Jack’s Old & Busted Blog

Find the highest and lowest gas prices in your area (fueleconomy.gov). This is just one of many interesting and useful links found at firstgov.gov (website) (new nickels!?).

Wristwatch merchants Tokyoflash.com (website) have updated their site. I ordered from them a while back on a whim and was very impressed with the service. Great, fun watches.

Well, I finished my first official bicycle race yesterday at Har-Ber Meadows. It was a “citizen-class” race, which means it was made up of people who a) have never raced before, or b) are former Olympians who haven’t raced in a year. The course was a nice 1.1 mile loop around a little converted swamp man-made lake. We raced for 20 minutes plus two laps, which took me about 30 minutes to complete, averaging 18.9 mph. It only took the winner about 27 minutes, however. It didn’t help that my right cleat broke on the second lap, but I don’t think it would have made much of a difference. The hardest part for me was getting used to making quick turns in a big crowd of bikes. It’s unnerving when you’ve never done it before and you imagine a giant pileup of expensive aluminum and titanium and stuff. I did beat the 14-year-old on the Schwinn and the guy who boasted about putting “150 pounds of air in my tires” and immediately got two flats. I’ll do it again, though, and I’ll check my cleats, too.

(riverfronttimes.com): This turtleneck-sweatered Jaguar shill has so desecrated his Policeman legacy that we’re not entirely convinced the current soft-rock incarnation isn’t the original Sting’s evil twin. He is, without question, the most hated man in rock. A better question is: Who’re numbers two through ten?

Funny, and dead-on. I would have picked about three of the list, though.

(wikipedia):
The word fascism has come to mean any system of government resembling Mussolini’s, that

* exalts nation and sometimes race above the individual,
* uses violence and modern techniques of propaganda and censorship to forcibly suppress political opposition,
* engages in severe economic and social regimentation, and
* espouses nationalism and sometimes racism (ethnic nationalism).

In an article in the 1932 Enciclopedia Italiana, written by Giovanni Gentile and attributed to Benito Mussolini, fascism is described as a system in which ‘The State not only is authority which governs and molds individual wills with laws and values of spiritual life, but it is also power which makes its will prevail abroad…. For the Fascist, everything is within the State and… neither individuals or groups are outside the State…. For Fascism, the State is an absolute, before which individuals or groups are only relative.’

Mussolini in a speech delivered on October 28, 1925, stated the following maxim that encapsulates the fascist philosophy: ‘Tutto nello Stato, niente al di fuori dello Stato, nulla contro lo Stato.’ (’Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State’.)”

Saw this ad for a tv-refrigerator on teevee tonite (lge.com). It’s the perfect accessory for the American lifestyle!

I’m definitely not a “Dominique” (bestwigoutlet) (via rivets).