I got tired of the old theme. Mainly because I jacked a few things up with the inner workings of php and Wordpress, so I decided just to use a theme created by someone else, modify it to my liking, and go from there.

That’s what it looked like before I got my hands on it. I don’t much care for the color scheme, but I think Mu could only have done a better job with the mechanics.

By the way, here is what my old theme looked like:

If you see anything that doesn’t look right, leave comments. And thanks MRignS for pointing out some flaws in the old one. That was the impetus for the change.

Update:

There. A few tweeks to the style sheet and things look halfway decent. To me anyway. If you see something that sticks out like a turd in a punchbowl, let me know. If you like it, let me know about that too.

I just got the dumb idea to try live blogging my New Year’s eve experiences tonight. Dumb because I’ll probably finish one or two entries and then forget about it.

Its currently going on 3:00PM and we’ve collected all the stuff for tonights party. The kids are in high rotation waiting to get started on the fireworks, the wife is having a much-needed nap, and I’m drooling over a bowl of Cumberland from a tin I just popped with over a year and a half of age on it. This stuff is grand.

I moved my easy chair out to the garage where we’ll be partying. In Hawaii, most house’s have their garage opening at the front, facing the street, so its a pretty typical place for people to hang out. I set up some music as well. I’ll be rinsing out the old year with Samual Adams Light, some Stone Mill Organic Pale Ale (good stuff) and my beloved Johnny Walker Red. There’s also a couple bottles of champagne.

I asked my wife not to make a big meal tonight, I want her to be able to relax without stress and enjoy everything. So its finger foods - chips and dip, blue cheese/shap, soybeans, korean cuttlefish (taigu), lomi lomi salmon, and nachos.

Well, that’s the plan anyway.

Update:

I fell asleep that night at about 10:00. Best laid plans….

My wife an I attended the Freedom Rally last night. Sean Hannity, Newt Gingrich, and Oliver North all made it to Oahu this week. This is a rare treat as I don’t recall many conservative events making their way to Hawaii. The three might have needed a vacation, but I doubt the could have set aside much time for themselves. Hannity was doing his radio and television broadcasts here, they visited vets and Tripler Army Medical Center, did some events at Pearl Harbor, and did some book signings. Those are just the ones I know about.

I took a quick look at the Honolulu Advertiser’s website - I couldn’t find any coverage of the rally. Two thousand attendees, three people known nationwide, including a potential presidential candidate spoke. Not a peep. Tho I didn’t dig that much. When whackjob Ward Churchill showed up at the University of Hawaii, that’s all you heard about. Two hundred people showed up.

All in all it was a good time. The hours of waiting in line to get my books signed (geez I wished I’d dropped by Costco beforehand) were much more painful than the price of tickets for the front section. I’m not going to go in to what Hannity said - you can probably guess. He was his usual self, and his material wasn’t anything new. I will say he’s a good speaker, and its a nice change to listen to him be able to make his points and carry a train of thought without commercial interruptions every five minutes.

Newt Gingrich blew me away. The man is a genious. He explained what has gone wrong with the leadership, government, and politics in this country. I wish I knew how to get a transcript or recording because I’m not good at recalling entire speeches. I can share a few points that stick out in my memory.

June 13, 1942, Long Island New York, four German saboteurs disembark a U-boat and sneak ashore in the middle of the night with enough explosives and money to sustain a two-year mission of secretly sabotaging our defense-related production, with the secondary purpose of bringing the war to American soil and terrorizing American citizens.

June 17, 1942, a group just like the first one lands near Jacksonville Florida with the same agenda.

June 27, 1942, all eight have been arrested before even beginning their mission. Of $175,000 they brought, they’d only managed to spend about $600 of it. They never had a chance to use any of their weapons or explosives.

By the end of the summer, they had faced a military tribunal, sentenced, and executed (except two who cooperated and got life in prison.) Germany never attempted to land spies on our soil again.

Fast forward a generation or two…

2007, over five years after 9/11, the Fort Dix Six are captured only after a store clerk alerts the authorities about a suspicious video. The six Muslims had planned to massacre as many servicemen and women as possible. All were born outside the U.S., three had been here illegally for 23 years. They had something like 75 run-ins with police during their time here, during which it was never figured out they were here illegally, much less that they were terrorists.

Another point he made is how, in the “world that works” a person can go to a foreign country, put a plastic card in a ATM machine, punch in a four-digit number, and eleven seconds later the network has accessed his bank account 4000 miles away, verified he had the money for the transaction, withdrawn the money, converted it to local currency, and spit it out. But the government never seemed to notice that some illegal alien was the 42nd person to use the same social security number. Its shocking enough red flags didn’t go up the second time someone used the social security number. That’s government.

He continued to make contrasts between the “world that works” and our broken, incompetent government (my words - can’t remember how he put it) as well as outlining what it’ll take to fix it. He pointed out that we didn’t lose the election in 2006 because America doesn’t want conservatism - and he cited some poll numbers that prove this - the election was lost because people are tired of how the politician are (not) doing things.

On with the pictures.

This is the line of people waiting to get their books signed before the event. I got in line about two hours before they showed up. There was another line after - the guys stuck around to get anyone they didn’t get to before the rally.

Something like 2000 folks showed up. One thing you might notice from these pictures - something that sort of bothered me when I noticed it last night, is that the majority of people you see here are white. Why is that bothersome? Because white’s make up around 10% of the population in Hawaii. That’s another post.

Here’s Hannity working out some last minute details at the sound board right before the show.

Not only is he a brilliant man, he’s also extremely friendly and outgoing. While he was signing books you could tell he was having a great time. That’s my wife Norma, he called her over when he saw me trying to get a picture of them both.

The Colonel was willing to pause for a pose with my wife as well.

That’s about it. I’ll update if I recall anything else I should add.

Installed the Ubuntu distro today. Its amazing how far Linux has come along. It was quicker and easier to install than Windows. Getting the video driver to work was only a matter of checking a box and hitting OK. Linux downloaded it and installed it. Everything else about the install was pain free.

This week I’ve been having a new roof added to my house. Before it was wood shakes which were probably as old as the house, now its composite tile - meneer? (sp?) What I’m really looking forward to tho is the addition of a couple sun lights above our dining room area which has no windows and kitchen. It’s going to brighten up the place considerably. To deal with the heat, we’ve had two solar fans installed. These are obviously powered by the sunlight and draw the hot air out.

When I left for work this morning, they were still humping the tiles on the roof - I couldn’t see how they’d finish that and lay them in two days. To my surprise, the roof was mostly covered when I got home. I’m pretty impressed.

This is not a review, and I didn’t flag it as one. I received my first tin of this yesterday - I’ve heard about it forever, and finally got around to trying it.

I’ll attempt a full-on review at some point, but the thing that struck me about this tobac right from the start is how easily it smokes. I can picture someone buying a tin of this way back when, popping the lid, and dumping the contents into the pouch they carry around or the humidor they kept at their desk that already contained the 1/4 of the last tin they bought. I guess that’s a fancy way of saying it’s an all day blend. But is that giving it enough credit?

Rattray’s 7 Reserve is an all-day blend. And a damn good one. Note: When I say all-day blend, I mean an all-natural English or American blend, as opposed to an all black Cavendish souped up aromatic. Not that I don’t cherish a bowl of BCA or Butternut Burly when the mood strikes, nor would I hesitate to smoke said blends all day or fear the result if I wanted, but those blends are sorta automatic all day blends if you know what I mean. Presbyterian Mixture meets the criteria 7 Reserve does, but isn’t as predictable. 7 Reserve is good stuff! Presby is too, but it goes off in a new direction - a direction that was new 100 years ago, and still is new today.

For the history, start with the front of the tin, check out tobaccoreviews.com, and let me know what you find out after that, because that is as far as I went. It’s supposedly a very old recipe - created long before the experts of ASP declared all quality blends shall contain latakia and/or be created by a regular poster to said forum.

The recipe has changed hands from one blending company to the next. I haven’t tried any samples from the company that made it 60 years ago, and I’m not really interested in trying because I don’t smoke blends that were available decades ago, I smoke blends available now. Yet you’ll see so many pompous reviews at tobaccoreviews.com where the anointed will moan about how it was so good before but lost something since.

Whatever.

People usually read reviews to determine the likelihood they’ll be interested in purchasing a particular product, not to learn the smoking history of the reviewer.

When I review the blend proper, I’ll expand on the smoking qualities - the way it burns so well, the unique, yet exotic taste, the way it refuses to bite, the naturally sweet background looming in the….

Oh wait, this is starting to sound like a review. This is not a review.

My Valentines day gift is a LJ Heart pipe - my first one from Lannes Johnson.

I ended up sending LJ an email, and in response he mentioned that the pipe could be smoked as much as I wanted to, in contradiction to the “conventional wisdom” of the majority of the online pipe smoking community that pipes must be rested for at least a day if not a week between smokes.

I have always doubted this is the case and asked his opinion. His reply: “I am not a pipe rester but a pipe smoker. If a pipe will not perform to my smoking habits I get rid of the thing. No need to dance with ugly women.”

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how these silly misconceptions arise - misconceptions like resting pipes, 3 layer packing, the evils of PG, etc. My instincts are it’s an internet thing. Before the internet and ASP, no one seems to have heard they weren’t supposed to smoke the same pipe all day every day, so people did. The pipes didn’t hear they were supposed to go sour and stop being smokeable either, so I guess it all evened out in the end.

I took a break for tinkering with this blog and web site today to attend the birthday party of a friend of our family - on my wife’s side. We celebrated this woman’s 75th birthday party. I’d have to say it was easily the largest, most extravagant birthday party I’ve ever attended. And I’ve been to Filipino one year-olds’ birthday parties.

It was held at a clubhouse at a golf course. She’s not a golfer - I guess they chose the location for the food. It was that standard Hawaiian catering fare - mahi mahi, teriyaki beef, and garlic/shoyu chicken thighs.

She’s a lucky lady. It was a surprise birthday party. Somehow the kids, and their families, and their kids, husbands, boyfriends, and girlfriends, that live on the mainland managed to travel back to Hawaii with the excuse they were attending someone’s wedding. They all put a lot of work into the party, and while I usually hate social things like this and their trappings, seeing all the dedication to this woman who I’ve known for over a decade, and always liked, warmed my heart. Though its hard to tell because the food still feels like a bowling ball in my gut.