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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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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...

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One of  52,041 random quotes. Please CTRL-F5 to refresh the page.

	kgbreport.com Web

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(July 2000 and earlier)

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Saturday, March 22, 2008
posted by KGB at 12:03 AM (permalink)

Happy Birthday, Bill

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Friday, March 21, 2008
posted by KGB at 8:41 AM (permalink)

Political quote of the day

It was reported that Barack Obama's Secret Service name is 'Renegade,' while Hillary Clinton's is 'Evergreen.' That's true. Meanwhile, John McCain's Secret Service name is 'Enlarged Prostate.'
-Conan O'Brien

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posted by KGB at 6:52 AM (permalink)

Quote of the day

Why can't things be like they weren't?
-The Covert Comic

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posted by KGB at 6:46 AM (permalink)

Campaign poster of the day

(The Elder Party, via Rafal M. Sulejman)

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Thursday, March 20, 2008
posted by KGB at 2:53 AM (permalink)

Quote of the day

The first day of spring was once the time for taking the young virgins into the fields, there in dalliance to set an example in fertility for Nature to follow. Now we just set the clock an hour ahead and change the oil in the crankcase.
-E.B. White

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posted by KGB at 1:54 AM (permalink)

Why we're doomed, #596

(via Photobasement)

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Wednesday, March 19, 2008
posted by KGB at 6:39 AM (permalink)

Quote of the day

Nation, it's tempting to say that our economy is in the crapper. But I think that's unfair. It is past the crapper, down the tubes, out the illegal runoff pipe into the ocean where lobsters are feeding on it.
-Stephen Colbert

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posted by KGB at 6:00 AM (permalink)

Final Odyssey

Arthur C. Clarke, 12/16/1917-3/19/2008

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

A country's armed forces can no longer defend it; the most they can promise is the destruction of the attacker.

A faith that cannot survive collision with the truth is not worth many regrets.

I am an optimist; anyone interested in the future has to be, otherwise he would simply shoot himself.

I'm appalled by what we all see on the news every day- massacres, atrocities, injustices, outrages of all kinds. When I see what's happening, I sometimes wonder if the human race deserves to survive.

I'm sure the universe is full of intelligent life. It's just been too intelligent to come here.

If our wisdom fails to match our science, we will have no second chance. For there will be no one to carry our dreams across another Dark Age, when the dust of all our cities incarnadines the sunsets of the world.

It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value.

It may be that our role on this planet is not to worship God, but to create him.

It was the mark of a barbarian to destroy something one could not understand...

Perhaps we should thank the Taliban for finishing the task the Crusades began nine hundred years ago- proving beyond further dispute that Religion is incompatible with Civilization.

Reading computer manuals without the hardware is as frustrating as reading sex manuals without the software.

Religion is a disease promoted by starvation, because hungry people hallucinate, and then pray for food. This is why so many religions encourage fasting: it weakens the mind.

Science can destroy a religion by ignoring it as well as by disproving its tenets. No one ever demonstrated, so far as I am aware, the nonexistence of Zeus or Thor, but they have few followers now.

Sometimes I think we're alone in the universe. Sometimes I think we're not. In either case, the idea is quite staggering.

Technology is really civilization, let's face it.

The best measure of a man's honesty isn't his income tax return. It's the zero adjust on his bathroom scale.

The only real problem in life is what to do next.

The psychologist who famously remarked that chastity was the rarest of all sexual perversions might have added that Religion was the most common.

The Solar System is rather a large place, though whether it will be large enough for so quarrelsome an animal as Homo sapiens remains to be seen.

There is a time to battle against Nature, and a time to obey her. True wisdom lies in making the right choice.

There is a type of mind that will believe anything if it is sufficiently fantastic, and it is a waste of time arguing with it. No one has ever received much thanks for exposing credulity.

There is hopeful symbolism in the fact that flags do not wave in a vacuum.

This is the first age that's ever paid much attention to the future, which is a little ironic since we may not have one.

Unfortunately, most people do not understand even the basic elements of statistics and probability, which is why astrologers and advertising agencies flourish.

Utopia is very dull. That's the problem with science fiction. Smashing things is more interesting.

We have to abandon the idea that schooling is something restricted to youth. How can it be, in a world where half the things a man knows at 20 are no longer true at 40- and half the things he knows at 40 hadn't been discovered when he was 20?

When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

When you finally understand the universe, it will not only be stranger than you imagine, it will be stranger than you can imagine.

Why is it that almost every man, when confronted by an unhappy woman, immediately assumes that her unhappiness is somehow related to him?

As our own species is in the process of proving, one cannot have superior science and inferior morals. The combination is unstable and self-destroying.

Any teacher that can be replaced by a machine should be!

The Muslims are behaving like Christians, I'm afraid.

I don't believe in God but I'm very interested in her.

We seldom stop to think that we are still creatures of the sea, able to leave it only because, from birth to death, we wear the water-filled space suits of our skins.

One of the great tragedies of mankind is that morality has been hijacked by religion. So now people assume that religion and morality have a necessary connection. But the basis of morality is really very simple and doesn't require religion at all. It's this: "Don't do unto anybody else what you wouldn't like to be done to you." It seems to me that that's all there is to it.

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Tuesday, March 18, 2008
posted by KGB at 8:20 PM (permalink)

Old. And scary.

Someone who doesn't care if we spend the next 100 years occupying a foreign country should at least make the effort to learn the names of the parties involved.

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posted by KGB at 11:15 AM (permalink)

Dollars? We don't want your steenking dollars...

AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - The U.S. dollar's value is dropping so fast against the euro that small currency outlets in Amsterdam are turning away tourists seeking to sell their dollars for local money while on vacation in the Netherlands.

"Our dollar is worth maybe zero over here," said Mary Kelly, an American tourist from Indianapolis, Indiana, in front of the Anne Frank house. "It's hard to find a place to exchange. We have to go downtown, to the central station or post office."

That's because the smaller currency exchanges- despite buy/sell spreads that make it easier for them to make money by exchanging small amounts of currency- don't want to be caught holding dollars that could be worth less by the time they can sell them.

The dollar hovered near record lows on Monday, with one euro worth around $1.58 versus $1.47 a month ago.

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posted by KGB at 7:44 AM (permalink)

Quote of the day

The threat to men of great dignity, privilege and pretense is not from the radicals they revile; it is from accepting their own myth. Exposure to reality remains the nemesis of the great- a little understood thing.
-John Kenneth Galbraith

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posted by KGB at 6:36 AM (permalink)

Make certain the kids aren't around..

... before you look at this New Yorker cartoon.

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posted by KGB at 6:24 AM (permalink)

The Most Wonderful Time of the Year

I don't want to risk forgetting it, so here's the annual Shatner joke, for delivery this Saturday, March 22:

William Shatner is 77 today.

His hairpiece is 50.

Thank you. Thank you very much.

And may all your Christmases be white...

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posted by KGB at 6:13 AM (permalink)

Biblical

One of the most impressive weather pictures I've ever seen... the tornado that hit Atlanta last Friday night. Details here.

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Monday, March 17, 2008
posted by KGB at 7:07 AM (permalink)

Quote of the day

And you wanted to have sex with a hooker, but you didn't want to wear a condom? Really? That might not be scary if you were Client #1, but you were Client #9. I wear a condom if I'm client #9 at the deli.
-Seth Meyers, Saturday Night Live

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posted by KGB at 6:53 AM (permalink)

"Something sinister?"

"...However, in Governor Spitzer's case he got humiliated, disgraced and then the voters lost the guy they voted for. It is deeply scary to me that a few employees of the federal executive branch can start a train rolling that has such immense effects on the electoral process. Basically a few career civil servants have nullified the will of the voters of the Empire state, over something clearly wrong, I don't doubt that, but it's not a political crime, not treason, not terrorism..."

From a surprising source,via Crooks and Liars.

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Sunday, March 16, 2008
posted by KGB at 12:55 PM (permalink)

Remember... the John Adams mini-series begins tonight on HBO

Quotes from my favorite Founding Father:

[I]n politics the middle way is none at all.

Abuse of words has been the great instrument of sophistry and chicanery of party, faction, and division of society.

Fear is the foundation of most governments.

Great is the guilt of an unnecessary war.

I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy.

Let us dare to read, think, speak, and write.

Power always thinks it has a great soul and vast views beyond the comprehension of the weak; and that it is doing God's service when it is violating all his laws.

Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.

The essence of a free government consists in an effectual control of rivalries.

The middle way is no way at all. If we finally fail in this great and glorious contest, it will be by bewildering ourselves in groping for the middle way.

The revolution was effected before the war commenced. The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people.

There are two educations. One should teach us how to make a living and the other how to live.

There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty.

There is nothing I dread so much as a division of the Republic into two great parties, each arranged under its leader and converting measures in opposition to each other.

These bickerings of opposite parties, and their mutual reproaches, their declamations, their sing-song, their triumphs and defiances, their dismals and prophecies, are all delusion.

Twenty times in the course of my late reading have I been upon the point of breaking out, "This would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it!"

When people talk of the freedom of writing, speaking or thinking I cannot choose but laugh. No such thing ever existed. No such thing now exists; but I hope it will exist. But it must be hundreds of years after you and I shall write and speak no more.

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posted by KGB at 12:29 PM (permalink)

Quote of the day

Genius is more often found in a cracked pot than in a whole one.
-E.B. White

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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...