Doppel’s Dementia

Another reason not to work or shop at Wal-Mart…

Wal-Mart worker trampled to death by shoppers in New York
Black Friday shoppers straining to get into a Wal-Mart in a suburb of New York City trampled an employee to death this morning, police said.

The surge at the Valley Stream store on Long Island also left three shoppers with minor injuries, and a pregnant 28-year-old woman was taken to a hospital, according to Nassau County officials.

A police statement said the death happened at 5:03 a.m., minutes after Wal-Marts across the country opened their doors to the holiday rush.

The employee, a 34-year-old man, suffered “an undetermined death” when a “throng of shoppers . . . physically broke down the doors, knocking him to the ground,” according to the statement.

He was declared dead at a hospital at 6:03 a.m. A Wal-Mart statement called the situation “tragic” and added that the employee was from a temp agency. “At this point, facts are still being assembled and we are working closely with the Nassau County Police as they investigate what occurred,” the statement said.

At a Best Buy in the Glendale area this morning, frustration and impatience caused several small fights to break out in the crowd before doors opened, according to police patrolling the front of the store.

Original LA Times article

Apparently some woman actually fell for the old “send us your life savings and we’ll give you $20 million”. The really sad part is that she sent strangers some $400,000 over a two year span and her bank even warned her to stop but she was so obsessed with getting the big payola that she didn’t listen.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,453125,00.html

Holy crap, we got home tonight and out of the blue Saratoga started walking on all four legs for 4-5 feet at a time. This is truly amazing, it was only about six weeks ago that we brought her home with no feeling in her back legs and now she can cruise around on her own. The surgeon told us it could be weeks, months or years before she walked again, who knew it could possibly be this soon.

Well, I’m going to go read e-mail while my balls warm up.

That gem was uttered by one of my co-workers after riding his new motorcyle in to work this morning. He picked the wrong time of year to switch from a car to a bike for his 60 mile commute.

My old friend SicPreFix linked to this site, I was amazed at how one-sided the world vote was. Anyone in the world could cast a vote for McCain or Obama. While not scientific or random it’s still very interesting.

I’m glad that Obama has apparently won the electoral college but sad that he seems to have barely squeeked by in the popular vote, I wanted him to get at least 55% there.

More importantly (and more upsetting to me) is that Proposition 8 in California is ahead right now by a decent margin (although the polls only closed a little over an hour ago). If that damn thing passes it will add an amendment to the state constitution that bans gay marriage. I figured surely Californians are enlightened enough to vote it down and by a decent margin but I’m quite pissed that it’s ahead at all.

Another disturbing result is that proposition in Colorado that has about 75% of the vote to create a law that says life begins at conception. That means that all laws for living people apply from the moment of conception including the right to not be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process. Short version: it effectively bans all abortions. From what I read on CNN that would mean even a fetus conceived as part of a rape would have to be carried to full term by the mother and that sucks.

I read this one in The Week magazine today (in an article about economic bubbles):

What we learn from history is that people don’t learn from history.
-Warren Buffett

I got the bug to start playing lots of TF2 again and noticed that there is now unlockable gear for some classes. I had no clue about them so I Googled for info and this page of fake acheivements on Something Awful came up near the top of the list. I haven’t read a Photoshop Phriday in a long time but this was damn hilarious.

I love this cartoon that my brother sent me because I’m so sick of the allegations against Obama that he’s advocating Socialist policies (i.e. redistribution of wealth). What the hell is Medicare? I pay money into it every paycheck but all that money goes to other people; that’s but one example of redistribution of wealth in this country that you don’t hear Republicans complaining about.

Tom the Dancing Bug

I can’t believe how busy we’ve been since Saratoga came home three weeks ago; so busy I forgot to post here. She doesn’t have full use of her back legs yet but with the 3x/day physical therapy that we’re doing with her she’s improving just a little almost every day. She can already hold her weight on her back legs for several seconds which is huge considering she barely had any feeling, let alone muscle control or tone in her back legs when she first came home.