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Joz News can now project that Al Franken, the Democratic candidate, will win the Minnesota Senate race.

After all the recounts and contested ballots are resolved, Fanken will be certified the winner today by some 250 votes.

I gotta say, the Danville area (very rural area where I grew up) is comin’ up.  Not only is there a Target only 30 mins away, the supermarkets now have things like MorningStar Farms and Naked Juice!  I asked the clerk at the grocery store a couple years ago if they had Naked Juice and she gave me this look like as if I’m some sort of pervert asking something very inappropriate and she’s about to ring the silent security button underneath the register.  Anyway, my friend Josh took us to this Thai place that now exists in the next town over.  Excited to see what small town Thai is like, we obliged.  The results are as follows, from my review posted on Google:

So this is all you’ve got in this area for Thai food as of 2008. Apparently it’s some sort of private dining club and not an official restaurant or something. I don’t know, a friend of ours took us here, and he’s a member I guess. He told us he made reservations and we were like “uhhh… you need reservations for a restaurant on a Monday night in Bloomsburg?” He was right, we did. It’s fairly small - has probably between 10-15 tables, and it got almost completely full after we arrived.

The service was ok. We were not asked if we wanted drinks. The food was hit & miss. We had some amazing pineapple rice, but my pad thai was probably the worst I’d ever had. All in all, it was ok. It’s all you got round these parts tho!

I spent my Christmas in Danville, Pennsylvania - the small town that I grew up in (pop. 5,000).  I took a trip to my childhood mall, the Columbia Mall, which turned out to be quite depressing.  Long gone are days of a thriving mall full of shops and crowded with people.  We went there the day after Christmas, which is usually a more busy shopping day.  Now this is a pretty small mall, single floor, some couple thousand feet in length perhaps (if you’re familiar with LA/OC, it’s basically a single story version of Sherman Oaks Fashion Square or Laguna Hills Mall).  Anyway, on this day after Christmas, there were probably less than 200 people in the mall.  One of the most buzzing areas of my childhood, the arcade and department store next to the arcade, instilled a sense of depression in me.  The beloved arcade of my youth, which I’ve painfully watched shrink over the years, is closed completely.  The department store next to it, one of the end department store spaces, one of the biggest spaces in the mall, has been closed for years.  This end of the mall used to be buzzing and full of traffic, and me and my girlfriend stood there, alone.  KB Toys is gone, the music store is 75%ing off a lot of items (bad sign?), and the amount of empty spaces in the mall is daunting as well as depressing.  The mall is just depressing.  Look at this Christmas bear in the mall, he is depressed:

We went through the mall and counted the number of stores open vs. closed.  Excluding the stands in the middle of the mall, of which there were perhaps 10, the total number turned out to be 31 stores open vs. 19 closed - only 61% of the mall’s real stores are open.  I’m not sure that it’ll be there next time I go back

While it’s simple to declare this a result of the poor economy, I believe there are other forces at work here.  Guess what opened very close to the mall just a couple years ago!?  That’s right, Wal-Mart.  During my trip I also happened to watch the movie “Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price”.  One of the tenets of the movie is how smaller/family/privately-owned stores die when Wal-Mart shows up.  There are a lot of stores in and around the plaza which houses this particular Wal-Mart.  This area, less than a mile away from the mall, is very much alive, while the mall is dying.  I’m not sure why the Wal-Mart didn’t open in the mall, as the aforementioned large end-mall retail space has been available for many years.  Either way, that whole area is depressing.  The only good thing out of it is that there is a Panera Bread there now, near the Wal-Mart.  To add insult to injury, the Wal-mart and surrounding stores are located on top of this steep hill type thing, where you wouldn’t even know they were there when driving by if not for a sign or two, while the mall is in plain sight right next to the interstate.

What’s up dude, you want USA Flag tattoos or Glow Crosses!?

Buckhorn, PA

So I got this here iPhone about half a year ago.  I was thinking of doing a review of it as my blog was going to be up not too long after that.  But alas, the blog didn’t really get going until about a month later than I would have liked to write a review… plus I wasn’t sure I was going to write one in the first place.

Regardless!  I gotta say this: I recently downloaded some new apps for my iPhone prior to going on Christmas vacation, and after installing Google Earth, Public Radio Tuner, Ocarina, and The Price is Right… I was just like “damn, AMAZIIIIIIIIIIIING!”  This was probably the fifth time I’ve had this type of reaction to some sort of iPhone related thing.  I mean, I’ve said a lot of “WOW!”’s, but to get to the amazing shouting levels is not the easiest thing.

Instead of going on about the awesomeness that is iPhone, the convenience of it, all the help and time saving it provides, the beauty of the design and interface, the great hardware features, the intuitiveness and comfort of using it, the endless expansion and enhancement of it due to the App Store… I just want to say what I’ve said to others a number of times: The iPhone is probably the most amazing piece of technology to date.  It’s just one of those few things that actually seems like it’s from 2007/2008.  Just amazing.

In the last of my series of negative posts in a row here: Oh my god, WHAT IN THE WORLD IS WRONG WITH PEOPLE.

So I got this question as part of a recent email from my British buddy Sam who just started working for the NHS as his first major job:

…I’m entitled to at least 5 weeks annual leave/holiday every year for this job. Oh speaking of which someone at work mentioned that people in the US are only entitled to only 2 weeks annual/holiday leave every year? Trey said this was true but I’m surprised if it applies for the whole country as I didn’t think it was that bad for something like that? (if so tell Obama that needs to change!).

 …and isn’t two weeks somewhat of a good start?  Don’t you get only one week at many places?  What’s more unacceptable is as follows:  I work for a contractor, but I work full time, 40-hour weeks, and yet I don’t get any sort of actual health insurance from them, and I don’t get sick days.  All I really get is paid holidays (as in, national holiday individual days), and even that only started after six months of work.  So, a couple months ago I was out sick for two or three days and as a result I do not get paid for those days.  So basically, I get penalized for being sick… and am provided with no health insurance… and am working full-time - HOW IS THIS LEGAL?

The lack of respect for labor in this country is disgusting.  More and more-so as you go down the wage scale.  For example, in the American retail sector, you are really treated as a second class piece of shit, in most cases.  I worked at a store in a Westfield Mall a few years ago, and besides the poor pay, when the holidays roll around, you better lay down on the ground and let everybody walk all over you.  As one example, at the start of the holiday shopping season you get these notices that employees must park in this way far away parking lot, from which you either have to walk all the way back/to the mall in the cold, or wait for a shuttle van to pick you up, which will be playing Christmas music (you know, since mall employees haven’t had a chance to hear it every second of the work day - whoever the genius is that thought of that one - there could be a whole blog entry lambasting Westfield).  Anyway, so we had to park in this far away lot because “damn… ooohhhh… the shoppers are so much more important and better than us and have to take all the close spots, so you’d better smile at them a lot!”  Ok… so why is it that when you go to a university, all the front/good parking is reserved for the professors?  Are they not employees of the school?  And the students paying customers who wish to attend the university?

The university model makes sense to me and is a great display of respect for labor.  I guess labor is only somewhat respected in America when it is labor of high income.  There is something that really rubs me the wrong way with that.  And even then you don’t get much vacation time.

I was going through FAIL Blog’s YouTube videos and had the ultimate WTF face when I was watching this one:

That is just sad.  I’m thinking this has to be in North Korea, yet most of the video comments seem to say that this is in Japan?  I can’t imagine this being Japan.

I’m disappointed in Apple selling their iPhone through Wal-Mart now.  You know, cause Wal-Mart sucks majorly… and how can such a liberal company team up with such a conservative one!?  Disgusting!  It’s like WTF JARBZ!?

The ability to manipulate a machine does not make one an intelligent person.

I thought of this because you often hear automatic praise and high intelligence attribution to those who are, for example, computer programmers.  “Oh, he’s a programmer, he’s so smart.”  “He works with computers, you know, he’s smart.”  But is he, or she?  It is my assertion that there are a large number of such people out there who are fools when it comes to other subjects, issues, or dealings.  This is, at its base, obvious, and of course applicable to any field, be it doctors, lawyers, what have you.  I mean, I’m sure there’s a decent correlation between people in these higher wage fields and intelligence, but it certainly is not high enough to be considered a given.  I’ve noticed that persons in such positions often unfortunately assume their own intelligence as well.  Though sometimes true, one should not think it to be automatic.  Though if one does not think it to be automatic, they’re probably smarter than the one who does.

And no, I don’t think I’m the smartest guy on planet Earth.

…how about the fucking ability to manipulate those blockquote quotes (mine) = fail.