When is an anti-gun rights group a pro-gun rights group?

Answer: when the media wants them to be. See this, an article by Cam Edwards at TownHall.com. Mr. Edwards' piece is not so much an expose of the American Hunters and Shooters Association, but instead notices the significant omissions of relevant facts left out of a recent story in The New Republic by Michael Blanding about the people who run the organization. Money quote -

In [an earlier piece] Blanding describes Rosenthal as an “anti-gun activist”, but now he’s a pro-gun moderate alternative to the NRA. Why? Because Blanding didn’t write a TNR article about the need for more gun control, he wrote an article about liberals trying to woo gun-owners. To accurately portray Rosenthal as someone who helped pass Massachusetts’ Gun Control Act of 1998 does nothing to win the hearts and minds of gun owners.

HT: InstaPundit

I just completed the Muppet Personality Test. Here's what came up (drum roll, please)...

You Are Rowlf the Dog

Mellow and serious, you enjoy time alone cultivating your talents. You're a cool dog, and you always present a relaxed vibe. A talented pianist, you can play almost anything - especially songs by Beethoven. "My bark is worse than my bite, and my piano playing beats 'em both."

The Muppet Personality Test

What a surprise! It could have been worse: It could have come back as "Miss Piggy."

Check Out Her Blog

I don't watch medical dramas on TV. (Indeed, I don't watch much television at all. Subject for another post. [1]) I'm more attracted to the real stories of the men and women who take care of us when our bodies fail us. TV just cannot do justice to the internet in that regard.

Kim is a nurse at a San Francisco-area hospital. Works in the emergency department. Has just recently learned her husband is diabetic. Loves the rock group Journey. Has an eccentric attraction to old photographs with nurses in them. Nurse cap fetish.

Her spin on things is funny and human and informative. Her two blogs are a weekly destination for me. Emergiblog (link above) was the first. From there you can check out Scared To Health, a new blog she started when her husband needed emergency surgery and his hidden diabeties was uncovered.

At Kim's blog you'll find links to a wealth of good blogs written by nurses and physicians. Leave the ER. Scrub Scrubs. Put Grey's Anatomy back on the bookshelf. Go and find for yourself some real medical stories and musings. It is worth your time to check them out.

[1]-for the record, I average 2 hours of TV viewing a month outside of football season. During football season the average jumps to about 7 hours a week. WHO DEYYYY!

Must See Video - Bush covers U2

Hat Tip - Crazy Trazy

You have to admire the poor soul who had to sift through an entire State of the Union speech, probably more than once, to cull the lyrics together. I couldn't do it. I get very uncomfortable watching Bush The Younger give a speech. I couldn't put my finger on it as to why, until I read what Tucker Carlson had to say about Bush's oratory skills -

As a friend of mine once said, watching Bush give a speech is like watching a drunk man cross an icy street. You really want him to get to the other side, but it's clear he won't be able to make it without a lot of stumbling.[*]

Mr. Carlson hits the nail on the head! That said, the video is funny even if you are not a big U2 fan. Indeed, U2 fans probably will react in horror.

[*] - as quoted in Cato's Letter: A Quarterly Message On Liberty; Spring, 2006; p. 4, column 1 (published by the Cato Institute; 1000 Massachusetts Ave. , N.W.; Washington, D.C. 20001).

Antidote for Radio Mediocrity, Pt. 2

I've run across a site which presents the most comprehensive list of streaming audio providers available on the internet. vTuner (link here) allows you to search for radio and television stations worldwide by format, geographical location or call sign.

The geographical search is somewhat broad. For now you cannot restrict your search to a specific city. And the list is alphabetized by name/call sign. So if you are looking for a college station in Columbia, Missouri, but you don't know which one, you just have to wade through all the stations in Missouri to find the ones in Columbia and then just take your best guess from there.

I spent a few minutes last night listening to Mark Kloss on KIHT, a classic rock station out of Saint Louis. Old phogies like me will remember spending our teenage years hearing him at KSHE. It seems there must have been a migration away from KSHE, as a good number of the old KSHE jocks are now at KIHT. A side effect of the homogenization of commercial broadcast radio?

I expect I'll be spending more time here checking out the audio goodies available.

Reverend?

A query from a reader (all two of you) asks, "So what's with the 'reverend' thing, anyway." It's a good question.

I am not a man of the cloth. On matters religious I am agnostic, but for practical purposes an atheist. Back in high school one of my computer teachers started calling me "Reverend Krull." I was part of a group that hung out in the computer room during lunch and after school. I cannot remember the genesis of that christening, and it was surely meant to be funny (and as I recall, it was).

When Blogger.com asked me to come up with a nom de blog, "Reverend Krull" popped into my head.

Given that a blog could, in a way, be compared to a pulpit in a church, perhaps the title isn't too off the mark.

[post made via email 6/10/2006 @ 6:10 P.M.]

Antidote for Radio Mediocrity

I grew up in a fair sized city. At one time (circa 1979) there were close to 15 AM stations and approximately 15 FM stations local to the area. A good receiver could pick up a few more AM stations outside of the metro area. At night most of the local AMs would sign-off, but the skies opened and I could catch the 1-A stations from as far west as Denver.

Each and every station had a distinct tone. I spent many a Summer just sitting with a radio in my lap, tuning up and down the dial. I got to where I could identify a station just by the way it sounded, regardless of the programming or personality.

Radio (and a Rand McNally road atlas) opened up my world.

My love affair with broadcast radio ended sometime with my arrival in Dayton. In short, Dayton radio sucks. The variety isn't there. Hell, half of them are so programmed that you can tell the time of day by the song - "Oh, 'Hit Me With Your Best Shot' is on. It must be 3:00 P.M."

The one or two good music stations here are cluttered with commercials. Car dealer commercials. Screaming-in-your-face car dealer commercials. It's so bad that I've sought sonic refuge at the classical music station when I drive.

At home I would limit myself to my meager music collection. The Pareto principle applies - 80% of what I listen to comes from just 20% of the CDs in my collection.

But there is a wealth of good, new music out there. And there is value in having a professional music critic, in the guise of a disk jockey, selecting and playing the new with the old. Unfortunately, the radio personalities of today are pretty much automatons. They play what they're told to play, say what they're told to say. A kind of living hell, if you ask me. (And your listeners aren't happy, either.)

The antidote to this radio miasma is the internet.

At about New Castle, Indiana, westbound on I-70, I could pick up WTTS at 92.3 MHz on the FM dial. It would be the most pleasant radio I'd hear until I reached Saint Louis. I figured with just a 175-foot tower on top of my apartment building and a 21-element Yagi aimed west, I could pick them up full time.

Which is to say, while in Dayton I was stuck with Dayton radio. Dayton radio sucks.

But within the past month I finally got a broadband (read: fast) connection to the internet. And oh! What joy to discover that WTTS has streaming audio. It's the actual broadcast audio, although they replace some commercials with instrumental music (why?).

I suspect at some point the owner will have no choice but to charge for all those folks listening via the internet. And I suspect at that point I'll have to fork over some cash to them. But for now it's free. And I'm enjoying music "radio" again.

If your musical tastes grew up in the 80's, when rock became fun and new and innovative again, when MTV would follow The GoGos with Quiet Riot, then you just might find WTTS an enjoyable listen.

Why This Blog Exists

The only reason I created this blog was so I could leave a comment to the creator of a Blogger blog. He (I assume the creator is a he) does not allow anonymous comments.

What kind of blog would have me jumping though Blogger's hoops just so I could leave a measly comment? The blog in question is here. As a 16-year resident of the Dayton area I've seen both the good and the bad parts of town. Granted, I've hung out more in the good than in the bad.

This guy (whoever he is) has managed to snap photos from the great unwashed middle between the good and the bad. His photos portray a side of Dayton which is more prevalent than folks would care to admit. They are honest. None of them will end up on a post card for sale in the airport gift shop, and yet they all speak a truth about this little city. Truths missed on those grand shots of downtown framed by the sky to the top and the Great Miami River to the bottom.

After having taken some time off, he's back. I hope he keeps on taking and posting more shots of the Gem city.