The Liquor Talking

• The Liquor Talking did pretty well for 2011.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

  By The Numbers

  Other stuff:
  

  
  
  • Wednesday (Reader Mail) is the most popular day, but only by 7 hits. Tuesday (Story Time) came in second with Monday (Makes Me Say “What”?) being third.
    
  • We had 25 hits from Switzerland. (Probably tourist)
    
  • 77 hits from Iran (all of which were in January)
    
  • We got 658 hits from China, averaging about 30 hits a month.
    
  • 48 of our hits were from the dhs.gov domain.
    
  • We got 18 hits from va.gov hosts. Most of right around when I was not having many love for the VA.
    
  • There were a total of 129 hits from hosts in the .gov domain
    
  • We got hits from 3 countries I’ve never heard of:
    
    
    
    • Faroe Islands
      
    • Brunei Darussalam
      
    • Saint Kitts & Nevis Anguilla
      
    
    
  • Today’s post is the 811th since March of 2009.
    

  Not bad for a hobby blog!

  My sincerest thanks to my readers. I’m deeply honored that you let me share your day from time to time.
  

  
  

  Now, now gentlemen, we all have our assigned tasks.
  

• Okay, so it looks like we got the US Congress wanting to tamper with the Interwebs again. I speak of course about the SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) legislation set up for debate later this month.

  Also known as H.R. 3261, it’s a bill introduced in the United States House of Representatives in October , by Representative Lamar Smith (R-TX) . The bill is supported by a 12 member group of bipartisan, initial co-sponsors.

  I won’t go into a lot detail because Wikipedia has a pretty good write-up on the subject.

  I will however say that is is a horribly bad idea.

  

  Supporters are claiming that it’s designed to combat overseas theft of intellectual property, but it’s also something that can be used to shut down THIS very blog.

  How’s that gonna work?

  Okay, so down toward the bottom, you’ll see (unless you’ve got them bocked) some Google ads. They’re there because it’s theoretically possible to actually make money blogging by poking in some ads. This hasn’t paid off very well for me, but I digress.

  Let’s say that one of the ads provides a link to a foreign site that becomes accused of one or more or the things prohibited in the legislation. Since I’m doing it for financial gain, guess who’ll be among those they coming after?

  It would be just a matter of time before some blogger ran afoul of some political power and would up vis-a-vis this SOPA bullshit.

  But setting aside the “Chicken Little” rhetoric, we gotta ask ourselves: Is this the congress we want tinkering with the Internet?

  

  No thanks. I personally would rather have the Three Stooges working on this than the 112th Congress.
  I’m not saying that on-line piracy isn’t a huge problem. I mean when you can download first-run movies before they’ve even shown up in theaters, then yeah, that’s a problem.

  But really? This is your answer? Am I to understand that given the gazillions of dollars that entertainment industry makes each year, they can’t find a way to secure their products from unauthorized distribution? They want the US taxpayer to foot the bill?

  Plus, Congress has got more, way more pressing concerns. We got a payroll tax reduction that’s due to expire in 58 days. They probably should get going on that, but they won’t. They’ll wait until about 3 days before it expires, put on the music and start their dick dancing all over again.

  Oh yeah, and the economy is still pretty much bupkis, but why should that matter when NBC isn’t getting it’s royalty fees from a 30-second snippet of a 1983 episode of Family Ties, that some guy in the Philippines posted to YouTube.

• And finally, as promised, we begin our “analysis” of the 2012 election Cirque des Fous!

  

  Since I’ve religiously attempted to avoid any and all coverage of the present presidential candidates, I am officially starting off not liking (but not necessarily disliking) any of the present presidential hopefuls. If my gut is right, it’s a pack of complete douchebag, career politicians. That being said, any one of them would (in my singularly un-humble opinion) make a better president than what we got now.

  But then again, so would a sock puppet.
  
  

  So here we go, candidates. You have from now until… oh, let’s say March 15, to impress me. That should be plenty of time.
  

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And that’ll do it for this first blog of 2012. I hope your year is prosperous and full of many happy.

Have an excellent Monday and be sure to tune in tomorrow for Story Time when we’ll explore the real reasons behind why my brother hates asparagus.