Random Thinking

So you want your kids not to be poisoned by their toys? Then you will need to pay more! You might think that not killing your children would be a basic feature built into the cost of a toy but apparently not. Toy makers plan to raise costs as much as 10% to make toys safe for kids to actually play with.

Toy companies have been sacrificing safety in order to increase profits and to meet the cost demands of big retailers like Wal-Mart. So a toy company that refused to sacrifice safety would find itself forced out of business by the bottom-feeders like Mattel that considered “safe to play with” as not being an essential feature of their toys. I know that the Bush administration would never even consider it, but Mattel and the other companies that put our children at risk should have HUGE fines charged against them. And by HUGE I mean ever single dollar that they made by sacrificing safety. In China, one safety official was executed. I am not suggesting that the CEO of Mattel be hanged, but I am suggesting that criminal charges need to be looked at across the board. Someone at Mattel had to know that they were taking risks with people’s lives. Those people need to be prosecuted.

Tags: Mattel, lead, poison, China, Barbie

President George W. Bush is prone to bouts of crying caused by the stress of his job and claims to have seen ghosts emerge from the Lincoln Bedroom in the White House, according to a new book on his presidency. “I’ve got God’s shoulder to cry on. And I cry a lot.”

Our president is psychotic. There is simply no other explanation for this.

Meanwhile, this is pure genius.

Tags: George W Bush, people who suck, president, white house, psychotic

I signed up for Google Analytics the other day and I heartily recommend it to anyone who has their own website. It allows you to track detail information about the traffic to your site. Beyond the basic unique visitors, pages served, etc, you get information about how long people spend on your site, how many different pages they visit, what keywords they used to find you, what connection speed they have, and lots of other details. And it is all presented with cool charts and graphs that make the information easy to read and understand.

The picture included here is an example of a diagram showing my traffic from Great Britian. The dots show where in Britian the traffic is coming from and the size of the dot tells how much traffic. The map tells me that most of my British traffic comes from London but there is also a substantial amount coming from the Nottingham, Sheffield, and Manchester area (the real map lets you hover over each dot to get the name of the city and the number of visitors) and from Edinburgh.

I only have three days worth of information so far but it should get more interesting and more accurate as time passes.

Tags: google, google-analytics, British visitors

It was Mikey’s first day of school, too. After I got back from delivering Beth to her fate, I went to get Mikey but he was missing! And where was he? Sleeping in his sister’s bed…

I’ll bet you can’t sleep like this.

I’m ready to go now stop taking my picture!

Time to wake up, Beth!

Go Away!

Not exactly the Cheshire Cat’s smile, but ready to face her first day back to school!

I just joined a used-book swapping club called Bookins. I had heard about it from Debra over at the deblog so I decided to give it a try. The process is fairly simple… you create two lists. One is a list of books that you have that you are willing to give up and the other is a list of books that you would like to receive. Bookins matches the lists with lists of other members. If they find a member who wants your book, they notify you and let you print a pre-paid shipping label. So to give a book away costs you nothing. If they find a member who has a book you want, they charge you $3.99 for postage and the cost of running Bookins. In order to make the whole thing work, books are valued with credits. In order to get a book you need credits. You get credits by giving away books.

So I sent my first book out yesterday. It was A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers, a book I despised. And I’m getting a book already, Rising Tide by John M. Barry. I’ll let you know how it goes.

P.S. If you join by clicking the Bookins picture above, I get 15 credits when you ship your first book! Woo hoo!

Tags: books, used books, Bookins, deblog

Continuing with island week:

If you scroll around you can see the several large mansions and a windmill. The island is an ecological paradise. The island has the largest stand of white oak in the American Northeast and the largest colony of ospreys in New York state.

The US government, apparently not learning a lesson from the fate of the lighthouse, decided to build a fort on the island for the Spanish-American War. The shifting sands of the island caused problems for Fort Tyler and it was abandoned at the end of the 1920′s. During World War II, the remains of the fort was used by the US Navy for target practice. The island was going to be made into a park but the fear of unexploded ordinance caused those plans to be changed. The island is now privately owned.