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Did I mention George W. Bush is in office?

Hey, if you live in a money sucking beneficiary state, go down to the Payday Loan Center and grab a little cash that came y'all's way via the red states' welfare system and have a drink, on me, to celebrate his Presidency.

I don't mind.

Culpepper, you remind me of an old joke.

"Did I mention George W. Bush is in office?"

A guy is on top of the Sears Tower in Chicago and slips and falls off.

As he hurtles past the 18th floor, he whizzes past a window washer, who says, "Hey, how's it goin'?"

The falling guy yells, "So far so good!"

Yup, "Did I mention George W. Bush is in office?"

Perfect reply!

Glad you got my tone, AlainR. I had considered an outright violent response to your presumptuous post but decided though that was appropriate, it was unseemly given that you might just be young and stupid.

For the record, my system is based on Music Hall, Shure, Musical Fidelity, Marantz, and Sonus Faber with a bit of Kimber thrown in. I don't expect that would interest you, however given the apolitical nature of sound equipment. On the other hand, if you are interested either in sound equipment or music, you might try another post having to do with one of those topics. Perhaps that would yield more agreement with your opinions.

Cheers and good luck,

Hey, Cheapskate!

Your list of equipment reminded me of something...when people talk about equipment that works well together, the names you mention come into play alot.

It would be interesting to try and figure out "families of gear" that seem to end up together.

And as long as we're meandering on this fine thread, do you prefer to be addressed as Clay or Cheapskate?

I chose a name that's not my own, purely because the first place I ever went online had my real first name already taken, so I got this. But then a hidden benefit came up...an internet search of your real name will lead people to many of the forums you visit where your posts have your real name. An alias keeps your privacy a little better.

I had a caffeine containing beverage this morning... ...that space contains an emoticon, but it's buzzing so fast that you can't see it.

I'm a caffeine free person, but, for some reason, a nice cold Coke called to me and down it went.

Too bad Clifton isn't here, then I could have had rum with it and been OK.

We need a chat forum, yup.

Cheers, buddy, I think you're great whether you're blue or red.

Maybe a Benadryl would help chill this caffeine thing...anyway...

We need a dependable test so we can get checked to see if we are liberal or conservative.

Maybe I'll have another Coke and do that now.

Alain, there are right and left wing fools.

Idiocy and hypocrisy can be very independent of party affiliation.

I wouldn't want Barbara Boxer or Trent Lot fully in charge!

There's this great old Jesse Winchester song called "Nothin' But A Breeze" that fits this thread.

Alain, I can't recall if you listed your system components before. We should check to make sure they are properly ideologically compatible.

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Maybe a Benadryl would help chill this caffeine thing...anyway...

We need a dependable test so we can get checked to see if we are liberal or conservative.

Maybe I'll have another Coke and do that now.

Alain, there are right and left wing fools.

Idiocy and hypocrisy can be very independent of party affiliation.

I wouldn't want Barbara Boxer or Trent Lot fully in charge!

There's this great old Jesse Winchester song called "Nothin' But A Breeze" that fits this thread.

Alain, I can't recall if you listed your system components before. We should check to make sure they are properly ideologically compatible.

You left out the nihilistic fools that take such a position that they cannot be proved right or wrong. It doesn't matter that what these particular fools state really don't mean anything.

Guys... guys... now look what you've done! Wes has gone back in time trying to smooth things over just so you won't fight.

Culpepper, how sad.

You mean it's not about a position on a certain issue, it's a thing where we are compelled to pick a general philosophical color or be branded "nihilistic fools?"

I guess that makes sense coming from someone who's greatest philosophical statement of support for the ideals behind his right wing stance is, "George Bush is President."

Just get the red guy elected and check your critical faculties at the door.

Wow, it's you and Condi Rice as the only two people on earth who are incapable of disagreeing with anything that guy does.

Pitiful, but at least it saves you the work of thinking about things.

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Well, Jeff, that's just wrong. Wes is going to deal with a Democrat, a communist, and a socialist to try and set things right?

Hey, I can remember what happened the last time those three got together to try and get things set up --- No thanks!

Send Wes back to Independence Hall, that might work. Or, if that's not feasible, a good bordello.

I'm sorry that you took my post personally. But you have shown your true color. Seems you actually fall under one of the two categories of fools you lump people into. Looks like you can't walk on water or turn water into wine. That's my fault? You can't be first but you can be next.

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Guys... guys... now look what you've done! Wes has gone back in time trying to smooth things over just so you won't fight.

Christ, FDR looks like he is already dead.

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I'm sorry that you took my post personally. But you have shown your true color. Seems you actually fall under one of the two categories of fools you lump people into. Looks like you can't walk on water or turn water into wine. That's my fault? You can't be first but you can be next.

This post actually makes sense in the right context.

You've already told us that you are crazy.

We can thank the guy on the left for making this whole discussion possible. What an interesting fellow, he was.

Well, it looks like Wes got enough juice flowing in the flux capacitor of the Conrad-Johnson to get him to Philly. Don't tell anyone, but, I think he got Huckleberry & Bagheera on the treadmill to supply the extra power. I knew there was a reason why they were exercising on Friday!

Jeff is a genius!

I bet Wes was writing a critique of the unsprung floor's affect on low frequency information and the acoustic smear created by the symmetrical room and lack of proper damping.

Great idea, Buddha! Your notion that we might have fun looking for families of gear that seem to work well together sounds fine to me. Given that most of us have been trying - mostly through years of trial and error - to put such families together, this crowd has some collective wisdom we could all profit from. As a twist on that, we'd probably also call out some disfunctional families of gear, to use a current psychobabble term. God knows we've all gone down some bad roads in the process too.

Besides being enjoyable, such a topic would get us free from duelling political ideologiies. How that crap slipped in here given the tons of other sites devoted solely to raving young know-it-alls was sure a surprize to me.

Call me Clay or Cheapskate, whichever suits you or the situation, I'll respond (or not) to both. Generally, since Cheapskate leans to the pejorative side, I suspect it'll work better when you want to express disagreement with something I've said, but I do prefer my real name whether you agree or disagree.

As to Red or Blue, I'm certainly on the red side of purple and if the current crowd in power would stop spending so much on bull**** programs and settle the immigration problems I could become redder still. Enough, however of political wrangling. I'm so old that I can recall when it was considered an act of bad manners to open a discussion of politics or religion with a relative stranger and when you didn't find yourself voting for the lesser of two evils.

I'm also so old that when the Navy took me to Spain (among other fascinating destinations) I found a surprizingly happy lesson in economics. Rum was dirt cheap in Spain at the time, and Coca-Cola was relatively expensive. If you ordered a Cuba Libre, the bartender would pour rum into the glass until you told him to stop and then top it off with the Coke. Luckily, destroyers are fairly large and therefore easy to find at the end of the night.

Cheers,

Everyone seems to know a lot about Belgium all of sudden...so many experts!

I only know 3 things about Belgium;

1) Their beer tastes like dishwater

2) They dont even make any wine or booze worth mentioning

3 The last time I tried to get from Amsterdam to Brussels, the train broke down as soon as they stopped at the border and hooked up the Belgian locomotive; made me miss my chunnel train to London, dammit!

We had a Europe First policy in WWII for 2 main reasons. One of them was to make sure Britain was still going to be available as an invasion point, combined with our emotional and cultural sympathy with the british.
The other was that we knew that even if it took until 1950, the massive population and resources of the Soviet Union would overwhelm Germany eventually (they had 230 divisions by 1945 compared to Germany's maximum of 90, and were not as short of men as Germany), and Russia would have occupied Europe right to the English Channel (including Belgium) for who knows how long (50 years or so??) if we didn't liberate part of western Europe first. Roosevelt and Churchill were not slow to figure that little detail out. When you look at the casualty figures for Europe, 95% of the battle casualties were Russian or German; our part was almost a sideshow by comparison. Our more important contribution was logistical; massive inputs of materiel and hardware. At the height of the fighting in France, Germany still had 80% of its troops on the Eastern Front. Our US total battle deaths in all theatres in WWII were well under 300,000, and the US and Britain lost about 500,000 total in Europe; the Soviets lost 23 million.
(sources vary tremendously on the Soviet battle deaths, because the Soviets did not give true figures; most sources before 1994 list 6 million; recent examinations of Soviet military records indicate 23 million or more)

On point number one I have to disagree with you commsysman. One of my favorite beers is Chimay Ale. Maybe because monks brew it it's a delicious product. Point 2 and 3 I completly agree with. I have heard that Belgium is primarily responsible for those stupid speaker connectors on current European gear.

4.) They put mayonnaise on "Freedom Fries"!!!

You nailed it here, Buddha. Pick a color -- reduce all the complexities to binary simplicity. Mental laziness and the rigidity that inevitably ensues may be our country's biggest problem, because it makes political strife so much easier than actually thinking through the problems. As soon as the "red" vs "blue" tags got separated from the maps, they became permanently polarized, convenient vehicles for name-callers. If only one "side" could just annhiliate the other, we could just all go to the beach, right? Then the problems of our age (deficit spending, trade imbalances, "dirty float" currencies, class wars, religious zealots, paranoid war cabinets, nuclear wannabies, vanishing natural resources, etc., etc.) could just disappear, right? The best thing about being old is I just might not live to see the next "final solution," the permanent elimination of the weaker side. Our politicos have gotten the message loud and clear, being extensions of ourselves. The loudest screams get the vote, regardless of the content, and the demigogue who best appeals to a dumbed-down majority by oversimplifying the issues wins. Just give me a few more rounds of golf, a few more evenings in a nice alcoholic haze permeated with music, a few more visits to the fishin' hole, and another ten thousand pages of poetry, and I'll head for the great listening room in the sky with a smile on my face. If this sounds escapist, well, I guess it is. I figure I've earned it.

Okay, Bill Jack!

And the Valley People killed the Mountain People...

Now the valley cried with anger,
"Mount your horses! Draw your sword!"
And they killed the mountain-people,
So they won their just reward.

Now they stood beside the treasure,
On the mountain, dark and red.
Turned the stone and looked beneath it...
"Peace on Earth" was all it said.

I have to give you credit for beer. American beer (Buddweiser, Coors, Miller etc) tastes like diluted dishwater in comparison. As far as trains go, riding Amtrak to Springfield MA from Philadelphia PA is like travelling three quarters of the way across Europe. You Europeans don't really seem to understand how large the USA really is.
Who cares if we infuriate some conservative Europeans. Those same conservatives would be recovering from a communist yoke if it wasn't for the US. I sometimes think we should have let the Russians take France after WWII. They wouldn't have been able to leave NATO. They would have been deep into the Warsaw pact. (My bait) Although the Russians would have found some way to screw up Champagne! That may be the only thing France is good for.

You forget one major factor. We (Americans) don't care about trains unless they're in our basements. Lacking a socialistic government they can't be forced on us.
The real point of contention is that you Europeans think you are morally and culturally superior to Americans. The fact that we don't care what you think must really pi** you off.

As I said Europeans think they are morally and culturally superior to Americans and are pis**d off that we don't give a da*n. Even though your response suggests you think some of the .5% who are equal are represented on this forum, guess what, we still don't give a da*n. We know that without the US you Europeans would be speaking either German or Russian. That is, those of you who would be among the living. I'm becomming more convinced the only reason to become invloved in WWII was to protect Champagne production! (bait)