…we’re movin’ on up!!!

Big news on the homefront in the past week; me and Jenny have just achieved the ‘american dream’ by purchasing our first house!

The offer has been accepted for a ‘bungalow’ style house on 52nd Street here in Milwaukee in the Washington Heights neighborhood, 4 bedrooms, nice oak floors, a real fireplace, a good kitchen (with pantry), and best of all it’s in really good shape.

It’s amazing how fast all this came together, just last Tuesday we signed with a real-estate agent, we checked out the house on Thursday night, and on Friday we put an offer in. The funny thing is we’ve spent more time deciding what kind of shower curtain to buy compared to the biggest purchase we’ll probably ever make. Our friend Chuck has been handling all the financing for us, and without him this wouldn’t even be close to happening, so a huge amount of gratitude goes to him.

Hopefully everything works out, and if it does, we close on the 2nd of December, just over a month from now. Needless to say things are going to be a bit crazy between now and then, but we’re very excited about having something that’s ours. More to follow I’m sure..

You surely recognize the SC Johnson (formerly Dow) Scrubbing Bubbles, but I noticed last night at the supermarket they’re getting a makeover, and wanted to know why.

Dear SC Johnson,

While meandering down the cleaning products isle at our local grocery store last night, I couldn’t help but notice something different about the little Scrubbing Bubbles mascots that I’ve known and loved since childhood.

What caught my eye last night was what appears to be a new look for the Scrubbing Bubbles themselves that I saw on a box of the “Scrubbing Bubbles Fizz-Its” product. The new Scrubbing Bubbles appear to have a slightly forward leaning stance and inward arched eyebrows, compared to their Scrubbing Bubbles counterparts that we all know and love, who display a more docile posture and wider, friendlier smile.

I immediately looked at all the Scrubbing Bubbles products in the aisle to see if this new posture was a trend or merely an anomaly, a new addition to the Scrubbing Bubbles family perhaps. I was surprised to see that most of the Scrubbing Bubbles line of products featured these new Scrubbing Bubbles characters, with the exception of the classic Scrubbing Bubbles Aerosol Cleaner. For some reason it still had the previous generation of Scrubbing Bubbles displayed on it’s packaging.

While I can certainly understand that the new tougher, more aggressive posturing is meant to imply that the Scrubbing Bubbles are tougher than ever on dirt, grime, and stains, I must admit I felt a slight pang of sadness in my heart for the Scrubbing Bubbles characters of old still feature on the Aerosol Cans.

With a cheery smile and a ‘can-do’ attitude, those Scrubbing Bubbles characters of yesteryear took on the uncleanliness of our houses with all the fervor, resolve, and determination that represent many of the outstanding qualities that make America what it is today.

Now of course, I welcome the new tougher Scrubbing Bubbles into our home, but hope that the marketing folks at SC Johnson keep our older more traditional Scrubbing Bubbles friends around in some role at least, if for no other reason that to remind loyal consumers such as myself of a simpler less hectic time, when we could always count on household chores to be brightened up by the happy faces of the Scrubbing Bubbles.

Thanks for your time, and all the wonderful products SC Johnson makes!

Daniel Cody

Milwaukee, WI

Winter is starting to set in on Milwaukee, which means three things are garnering attention again: Red Wings Hockey, kicking ass in my fantasy football league, and Friday night fish fries.

Fish fries are a longstanding tradition in many parts of the Midwest, but no one that I’ve seen takes them as seriously as people from Wisconsin. What is a fish fry you may ask?

From what I have seen living in many parts of the Midwest, the traditional Friday night fish fry started out (and remains strictly as such in some less than fish-fry-committed places) as a method for getting around the ‘Thou Shalt Not Eat Meat on Fridays’ Lent tradition. Fridays during Lent, the whole family would pile in the car and head to their local church where a fish fry was usually being served for a small ‘donation’. The church put it on both for the ‘donation’ factor, but also to facilitate good ‘fellowship’ among it’s congregation.

This is probably why so many of the oldest (and best) fish fries are still done in church basements.

Well it turned out that these fish fries – which is breaded or battered cod or haddock served with tartar sauce, rye bread, cole slaw, and french fries or potato pancakes, all typcially served in an ‘all you can eat’ fashion – were pretty tasty. Soon word spread to the non-believers and casual Christians (who you could barely get in a church on Sunday, much less a Friday), and regular restaurants started picking up the traditions adding their own small changes and flare. Thus, a tradition was born.

These days, almost every dining establishment in the city has a Friday night fish fry of some sort, so it can be hard to choose which one is worth your dime.

That’s why I was happy to see local food critic Dennis Getto run a special Fish Fry roundup in a recent article for the Journal Sentinel. Milwaukee citizens rate their favorite fish fry establisments in a number of different categories, and Getto chimes in with his personal picks as well. All in all, it’s a good – but naturally incomplete – list of places to head in Milwaukee when you’re looking for a satisfying low-priced night out.

My personal Favorite: Slim’s Bar & Grill on 2nd Street in the 5th Ward.

Today’s “Christians Gone Wild” post:A religious wacko who goes by ‘Reverend’ Fred Phelps wants to put up a monument to cheer on the brutal killing of Matthew Shepard, a gay college kid from Wyoming who was tied to a fencepost and beaten to death back in 1998 for being homosexual.

Sounds great until you hear the message another one of these self described ‘reverends’ – who no doubt got his idea straight from the mouth of god – wants the monument to proclaim:
“Matthew Shepard entered Hell October 12, 1998, at age 21 in defiance of God’s solemn warning: Thou shalt not lie with mankind as with womankind; it is abomination. Leviticus 18:22.”

Folks, you just can’t make this kind of disillusional detachment from reality up.

The kicker though is he wants the ‘monument’ displayed on public land in Casper Wyoming – the town Shepard was killed in. You see, for these holy high rollers, it’s not enough just to believe in their particular brand of fucked up fanaticism.. No, no, they want to slam that message down the throats of everyone and anyone else in sight. Faith for these kinds of people doesn’t mean quiet introspection and finding your own way to god, it means getting up on the Mount and blaring your message so loud it drowns everything else out.

I’m the first to admit that belief in a higher power defies logic, but people like the Rev. Phelps are not only illogical, they’re becoming more and more unreasonable and irrational as they increasingly think the world is sliding into some sort of moral tar-pit. Of course, they also think they’re the sole saviors for society.

What I want to know is where are the religious leaders in Casper on the issue? Someone needs to bitchslap Fred with an New Testament and tell him that god doesn’t kill people out of anger or to spite them or to prove a point anymore, and if he’s going to continue to quote the Old Testaments fire and brimstone routine, he might want to to flip a page or two ahead and take the following passage just as seriously as the one he wishes to engrave on the monument:
“Thou shalt not avenge, nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people, but thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. – Leviticus 19:18“.

So where’s the love Fred?? And if we’re going to literally interpret the Bible, whats up with no beard and that haircut???

“Ye shall not round the corners of your heads, neither shalt thou mar the corners of thy beard” – Leviticus 19:27″

Of course, that’s the deal with people like Ole’ Fred. They can dish out literal interpretations of the bible, but they sure as hell don’t want to apply them to themselves.

The real threat to society are the people like Fred Phelps who incite hatred against those who are different than themselves and promote violence against those people in the name of god.

I have a feeling that the Hell Fred will have to deal with when his time is over will be much much worse than the hell he assumes Matthew Shepard is suffering in right now.

And now for today’s laugh…

Jorge Lopez, MCSE, breaks down “Windows vs. Linux on the Server and the Desktop”:

Linux is popular with the freeloading crowd that feels justified stealing all their music, movies and software for free. But with Windows XP, and even more so in the upcoming Longhorn, activities that infringe on a corporation’s intellectual property are becoming harder and riskier to engage in.

I have dabbled with Mandrake Linux for a day or so, and I was shocked by how few preference-gathering applications were running in the background and how it did absolutely no “calling home”, never even contacting the Mandrake server to make sure my product’s license key was intact.

Hey Jorge, I read McBride’s press releases daily too! Sweet!

Good news on the Open Source software front: the latest version of Samba (which provides things like file sharing and print services to PCs) is over twice as fast as Microsoft’s latest server offering, Windows Server 2003, according to recent tests run by IT Week.

Yes indeed, an Open Source product beats Windows at it’s very own game, and for free, proving that software doesn’t have to be expensive to be superior.

In a move of unrivaled leadership, the George Bush re-election campaign website has hopped on the latest ‘down with the people’ bandwagon, and started their own campaign weblog.

While the whole blog format works well for campaigns like Howard Dean and Wesley Clark, does simply recyling white house press releases onto a campaign website and calling it a weblog really make it a weblog? Or is the incumbant campaign just sensing a ‘hot new trend’ in campaigning and jumping on board without really understanding the medium?

Bush’s little motorcade just rolled in front of me on the way to work this morning, and I was mildly amused to see two people on the corner next to me flip him off as he passed.

He’ll be giving his $2000 per plate luncheon about 2 blocks from my office in about an hour and a half, and there are alerady people lining up to protest his visit. The Milwaukee police dept., in a move that reaks of a bad Orwelian nightmare, will be video taping protestors today “so no one could complain of unfair treatment”. Right…. They pulled this out at the Anti-War protests here in town before the Iraq war as well, and the police chief never answered any questions about why the city police department was taping it’s citizens without their knowledge. Of course, they never seemed to roll the camera’s for “Pro-War protests” for some reason. Maybe it’s because those people are never treated unfairly?

Anticipating rolling camera’s, I combed my hair real nice today and shaved. After all, who wants to look bad on camera?

Will have more as the day rolls on.