Self-composed

Fedex vs. Government Bureaucracy - Newt Gingrich - youtube - 3 min

Earlier this summer I blogged about my attendance at the freedom rally where Newt Spoke. He obviously doesn’t have a new speech written for each appearance, and when I viewed the video I instantly recognized one of my favorite points. The theme of his speech is “the world that works and the world that doesn’t.”

This former police officer was shot 40 years ago, and the injuries were severe, and left him paraplegic, but alive. Just recently, the man dies in his sixties, and the coroner rules it a homicide and says death was caused due to complications from the 40 year-old bullet wound.

The shooter is still alive, and went to prison back then for the shooting, but at that point, it wasn’t murder. He now could face new murder charges. (This reminds me of a movie I’ve seen recently, but don’t want to name it as it would make for a spoiler.)

I’ve always had a thing against punishing people decades after they do something wrong. I’m all for stiff penalties as a direct reaction to a crime, but I just don’t think that they’d be charging the same person. A 20-something year-old kid shot the police officer, and they want to charge a 60 year-old man?

On the other hand, punishment for crimes is not as much for the individual criminal as it is for society. The value of charging this guy with murder and punishing him for it isn’t so much to ensure he feels bad about doing it, and deter him from doing it again, its to assure society that we don’t let murderers run the street - however long it takes, justice prevails.

Difficult one. I’m torn.

I can’t help it. As much as I dislike and disrespect the government school system, I have to feel sorry for this guy. He gives an English proficiency test to his teachers, then puts the 24 who fail it on unpaid leave.

Then he takes the test.

And fails it.

Ouch.

The story says he gets to take it again. He has time to prepare, but I missed the part where it said anything about him being on unpaid leave until he passes it. So, he continues to collect his $156,560 salary as far as I can tell while the teachers sit at home wondering how to make a few extra bucks.

So he has a tantrum - “I’m trying to understand the congruence of what I do here every day and this stupid test,” and then some excuses - “What brought me down was the rules of grammar and punctuation…English being a second language for me, I didn’t do well in writing. If you’re not an English teacher, you don’t look at the rules on a regular basis.” I wonder if all of the teachers he suspended were English teachers?

Stupid test indeed! (Did he think it was stupid when the teachers were taking it?) I’ll meet him halfway - teachers and superintendents don’t be tested on their proficiency in English, but can we test them on their proficiency in teaching their students English?

Deer tongue that is. It’s one of the condimental ingredients in Cornell & Diehl’s #410 “New Market.” Bing Crosby is reportedly known to have enjoyed a mixture of cubed burley with deer tongue. Today that is probably the most widely known example of the herb’s use in a pipe tobacco blend as it has been recreated by C&D and some other blenders.

Back to #410….

Good stuff. Its growing on me fast. The blend is lemon Virginia in a ribbon cut with unflavored black cavendish. The deer tongue adds a taste very similar to vanilla in a very natural subdued way. Don’t think of the kind of vanilla flavor like you’ll find in a Lane bulk, or even C&D’s excellent aromatic black cavendish blend #734 Green River Vanilla. This blend is all natural as far as I can tell and the vanilla is sort of herbal rather than saucy.

As usual, the “reviews” on tobaccoreviews.com do not do this blend justice. Pay no attention to them. Try this one yourself. It is smooth, naturally sweet, interesting, and this blend burns so very nicely without a hint of tongue bite.

That’s what the Health Service told a gentleman with a badly broken ankle that requires surgery to repair. Read the whole story.

This has been discussed on at least one of my favorite pipe smoking forums, where a lot of my friends there seem to think this is an anti-smoking issue. In my opinion, it is not, it is a socialized health care issue. Big difference.

Smokers aren’t the only ones hard hit by socialized health care. Here are some other horror stories assembled by the folks at Free Market Cure. That site is a must read for anyone that wants some solid yet digestible information on the health care issue. They made the following short videos. I highly recommend all of them.

Two Women
The Lemon
A Short Course in Brain Surgery
Uninsured in America

When you hear a Democratic candidate promising free health care (no such thing) know that they are promising to be able to treat you like the above victims of rationed health care. Like Fred Thompson said, “when you give the government power to do everything for you, you give the government power to do anything to you.” Hyperbole? No. John Edwards is talking about mandatory check ups - the government is going to order you to come to the doctor.

Update: Problem solved. I had tinkered with something to see what it does, but forgot to go un-tinker it.

Not sure what the problem is, but you can’t visit individual pages. Troubleshooting in progress.

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Update: I was reading my blog (I’m one of the few who do) and realized that this post would probably make more sense if I relayed the context. When I made the purchase from E.A. Carey, I was sent and email asking me to review my purchase. This is the full text of what I attempted to submit. I copied it here because a) my blog needs material, and b) the site kept erroring out every time I tried to submit the review there, and I wanted to put it somewhere so that it wouldn’t be lost forever - so I copied and pasted it here. I also realized it is pretty negative, but it is true, so I’m going to leave it for now. BTW, as far as I know, it never did appear on the review site.

I bought two pipes, a tin of tobacco, and received a free portion of bulk aromatic. I like things to be upfront when I do business, and this is where Carey Smokeshop is lacking most.

Their scheme where they want you to pay them $25 so you can get your items for the “sale price” - the same price that shows up in your shopping cart when you select buy - they want you to pay $25 for getting items at this price. For one year.

Mind you, their sale price - the one you have to pay them $25 to get - is not really even competitive. I can purchase the same product at a lower regular price than I can get it for the gimmicky membership price - and that is forgetting that when you pay $25 to save $25 you haven’t even saved anything at all.

For example, consider a tin of MacBaren Scottish Mixture - the membership price is $10.51 while the regular price is $11.95.

Suppose you’re going to buy 16 tins of Scottish Mixture, and you pay their membership - you may have just as well saved your $25 up front and paid the regular fee because you haven’t paid a dime’s worth of difference, and if you were dumb enough to pay for the membership AND bought less than 16 tins, you got suckered for more money than you would have paid at “full price.”

Suppose you know you’re going to need more than 16 tins of Scottish Mixture in a year, yes you’ll start saving money beginning with your 17th tin, but if you want to save even more money, buy them pretty much anywhere else online. I checked the price of this tobacco at three other online merchants and it ranged between $7.40 and $8.70 with no phoney membership schemes.

On the other hand, if you plan to buy a lot of Carey pipes, you don’t have to buy sixteen to start “saving money.” More like half a dozen.

I bought two of these pipes - a Duncan Hill Aerosphere and a Magic Inch. I’ll likely never buy new from them again, because I don’t think they are quite worth the membership price, much less the regular price. Not that I feel I got ripped off, just that I think there are better deals on pipes out there. Both the pipes I received were poorly drilled - the draft hole met the tobacco chamber about 1/8 inch higher than it would on a properly engineered pipe. This impacts the burn making it uneven, and impossible to smoke to the heel.

Were these drilled correctly, I think they’d make pretty darn good smokes for the money actually. Probably some of the older estate versions floating around on the online auctions are drilled better - I have one such “magic inch” Carey that I picked up in a lot for a couple dollars that is drilled correctly. By the way, on both of the new pipes I bought, the stamp wasn’t even applied evenly on either pipe and some of the nomenclature is missing on both new pipes. And again, not an issue on the estate pipe.

Maybe Carey should put less effort into devising clever schemes to sucker people out of money and more effort into the workmanship of their pipe.

Also, one last tip on their free tobacco. Whatever you do, don’t pick a second choice if it is cheaper than your first choice. I carefully selected two blends - a English and, like a good boy following directions, chose one of the repackaged Lane bulks as a second choice. Both were in stock, and of course, they sent me the cheaper of the two anyway. I guess calling this tacky is looking a gift horse in the mouth?

Positive notes - they shipped the order fairly quickly and packed it well. There is a real person there who will answer your emails, in fact she was even nice enough to send me an email letting me know I wasn’t getting the order for the price that shows up in the shopping cart because I didn’t allow myself to get suckered into the membership scheme.

For the folks at Carey, here is how you can improve:

1. Get rid of the membership scheme on your pipes and pipe tobacco. Its insulting. Treat all your customers the same, offer one price to everyone. If you have to charge higher prices to make ends meet, so be it, but don’t try to camouflage it with that sleazy membership scheme.

2. See if you can lower your prices - just a little.

3. Find a way to restore some workmanship in your pipes. They feel like they were made in China with their poor drilling and uneven stamping. Sorry China. They would be nice pipes for the money were it not for the shoddy workmanship.

I’ve had a love-hate relationship with this site for some time. I can say without hesitation that its all but worthless for simply looking up a blend and getting a solid consensus of opinion. Too many bandwagoners, fanboys, axe-grinders, and frankly, people with no clue. My favorite example is the guy who reviews Old Joe Krantz and compares it to a balkan and questions whether it has Perique.

This blend remind’s of a dryer version of some balkan blends, that are out there.(But,they say there’s no latakia?) … I really didn’t notice the perique,very much,if at all???

Those who know and love the blend as I do know it’s a burley based blend with no Latakia or Oriental leaf at all, and a monumental amount of Perique! Yet this gentleman’s obviously mis-informed review and grade is counted against the overall score on the site.

But I’m attracted to to tobaccoreviews.com like a moth to the flame anyway. I just can’t help it. I’m in this hobby for the tobacco, and I love reading about blends, even when there is a lot of garbage among that reading.

A great way to sort out that garbage is find other reviewers you trust. This takes some work, but it is very do-able. Go to a blend you know very well, be it one you don’t like that much or one at the top of your list. Go through the reviews until you find one that matches your impressions of the blend. Now work your way through the site’s clunky navigation system to find the list of reviews for that reviewer. Find other blends he’s reviewed that you like and check those reviews to see if they match as well. If a lot of them do, you have a winner! Reading this person’s reviews of blends you haven’t tried will probably prove much more useful than sorting through the rubbish wondering who to trust.

Too bad the site doesn’t have a better navigation system and maybe some mechanisms like “favorite reviewer” or such. I’ve heard of people knowledgeable about web databases who have offered to help out with such things and they’re turned down or ignored. Sad.

I’m not a big fan of cigars. I’m a fan of cigars - just not a big fan. Ok, maybe I’m kind of big…

Anyway….

In my years of questing for the holy grail, I’ve did little searching among cigar blends. I think I can say I’m limited to “Viginia Spice” from Russ Oullette’s Hearth and Home series. And that was a good blend, but I didn’t continue down the path of cigar blends because I usually stay away from heavier blends (for the same reason I don’t smoke a lot of cigars) in preference for lighter bodied concoctions.

I don’t know if it was reading one of Greg Pease’s articles where he’s bragging* about Robusto, or looking through the reviews of another reviewer on tobaccoreviews.com with similar tastes to mine** who gave McClelland’s Dominican Glory Maduro as a four-star blend. Something along the way enticed me to order a tin of each. Glad I did.

No review yet, I’m barely into each tin, but I will say don’t make the mistake I did in thinking you’ll be smoking a cigar through a pipe. The cigar leaf is used as a condimental addition just as Latakia, Orientals, or Perique would be applied. You know there is something different there, but it works with the base Virginias. Pease works some other condimental leaf into his blend with his expert hand, so both of these blends have a different presentation.

All this to say both of these are worth a try and will likely appeal to both the confirmed VA smoker looking for a change of pace as well as the fans of English blends.

* Greg Pease is entitled to brag.
** This is how to get the best use of that site in my opinion.