If you’re attending the Millard Fillmore Golf Tournament and/or the Post MilF party next month – or even if you’re not – I need to draw your attention to something of utterly dire importance.

Learned Foot is taking votes to determine which type of sausage will be served at the party.  The choice is between Beer Brats and Italian Sausage and Chorizo (which belongs only on omelettes anyway).

I need you to go to Kool Aid Report and vote for Italian Sausage, if you please (the poll is on the right margin).

Because beer brats are edible, but…c’mon.  Italian Sausage.  Yum.

It wouldn’t be a major issue, but there’s guys from Wisconsin in on the vote.  You never know what they’ll do when the word “beer” is involved.

So, hypothetically, if someone wanted to:

1. Take a piece of digital video, and…
2. …want to remove the audio track, and then…
3. …record a new audio track and…
4. …dub it onto the video from Step 2

How would one do this?

Leave a comment, and thanks in advance.

It was Friday, July 31, 1987. 

I’d called the unemployment office to tell ’em I had a job.  My last check would be coming a week from today – the same time I’d be getting my first check from the freelance writing gig. 

I hatched a plan, one that I’d never hatched before, and until the advent of the MOB, have never hatched since; I was going to throw a party.

I started calling all my friends, inviting them to the Mitch’s Final Unemployment Check Party.  The intention:  spend (at least a big part of) my final unemployment check (all $200-odd dollars of it) on a big summer blow-out. 

People started accepting. 

It was going to be fun.

…I’m not the only Allison Krause et al fan in the MOB…

Kathy at Cake Eater Chronicles writes what needs to be written:

Please, please, please hire Sigourney Weaver to act in something so she doesn’t have to demean herself with these pitiful DirecTV commercials.

It’s great that she has a sense of humor about herself and the character that brought her worldwide fame, but really. The schtick behind these commercials instantly went straight to hell the minute DirecTV hired El Slutta herself, Pam Anderson, to be in one. Signourney is better than this. Hire her.

On the one hand, the spot is a lot better than the Charlie Sheen/Pam Anderson spots.

On the other – it’s Sigourney Friggin’ Weaver.

If we can put a man on the moon and a Mac into a  package the size of a cell phone, we can keep Sigourney Weaver working.  Right?

Seeing the Dems’ “YouTube”-fed debate – which reminded me of nothing so much as institutionalizing the “Boxers or Briefs” school of political “debate” – left me feeling bone-weary about the future of this country.

Mike at FND felt the same – but could muster at least a response:

I thought most politicians, after Borat, could tell when they were walking into a trap. Not the Dems. They seemed perfectly comfortable with this sort of contemptible youth. Not a once did I see them even so much as flex their hands into fists. I would have jumped through the monitors and flicked the brats’ ears.

To prevent further damage to our republic, I propose instituting a mandatory draft for all YouTube users. Implementing this policy is the only way I see of reversing the American Idol-addled of this country and turning these brain-dead mockers into responsible civic-minded adults. Only then would I feel comfortable giving them back the vote.

I couldn’t – and wouldn’t – argue.

My NARNII colleague Ed noted something that I’d noticed and started writing about myself; the local leftymedia’s caviling and cavorting over the death of Norm Coleman Sr.:

the Minnesota open-borders contingent turned themselves into the equivalent of Fred Phelps when they decided to picket the home of Senator Norm Coleman — as he and his family prepared to bury his father, Norm Coleman, Sr. Coleman’s presumed opponent for the 2008 Senate Race, Al Franken, couldn’t breathe a word of sympathy for Coleman, and some — not all — of the liberal bloggers here in the state followed his lead.

He went on to quote a pretty ghastly, self-indulgent bit of rationalization on the part of the ghouls “protesters” who tried to disrupt the Coleman family’s mourning.

And I join Ed in noting…:

we should acknowledge those who did show class. Liberal bloggers and Coleman opponents MNPublius and Centrisity had the class to acknowledge the personal loss of our state’s Senator. This shouldn’t surprise anyone who follows these two blogs. Others … didn’t, and that shouldn’t surprise anyone, either.

In no case would anyone who watches some of those hamsters be surprised.

From today’s Rush Limbaugh show, more talking points from Fox News:

Here is the most important thing Americans need to understand: We are finally getting somewhere in Iraq, at least in military terms. As two analysts who have harshly criticized the Bush administration’s miserable handling of Iraq, we were surprised by the gains we saw and the potential to produce not necessarily “victory” but a sustainable stability that both we and the Iraqis could live with.

After the furnace-like heat, the first thing you notice when you land in Baghdad is the morale of our troops. In previous trips to Iraq we often found American troops angry and frustrated — many sensed they had the wrong strategy, were using the wrong tactics and were risking their lives in pursuit of an approach that could not work.

Today, morale is high. The soldiers and marines told us they feel that they now have a superb commander in Gen. David Petraeus; they are confident in his strategy, they see real results, and they feel now they have the numbers needed to make a real difference.

Well, who cares what Limbaugh thinks.  He’s just a neocon tool.

(more…)

…or what’s Heaven for?

Just saying:

Jessica Alba has split from boyfriend Cash Warren.

The Hollywood beauty reportedly called time on the couple’s two-and-a-half year romance during an emotional telephone conversation, in which she told the movie producer she “didn’t love him anymore”.

After delivering the heart-breaking news last weekend, Jessica, 26, allegedly sent an aide to the Los Angeles home the couple shared to help Cash, 28, pack up his belongings and make sure he moved out.

Apropos not much.

Noodles at Freedom Dogs notes FCC Chairman Kevin Martin’s pinky-swear that the Commission has no plans to reinstate the Fairness Doctrine:

Every once in awhile something that makes sense and shows some level of rational thinking comes out of Washington.  This is one of those times.

WASHINGTON (AP) – The Federal Communications Commission has no intention of reinstating the Fairness Doctrine  imposing a requirement of balanced coverage of issues on public airwaves, FCC Chairman Kevin Martin said.

Martin, in a letter written this week to Rep. Mike Pence, R-Ind., and made public Thursday, said the agency found no compelling reason to revisit its 1987 decision that enforcing the federal rule was not in the public interest.

Of course there’s no compelling reason – now.

But if we have a Democrat president and a Democrat Congress? 

Compulsion will likely follow, in the form of a slew of Democrat nominees. 

Chairman Martin’s word is only as good as his appointment, and as good as the strength of the Free Speech advocates on the Commission.

Any bets, if Hillary! takes over?

Of course we all know why this came up in the first place, it is clear that Democrats want to silence any opposing views to their own.

Several Democratic lawmakers suggested that Congress take another look at the doctrine after conservative radio talk show hosts aggressively attacked an immigration reform bill when it was on the Senate floor, contributing to its defeat.

Even with all of their clamoring one only need to take a look at the wide variety of information sources available today to know that the Fairness Doctrine has no place in the current marketplace of ideas and news.

If it were about practicality, reason, or fact, there’d never be a question.

But it’s about quashing dissent. 

I’m passingly familiar with Gerald Beck of Wahpeton, ND; plane geek that I am, I knew that he restored old warplanes.

So his death at the Oshkosh Air Show on Friday was a dual tragedy;

Gerald S. Beck was killed in the crash of two P-51 Mustangs, single-seat fighters used in World War II, said Dick Knapinski, a spokesman for the Experimental Aircraft Association, which puts on the weeklong air show called AirVenture.

The other pilot involved in the crash, Casey Odegaard, 24, Kindred, N.D., suffered minor injuries…Witnesses said one plane was behind the other, and when its propeller hit the tail of the other plane, it flipped up and over the other aircraft, landing upside down in a fireball.

Ugh. 

My condolences to the Becks. 

Via Malkin, yet another onslaught of liberal voter fraud:

Guess which left-wing group is at the center of the worst case of voter-registration fraud in Washington state history? Yep, you guessed it: ACORN. The same ACORN tied to massive voter fraud in Missouri. And Ohio. And 12 other states. Here’s the Washington state scoop via Seattle’s KOMO TV: “King County prosecutors filed felony charges Thursday against seven people in what a top official described as the worst case of voter-registration fraud in state history, while the organization they worked for agreed to keep a better eye on its employees and pay $25,000 to defray costs of the investigation. The seven submitted about 1,800 registration cards last fall on behalf of the liberal Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN, which had hired them at $8 an hour to sign people up to vote, according to charging documents filed in Superior Court.”

Prosecutors didn’t sugercoat the fraud: “This was an act of vandalism upon the voter rolls of King County,” said Dan Satterberg, the interim King County prosecutor. But officials tried to give ACORN some benefit of the doubt, noting that the defendants were motivated by financial gain rather than intentions of sabotaging the election.

The leftymedia and the Sorosphere gamboled about like poo-flinging monkeys at the news of the two GOP functionaries in New Hampshire who got caught tampering with elections – but will this story get any coverage outside of the blogosphere and talk radio?

About an acorn’s chance in a squirrel farm.

Matt, one of the giggly fratboys at MNPublius and late producer of AM950’s hapless “Minnesota Matters” (I’m not sure if I should congratulate Matt for getting into law school or for escaping the world of freebie PM drive radio), gushes, crushes and blushes over A-Klo’s latest poll numbers:

According to the same SurveyUSA poll that shows Senator Norm Coleman’s numbers tanking, Senator Amy Klobuchar has more support than any other time since she took office. The 61% approval rating released today is nothing short of stunning and is even more impressive when viewed against the backdrop of her miniscule 31% disapproval rating.

He finishes with…: 

Wow, just wow.

Embarassing, just embarassing. 

Note to the crush-stricken Matt: it’s easy to get great approval numbers when you don’t do anything. 

What, exactly, has A-Klo done? 

(More important is what she hasn’t done:  sat at the crux of a serious issue, as Coleman has, risking political capital on issues that matter.  A-Klo has not.  A-Klo gets good numbers because she is a non-entity).

It might make a great addition to one of her workout IPod songlists…

Nancy Pelosi:  “Americans should be a herd, not a pack.”

Harry Reid: “Freedom is slavery!”

 Via Cox ‘n Forkum

To A-Klo’s credit, she was for protecting John Doe – after she was against it.  In her defense, it seems the dog ate her homework:

It would be nice if she actually understood the bill before she voted on it the first time. She’s still new, maybe they didn’t cover that in freshman orientation classes. But in the absence of perfect information, it’s interesting to note what her instincts tell her to do.

“All that reading and reasoning and questioning what CAIR and Cuddles Reid tell me is so complicated“. 

Thanks, Senator Barbie.  Hope your colleagues don’t kill too many of us.

 I remember when I was a kid, listening to my dad and his friends talking about “Coors Beer”.  Unavailable east of Montana, the stuff was supposedly the nectar of the beer-drinking gods. 

And then, word spread across the state; Coors was going to be available in North Dakota!

Now, this was way before my beer-drinking days (I didn’t really start drinking beer for real until I went to Europe; I actually had exactly one beer all through high school, a story I’ll save for another time), but the general reactions were…

…well, pretty much the same as the one I had when I finally had a Coors, sometime in college; it tasted like puddle-water that had come from the wrong end of a well-hydrated goat.

All that waiting, all that anticipation…for what?

So I always get leery when Big Things from Out Of Town come to town.

At any rate, it seems Sonic – “America’s Drive-in” – wants to come to the East Side of Saint Paul, according to City Hall Scoop, which got the, er, scoop at, um, city hall:

We called Kathy Lantry this afternoon.

“It’s true,” she said. “When I told my 17-year-old son, he just went ballistic… Someone on the District 1 board heard about it and said, ‘Oh my God, I can have a cherry lime-ade slush!’” The nearest franchise seems to be in Fort Dodge, Iowa.

“I don’t really understand what the deal is with Sonic,” Lantry added later. “It seems almost like some kind of cult thing.”

Indeed.  I blame cable TV.

Although my kids have never been closer than 250 miles to a Sonic, they visibly slaver whenever a Sonic ad comes on the tube; the Discovery channel runs one Sonic ad or another during pretty much every spotbreak. 

Sheesh. First Culver’s, then Krispy Kreme (defunct, alas) and now Sonic. What’s next for the East Side? Starbucks?

I’m amazed (or perhaps ignorant) that a Dunn Bros hasn’t opened up across from 3M yet.

Mmmm.  Dunn Brothers.

Condolences to Senator Coleman’s family on the passing of his father, Norm Senior.

The frothy jags that bring you “Cucking Stool” have a mission for you!

What if all the religious conservatives and the other self-appointed dispensers of truth who huff and puff daily from the moral high ground were really moral and ethical midgets?

 Hm.  In other words, “what if people who stand for moral standards have human frailties and flaws, and are imperfect – sometimes flagrantly so?”

I guess the answer would be “They’re human.  Get a life”. 

Limited capacity thinkers? 

[cheap shot on] then they’d be leftybloggers [/cheap shot off]

This could be big, boys and girls. Really big.

What could be big really big, you ask?

And now, a small cadre of Minnesota bloggers is preparing to prove it. It will probably start off as just a sprinkle;

…followed by a muted dripping and a flush, I’m guessing… 

then it will rain harder, and finally all of collected grime of empty moralisms will be washed away. Or something like that. It should be fun.

Fun, huh?

Hm.  No, like most Twin Cities Leftyblogger efforts, it will probably turn out to be an embarassment.  Twin Cities’ leftybloggers, for all of their sturm und drang, have tended to be generals in the bedroom and whores on the battlefield; big talkers and little doers.  As “journalists”, they’re proven themselves (so far) incapable of covering a one car crash.  As “investigators”, they’ve embarassed themselves.  While some of them are excellent (and some are friends of mine), their collective track record so far is a weary “STF What?”

So bring that “little cadre” on.

In order that the blooming of the thousand flowers can be collected, Spot suggests using a Technorati tag and/or category “judgmentalism”

Alternatively, I’d suggest “wankers gone wild”, “cheap imitations of blogs that matter”, “monkeys flinging poo”, or “Junior’s First Attempt at Electronic Activism”. 

We had the beginnings of a much better discussion about social conservatism (or, if you’re hopelessly dramatic, “Judgementalism”) over on one of Andy Birkey’s posts at MinMon. 

It was Monday, July 27, 1987. 

The storm had overshadowed one big bit of news; I’d landed some freelance work, writing a manual for some software for a company in Edina.  It was going to be a month or so worth of work.  The best part?  It was going to be a princely $12.50 an hour!.  Other than the odd voiceover job, I’d never gotten more than $8/hour in my life, for anything.

It was a long commute, made doubly galling by the fact that I’d moved to Saint Paul just in time to get whacked at KSTP, from a place that was probably a 20-25 minute drive from this gig. 

The work was interesting – and utterly unlike anything I’d done before.  For starters, I was writing on a computer.  Not one of the DEC PDP 11/44s I’d used in college, for everything from programming (I’d completed most of a Computer Science minor, before I decided that I hated it) to writing term papers (we used the roff and nroff text-formatting programs to print “pretty” documents on an NEC Spinwriter teletype terminal, at a stately one page per minute) – but the company sat me down behind a Mac.  It was the first computer I’d touched in a long time, and the first time I’d seen a Graphical User Interface other than, say, in the movies.

The commute was gruelling.  It was blazingly hot, and with all the water soaking the region, it was one of the two most humid periods of time I can remember in my life.

But I looked forward to a paycheck that’d cover more than bare subsistence for the first time in quite a while. 

And that felt good.

The Strib collects more DFL flak points, breathlessly reporting that, fifteen months before the election, Senator Coleman’s numbers have dropped from “plenty solid” to “still plenty solid”:

That’s a slip from last month, when the same poll showed a 48 percent job approval rating for Minnesota’s senior senator.

Cullen Sheehan, Coleman’s campaign manager, dismissed the poll, saying that “with 16 months to the election, there will be numerous polls with numerous results. The senator’s priority is to get things done for Minnesota.”

The story does have one relaitvely honest note: 

Coleman recently has been subjected to a drumbeat of attacks for his continued support of the Iraq war in the face of mounting public disapproval. National Democrats and antiwar activists have started two separate TV ad campaigns criticizing Coleman for his opposition to troop pullouts.

Background: in the Twin Cities, the major media and the DFL are practically indistinguishable; the number of reporters, not merely editors and publishers, who’ve gone on to jobs with the party and with various candidates, office-holders and “progressive” rent-a-blogs is staggering.  Lori Sturdevant is the smug, disingenuous tip of the figurative iceberg.  It is truly sad and amazing that the Minnesota Public Radio newsroom (as opposed to their programming) is probably the most fair and balanced in the region.

So the Strib, which is part of the DFL/media bloc that is broadcasting the attack ads, is now reporting the attack ads as news to help further their effect. 

Sure, a 5-6 point poll drop is news (also meaningless at this point in the campaign).  But look for much, much more of this as the we  move into the final year of this campaign.  The Twin Cities’ media is an organ of the DFL, and it will act as such.

Kevin Ecker subjects the US government to the same “benchmarks” to which Iraqi democracy are currently tied, and finds our bureaucracy sorely wanting.

UPDATE:  And now, with the link…

A few years ago, quite a number of talk radio programming execs – including those at both of the Twin Cities’ big talk stations, Hubbard’s KSTP-AM and (later, in 2006) Clear Channel’s KTLK-FM – greeted the latest news from “the consultants”.  Although “The Consultants” have gotten nearly every trend in talk radio throughout the medium’s history utterly wrong, this time the prediction – that conservative political talk radio was dead – was going to be right. 

Of course, it was right after the ’04 elections, when talk ratings had noplace to go but down; exactly as they had after every election cycle since conservative talk had risen to dominate the format.

This past winter, after the ’06 elections, talk in general – and conservative talk in particular – took another hit in the ratings.  And the consultants – many of whom date back to the business’ pre-Limbaugh days, many of whom really really don’t like conservative talk, to say nothing of conservatism itself – cried “the witch is dead” yet again.

And, yet again, it seems they celebrated too soon. 

Where it really counts, Limbaugh / Hannity affiliate WABC scored big gains, moving from a 3.5 overall share of the audience to 3.9. That was good for fifth place among listeners 12 and older, higher than we’ve recently seen for the format in the Big Apple.

Though ratings are tracked monthly, the four quarterly “books” are what actually count. From those, the spring and fall surveys are most critical for setting future advertising rates, as well as sheer bragging rights.

No word on the NARN’s numbers, yet.  But  you can bet we’re kicking whatever hamster KTLK is putting up against us in the utterly make-or-break Saturday Afternoon time slot – and that Air America Minnesota might as well broadcast static for all the good tackling us will do ’em.

Barack Obama hands Protest Warrior yet another early Christmas present:

– Barack Obama’s offer to meet without precondition with leaders of renegade nations such as Cuba, North Korea and Iran touched off a war of words, with rival Hillary Rodham Clinton calling him naive and Obama linking her to President Bush’s diplomacy.

Up next:  Obama calls Joe Biden “America’s greatest speechwriter”.

Older politicians in both parties questioned the wisdom of such a course, while Obama’s supporters characterized it as a repudiation of Bush policies of refusing to engage with certain adversaries.

It triggered a round of competing memos and statements Tuesday between the chief Democratic presidential rivals. Obama’s team portrayed it as a bold stroke; Clinton supporters saw it as a gaffe that underscored the freshman senator’s lack of foreign policy experience.

“I thought that was irresponsible and frankly naive,” Clinton was quoted in an interview with the Quad-City Times that was posted on the Iowa newspaper’s Web site on Tuesday.

In response, Obama told the newspaper that her stand puts her in line with the Bush administration.

Both parties were weighing the potential political fallout, especially in Florida, an early primary state, a pivotal general election state — and where Cuban President Fidel Castro remains particularly unpopular.

Hm. Wonder if anyone’s going to make sure that Floridians hear this?

Well, Mora from Babalu Blog will give it a shot:

If either of these idiots were elected president, Chavez and castro would roll their asses in the streets of Matamoros, to quote Tom Wolfe, and fry them up for dinner before they knew the fork was in them.

Both fools show no understanding of dictatorship, no understanding of the perpetual war against America that castro and Chavez must conduct in order to energize their own communist party bases. If there were no America for castro and his minime to scream about, the two of them would rapidly become lightning rods for all that is wrong in Cuba and Venezuela and would finally have to face the music of their own crimes. That is why the two of them desperately need an America to rail against, and why it’s sustained them for decades. A simple understanding of the warlike nature of dictatorship ought to have informed these two, but this response just goes to show how stupid and venal and despicable these men really are.

And how missing in understanding they are of the Cuban experience in Florida, where memories of the bloodsoaked castroite communist scum shooting children against a wall isn’t something that ought to ever been forgotten. Nevermind that, though, watch them come pandering for the Cuban-American votes anyway.

Anyone out there wanna photoshop some T-shirts of Obama in a Che Guevara beret, a la the iconic lefty photo?

You can thank me later.

As a history geek who speaks German pretty well, it’s probably not a surprise that I spend a lot of time reading about twentieth-century German history.  And one of the more aggravating subjects in the field is the notion that Naziism – the German contraction of Nazional Sozialismus, “National Socialism” – is, in fact, socialist and not capitalistic. 

Of course, if you had a mainstream, left-of-center history teacher – and I had a few – you learned what’s become the orthodoxy in learning about the era; since Hitler and Stalin fought the bloodiest war in history against each other, Hitler must be the opposite of Stalin; ergo since Stalin was “far left”, Hitler must be “far right”; since communism hated capitalism, Naziism must have been pure capitalism. 

It was all buncombe, of course.  In Modern Times – perhaps the essential libertarian/conservative apologetic of my lifetime, at least from my little perspective – Paul Johnson spelled out the case that Hitler learned a lot – a lot – from Lenin and Stalin, positive (the need for total, brutal control) and negative (the need to do it by co-opting, rather than destroying, society’s institutions). 

But the message – and its importance today – still need to sink in, in some quarters. 

Fortunately, Ilya Somin at Volokh is on the case, reviewing two new books on the subject, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy, by Adam Tooze and Hitler’s Beneficiaries: : Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State, by Gotz Aly.

Why care?

Nonetheless, the socialist element of National Socialism matters for three reasons. First…some still claim that Nazism was a form of “capitalism” and try to use this association to discredit free markets. Second, and far more important, Tooze and Aly show that far-reaching state control over the economy was an essential element in Nazi policy, without which Hitler could not have carried out his plans for conquest and mass murder. It also helped quiesce potential German opposition to Nazi policies; both by imposing state control on economic resources that any opposition movement would need to support itself, and by “buying off” potential opponents through welfare state handouts (as Aly emphasizes).

The concentration of economic power in the hands of the state does not always lead to atrocities as extreme as Hitler’s. But it does significantly increase the risk that these types of abuses will occur – not to mention numerous lesser (though still severe) atrocities. In the twentieth century, both left-wing (communist) and right-wing (Nazi) forms of state domination of the ecoomy paved the way for war, repression, and mass murder. There is little reason to expect better results from similar policies in the future. This is an important point, given the recent renewed popularity of socialist ideas in some parts of the Third World, such as parts of Latin American.

Finally, Barkai’s discussion of Hitler’s view of the world economy bears a remarkable similarity to the analysis put forward by many of today’s opponents of free trade and globalization. Both view the world economy as a zero sum game; both reject the possibility that free international trade can provide for a growing population and lead to the development of “have not” nations; and both claim that the wealthy nations of the West had “rigged” the rules of the international economic game in their favor.

Stuff for the summer beach reading list.

Next job for historians:  write a book explaining to the attention-span-deprived that even though Hitler exploited endemic anti-Semitism in German society (and in the native Lutheran and Catholic churches), he wasn’t actually a Christian…

(Via Jay Reding)

A few years back, before secondhand smoke was the plague that was going to destroy all of us in Saint Paul if we didn’t get on top of it, billboards were the great scourge.  A group of motivated, well-connected people devoted tons of time and energy to trying to ban billboards and their advertising in Saint Paul. 

And I know what some of you might say; “you can’t compare the two issues; they’re different groups of people”.

No.  In fact, the two groups were largely the same.  But for the likes of the American Lung Association of Minnesota, the cast of players was nearly identical (and for all I know the ALAMN people may have been involved in some astroturf “American Visual Pollution Society of Minnesota”).

Anyway, the city (operating at the behest of the well-connected activists) tried to seize the billboards (they are private property), and fought and lost a lawsuit in pursuit of that niggling goal. 

Saint Paulicy notes that times would seem to have changed:

Como Zoo, Conservatory and “Como Town” are prominently advertised in all of the square footage that can only be achieved through a….. billboard!  Has the city had a change of heart or are billboards no longer the political hot potato they used to be?  After eating the juicy SPicy almost felt like maybe the city did not mean it after all and it would be o.k. to light up a smoke, no forget it.

SPicy wonders if the anti-billboard folks completely forgot about billboards in Saint Paul while they pushed their smoking ban, they are the same people you know.  Maybe they too realized the power of advertising. After SPicy  and SPousy parked the mini, we walked around the corner and saw a billboard on the bus stop promoting the virtues of quitting smoking.  This group must not know what to do with themselves.