Republican power grab? Maybe. But take a look at this California congressional district map and tell me that the Democratic party in California isn’t mobbed up. Go ahead, click on the map. Notice that these districts curve any which way they want and have nothing to do with city limits or counties.

That’s right, until Proposition 11 was passed, the people drawing up the district boundaries were the ones being elected to those very districts. Of course, this is obvious, because otherwise why would the districts look like a first-grader drew them? (No offense to my daughter.)

Which leads to the question, since the previous system was so corrupt and such a crime against democracy, then who are the 4,781,082 morons who voted against Proposition 11? They can’t all be party-line democrats because nearly ever newspaper in California came out in support of Proposition 11, including the papers that lean far-left. So again, who are you people? Did you just not “get” the concept? Do I need to have my daughter draw a map for you in crayon?

It was reported by The Independant on Friday, 27 June, 2008 that the ice at the North Pole is melting at such a rate that it might be possible to sail directly to the pole during the warmer months. The paper reports this as being the outcome of Global Warming™, and I agree, but not for the same reasons.

While some scientists believe that the earth is warming ever so slightly as a result of mankind’s influence on the environment, others don’t believe mankind is affecting the planet at all, or at least not enough to make a catastrophic impact.

Unfortunately, the Global Warming™ doomsayers are right. Global Warming™ is impacting the planet, in a big way. Just as animals will migrate to the north during the summer months and the elderly will migrate to Florida during the winter, so too has the polar ice been migrating as a result of Global Warming™. Look closely at this diagram provided by the National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service (NESDIS). It shows the sad fact that the thickness of ice in the Northern Hemisphere has been averaging a decline over the last 30 years.

Now the First Law of Thermodynamics states that, “Matter and energy can neither be created nor destroyed, only changed in form.” If this is true, and it is, then that ice must be going somewhere. So, is it being changed in form into water? No, if that were true we would see a rise in the ocean levels that would make Katrina blush. So where has the ice been going? The following diagram shows where that ice has been going, to the South Pole!

While the ice thickness has been shrinking at the North Pole over the last thirty years, it has been growning at the South Pole, all thanks to Global Warming™.

So is Global Warming™ real? You bet your igloo it is! It’s warming up the top of the globe and making all of the icebergs (which are really quite put off by warm weather) move to the bottom of the globe.

Don’t cry for you Argentina? I won’t; the tears would freeze to my cheeks.

Three-way phone calls are a thing of the past. In fact, three-way phone calls are so ancient, it’s probably something dinosaurs would have done, if phones had been invented that is, and if dinosaurs could talk, and if a communications infrastructure had been in place. But that is besides the point! which is, dinosaurs are really old, and so are three-way phone conversations.

Five-way telephone conversations are the wave of the future, and it is easier than you might have expected. Let me share with you how I was able to place my own five-way telephone call, and how you can have five-way calls yourself!

First, you need to have two telephone lines. Now before you go clicking that BACK button, please hear me out. Having two phone lines is not as expensive as it used to be. In fact, it might even be cheaper than your single phone line now. Personally, I use ViaTalk, a broadband phone company that routes all calls through the internet. It costs me less than $20 a month and I get two, real phone lines, with real phones. ViaTalk is not the only broadband phone company to offer inexpensive, dual phone lines; you might prefer getting two lines from the local telephone company, but either way, you will need two lines.

Second, you will need a two-line telephone with conferencing capabilities. I am using a two-line Uniden TRU9566 cordless phone, but any telephone capable of handling two simultaneous lines and has the conferencing feature can make five-way phone calls.

This is how it works. You use line one to call your first victim - I mean friend or family member. Then, press the flash key to get a dial tone, just like what you would do to make a three-way call. When the phone starts to ring your second call, press the flash key again and you will now be connected with your first and second calls. At this point, you are on a three-way call, but unless you want to become extinct like the dinosaurs, you will need to do just a few things more.

Let your two callers know that you are going to leave them for just a moment. You will need to press the “Line 2″ button to get a dial tone on your second phone line. Don’t worry, your first two calls will be able to talk to each other while you are on line two. Now, dial the number for your third call, then when you have them on the phone, press flash, and dial the number for your fourth call. When it starts to ring, press the flash button to bring the third and fourth calls together. Now you are in a three-way call with your third and fourth calls.

Now for the grand finale! Press the conference button on your phone to bring both lines one and two together. You will now be connected with calls one, two, three, and four, all in the same conversation. You make the fifth person in the five-way call, and now you won’t end up in a museum of natural history! Congratulations!

When I made my first five-way call, I called my mother, grandmother, brother, and cousin. Just for fun, you might want to try it with your best friend, your sister, her best friend, your boyfriend, and your boyfriend’s secret girlfriend! Let the fun begin!

So you’ve just returned from a vacation to Hawaii and the first thing you do when you walk through the door is plop down at your computer to check your email. Here is an email that offers you a great deal on viagra. Here is another email from the President of Nigeria who needs you to send him money in order to get a check for millions of dollars. Oh look, here is a fowarded message from your Aunt Carol. Isn’t Hercules the giant Mastiff cute? You weed through the piles and piles of spam and pick out the funny fowarded messages sent to you by your friends and family. The good messages and the bad spam don’t seem to have anything to do with each other, do they? Well, you’re wrong!

For nearly every piece of spam sitting in your inbox, you can thank your Aunt Carol, or your sister Carolyn, or your brother… uh, Carl. Or you can even blame yourself! You see, when someone forwards you an email message, they are sending you a list of all the people that they sent that message to, yourself included. If you then forward that message to your own friends and family, then you are sending all those name, including yours, to the next group of people, and those names are being added as well. Pretty soon, you’ve got hundreds of names, including those of you and your friends, all in a convienent little email.

Let’s take a look at it mathematically. If you send an email to just 3 people, and each person waits a whole day to send it to 3 more, then 9 people will have received the message by tomorrow. At the end of one week, your message will have reached 6,561 people. After a fortnight (that’s two weeks), it will have reached over 14 million people.

Now let me ask you this, with all of the spam you have sitting in your inbox, what are the odds that at least one out of those 14 million people is the spammer (person who sends spam). Considering all that spam you get in your inbox, the odds are pretty high that your fowarded messages have reach dozens, maybe even hundreds of spammers. And since you are the one who fowarded the message, the spammers know that your email address has a real person checking the mail everyday. Since real email addresses are worth a lot of money in the spam market, your email address will be sold to other spammers who will be kind enough to send you even more spam.

So what can you do about the problem? Well, you could stop fowarding messages, but I know you’re not going to do that. You might ask people to delete your name from the email header before they forward your message along to other people, but you know your friends aren’t going to do that either. So what is the solution? It’s really very simple. Start enjoying that spam! Sign up for free samples of sex enhancing herbs! Tell the President of Nigeria that his Western Union money order is on its way! Learn to love the colorful language used to describe the human body!

Or, you could just stop forwarding emails and save yourself, and your friends, the trouble of a box full of spam everytime they turn on their computer. You could, but you won’t.