Buck O’Neil dead

Negro League star player, and historian, Buck O’Neil is dead at 94.

Now’s the change for Bud (Light) Selig and Major League Baseball to right a serious wrong from earlier this summer.

MLB ought to do like the Hall of Fame did for Clemente and Gehrig, and use this as an excuse to immediately vote him in. His resume includes Negro League batting champ and title winner as a manager, major league eagle-eye scout and the historian’s role brought to the attention of the larger baseball world in Ken Burns’ “Baseball.”

The Four Stooges have debated; your turn to sound off

I was doing my normal Friday night fall work of covering a Lancaster Tiger football game, so I didn’t get to watch the debate, or glorified joint press conference, as these things usually are.

But, now’s your chance to sound off, with the two polls below, both on who you think will win the race, and what voting percentage the winner will draw.

Free polls from Pollhost.com

Who do you think will win the gubernatorial race

Bell Friedman Perry Strayhorn

Free polls from Pollhost.com

What will the winner get as far as vote percentage?

40 or more 38-39 36-37 34-35 32-33 30-31

The word is “using”

I can’t stand government press releases that talk about “utilizing” something. That’s it. Carry on — with better English.

Google continues to grow. — wants YouTube

Makes sense to me that Google would want to snatch it up for $1.6 billion. It’s a niche service in an exploding area and it fits well with Google’s core ideas.

But, what happens when Google controls 80-90 percent of the Net’s “plug-ins”?

More on tags, known issues and other Beta stuff

I like that tags are remembered by Blogger, so I don’t have to keep typing them in.

This blog still shows up under a Google search of my name — and the Beta, not a cached version of the original.

My previous comments about not having a version of Haloscan available, and the RSS feed issue, remain the only problems I’ve had.

Which of the Four Stooges will get my vote for Texas governor?

Simple: The first candidate to make a full and unequivocating pledge to kill electricity deregulation will have a huge inside track.

Bit of potentially good news: Phil King and other members of the Lege are talking about capping dereg. We’ll see after Nov. 7.

GOP goes McCarthy, deals gay-bashing card under the deck in Foley fallout

The Nation’s David Corn shows senior Congressional GOP going Joe McCarthy, even to the point of “We have a list” of gay Congressional staffers who allegedly set Foley up.

Count one among gay ex-staffers: Kirk Fordham, former chief of staff to Rep. Tom Reynolds, chair of the Republican Congressional Campaign Committee.

Corn details the list:

I have a copy. I’m not going to publish it. For one, I don’t know for a fact that the men on the list are gay. And generally I don't fancy outing people--though I have not objected when others have outed gay Republicans, who, after all, work for a party that tries to limit the rights of gays and lesbians and that welcomes the support of those who demonize same-sexers.

What's interesting about The List -- which includes nine chiefs of staffs, two press secretaries, and two directors of communications -- is that (if it’s acucurate) it shows that some of the religious right's favorite representatives and senators have gay staffers helping them advance their political careers and agendas. These include Representative Katherine Harris and Henry Hyde and Senators Bill Frist, George Allen, Mitch McConnell and Rick Santorum. Should we salute these legislators for being open-minded enough to have such tolerant hiring practices? After all, Santorum in a 2003 AP interview compared homosexuality to bestiality, incest and polygamy. It would be rather big of Santorum to employ a fellow who engages in activity akin to such horrors. That is, if Santorum knows about his orientation.

Corn then goes on to say this is “not about homosexuality.”

But it IS, David. True, it’s ultimately about GOP hypocrisy, but the cause of this hypocrisy in these cases is homosexuality. Maybe you won’t out gay GOP staffers, but, even with being conservative on being sure who’s gay, I hope somebody else will.

Hypocrisy at this level is bullshit, and not to lay the bullshit out on a hot, steaming platter is enabling it to continue.

I hope someone from The Advocate or Out has a copy, has the appropriate information or contacts to do some confirmation, and then starts writing.

A local take on the Lancaster school bond election, from a semi-regular reader

Get a local resident’s take on why you should be voting “no” on the Lancaster School District’s $215 million bond issue by
taking a look at his blog.

I’ll be writing something editorially at my newspaper before the end of the month. Meanwhile, our website has a poll up about the bond issue, down in the lower left corner. We’ll have it up until the start of early voting.

Update, Oct. 14:
Unfortuantely, Mr. Melcher does not do his side any favors by running wildly inaccurate comments to him without any follow-up comments on his part correcting them.

Here is what I wrote him:

My header says it all, and since my e-mails to you from work got bounced back last week, I hope this goes through.

First, Janette is misinformed or self-confused in a couple of ways.
A. She comments the common error of conflating CITY property taxes and SCHOOL DISTRICT property taxes. CITY property taxes have NOT increased, while the city has been on a program of adding two police officers every six months, and now doing the same for firefighters. Please straighten her out; I believe that, due to the nature of your blog, it's kind of incumbent you do that.
(SIDEBAR: Obviously, a lot of people DON'T READ A NEWSPAPER.)
B. Also, the city DID start increasing code enforcement work this summer; and Neighborhood Services in general got a couple new employees in the new budget. Plus, street repair money was upped about $200K.
(SIDEBAR: Obviously, a lot of people DON'T READ A NEWSPAPER.)
C. The special semi ramp that is being built as part of the access road work on I-20 eastbound will keep a lot of trucks OFF the I-20/HSR intersection. Plus, the city is working on a new version of its truck route ordinance, trying to do something that won't have the Danieldale Road truck cos. suing again, or will have better ammunition to fire backif they do.
(SIDEBAR: Unless this person is a newcomer -- Obviously, a lot of people DON'T READ A NEWSPAPER.)

I still haven't finished my editorial, and I have enough room to have some sort of "pox on both houses" comment as part of it.

So, for a little more "cred" on your part in the eyes of the people who DO read my newspaper, again, you might want to shoot down what people like this GET WRONG while you also address their legitimate concerns.

Remember, Hastert, Reynolds and others could be guilty of criminal charges

Speaker of the House Denny Hastert, along with Republican Congressional Campaign Committee Chairman Tom Reynolds, could face criminal charges over ex-Congressman Mark Foley’s sexually explicit discussions with underage Congressional pages.

It’s a crime — whether formally found to be obstruction of justice, or some other type of criminal behavior — to knowingly fail to report criminal behavior, after all.

So, if Foley is convicted, or pleas out — even to deferred adjudication — lawyering up for Hastert, Reynolds, et al, won’t just be for failure of ethics reason.

The National Labor Management Relations Board strikes again

A lot of people — perhaps as many as 8 million — could lose the right to unionize, now that the National Labor Management Relations Board has said they are all potentially supervisors
and ineligible to join a union.

Sadly, the Bush-era NLRB has accelerated a process that started on Clinton’s watch. The bit of schadenfreude I take from this is the possibility of it hitting workers in the tech sector who are on wage, not salary, and cheered the passage of NAFTA in 1993.

The offensiveness of Denny Hastert

On Rush Limbaugh’s show, Hastert claimed Democrats were ramping up the Foley affair because
they were soft on terrorism. I hope a USA Today poll is right that Hastert has just 24-48 hours left to save his job, and he fails, and drags a lot of people down with him.

But, Democrats and Republicans need to combine to do more to reform the page system.

Kinky Friedman more organized than Chris Bell?

Bell missed speaking to the Duncanville Chamber of Commerce for lunch today. The staff writer at our newspaper group said he had gotten overscheduled, but didn’t have any information on where he was that caused him to miss the lunch.

Could have gotten a lot of coverage. Our suburban newspaper group covers a territory of more than 300,000 people; I don’t know if the Morning News was there or not.

Tagging proper names

Here is the format I intend to use:

Last Name (First Name), Last Name (First Name), etc.

That way, if I choose to have tags alphabetized, I have them done by last name for proper names. Obviously, you cannot separate first and last names with a comma or you get two separate tags. And, there may be enough different people with the same last name that I need first names to keep them separate.

Using the new Blogger beta

Overall, gotta say I love it. I’ve been dying to have the ability to tag my posts, like professional blogs from people who get ads through consortia of like-minded people, or else put out the “pay me” or “donate to me” shingle post often enough.

Well, now I can.

The changes to the template system, with the page elements, to allow draw-and drag reconfiguring? Nice, but not massive. It took me a minute or two to figure out what to put where, in transferring things from my old template.

But, the tags, that’s the biggie.

Oh, I noticed there doesn’t seem to be an Atom feed link to go with the beta settings; instead there’s a feed listed at each individual post. Well, now, I have to e-mail Blogger to find out about putting a regular RSS link for the whole blog up, so I can then reinstall Haloscan. And why can’t Blogger/Google have the beta configured to do an auto-reinstall of Haloscan?

I DID notice that one of my links, to my Amazon book reviews, did NOT transfer over in the template upgrade.

I’m also not totally fond of the Euro-style “October 04” dating. And why the hell is Chicago the ONLY U.S. city listed under Central Time Zone settings?

But, I’ll see what Blogger has to say in an e-mail.

Don’t think I like Google’s “flag” button on Blogger

I don’t know if it’s new to the Beta upgrade, or if the earlier version of Blogger had it.

But, it sounds a little bit chilling. Who’s defining what’s “objectionable”? James Dobson? The Taliban? Dick Cheney?

Sergey, et al, will you just get rid of this and show you’re not in the process of becoming “just another company”?

More reason to question Mozilla hype

I have a lot more problems on my computers, especially if they’ve been on a while and using some memory, with Firefox timing out connections for various reasons. (I’m using Windows XP, Home on a dialup.) It seems even worse with Flash-based content.

Needless to say, Firefox isn’t going to get regular use by me.

Foley claims to have been abused by a clergyman - beyond politics, let me talk truth and myth here

First, let me qualify myself. As a survivor of child sexual abuse myself, I know whereof I speak.

Now, as to Foley’s apparent self-justification that he was abused by a clergyman and this somehow caused him to be an abuser.

First of all, the great majority of abused children never go on to be abusers themselves. Now, although exact statistics are not available, looking from the other direction, it is likely true that a majority of abusers were themselves abused in some way.

Second, despite his words to the contrary, Foley is NOT accepting full responsibility.

Foley said through his lawyer Tuesday that he was sexually abused by a clergyman as a teenager, but accepts full responsibility for sending salacious computer messages to teenage male pages.

If he really accepted full responsibility, he wouldn’t have mentioned his childhood until some time later. It looks clear to me he’s trying to have it both ways.

Before you object, it would be something entirely different if he had said something like this in private, to a counselor, immediately.

Third, contrary to the Rush Limbaughs of the world who must be giving themselves double hernias from trying not to gay-bashingly crush Foley, adult male child sexual abuse of young boys does NOT cause homosexuality. Period.

Fourth, while Foley’s lawyer is right that “shame” keeps many adult victims of child sexual abuse quiet, it usually doesn’t keep them quiet that long. From my experience, the age of realization is more likely to be in one’s 30s.

Fifth, child sexual abuse is indeed a major cause of alcoholism, as well as drug abuse, abusive self-mutilation such as cutting and more. But, again, problems in this areas usually come out well before one’s 50s.

So, to turn this back to the world of politics, while I don’t outrightly disbelieve you, ex-Congressman Mark Foley, I’m pretty skeptical.

Iraq so deshabile it can’t even refine it’s own oil

That’s right. Iraq’s oil economy is so wrecked it has to export crude to Turkey to be refined, then import back the gasoline and other refined products.

However, Turkey is so concerned about border security that it may shut the border for a day or more at a time. Obviously, thousands of backed-up tanker trucks are a hugely tempting target to guerrillas.

Frontline kicked off its new season with a bang

More than 100 tribal leaders assassinated. An original agreement between the Pakistani government of Pervez Musharraf and the al Qaeda-connected Northwest Frontier Taliban leader Nek Mohammed to have a cease-fire, with surrender of al Qaeda leaders, negotiated in 2004, later being broken. Haji Omar, head of the Taliban in South Waziristan, pledging to continue to import fighters into Afghanistan. And, as Frontline pointed out, a similar agreement negotiated just a month ago has already been broken.

No Pakistani arrests of any Pashtun Taliban leaders. Little more than that, at times, on al Qaeda leaders, and that only under American pressure. A Pakistan that either cannot or will not intensely patrol the Northwest Frontier. A Pakistan that is arguably not a whole lot less of a failed state than post-invasion Iraq or Afghanistan.

That’s the Pakistani border area profiled in detail in the “Return of the Taliban” episode.

A Pakistani journalist, Hayat Ullah Khan, who becomes a freelancer for PBS’s “Frontline” in areas restricted to Westerners kidnapped six days after his photographs showed a U.S. missile killed al-Qaeda connected leader Abu Hamsha in Pakistan. Musharraf first claimed to not even know who he was, then to say he was not in Pakistani custody.

Six days after the interview, he was found dead in a ditch, bound with government-issue handcuffs and with nine bullets in his head. So, you have a Pakistan that will clamp down when it can, and brutally, to maintain control. The dichotomy should underline just how much out of control, at least control from Islamabad, the Northwest Frontier is.

At the same time, you have an America refusing to recognize the fragile tightrope of a Pakistani leader who has survived multiple assassination attempts, who has little control over his own intelligence services, and not necessarily total control over all units in his own army.

And, in the combination of a power vacuum and a cash infusion in neighboring Afghanistan to roll back the Soviets, mullahs gained new authority, despite “Pashtuns derisively refer(ring) to the mullah as ‘the dog that lives off of table scraps.’”

Can we win the war with the Taliban? Is Musharraf right ― from his own point of view, setting aside that of the U.S. ― to try to negotiate? Read all this and more discussed online.
.
Go see the even more in-depth online coverage. This map will show you the Northwest Frontier in some detail, as well as a larger overview of both Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Mark Foley and Gerry Studds — it’s apples and oranges

The Wall Street Journal trotted out the old “moral equivalence” argument in a Monday editorial mentioning former Massachusetts Congressman Studds.

Sorry, doesn’t fly.

Per Wikipedia, here’s the basics on Gerry Studds’ case.

First, Studds admitted to a relationship with a 17-year-old male page, albeit while claiming it was a private matter, despite violating age-of-consent laws.

But, the relationship itself happened a decade ago, so, as far as possible criminal prosecution, or House sanctions beyond censure, the statute of limitations had expired.

Second, Gerry Studds in particular, or the Democratic party in general, had not run election after election as defenders of “moral/family values.”

Third, Studds openly admitted his sexual orientation as a result of the incident; Wiki claims it was common knowledge in his district. Foley, part of an officially anti-gay political party, has refused to admit his sexual orientation. And despite some PR flackery, it seems pretty clear that this has NOT been common knowledge in Foley’s district.

And, contrary to Hotline’sChuck Todd, it is NOT the media who drive a Republican/Democrat dichotomy on differing standards and differing political fallout. The GOP invites this on themselves.

However — SURPRISE — Kos whitewashes ALL of Studds’ history in his Kosopedia entry on Studds, not mentioning the age-of-consent issue.

And again, that’s why this blog doesn’t accept the Conventional Wisdom of self-appointed conservative or liberal talking heads.

Grandfather, father, son? Triplets separated at birth? Clones taken out of the freezer decades apart?

Current and former Speakers of the House (from left) Denny Hastert, Newt Gingrich and Tip O’Neill eventually came to be near-identical caricatures of overblown, overgrown, bloviating gasbags who became so addicted to political spinning and lying they couldn’t have stopped even if they had wanted to.

With Hastert, his likely downfall is going to be the transparency of his lies, like he had just pulled a talking points list out of his inbox three minutes before his press conference.

With Newt, it was not so much lies as it was petulance in his political life. In his personal life, ahh, the old “Party of Values” one again showed its Orwellian stance of “Values for thee but not for me.”

Tip’s in here in part just because he looks the part. With him, it wasn’t private life problems, nor even lies in public life. The bloviating, though? The cluelessness about being marginalized by Reaganism? The cluelessness before that, under Carter, about where a post-New Deal Democratic party might be headed? ’Nuff said.

Evidence backing up why I didn’t vote for Kerry — the refusal to face Iraq in the campaign

Activist/author Paul Rieckhoff shows how John Kerry was
semi-criminally clueless on Iraq.

Money quote: “Clearly, the John Kerry of 1971 never could've gotten in to see the John Kerry of 2004.”

Go get the book if you want to know more.

The GOP Congressman’s blame game best friend — alcohol rehab?

First, Ohio Representative and Jack Abramoff-connected shyster Bob Ney announces a stint in rehab as part of his plans to leave office after his guilty plea. Now it’s Mark Foley.

While I’m not denying these gentlemen may have alcohol problems ….

What happened to the GOP’s vaunted mantra of “personal responsibility”?

You know, of course. It walked out the back door to Hypocrisy Gulch.

Gerry Fraley needs to buy an NL MVP clue

Fraley, the Dallas Morning News baseball analyst, picked the Stros' Lance Berkman as MVP.

A. Not when he had boo-boos in the Stros' one loss last week that move them back to 1.5 out.

B. And certainly not when Prince Albert, the Cards' Albert Pujols, had better stats than him across the board, despite playing in fewer games.

Pujols: 142 games, 48 HRs, .330 BA, 136 RBIs, 118 runs, .667 slugging, 1.097 OPS.
Berkman: 151 games, 45 HRs, .312 BA, 135 RBIs, 95 runs, .620 slugging, 1.037 OPS.

Pujols, never known as a speed demon, even had 7 stolen bases to Berkman's 3 AND is a Gold Glover.

Add to that this bit from ESPN: Besides carrying the team for basically the entire season, Pujols raised his game in the season's final week. His push for the NL MVP was a .391 batting average, three home runs and seven very important RBI in his last six games.

Gerry, I don't know if you grew up in Houston, or Waco (Berkman's home), but Lance isn't even No. 2 in the MVP race -- the Phillies' Ryan Howard is. After the Abreu trade, they'd be nowhere without him.

Pro athletes’ unfounded God-touting gets a perfect smackdown, thank doorknob

I hadn’t previously heardthis idiocy about the power of prayer out of Shaun Alexander’s mouth before, and it’s WAYYYY too good to pass up.

Alexander, the Seattle Seahawks’ running back and last year’s NFL Most Valuable Player, broke his foot a week ago. But he still expected to play yesterday. Why?

Alexander had been bothered by a bruised bone in his left foot before it cracked during last week's win over the Giants. Still, he hoped to play, saying the power of prayer had healed him and even jumping around for coach Mike Holmgren. A second round of tests on Wednesday showed the bone was still broken, so he sat for the first time since being drafted in 2000, and Morris made the fifth start of his career.

Shaun… you know why the prayer didn’t work? You forgot to thank God for exercising his sovereign will the week before in breaking your foot in the first place.

Can the Cards get any more inept?

No, no, not the football Cards, who once again are the Deadbirds of the Desert. (Even a runner like The Edge has to have an O-line, and Warner obviously needs to step down or be set aside.)

No, I’m talking about the REAL Cards — El Birdos in St. Louis.

Backing into the playoffs like they did. With LaRussa’s inane gamble of not pitching Carpenter Sunday.

I think it’s time — as do most fans — for ownership to take at least a small dip into the luxury box moneys from the new Busch and do something in the offseason free agent market.

For that matter, to critique this year, and not just the previous offseason, why didn’t they try to do a sign-and-trade w/the Phillies to get Abreu? They could have then put Edmonds in right to ease things on him, and you could have had Abreu cheating to left all the time for a great defensive outfield.

Meanwhile, they’ll likely not only lose, but get swept in, the divisional round of the playoffs.

And, speaking of that, while LaRussa’s a great regular-season manager, it might be time for him to go. I think he gets over-wound, over-intense, in the playoffs, and the players pick up on it.

The Wright Amendment has been repealed — so what?

Don’t believe all the hype is, is so what

First, this is going to get challenged in court, and rightfully so. Somebody’s going to sue on antitrust grounds.

Why? Doesn’t this break a monopoly that American allegedly has at D/FW Airport? Well, yes, only to replace it with an American-Southwest duopoly that may be worse. As I commented here and in a newspaper column this spring, that fact alone makes this worth just a third of a loaf.

(Besides any other suit over antitrust issues, Legend’s suit will deal with takings issues due to gate closure at Love.)

But, antitrust is just one of several matters about the Wright repeal compromise that are either concerns on my part or I see as fluff on the part of Southwest, or American.

Specifically, here’s the problems.

I first looked at the gate reductions, and how the mechanics of Wright repeal would play out. After all aspects of Wright repeal are done, Love will have two fewer gates than Houston Hobby. Southwest will have above 35 fewer flights than at Hobby, and will have just two more gates at Love than it does now. I listed where all it flew from Hobby and told travelers how I thought that would be trimmed to fit a lighter schedule at Love and to temper their expectations.

In my first somewhat skeptical Wright repeal post (after the initial unscrutinizing embrace), I said:

The ugly word “collusion” has started filtering through my mind. … I had to wonder — is Southwest getting something in return that’s not being publicized?

Hey, Southwest propagandizing and myth-making aside, it’s a business like any other. If American deals it some cards under the table, it’s not going to complain.

See the link for more of why I wondered about that.

I followed that with questions from we the consumers’ point of view, about whether or not Southwest would now rejoin Orbitz, Travelocity and Expedia.

An incredibly, mind-numbingly gushing reader response to my initial post led me to call Southwest The Amway of the airlines. Here’s why, quoting Mr. Gebhart’s response:

The Wright Amendment compromise won't affect Southwest refusal to allow their inventory GDS wide and on third-party services. It is about control over how their available inventory is displayed and managing customer expectations.

When some travel sites were displaying SWA fares, they were comparing different fare types. Generally they were showing more expensive and less restricted SWA fares against less expensive and more restricted participant airline fares. This made SWA look like the more expensive airline, and didn't inform customers they could get a cheaper rate going to SWA directly.

Alternatively if one service becomes a large enough portion of your sales, the extortion effect becomes possible. That service could start demanding a referral fee or a higher fee than they were already receiving. If you train your customers to go to your own distribution channel, you can prevent the threat of that possibility.

Finally southwest.com is an award winning site for clarity and ease of use, and their 800 number is always answered by humans and not voice response robots. Many of these other services have usability problems. Not all customers are savvy enough to recognize the difference and blame the third party. Customers could come to think of your company as providing this sub-standard service and negatively affect your brand image.

It is in Southwest's interest to maintain tight control of their distribution channels.

If not Amway, it sounds like Wal-Mart tightening up suppliers charging a penny too much for a widget, with the “tight control of their distribution channels.” But, that’s the least.

“Managing customer expectations”? That’s Amwayish. Thinking airline passengers are too dumb to tell the difference between a computer and a real human? More Amway.Thinking that real humans are always needed for things like telephone-based flight confirmation? Blowing company smoke.

As for the idea that, say, Travelocity could start demanding a shakedown “referral fee,” nonsense. Southwest would, first of all, be taking that to the Federal Trade Commission so fast Travelocity’s head would spin. Second, Travelocity wouldn’t want to lose that business.

I fly the airline that best meets my needs through
A. Being cheap, and
B. Having a reasonable schedule.

I don’t fly the one that’s blowing the most smoke up people’s skirts, Mr. Gebhart.

Finally, I exposed some Southwest hypocrisy, showing how it will use market research studies, etc., just like any other business without ever intending to do anything with the biased research that is not independently conducted.

Among concerns (of some D/FW area Congressional members) is a provision that requires Dallas and Fort Worth to mutually work to bring new air service for North Texas to D/FW Airport. …

“That is a contractual agreement between the city of Dallas and the city of Fort Worth that says we will put all of our eggs into the D/FW basket,” said Cox. “That agreement will stand on its own.”

In other words, for all of Southwest’s bluster and studies alleging the area would eventually need a third passenger airport, they’re willing to throw that all under the bus to collude with American.

Remember, for all of Southwest’s PR, too, this deal is ultimately about what’s best for Southwest, first, and what’s best for D/FW air travelers, whether Southwest customers or not, second.

Besides all this, in the long run, we’ll all be dead anyway, as Keynes famously said, so take everything Southwest says with a grain of salt.

I look at Southwest as the Apple of airlines. And like Steve Jobs, Herb Kelleher’s “fighting the giants, slaying the dragons” image sounds great. But, just be careful.

Mozilla — what’s all the hype?

It does seem to load pages a bit slower than IE. And, I’ve got Google Toolbar on both, so I’m pretty much comparing apples to apples. And, albeit at the end of several hours on line, and via dial-up, it simply didn’t want to load my blog. It loaded the Blogger home page, then eventually, and oh-so-slowly, opened the posting page. That was after a speed-up plug-in that is supposed to help; I restarted Firefox after the download, but not my computer.

And, yes, I know that Hotmail is webmail. But, it’s the most popular webmail. You’d think Mozilla would get a way to get Thunderbird to run Hotmail.

So, count me as likely to continue to use IE more. And, no, I’m no Gates apologist. I have a Mac at work, and like many things about it, a fair amount more than I do PCs. But, I don’t drink Steve Jobs’ coffee either.

Even aside from price, comparing a Windoze w/2000 to a Mac OS9, a PC has some advantages.