If you're looking for cheap hotels, that is to say, not the shabby, run-down kind; but the ones you want to stay at but not pay full price, or worry that you're missing out on a deal, this is one of the places you can go to look for deals. And if you're looking for deals on flights, cruises, vacation packages and more, they can help you out.

Hey Kids! It's Mark Gibson's birthday today! Go read his blog and send him some birthday money via PayPal if you haven't sent him anything yet. Or at least send you best wishes. Or at least read his blog.

Many businesses use barcode scanning to keep track of sales, inventory, etc. By keeping on top of that information, you can better stock and sell items and therefore do better in your business. And inventory goes a lot better and faster with something like a symbol mc50 hand held computer on hand. And there's less chance of errors keeping track of inventory with something like that.

Comic Book Urban Legends #157. Did Johnny Carson apologize to Jack Kirby? That and more!
New Ask The AV Club column is up. What was that one video I remember from years ago, what movies get referenced on DVD blurbs, how does music performance rights work?
And The Venture Bros. new season starts on Sunday. Here's an interview with Jackson Publick. And here's a clip from the premiere episode. Apparently AdultSwim.com is going to have the episode up on their site tonight at 6pm, if you don't want to wait until Sunday night.

With the graduations going on and Father's Day coming up next month, a lot of people are wondering what to give those people as a special gift. Why not give them Personalized flash drives, available in 14 exciting colors and 6 capacities ranging from 512MB to 16GB.

Personalization with custom laser Engraving on BOTH sides of the drive is absolutely FREE with no order minimums. In addition to text engraving on one side of the drive, you can choose a "Theme" on the other, such as; "Happy Father's Day", "Congratulations" and "#1 Teacher". Order one drive, have your father's name engraved on the back, with the Father's Day theme on the front ... and pay ZERO engraving fees or setup charges. Plus, they'll ship it within 3 business days, guaranteed! Not only that, but if you click on the link in this post, you can get 20% off your order. So with the big day fast approaching, why not order now?

There's been a clip going around the internet tubes of Bill O'Reilly blowing up as he finishes a taping of "Inside Edition" all those years ago. The latest place I've seen an embedded clip is on Keller's site. You can go there and check it out. It's YouTube and it'd be easy to put it up here, but I'm not going to. While I've taken my shots at O'Really here from time to time, this seems more like an instance of scherenfreude where people are using this as an excuse to attack him. Much like Martha Stewart's insider trading scandal wasn't as much about justice as it was about people thinking Stewart was too haughty and should be taken down a peg or two. Everyone has a bad day, and I'm sure everyone can think of someone who may have been very nice who unexpectedly exploded that one time. Even everybody, no matter how good they look in "The Story Of Me", can think of a time when circumstances left them short of temper and it came out inappropriately. If this were a case of O'Really acting improperly in his journalistic duties, I'd be on it as well, but someone that got stressed out and I don't like him...I dunno.

Many people seem to think that because a company offers a service that helps you or look out for you that they must care about you as a customer. But usually it's because that they can make money or that they were mandated by an act of law. For instance, my credit union helps me by offering overdraft protection in case I overdraw my checking account by transferring funds from my savings. But it's after all the spin on how they value me and want to protect me that they mention that it's a $3 charge each time they do it, that's if I have money in my savings account or the really big charges kick in, and it's only 5 times they can do that before the next level of protection and charges kick in. And one of the big credit agencies Experian is trying to quash the efforts of another company to look out for their customers, as lifelock offers identity theft protection for a charge by offering additional protection, and taking steps to ensure their customers' information isn't traded or sold by the credit reporting agencies, and getting placed on mailing lists, etc. I've read that identity theft is very difficult to fight and clear off the charges, and the companies know they can make lots of money by keeping it that way, and aren't happy with anyone trying to stop their gravy train.

I was catching up online after I got home when I read the news on Mark Evanier's blog. Then I went to Yahoo for confirmation, which is something I usually don't do for news like this.
Not only that, but director Joseph Pevney, who directed 35 theatrical films plus numerous television episodes of the 1960s and 1970s, including 2 classic Star Trek episodes "The Trouble With Tribbles" and "City On The Edge Of Forever" passed away today as well.
Condolences to family, friends and fans.

Kestenbaum, Eisner & Gorin LLP is a law firm based in the Los Angeles area with over 50 years courtroom experience, former district attorney and former senior trial prosecutors as part of their staff, a private investigator on site, and more.

Not only that, but they have a Los Angeles Criminal Defense Lawyers Blog | California Criminal Law Discussions blog where they discuss current legal issues. So even if you're never going to be in LA, the blog is interesting.

John Rogers is right, let's not get bogged down in exaggerating statements, gaffes, and half-truths, since--okay, I'll shut up now, back on track:
Here's Obama's issues page.
Here's McCain's issues page.
Here's Nader's issues page.
Here's Barr's issues page.
Vote the issues, don't vote for A because you don't like B, and vice versa. I even gave you C and D as a bonus. I'm not even going to start about anyone else running, because I'm always venting when this country diverges from a democracy, and if it can't be reflected at the voting booth, then what's the point?

There's all sorts of networks out there where people of like interests can meet and share things. They even have one for people with pets. It's real easy to join and you can get so much out of it, much more than seeing pictures of people and their pets. They have all sorts of articles to help people with the care and upbringing of their pets, plus a network to find the best people, whether it's vets, groomers or more to help you take care of your pet. Also, if you want to get more involved by volunteering at a shelter or other animal related activities they can help you out. Everybody wants to share about their pets. I can't even resist showing you a picture of my two cats Jojo and Selina.

John Rogers wrote about a CD he found that he got when he got a book about pulp writing a while back. Although he can't recommend the book, there is some interesting tidbits he passes along. And there's a plug for Amazing Adventures magazine, and they have a better download of issue 3. If I thought they'd pay some people faster if I bought it, I'd buy it.

The one thing I like most about online shopping is that there are places that know what you're talking about when you're shopping. Back in the stone knives and bearskins era of shopping, some stores seem to have the attitude that if they didn't have what you were looking for, you didn't know what you were talking about. Like the time I was trying to get a copy of "Bring On The Bad Guys" by Stan Lee. The bookseller was amazed that that was his name, and was trying to tell me that "Stanley" was the first name and I must've forgotten the last name. Now, of course you can go online and find what you're looking for, and often without the very long wait. The stores are starting to get wise, because now you don't have to wait quite as long as you used to for special orders.
The drawback to online shopping is the feeling that you're missing out on a better price, if not at a competing online retailer, then at that online shop itself. They have the "enter discount code" or something similar when you're checking out, and you try to do an online search, usually to find an expired code at best. But there's a website you can go to to find online codes, whether you're shopping for cheap bargains on high definition plasma TVs and LCD televisions, or if you want to join an online DVD rental and you remember seeing the ads for free trial, and special rates while you out and about online, but don't have the code, and don't remember where you saw it. Or you're in the market for plus sized fashions, and you saw the banner ad offering deals, but where? Or you happen to see a deal while looking for toys and action figures. You can find all those and more here, and be able to shop online without thinking you're missing out on a better deal.

It was warm on Monday, and I even got a couple of more fans out of storage to cool things down. I've been reading the forecasts, so I knew it was going to get cold again, so I held off on putting in the air conditioners until Friday, when it's going to get warmer again and stay that way. I put the blanket back on the bed tonight and Kathy thought it made a world of difference on the bed. It did feel a lot better with it, too.

You can read all sorts of interesting articles on the internet. For instance, Brazil is now the top-producing country for sugar in the world. India was giving them a run for their money, and were number one, but this year it looks like Brazil is going to re-emerge at number one again this year, with over 32 million tonnes of sugar. Up until now, the only thing I knew about sugar as a commodity was the episode of The Simpsons where Homer finds an overturned truck of sugar on the highway and tries to parlay that into a fortune. Of course, to do that, you need to deal with much higher quantities. And it helps if you don't transport it by car trunk, where bolts and other things can get into it. And instead of looking for overturned trucks you can deal with a company like Icumsa 45, who can find you the best quality sugar from Brazil to suit your needs.

I've got Kathy set up with her own e-mail account, but she hasn't made the leap to surfing the net. Which means that usually I get her prayer requests for her (they used to send it by mail to her, and she realized everyone else was getting it e-mailed to them, so that's how she got the e-mail account) Sometimes she gets more than prayer requests from other church members. One person sent her an e-mail about John McCain, that links to this article about his appearance on Ellen DeGeneres' talk show. This is where I'm in tricky territory, not to mention being very frustrated. He asks us to notice how he contracts himself in the first paragraph, how he is honestly ashamed about the candidate the Republican party has selected for this election, and will "probably find it very hard to vote for him".
Of course, I can't really say anything, since technically it's not my e-mail. And I don't know what good it'll do. And what do I say? Sorry the Republican party picked a candidate he doesn't like, and I guess all the news reports I saw about the primary elections, where the voters got to pick their party's candidate, were all lies since the fix was in. Of course, there was another fix back in 2000 that you guys didn't complain about since it favored your candidate, so now you might understand what we've been saying since then that you responded with "get over it": that when the fix is in, sooner or later the fix isn't going to go your way, and you'll understand, but it might be too late. Or are you mad that Mike Huckabee didn't get the nomination?
And I'm sorry that even though John McCain is running for a third Bush term that he isn't repeating the same talking points W made the first two times about "family and traditional values" which is what they say to get your vote, then not only do they don't do anything about those values, not only do they flount those values, they go ahead and make their friends and cronies richer while the rest of us get worse and worse off. Since the Republicans revere Ronald Reagan so much, let me ask you a question he famously asked: Are you better off now than you were four years ago? How about eight years ago? Do you really think they're going to act on any of the things they promise to you, or at the very least not lead hypocritical lives?

Corn's going up, and a lot of people are saying it's because more of it's going into biofuels. Some are saying that that's a futile attempt at alternate energy. Not so fast, says Daily Kos. There's other things making the price of corn go up. Thanks again to Laura for the link.

There are a lot more avenues available for printing than there used to be. Years ago when there was no competition and you needed something printed, you had to take what they charged you. What were you going to do? Print it up yourself? And then computers became more readily available. If you needed some resumes printed up, all you had to do was buy the resume paper and load it up in your printer and you were good to go. Another good thing that was related was that I didn't have to type a cover letter worried about making more than a couple of mistakes, or finding a typo after it was typed, and having to start over from scratch, but that's another discussion for another day. But there are some printing jobs that you can't run off your computer (remind me to tell you about the time I tried to publish a fanzine for my anime club off my first computer sometime) or you don't have the time, software, or ability to do. But there's another way that the computer age has paid off, because you don't have to schlep down to the local printer and take what they give you. There are online options as well, such as VistaPrint, that offer excellent quality printing at low rates. For example, you can have postcard printing done as low as 100 for free, or add a color back side for $7.49. And they offer a wide array of printing services including business cards, checks, rubber stamps, announcements, car magnets, and more. So if you need some printing done, why not see what VistaPrint can do for you?