Welcome to The Hoosier Illuminati. Macintosh bigot, clothes horse, motorsports fanatic (as long as they turn right), Anglophile.

Clothes and manners do not make the man; but when he is made, they greatly improve his appearance. --Henry Ward Beecher

Marsh is closing stores

Including one in my stomping grounds that has fallen prey to a new Wal-Mart just down the street.

Cue the usual wailing and gnashing of teeth about how Wal-Mart is responsible for Marsh going down the toilet and how Wal-Mart destroys communities.  Well, spare me, because it simply isn’t true.  The Winchester Marsh store sucked long before Wal-Mart moved in, Wal-Mart presented shoppers with an alternative, and THAT is why Marsh closed.  It really is that simple. 

Look, if you can’t, don’t or won’t compete on price, you have to compete on something else.  In the case of Marsh, that has to be service and product.  When Marsh had a decent fresh meat case I shopped there several times a week on my way home.  Or I tried to anyway, be sure to get there before 6:30 or so because if you don’t the fresh meat case will be closed.  If you did get there before 6:30, the case might be open, but good luck getting anyone to wait on you.  And, as I said, that was WHEN Marsh had a fresh meat case, they took it out about a month ago.  I can get pre-packaged crap at either store, but less expensively at Wal-Mart.  The occasionally futile attempt to purchase decent meat was the sole reason I ever went to Marsh, but I bought quite a bit while I was there.  Now I don’t. 

With a few major exceptions I found the Marsh staff unpleasant and unresponsive.  Their prices on the things I bought were always about 25% higher than the competition.  These things were true before Wal-Mart ever built a grocery in the town I’m talking about. Then Marsh voluntarily removed the one product line that I couldn’t buy at Wal-Mart. 

I don’t like Wal-Mart.  At all.  But here are the options:  Both stores are unpleasant.  Neither store has much in the way of friendly, personal service.  Now both stores have the same merchandise, Marsh having voluntarily crippled itself.  One store forces its employees to wear silly sailor hats, the other forces its employees to wear silly vests.  One store is significantly cheaper.  Where do you go?  There’s no reason NOT to accept the less expensive alternative, as much as I’d like to.  That, my friends, is why Marsh is in the shape it’s in.  Wal-Mart didn’t make Marsh hire unpleasant people (and damn few of them at any one time).  Wal-Mart didn’t make Marsh remove their superior products.  Wal-Mart didn’t make Marsh cause me to stand at the meat counter for ten minutes waiting for someone to notice me.  Marsh did that all on their own. 

Me, now I go Krogering whenever possible and patronize the local independent meat market.  They’re a little (but not much) out of my way.  But I won’t go to Marsh anymore.  They let me know a long time before they locked the doors that they didn’t care about my business. 

You’ve got to be kidding me.

I’m no nuke expert, but it sounds like a really bad idea to run your nuke test 240 miles from your capital if that’s what the seismology report is telling us. 

Magnitude 4.2 (Light)

70 km (40 miles) N of Kimchaek, North Korea
90 km (55 miles) SW of Chongjin, North Korea
180 km (115 miles) S of Yanji, Jilin, China
385 km (240 miles) NE of PYONGYANG, North Korea

I tried to post this a half hour ago, but my server at Hosting Matters was down AGAIN. 

Anyone else have a really bad feeling

about what’s coming next?

Why I’m not a basketball fan

And particularly not the Indiana Pacers.

Four members of the Indiana Pacers were involved in a shooting incident this morning at a Westside strip club, Indianapolis police said.

Stephen Jackson fired five shots from a 9-mm handgun after someone hit him in the face and tried to run him over with a vehicle outside Club Rio at about 3 a.m., IPD spokesman Sgt. Matthew Mount said.

It’s time this kind of classless thuggery was stopped.  It just keeps happening around these guys, and if Rick Carlisle can’t or won’t stop it Larry Bird needs to.  Typically people don’t try to run you down if you’re not being an ass. 

Tinsley and Daniels also had guns in their vehicles, Mounts said, but never pulled them during the incident. Tinsley has an Indiana gun permit; Daniels has a Florida permit.

A small amount of marijuana was found in Jamaal Tinsley’s car, Mount said, but no one was arrested because the drug can not be linked to any particular person.

Guns are one thing.  I don’t blame them for having guns.  Guns and drugs are something else entirely.  And everyone, everyone, knows that nothing good is happening with guns, drugs and sleazy strip joints at 3AM.  Enough. 

I hate basketball and basketball players are a huge part of the reason. 

Well I’ll be darned.

The hijackers of the Turkish Airlines jet?  Muslims.  Yeah, Muslims.  I sure as hell never would have guessed Muslims, would you?  Of course not.  After all, it’s not as if there’s any precedent for that kind of behavior in the Muslim community, and it IS Ramadan.

Color me shocked. 

Not. 

Ted Turner:  First Class Idiot

It annoys me that the MSM gives this creep air time to present his whacked out ideas. 

On CNBC last week,

CNN founder Ted Turner argued that “you don’t win people over by bombing them, you win them over by being friends with them,” and soon recommended giving Muslim extremists what they want as a solution to terrorism.

Well, sure.  Just do what the Islamofascists want us to do!  Why didn’t we think of that?  BECAUSE IT’S BLOODY INSANE, THAT’S WHY.  Unless you want to convert to Islam, grow a long beard and make your wife walk around in a burka, in which case I suppose it makes perfect sense.  Me, I’ll pass.  I don’t want to be their friends.  They want to kill me, and that has something of wet blanket effect on my friendly feelings toward them. 

Ted goes on to note that he ended the Cold War, Al Gore is a great leader, Cuba is a “wonderful place,” that if the U.S. can have 28,000 nukes Iran ought to be able to have ten, and that men should not be allowed to hold political office for 100 years in order to make the world a peaceful place.  I’m not sure how accepting his friends the Muslims would be of that last idea, but whatever. 

Ted is either trolling all of us or he’s one of the world’s leading moonbats.  Personally, my money is on the latter. 

Male Restroom Etiquette

A Hoosier Illuminati Public Service Announcement

This spider thing…

I’m telling you, the little bastards are taking over.

Brown recluse spiders won’t shut down Killbuck Elementary School, despite their poisonous reputation.

Classes are continuing as normal at the 332-pupil school in rural Anderson three weeks after officials first found the spiders in the building. More spiders were found Wednesday.

“She was taking out some books,” Lowe said. “She did say she’d been bitten, but she didn’t see what bit her.”

I call for a jihad. 

Say what you will

But here’s a guy who absolutely digs being the Pope.  You just KNOW he gets up in the morning, looks at himself in the mirror and says, “Dude, you are the POPE!”

I like a guy who likes his job. 

Interesting question

Blog Goliard posits the following:

Imagine, for instance, that it was the Ku Klux Klan that was bombing airplanes…and that on his next flight out of D.C., Jesse Jackson’s party got singled out, more or less randomly, for extra screening. What do you think he would say? Do you think he would find this morally superior to focusing the TSA’s attention on white male Southerners?

An excellent and interesting point.  Now, the brilliant part:

And just imagine how some Southern advocacy group would be received if they stepped forward to play the role that CAIR does now. How do you think the government would respond to their calls, in the immediate wake of a 21st-century version of the Birmingham church bombing, to reach out to disaffected white Southerners, to protect them from any hate or discrimination or other unpleasant backlash, to solemnly instruct Americans that the redneck culture is really one of peace and understanding? And don’t forget their demands that the “understandable rage” over this, that or the other thing be understood by everyone…not that any of it justifies terrorism, exactly; but we must always go after the “root causes”, you know…

Precisely!  A Jewish Center is attacked in Seattle, a woman is shot dead by a Young Arab Male™ for the crime of being a Jew.  The immediate response of the government?  Protect the mosques. 

It’s time for those of us who get it to start swinging our cluebats. 

Thanks Jonah.

After 226 arrests you ought to be eligible for the death penalty

LINCOLN, Neb.—Lincoln police on Monday morning arrested a man for the 226th time after, police said, he was breaking into vehicles.

Kevin Holder, 41, has a 43-page criminal history that stretches back to 1980. Lincoln police have his mug shot on file 16 different times.

You gotta believe that after, oh, 100 or 150 arrests that a guy would be eligible for habitual offender status and that you could just lock him up permanently, wouldn’t you?  And this guy is surely the top offender in Nebraska, right?

Even with Holder’s 226 arrests, Casady said, he doesn’t even crack the top 10 habitual criminal list. Casady said there are a number of people that have over 500 arrests.

Why?  Why are such creatures allowed to walk the streets? 

BUILD MORE PRISONS.  I don’t care how many prisons it takes, if the reason we give these savages freedom is because we don’t have enough prison space, BUILD MORE.  Those of us who aren’t scumbag criminals have rights too. 

Am I the only one

who saw Jurassic Park? Those critters are extinct for a reason, boys.  Leave ‘em that way. 

Great time to drop a bomb?

Yeah, I think so too.

I’m unfortunately forced to say

That I’ve been totally wrong about Condoleezza Rice.  I thought she was brighter than her boss.  Guess not. 

Saint Cindy treated for acute attentionwhoredom

Nobody’s paying attention, better make a trip to the hospital.

Anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan was being treated Friday evening in the emergency room of Providence Health Center in Waco.

Sheehan, who has been on a liquids-only diet for 37 days as part of a fast in protest of the war, was described as being gaunt and pale as she arrived at the hospital.

Last time I saw her on the news she could have done with a little MORE gaunt… if you know what I mean.

An assistant said Sheehan, who flew to Central Texas after a trip with other activists to Jordan to meet with members of Iraq’s new parliament, was being treated for exhaustion.

Yes, I’m sure that being an attentionwhore is totally exhausting.  Among the many reasons I’m looking forward to the end of the Bush administration is that also means an end to the tedious haranguing by this bitch.