It’s been almost four years since I codified the various “Berg’s Laws” in one convenient place.

It’s high time I updated things.

Berg’s First Law of Liberal Iraq Commentary – “No liberal commentator is capable of addressing more than one of the President’s justifications for the War in Iraq at a time; to do so would introduce a context in which their argument can not survive”

Berg’s Corollary to Bissonnette’s Law – (Whenever someone introduces an “Old West” analogy into a discussion on civilian firearms ownership, the person can be presumed to be covering for absolute ignorance on the subject). Corollary: Whenever anyone says “people who favor guns are compensating for something, ifyaknowwhatImean”, know what they mean only in the most academic possible sense.

Berg’s Third Law of Human Resilience – After any disaster, whenever government and the media declare “there can not be any more survivors, and this is now a recovery operation”, they will be wrong.

Berg’s Fourth Law of Media/Sports Inversion – The Vikings will be contenders until the moment the local media actually believes they will be contenders. At that moment – be it pre-season or Week 12 – the season will fall irredeemably apart.

Berg’s Fifth Law of Historical Illteracy – 99% of the invocations of Godwin’s Law are done by 1% of the online population. Corollary: That 1% understands .000001% of the history required for a literate invocation of Godwin’s Law.

Berg’s Sixth Law of writing a Blog in a city full of people with dubious senses of Humor – To every joke, there is an equal and opposite inappropriately petulant reaction.

Berg’s Seventh Law of Liberal Blogging – When a Liberal issues a group defamation or assault on conservatives’ ethics, character or respect for liberty, they are projecting.

So yesterday was the first “round trip” commute – riding both ways – of the season.  Which means the first climb up Cathedral Hill of the season.

Make no mistake about it; by June, I’ll be zipping up Grand Hill like it’s hardly there (although Ramsey Hill is kinda the great white whale for me; maybe this year, maybe not.  Even when I was in my twenties, I didn’t ride up Ramsey Hill).

But the day-by-day hill that I face in my workadaddy, hugamommy routine is Cathedral Hill – the big hill from which the, doy, Cathedral of Saint Paul looks over downtown.

The BikeRadar map says it’s about a 100 foot climb from my office to the corner of Summit and Selby.  And in about three weeks, that’s all it’ll be.

But that first climb-out of the year is always a bear, even if you take the long way up the hill – up Wabasha to the 94/Capitol frontage road, and then up John ireland Boulevard.
But a smaller bear every year.  Two years ago, when I started bike-commuting, I ran out of wind aroud Marshall and had to walk it the rest of the way on my first attempt.  Last year, I made it to the top (in first gear, nice and slow and easy).

I did about the same yesterday, but feeling much better about the whole thing.

And by golly, it’s time to get on the road again!

Shucks!

I’m on my way to The Uptake’s undisclosed location in Saint Paul for a taping.

On the one hand, I’ve been told to be careful; “Uptake’s a bunch of hard-lefties; watch for the ambush”.  I’ve certainly encountered the group’s seamy side before.
On the other hand, I’m always up for an adventure. Things seem – before the fact – to be on the up-and-up.

We’ll see!

The unintended effects of populism.

The Steele melteown.

The end of the Oboneymoon.

The flooding. Oh, my, the flooding.
And all I got today is piercing headache,hacking cough, piercing headache and general run-downitude.

I haven’t had so much as a beer in weeks, but I feel hung over.

Through the grace of G-d and Nyquil (R), I should be back in action later today.  There probably won’t be a whooole lot of blogging until tomorrow.

I’ll be guesting on Marty Owings’ “Radio Free Nation” tonight.

The first hour will be the usual scrum.

The second hour will be about Minnesota’s proposed gay marriage amendment. I’ll be joining State Representative Phyllis Kahn (D) , Senator Warren Limmer (R), Thomas Prichard from the Minnesota Family Council and Out Front Minnesota’s Monica Meyer.

It starts at 7:30 PM right here.

For reasons too complicated yet mundane to go into, I wound up getting about 90 minutes worth of sleep on Wednesday night.

I checked the temperature as I waited for the bus; 31 degrees.

My plan: to throw my bike on the bus, and take a leisurely ride home in the afternoon, when it was (much) warmer.

And then the bus – running, for whatever reason, a minute or two early – went sailing past.

I did the math in my fatigue-fogged head; wait half an hour for the next bus and be fifteen minutes late for work, or jump on my bike and go for it, taking the short, but less-scenic and more-dangerous route (via Frogtown rather than Summit Avenue) to work, and be there before the next bus even got to my stop.

So I jumped on and started riding.

Now, remember – I said I was “fatigue-fogged”.

While it wasn’t windy, biking creates its own breeze, ergo its own wind chill.  And that was fine; I was wearing a sweatshirt and a ocuple of T’s.

But no gloves.

By the time I got a mile, to about Victoria, I was feeling it; I’d forgotten how badly hands can hurt when they’re cold.  I thought, alternately, about waiting for the bus (which was still close to half an hour away) or turning around and heading home, either to get gloves or to wait for the bus.

But I kept pedaling as I pondered, stopping at the odd stop sign to flex and rub my hands, before I resumed the pothole slalom that is Minnehaha Avenue through Frogtown.

End result: I made it, generally fine but with hands curled into frozen claws.  A long, hot shower in the office locker room cured most ills, though.

And so it’s time to get ready for another go-around!

…to have Johnny Roosh on the staff for many reasons…

…not the least of which is “on days like today, this blog’ll have some output”.

Personal, family and work-related stuff going on today; posting will be light until, likely, the afternoon.

Took the steed out for a spin last night.

Dayum, that felt good.

A little cold to ride it in to work this morning – I don’t quite trust the roads yet – but tomorrow morning is a definite possibility.

It’s close.  So close I can almost taste the road salt splashing in my face.

Bike commuting season seems to be darn near here.

I didn’t start until mid-June in 2007, because that was the earliest I could get my bike working.

Last year, I was raring to go on April 1 – but the weather, you may recall, didn’t start cooperating until the third week in April; we even had a snowstorm in the second week of the month.  Still and all, it was a great biking season for me; from April 20-somethingth until early October.  It felt great.

This year?  The ice is mostly off the roads; the daytime highs are in the forties and fifties.  The morning lows are still a tad chilly, and it looks like we’re in for a four-or-five day rainy stretch starting this weekend…

…but I don’t know that I care.  The bike’s in the shop for a tune-up as we speak; with any luck, I’ll tee up this year’s biking season Thursday morning.  And if the weather doesn’t totally close in, the weekend looks like a gorgeous one to kick off with a ride out to The Patriot, one of my favorite weekend diversions last year.

Just saying – I’m pretty excited about this.

…of my dad coming home from the office…

…and not leaving the house for three days.

Perhaps the greatest North Dakota blizzard of all was 43 years ago today (and tomorrow,and the next day).

This photo was taken near my hometown, Jamestown.

Yes, in North Dakota the power poles are 20-odd feet tall.

It’s “jokingly” captioned “I believe there is a train under here somewhere! “.   I remember seeing newspaper photos (years after the fact,  in the stacks at the library) of a  Northern Pacific passenger train stuck in a drift that pretty much buried the locomotives to the roof.

I’m doing my usual thing when I have a nasty cold; lots of fluids, rest (when I can – and I actually took a rare sick day @ work today), and eating lots of onions.

“Onions?”

Yep.  It’s part of the least appealing part of my anti-cold regimen.

I eat lots of onions for dinner – cheese and onion enchiladas, tonight, in this case – and pound a liter or two of water before bedtime, with a NyQuil chaser.  Then I curl up in sweats with a few extra blankets and a two-liter water bottle by my side, and try to sweat out the evening as hard as I can.

Doctors have spent the past 25 years poo-poohing the notion that this regimen works.  All I know is, it does; I can think of one cold in the past 20 years that it hasn’t cured, or nearly cured, overnight.

At any rate – I’ll be in full fighting fettle for Saturday night’s MOB party!  Or at least, fitter fettle than I was for the winter 2005 party, where I had bronchitis so bad I could barely get up from the table in the back and fill my customary role, circulating hyperactively about the place.

Anyway – where are those sweatpants?

Crushing headache, bodyaches, head cold.

If I had a jacuzzi, it’d be a great day to hammer back some Dayquil and vegg out in one.

Alas – unless the NARN picks up a jacuzzi dealer as a sponsor,they cut us a trade-out deal, and can have the thing installed by 9AM – it’ll be more like “wallow in the bathtub and to back to bed” for me today.

Carry on.

Charlie Quimby notes that Athis blog is blocked on the wifi system at Denver international:

Not sure if it’s the headline, the post or the general content of Shot in the Dark. Or just general prudery.

Hm.  How to approach this?

I’ll let each of the voices in my head have a say:

• Marketer Mitch: [Wockawocka bow bow] “The ladies’ve been talking…”
• Kos Diarist Mitch: ACTION ALERT!  PRESIDENT JUGHEAD IS REPRESSING TEH OPPOSITION!
• Aaron Landry Mitch: “It’s Norm Coleman’s fault.  I hate him more every day.”
• Joe Mitch Bodell: “Open a new socket, Chloe!”
• Bulgarian Mitch: “Вие не виждате, че всеки ден…”

Charlie eventually chalks it up to the material in the comment thread.

I knew it; Angryclown and Swiftee are FCC plants.

My day today:

1. Woke up late, fighting one of those toxic headaches.  Fought – successfully – the urge to herk. It did wipe out my morning blogging time, though.
2. Went to a pre-work appointment, headache and all.
3. Went to office. Now, I’m on like five projects right now. Four of them, I love.  One of them is bottled misery. Spent morning on bottled misery – headache and all.
4. Had soup for lunch.  Switched to one of the non-misery projects.  Headache gradually dissipated, although the work load did not.
5. Home.  Made dinner.  Put out brushfires.
6. Taking a moment to blog.
7. Next:  Finding nacho fixings in time for Burn Notice.

More tomorrow.

Supper last night:

1. Lightly brown a pound and a half of miscellaneous chicken meat.
2. Shred a couple of medium onions.
3. Throw the whole thing in a crock pot with a couple of those little 7-ounce cans of San Marcos Chipotle sauce (one can if you’re less spice-tolerant)
4. Let it cook for nine or ten hours.
5. Use for burrito or enchilada filling.

No, it’s not why posting was so light today.  But it’d have been totally worth if even if it were.

I’ll be guesting on Radio Free Nation on BlogTalkRadio tonight with Marty Owings and a cast of characters.

I’m the token conservative guest – one on three.

And it’s still not a fair fight.

I don’t have much patience for – I’ll try to be civil, here – really dumb arguments.

The one that I hear the most on blogs and talk shows, lately, is “you’re just reciting talking points”, stated as a way to simply dismiss an argument or point of view.

Let’s take a moment to unpack what a misguided and nonproductive statement that is, when abused – and these days, it most usually is abused.

Let’s take a hypothetical example:  Say you, a liberal, construct an argument about, hypothetically, a political issue, one that springs from your perspective.  That perspective has a lot of background to it; your background, your own life experiences, conclusions you’ve reached after a lifetime of thought and – since the issue in the example is a political one – bits and pieces of the political philosphy you’ve adopted. 

Given that you are a liberal, is it not reasonable that, in among the bits and pieces of your argument will have things in common with some of the overarching ideas and ideals of liberalism?

So what are you doing?

• Creating an argument based on your interpretation of a philosophy that you agree with – knowing that since you agree with the philosophy, and are not alone, that there may be points in common with other people? Or…
• “Reciting talking points?”

I thought about this while guesting on Marty Owings’ “Radio Free Nation” last weekend.  A caller responded to one of my statements with “you’re just reciting conservative talking points”.

And the possible responses ponged about my mind like four-year-old boys who’ve gotten into the chocolate espresso beans:

• Of course, the oldie but goodie: “Please show me where this memo is from which I supposedly get these “points”, because I sure never read it”.
• Given that these are supposedly “conservative talking points”, please tell me – who is the “authority” that makes these “points” up for the rest of us?  The “Conservative National Committee?”  There is no such author or authoring body! 
• Perhaps you mean “Republican” talking points, since there’s actually a group of officials that do that kind of thing for the GOP?  But wait!  Given the abysmal record of the National and State GOP in getting anything done over the past four-eight years, what makes you think that even if a GOP official were to send me some “talking points”, I’d use them?  What has the GOP done for us lately?
• I’m 46.  I’ve been “working” as a self-appointed pundit of sorts for most of my adult lifetime.  In that time, I’ve developed some form of opinion or another about just about every topic you can think of, from cuisine (Mediterranean!) to liquor (Polish Vodka!) to music (Springsteen, Richard Thompson, Tchaikowski, Mahler, Marah, Emmylou Harris!) to literature (Dostoevskii and Hemingway!) to sports (don’t care about much but Baseball!) to guitars (rosewood fingerboards!) to firearms (Garand, Colt, Heckler und Koch!) to politics (need I go into details?).  In every case, if I’ve bothered to develop an opinion, it’s because I’ve become convinced that “that’s the way it should be”, through a process whose intellectual rigor you are not equipped to understand – merely emulate, in your own way, in  your own mind.  In short, I don’t need anyone to give me “talking points”; I write my own. 
• The same, indeed, holds true for pretty much everyone (who doesn’t write for “Minnesota Progressive Project”, anyway). 

In other words – Duh.  I’m a conservative.  Some of the things I believe will be common to many, even most, other conservatives.  That’s why it’s called a “movement”, rather than a “completely random instance of applied interpersonal chaos theory”. 

I think the actual response I used with the caller was “You need to quit snacking on the lead paint chips in your efficiency apartment, go gather up the scraps of the pathetic excuse for a life that you are supposedly living, try to find a sack so you can sack up and head out on the street and try to make something other than “a piece of walking semi-sentient suet” out of yourself”. 

Karl Rove told me to say it.

It occurs to me – it’s been over a decade since an employer has sent me to “quality training”.

A toast to ten years of non-wasted time!

…my true love gave to me:

Twelve gorgeous mornings, eleven deranged liberals, ten panicked Kremlins, nine hot economies, eight imprisoned Cubans, seven Pershing missiles, six tired chimpanzees,

Five torn-down Berlin walls!

Four epic tax cuts, three cheesed-off commies, two times for choosing, and a shining city on a hill!

Before I forget – today’s my BlogBirthday. 

I’ve related the story a time or two; it was seven years ago today, whilst working at a rapidly-failing dotcom, that I read an article at Time Magazine about Andrew Sullivan and (here’s a time-capsule piece for you) the new breed of young conservative intellectuals…

…which featured a bit about Sullivan’s blog.  Which I read…

…and, after the kids were in bed, I hurried out to Blogger.com, set up the original Shot In The Dark, and scrambled to write my first post.

Anyway – thanks for keeping me company all this time!

…my true love gave to me:

Eleven deranged liberals, ten panicked Kremlins, nine hot economies, eight imprisoned Cubans, seven Pershing missiles, six tired chimpanzees,

Five torn-down Berlin walls!

Four epic tax cuts, three cheesed-off commies, two times for choosing, and a shining city on a hill!

I do love winter.  I’m not wild about shoveling, hauling kids to school when it’s below zero, or paying heating bills – but I do love the snow, and walking the dog on clear, brisk nights, and settling into a hot bath or a steam room after a cold day.  All to the good.

Still, I’m not going to kid you; seeing that the temperature bottomed out about two hours ago, and is going to basically rise hour-by-hour for the next five days, is one of the highlights of the year.

It was sixteen years ago tonight Zam was born.  He was two weeks late, covered in a bright scarlet rash from head to toe, and his forehead was pushed down over his eyes like a little puppy.

But he was sure adorable.

And underneath all of that awful teenageryness, he still kinda is.

Happy Birthday, Zam!

…my true love gave to me:

Six tired chimpanzees,
Five torn-down Berlin walls!

Four epic tax cuts, three cheesed-off commies, two times for choosing, and a shining city on a hill!

…my true love gave to me:

Five torn-down Berlin walls!

Four epic tax cuts, three cheesed-off commies, two times for choosing, and a shining city on a hill!