KGB Report by Kevin G. Barkes

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(July 2000 and earlier)

Saturday, May 24, 2008
posted by KGB at 9:27 AM (permalink)

Quote of the day

Well, in 2004, I expect to be campaigning for the reelection of President George W. Bush, and by 2008, I think I might be ready to go down to the old soldiers home and await the cavalry charge there.
-John McCain (8/1/2000 inteview on PBS)

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posted by KGB at 6:33 AM (permalink)

In Heaven, there is no beer. Or Google.

While it's reassuring to learn Google believes in the afterlife, you have to wonder why they won't permit you to access your stuff once you've shuffled off this mortal coil.

Maybe they had problems with, literally, Spam from Hell. You'd think it would be easy to block. I mean, Heaven and Hell must have different I.P. addresses, right?

The theological implications alone are staggering. To say nothing of the packet delay.

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Friday, May 23, 2008
posted by KGB at 12:17 AM (permalink)

Quote of the day

Some days you're the dog, some days you're the fire hydrant. And some days, when the matter transference machine malfunctions, you're the dog and the fire hydrant, screaming in unimaginable pain.
The Covert Comic

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posted by KGB at 12:09 AM (permalink)

The Graduate

Five years old, and granddaughter Leanna totally prepared to kick some serious kindergarten butt come this fall.

Of course, it was obvious from the start she was a force with which to be reckoned:

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Thursday, May 22, 2008
posted by KGB at 6:55 AM (permalink)

Quotes of the day

Victor Hugo (February 26, 1802 - May 22, 1885)

A creditor is worse than a slave-owner; for the master owns only your person, but a creditor owns your dignity, and can command it.

Adversity makes men, and prosperity makes monsters.

An intelligent hell would be better than a stupid paradise.

As the purse is emptied, the heart is filled.

Forty is the old age of youth; fifty is the youth of old age.

Liberation is not deliverance.

Men hate those to whom they have to lie.

Popularity? It is glory's small change.

The desert is where God is and Man is not.

The ones who live are the ones who struggle.

There is no such thing as a little country. The greatness of a people is no more determined by their number than the greatness of a man is determined by his height.

To reform a man, you must begin with his grandmother.

When God desires to destroy a thing, he entrusts its destruction to the thing itself. Every bad institution of this world ends by suicide.

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Wednesday, May 21, 2008
posted by KGB at 1:05 AM (permalink)

A new meaning for the word "joystick"

(The complete story is here. Thanks to Rafal M. Sulejman.)

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Tuesday, May 20, 2008
posted by KGB at 4:23 PM (permalink)

Useless web site of the day

Well, not entirely useless. It scares the cat off the keyboard...

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posted by KGB at 6:40 AM (permalink)

Quotes of the day

Cher (Cherilyn Sarkisian LaPierre) b. May 20, 1946

A girl can wait for the right man to come along but in the meantime she can have a wonderful time with the wrong ones.

I don't know how many more times I can beat this face into submission.

I would have gone home to my mother, but I'm not that crazy about my mother.

If grass can grow through cement, love can find you anywhere.

If Michelangelo painted in Caesar's Palace, would that make it any less art?

Mother told me a couple of years ago, "Sweetheart, settle down and marry a rich man." I said, "Mom, I am a rich man."

Sometimes I feel like an old hooker.

The only grounds for divorce in California is marriage.

The trouble with some women is that they get all excited about nothing- and then marry him.

I've come back so many times. Someone once told me that after World War III, the only things that will still be around are cockroaches and Cher.

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Monday, May 19, 2008
posted by KGB at 12:47 AM (permalink)

Quotes of the day

Ogden Nash (August 19, 1902 - May 19, 1971)

A dog's best friend is his illiteracy.

A family is a unit composed not only of children but of men, women, an occasional animal, and the common cold.

Any kiddie in school can love like a fool,
But hating, my boy, is an art.

Children aren't happy without something to ignore,
and that's what parents were created for.

A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of.

Every New Year is the direct descendant, isn't it, of a long line of proven criminals?

God in His wisdom made the fly,
And then forgot to tell us why.

I believe that people believe what they believe they believe.

I would live all my life in nonchalance and insouciance
Were it not for making a living, which is rather a nouciance.

Life is not having been told that the man has just waxed the floor.

Marriage is the alliance of two people, one of whom never remembers birthdays and the other who never forgets.

Merry Christmas, Nearly Everybody!

Middle age is when you've met so many people that every new person you meet reminds you of someone else.

Oh, what a tangled web do parents weave
When they think that their children are naive.

One man's remorse in another man's reminiscence.

People who have what they want are fond of telling people who haven't what they want that they really don't want it.

Progress might have been all right once, but it's gone on too long.

Senescence begins
And middle age ends
The day your descendents
Outnumber your friends.

The Bronx? No, thonx!

The cow is of the bovine ilk,
One end is moo,
The other milk.

The Frenches do not please the Germans,
Who call them names in hymns and sermons;
The Germans do not please the Frenches,
Who wish to shoot at them from trenches.
Now, anybody whom a German hates,
He presently exterminates,
But he who exterminates a French
Is never safe from Gallic revench,
But he who gets even with a German
Is obliterated like a vermin.
And so it goes for ages aeons
Between these neighboring Europeans.
I hope that such perpetual motion
Stays where it started, across the ocean.

There is only one way to achieve happiness on this terrestrial ball, and that is to have a clear conscience, or none at all.

To keep your marriage brimming
With love in the loving cup,
Whenever you're wrong, admit it;
Whenever you're right, shut up.

When called by a panther,
Don't anther.

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Sunday, May 18, 2008
posted by KGB at 9:26 PM (permalink)

What the hell were they thinking?

When you sell a poster like this,

you know some smart ass is going to remember this,

fire up a handy-dandy image editor and produce:

which then gets uploaded to CafePress, and the next thing you know:

you have dozens of Evillary! products available from Commentwear

I mean really, guys. This is the net equivalent of taping a "kick me" sign to the back of the high school schlemiel.

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posted by KGB at 6:46 AM (permalink)

Picture of the day

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posted by KGB at 6:06 AM (permalink)

Quotes of the day

Bertrand Russell, (May 18,1872-February 2, 1970)

A stupid man's report of what a clever man says can never be accurate, because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something he can understand.

Conventional people are roused to fury by departures from convention, largely because they regard such departures as a criticism of themselves.

Envy is the basis of democracy.

If a man is offered a fact which goes against his instincts, he will scrutinize it closely, and unless the evidence is overwhelming, he will refuse to believe it. If, on the other hand, he is offered something which affords a reason for acting in accordance to his instincts, he will accept it even on the slightest evidence.

In America everybody is of the opinion that he has no social superiors, since all men are equal, but he does not admit that he has no social inferiors, for, from the time of Jefferson onward, the doctrine that all men are equal applies only upwards, not downwards.

It is preoccupation with possessions, more than anything else, that prevents us from living freely and nobly.

It seems to be the fate of idealists to obtain what they have struggled for in a form which destroys their ideals.

Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education.

Men who are unhappy, like men who sleep badly, are always proud of the fact.

My sad conviction is that people can only agree about what they're not really interested in.

Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear.

No one gossips about other people's secret virtues.

One of the most interesting and harmful delusions to which men and nations can be subjected is that of imagining themselves special instruments of the Divine Will.

One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision.

One of the symptoms of an impending nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important.

One should respect public opinion insofar as is necessary to avoid starvation and keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny.

Our great democracies still tend to think that a stupid man is more likely to be honest than a clever man, and our politicians take advantage of this prejudice by pretending to be even more stupid than nature made them.

Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons.

Religions which deprive the pleasures of sense, drive men to seek the pleasures of power. Throughout history power has been the vice of the ascetic.

So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence.

The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd; indeed, in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a wide-spread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible.

The fundamental defect of fathers is that they want their children to be a credit to them.

The people who are regarded as moral luminaries are those who forego ordinary pleasures themselves and find compensation in interfering with the pleasures of others.

The secret to happiness is to face the fact that the world is horrible, horrible, horrible...

The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.

There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge.

There is no nonsense so errant that it cannot be made the creed of the vast majority by adequate governmental action.

To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness.

War does not determine who is right- only who is left.

We must be skeptical even of our skepticism.

What men want is not knowledge, but certainty.

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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...