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ISSN: 1525-898X
Observations by and for the vaguely disenchanted by Kevin G. Barkes

 

Conceived above a saloon, delivered into this world by a masked man identified by his heavily sedated mother as Captain Video, raised by a kindly West Virginian woman, a mild-mannered former reporter with modest delusions of grandeur and no tolerance of idiots and the intellectually dishonest.

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network solutions made me a child pornographer!
The sordid details...

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Anniversary

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Requiem for a fictional Scotsman

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Oh my God! They killed Library!! Those bastards!!!

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Elegy to a Mostly Maine Coon

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It's a Hap-Hap-Happy Day

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A Pittsburgher in the Really Big City

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Da Burg Annat

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I Have Issues

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Yeah, yeah, I'm inspired

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At least the rivers freeze in Pittsburgh

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He knows if yinz is a jagoff

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Please support KGB Report by making your amazon.com purchases through our affiliate link:
 

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dcl dialogue online!

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no. we're not that kgb.

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KGB, CIA linked

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The Carbolic Smoke Ball
Superb satire, and based in Pittsburgh!

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Americans United for Separation of Church and State

"No religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States."
Article VI, U.S. Constitution

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Geek of the Week, 7/16/2000

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Cruel Site of the Day, 7/15/2000

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miscellany

Hard to describe.

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"a breezy writing style and a cool mix of tidbits"

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Our riveting and morally compelling...

Privacy statement

One of  51,847 random quotes. Please CTRL-F5 to refresh the page.

	kgbreport.com Web

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(July 2000 and earlier)

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Saturday, March 14, 2009
posted by KGB at 8:44 AM (permalink)

It's Pi Day

Knock yourselves out.

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Friday, March 13, 2009
posted by KGB at 9:51 AM (permalink)

And you thought raccoons were bad...

How'd you like to go out in the morning and find a giant coconut crab poking through your garbage?

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posted by KGB at 12:22 AM (permalink)

"It's a vicious cycle down... and it's a pretty good game."

Jon Stewart used excerpts from this video to hand Jim Kramer his head on The Daily Show and expose CNBC for what it is- a tool for dealers to manipulate the market.

Again- why is it Stewart asking these questions, and not Katie Couric, Brian Williams and Charles Gibson? I've never seen a "real" journalist as tenacious as Stewart, with the possible exception of some of Mike Wallace's ambushes on 60 Minutes. This is going to be shown in journalism classes for years to come. Stewart and the staff at The Daily Show deserve a Pulitzer.

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Thursday, March 12, 2009
posted by KGB at 1:07 AM (permalink)

Oh, poop.

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Wednesday, March 11, 2009
posted by KGB at 9:52 AM (permalink)

Don't get Obama angry...

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posted by KGB at 1:18 AM (permalink)

Quotes of the day

A common mistake people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.

Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.

He hoped and prayed that there wasn't an afterlife. Then he realized there was a contradiction involved here and merely hoped that there wasn't an afterlife.

Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.

I don't believe it. Prove it to me and I still won't believe it.

I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.

I seldom end up where I wanted to go, but almost always end up where I need to be.

If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, we have at least to consider the possibility that we have a small aquatic bird of the family anatidae on our hands.

In those days spirits were brave, the stakes were high, men were real men, women were real women and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri.

Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?

It is no coincidence that in no known language does the phrase "as pretty as an airport" appear.

Life is wasted on the living.

The impossible often has a kind of integrity which the merely improbable lacks.

The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at and repair.

The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't.

Well the hours are good, but now that you come to mention it, most of the actual minutes are pretty lousy.

You live and learn. At any rate, you live.

Douglas Adams (11 March 1952 - 11 May 2001)

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Tuesday, March 10, 2009
posted by KGB at 9:00 AM (permalink)

Poor Cramer...

These past few days have been brutal...

 

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posted by KGB at 1:22 AM (permalink)

Photo of the day

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posted by KGB at 12:01 AM (permalink)

New Rules

Of course it's easy to tear government down. Ronald Reagan used to say the nine most terrifying words in the English language were "I'm from the government and I'm here to help". But that was before "I'm Sarah Palin, now show me the launch codes".

You know the stimulus package was attacked as typical tax and spend, you know like repairing bridges is left wing stuff. Ooh, there the liberals go again. Always wanting to get across the river.

Folks, the people are the government. The first responders who put out your fires. That's your government. The ranger who shoos pedophiles out of the bathroom. The postman who delivers your porn. I mean how stupid is it when people say "Oh yeah that's all we need. The federal government telling Detroit how to make cars, or Wells Fargo how to run a bank. You want them to look like the Post Office?"

Yeah. Actually. You mean the place that takes a note in my hand in L.A. on Monday and gives it to my sister in Jersey on Wednesday for forty two cents? Well let me be the first to say I would be thrilled if America's health care system was anywhere near as functional as the Post Office.

The truth is, recent years have made me much more wary of government doing the opposite. Of stepping aside and letting unregulated private enterprise run things it is plainly too greedy to trust with, like Wall Street, like rebuilding Iraq. Like the way Republicans always frame the health care debate by saying health care decisions should be made by doctors and patients, not government bureaucrats. Leaving out the fact that health decisions aren't made by doctors, patients or bureaucrats. They're made by insurance companies.

Insurance companies. Which are a lot like hospital gowns. Chances are your ass isn't covered.

(from "Real Time With Bill Maher," 3/6/09)

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Monday, March 09, 2009
posted by KGB at 6:59 AM (permalink)

It's an ill wind....

... that blows two four-foot tall commercial-type garbage cans 15 feet into the street. Drat Daylight Saving time. Sunrise isn't for another 40 minutes, and I can't assess all the damage until then. Judging from the way the dogs are behaving, there's a witch with a house lying on top of her in the side yard...

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posted by KGB at 3:29 AM (permalink)

Why we fiftysomethings are really pissed.

(via Crooks and Liars)

Every day there's another layoff announcement, so Sean O'Grady finds himself confused about why his Philadelphia-based recruiting company, CareerTV USA Inc., is doing so well.

"We had to shake our heads at that," he said, "because we're doing our best sales ever, and we had our best quarter at the end of 2008."

So O'Grady started asking his clients to explain why they are bothering to recruit in these times, even when, in some cases, they are cutting back on hiring.

What he learned and what he is seeing "is the layoff of the baby-boom generation. Companies are filling those holes with bright-eyed, bushy-tailed college graduates.

"They are essentially trying to hire people they can pay less and get a lot of energy and enthusiasm," said O'Grady, 26, a senior producer at CareerTV.

[...] One was Andrew Vavra, 55, of Schwenksville, an unemployed marketing project manager. He had been to a another job fair recently "and no one under 40 was there," he said. "It made me angry.

"They are laying off older workers to reduce their pension exposure and their health-plan exposure," he said. "The young people are being hired in without medical plans and pension plans."

What is clear, said economist Joel Naroff, is that companies are using the recession to reconfigure their workforces- and that is what they should do.

"There is a popular phrase- 'don't waste a perfectly good crisis'," said Naroff, chief economist with TD Bank N.A. "The idea behind that is you can do things you couldn't do under a normal set of circumstances. You have the opportunity to make the changes that you really should have made before."

Companies that cut jobs just to shave expenses will not be prepared when the economy rebounds. The cuts should be strategic to position the companies for the future, said Naroff, of Holland, Bucks County.

If companies are going to announce layoffs of 5,000, he said, it does not give them much more of a publicity problem if they say they will lay off 5,500, with the idea of getting rid of "dead wood" or entire unproductive divisions. "It looks the same to the public."

"Now they've been given free hand to do it," Naroff said. In a sense, "the economy gives them cover."

(The bright-eyed, bushy-tailed college grad who displaces me is certainly going to need health insurance. Or someone to start his car. Probably the latter, since there seems to be no shortage of venal, short-sighted narcissistic youth who somehow never learned that actions have consequences.)

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Sunday, March 08, 2009
posted by KGB at 12:01 AM (permalink)

Why you'll never see El Rushbo before a non-dittohead audience...

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Copyright © 1987-2024 by Kevin G. Barkes
All rights reserved.
Violators will be prosecuted.
So there.  
The kgb@kgb.com e-mail address is now something other than kgb@kgb.com saga.
kgbreport.com used to be kgb.com until December, 2007 when the domain name broker Trout Zimmer made an offer I couldn't refuse. Giving up kgb.com and adopting kgbreport.com created a significant problem, however. I had acquired the kgb.com domain name in 1993, and had since that time used kgb@kgb.com as my sole e-mail address. How to let people know that kgb@kgb.com was no longer kgb@kgb.com but rather kgbarkes@gmail.com which is longer than kgb@kgb.com and more letters to type than kgb@kgb.com and somehow less aesthetically pleasing than kgb@kgb.com but actually just as functional as kgb@kgb.com? I sent e-mails from the kgb@kgb.com address to just about everybody I knew who had used kgb@kgb.com in the past decade and a half but noticed that some people just didn't seem to get the word about the kgb@kgb.com change. So it occurred to me that if I were generate some literate, valid text in which kgb@kgb.com was repeated numerous times and posted it on a bunch of different pages- say, a blog indexed by Google- that someone looking for kgb@kgb.com would notice this paragraph repeated in hundreds of locations, would read it, and figure out that kgb@kgb.com no longer is the kgb@kgb.com they thought it was. That's the theory, anyway. kgb@kgb.com. Ok, I'm done. Move along. Nothing to see here...