Keith Burgess-Jackson

Here is a scene from today’s stage of the Tour of Switzerland, won by Luxembourgian Frank Schleck, who took the overall lead.

Chone Figgins of the Los Angeles Angels went six for six yesterday in a nine-inning game. Check out the box score. When I was a kid, I listened on the radio to the game in which Cesar Gutierrez of the Detroit Tigers went seven for seven. I’m pretty sure the game went extra innings, however. I believe Rennie Stennett of the Pittsburgh Pirates also went seven for seven. I’ll snoop around on the Internet for confirmation of these statistics.

Addendum: Here is what I found about Gutierrez, who, I’m sad to learn, died two years ago. I was 13 when he went seven for seven—and yes, it was in extra innings.

Addendum 2: Here is what I found about Stennett. Incredibly, he got seven hits in just nine innings! So Figgins did not tie, much less break, the record, but six for six is pretty impressive.

When I open a window, it fills only the northwest quadrant of the screen. I have to click the “maximize” button in the upper right corner to get it to fill the screen. Somebody please tell me how to get screens to open already maximized!

Here. (Still no mention of immigration.)

If you’re a fan of The Jerk, as I am, you’ll appreciate that title. Yes, my Dell XPS M1210 notebook computer arrived today (as did my 19-inch flat-panel monitor). I knew I’d have trouble getting an Internet connection on the notebook. How did I know? Because it’s a law of nature. Some things simply must be. Not only was I unable to get an Internet connection on the notebook, but I lost the Internet connection on my desktop computer. This, too, was bound to happen. Why, oh why, must computers be so difficult, so complicated, so frustrating? When I buy a toaster, I don’t have to fight with it to get it working. I just plug it into the wall and pop the bread in. To make a long story short, I finally gave up on the notebook computer after trying various things with a Charter technician for 30 minutes (via the telephone). Before letting the technician go, I plugged the modem back into the desktop computer. To my horror, something she did messed up my desktop’s Internet connection. By this time, I was shaking, half in frustration and half in rage. She finally got my desktop’s Internet connection back, so I decided to cut my losses and have a technician come to my house to get the notebook’s Internet connection working. Perhaps by tomorrow afternoon I’ll have two ways to get on the Internet. Then again, there are those pesky laws of nature.

Addendum: There was good news amid the bad this afternoon. My notebook computer has one of those godawful touchpads for moving the cursor across the screen. Who invented this? He or she should be shot. Determined not to put up with this monstrosity, I wondered whether I could use a mouse with the notebook. Unfortunately, there was no mouse port on the computer. Then I recalled that they make wireless mice. When I went to Radio Shack to buy a cable, I asked about wireless mice. Sure enough, they make such things, and sure enough, Radio Shack had one in stock. I bought a Microsoft Wireless Notebook Optical Mouse 3000 for $29.97 (not counting sales tax). All you do is plug a little doodad into a USB 2.0 port on the computer and the mouse—tailless and frisky—is up and running. Thank goodness for small favors.

Addendum 2: I’m grateful for the feedback some of you have provided. I should consider an Apple for my next desktop computer, but I’ll probably stick with a PC, if only because so much of my stuff is by Microsoft. Here is the status of the faint-character problem on my desktop computer. I called Dell this afternoon to make arrangements for a technician to come to my house. The technician who answered the telephone wanted to troubleshoot, so I let him. We spent three hours trying things. At one point, the screen was so messed up that all I wanted was to get back to where it was when I called. Finally, we got back to the status quo ante. But I’m pleased, because I now know that the problem is not with the monitor. I have my 19-inch monitor hooked up, and the faint characters remain. (Other than that, the monitor is beautiful.) We also downloaded a new NVIDIA driver. That didn’t solve the problem. It appears that I have a defective video card. The technician says the card is not part of the motherboard and will not affect my hard drive. Dell doesn’t have technicians on call, surprisingly, so I’m going to have a freelance technician come to my house to replace the card. By the way, the technician who helped me this evening was in the Philippines. He got control of my computer to try various things. I watched as he moved the cursor around the screen. During reboots, we chatted about the weather in our respective homes (what else?) and our careers. I hope the characters don’t fade any further until I get the video card replaced. But if they do, I can use the notebook computer. It should be connected to the Internet by this time tomorrow. Wish me luck!

Kevin Stroup sent a link to this excellent essay by classicist Victor Davis Hanson. I especially enjoyed the part about guilt. If you can make someone feel guilty, you can get just about anything you want from him or her. It’s not an accident that people throughout the world are trying to make Americans feel guilty about this or that. It’s an attempt to manipulate us into giving up our hard-earned resources. If you feel guilty, fine. Give away your resources. But don’t try to take my resources. I’m not guilty of anything. I’m not a slaveowner; I haven’t harmed anyone in a Third World country; I haven’t forced anyone to have children; and I’m not responsible for what anyone else has done.

The point is that we can now see clearly that ‘right’ does not mean ‘ordained by any given society’. And it may be doubted whether even primitive men thought that it did. Their thoughts about what in particular was right were to a large extent limited by the customs and sanctions of their race and age. But this is not the same as to say that they thought that ‘right’ just meant ‘what my race and age ordains’. Moral progress has been possible just because there have been men in all ages who have seen the difference and have practised, or at least preached, a morality in some respects higher than that of their race and age.

(W. D. Ross, The Right and the Good [1930; repr., Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 1988], 12)

Michelle Malkin’s website has been redesigned. She describes and explains the changes here. I like the new look. I used to get a lot of visits from Michelle’s blogroll, which appears to be gone. By the way, if you scroll to the bottom of Michelle’s site, you’ll see that she uses WordPress, as I do. I use BlueHost as my host and WordPress for my blog software.

Here.

To the Editor:

Why do so many people who preach forgiveness in church fail to find it in their hearts to forgive illegal immigrants for trespasses undertaken out of a desperate need to work and survive? Why can’t we stop calling them illegal immigrants and refer to them simply as neighbors?

Why turn the word “amnesty” into something obscene instead of what it is, a sign of decency and compassion?

Carolyn D. Lewis
Ocean View, Del., June 17, 2007

Note from KBJ: I hope some poor people break into the letter writer’s house in Ocean View and make themselves at home. She will complain, and I will reply, “Why can’t you stop calling them trespassers and refer to them simply as family?”

Memo to Bob Herbert: Your children are not my responsibility.

This anonymous blogger linked to me, so, since his or her site looks interesting, I’ll reciprocate.

John Hawkins of Right Wing News interviews Bernard Goldberg.