Party at SCOTUS

According to thishttp://www.scotusblog.com/2012/03/argument-recap-it-is-kennedys-call/#more-141900, Justice Kennedy is going to make the deciding call on the individual mandate portion of Obamacare, now being argued before them.  As per custom, the four reliable liberal judges are being reliably liberal while the conservative justices (with the exception of Justice Thomas who is busy sharpening pencils) are open minded about things--going this way and that.  Curious how that works out--the lefties being dogmatic while the knuckle draggers are thinking outside the box.

I sat through an hour long webinar about reform, the elections, the economy, and most particularly about some incredibly bureaucratic even by bureaucratic standards requirements that will be put in place for your friendly employer out there and am still sitting here stunned, open mouthed, and on the verge of wetting myself.  Ruinous stuff created by Mandy, and Simon, and Eleanor, and Zoe, et al--smart Ivy grads with a heightened sense of justice as it applies to you and me and the untold zillions of employees that are being chained and beaten and forced to accept wages and cable television and live in a society run by capitalist running dogs.  To date, Mandy and friends have written 12,260 pages of regulations for Obamacare--roughly more than two King James bibles and there is not a soul alive including those brave Dartmouth and Brown grads who know what in the flying f*** is in them.  Fact.  It's a bigger boondoggle than even the most pessimistic doubters of the law would have thought possible and far costlier.  To recognize that President Obama will be re-elected given the debacle is the most damning of indictments regarding the dazzling lack of appeal possessed by Mitt and Rick and Newt and the band of fools the Republicans have trotted out.  It's really best to just go off in the woods somewhere and drink for four or five years.

Saw "21 Jump Street."  Not impressed.

"Mad Men" is back in bidness and it looks like a season of some heavy "social justice" lifting ahead of us.  That will, of course, mean more of Peggy Olsen and her earnest righteousness and who I would prefer not to look at or listen to.  Instead, I would rather watch Don and Roger drink and smoke and make fun of people.  Call me old fashioned.

Less than 160 days to college football season.  As per custom, the NCAA rules committee is filling the void by coming up with inane rules changes.  One--if a player's helmet comes off during a play, he must be disqualified from participating during the remainder of the play and then also sit out the next down.  Personally, I think that if a helmet comes off, it should be deemed a live weapon that a player on either offense or defense may then use to bludgeon an opposing player or NCAA rules committee member.

Baseball is right around the corner and my team is facing a season of heightened ineptitude and record suck.  It makes tolerating Yankee, Red Sox, and Cubs fans even worse than usual.

Thinking about taking one of those European river cruises in the next few years.  Except, every time I look at the brochure, it shows a guy even older than I am in some kind of ridiculous embrace of a slightly younger female who in real life would never put up with that bullshit because she got tired of his lame act thirty years before.  Anyway, it looks semi-appealing until you consider that the boat will be filled with old guys wearing taupe colored shoes with Velcro straps.  I hate Velcro.  And, taupe.  I also don't like the French so maybe we'll just ride on a motorboat down the Colorado.

Peeps (especially the yellow bird ones) go surprisingly good with Modelo Especial.

"Madness! Madness!" and Other Holiday Musings

Ganaway runs wild.  Major Clifton would have been at home that night.

Made it through the "Holiday Season" which was once known as the "Christmas Season" prior to the onset of the reign of "No Hurt Feelings and Soccer Trophies for Everyone" in what passes for our national psyche.  Made it, in the sense that we had only one screaming, hair pulling, semi-wrestling match between Daughter No. 1 and Daughter No. 2 this festive time of year, over--a pair of jeans.  It was touch and go for a while, but neither employed the dreaded "Iron Claw" or scissors kick and it ended in a disqualification and a return to their neutral corners which fortunately reside on opposite ends of the house.  Yours truly was the hapless referee without a bow tie, treading lightly on a bum knee and a keen eye for getting caught in the scrum and a return to Dr. Happy Scapel and his band of mule skinners at Texas Orthopedic Group ( I had been scoped and lightly gutted only days before).

I was alone for New Year's Eve as Mrs. Bulba and Daugher No. 1 were visiting her family in the Valley and Daughter No. 2 was at a friend's ranch along with fellow collegiates, happy to be away from law enforcement personnel and close to all of the Budweiser contraband they could smuggle.  It's never a good thing when I'm on my own as I rapidly descend into a state much akin to a family dog left alone in the house--pretty soon, there's trash strewn about and I've eaten something poisonous and the couch is stained and torn.  This time, due to said crippled knee I had ample time to view three seasons of "Mad Men," some random stuff about Germans and firearms on The Military Channel, and a couple of episodes of the "Game of Thrones" series on HBO which is as far as I can tell is designed to appeal to the mastubatory needs of the science fiction/fantasy game community at large.  Mad Men is pretty good stuff--really, it's a 60's version of "Deadwood" set on Madison Avenue instead of the Dakotas Gold Rush.  For me, it's a little easier to be sympathetic with the flawed characters of Deadwood since they at least had the excuse of living on the edge and close to a bullet or stab to the gullett.  Don Draper in Mad Men does a lot of stabbing, himself but with a different kind of sword.  Though well played, I don't care for the Peggy Olson character played by Elisabeth Moss.  She has all of the joy of someone late for a civil rights meeting or a kale and radish soup recipe exchange.  Entertaining, though and worth watching.  I did so in the spirit of the proceedings, killling a bottle of Laphroig (neat) in the process.  No Lucky Stikes, though.

Attended the Alamo Bowl in SA last week, capping off an epic season of viewing collegiate football in person and living to tell about it--if you are or were a Baylor graduate or student or unfortunately married to one like the long suffering Mrs. Bulba, you witnessed more excitement and on field drama than watching the combined editorial and "reporting" staff of the New York Times figuring out how to pour piss out of a boot.  An opening game of aerial bombardment with TCU, a nail biter with Missouri, a miraculous victory over Oklahoma, a decisive win over their overlords of Mighty Texas all culminating in a spectacle of something resembling football but which was really a descent into madness, MADNESS in The House that Henry Cisneros Built in San Antonio last Thursday night (this guy captures it in all of its insane glory:http://www.everydayshouldbesaturday.com/2011/12/30/2669863/and-in-san-antonio-we-were-all-departed-for-four-hours).  Essentially, two weapon enhanced high octane offenses came into contact with a like number of "defenses" bereft of talent and/or still hungover and the result was a frenzy of scoring and blood letting not known or seen before outside of a Cormac McCarthy novel.  Record number of points, yards, dead cornerbacks, flattened linebackers, pancaked defensive tackles, and cardiac arrests--the lady sitting behind died a couple of times along the way.  If you're a defensive asthetic and concerned with the bad taste of excitement in a game, you were surely disappointed.  If you were there that fateful night, you did your best to simply hang on and live as the roller coaster plunged downward and off the tracks only to be hurled upward into the sky, and to be rinsed and repeated over and over until the thing ended with gnashed teeth and garbled wailing and finally balloons descending from the roof and everyone on both sides staggering out into the night, doing their best not to wonder too hard about what they witnessed--one somehow lived through the shelling and turned their thoughts to a quite meadow and a brook (or, a cactus flat and an arroyo seco if you're from Texas) and maybe watching "Antiques Roadshow" or vomiting or something.  Never saw anything like it.  Not sure I ever want to again.  But, damn, it was something.

Didn't get any golf shit for Christmas and I'm thankful for that.