Dick Cheney

OK, yes, I said I'd have absolutely no time to blog this week, but I am making time for this....can you believe it? Dick Cheney uh, HELLO, shoots someone, and the White House and VP's office both stonewall reporters about the incident. Isn't anyone else sick unto death of this administration's tight fisted and lipped-ness when it comes to releasing information of any stripe or color?

I've never blogged about my total aversion to all things of the weaponly variety, but this just goes to prove what I've always said about guns. Play with them, and you will get shot.

When I first heard about this, my first reaction was to laugh...where I live in Oh-Hi-Ia is about an hour's drive from West Virginia, and every year during deer hunting season, usually someone in both Ohio and West Virginia are accidentally shot in hunting accidents, and someone usually dies. Which yes, is tragic, but also comic because hunters are supposed to wear little orange vests that make them highly visible, so theoretically, you should be able to tell the difference between your hunting buddy and the deer. So my personal perception had always been "Hunters=Idiots". Then I worked for someone at the big ol’ bank that was a hunter and a really smart guy, and he adjusted that perception for me. He hunted with a bow and arrow, and I gotta say that it takes some impressive skill to bring down a deer with a bow and arrow. Plus, bonus, rarely are other hunters shot by arrow. So now my perception is more like "automatic rifle hunters=idiots". But anyway. I was talking about the VP's hunting accident. He shot some high-powered Texas attorney with birdshot, which IS teeny-tiny, but still, I’m trying to understand how you “accidentally” shoot ANYONE. Isn’t the primary rule of gun safety to never ever point the gun at someone? If it isn’t, it sure oughta be. Well, maybe the second, after never ever peer down the barrel of a loaded gun. So I did think this was kinda comical until I learned that the VP’s hunting buddy is in an intensive care unit in a hospital, and as I work in healthcare, I can tell you that they DON’T put healthy, on their feet, gonna go back to work tomorrow types of people into the ICU. So not the comedy fest I was thinking. And then I hear Scott McClelland on NPR yesterday telling reporters that he wasn’t going to answer their questions about the incident, and here we are yet again with the administration stonewalling the American people. Did I mention that this is about the bazillionth time? So I went from ha-ha to royally pissed off in about 0.03 seconds. And then I feel guilty for laughing, cause it turns out that the TX atty has some of that birdshot lodged near his heart and they’ll have to do open heart surgery to remove it. A Washington DC doc that NPR interviewed yesterday said that it was likely that they just might leave it where it is, due to his age and other considerations, as in, hey, it might not be so smart to crack this guy’s chest. Cause open-heart surgery also not the comic fest you might be thinking it could be. Really.

So this happened over the weekend, and Cheney’s office makes its first statement on the matter on Tuesday. Am I the only one who thinks that is ludicrous? Eminem talks about Lynn Cheney in one of his songs, “Without Me”, where he mentions Dick’s heart problem, but I’m thinking that maybe Dick has a major communication problem.

Let’s talk about something else that won’t have my blood pressure through the roof. How about the Olympics? Well, there is fuel for my ire there too. Whenever the games are NOT held in this country, the television coverage of the games blows. Which makes me sound really ethnocentric, but that isn’t it. It is that I simply can’t stand it when many things are time-delayed for prime time, but worse than that is the heavy-handed editing that goes on. I have a friend in Italy that I’ve been chatting with about once a day since the games started and when he asks if I’ve seen this or that on the television coverage, I’m forced to tell him that they deleted it out, EVERY DAMN TIME.

This morning on MSNBC, they were showing the Sweden vs. Kazakhstan men’s hockey game, which made me happy, but they kept going to commercial, and Sweden would score while they were out on commercial. RRRRGGG. Then, they stopped that game, right near the end of the 2nd period, to bring the Canada vs. Italy game. RRRRGGG, again. No announcement, no explanation, just cut to the other game. Sloppy. This was fairly early, east coast time, and I had to turn it off to get ready for work, but I never did see who won the Sweden/Kazakhstan game. The announcers of the new game didn’t bother to update the score for the old game. Now I know that I am personally more concerned with Sweden than most Americans, I freely admit that. But 100% of the Swedish team is players from the NHL, so you’d think that some hockey fans would want to know how the players did…wouldn’t ya? I’m pretty sure that Canada trounced Italy, because the average age of the Team Italy players was around 35, and most of the Canadian players were younger and faster. And anybody who can tell me why the heck the Italian players were in blue rather than the colors of their flag wins a “you’re smarter than Lucy” certificate. A check of NBC's Olympics page (which loads super slow, thanks NBC) shows me that Sweden won (7-2, Heja Sverige!!), Canada won (also 7-2), and Finland won too (against Switzerland, 5-0, ouch for Switzerland). The Czech Republic trounced Germany, 4-1. Those 7-2 games are really high scoring hockey games, for any unfamiliar with the sport. The final gold medal game is widely expected to be Canada vs. Czech Republic, but I’d love to see it between Sweden and the Czechs.

The graphs that NBC has up to show the scores really couldn’t be more confusing. Russia vs. Slovakia, and Latvia vs. US are all later today. No hope whatsoever of being able to catch the Russian game on TV here, which is a shame, the Russians are good players. I don’t have high hopes really for the US team, most of the good hockey players in the States are Canadians, eh?

It was really fun to see the Team Sweden fans on TV at the arena in Italy. I forgot that they wear those Viking helmets with the horns and they paint their faces and wave flags and do normal fan sorts of things, but for the shy and introverted Swedes, that’s really being very flashy and nationalistic, which they aren’t into too much. Ohh, something else that irritated me was that the announcers kept referring to “the Swedish club” or “this club” rather than TEAM. It is a TEAM, people, TEAM.

Gotta go.