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What? And you thought I was going to insert an image of the Storm logo???

If you pay any attention to the local (Seattle) tech industry, or did any shopping on Amazon.com recently, you are well aware of Amazon’s first foray into manufacturing and selling hardware, the Amazon Kindle, an eBook, which the company breathlessly described as:

…a revolutionary portable reader that wirelessly downloads books, blogs, magazines and newspapers to a crisp, high-resolution electronic paper display that looks and reads like real paper, even in bright sunlight.

However, when reading customer reviews of the Kindle (and here you have to at least give props to Amazon for allowing the customer reviews just as they do for every other product on their site), one is reminded of the notorious Zune review Andy Ihnatko wrote for the Chicago Sun-Times upon that product’s launch.

Microsoft’s new Zune digital music player is just plain dreadful.

I’ve spent a week setting this thing up and using it, and the overall experience is about as pleasant as having an airbag deploy in your face.

The Zune is a square wheel, a product that’s so absurd and so obviously immune to success that it evokes something akin to a sense of pity.

The Zune is a complete, humiliating failure.

OK, maybe the Kindle reviews aren’t that bad, but here’s a quick aggregate of some of the complaints found in Kindle reviews:

The $400 price far exceeds Kindle’s value
EBooks are $9.99 which is more expensive that most paperback copies of the same book
No PDF support
No Wi-Fi
Small Screen
No Backlight
Unnecessary Buttons
Big & Clunky
Hard to hold without hitting next page
No page numbers available in the display
Inferior e-ink technology (fewer shades of gray compared to the older & cheaper SONY)

Now to be sure, there are plenty of people who have given the Kindle positive reviews so it must be meeting some expectations. But regardless of Kindle’s pros or cons, there’s one con that so significant, I can’t see myself ever using one. That is, the inability to operate the Kindle when departing or arriving on a flight. As we all know, electronic devices are absolutely verboten during the departure and arrival portions of flights, which means your Kindle is extinguished exactly at the time when reading a good book or magazine is one of the few activities available to you.

As I type this, I’m in flight to San Francisco. After boarding the plane and being ordered to power down all electronic devices we sat, and sat, and sat. It was nearly 50 minutes before we took off and hit the 10,000 foot level where it’s safe to power up again. I didn’t particularly mind. I was reading my book, Still Life With Woodpecker by Tom Robbins. Frankly reading time is so hard to come by sometimes, I relished it.

And, I wondered what those poor schmucks with Kindles were doing to pass the time.

Liberal bloggers everywhere are working in tandem to Googlebomb Jonah Goldberg’s new book, Liberal Fascism.

More here.

I hate almost everything about the presidential primaries-starting with the disproportionate influence Iowa and New Hampshire have-and continuing through the preposterous system we have in Washington State where the Democrats won’t even acknowledge the primary election, instead deciding to commit all delegates from the caucuses. (Four years ago I attempted to attend the Democratic caucus at AE2 @ Decatur Elementary only to leave in disgust because it was so crowed and disorganized.)

And don’t even get me started about the fact that most of the time the nominee is all but decided by the time Washington State gets around to our turn anyway.

This distain for the system, combined with the fact that I honestly feel nothing for any of the current candidates (Al Gore, how could you break my heart like that???) left me totally unsure what I would do come February 9^th. That is, until recently when I was reading some comments on HorsesAss.org. serial commenter Roger Rabbit hit upon a brilliant idea:

I’ve decided to vote Republican in Washington’s Feb. 19 primary, and I’m going to vote for Mike Huckabee!

Why not? The Democratic primary is nothing but a meaningless beauty contest – all the Democratic delegates will be chosen in the Feb. 8 caucuses. The GOP, on the other hand, has allocated half of its delegates to candidates selected by popular vote in theprimary.

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Looking forward to the fall presidential debates, I want to hear Gov. Huckabee tell the American people he’s going to abolish science education and force America’s public schools to teach creationism to our kids, so that our future doctors, biologists, scientists, and engineers will think mutating viruses are supernatural punishment for immoral behavior.

I want to hear Gov. Huckabee explain that little girls deserve to be raped if they’re related to Bill Clinton, and it’s okay for little boys to lynch dogs in Boy Scout Camp if they’re related to MikeHuckabee.

I want to hear Gov. Huckabee tell the American people he wants to replace the progressive income tax with a 40% sales tax.

I want to hear Gov. Huckabee tell a worldwide TV audience in the hundreds of millions that George W. Bush’s foreign policy is all wrong – he should have used nukes from the get-go.

Yep, Mike Huckabee is the guy I want to carry the GOP banner in November. He’s a perfect representative of that party and its adherents – he’s as stupid, ignorant, crazy, dishonest, and immoral as they are!

I love it and, for only the second time in my life, I intend on voting for a Republican in an major elections-the previous time being voting for Ellen Cranswell in the 1996 gubernatorial primary in another attempt to burden the Republican’s with as weak and whacky a candidate as possible.

For years I participated in the Web’s largest celebrity dead pool over at Stiffs.com. I never did very well, rarely finishing in the top third of the 800-900 entries, but it was a fun diversion nevetheless. In 2007 I tool a hiatus, mostly out of lethargy.

Over the past year, the commissioner of the site, Zachariah Love, has had a hell of a time keeping the site stable, and for a long time, it was questionable whether there would even be a 2008 Dead Pool. But, the site is back up and the 2008 game is on. Unfortunately, I didn’t get my act together in time to enter this year, so I’ll just have to sit on the sidelines as one celebrity after another drops.

Here’s the partial list I was keeping for possible 2008 consideration.

1. Harry Morgan
2. Fidel Castro
3. Ariel Sharon
4. Farah Fawcett

After the news of today, you have to wonder if Britney Spears will beat ‘em all to the gates of hell!

BTW, welcome to my new blog. I’m glad you stopped by.