the weary of guffaws, lies and outright bullshit campaign of Al "I Invented the Paperclip and the Thesaurus" Gore had to get the brooms and shovels out again last week. And it had nothing to do with Love Story, the Internet, or the Love Canal. First, we had Gore campaign manager Donna Brazile calling General Colin Powell and Congressman J. C. Watts, in essence, nothing more than set decorations — poster boy idiots — for the Republican party saying, "They'd rather take pictures with black children than feed them." As inconceivable as it may seem, Major League Baseball took action which is more fitting than the Gore campaign. Commissioner Bud Selig ordered John Rocker to undergo psychological counseling for his so-called racist remarks. AlGoreBore should, at a minimum, find out who his shrink is and get a group rate. There have been many more Atlanta Braves fans calling for the dismissal of Rocker than there have been Democrats calling for the dismissal of Brazile. That mark, actually, was met when the first fan called for Rocker's release because no Democrat has gone on the record to demand Brazile be fired. Then, during one of the 397 debates in the past two weeks, Gore and Bradley got into a frenzy trying to top each other on the matter of gays in the military. Gore said it would be his policy to allow gays to serve openly and would require any prospective member of the Joint Chiefs to "agree with my policy." Bob Shrum — a true liberal lowlife pol-whore and one of the best counter-punchers in the business — tried to convince us that, because the words "allowing gays to serve openly in the military" were not in the same paragraph with "agree with my policy," we should forget that a policy of gays serving openly in the military was exactly the focus of the discussion. Hey moron: I know what I heard AlGoreBore say. The Gore campaign has a basic problem of Al continuing to say things that sound, and are goofy and stupid. AlGoreBore is easily beatable and will likely self-destruct prior to the liberal-Democrat's convention; Bradley may prove otherwise in 2000. Around The Garden Center. What a difference a day makes. The storm which blew through last Thursday afternoon made some major changes in the weather; we still don't have the much-needed snowcover. Not one of the LSCP Crew came in last Friday — it was 13°F — and we all took the day off from working outside. Wind chill brought the temps down to just below -19°F. The bitter cold stayed around all weekend. The 3 main "over the Winter projects" are going smoothly so far: the front field irrigation system designed to accommodate 800 new trees is almost complete, the front steps timber & brick replacement is 60% completed, and the door replacement order for GHs 1-2-3-4 is in the works. The new "Taggit Pro v5.0" software/hardware for label/sign/tags has been ordered and will be in place, shortly. BTW, Congratulations! to Jeff & Denise for getting married, after 3 years; Denise finally made an honest man of Jeff. They're honeymooning in Cancuun, Mexico and then off to an industry trade show in Las Vegas. We'll celebrate when they get back. So far — knock on wood — we haven't been decimated by the flu, but I see it coming eventually. Last Sunday, we were closed. (New Winter Hours!) It was 55°F; what a difference a day makes. We've always been open Sundays and it's always been very cold, this time of Winter. That's the first time in 10 years of operation that I've slept until 10am Sunday and taken my leisurely time in getting in. I still had to go in about 11am and feed Pickles, check the Main Greenhouse for needed watering, divide a few catnip plants, clean plants et al. GHs 1-6 were watered Saturday by Ken, my weekend salesman, on Saturday. It was tough to not stay longer than required (1pm) on Sunday, so I brought 2 LSCP Estimates back on Zip Disk to work on at home, something I assiduously avoid. After 17 years of working for others, and 10 years of owning my own business, it's been a rough road to hoe in trying to stop working 24hrs a day; yet, having some kind of life is preferable to the "alternative". I guess withdrawl from LSCP activity — action, the jazz, whatever — is going to take longer, each Season, as I get older. What a difference another day made: Monday it was 11°F, with 40mph wind chill at -30°F. Colder than a well-digger's ass in January. Factoring in wind chill, that's a 85°F swing in less than 24hrs. I could not get warmed up all day, despite having every heater in the place running full blast. Since everything — banks, post offices, many businesses — were closed due to MLK Day, it was a boring 5hr stint at the complex; I had 4 walk-in customers and one LSCP couple, for Spring '00, before closing at 12:30pm. I closed Tuesday and Wednesday at around 1pm, after getting the pipes thawed out and allowing the water to run overnight, with heaters and pipe tape-like, electrical heat-wraps everywhere I could apply them. Everyone was off anyway; way too cold to continue working outside on the front steps or field irrigation system. Sounds like the Northwest really got hammered. The East Coast is in a deep freeze? No shit, Sherlock. We lost the whole week to the cold; with minus double digit windchills, no one worked outside. A few customers ventured in, but on the whole, it was a very quiet week. Thursday morning, it snowed: our first of the '99-'00 Winter season. It wasn't this bad; in fact, it was kinda nice. Up at 5am to feed the cats, I decided to leave early and enjoy the snowy ride to work, in my '94 Jeep Grand Cherokee LTD 4x4, before all the putzes in the 2 wheel drive vehicles clogged the roads. The usual 25 minute, 14 mile drive turned into an 1.5hr odyssey, with everyone creeping along, cars fender-bendering and sliding into ditches. Wow, it was 4 years and 2 weeks ago that I got stranded in The Blizzard of '96, something I'll always remember. And of course, I always put out copious amounts of birdfood during the Winter. Final tally was about 6" by midday. Reflections. I can remember back in '82, when my Dad bought me a $4,500 IBM PS2/50 'puter — I grew up and lived in DOS in the 80s — the early iterations of MS software, from 286x Windows RunTime through Win 3.x, Win95 and Win98. Most of the idiot "pundit" reporters weren't even born when I was trying to figure out DOS, so they aren't qualified to write about the struggle or criticize MS. There simply isn't any better software anywhere on the market, for better or worse, than Win98 — soon to be Windows 2000. Period. All the so-called "pretenders" — Mac and Linux — are just that: shit. I kinda hate to see "The Age of Gates" pass by. Breaking up MS into "Baby Bills" is a huge mistake. The Dept of (In)Justice is irrational. Consider the new mega-monopoly of AOL-TimeWarner.com, (In)Justice Dept. Say What? I can't believe it's actually occurring in America; chalk it up to the "soccer moms". Violence over Pokemon. Pokemon, Beanie Babies, Cabbage Patch Dolls, Tickle Me Elmo, Barney The Purple Dinosaur, et al shitola. What's wrong with the moral fabric of America? I don't watch much TV, but I sympathize with David Letterman's quintuple bypass operation. Truth is, I'm a coward; I'd probably turn the emergency procedure down. Hell, my cholesterol's borderline, too: "It’s borderline 680," Letterman quipped. Doctors usually recommend people keep their cholesterol levels under 200. Hell, I've never had mine tested; don't want to know. No history of heart problems in my family. Average age of death is 79.25463869 years. Okay, I'll take that. Can I still smoke 2 packs of Marlboros a day? Cool. You'll have to judge whether Pleconaril is effective. Who in their right mind wants to live in that disease and filth to test the drug? Answer: no one I want to know! I'll be on a 767 or military jet to the other side of the planet, if I hear of an "outbreak". Bet on it. Who cares about AIDS? We — as a Nation — waste far, far, far too much money on this easily-preventable disease. Cancer and heart disease et al merit far more attention. Ten wasted years of "The Simpsons"; a true waste of Net bandwidth. Phew. A product of a twisted, perverted liberal mind, this shit has eroded morals and ethics over a decade. It was bound to happen: more people hating AOL than Microsoft. I'm one of them. Wow, what a shock! Another of the Clintonistas in trouble for lying: Commerce Secretary William M. Daley lied to a Senate committee during his 1997 confirmation hearing when he denied knowing about state probe linking him to a suspected kickback scheme that was never proved. This makes 6 cabinet-level people in the "most ethical administration in history" to be investigated, indicted and tried for criminal activity. What's the problem? We can't beat these stone-age Iranian towelheads? I can't even understand soccer and yet, I appreciate a good fight at midfield. Nail the scum, boys! Looks like Arizona Republican Sen John McCain is still weighing in for campaign finance reform, unless he gets a "healthy contribution" from AOL-TimeWarner dot com. Love those unreported, corporate perks, Johnny Boy. In the No Wonder They Drag 'Em Behind PickUp Trucks Dept, one of the six criminals expelled from decatur HS, whom the Irreverent-Rev Jesse Jack-Scum has interfered for, has been re-arrested. That should speak volumes to the NAACP scumbos. Gee whiz, could it be that 82 percent of students the Decatur school district has expelled are black, although black students comprise only about 46 percent of Decatur's public school population, the blacks are "more troublesome", according to stats? Is Jack-scum too stupid to understand that? Yes, he's an ignorant idiot. Speaking of ignorant idiots, nay white trash: Al "Pass Dem Donuts, Whitey Jew Scum" Sharpton is back to bless and sanctify Hitlery Clinton's abortive(hah!) attempt at NYS Senatorship. I truly hope the criminal, congenital-liar bitch, chokes and dies on her own lies. Sharpton is truly a racist, bigot, idiot-scum-filth lowlife; richly deservant of destruction. Didn't the USA just pay the Japanese Nissei who were interned in "detention camps" in WWII, billions and billions of US Dollars? Sure we did. But here are US Citizens who were made "slaves" to the Japanese army, and are denied any compensation? Ummm, didn't Germany and Switzerland just cough up billions to "reimburse" Jews who were made to work as "slaves" or had their assets "appropriated"? Sure they did. Whas'sup? up with the idiot USA in denying claims? Hell, I support Proposition 22. Anything less is perversion and degeneracy. Do you think that theEuropean Commission of Human Rights is merely fascist, communist, socialist tumor on the Orb of Earth?. I do, and it can be excised surgically. Read what destruction they're doing to The American family, thru the surrogate Brits. They've made child punishment illegal in 8 European countries; is that f*cked-up, or what? The liberal filth have taken away all parental control from the family unit. Huh? Allowing a criminal to "sleep it off" is absurd. Wake and arrest the lowlife. Proof that Hitlery Rodham Clintonista is a fascist, commie, socialist whore: she would even meet or talk to or spit in his face, the idiot lowlife that Dr King would order whacked, Al "Pass Dem Donuts, Whitey Racist Pig-f*cker!" Sharpton. Mayor Rudy wouldn't even whiz on that idiot's head, all greased up with Pomade Hair Glitz. I like Rudy. Al? Time to die. How many homeless filth would you allow use your private and customer-only bathroom, at your business? Would you allow them to urinate and defecate on your sidewalk, outside your business? Nope. Didn't think so. Me, neither. I'd use my Colt .357 Magnum Trooper Mk III with .157gr hollow points to clear the lowlifes out. Kids are what they read; obsolete library books belong in a "private collection", not a public offering. Just when we all thought the Nation's gene pool was once again safe, another f*cked-up Kennedy emerges as a murderer in a 25 year old crime. Well, hey: fat, alcoholic Uncle Teddy is a murderer — does the name Chappaquiddick and Mary Jo Kopechne ring any bells? Death Row. Giving the subhuman filth on death row in Florida, a choice of lethal injection v the electric chair is okey-dokey with me, as long as they're executed for their heinous crimes. And I roundly applaud cutting the appeals process by 50%; all the better to send those scum to hell, sooner. How anyone can claim that electrocution is "cruel and unusual punishment" for a murderer is beyond rational thought. That's the liberal idiots' thinking for you. Does it really matter that someone under the age of 18 commits a murder and isn't held accountable? f*cking-A, YES! The Death Penalty is a deterrent, when properly applied. Prime Time Death TV would go a long way in dissuading criminal behavior. Bennetton, a loser of a company, is trying to sell their shitty brand of clothing on the backs of dead victims; this time using subhuman filth in Death Row as the hawksters. Bennetton managemeng is greaseballs, WOPs and degos, in the ultimate bad sense of the word. No mention is made of the long-dead victims of the murdering scum they feature in the sleazy ads. They parasited the degenerate and dying AIDS folks to sell sweatshirts. Bennetton is scum. I agree: give convicted Unabomber Theodore Kaczynski his day in court, so he's eligible for the death penalty. Couldn't happen to a weirder nutcase. To my mind, a record number of executions in Texas should help GW Bush. Now if his Florida governor brother would just get that state's execution program back on line and rid the world of some more filth, it'd be a great competition. MLK Day. Monday the 17th wasn't his real B-Day; it was just that the federal workers needed another 3-day weekend. That's why "they" put it there. King’s image has often suffered a sad fate. His strengths have been needlessly exaggerated, his weaknesses wildly overplayed. King’s true legacy has been lost to cultural amnesia. King paid dearly for his inevitable betrayal of Southern white interests, capitalist ideology, and black bourgeois beliefs. Financial support for his civil rights organization dwindled. Moral support for his war on economic inequality waned. Other scum-filth use his "celebrated birthday" to support and fund lowlife racial, bigoted agendas: Jesse Jack-Scum and Al "fat boy" Sharp-Scum are two racist, bigot scum-filth, who readily come to mind. Funny, Ha Ha. Read The Onion to learn about the crispy new snack cracker that eases the crushing pain of modern life. Read about the man who went on eBay drunk and bought the complete Mama's Family video library. Hands down, The Onion is the ulimate online comedy oasis. Dave Eggers of McSweeney's calls it "the best use of the English language in my lifetime." He's right.