Luke ‘n’ Bill

So the other day I was reading about the confirmation of water on Mars and it got me thinking, well some day I guess they really could plant someone on Mars. Which led me back to the thought of…well some day they’ve got to try to put someone on the moon. Which led me to the thought of….Who owns the moon?

Traditionally throughout history, the first time someone “owns land” is when the civilization that killed off the last civilization was organized enough to do some type of surveying to lay claims on the land. For example, North America. Indians follow the mammoth in, kill them off. Europeans run into the side of the continent and kill the Indians off. Europeans survey it and lay claim. After that it can really all be summed up with this great excerpt from Eddie Izzard.

Now this brings me back to a thought I had a while ago…who owns Antarctica? I can’t remember how I found out back then if I just asked someone or what, but my good friends Google and Wikipedia can give some answers to that. Apparently somewhere in the early 1900’s countries started laying claim to territories on Antarctica up until the 50’s when they started signing treaties on it. What I find interesting is this:

In 1991, 24 nations approved a protocol (addition) to the treaty that would ban oil and other mineral exploration for at least 50 years.

So I’m going to go ahead and make the call…I’ll give it 10 years before the US starts drilling there (5 before they start exploring for it).

But all of this still doesn’t answer the question….who owns the moon?

I love the band Flogging Molly!

Ok, I just wanted to put that out there before we got started. Last Friday I went up to the Irish Festival in St. Paul, thanks to Ross for letting me know about it. The whole reason that I went up there was not for a Guinness. Which by the way, I found out that they didn’t have on tap there…anywhere…I’m pretty sure that is the reason why it rained a little after I got there…God was crying!

Anyways, the reason I went was because the headliner of the nights Irish music was the best Irish band ever (and best punk band ever) Flogging Molly. If you disagree, it’s ok, you’re wrong. If you haven’t heard Flogging Molly before, do yourself a favor, go to Itunes and download a song. Any song will do, I really can’t think of a song I don’t like.

So yeah, I headed up there Friday night…met up with Chris McMacken and we started to check out the festivities. There were tons of people there selling everything they could Irish, a few cool entertainers including a couple soccer teams playing in the center of the park, a few guys boxing in an old style boxing setup, plenty of kids doing their little irish dances and finally a large assortment of great Irish music.

The best of course was Flogging Molly.  This was the second time I got to watch them live and they have just as much energy and excitement as they did 6 years ago.  There is something awe inspiring with seeing 7 people on the stage making music with a such soul that it literally grabs you by the neck and forces you to sing along.  They played a fairly long set which was nice, being that I only was able to see their Friday show and they were going to do it all again the next night.

Here’s to Irish Punk.

I had wanted to write just a quick “general complaint” for a while about government as a “business”.   Every job out there works with “customers” at some level or another.  Your customers may be employees of the same company in a different department or even the standard definition of customers being the general public.  The first thing you are taught going into these jobs is that the “customer is always right”.  No matter how dumb their request is or how ignorant they may be you always…even in the worst cases, need to sugar coat it when you tell them they are wrong.

This all boils down to what drives businesses to be better, if the customer doesn’t spend their money with you, they’ll spend it somewhere else.

Somewhere where this is turned on its ear is government.  It really started to annoy me for the first time when I sat in a line of about 15 people at the DMV waiting for 2 totally incompetent and lifeless individuals to “help me”.  I watched as the most mundane tasks, which a mentally handicap chimpanzee with a limp could have completed in record, took them forever to complete.  After sitting in line for entirely too long while the line moved 1 person, I decided I could not wait another 3 hours for this, I needed to go back to work, for a real company that had real customers.

The next place that I saw this was the licensing center.  This was a much shorter wait due to the fact that no one was in there however I had to deal with the same quality of individuals.  I sat there listening to how Sally had talked to Edna and oh my goodness… yada yada yada….not work appropriate and someone shoot me in the face this wait is painful!

The painful truth that is evident in both of these locations was that their pay checks are not dependent on their company surviving.  Their paychecks are depending on the fact that everyone doesn’t want to get arrested for breaking the laws of proper licensing.  They do something that all of us have to pay for both in taxes and in the fees we pay for these “services”.  If these were services that were done in the general business world they would have been automated years ago to streamline the process but they do not need to be, because of the lack of competition.

Moral of the story….there is no moral to this story, I’m just ranting.

Oh and…maybe lick your drivers license before you hand it to them so that they might catch a cold tomorrow….making their day horrible tomorrow in return for making your day horrible today!

As I wrote about earlier Rage Against the Machine is playing the Target Center during the RNC this year. The show will of course be incredible and after Josh brought it up I figured I had to go. So this morning I set up shop and was ready to buy some tickets.

Yesterday I went through and updated all of my Ticketmaster account information. This morning I got up to an alarm at 9:45 (it was a late night last night, I’ll write about that later). I had to set up my laptops down stairs, right next to my modem so that I could restart it if need be being that my qwest for internet that doesn’t suck is still on going. I had both of them loaded up onto the ticketmaster page and starting at 9:58 I started refreshing both browsers….back and forth. Right at 10:00 the page loaded allowing me to purchase tickets, I picked my preferences, quickly deciphered the CAPTCHA and made a sprint for the finish line. At 10:01 I had 4 tickets for the floor!

I win!

After 5 minutes I checked things out again and all the floor tickets were sold out already. Just out of curiosity I looked around to see if I could see what Minnesota’s scalping laws were and apparently just last year they made it legal again (after close to 100 years of it being illegal apparently). So I think next time a big show comes through I may have to try out my game plan again to see if I can make a couple bucks on craigslist.