2004 – Page 26 – CoffeeBear.net

USA PATRIOT Act is crap!

16 July 200416 July 2004 Mark

Before this horrid bit of legislation got passed; I was against it because I knew it was only a matter of time until the government was going to abuse it. Then like many people, I got distracted by my own life and forgot about it for a while because nothing was happening with it that affected me. Today, I happened across a link to Ian Spiers’ Brown Equal Terrorist website. The crap that Mr. Spiers had to go through is unfortunately all too believable and to me just proves that the USA PATRIOT Act should have never been passed.

The USA PATRIOT Act is an abusive law that gives the government excessive powers and as should have been expected by our representatives it was abused to harass an innocent U.S. citizen. Why was he harassed? Because there are still petty & shallow minded [insert explictive of your choice here] out there that think if you’re not a good, clean white-boy then you must be up to no-good.

Oh and for the record:

I am a white guy (part Scottish even).
I like to think of myself as an amatuer photographer and have taken courses at my local community college.
I carry a camera with me everywhere I go, but don’t take as many pictures as I’d like because I have nasty suspicions that somebody’s going to get the wrong idea of what I’m doing.

Travel

9 days and counting…

15 July 200414 March 2007 Mark

As briefly mentioned in various posts on this blog, I’ll be heading to Japan for a vacation/class. The current count is 9 days until takeoff. I’ve got all the omiyage that I’m going to take with me. I’ve got plenty of clothes¹. I’ve got my luggage. I’ve started planning how I’ll be packing for the trip and what all I want to take with me besides clothes (e.g. camera, sketchpad, sanity). I am getting very excited about this trip, but it still feels somewhat unreal to me.

In part because I still don’t believe I’ve got enough money to do this² and in part because I’ve not been on an airplane since I was two. I don’t remember that flight but my Mom tells me that I handled it fairly well. The flight is one part of the trip that I’m not all that happy about as it’s fourteen hours in coach and while my legs do fold up; I’m pretty sure it’s going to be miserable for me. Of course, the worse part of the flight for me is that I’ve enjoyed watching too many disaster movies where planes have exploded, crashed, been ripped to shreds or something equally nasty happened to the passengers. It didn’t really help that I caught the episode of Mythbusters³ where they “fire a bullet into the shell of an aircraft to find out if a single shot can cause explosive decompression — and total aircraft destruction.”⁴ Eep!
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Links

Austen Blog

15 July 200415 July 2004 Mark

While browsing the WP support forums, I ran across this little annoucement:

I would like to announce the grand opening of AustenBlog, a compendium of news about Jane Austen in popular culture. This weblog probably will only be interesting to those who like Jane Austen, of course, but I’d like to announce it here and publicly thank some folks who were helpful to me while I was putting it together

I normally wouldn’t make a post on my blog for somebody annoucing their new site, but the design is pretty good and based on Root’s Gemini template for WP (which means I should seriously look at that template for help with designing CoffeeBear’s look). Also, a good friend of mine (AWelkin) is a fan of Pride & Prejudice and I figure she’ll eventually see the link & might want to check it out.

Politics