These Coffee Mugs are Awesome

For months, Mom’s been looking for coffee mugs that weren’t made in China or some other, crappy place. This wasn’t an intense search—it wasn’t like we scoured every inch of the local thrift stores twice a week for these things—but we were both keeping our eyes open for something workable and I was making use of the Internet to a certain extent in my free time. When I did find something American made, it wasn’t a design Mom or I liked, or it was out of stock, or there was some other problem; I kept looking.

Last week, I headed over to RangerUp to see if they have any new shirts. While I was browsing, I discovered that they’ve partnered with a fellow veteran to sell us American-made coffee mugs. (Scroll way down to see the mugs.)

Oh, this was perfect. I let Mom know that I’d found mugs she might like; when I gave her the details, she all but threw the debit card at me and asked, “Why are you still here? Go order me some coffee mugs.” It just so happened that I found the mugs the same day Gearhog offered a voucher, so we spent $20 there to get a discount code good for $40 worth of RangerUp merchandise.

Mom had the money to spend anyway, so she ended up ordering a total of six mugs, three of each of these two designs. The “Unapologetically American” design was out of stock and the “Sheepdog” one, while very nice, is something my dad, not me, would be correct to use*—but he’s attached to the two coffee mugs he’s had since before I was born. (They’re thick porcelain and don’t have handles. They’re going to survive nuclear war, I’m sure, as they lived through five rowdy kids.)

Each mug is $10.99 plus shipping. That, though, is a downright-reasonable price. The mugs are thick enough, with solid handles, and large—big enough to hold enough coffee to get me started in the morning. Shipping charges for six mugs came to nine bucks, which got them here via Priority Mail. When I got the big-ass cardboard box home from the Post Office where we have our box and receive most of our mail, Mom and I found that the folks at RangerUp had done a fantastic job of individually bubble wrapping and taping each mug; everything safely arrived and each one was every bit as nice as the pictures at RangerUp made them appear. Those photos are better than any I could take—I have an old camera and, to boot, haven’t seen it since I left for West Texas—so no photos from me.

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*When it comes to RangerUp’s tee shirts and other merchandise, I’m of the opinion that I’m free to wear/use the ones not specifically for combat vets and members of units that never had me as a member. For example, I gleefully wear my “I [club] Hippies” tee, along with the “Vive le France” shirt Mom ordered from RangerUp for my birthday one year. However, for other shirts, like the “I am the sheepdog” design, I didn’t earn the right to wear that; I served, briefly, during peacetime and didn’t do anything spectacular while I was in the Army.

**Dear FCC: I politely request that your bloated, government agency perish in a fire, preferably one fueled by grease. Nobody gave me any sort of discount or freebie in exchange for this product review.

Musical Monday: God Save the Queen

History’s an interesting subject, especially when music’s involved.

Let’s talk, specifically, about Sex Pistols, the pioneers of punk who turned the genre into a political movement. “God Save the Queen” wasn’t the first Sex Pistols single or, for that matter, the first offensive song they released; “Anarchy in the UK” came before.

[I’m trying to embed a video, but keep finding copies that are restricted. If you want to see the official promo video, which is kind of cool, head over to YouTube. I’ll wait.]

Back now? Good deal.

Anyway, GStQ was released thirty-five years ago, when the UK still had a general “Don’t criticize our overlords” attitude. This single challenged that—maybe not in the most musically pleasant of ways, but still. As a result of what some perceived to be assholery for assholery’s sake—I think, on the other hand, that the band was just tired of listening to, “Oh, the Queen is great” sentiments, just like I’m tired of hearing about the gold-dust-farting unicorns our Dear Leader’s gonna bust out any time now as a reward for blind, unwavering loyalty—the single had a lot of things going against it.

Despite A&M destroying nearly all the 25,000 copies of the single before it was released…despite not getting an abundance of radio airplay…despite some being pissed off because Sex Pistols went the inflammatory route by releasing the song during the Queen’s Silver Jubilee (a big-ass shindig)…despite all that, GStQ shot up to the number-two spot on the charts. (Some record shops didn’t acknowledge this, though, opting instead to leave that line blank.)

More impressive is the fact that people who weren’t around thirty-five years ago—including me—still play and appreciate the song.

The Wild Boar and the Ox

The Wild Boar and the Ox*

A Wild Boar was engaged in whetting his tusks upon the trunk of a tree in the forest when a Fox came by and, seeing what he was at, said to him, “Why are you doing that, pray? The huntsmen are not out to-day, and there are no other dangers at hand that I can see.” “True, my friend,” replied the Boar, “but the instant my life is in danger I shall need to use my tusks. There’ll be no time to sharpen them then.”

Happy Friday, everyone. I came across that while I was reading this afternoon and thought it was worth posting. Well, it’s better than the other things I thought about, anyway, which amounted to a big pile of crap.

It looks like we’ll get in some range time this weekend. The weather should be cooperative, so I’m looking forward to it—haven’t been able to go since I got back in mid-December, so I’m looking forward to this just a wee bit.

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*Aesop’s Fables: A New Revised Version From Original Sources [Kindle Edition]. Get this title free for Kindle and Kindle apps; you can even read the ebook with your Web browser if you’d like. Living in the future is awesome.

Lamar Smith Infringes Copyright

Texans, if you’re in the 21st District, Congressman Lamar Smith (R-is-for-rat—TX) is your copyright-violating critter. He’s also the one who introduced SOPA and, by the way, is up for reelection. I suggest voting against him even if his strongest or best opponent is a dead skunk TxDOT scraped off the highway.

According to Vice.com, the pre-SOPA version of Smith’s official campaign Web site included a background image that was not properly attributed to its creator per Creative Commons license. DJ Schulte, the photographer who took that gorgeous shot, confirms this:

Vice.com contacted me with evidence that Lamar Smith’s website www.texansforlamarsmith.com used my image as a background for their website. I have no recollection, nor record of Lamar Smith or anyone from his organization requesting permission to use my image “Mist Lifting Off Cedars”. That lack of request does not violate the Creative Commons license although it does show high disregard for creative material producers. What does violate my Creative Commons license though is that I do not see anywhere on the screen capture that the image was attributed to the source (me). It would seem this image was improperly used by the organization of the very author of the SOPA bill that is being debated in Congress.

Another, interesting allegation from Vice.com: somebody associated with Critter Smith took his site offline and updated the robots.txt file to disallow the Internet Archive that caches so much of the Internet’s content, including the old version of Smith’s site. Here’s a screen cap of the file (I took this one, for the record):

I believe the phrase we’re looking for is, “down the memory hole.” Too bad they didn’t get to this before Internet users started playing the, “How hypocritical are our hired help?” game. Whether or not Smith himself took any of the actions I’ve mentioned (he probably didn’t, as operating a computer requires a few brain cells more than the average, hired critter possesses), that’s his Web site and the people working on it answer to him. It’s no different than Ron Paul being responsible for his tinfoil-hat newsletters from before my time. Don’t want to be held accountable in these kinds of situations? Don’t put your name on things or, at the very least, closely supervise the people doing the actual work.

Censorship