Places I Would Rather Be Right Now
  • On a date with a beautiful woman.
  • In my own mansion in the countryside of England.
  • In the White House.
  • On vacation.
• Four Bloggers I’m Tagging
  • What’s tagging?

Just as I was complaining privately that “no one reads my blog,” a hugely popular Internet talk show practically reads from my blog “on the air,” as it were.

Free Talk Live is a project of the Libertarian Free State Project where just about anyone can control the direction of the show.

It’s a pretty neat concept. How many times have you wanted to knock Limbaugh, Hannity or Savage off the air and give them a piece of your mind? With Free Talk Live, you can, in effect, do exactly that! It’s pretty cool, check it out.

I’m kinda bummed because the next story they talked (at length) about was one about Texas prohibition (via Hammer of Truth), a story I heard on Dallas radio last week and I wanted to blog about.

Oh well, I suppose if you snooze, you lose, right?

Here’s something I never thought I’d see; the Simpsons as real, human actors!

Imagine you’re the mayor of a metropolitan area than, because of massive flooding, your city has approximately 50,000 abandoned, destroyed cars strewn all over the place. You’re on record as saying you’d like to get the city cleaned up and reoccupied as soon as possible.

Now imagine that a private company from a neighboring state offers to collect all those abandoned cars, pay your city $100 for each of them, and sell them for scrap, and they tell you they can finish the job in approximately three and a half months.

Do the math: 50,000 cars x $100 = $5 million dollars.

Would you accept the offer?

But wait! Before you answer, you think there may be legal concerns. “What about the owners of all those cars?” you ask yourself. “Do we have the right to, in effect, sell their cars?”

If you were to contact a city attorney, you’d find that there are already laws on the books that allow your city to contract with companies to remove abandoned cars and sell them for scrap metal.

Now, would you accept the offer?

New Orleans’ Mayor Ray “Chocolate” Nagin didn’t.

Without even asking for legal clarification, he turned down that exact offer, opting instead for a government program that would cost $23 million dollars and take an additional 2 to 3 months to complete.

In effect, he cost the City of New Orleans $28 million in direct and lost opportunity costs. And, since New Orleans is bankrupt, he has in reality, cost the taxpayers of Louisiana, of which I’m one, $28 million dollars.

Thanks, Ray.

Back in July of 2005, I wrote a simple little WordPress plug-in to simulate Flickr’s navigation system for a WordPress blog’s index page. Because it didn’t work quite as well as I thought it should, I enlisted the help of David House who completely re-wrote it, tightened up the code, fixed the bugs and added features.

It only works on the index page, and requires some CSS to look right, but I like it.

Zip file: http://charlesstricklin.com/archives/wp-page-jump.zip

I am thoroughly enjoying my new 19″ Samsung SyncMaster 913v LCD display.

I can even see some entire blogs in one viewing!