Snowflakes in Hell

Caroline Kennedy has endorsed Obama saying he’d be “A President like my father.” Except that her father wasn’t a socialist, and was a member of the NRA. I don’t know how to feel about Obama’s victory over rout of Hillary Clinton in South Carolina.

I tend to cheer him only because of my visceral disdain for Hillary Clinton and my admiration of Obama’s political talents. Hillary believed she was the anointed one, and I have to admit to taking great pleasure in her realization that this won’t be a cakewalk for her.

Bitter made a fabulous crock pot meal of collard greens, pork shoulder, and dumplings, all slow cooked in the croc pot. I have to say that it was excellent. The smell of pork in the air is absolutely heavenly. It’s times like this I am very glad I’m not a Jew or a Muslim. They don’t know what they are missing.

UPDATE: Mmmmmm

A Pennsylvania man finds himself suddenly faced with charges for killing his wife:

A kinky sex escapade ended this week with the electrocution death of a Pennsylvania woman and the arrest of her husband for manslaughter. According to cops, Toby Taylor, 37, first claimed that his wife Kirsten was shocked by her hair dryer. But he then admitted that the couple was “into weird sexual behaviors,” according to a probable cause affidavit. Taylor then explained that he hooks clips to his wife’s nipples and “plugs the cord into a electric strip” and shocks her. On Wednesday evening, Taylor said, Kirsten removed her clothes, attached the clips, and shocked herself. He then picked up the electric strip and shocked her several more times, adding that he had placed a piece of electric tape over her mouth during the jolts. After the last shock, Kirsten, 29, “fell over on to her face.” Taylor initially thought his wife was joking, but quickly realized she was unconscious. He then dressed her in preparation for driving to the hospital, but instead called 911 when she stopped breathing.

Ouch! He stands charged with involuntary manslaughter and reckless endangerment. This lead to a discussion with Bitter as to whether justice is really served by charges here. If I were the DA for York County, I’d probably offer a plea to reckless charge in exchange for dropping the manslaughter, but most normal human beings are aware that hooking up someone else’s nipples to a power strip in all its 120V 60Hz 20 amp glory runs a severe risk of killing that person.

If you’re into kinky electrocution sex, get yourself one of these. While I’m sure that use will invalidate the manufacturer’s warranty, it’s far less likely to kill, and it even seems to come in kinky sex toy-like colors.

Since it doesn’t appear this couple had any children (I’d hate to think of how you explain that “Daddy is hurting mommy” to a kid anyway), I think these two are great possibilities for 2008 Darwin Award winners.

UPDATE: Perhaps electrofetish people could use this peculiar antecedent of the taser.

Clayton has discovered an 18th century antecedent of the machine gun:

Harold Leslie Peterson’s The Treasury of the Gun (1962), p. 205, indicates that 1722 London Journal accounts indicated that one fired 63 rounds in seven minutes in the rain. Okay, that’s not a machine gun, but nine rounds a minute is a major technological breakthrough compared to muskets that fired three rounds a minute, and not at all if it was raining.

It’s interesting, because we constantly hear “The founding fathers could never have imagined something like an Uzi.”  It’s becoming more and more likely that they indeed could have imagined it.  I seem to recall at some point, I think it might have been Dave Hardy, mentioning that if you had shown up at the constitutional convention with an M16, all the founding fathers would have recognized it as a firearm.  They would have thought you were pretty cool, but they still would have recognized it as something protected by the second amendment.

Looks like I wasn’t the only one who had to spend time at a car dealership today. Once I got here to Bitter’s, I noticed my car didn’t want to turn at the intersection, which is when I noticed it had stalled. Its idling rough, and at very low RPM. Check engine light is on. I’m figuring an O₂ sensor on the engine is acting up and the computer is running the engine too rich. The dealership I took it to hasn’t read the code off the engine yet. We shall see when they call me. Unlike Ahab, I didn’t bring a copy of American Rifleman, but the Honda dealership is right down the road from NRA headquarters.

UPDATE: Turns out the code indicates the computer wasn’t reading anything from the throttle body.  When the dealer tested the throttle body itself, it was fine.  They couldn’t get it to produce the code again.  I’m going to take it home.  If it happens again I’ll get the throttle body replaced.  Hopefully it was a bump in the night type thing.