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ISSN: 1525-898X
Observations by and for the vaguely disenchanted by Kevin G. Barkes

 

Conceived above a saloon, delivered into this world by a masked man identified by his heavily sedated mother as Captain Video, raised by a kindly West Virginian woman, a mild-mannered former reporter with modest delusions of grandeur and no tolerance of idiots and the intellectually dishonest.

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network solutions made me a child pornographer!
The sordid details...

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Anniversary

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Requiem for a fictional Scotsman

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Oh my God! They killed Library!! Those bastards!!!

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Elegy to a Mostly Maine Coon

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It's a Hap-Hap-Happy Day

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A Pittsburgher in the Really Big City

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Da Burg Annat

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I Have Issues

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Yeah, yeah, I'm inspired

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At least the rivers freeze in Pittsburgh

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He knows if yinz is a jagoff

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Please support KGB Report by making your amazon.com purchases through our affiliate link:
 

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dcl dialogue online!

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no. we're not that kgb.

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KGB, CIA linked

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The Carbolic Smoke Ball
Superb satire, and based in Pittsburgh!

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Americans United for Separation of Church and State

"No religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States."
Article VI, U.S. Constitution

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Geek of the Week, 7/16/2000

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Cruel Site of the Day, 7/15/2000

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miscellany

Hard to describe.

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"a breezy writing style and a cool mix of tidbits"

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Our riveting and morally compelling...

Privacy statement

One of  51,847 random quotes. Please CTRL-F5 to refresh the page.

	kgbreport.com Web

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(July 2000 and earlier)

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Thursday, June 28, 2007
posted by KGB at 11:11 AM (permalink)

Compassionate conservatism gone rabid

"Before beginning the drive, Mitt Romney put Seamus, the family's hulking Irish setter, in a dog carrier and attached it to the station wagon's roof rack. He'd built a windshield for the carrier, to make the ride more comfortable for the dog. (a 12-hour drive.)

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"As the oldest son, Tagg Romney commandeered the way-back of the wagon, keeping his eyes fixed out the rear window, where he glimpsed the first sign of trouble. "Dad!" he yelled. "Gross!" A brown liquid was dripping down the back window, payback from an Irish setter who'd been riding on the roof in the wind for hours.

"As the rest of the boys joined in the howls of disgust, Romney coolly pulled off the highway and into a service station. There, he borrowed a hose, washed down Seamus and the car, then hopped back onto the highway. It was a tiny preview of a trait he would grow famous for in business: emotion-free crisis management."

What's particularly stunning here is that this horrific behavior is offered as something to be admired. Emotion-free crisis management?! How about emotion-free animal cruelty? After hours in the hot sun and near-hurricane wind noise, Romney is lucky all the unfortunate canine did was relieve himself. I hope poor Seamus at least had the opportunity to bite Romney in the ass or take a dump in his shoes when they reached their destination.

The entire article is here.

"He who is cruel to animals becomes hard also in his dealings with men. We can judge the heart of a man by his treatment of animals."
-Immanuel Kant

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posted by KGB at 10:38 AM (permalink)

Happy 81st, Mel...

Mel Brooks, June 28, 1926

As long as the world is turning and spinning, we're gonna be dizzy and we're gonna make mistakes.

Bad taste is simply saying the truth before it should be said.

Critics are like eunuchs at an orgy. They just don't get it.

Every human being has hundreds of separate people living under his skin.

Everything we do in life is based on fear, especially love.

Hope for the best,
expect the worst.
Life is a play.
We're unrehearsed.

Humor is just another defense against the universe.

I've been accused of vulgarity. I say that's bullshit.

If God wanted us to fly, He would have given us tickets.

If Shaw and Einstein couldn't beat death, what chance have I got? Practically none.

Look at Jewish history. Unrelieved lamenting would be intolerable. So, for every ten Jews beating their breasts, God designated one to be crazy and amuse the breast-beaters. By the time I was five I knew I was that one.

Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.

Usually when a lot of men get together, it's called war.

What is the toughest thing about making film? Putting in the little holes. The sprocket holes are the worst. Everything else is easy, but all night you have to sit with that little puncher and make the holes on the side of the film. You could faint from that work. The rest is easy. The script is easy, the acting is easy, the directing is a breeze... but the sprockets will tear your heart out.

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posted by KGB at 9:33 AM (permalink)

Quote of the day

I love the fact that 'spam' has come to mean unwanted garbage on the Internet. Every day I receive four or five offers to add three or four inches to my penis. All of which I accept. And now I have a nine-foot penis.
-Eric Idle, "The Greedy Bastard Diary"

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Wednesday, June 27, 2007
posted by KGB at 10:29 AM (permalink)

I got your 'Flipper' right here, pally...

"The activities and fates of 29 lone, sociable dolphins are well documented (Table 3). More than two-thirds were males (17/25 whose sex was known), and slightly more than half were immatures (15/28 whose age was estimated). Most were reported to have near-daily interactions with humans and infrequent interactions with conspecifics. One lone, sociable dolphin was locally acclaimed for 'saving' a drowning boy ('Flipper'); however, others achieved notoriety for 'abducting' people who then had to be saved by boat (e.g. 'Donald', 'Percy'). At least 13 dolphins had periods of mis-directed sexual behaviour towards humans, buoys, and/or vessels, and approximately two-thirds (at least 18) directed aggressive behaviour towards humans. Dolphin-to-human aggression sometimes resulted in such serious human injury as unconsciousness, a ruptured spleen, and broken ribs, (e.g. 'Donald', an unnamed dolphin from Florida Keys) or even death ('Tiao'). At least eight dolphins were reported to cause damage to human property, primarily vessels and fishing gear. Aggression, damage to human property, and/or disruption of fishing operations resulted in conflict with local people in several cases (e.g. 'JoJo', 'Nudgy', 'Percy')".
Swimming with Wild Cetaceans in the Southern Hemisphere

And just be thankful they don't have opposable thumbs.

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Tuesday, June 26, 2007
posted by KGB at 4:25 AM (permalink)

If you're an adult, you've probably always wanted to do this:

The latest software update to Apple TV links it to YouTube, so instead of wasting time in front of the computer screen, I can waste time lying on the couch and watching great stuff like this on a big-screen TV:

In fact, there's an entire category of microwave oven destruction. I'd still like my personal jetpack, but the 21st century does have its perks.

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posted by KGB at 2:54 AM (permalink)

What fresh hell is this?

I've worked with complex software systems for 25 years. For a number of years I specialized in OpenVMS systems and spent nights and weekends getting dead systems back up and running. I've walked into a smoke-filled computer room at 6 am on a Monday morning to discover a malfunctioning air conditioner, three crashed hard drives and a dead cpu, and had them all up and running again by lunchtime.

Still, nothing puts the fear of God in me more than attempting to upgrade a personal computer to a new version of a Windows operating system. I've never had an in situ upgrade work properly, despite days of preparation. If I have to go to a new Windows OS, I either wipe the disk or buy a new computer.

Even that approach is not without risk. I spent a day and a half getting a new Vista laptop to network with my XP machine. So, it was with a sense of vindication and great sympathy that I read Andy Pennell's tale of horror. And he works for Microsoft.

Isn't this the 21st Century? I can live without the personal jet pack, but is it too much to ask for an operating system that can be installed on a personal computer in less than a week?

I say it again:

Calling Windows Vista Microsoft's most advanced operating system is like saying Moe was the smart stooge.

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Monday, June 25, 2007
posted by KGB at 11:03 AM (permalink)

Headline-related Question of the Day

Christina Aguilera Is Reading Scripts

Are her lips moving?

(I don't know what it is, but something about this photo
weirds me out. It looks almost like an Alberto Vargas pin-up.
Living humans just don't look like this. She has more paint than
a Sherwin-Williams store.)

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posted by KGB at 4:13 AM (permalink)

The ultimate quote

Never play cards with a man named Doc. Never eat at a place called Mom's. Never sleep with a woman whose troubles are worse than your own.
-Nelson Algren

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Sunday, June 24, 2007
posted by KGB at 6:49 AM (permalink)

Okay, what do you really think?

The new secrets are up at PostSecret. Some are definitely not work or little-kid safe.

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Copyright © 1987-2024 by Kevin G. Barkes
All rights reserved.
Violators will be prosecuted.
So there.  
The kgb@kgb.com e-mail address is now something other than kgb@kgb.com saga.
kgbreport.com used to be kgb.com until December, 2007 when the domain name broker Trout Zimmer made an offer I couldn't refuse. Giving up kgb.com and adopting kgbreport.com created a significant problem, however. I had acquired the kgb.com domain name in 1993, and had since that time used kgb@kgb.com as my sole e-mail address. How to let people know that kgb@kgb.com was no longer kgb@kgb.com but rather kgbarkes@gmail.com which is longer than kgb@kgb.com and more letters to type than kgb@kgb.com and somehow less aesthetically pleasing than kgb@kgb.com but actually just as functional as kgb@kgb.com? I sent e-mails from the kgb@kgb.com address to just about everybody I knew who had used kgb@kgb.com in the past decade and a half but noticed that some people just didn't seem to get the word about the kgb@kgb.com change. So it occurred to me that if I were generate some literate, valid text in which kgb@kgb.com was repeated numerous times and posted it on a bunch of different pages- say, a blog indexed by Google- that someone looking for kgb@kgb.com would notice this paragraph repeated in hundreds of locations, would read it, and figure out that kgb@kgb.com no longer is the kgb@kgb.com they thought it was. That's the theory, anyway. kgb@kgb.com. Ok, I'm done. Move along. Nothing to see here...