is the title of my article in the Courier-Journal today.
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On Tuesday I will be boarding a plane headed to Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri. I’m shipping out for Basic Training.
Yup, call me crazy, but I enlisted in the Army during war time. As insane as it may sound it was far from a rash decision. I’d thought about it for many years before finally deciding to take the plunge. For a much more detailed explanation of my decision click here.
This means I will be taking a break from writing until I return in June. (Unless, of course, blogging is now a part of boot camp; but I am not counting on that.)
So this is goodbye for now and my last post as a civilian – I shall return as a soldier.
Happy New Year’s Eve. If you are like me then you are at home tonight - alone - and busy rummaging through Iowa polls which seem to tell you everything and nothing at the same time.
In the midst of my pointless searching I came across a convenient little graph, put together by Google, which shows a time line of the most searched-for presidential candidates over the past year.
Click the picture for a larger view: 
On the same page was a list of the most popular searches overall:
- american idol
- youtube
- britney spears
- 2007 cricket world cup
- chris benoit
- iphone
- anna nicole smith
- paris hilton
- iran
- vanessa hudgens
You tell me, is it BAD that I have never heard of number five or number ten on the list?
Today, I ran across a blog post by Jacob Grier in which a guy named Billy Chasen claimed to have ordered the most expensive drink possible at Starbucks. His drink totaled $13.76. In his post he extended a challenge to anyone who thought they could come up with a more expensive drink.
I am a regular at Starbucks and I knew my favorite baristas would be more than up to the challenge so I thought, why not? I might as well see how much money I can blow on a cup of coffee.
I walked into the coffee shop and told the baristas that I needed them to make me a drink that cost more that $13.76. After about ten minutes of discussing their plan amongst themselves, they came up with a nice and pricey concoction. Interestingly, the trickiest part of the task was not creating a drink more expensive than Billy’s mocha, but creating a drink more expensive that could still fit into a cup.
Eventually, my baristas succeeded. They crafted a $14.05 mocha. Well, to be exact, it was a peppermint white chocolate mocha with half organic milk, half breve, extra caramel, extra mocha, and thirteen shots of espresso.
Here is a copy of my receipt:
The first five or so sips weren’t so bad. After that, however, it went downhill. This is me cringing while attempting to drink it:
Here is a bird’s eye view of the actual mocha. Thick, bitter, and hard to swallow:
So, I now extend the same challenge to anyone who thinks they can come up with a Starbucks drink more expensive than $14.05.
An unexpected change was added to Louisville’s smoking ban. The CJ now reports that the new ban includes
“a requirement that business owners call police if their customers refuse to stop smoking inside.”
Yup, that’s right. You are now required by law to call the police if your customers smoke a legal substance on your own property.
Update: This is a part of the proposed ban.
The Louisville Moral, I mean, Metro Council is at it again.
The council intends to pass the new smoking ban Jan. 10. The belief is that the smoking ban without an exemption for the racetrack — which competes for entertainment dollars with bars and restaurants — is constitutional.
Constitutional?! Does the Louisville Metro Council have even the foggiest notion of what private property is all about?
Apparently not.
Put bluntly, owning private property means that the owner of the property should be able to determine — for good reasons, bad reasons, or no reason at all — whether to admit smokers, nonsmokers, neither, or both. Customers or employees who object may take their money or labor elsewhere.
In doing so they would not be relinquishing any right that they ever possessed. By contrast, when someone is forced to enforce an unwanted smoking policy on his own property, the government violates his rights.
Today it was confirmed in the New York Times that a great number of Kentuckians are in fact toothless — one in ten to be exact.
Pain caused by dental problems is a leading cause of missed school days in Kentucky, according to state health officials, and almost half of the state’s children ages 2 to 4 have untreated cavities. About 1 in 10 state residents are missing all their teeth, according to 2004 federal data.
And apparently Kentucky has a thriving black market denture industry:
“Not much has changed over the years here, really,” said Glen D. Anderson, who for two decades has made dentures in Corbin, Ky. He sells a pair of dentures for $400 that many dentists sell for more than $1,200. Like his brother, father and grandfather, he makes them without a license.
“Bootleggers exist here for a reason,” Mr. Anderson said. “People need teeth, but they can’t afford to go to dentists for dentures.”
So, why the lack of teeth in Kentucky? The article names several causes such as meth, cigarettes, chewing tobacco, and of course,
angry husbands hitting their wives and the end game of pill-poppers who crack healthy teeth, one by one, to get dentists to prescribe pain medications.
In the wake of the Mitchell Report, baseball fans everywhere have a great deal to be disappointed about. After all many of their heroes’ “love of the game” was revealed to be nothing more than lust – lust for fame, glory and wealth.
Nevertheless the recent steroid scandals within Major League Baseball should serve to remind us that — here in Kentucky — we do have something to be thankful for.
Kentucky Horse Racing, for the most part, has managed to remain extremely stern and exceptionally honest when it comes to the prohibition of performance enhancing drugs.
Other states with much lower regulatory standards have experienced the fatal consequence of allowing performance enhancing drugs on the track.
The use of steroids not only threatens the horses’ lives, but also hurts the game. Arguably, fair play is much more important in horse racing than in other sports like baseball, since wagering by the public is not only legal but is the lifeblood of the sport.
Fortunately intentional medication abuse on Kentucky race tracks is extremely rare.
Continue reading ‘Maintaning integrity on Kentucky’s horse tracks’
