121 weeks: Weight Watchers is still working for me

Saturday, June 14, I started my 121st week in Weight Watchers. I got my lifetime membership a year ago, but I had drifted back up about 9 pounds, starting late last year. This Saturday, I was back down to 1.2 pounds over my goal weight, which means that I don't have to pay to attend meetings. When you are more than 2 pounds over goal weight, you have to pay.

Of course, now, whatever was happening has subsided

I wish that we could understand what has been happening. I suspect Blogger or perhaps Google having either technical problems. In any case, yesterday was a "better day".

Former Naval Person (my original blog) is practically "flat-lining"

I am not sure of the cause, for sure, but my original current events commentary blog, which morphed into a racy pictures blog, is practically flat-lining on traffic. My recent startup on TypePad is doing better today. The whole business is crazy, but it is illustrative of the power of censorship by search engines. Up until July 2007, Former Naval Person had days above 3,000 visits. Starting in July, Blogger (owned by Google) put robots.txt files on some blogs that keep Google from indexing the blogs. The nasty feature is that the proprietor of the blog can't change the robots.txt file. I was slow to pick up on what was happening. I could see the results, but didn't know the cause. I finally was able to check, using the Google Webmaster tools, and found the problem. At that point, I started up the TypePad version of Former Naval Person blog. I checked with TypePad to see if they had a problem with what I was doing and then got started.

Some predictions

(1) My prediction is that if, in fact, Barack Obama is elected president and the Democrats expand their hold on Congress, that one of their first moves will be to nationalize the oil industry. That will not do anything to solve our present problems, but it will make a bunch of lefties feel good.

(2) Northrop Grumman will be lucky if they get to build some of the new tankers for the Air Force. Boeing "owns" too many politicians. The crazy thing is that Boeing had the original contract, but lost it due to their seemingly corrupt practices.

(3)Barack Obama is sitting on a figurative pile of bombs, at least one of which is "atomic". All their fuses have been ignited, so it is just a matter of time until they "explode" onto the news. My guess is that it won't happen until AFTER he is inaugurated president, so his choice of Vice-President is critical.

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Paid People Searches

I have been doing some genealogical research and background checks, trying to do it online. I have been appalled at how bad the situation is. I have even tried "for pay" searches and was greatly disappointed. I have used USSearch before, but they don't even have an easy way to update your credit card expiration date! What a way to inspire confidence, yes? Another service, Intelius, didn't produce anything useful. Even USSearch seemed to find more, although I couldn't find a way to pay for it. Things that were easy six or eight years ago now seem impossible.

Kristen Schaal

After seeing the YouTube clip of Kristen Schaal stripping down on the Daily Show (Steve Silver has it), I have been looking for images of her. There is apparently an R or X rated pic of her and Dave Hill "exposed", but the one shot on the web is censored. One thing that I found is that Yahoo Image Search has much better coverage of her than Google. Google Image Search is really pedestrian, while Yahoo has many unique images. It is NOT the case that Google Image Search is better. It used to be better, but since they started censoring search results, Google is in near collapse. I can't really explain it.

This would be fun...

If this is true, it would be fun to see: "Rumors Of A Michelle Obama 'Whitey' Video Abound" (by Kevin Aylward at Wizbang!). Given Barack Obama's modus operandi, would he divorce her for this? He has been throwing everyone else "under the bus".