As you may recall in a post I made last year about this time, I went to work dressed as Spider-Man while making deliveries of pizzas Halloween night.

Well, I’m going to do that again, but with an upgraded suit. This one is being sold by a guy in Florida, but I guess it’s being made in China. The upgrade is that it has chrome-reflective eyes rather than a double-layer mesh.

The seller, americangolfer2000 on eBay, says the eyepieces will allow people to see out perfectly, but others can’t see in. It’s a lot like using those mirrored sunglasses you see some wear out on the street.

I just ordered this over the weekend, and the guy said it could take up to three weeks to get here. That means it’ll be here sometime within two weeks before Halloween. On top of the different eyepieces, the new one also has the red spider on the back. The back of the suit is above, while the front can be seen below.

I did see if I can get the suit with zippers along the seams between the shoulders, but the guy said he couldn’t have it done.

Over the last week, Congressional leaders and Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson were hammering out details to a $700 billion plan to either bail out or buy in or whatever the economy. Over the weekend, it seemed there was a barely-palatable, bipartisan bill hammered out. It seemed that passage was just a formality.

And then along came the House Republicans and some liberal Democrats who picked the bill apart and told their leaders on both side of the aisle: “No dice!” In a stunning move, the bill, the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008, was defeated in the House, 228-205.

Paulson said the following after the defeat: “We need to put something back together that works.” He added that his department will work with other regulators “to use all the tools available to protect our financial system and our economy. Our tool kit is substantial but insufficient,” meaning that the government will do piecemeal fixes until Congress does something more sweeping; LIKE PASS THE STUPID BILL!

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., warned the public that inaction was unacceptable: “The legislation may have failed; the crisis is still with us. What happened today cannot stand.”

However, the GOP blamed Pelosi for injecting partisanship into the debate on a bi-partisan bill:

“We could have gotten there today had it not been for the partisan speech that the speaker gave on the floor of the House,” said House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio.

What Boehner referred to was Pelosi calling Pres. Bush’s economic policies over the last eight years “right-wing ideology of anything goes, no supervision, no discipline, no regulation.”

I have to agree with Pelosi on what brought us into this mess, but it wasn’t just Bush’s policies that caused this mess. This has roots all the way back in the Ronald Reagan administration. He’s the one that introduced the concept of “trickle-down economics.”

The theory behind Reagan’s economic plan, a.k.a. “Reaganomics,” is that when the corporations and wealthiest Americans get large tax breaks and cuts, they can invest more into the economy and their businesses, which allows them to hire more people with good wages, which benefits the middle and lower classes.

However, in practice, the corporations took those breaks and cuts and put them in their collective pockets, improving their bottom line. On top of that, the companies cut their work forces or transferred their labor to overseas operations, where there are less regulatory controls and lower cost of living margins, thus they don’t have to pay their employees there.

The “trickle-down” theory may have worked for a few years under Reagan, but it the greedy Wall Street types and others in the top 1% of the economic spectrum thought if a little profit was good, even more was even better. The Dow Jones climbed to new heights, but the average American’s income was stagnant. They did grow somewhat over the 1980s and ’90s, but in the 2000s, real wages have gone down by about $1,000 a year, adjusted to inflation.

In 2001 and 2003, Pres. Bush decided to further Reagan’s model and cut taxes heavily, mostly to the upper reaches of the economy, and the richest people’s greed got in the way of real economic growth. Add the fact we’re fighting a two-front war, one of which is unnecessary, and you have a budgetary crisis that has dragged our economy to the brink of another depression, not to the levels we’ve seen in 79 years.

What upset me most is that my Congressman, Rep. Bruce Braley, D-Iowa, voted against it. I wrote him a letter asking him why that was. I hope he can give me a logical explanation so I can feel comfortable voting for him again.

A friend of mine posted this on her blog. Let's see how you ladies answer this. (Please, only women should answer this survey. I do not want any dudes' answers. If you want to answer this survey, go to my friend's blog at http://360.yahoo.com/balletgirl804.)

1. Would you let me be in control?

2. Would you want to be top, bottom, or versatile?

3. Would you mind if I was only on top?

4. Would you want me to talk dirty to you?

5. Would you want me to kiss you with a little tongue or a lot of tongue?

6. Would you remember my name tomorrow?

7. Would you want me to go down on you?

8. Would you go down on me?

9. Would you let me give you a hickie?

10. How many rounds would we go?

11. What would you want to do afterwards?

12. Would you want me to take off all your clothes quickly or slowly?

13. Would you want me to lick and bite you all over?

14. Would you like foreplay or just get straight to the point?

15. Would you want me to take my time?

16. How freaky are you, 1 - 10:

17. Would you want me to go fast or slow?

18. Where would you want to "do it"?

19. Would you be loud or quiet?

20. Would you mind if I licked you?

21. Would you want to do it today?

22. Would you want to do it again tomorrow?

23. Would you want me to keep in touch?

24. Do you like anal sex?

25. Do you swallow?

And lastly...

26. Are you going to re-post these questions so I can answer them for you?

Repost as "If we had sex"... see who reads it.

Some of you who are good Internet friends of mine might've missed seeing me the last four or five days online. Here's the situation:

Wednesday afternoon, I was chatting with "Silly Billy" from Moscow on ICQ and surfing some of my usual websites when my computer started to lag. A few minutes later, I got the "Blue Screen of Death" (a.k.a. stop-error message) with the message "MACHINE_CHECK_ERROR." I thought it'd be a simple error, so I turned off the machine and turned it back on. During the posting phase, where the BIOS kicks in, I see the machine list the processor and then the memory, and then, when it was supposed to do the IDE drive search, my computer makes a strange noise, like "Eeeeeeeeer, eeeeeeeeeeer." Then nothing. So, I turn it off and turn it on again. The same noise happens. I call Computer Reboot, where I usually would go for computer service, and had my phone next to the case. One of the guys heard the noise and thought it was either a dead hard drive or an IDE switch, but he needed to see for sure. I took it over (and had to take Mom with me, because we don't trust her anymore by herself), and the guy tells me they are three to four days behind. Great! I'm without my computer until probably next Wednesday, I think.

Anyway, on my way home, I stop at the public library to post a couple messages and check my recent e-mail. One of the guys at work suggested I see a guy who owns his own computer repair business in his home, who charges a flat $89 fee if he does it at home, $69 per hour if he came into my place. So I get his number and call him Thursday morning while I'm at the gym. He said he can get to it Friday, and from what I described, it was most likely a hard drive issue. So, I get the computer from Computer Reboot and take it Orville, the owner of Computer Works. I then go to work, and then go back to the library after work to get Thursday's e-mails and such.

Friday just before noon, I get a call from Orville, and he said it was the 20 GB hard drive that went dead. Luckily, I had two HDDs; one that was 20 and one that is 120 GB. Orville simply reinstalled Windows on my 120 along with most of the drivers and updates. He, however, said he couldn't get to it until today. I thought he would've been able to do it Friday if he didn't need to order a new HDD. Well, one way or the other, I got it back today, and it only cost me $96.30 with tax. I'm going to write it off on my taxes for this year along with my camera and accessories for work on the Cedar Falls Times.

Speaking of which, I was most worried about being able to work the Waterloo East-Waterloo West football game Friday night without a computer at home. I called Pat Racette, the sports editor of the Cedar Falls Times, about my predicament, and he said he'd drop off a key to the downtown Cedar Falls office (normally the paper's produced in Waverly) as well as a card reader (he forgot it) so I can do my story and pull off pictures there. Well, Friday night, Pat tells me the Waverly office had some Internet issues that wouldn't be fixed until Tuesday, so he had to come down from Waverly to finish the page in Cedar Falls after I got my story done.

The game wasn't all that competitive most of the time. East High hasn't been the same since I was in school. West High won, 30-0. I got the story written and two photos selected, and Pat plopped them on the page and sent it to Oelwein for printing. I then checked my e-mail on CFU's webmail.

So, now I have my computer back, and I had to reinstall Norton 360 v.2.0, AIM, Yahoo! IM, Windows Live Messenger, ICQ, eBay toolbar, MySpace Messenger, Skype and a bunch of other stuff. Also, most of my saved e-mails and my entire address book were on my old, dead drive.