Cruller No More

Its retirement never even merited a notice on the drive-through menu, much less a memorial service with Homer Simpson-esque eulogies. But over the summer, when customers were distracted by Coffee Coolattas and maple-frosted scones and such, Dunkin’ Donuts took a step that left some loyalists with an empty, funereal feeling, twisting them in knots like the snack whose passing they now mourn.

the link

Elite CX Team

You, too, can join Kenneth Copeland’s “special forces” team!

Mach .92 - Spreading the word around the world at 600MPH!

As you know, Gloria and I have been believing God for two Cessna Citation X’s so that we can better fulfill the calling of Kenneth Copeland Ministries—to take the Word of God to the world—from the top to the bottom and all the way around.

the link

I’m thinking that God wants me and Becky to take the word of God to Houston this winter at 183 mph starting off at 0-62mph in 4.5 seconds, so we are praying that God will provide us with two Ferrari 360 Modenas — please, help us find this dream.

U.S. 31st in Freedom of Press

Cuba second from last, just ahead of North Korea

Reporters Without Borders is publishing its second world press freedom ranking. As in 2002, the most catastrophic situation is to be found in Asia, especially North Korea, Burma and Laos. Second from last in the ranking, Cuba is today the world’s biggest prison for journalists. The United States and Italy were given relatively low rankings.

the full article

80's Lyrics Quiz

Here’s a quiz that tests your memory of lyrics instead of song/artist. I really want to see how Betc does on this since she sings along to EVERY song on the radio.

Wanna Switch, Now?

Mac users installing the new OS upgrade are having their external hard drives wiped of all data. Despite what PC-philes will say, this only points to the equivalacy of the platforms. This could happen in any OS so you should always have a backup…Always have a back-up is getting harder and harder, though, now that we all have large external drives. I know this because I lost a drive last weekend and had to pay $100 to recover the data. (Oddly, I can recover the data, but the drive still won’t format…)

Lots and Lots of Running

Think I’ll try this after my first marathon instead of the IronMan. Who’s with me?

Categorical Demise

You’ve all probably noticed the CGI Timeouts occuring here at the BPB. The general cause is that MT rebuilds archives every time an entry or comment is made. I have tried to fix this problem by removing the “Category” Archives. A) I don’t think they are used…at all. 2) Each entry had to be stuffed in an Archive that was numbering in the 500+ range, which takes to much CPU — I think. So, here’s hoping I’ve cleard out the problem.

Happy blogging!

(trying again…)

Etrigan's Jack (o-Lanterns)

Another fine etrigan example of a great idea squandered by procrastination and shoddy handy-work.

Jank Pumpkins

Dig it. I did the scary one, my dear bride did the middle one, and Jake wanted the smallest one.

Extremely Cute shot of boy with pumpkins:

Jake’s pumpkin is supposed to look like Curious George:

It’s even got a tail

Another Rant no-one else cares about...

It’s fly-fishing magazines believe it or not.

I let most of my subscriptions to glossy fishing rags lapse once I moved down to Houston and didn’t have the opportunity to pick up rod, reel, and fly-box on a weekly basis any more. Possibly I should have kept the subscriptions, but I found it much more satisfying to fish the rivers in my mind. That, and on the odd occasion I was able to make it to the Gulf coast, I was dragging live shrimp on a bobber instead of swinging a fly. I felt kind of like a traitor.

Enough background. Next time you’re in a bookstore, pick up a copy of Fly Fisherman (Linked to a page about the Farmington in CT which was one of my frequent stops) or “Fly Rod and Reel,:http://www.flyrodreel.com/ two of the US’s premier fly-fishing rags. Notice that the vast majority of pictures show smiling fisher-folk holding, no cradling fish.

I stopped into a bookstore for a cuppa this afternoon, and found a UK fishing rag, Fly Fishing and Fly Tying and was kind of struck by the difference in content. Pleasantly suprised, to tell the truth.

FF&FT featured a lot more pictures showing the water being fished, of how the people were approaching lies, and tons of pictures of the flies used. The few pics of fish weren’t framed to make the fish look HUGE, nor did they give the apperance that fishing was a pleasant experience for the fish. Nope, the pics featuring fish either showed them still on the rod, or showed them hooked by the gill and destined “for the pot.”

Even the articles about fly tying were different. No emphasis on Brand X’s hooks and hackles. One featured a fly that was tied with found materials from a previous fishing trip, and another featured “Red flat tinsel (Christmas decorations!)”. Having tried flies tied from roadkill and birds I’d shot personally, I loved the examples.

I kind of appreciated the change. There were about a dozen different British streams mentioned, most of which I hadn’t heard of. US mags tend to focus on about a dozen or so ‘blue ribbon’ streams, ignoring the thousands of decent trickles from Georgia to Alaska. And there were none of the big ‘travelogue’ type pieces, emphasizing the importance of staying in a high dollar lodge to heighten the fishing experience. The FF&FT was about fishing, not pretending to be a fisherman.

Here’s to a lack of hype, and an appreciation for the subtle.

Huh. Guess that leaves me...

Fire away, folks. As a middle-class, white, Republican (At least until the primaries) male I’m the last acceptable target for humor in the US. The powers that be have declared that it’s no longer kosher to make jokes like “Fight inbreeding, ban country music,” or to wear overalls and buck teeth for halloween. “I can’t think of any instances where it’s OK to make fun of someone who lacks medical care,” says Rubin, an American studies professor at the University of Massachusetts in Boston.

Cletus the-slack-jawed Yokel is now officially a disenfranchised minority. But it’s still OK to make fun of the group you claim Foxworthy, who defines “redneck” as a “glorious absence of sophistication,” has never been the subject of protests, despite the subject of his humor. His audience knows his “redneck” jokes are inspired by his own experience, he said.

Oh Boy! E-voting is SO secure...

No Comment

- The Luddite

Sure, it may be fast

But does it run Linux and has someone ported Doom to the new optical processor?

Sue J.K. Rowling!

Spending long stretches of time reading can cause headaches! (I know you are all shocked.) And some parents were so concerned about the effects on their children when reading the latest Harry Potter tome that they took them to the doctor to find a rememdy.

A Washington doctor warned that he has seen three children complain of headaches caused by the physical stress of relentlessly plowing through the epic 870-page adventure.

The worst part is that some parents decided it was better to drug their kids than to actually implement some discipline.

The obvious cure for this malady — that is, taking a break from reading — was rejected by two of the patients, Bennett said, adding that the children took acetaminophen instead.

This is freaky -

And extremely sad. A Houston Police Detective was found shot in his cubicle at HPD headquarters downtown. He was apparently a good fella - One of those (long term) investigations yielded results this week, with the arrest of Anthony Allen Shore, who was charged Monday with four counts of capital murder in connection with the deaths of three girls and a young woman. Smith had been involved in the probe of the September 1986 killing of 15-year-old Laura Lee Tremblay, one of Shore’s alleged victims.

There’s no word if this may have been suicide.

Project Censored

Always one of the highlights of my year. This year’s list is hugely anti-war, but that’s to be expected. And, no, it shouldn’t, but

8. US/British Forces Continue Use of Depleted Uranium Weapons Despite Massive Evidence of Negative Health Effects

cracked me up. They’re weapons, for crying out loud! Of course they’ve got massively negative health effects when used properly.

More Goldberg

I am usually reluctant to post anything by Jonah Goldberg up here, since he tends to rub us Democrats the wrong way. But today’s bit is somewhat relevant to the ongoing discussion here in the last couple of days. The closing bit is

But these Democrats want none of it. They see each setback in Iraq as a political opportunity to question whether we should be there at all. Not only do they send a message of weakening American resolve at precisely the wrong moment, not only do they abandon their historical principles, but they underscore their most enduring political handicap — the impression that Democrats are unserious on foreign policy. They are left with no principle to stand on, no plan of their own to promulgate, and no credibility to trade with. In short, they have ritualistically shorn themselves of everything but animus and appetite.

There are GREAT issues out there for the Democrats to run on.

Tort Reform, or lack thereof, could play well with the masses, especially if it’s tied into the Continuing Corporate Scandals. Democrats could legitimately question the futility of the drug war and the cost in both people and treasure while there is a real and present danger still in Iraq and the other terrorist havens. And where is the Perscription Drug Benefit? Why is it still tied in committee? How about the promised funding for Hydrogen Infrastructure? And that’s in just two minutes of brainstorming.

Wow - here would be the killer - REAL tax reform to make it much easier for average folks to file returns. Knock out the loopholes, simplify the forms, and make it easier to get returns and tax credits sooner. Then beef up the IRS’ audit teams for both folks filing the Alternative Minimum Tax and for Corporate income tax. It’s progressive, it’s anti-corporate, and the benefits go straight to ‘average people’.

Politics has traditionally stopped at the waters’ edge. Presidents have been given wide sway, even for propoganda events, in foreign affairs, and doubly so in war. Bring that back, DNC. Take the high ground, and work on the domestic weak spots. Every minute spent on the War on Terror is a minute of advertising for GWB.

*** Here’s another idea *** How about the Democrats become the party of small government? Push for cuts in any and all corporate welfare programs? That’d be huge!

People Eating Tasty Animals

(I’m not going to rant about PETA and their shameful censorship of the original PETA website, but I do like to mention that egregious violation of free speech whenever possible)

NRO’s got a pretty decent column about killing and eating Bambi today. Just the right thing to put me in the mood for lunch, and to kick off hunting season.

Hunters for the Hungry is another group of venison-donation charters across the U.S. HFTH has collected and donated over 1.5 million pounds of venison since l991. Some of its notable affiliates include Hunters for the Hungry in Texas, which has donated over 500,000 pounds of venison in the last decade; Hunters Helping the Hungry in New Jersey, which donated over 30,000 pounds of venison last year; Alaskan Hunters Fighting Hunger, which provides deer, bear, caribou, and moose meat to local food banks; and Michigan Sportsmen Against Hunger, which coordinates donations from several different groups throughout Michigan. This last group also holds raffles to raise cash for meat-processing fees; one of the prizes is a chance to hunt with good ol’ Blood Brother Ted Nugent.)

Mmmmm, Venison (and even better - Duckies!)

Ummm, Justice O'Connor?

Didn’t you take an oath when you were sworn into the bench to uphold the US Constitution? Then why are you saying “I suspect,” Justice O’Connor said, “that over time we will rely increasingly — or take notice, at least — increasingly on international and foreign courts in examining domestic issues”? (Atlanta J-C article here ) It’s been a couple years since I sat through Ms. Webb’s class, but I thought it was up to the Legislature to determine what set of law the Judiciary ruled on. Apparently Justice O’Connor doesn’t think that the American people are smart enough to elect representatives to speak for them, so we ought to let the smarter, more erudite Europeans speak for us. Wow. This should have been the lead on every news broadcast this morning.

BTW - second item in the Wash Times article has Democrat Zell Miller endorsing GWB for 2004.

Small Triumph

It’s taken a couple months, but I was finally able to grab enough pieces/parts and screw around with YellowDog Linux on the old iBook to get old school Airport working. So now I’m free-software surfing without wires.

Next project: Figure out how to access the HFS+ partition on this hard drive so I can access my Mail files with Evolution and ditto spreadsheets/etc. Oh, and find a hack that will let me display the same time on OSX’s desktop and Yellowdog.

I have been running Mandrake 9.1 on my Dell laptop for a couple of weeks, and have been impressed. Unlike Yellowdog, Mandrake mostly just works. My biggest huzzah for Mandrake is that the Windows partition shows up without a bunch of hacking under /mnt/win. Wish that it were that easy to get /mnt/osx on this machine. Good learning experience, though -

Why Does The Muslim World Hate GWB and His Cronies?

(and us by association)?

I linked to this article (in a previous discussion ) about W’s surprise in realizing that he’s hated and not trusted by the majority of the Muslim world (which is backed up by this interesting poll done in Saudi Arabia.) While jank is sleeping, I thought it’d be a good time to throw some wood on the presidential fire with some excerpting from this (obviously biased, but might make a good point) Muslim news article that simply starts with…

George W. Bush is a thief.

On May 22, 2003 President Bush issued Executive Order 13303, “Protecting the Development Fund for Iraq.” This order invoked the “National Emergency Act” to effectively seize Iraqi oil and oil revenues, ostensibly to ensure they are spent on “Iraqi reconstruction.” …

… I hereby order…any attachment, judgement, decree, lien, execution, garnishment, or other judicial process is prohibited, and shall be deemed null and void, with respect to the following: a) the Development Fund for Iraq, and b) all Iraqi petroleum and petroleum products… reads the kernel of Bush’s decree. …

… On October 17th, and the US Army Corps of Engineers reported that to date $600 million from the Development Fund has been paid out to Halliburton – for “importing gasoline into Iraq.” This is a direct violation of Resolution 1483, which demands that “the fund shall be used in a transparent manner to meet the humanitarian needs of the Iraqi people.”

It’s also the modern equivalent of shipping coal to Newcastle. …

… Halliburton charges $1.59 per gallon for gasoline imported from Turkey into Iraq, whereas the going market rate in the Persian Gulf is 76 cents per gallon, plus about 25 cents for transport according to US Congressmen Henry Waxman and John Dingell …

… But charging market rates for Persian Gulf gasoline would not be good for Halliburton, which adds from 2% to 7% to the price for itself. 2% of 96 cents is 1.92 cents a gallon for Halliburton. 7% of $1.59 is 8.11 cents per gallon for Halliburton. The profit must be added to the cost of the gasoline, as Halliburton’s contract is “cost plus” profit; the profit to be calculated “depending on performance.”

Executive Order 13303 protects Halliburton’s war profiteering…

Let's All Go To Cat Town

I can’t believe that John didn’t think of it first. Stellar graphics, compelling performances and intricate plots. This site has it all.

Including a catchy theme song.

The End of the World

This Californian (I still need a derogatory term for ‘em) with a funny accent tells a story about the possible end of the world in this simple but funny Flash movie.

NSFW if you don’t want your neighbors to hear the “f” word coming from your speakers.

Why I'm dragging this up I don't know

But here goes:

Bush’s visit to the USS ABRAHAM LINCOLN just won’t freaking die, and it is a blatant example of media bias, plain and simple.

The current kerfuffle is about the “Mission Accomplished” banner that was flying from the bridge (The flag bridge, BTW, where there’s a couple of exercise bikes for the brass) when the Commander in Chief of the United States of America’s Armed Forces paid a morale visit to a carrier that had just completed the LONGEST DEPLOYMENT since Vietnam. Even though in his speech, GWB referred to “…difficult work to do in Iraq. We’re bringing order to parts of that country that remain dangerous” and “The transition from dictatorship to democracy will take time,” he is still being lambasted for declaring the war over (Which, BTW, he did not - “…major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed. And now our coalition is engaged in securing and reconstructing that country
…” )

After I wrote this, I found this article at CNN talking about the Pres’ media crew. It doesn’t change my mind at all, but I thought I’d include it for balance. I am still pissed at how this LINCOLN thing is being handled by the press.

I don’t know how many of y’all have had the pleasure of seeing a crew who have been gone for many months return home, back to the land and the people they love. Things tend to grow somewhat out of proportion.

When I left the ABE in April, the crew I worked with was already building up for the trip home. Plans were being made to get In-N-Out burgers, go camping, see children, etc. The crew was pumped, proud, and rightly so. They had just played a major role in liberating 26 Million Iraqis, fortunately without loss of life from the crew or air wing (to the best of my recollection, I may be wrong). The LINCOLN’s mission certainly was accomplished.

But homecomings tend to be things involving banners, balloons, bands both on the ship and on the pier. VIP’s come out to say great things about a job well done, and seeing as how the LINCOLN Strike Group represented about 8,000 Americans, I don’t think that a Presidential visit was completely inappropriate.

Could he have taken Marine One and rode in a suit and tie? Sure, but that’s because the ABE made better time than expected. But my guess is that the pilot of that S-3 will have few prouder moments than getting to fly with the PotUS, and I can’t blame Bush for wanting to ride in a jet. I’d bet that given the choice between a helicopter ride and getting to do an arrested landing on a carrier, each and every one of us would choose the landing.

Was the picture he painted for the LINCOLN’s crew a little rosy? Possibly, but for crying out loud - here is well over a half dozen person-millenia (5,000 people spent 10 months on that boat) used in defense of the country - why not let the crew bask for an afternoon in the sunny waters off Southern California? It’s called leadership, it’s called rewarding good performers, it’s called thanks for a job well done.

If continually harping on stuff like the speech on the LINCOLN, or the Yellowcake in Niger (the speech claimed Africa) is the best the my new adopted party can offer, there’s another 4 years of GWB at 1600 Pennsylvania. Cowboy Up.

I'm confused...

I thought these were real ‘fair & blanced’ headlines?

That is about the funniest thing I’ve seen in a while… :-)

The Funny, Funny Art of Lore Sjöberg

Formerly of The Brunching Shuttlecocks (a funny collective that has “moved on”), Lore Sjöberg has moved on to do his own strip which he supposedly updates every Thursday. Check out his classic Flash movies Kevin Smith and His Magic Feather and The Adventures of Evil Overmom, then be sure to dig through his archives for gems like this:

Owignal Wabbit

I hope we all were dismayed over the last few years to notice the censorship of our favorite childhood cartoons. My warm familial memories of laying on the couch with my Dad while he chuckled away at Roadrunner shorts — I think he identified with having chosen a career that involved so much futility…or maybe he just thought they were funny — were laid waste by a Coyote whose antics climaxed off-camera in more recent edited versions. Thankfully Warner Bros. heard the anguished cries of us Gen X’ers and released Looney Tunes - The Golden Collection, an unexpurgated collection of 56 restored and re-mastered shorts.

More good stuff from Wired

Not meaning to only grab low-hanging fruit, but this article has Tim O’Reilly saying a lot of things that I’d noticed a while ago, namely “O’Reilly said the old idea of stand-alone software — the unconnected word processor or spreadsheet — is becoming passé. Even the idea of making a distinction between software platforms — Mac, Windows and Linux — is starting to no longer make sense. “

Small win for freedom of info

Wired is carrying a story on rulings by the US Copyright Office exempting at least four classes of material from copyright protection:

On Tuesday, the U.S. Copyright Office released the four “classes of works” exempted from the anti-circumvention rule. People may bypass a digital lock to access lists of websites blocked by commercial filtering companies, circumvent obsolete dongles to access computer programs, access computer programs and video games in obsolete formats, and access e-books where the text-to-speech function has been disabled.

Best part of the article? A reference to the Librarian of Congress

Where Are Mulder and Scully When You Need Them?

Creepy stories are starting to pop up. It may be just my state-of-mind due to the upcoming holiday, but between the black spots on Jupiter and this story I am a little freaked out.

The mystery began a few years ago when a turkey hunter, scouting in a remote area of the 23,000-acre forest, discovered a large boulder in the top of an 80-foot-tall chestnut oak tree. What he saw wedged among its branches was a boulder about 4 feet wide and a foot thick.

Director's Series - Music Video on DVD

Here’s a series of DVDs grouped by popular music video directors: Spike Jonze, Chris Cunningham and Michel Gondry. A few of the highlights:

• Fell In Love With A Girl – THE WHITE STRIPES
• Army Of Me – BJORK
• Sugar Water – CIBO MATTO
• Sabotage - BEASTIE BOYS
• Da Funk - DAFT PUNK

This is ripe for ripping to hard drive to make a party video.

( another thing I have to not buy…I really should try the frozen credit card technique. )

Wow. Information wants to be cheap, at least

Maps are life when tromping around the woods. So I was floored when I saw that Connecticut’s DEP was selling a 7 CD set with pretty much any bit of geographic data one could want about the state, and the software with which to process it, for all of $30.

Dude.

The package includes the various USGS quads for the state as well as political/infrastructure data, bathyemetry data for bodies of water, satellite pictures, etc.

Granted, CT’s a pretty small state (~80 miles x ~150 miles), but I’d expected that the great state of Texas could offer something which would come close to meeting this. Not even. A single CD with Texas quads for a degree square (Roughly 60 nautical miles square) is $28. Although, it is possible to download all the information for free in small increments.

Theremin Resources

Found this downloadable virtual theremin and it got my buying demon all excited. Here’s a website, ThereminWorld, that even has a list of places you can buy theremins and theremin kits.

( JIC you needed an idea for my Christmas list besides this wishlist of DVDs.)

Lightning Strikes Twice

Maybe God is trying to tell them something?

Bike Shop in Austin

Folks who truly walk the walk that they talk are few and far between. Not sure what they carry, but if any of you Austinites need a bike, the Rhizome Collective may be the place to go.

A windmill made out of bicycle gears turns lazily on the roof, powering a system of pulleys and levers capturing rainwater. On the other side of the roof, three suspended bathtubs, brightly tiled and filled with papyrus and cattail plants, filter dirty washing machine water through bacteria in the plants’ roots. A few feet away sits a solar oven, a squat grill covered by glass that captures enough Central Texas heat to cook a batch of tasty rice and beans in about six hours… The group also envisions an “edible neighborhood,” where fruit trees and vegetable plants dot the landscape and neighbors can munch on apples and nuts as they stroll down the street.

Rock on, hippie folk. Best of luck to you, in all honesty. Here’s their very attractive web page.

Boo!

I’d like to twist the ‘favorite movie’ thread a little in light of the fact that Halloween is almost upon us… What are your top 5 scary movies of all time?

I have to go with (not in any order):
1) Exorcist
2) All three Omen movies
3) When a Stranger Calls (get out of the house! the calls are coming from inside the house!!)
4) Alien
5) The Thing

Singing Xylophone

NSFW if you’re not using headphones.

Here’s a Flash animated singing xylophone with an inappropriate message. I really spent more than 5 minutes just playing songs over and over. They should make a clean version of this.

Nate Heatwole

Here’s a bipartisan proposal I’ll buy off on - Send Nate Heatwole to work for the TSA.

Heatwole is the college kid who stowed away bags of contraband on SWA flights. Apparently the guy did the stowage in FEBRUARY, 8 whole months ago, and then e-mailed the TSA to let them know where their security holes were. TSA did nada.

So he’s caught, and the Administration wants to run him up the yardarm (More sailor lingo) for breaking the law, saying that “He took an opportunity to seize the latest reality-show, self-celebrity-making tactic and get himself out in front of the news.” Uh, yeah - that’s why he didn’t call channel 12 (or whomever) for EIGHT MONTHS!

In steps Massachusetts Representative Edward Markey, with a proposal that “this college student should be sentenced to working 20 hours a week for the TSA. The TSA’s punishment for this massive failure should be listening to this 20-year-old student — and subsequently closing loopholes that continue to worry passengers every day.”

The road to peace begins with a single step...

Look - I’m a realist, if nothing else. I KNOW that the prospect of getting democracy and a respect for rights to stick in Afghanistan and Iraq is a pipe dream, a beer-induced haze, and a terrible attempt to impose western culture on an ancient and noble people (I really am trying to drink the kool-aid, folks, honestly)…

But then I find articles like this which show the first steps taken down a long, long road to lasting peace.

“I will tell my sons never to become soldiers,” said another former soldier, Ahmed Shah, 35, a member of the Jamiat-e-Islami faction. “We ruined this country, they will now have to fix it.”

We have made a commitment to these places, and owe it not only to ourselves to see the task through to lasting democracy, but owe it to courageous folks like Ahmed. If we pull out, the folks like him who are willing to give lawyers rather than LAW a try are going to be the ones slaughtered. 1,000 weapons is a small fraction of the total, but it’s a start.

Bible Study

At first I thought this would be inappropriate, but then I decided we should all take the time to read our bibles more. (Credit goes to NY expatriot Ashley Mc for this link which sells related paraphenelia.)

There she lusted after her lovers, whose genitals were like those of donkeys and whose emission was like that of horses. Ezekiel 23:20 (NIV)

Whitehouse Is Hiding from Google

It seems rather innocuous at first that whitehouse.gov is using this list to instruct the Google robots to ignore certain parts of the Whitehouse’s website, but digging into the file it becomes readily apparent that Google will miss just about everything of substance. The really significant (and obvious to tech-heads) impact is that the Google cache will not keep up with any website removals or rewrites after The Man decides to change history.

Take Back the Republican Party!

j/r - how’s this one fit you? An article at Common Dreams ‘s News Center — “Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community”.

Today’s so-called Republicans have established a mind-numbing record at polluting the environment; bloating government; appointing crony partisans; pushing the nation into debt to fund tax cuts for the rich; legislatively catering to the world’s largest corporations; opposing women’s rights; kneecapping states, local communities, and schools; eviscerating constitutional protections of liberty at home; and devastating our nation’s reputation abroad.

bq. They try to re-write history - the biography of Thomas Jefferson on the www.whitehouse.gov website has been re-written to turn him into a man who had “assumed leadership of the Republicans,” while the reality was that Jefferson’s party was the Democratic-Republicans and still exists today, called the Democratic Party. (The Republican Party is much more recent, having come into national existence in 1856.)

bq. Corporate shills like former Enron lobbyist and current GOP chairman Ed Gillespie would have us think the Republican party was born in service to corporations. But Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican president, was also the first president to actively use the power of government in support of striking workers.

The guy’s as much of an extremist nut as any radio personality, but behind his rhetoric is a few interesting notes.

Conkers - Old School Game, New School Presentation

I know this is not right. This weird-ass British game, Conkers, is about schoolboys hitting each other’s horse chestnuts trying to break them apart. In an effort to revive this crappy lost game some guy has recreated it in Flash.

It’s a couple-minute time waster if only to marvel at this example of “not quite getting it”.

Letter from SoCal

I found myself in an unusual position this past Saturday morning: home alone with no obligation to go to work. The wife was in Ann Arbor for a class reunion and my biggest deal at work had just imploded, so I basically had nothing to do. After giving it some thought, I decided that I would head into downtown LA and check out the new Disney Concert Hall. I even thought about taking a train into downtown (there is a train station about a mile from my house), just so I could finally say that I had experienced LA’s mass transit system.

Then I remembered that I live in Southern California and that nothing could ever be so simple.

LA County has been doing a damned good impersonation of Paris for the last two weeks. No, we have not been infused with snooty waiters or a cadre of hygiene-challenged men on bicycles, but we have learned the fun of having multiple strikes occur simultaneously. In one strike, Municipal Transit Authority workers have shut down the trains, subways, and many of the buses over their fight to maintain health benefits.

The other local strike, however, seems to be in some way attributable to a long-dead dude from Arkansas. Grocery chains, fearing the imminent arrival of Wal Mart superstores in SoCal, are trying to cut the health benefits that they offer their workers in an effort to lower their prices. The workers, naturally, thought that the best way to combat this was to sit around store entrances and intimidate people from going inside.

Since I could not take the train, I decided to drive instead. As soon as I pulled out of the garage, I noticed that there were millions of little white pieces of crap floating all over the place. I guess the technical term is ash. That was when I remembered the other fun thing going on in LA right now, the fires.

Undaunted, I went downtown anyway. The Disney hall is pretty amazing, even though it was not open for tours as advertised on the website. I also took a look at the almost-industrial sized LA Cathedral that opened a year ago. It is also worth seeing, if only to experience a catholic church that maintains a sense of awe and reverence without trying to appear as if it were designed in the dark ages.

While downtown, I noticed that the place smelled a bit odd (like a combination of car fumes and camp fires) and seemed especially hazy. Like most Angelenos who live closer to the ocean, I maintain undeserved feelings of hostility towards downtown and thought the smell and haze were simply endemic to the place. On Sunday morning, I realized my mistake.

The smell that I thought was just a part of downtown had invaded my house. I noticed that the next door neighbor was setting up an inflatable trampoline castle, and tried to convince myself that the smell was just the exhaust from their air pump. The sky, however, was especially hazy and red; I doubt that the pump had the power to cause that. That was when I understood that the effects of the fires (which are over 50 miles from my house) were causing problems in my neighborhood. The local branch of the EPA had issued a health advisory due to the quality of the air. Some of my neighbors were saying that cancer-causing ash was getting in the water supply and we needed to boil our water.

I was just annoyed that everything smelled funny while I ate Froot Loops and searched the ESPN channels for highlights of the Texas-Baylor game.

A little aside… I was supposed to pick my wife, Tina, up from LAX at 11:00AM. Since I have no faith in commercial airliners, I decided to track the flight on the web. In case you were wondering, Spirit Airlines has the worst current-flight tracker that I have ever seen. Because the fires shut down one of the local air traffic control centers, my wife’s flight was diverted to Las Vegas and landed at about 10:30. The website, however, continued to show that the flight would arrive in LA on time until 10:50. Since almost no one lives within 10 minutes of LAX, that probably meant that everyone who was going to the airport due to that flight had already left home by the time the website was updated. I would have gone to the airport to pick up Tina had she not been kind enough to call me and tell me what happened.

For the next 6 hours, the website continued to show completely unattainable arrival times until about 5 minutes before that arrival time passed. Only then would they update the site and add an hour or two to the expected arrival time. Luckily, I only made one aborted trip to the airport because of the fallacy of the website.

Finally, I decided to call the airline and ask when the flight would arrive. The attendant told me that the flight was in the air and would arrive at LAX in an hour.

15 minutes later Tina called to tell me that she was on the ground and waiting for me to come and get her.

This morning, when I drove to work, traffic was horrendous, due mainly to the metro strike. It took me about 50% longer than normal to get into the office. As I passed the train station near my house, though, I noticed that the strike doesn’t seem to be so hard on the striking workers.

They were barbequing meat on a Coleman grill. I wonder if they crossed supermarket picket lines to get their food?

Supersize me, part 2

Walters and I were just talking about this last night, so it caught my eye.

Being a health-nut, I’d love to see restaurants posting the calorie/fat counts in what they serve. And it seems fair to require nicer restaurants to post it somewhere if McDonald’s has to. But I don’t think this will help with the obesity problem everyone’s so lathered up about these days.

I am constantly amazed by how little the normal person knows about how many calories they’re consuming. A Whopper with cheese has 800 calories, which is half of what I’m supposed to eat IN A DAY. But I bet you a million dollars I could sit in front of Burger King all day telling people and they’ll still go in and order their food without a second thought (the small order of fries only adds 229, so what the hell…).

Brian’s idea was to require restaurants to serve portion sizes that match the FDA’s daily requirements, but forcing people to eat a certain amount of dinner seems like an awfully slippery slope. I’m as liberal as they come (at least as this list goes), but what I put in my mouth seems like the definition of personal freedom. (let’s keep it clean, everybody) Plus, the FDA’s requirements are really for a very limited range of people anyway, so most of us would still end up eating too much or too little.

I’m a problem solver, and hate to just say “this won’t work” without providing alternatives, so I’ve decided that I’m going to figure out the answer to America’s fat-ass health crisis. Sure, people have failed before, but Dr. Phil is already on the bandwagon. I’m not sure how I’m going to do it yet, but I’ll keep you posted.

Osama and Saddam Sitting In a Tree

Apparently I completely missed the news article that Osama Bin Laden and Sadam Hussein were married about a month ago. Thankfully, I didn’t miss the follow-up article where they adopted a shaved chimp to complete their family unit.

If it weren’t for the Weekly World News how would we ever know the truth?

Political Speech Censored

I tried to go to this site at work and was greeted by the following message:

This site http://supersphere.com/FrontPage/Politic/Page.html?ID=Audio has been categorized as Mature according to [ my employer ]’s Code of conduct for Internet usage.

I’m not sure why [ my employer ] feels the need to censor a website featuring speeches from the likes of Jello Biafra, Noam Chomski and Malcom X covering all kinds of topics like WTO, Mumia Abu-Jamal, etc. but it does seem odd.

(anyone smart enough to note that I got to the site despite the objections of my employer? if you want to know my secret — which costs me $5 a month — send me an email. it’s well worth the cost to get around pesky firewalls or prevent the corporate website loggers from knowing where I’m surfing.)

Knee Defender

I’m only posting this one because they educated me with an Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. quote that I was unfamilar with. For that I am grateful so I’ll give them a little free plug.

Here’s the original quote:

The right to swing my fist ends where the other man’s nose begins.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

and here’s their version:

The right to recline my seat ends where the other man’s knee begins.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

I Blame Jank and Reeder

This site analyzes text and webpages and determines how evil they are based on Gematriculation (kind of like numerology, except it’s about words and the bible.)

How do they celebrate Halloween in West Virginia?

We’ll be out of town on Friday, so we thought we’d get the ball rolling early.

Cynthia’s excellent entry — I’ll let her explain in comments if she feels an explanation is necessary. (And let’s not accuse her of sucking up to the Webmaster.)

Mine, quite obviously, is Domo (pump) Kun.

Every time you ask for candy, god kills a kitten.

You’re A Rich Girl, And You’ve Gone Too Far

Damn that Heather Havrilesky (no, the other Heather Havrilesky)! I was bound and determined to avoid a spate of upcoming reality shows that centered around the insanely wealthy. Instead HH casually tosses off a review of the shows this weekend at Salon.com and I am compelled to watch.

Three upcoming programs — MTV’s “Rich Girls,” HBO’s “Born Rich,” and Fox’s “The Simple Life” — reflect the fascination and ambivalence we have for the wealthy. How well or badly they come across, of course, is determined largely by the prejudices of the producers, and whether they intend for the close-up on America’s most wealthy to incite thoughtful discussion or shameless rubbernecking.

Like a Race Horse

Of the many things men do to increase their perceived machismo that women don’t understand (like using long sticks as swords and getting shotgun in the car ), I bet that few women know about peeing like a race-horse.

Ladies- there is a zen-balanced moment as we men glide our drunken bladders to the men’s room urinals and prepare to release a yellow stream of unending power. The longer we can draw it out, the more manly we are in the ears of our fellow bathroom-going brethren.

Gentlemen- today I discovered a cheat! If you flush mid-evacuation, pinch it off and then continue peeing just before the flush is over and your near-by compatriots will be none the wiser that you got a few seconds credit that you don’t really deserve! …unless of course the guy next to you is checking out your junk. Then you’ve got a whole different situation.

VH1 Presents "I Love 6 Months Ago"

Here’s a script for the yet-to-be-released follow-up to VH1’s popular “I Love the 80’s” show.

Water Yo-Yos:

Beth Littleford: Ewww… those things were just gross. Like, Congress recalled all the breast impants from the 80s and someone just made them into toys.

Donal Logue: Water yo-yos! Oh, man! Oh, man!

Mr. Personality:

Michael Ian Black: The beauty of Mr. Personality was that it combined personality with the word Mister. Well, the abbreviation “Mr.” at least.

(and it’s not the Onion!)

Lunchtime Poll

In preparation for this year’s Butt-Numb-A-Thon, I’m working on a paragraph where I (among other things) have to name my favorite movie.

I’m narrowing it down, here’s where I am now (in no particular order):
* Some Kind of Wonderful
* The Goonies
* The Shining
* Funny Face
* Fight Club

Pretty random, I know.

So, now I’m curious about you guys. Anyone want to share any favorites?

How Can I Get Rid of These Awful Blackheads?

Astronomers have spotted a strange, obvious and inexplicable black spot near the equator of Jupiter. A picture of the object was circling this planet electronically this week as researchers scratched their heads about what they’d found.

A second image, taken on another day by a different photographer, contains a similar looking spot. As of early Thursday, the second image had deepened the mystery. Some astronomers were at first puzzled over whether the two photos show the same thing or not. As it turns out, they do not.

…continued in this article at Space.com.

Very, very creepy.

EULA For Tools

Thanks to slashdot for this story about a tool manufacturer, Stots Corporation, who is including a shrink-wrapped EULA for its TemplateMaster jig tool.

I just bought a jig for making dovetailing jigs — this is woodworker talk if it’s unfamiliar to you. The master jig contained a license that says I’ve licensed the master jig, not bought it. The license says I can’t lend or sell the master, and furthermore I can’t lend or sell the jigs I make with the master.

From Stots’ website: the purpose of the TemplateMaster is to clone itself. Therefore we are verifying your honesty that only you will use the tool and you will not be passing it around to others to use for free. It is exactly the same as the ‘shrink wrap’ agreement that comes with almost all computer software. Please help us fight ‘tool piracy’.

BpB write-a-caption contest

I’ll get us started…

AS: So, dis is de phone, yah?

GD: Yep, yep! That’s the phone.

This sounds like a challenge

I’ll admit that I’ve become a huge fan of my Mac. And the number of viruses I’ve had since switching has been exactly 0, as opposed to the two or three my antivirus software caught each month when I pulled e-mail down onto my Win2K box.

But Mossberg’s recent article in that right-wing rag, the WSJ (I’m having fun as a Democrat), seems not a whole lot more than a gauntlet thrown down for an intrepid virus writer. (Not that I’d condone anything like that)

In addition, Macs constitute such a tiny share of the world’s computers that they just aren’t an attractive target for virus writers and hackers. You can’t take down many computers, so you won’t get much publicity. To do damage to a Mac, virus writers have to construct viruses that are specific to the Mac. The Windows viruses they churn out can’t run on a Mac, even if they are received in e-mail by a Mac user. Neither can spyware or Trojan horse programs written for Windows.

How does this help educate folks about how to make their systems more secure?

On a side note, I recently had an interview with the DoD security service as a periodic re-investigation. One of the questions the interviewer asked was if I was interested in ‘hacking’ or ‘hackers.’ When I said ‘Yes’, her jaw about dropped.

I hadn’t realized how loaded a question that was, and my answer was entirely open and honest. To salvage myself, I went on about how I am interested in it. I’d love to spend more time figuring out how the computers at my house talk to each other, and wish I had a lot more time to spend generally fooling around with computers, which is what I’d always associated with ‘hacking’. Yeah, there are people who do bad things while they ‘hack’, but much like I don’t think that anyone should drive who hasn’t at least changed motor oil once and several tires, I think that folks should have a little more idea of the ‘mechanics’ of the box on their desktops.

On John's Christmas List

How the Poll Results on Iraq Were Manipulated

Getting Cheney to interpret your statistics is like getting Ron Popeil to review your gadgets.

For example, while Cheney noted that when asked what kind of government they would like, Iraqis chose “the US… hands down,” in fact, the results of the poll are actually quite different. Twenty-three percent of Iraqis say that they would like to model their new government after the US; 17.5 percent would like their model to be Saudi Arabia; 12 percent say Syria, 7 percent say Egypt and 37 percent say “none of the above.” That’s hardly “winning hands down.”

When asked whether over the next five years, they felt that the “US would help or hurt Iraq,” 50 percent said that the US would hurt Iraq, while only 35.5 percent felt the US would help the country. On the other hand, 61 percent of Iraqis felt that Saudi Arabia would help Iraq in the next five years, as opposed to only 7.5 percent, who felt Saudi Arabia would hurt their country.

Bah! Why would we ask these people what they think? We should give them what they need, and ask forgiveness later!

More Spam

For anti-spam software. Wouldn’t this qualify as blackmail in a just world? Why does the Senate need to pass a new law while there’s plenty of old ones that haven’t been tried by prosecutors?

Spam is below the break.

From: Roberto Levy [w3zyicasj@msn.com]
Sent: Friday,
October 24, 2003 12:50
To: ******@mindspring.com
Subject: RE: Finally,
a smart sp@m control solution you can trust

FORGET SPAM
BLOCKERS!

Get SMART Spam Control That Always Delivers The Email You Want!

Finally, we discovered the ultimate solution that is guaranteed to stop all spamwithout losing any of your important email! This revolutionary advanced technology also protects you 100% against ALL email-borne viruses - both known and unknown.

We didn’t beleive it either until we actually tried it. So you be the judge and see for yourself.

You owe it to yourself to try this
program, and forward this email to all of your friends who hate Spam or as many people as possible.

We are strongly against sending unsolicited emails to those who do not wish to receive our special mailings. You have opted in to one or more of our affiliate sites requesting to be notified of any special offers we may run from time to time. We also have attained the services of an independent 3rd party to overlook list management and removal services. This is NOT unsolicited email. If you do not wish to receive further mailings, please click here to be removed from the list. Please accept our apologies if you have been sent this email in error. We honor all removal requests

Tour 2004 Route is out

At le Tour’s site.

Looks like Jean Marie’s trying to make it much harder for Lance to hit number six- Only one individual time trial, ending on top of L’Alpe D’Huez, in the last week. Wow. No, scratch that - TWO individual time trials in the last week. The one up L’Alpe is 15 km, about 10 miles, but it’s straight the heck up the beast.

Starts in Liege, an ancient Belgain town with absolutely great waffles (I kid you not). Stage 3 leaves from Waterloo, pretty neat town, wonder if it’ll go past the lion statue. Route map is here I gotta get back on my bike…

Your Tax Dollars at work (For personal gain)

“The photographs of that second awakening, and other images from robotic space probes, were the subject of a panel discussion at the American Museum of Natural History titled “Far Out: Space Probes as Landscape Photographers.”

(From Wired )

But the best part is “And while NASA scientists and engineers strive to produce accurate photographic representation from the binary bits that arrive back home by radio signal, the transformation of images into art comes when someone like Benson frames and edits them.”

Luckily, NASA’s got tons of groovy shots available for free. And, to be fair, NASA doesn’t prohibit use for profit. So there’s some credit to be given for seeing an opportunity and seizing it.

My beef is the arrogance that stems from the idea that the engineers and scientists who built the probes, wrote the code, and did the heavy lifting to get the pixels back to earth, aren’t given credit for creating the images. But someone with a computer and connections to a publisher - Now, that’s an artist.

No More Rerun

Fred “Rerun” Berry died in bed at the age of 52 on Tuesday.

Fred Berry was well into his 20s when he was cast as a high-schooler on the 1970s sitcom What’s Happening!! Well into middle age, he was still playing the role.

Why I don't feel a lot of sympathy for the Palestinians

Almost 60% of them want to continue killing Jews even if they were immediately granted statehood, and an unconditional withdrawl of Israelis from the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem, says a new survey in the Jerusalem Post.

Nintey-six percent of Israeli Jews say the people who piloted the planes on September 11 were terrorists, while 37 percent of Palestinians share that view.

Truthfully, I love this

Penis enlargment spam - Hate it.
Porn Spam - Hate it.
Spam offering low mortgage rates - already got one.

But I really dig the various scam e-mails, such as this one:

Dear , (Yep, no name mentioned - this guy’s a pro…) Though I know that a transaction of this magnitude will make any one apprehensive and worried, but I am assuring you that everything will be well at the end of the day. We have decided to contact you due to the urgency of this transaction. I got your email address while searching for trustworthy individual.

From: Mr. Donell Makaty(chief auditor) 155 president street, Johannesbourg,
South Africa.

Tel: +874-762919-885.
Fax:+874-762919-886.

Dear ,
Though I know that a transaction of this magnitude will make any one apprehensive and worried, but I am assuring you that everything will be well at the end of the day. We have decided to contact you due to the urgency of this transaction. I got your email address while searching for trustworthy individual.

MY PROPOSITION:
I am an auditor with NEDCREDIT BANK OF SOUTH AFRICA. During my work with the bank I came across the financial record of late Engr. Peter Claude a foreign national. When reading further I was made to understand that he have $30,800,000.00 (Thirty million eight hundred thousand US dollars) floating in the suspense account of the Bank without any body claiming it. Now I made more investigation on this record and found out that late Engr. Peter died with the members of his family died in a plane crash. I continued the investigation to see if I can locate any member of his family but none was found. Now, since this money is still there in the bank and nobody is coming to claim it, The Management under the influence of our Chairman and Members of the Board of Directors, that arrangement has been made for the fund to be decleared “Unclaimed” and subsequentllybe donated to the trust fund for arms and ammunition to further enhance the course of War in Africa and the World in General.. This is totally a wrong idea; it is not good for the world. In the light of the above, since I am the only person that knows the details of this record, I made a plan on how we will get this fund out of the country, and for this fund to move out of the country I need you as a foreigner to play an important role. Now, your role is that I will arrange for a close confidant Attorney who will draft an application that you will send to the bank as a next of kin to Engr. Peter Claude with your account details where the fund will be transferred. Furthermore, to back-up this application the Attorney will also get some legal document that will evidence you as a distance cousin to Engr. Peter, so that the bank will not ask you any question on your application. Also, I will need you to send me your full detail, that is, your full name and address, your occupation, your nationality, religion, age and your contact telephone / fax number for easy communication. Please, know that the attorney will need this so that he will be able to get the documents in your name as the next of kin.

Finally, after the successful transfer of this fund to your account, I will make arrangement to come to your country so that we can share the fund, Your share will be 30% of the total sum while 10% will be set aside for any expences incured during the cours of transaction, The rest of 60% will be for myself. Do accept my warm regards as I await response. My alternative email address is userfrnk27@netscape.net, and this should be kept confidentail.

Regards,

Donell Makaty

Observations-
1. What does Engr. Peter Claude mean? The salutation, in particular, is what I’m looking for.
2. One of my favorite things about this is the handwringing about unclaimed funds being used to fund the “War in Africa”, etc.
3. It’s also subtle, but the email makes it clear that Mr. Makaty is asking you to commit fraud - “I need you as a foreigner to play an important role. Now, your role is that I will arrange for a close confidant Attorney who will draft an application that you will send to the bank as a next of kin to Engr. Peter Claude with your account details where the fund will be transferred.” So when the thing goes south, I’d need to own up to trying to defraud a bank.

the Centrist Coalition

Hmm…I will have to keep an eye on these guys . Maybe I have found a group I can be active with.

The Centrist Coalition is a gathering place for moderate Americans who have a certain distinct vision of political leadership in our country.

We believe strong leadership involves a bold mix of views drawn partly from the right and partly the left.

On the one hand, we embrace an economic agenda focused on growth and fiscal responsibility. We believe in free trade, fair competition, and limited government.

On the other hand, we embrace an inclusive social agenda that celebrates the rich diversity of American life, and seeks to avoid imposing one person’s choices on another. We are pro-choice and pro-civil rights.

…

Finally, we are an independent organization. We evaluate candidates based on their views, voting records, and leadership skills, setting aside party affiliation as a consideration. Take a peek at our candidates list, and you’ll find a motley mix of Democrats, Republicans, and independents.

Love in the Stacks

Nothing especially shocking here, except the recognition that Harry J. is a madame according to the Guardian.

(BTW- you can link from there to this article about the old space game, Elite. I had some serious flashbacks reading about it. Learning the authors dug Thatcher makes it that much better…)

It was only a matter of time.

Before this happened. Wal-Mart and Take Two are being sued by families of two women shot by a couple of knuckleheads trying to reinact a scene from Grand Theft Auto III. Wonder why their parents aren’t named in the suit? Maybe because they don’t have the $200 MILLION in punitive damages the families seek. Tort reform, anyone?

My wife is so going to leave me

Not only do I need a next-Gen iPod but the bastards in Cupertino have finally kicked out a G4 iBook. I know it’s inevitable with any tech product, but suddenly, I don’t love my G3 so much.

So I guess I’m saving pennies until they kick out a Superdrive 12” iBook, and beginning to look for apartments near the kiddo(s).

If there weren't enough to worry about

With Iran and North Korea getting the biggest M-80 around, Pakistan is going to swap bombs for Saudi Oil. Thanks to the other Washington paper for the link.

Good stuff (Well, interesting stuff) in there about our ‘allies’ the Pakistanis giving the NK’s a little bit of enrichment technology in exchange for missiles. Wonder how this is all playing out in New Dehli and Tel Aviv.

Jank oughta dig this...

This crap breathes uranium and renders it harmless to ground water. Pretty cool.

She's a Man, Baby!

The woman’s evil, but this is just mean.

Elliott Smith

Sadly, Elliott Smith committed suicide. Don’t do it.

What all the hip-and-with-it kids are talking about

Now you know how to get what you need ‘on the street’. Just a rough survey shows many more cool names for Heroin than the rest of the drugs.

Just a few for the porchers-
Bill(ie Hoke) - Cocaine
Big Harry - Heroin
B(aby) T - Crack Cocaine
John(son) - Crack Cocaine
Doc(tor) - Methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA)
Cin(namon) - Methamphetamine (yeah, I know it’s spelled wrong)
Trey - Small rock of crack cocaine or $3 bag of marajuana

Sorry, Becky. Nothing close

(Insert joke about GWB and drugs here. Such as “So this is from the White House’s Drug Czar. Finally something GWB knows something about”. GK was wrong: We’re all Democrats now)

Oh, and thanks to Reason for the link.

Why So Strange?

Who told Scarlett Johansson that this outfit and hairstyle was attractive?

Which leads to a question I have been wondering. At a recent movie premiere we sat directly behind a formerly-local-Austin actress who was in the movie and she was dressed like someone straight out of Pat Benatar’s “Love is a Battlefield”.

What is it about becoming “a star” that makes some people dress funny?

Look at this:

She is a very attractive (and very talented — you should go see Lost in Translation) actress. What possesed her or her agent or whoever to think that a Buck Rogers hairdo and blue foil dress would further her career?

The Soap Opera of the '04 Tour begins

Big News. Jan Ullrich is heading back to Telekom (Will be T-Mobile as Deutsche Telekom tries to consolidate it’s various sub-entities).

What does this mean for our Shiner-Swilling hero? Essentially, a tougher time trying for win number 6. Bianchi put together a decent team for Ullrich this year, and he proved he’s dangerously close to taking LA down. Telekom is an order of magnitude up from Bianchi.

The only other cycling news worth noting (besides my continued laziness and neglect of my bike) is the upcoming announcement of the 2004 TDF route on the 23^rd of October.

Party On, Wayne.

Bad Information

Interesting article at the New Yorker says that the real problem behind W’s iminent threat (which is collapsing in the harsh light of reality) is due to a quality control failure in the CIA.

… Preliminary findings, one intelligence official told me, are disquieting. “The intelligence community made all kinds of errors and handled things sloppily”he said. The problems range from a lack of quality control to different agencies’ reporting contradictory assessments at the same time. One finding, the official went on, was that the intelligence reports about Iraq provided by the United Nations inspection teams and the International Atomic Energy Agency, which monitored Iraq’s nuclear-weapons programs, were far more accurate than the C.I.A. estimates. “Some of the old-timers in the community are appalled by how bad the analysis was,”the official said. “If you look at them side by side, C.I.A. versus United Nations, the U.N. agencies come out ahead across the board.” …

… A retired C.I.A. officer described for me some of the questions that would normally arise in vetting: “Does dramatic information turned up by an overseas spy square with his access, or does it exceed his plausible reach? How does the agent behave? Is he on time for meetings?” The vetting process is especially important when one is dealing with foreign-agent reports—sensitive intelligence that can trigger profound policy decisions. In theory, no request for action should be taken directly to higher authorities—a process known as “stovepiping”—without the information on which it is based having been subjected to rigorous scrutiny. …

The article supposes (and I support) that this may be the reason for bad information, but the responsibility for using this bad information has to rely on the person at the top. Using the information was a decision made there, and the “stovepiping” was a direct result of an executive mandate.

Not to be Presumptuous

But I want to take this occasion to extend an invitation.

I will be there on April 25, 2004, and if you would like to participate but need a place to stay in DC, you can stay at Casa SmiCollum.

Al Franken on PHC

Prarie Home Companion gets a lot of flack for being un-cool, and the ultimate sign of my lack of taste may be that I listen to (and enjoy) PHC almost every week. This week was exceptionally good with Al Franken showing up on the show to plug his most recent book, Lies and the Lying Liars who Tell Them . Here’s a bit of the best part of the show:

Al Franken: I want to congratulate you, Garrison.

Garrison Keillor: Really?

AF: Well, on having not just a Republican radio show, but a drug-free Republican radio show. Evidently, it’s so hard to sustain a radio show…for this many years and keep it a drug free Republican radio show.

Vote Early, Vote Often

Nothing so sexy on the Texas ballot this time, but Early Voting has begun. As I asked before Why are you sitting on your duff?

Baseball *Itching

Yes, Grady Little and Dusty Baker rode their stars too long in each Game Seven. And yep, there’s still evidience that the curses in Boston and Chicago have pull.

But this World Series is completely off the charts. Florida took Game 1 IN NEW YORK! (The All-Star Game: This time it gets home field advantage for the team who would have had it anyway). The Yanks took game 2, so the Series is headed to Miami tied, and the sportswriters who wrote Florida off as soon as it was apparent that Boone’s solo shot in the 11^th inning of Game 7 of the Boston series are eating crow.

The coverage of this series is a blatant exercise of the pro-NYY bias in the sports media. The most egregious example is the non-reporting of a terrible call in the bottom of the seventh. With ‘Pudge Rodriguez’ on first and one out, Derek Lee had a foul bounce off his front leg, and roll down the third base line, right to Aaron Boone, the third baseman. Lee wasn’t running. Pudge, seeing Lee not running, wasn’t running. Boon fields the ball, and since the ump didn’t see the ball bounce off Lee’s leg, fires it to the second baseman, who fires it to the first baseman. The plate ump rules it a double play.

Yeah, umps make bad calls all the time, but this was one of the worst I’ve seen. But, since it happened to Florida, who has no fans north of Orlando, the story is completely being ignored. Sure, FLA was down a half-dozen runs at the time, but having seen them rally consistiently in the post season, who’s to say that Rodriguez and Lee couldn’t have started a late inning rally?

The biggest disgrace, however, is the amount of coverage that this would have gotten if it had been, say Derek Jeter off of whose leg said foul ball had bounced. Every sports broadcast in the country would have lead off with the Yankees being robbed, and the picture of the ball clearly bouncing off the shin would have been the lead of every sports page in the country. I’d say ‘East Coast Bias’, but it’s really Yankees bias in baseball reporting.

Last item: Donruss is destroying one of three (Two, now) surviving Babe Ruth jerseys to sell a few baseball cards. I hear there’s negotiations with the Nat’l Archives to slice up the Constitution, too.

Your Government at work, Part II

Medicare Blimp. I (Excrete) you not.

The blimp is scheduled to tour many parts of the country in the coming weeks, serving as a huge, mobile billboard that can specifically reach our audience in a different location every day. It will provide aerial television coverage for selected sporting events and make appearances at major community events and senior activities throughout the fall.

I’ve been searching unsuccessfully for pictures of this bit of pork; hopefully someone else can find them.

A Pox on ESPN

There are few things on the internet that I read religiously, but one of them is apparently dead in the water.

That’s right. You heard it here. ESPN has fired Gregg Easterbrook. No more Tuesday Morning Quarterback (at least on that site— although, in years past, the column was on Slate, so maybe it will be picked up elsewhere). It looks like ESPN has erased all reference to Gregg from its website.

I will be the first to admit that Gregg said some stupid and insensitive things about certain Disney executives recently, but I also think that by attributing a higher moral standard to Jews he has not committed the greivous sin of Anti-Semitism. I know that no one wants to be defined solely by their ethnicity, but at least Gregg was trying to exhort the leaders of Disney and Touchstone to reach a higher moral standard, which generally is a good thing.

And he has certainly not done anything worthy of losing his job.

ESPN- Worldwide Leader in Censorship

Being the huge fan of Page 2 that I am, I’ve loved Gregg Easterbrook’s Tuesday Morning Quarterback column for the last few years. Easterbrook wrote a column for The New Republic in which he bashes Kill Bill and includes some comments which have been interpreted as anti-Semetic.

ESPN has now made it appear as if TMQ never existed. Try searching for ‘TMQ’ or ‘Easterbrook’ on ESPN, and there’s nada. Nothing. Nyet. Rein.

He may have stepped over the line by trying to link the Holocaust and terrorism with movie executives, and may be rightly being canned by ESPN (Though IMO it’s more Limbaugh backlash), but to scrub the archives of his past work is a little excessive, if you ask me.

Not that anybody did. Isn’t that the beauty of blogs?

NPR Salaries

Article here listing the salaries of a couple of the NPR talking heads. I’ve got no beef with these folks getting paid what they do; they put out a quality product, but it makes me scratch my head a little bit when I hear the folks on the recent KUHF fund drive talking about operating on a shoestring.

Isn't It Ironic iPod?

(Since we hit the 20 comment mark on this thread I thought I’d start a new one.)

How odd that just after Kelly menitons the safety of having your iPod backed up to a hard drive thay my iPod started going east? (I’ve decided that the term “going south” is an insult to my heritage, and I’m falling back on the BT/Kelly invention that “go west” is a slogan for good so…) After some finagaling I was able to only recover about 2K of the +3K songs before I wiped the damn thing. Now, it won’t load at all. Since the songs I could not recover were on the first sectors of the drive (and the reload would try to start in the same place) I think I have too many bad sectors there.

So, I now await Apple’s support system to provide me an empty box with which to begin my iPod exchange. More details as they become available.

p.s. Jank- here’s your “we get a cut link” for the 40GB iPod on Amazon .

Your Tax Dollars at Work

In a useful way, this time.

If, like me, you’re fighting the battle of the belly (mostly as a holding action), it’d be great to have a tool to carry around to let you know what’s in what you’re eating. Well, the folks over at the USDA have the hook for you. There’s a Palm App that includes the entire USDA database on nutrition in a handy, searchable format. Go to the download page by clicking on the USDA logo.

Only drawback is the size; approximately 2 MB on the handheld. But hey, whadda you want for nothing? Rubber Biscuit?

BNAT 5

Becky and I would appreciate it if you would keep us in your prayers. Just this week we were struck with the announcement that BNAT 5 admission will be determined by photographic and literate content (and maybe a little bit of “who-ya-know”). Since we are a little light in the aforementioned paranthetical content Becky, Rod, Michael, Tim, Jen and I (the Usual Suspects) will be assembling our submission over the next eleven days with the hope that we can overcome the odds we are facing. Thank you in advance for your support.

each year roughly 7000 try, only 250 get in

Another Joy of being a dad

With a smart wife, I might add…

I walk in the door from work this afternoon, and this
is what I find. Made my day.

Backstory to follow.

The boy gets to watch two shows a day, maximum, period, end of story. Sesame Steet and Zoboomafoo. If it’s been a few years since you watched pre-K television, Sesame Street hasn’t changed much, with the exception of adding Elmo. Zoboomafoo is a pretty neat new show featuring a couple of exceptionally chipper hosts and lots and lots and lots of cute animals. Tough concept.

The animal star of the show is a lemur (That leaping lemur!) named Zaboo, or some such nonsense. Lemurs, apparently, love celery, so every show starts out with Z. eating a stalk of celery. So I’ve got a three-year-old who’s crazy about celery. Yeah, I know - if that’s my toughest problem as a parent, I’ve got it way, way, too easy. So sue me.

Missy’s been doing her best to encourage Jake’s addiction to celery (and possibly forestall an addiction to, say, scotch) with things like ants on a log and whatever the heck else you can do to make celery interesting. Missy was against giving him a bloody mary.

It's the Jews, I Tell Ya'

What was I thinking all this time?!?

Human rights is just an invention of the Jews!

They survived 2,000 years of pogroms not by hitting back but by thinking, Mahathir said of the Jews. They invented socialism, communism, human rights and democracy so that persecuting them would appear to be wrong, so that they can enjoy equal rights with others.

I don’t even know what to say.

iTunes Gripe

Much because I spent many years as a nuke, I’ve got an inability to leave well enough alone. I dig iTunes, and the iPod, but have a few gripes.

- Why can’t you make links to songs/albums in the music store? It’d be a great way to “share” music without illegally swapping files.
- I’m a little miffed that Apple kicked the first and second gen iPods to the curb with the new rev. There hasn’t been a software update since they added AAC compatibility. I’d especially like the ‘Playlist on the fly’ feature.
- Have to upload album art by song, not by album. Takes up mucho espace.

Feelin' Crazy?

Wanna ride a bicycle from Houston to Austin, spending the night sleeping on the ground in (bud-up buh buh buh buh badaba bud-up buh buh buh buh “Ya must be down, in that Texas town, just a shack outside) LaGrange (They got a lotta pretty girls there”)

This is the year to knock the rust of the two-wheeler and do it, since next year’s ride finishes on the steps of the Texas Capitol building. Pretty nifty, huh.

BTW- The Houston Coordinator for the MS 150 is none other than CMHS ‘s own Adolph Trudeau.

Blip Blip Blip Blip

I ran across an experiment in which a popular gaming magazine forced a number of tweens to play a bunch of old school games, like Pong and Donkey Kong.

Something tells me that JRO has already seen this, but I still found it pretty damned funny. Hell, I bet that JRO has all of these games in his garage.

Fijian apology

Fijians say sorry to eaten Briton’s family

The family of an English missionary who was eaten by Fijian tribes people 136 years ago are to receive an apology.

According to local media, the remote village of Navatusila of Navosa on the Fijian island of Viti Levu has invited the descendants of the late Reverend Thomas Baker to visit next month.

This trip and apology ceremony has “wacky misadventure” written all over it. I hope an enterprising documentarian is following along to catch it.

I’m imagining an overly-accomodating British man apologizing to the apologizers for causing them to worry. (“Oh really, no bother at all, grandad could be a little rude at times, and I’m sure they were really quite hungry.”)

Also, the sullen teen of the family who never takes his iPod out of his ears.

I Thought I Loved Beer...

…but apparently, not as much as the next guy — If the next guy is this guy.

Especially poignant is the look on thier faces. Surely this was a family gift from a rich relative and they couldn’t bring themselves to say no.

(stolen from linkfilter.net who stole it from this site)

Hey, Buddy, Can You Spare a Few Curies?

News Flash! There are still folks out there who want to kill us simply because we’re Americans.

Like this fella who was wandering around McMaster University up in Canada, the 52^nd state.

According to an FBI informant, (The Prospective Terrorist) was spotted last year in Hamilton, Ontario, posing as a student at McMaster University, which has a 5-megawatt research reactor. U.S. officials believe (The Prospective Terrorist), whose photograph was posted on the FBI’s Web site in March, was in Hamilton trying to obtain radioactive material.

It looks like this guy was fingered by Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, and has pretty solid connections to Sr. Jose Padilla, the ‘Dirty Bomber.’

Not to make too light of a serious situation, but I can see it now:

A grad student is sitting in the control room for McM U’s research reactor, reading a comic book. The Wanna-Bomber walks into the room.

“Um, yeah, uh - Do y’all have a reactor here?”
“Yeah, man, 5 megawatts. You can see bremstrasslung and everything.”
“Cool. Uhhh, where do you store the irradiated material?”
“Over here. Here’s the log book, and it’s all double bagged and tagged… Hey, man you can’t put that in your backpack…”
“Ooops, sorry. Thought I’d dropped that. Here you go.”

Little bit of Senate Action that makes sense

To me, at least.

The Senate has proposed making half of the $20 Billion or so that’s non-military costs associated with correcting 20+ years of dictatorship in Iraq into a loan, instead of a direct grant.

The kicker, and why I think this may be a decent move, is that if other nations forgive the debts that Saddam Hussein’s regeime incurred, we’ll forgive this one.

I Need YOU To Grow My Business - Easy Money! - EBay Secret Revealed!

All the spam I have received about starting a new business and getting secrets on EBay have been trumped by this article with a real business model based on an EBay secret.

I’ve put together this basic guide to help you get started making money right away. … Remember, collectors seek direct catch farts due to their high quality properties.

(yes, it’s juvenile. what did you expect?)

Ways you can tell your SO is happy with you

Since John’s gone soft, I figured I’d prolong the estrogen-fest. Here’s just little things that are the difference between just day-to-day life and the times when a relationship is actually clicking. Things that are above and beyond.

- She cleans the coffeepot even though she doesn’t drink coffee.
- Stops taped show and switches on baseball game when you come downstairs from tucking in the kid.
- Says “Why don’t you pick up the new (semi-expensive toy) you wanted?”
- “Hey, do you wanna meet for lunch?” (On a work day)

You Better Check Yo'self

Just a quick cautionary tale that you should always keep up with your domain name. Even though you may be the only Ashley McClaran in the world, someone will buy your domain name just because they know it was active at some point and they’ll use it to sell porn.

NSFW

T-Shirt Hell Is Still Wrong

Got the latest email spam from the folks over at T-Shirt Hell and I’ve culled the list to find the ones that (I consider) are a reasonable balance of wrong-ness and funny. (DO NOT peruse the T-shirt Hell site on your own or you WILL be offended and get angry. Seriously, these guys make Matt and Trey look like choir boys.) They have introduced a new product, wrapping paper, and most of the prints are just wrong, but this one is wrong and funny.

The best new shirt needs a little back-story. For Christmas one year KMc got me a set of beer glasses with “<#include beer.h>” written on the side. I think he should get this shirt for Cynthia, but it might be too wrong.

NSFW

Pedestrian Photography Update

FYI: If you haven’t been over to PP in awhile (because it is so seldom updated), I’ve got a few new shots up there. If you feel like showing some of your own photography, I’ll be glad to setup an account for you.

I've Got a Crush

This post serves two functions. The first is to waste your time with this cool website featuring Brian Battjer, Jr.’s exploits expressed as photoblogs. Brian comes off a little over-manic sometimes, but it might be fun to run into him the next time I find myself in NYC. Also, I’ve developed a crush on his friend Tara. How can you not find a girl in Holly Hobby lingerie to be super cute? (Did she make it herself? That would be even cooler!)

Which leads to the second reason for this post. I am a living breathing man who is married to undoubtedly the most wonderful woman in the world. Is it wrong for me to admit that I still get crushes? Becky knows that she’s the entirety of my world and she shouldn’t be threatened by other women. Do I have to lie or hide the truth? That feels wrong to me.

I’m not really looking for marriage advice, since none of you readers live in our heads and can really truly understand the fullness of our relationship, but a discussion around full honesty in relationships would be nice.

The Marlins are Going to the World Series!

Yeah, the Cubbies got the snot kicked out of them again last night. Proving my theory, again, that you don’t mess with drunks or their goats.

I’ll be brief, but the Cubs didn’t show up to play, and Florida did. I’d have preferred Chi(NL) to be going to the Series, but the Marlins flat out outplayed the Cubs for the last three games. The life-long Cub fan who (didn’t) blew game 6 needs to be put on a suicide watch, and needs to get in touch with Bill Buckner to start making the sports memoribilia circuit.

Pedro and Roger’s Steel Cage Death-Re-Match this evening in the Bronx will be an epic. I understand that Don Zimmer is actually going to wear wrestling tights under his pinstripes for a rematch. Hopefully, the ghost of Ruth is absent tonight.

Kerry Wood had a fabulous night at the plate, with a two run homer in the bottom of the second. Too bad he’s a pitcher, and got shelled at the plate. Lead-off triple in to start the first. Then a walk to put runners on the corner. Then a three run dinger to be down by three before the second out of the night.

And it was all downhill from there. Watching the Cubs bench was like looking at faces on a landing craft in an old WWII newsreel. The Cubs knew they were going to lose the series ever since Alex Gonzales missed the easy out in the eighth the night before. This game was a formality.

Even after the Cubs scraped back to a two run lead in the third, noone in Chicago had hope that the Cubs would be playing on Saturday. The feeling that the season was over was evidient from the pics on the telly, and the sounds over the radio. Wrigely was like a church, a place of worship, a place of quiet reverence and prayerful acceptence of the inevitable.

It’s trite, but Florida wanted the win more. They’re a young team, and a team that’s been built from the bottom-up, unlike the group they had in 1997, when Florida proved what the Yankees have been showing for years, that the World Series can be bought if you throw enough payroll at the problem. This Florida team is not purchased, they’re grown, they’re teamwork, and they (like the Cubbies, who had an exceptional year by any standard except that in sports) are an example that there is still good in baseball.

Soul Searchin'

So to make a short story long: In the process of dumping my CDs for my iPod, I came across the Those Who Dig CDs that Matthew Hart provided recently. (For those not in-the-know, here’s a short back-story with mp3s.) Since it’s a homemade CD of songs TWD released on cassette, it’s not in CDDB. So, I was out searching for song titles and while generally getting distracted I Googled one of the artists in the band, Kit Pongetti . Anyone who knows me knows that I had a crush on Kit back-in-the-day. She’s cute, intelligent and talented. She was someone I knew through 3-4 degrees of seperation that I thought was pretty cool.

I am happy for my high school alumnus, Brian Blade, but since I was aware of his talent all the way back then I am not surprised that he’s done as well as he has. My college friends and FOAFs have found recognition for thier art in various forms (Elephant 6, The Apples In Stereo, Neutral Milk Hotel, Olivia Tremor Control), but while they certainly have received critical recognition (from some pretty cool people) they have never been widely publicly accepted (and I’m guessing that’s ok by them). There are a ton of entertainment types that I admire and carry a sliver of jealousy for because they are doing well and living a life that I dream of, but I’ve never really “known” them and it is that seperation that keeps me from really connecting with them. When I saw that Kit is starting to break in the industry it was a stiff drink of not fulfilling my dreams. I only peripherally knew Kit and she probably has no clue who I am, but for some reason seeing Kit do bit parts in big sit-coms and having her songs played on pilots for great TV shows was a dip in a melted-snow-water river.

So, I am publicly (at least to you few readers of the BPB) comitting myself to a life change. I will be applying to UTEX and/or ACC to get myself a little closer to fulfilling my desire to be involved in entertainment. My ultimate goal is to try my hand at directing or producing, but like most overweight personality-free pleebs I will probably start by working on my screen-writing skills and pump out a few scripts. Here’s hoping to see my name at IMDB someday.

Chickweed Lane

Over at Comics.com’s ComicZone is a little strip called 9 Chickweed Lane . It’s one of my daily strips and for the most part it’s standard funny fare about cats and realtionships and the generation gaps between Edda, the daughter, Juliette the mother, and Gran…the grandmother. It’s a little edgy in the modernism of the artist’s drawings, his challenges to the standard comic space and occasional wraping of reality. What makes 9CL stand out the most is Gran’s beau, Thorax.

He’s always a little odd. He believes in aliens and occasionally appears to be omniscient. He’s a crazy likeable quack.

eBay tips

After a recent selling binge, I’ve topped the 50 feedback mark on eBay (that’s right, I’m a blue star man now.) and I thought it would be a good occasion to share with you people some of my winning tips for selling success on eBay, the world’s online marketplace.

For lesson one, I’d like to point to a particular auction that I think illustrates one of the key elements of successful selling — good presentation of your item.

32 Candles

I know this is going to suck, but I’ll shell out my 8 bucks to see if Jake Ryan is still a dreamboat (if they can find him).

Unholy Goat.

Wow.

Much like Bill Buckner may be somewhat less responsible for the Sox’ ‘86 World Series loss than is commonly thought, the guy with the headphones in the above picture ultimately bears no responsibility for the Cubbies loss this evening.

Truth be told, I’m still numb. The lesson to be learned, as true today as it was in 1945, is to never mess with drunks and their goats.

I’d just literally just mentioned to my lovely wife that despite my fondness for the Sox, after the terrible showing on Saturday at Fenway, I had to throw my support to the Cubbies. I even started browsing for a Cubbies hat to add to my collection. Then the bottom fell out.

Blame for the loss should start with Alex Gonzales, who dropped an easy grounder and missed making the second out of the inning immediately after Alou was robbed of the foul-ball-out.

Or possibly to the decision to walk three batters in the inning, including walking the bases full twice.

But the game is now one for the ages. Right up there with Byung-Hyun Kim blowing games 4 and 5 of the 2001 World Series.

It ain’t over ‘till it’s over, as Yogi Berra would say, but 8 runs in the eighth inning tonight swing a ton of momentum over to the Marlins.

Unbelievable game.

Bush's Supreme Court allows overturn of Clinton-era Perscription Pot Policy

It’s actually a pretty typical pro-state’s rights move by the court; but I just wanted to point out that it was WJC and his Justice Department who tried to revoke federal prescription licenses of doctors who recommend marijuana.

Robert Kampia, head of the Marijuana Policy Project in Washington, said the court “has eliminated any doubt that states have the right to protect medical marijuana patients under state law, and that physicians have the right to give patients honest advice and recommendations, whether the federal government approves or not.”

To be fair, the Bush Administration had continued the fight by appealing the case to the SCOTUS.

Oh, and a kudo for the NYT for including applicable links at the bottom of their internet news stories.

Good Environmental News in Iraq

The Iraqi Engineers, in a move to undo one of Saddam Hussein’s attempts at genocide, have restored normal flows in Iraq’s rivers:

The rest of the marsh is similarly nascent. The reeds are not yet sufficient to rebuild the huts destroyed by Hussein’s army. The birds that have returned are not the right species to trap.

But as the scion of a clan that has lived here for perhaps 5,000 years, Kerkush said he is willing to be patient while engineers and politicians figure out how to pump more water into the marshes.

“Saddam did everything he could to kill us,” he said. “You cannot recover from that right away.”

More reason to kill the DH

Jay Leno summed it up well last night: “Sunday’s rain-out (of the ALCS) was God saying ‘Hey, (y’all), it’s just a game.’”

Saturday’s ALCS game between the AL East champs, the NY Yankees, and the AL Wildcard, the team who traded away the babe and is forced to watch Bill Buckner letting an easy grounder dribble through his legs again and again, the Boston Red Sox, disintegrated into something that was more WWE than “our National Pastime”.

And it can be traced back to the simple fact that in the AL, pitchers don’t have to get in the batter’s box and let the other team throw 90+ MPH fastballs at their head.

Saturday’s Game should have been one of the games that’s instantly on highlight reels, that takes on sepia tones and gets strings in the background and hushed narration. Roger Clemens, ‘The Rocket’, the guy from small town Katy, Texas, had gone on to the Big Leagues and become one of the defining pitchers of his generation. The first guy in the history of the game to throw a 20 strikeout game (And then turn around and do it again in his career), World Series winner, etc, etc. And the Rocket was returning to Fenway Park for probably the last time, returning to a Boston crowd who had loved him for the first years of his career, but now saw him as one of the biggest traitors ever to have left Beantown.

Starting for the Red Sox was Pedro Martinez, their ace, in a clutch game that had the potential to put the Sox up two games in the ALCS. Pedro had filled a void in Boston, arriving as Clemens left, with a talented pitching arm and great head for the opposing batters.

Long story short, Pedro is losing in the top of the fourth and decides to throw a ball at the Yankees batter’s head, baseball’s equivalent of calling the other team out. The Rocket responds in the bottom of the fourth by throwing a ball at the head of one of the Sox. Then one of the Yankees’ coaches, septuagenarian Don Zimmer waddles across the field to get in Pedro’s face while the Yankees are batting (This one completely baffles), takes a swing, and is thrown to the ground by the 32-year-old Dominican. The Yankee whose head was targeted by Pedro responds by sliding cleat-high into second and trying to cut the Sox’ second-baseman’s hand.

Oh, and as the last straw, in the late innings, two of the Yankees’ relievers decided to beat the crap out of the Sox’ groundskeeper who was tending their bullpen, cleating him, and sending him to the hospital for stitches. Possible criminal charges are facing those two. The outfielder who was pitched at by Martinez got a little piece of that action. Yeah baby.

This is nuts.

Granted, there’s a long and storied rivalry between the Sox and the Yankees. Red Sox Nation is tired of watching the Yanks be the handsome jocks porking the cheerleaders while they play the likeable but odd types sitting on someone’s porch drinking beer. The Yankees live in the Capitol of the World, the Sox live in Hometown, USA.

But for Pete’s Sake (And that’s Rose I’m compelling) - it’s a darn game! Beating the crap out of the other team is a metaphor, not an instruction. Baseball’s pretty much non-contact. And bats, metal cleats, and 100 MPH projectiles are often classified as deadly weapons in manslaughter cases.

The reason I think this is another reason to kill the DH is that both Pedro and Clemens had no qualms about flinging the ball at the opposing batter early and often. I’m a firm believer in a pitcher’s right to throw balls inside (between the plate and the batter); that’s part of the game. Intimidating the batter is often what separates a pitcher who wins games from a guy who can throw a bunch of great pitches. Batters who can hold ground close to the plate (Watch Sosa, Giambi, Jeter, Alou, etc over the next couple of days) are usually better hitters, because they can make a pitcher throw where they want. Baseball is a mental game.

In the National League, the pitchers have to go up to the plate and stare down the opposing pitcher, just like the rest of the players on the team. If a NL pitcher has been extremely aggressive with the opposing batters, he’d better be prepared to take as well as he gives. American League pitchers get to hide behind a DH who bats in the pitcher’s place in the lineup. So the only recourse against an aggressive pitcher in the AL is to headhunt one of his teammates, usually someone who’s a threat at the plate, and one of the alpha dogs on the team.

Sure, there’s a fair amount of headhunting that goes on in the NL. But the pitchers doing it know that they’re going to be a target the next time they’re up. What Pedro did on Saturday served no purpose other than to rile up an already keyed up Boston crowd, piss off a bunch of Yankees who were already on edge, and turn what should have been a game instantly sent over to ESPN Classic into a very special episode of SMACKDOWN.

Someone must have stopped in to Vince MacMahon’s office off I-95 in Connecticut on the way from New York to Boston on Friday.

Postscript: Monday’s game ended up being great, cleanly played and easy to watch. Series is tied.

Hunting Rant

The Cabela’s post got me riled up about one of my huge pet peeves.

One of my more repugnant qualities is a fondness for bloodsport (Hunting and Fishing in particular). I’ll freely admit that my environmental tendencies are driven by a desire to have clean water and land on which to catch and kill things to eat. I dig the hiking, camping, etc during the off-season, but I’m rarely so happy as when I’m waist deep in a trout stream or wading the flats on the Texas Coast, or during that cold, dark pre-dawn, after the decoys have been set, the blind set up, and all that’s left to do is sip coffee out of a Thermos and wait for first light, and the quacks of mallards coming in to get breakfast.

But I’m disturbed by the proliferation of stuff that some insist is necessary to go kill and catch tasty animals. Ya just don’t need it. I dig the catalogs, but even in my short adulthood, the quantity of CRAP in them has completely ballooned.

For instance: When I was a young kid, lots of folks still hunted in muted colors of normal looking clothes. The truly hard-core folks might go to the Army surplus store and pick up an old set of camo fatigues, but there was good old Cold-War-Relic woodland pattern or - well, that was it. Now there’s more photorealistic patterns than you can shake a stick at. (Oh, and there are special kevlar impregnated shaking sticks you can buy to match your camo.)

Well built, attractive guns and rods - sure. But freakin’ camouflage furniture? Give me a break.

It’s not just the hook and bullet crowd that’s gone overboard. Thumb through REI or EMS

So my resolve is to leave behind one piece of gear on each camping, hiking, hunting and fishing trip I take in the near future. Strip it down to basics, baby. Get back to the old explorer ethic, where all that is carried are basics, and anything else necessary can be improvised in the field.

It ain’t about the toys. Sure, they’re cool, but IMO a necessary part of hunting has been sucked away by the truckloads of crap that have been tagged on to woodcraft. Where’s the respect for nature? The admiration of the beautiful creatures you’re about to stick on your plate? The knowledge that generations before you went about these processes for survival, not just entertainment?

Oooh - I think I nailed it with that last sentence. That’s what bugs me. I won’t lie and say that I don’t thoroughly enjoy hunting and fishing, but I don’t appreciate them being taken to the level of, say, reality TV. It is ultimately harmful to the fish in the creel or the animal being killed. Losing the respect for the quarry takes away some of our humanity, much like the blind faith of many that meat naturally grows shrinkwrapped on styrofoam trays in your grocer’s meat department (Notice it’s not usually a butcher department anymore).

Grrr. Hate to end on a downer, but that’s where it’s at. These catalogs really kind of strike an anti-commercial nerve in me that’s buried pretty deeply. The solution, of course, is that duck season starts soon. Time to load up the hand-built kayak with the dekes, gun, and sleeping bag and head down to Port O’Connor. Fresh duck in the oven makes everything better.

There's a nip in the air, and a young man's fancy turns to ...

It could just be me, but I look at this picture and think that Cabelas may be trying to capture an audience besides redneck hunter types like me-

Although when I see the following two:

I realize they’re not reaching too hard.

Thug 4 Life

Our blog here bears too much resemblence to Thug4Life.org where artist Tom Sanford is trying to get closer to Tupac.

I’ll work on some changes.

Cheap Grain Fodder

From the NYTimes magazine, an explanation of how farm subsidies have contributed to the obesity epidemic…

Snack food lovers and Fast Food Nation readers should appreciate this.

Freaky

So imagine my shock when I hit the ATM this weekend (Before going to buy food on a stick) and got a handful of these:

It’s like being in Europe or something, what the colors on the money and stuff. And look at that Andrew Jackson, with the wild hair and dreamy eyes. He looks like a damn movie star!

The oddest part is the back, with all kinds of golden ‘20’s floating around.

BTW- the first booth I went to thought they were fake. The treasury hasn’t done a whole lot of promotion this time around.

Hey Windows, it's your birthday

iTunes is coming to Windows. Or more specifically, the iTunes music store.

I dig iTunes. Like classic Apple work, it’s everything you need, easily accessible, and nothing you don’t. Not having seen the Windows version, I don’t know how clean they’ll keep the interface. But it’s nice, no ad space like RealJukebox, big buttons, easy to drill down to artists/albums/songs, pretty much automated file management. Good stuff.

One of the big questions I have is wondering if iTunes for Windows is going to bring .AAC encoding over to the PC. Not that I know a whole lot about this, but the latest Mac version uses .AAC as a default format, and it’s supposed to be slightly superior at a given bitrate to .MP3. I’ve left my library in MP3 since my lovely bride still uses WIN 98 (and refuses to change), and we keep our music on a shared drive.

If iTunes is freeware, be sure to give it a spin. If it’s paid software, it might be worth $20, but unless you really want to try the music store

(Completely unrelated ramblings, but didn’t want to start a new post. That, and it’s mostly flame-bait.)

Strange things are afoot at the Circle K. Microsoft kills MSIE for Mac (effectively, no new versions in development), Apple sends iTunes to the PC, and the ever-present talk of porting OSX to x86 chips. I don’t think for an instant that Apple is going to grow much past its 5% share. Maybe DOUBLE its presence to 10% in a blue moon. But there’s enough Intel hardware out there that the biggest challenge to Microsoft would be another x86 OS.

Free Phone Calls

Looks like Kazaa is getting into the long-distance business

Thanks to the NYTimes most emailed articles page for the heads up!

Google Phone Search

Google has instituted a new _’feature’ _ whereby you can type in any US phone number (xxx xxx xxxx or xxx-xxx-xxxx), and it gives Mapquest or Yahoo Maps links to the address, as well as listing the name the number is listed under.

Pretty Snazzy, huh?

If you’d like to block your phone number from showing up when it’s googled, click on the phone icon next to your name and address, or go to this page and fill in the appropriate information.

Google’s got a paragraph that says “Removing your phonebook listing will not remove your personal information from other pages on the web or from other reverse phone listing lookup services”, or basically everybody else is doing it, why can’t we?

The Internet - It’s in there!

Texas Football

Bumped with new vigor.

Failure to beat top 10 opponents almost every chance. Playing raw politics and benching the quarterback with leadership skills in favor of the quarterback with the rich, famous dad. Huge resources and talent squandered year after year.

Is it time to Fire Mack Brown?

(Site is run by a friend of mine from college. Go Moose, go!)

White Wash the War

Bush started his PR campaign to counter the negative war stories a little earlier than previously thought. Several letters from soldiers published in local newspapers across the country seem to be form letters . The problem continues, though, that some soldiers didn’t know they had sent letters.

Six soldiers reached by GNS directly or through their families said they agreed with the letter’s thrust. But none of the soldiers said he wrote it, and one said he didn’t even sign it. A seventh soldier didn’t know about the letter until his father congratulated him for getting it published in the newspaper in Beckley, W.Va.

“When I told him he wrote such a good letter, he said, ‘What letter?’ ” Timothy Deaconson said Friday, recalling the phone conversation he had with his son, Nick.

Getting caught in something like this is just bad, bad, bad. Even if the soldiers agree with the message of the letter, it looks fishy to line soldiers up in front of their superior officers and peers then ask them to sign a letter if they agree with it AND THEN mail the letter for them. Even worse, trying to pass it off as original writing…

Shrinking Coins

ARTBPSLNEO

I need a crew who’s willing to risk life and limb for cool science projects. For example, here’s an article about using copper coils and a lot of energy to shrink coins. Not the kind of thing I can do with my wife.

Pat Robertson vs Smicollums

The US State Department has lodged a vehement complaint with prominent conservative televangelist Pat Robertson for comments suggesting that its Foggy Bottom headquarters should be destroyed with nuclear weapons, officials said.

Spokesman Richard Boucher called the remarks — which Robertson made last week on his nationally televised “700 Club” program — “despicable” and a senior department official said a protest had been made “at the highest level.”

I think this is all subterfuge because Pat Robertson has is it in to stop the wedding of people who are living in sin. Even a small nuke in Foggy Bottom would have devestating effects, possibly even detroying, the Smicollum facilities in Adams Morgan.

Animusic - "Pipe Dreams"

Cheesy, but geek-cool short film featuring new age music created by virtual self-playing instruments. I really hope someone out there gets inspired and decides to try and build one of these or something like it.

Kelly Asked for a New Post

Next Month: Playboy

Casualty of the vast left-wing conspiracy

Limbaugh is addicted to painkillers.

“Well, I am no role model. I refuse to let anyone think I am doing something great here, when there are people you never hear about, who face long odds and never resort to such escapes. They are the role models. I am no victim and do not portray myself as such. I take full responsibility for my problem.”

“At the present time, the authorities are conducting an investigation, and I have been asked to limit my public comments until this investigation is complete. So I will only say that the stories you have read and heard contain inaccuracies and distortions, which I will clear up when I am free to speak about them.”

The title is hyperbole, obviously. Limbaugh brought this on himself, and ought to be hung out to dry if he was getting pills illegally. He insists in the first part of his statement that “Rather than opt for additional surgery for these conditions, I chose to treat the pain with prescribed medication. This medication turned out to be highly addictive.” which implies, to me, at least, that he’s denying buying drugs illegally.

One last related Item I’m still trying to make up my mind over: This morning on the Today show, Kate Couric was interviewing two lawyers about the Kobe Bryant case. One of the folks, a defense attorney who had made some pretty agressive potential defenses of Bryant turned out to have been retained by Limbaugh WRT the police investigation in Palm Beach. Couric, knowing obviously that the attorney couldn’t say a damn thing due to 1) attorney/client privelige, and 2) gag rules by the investigators, asked him about the case anyway. Limbaugh’s attorney stammered an excuse, but looked like a slimy ass on nat’l TV regardless of what he would have said.

Arafat runs off another one

Palestine Prime Minister (V2.0) is going to quit over - guess what? - disagreements on how much power the Prime Minister will have to crack down on militant groups.

Stupid Israelis. Always trying to push off peace in the mid-east.

You've got to be kidding me...

Parents are sueing a school that’s installed a wi-fi network.

Where does it end? There’s absolutely NO damage alleged, NO basis for the suit other than “it hasn’t been proven completely safe”. Grrr.

Hopefully the school can figure out if there’s wireless networks, or cordless phones, etc, in these idiots’ homes and get this kicked out. In the mean time, the rest of the folks who pay property tax in the district are on the hook for this action, and the kids who ultimately benefit from exposure to technology and new learning methods are being penalized.

What puts me over the edge here is that the parents are seeking class action status, which is usually code for lawyers looking for a huge payout.

Why Britian still matters

Look, I’m well aware that the Plame affair is beating a dead horse. But, I caught this article in the British Spectator, and had to throw it up since it catches a mastery of English (as a language) that we as Americans haven’t ever quite grabbed.

But, despite the media’s efforts to oomph it up into Watergate — or ‘Intimigate’ — it doesn’t make any sense as a conventional political scandal. Even if you accept that it’s technically possible to leak something that’s widely known around town and published in the guy’s Who’s Who entry, if the object was to discredit Joe Wilson why leak the name of his wife? On his own, Wilson comes over like a total flake — not a sober striped-pants diplomat but a shaggy-maned ideologically driven kook whose hippie-lyric quotes make a lot more sense than his neocon-bashing diatribes for leftie dronefests like the Nation. This is a guy who says things like, ‘Neoconservatives and religious conservatives have hijacked this administration, and I consider myself on a personal mission to destroy both.’ He spends his days dreaming of the first sentence of his obituary: ‘Joseph C. Wilson IV, the Bush I administration political appointee who did the most damage to the Bush II administration.’ Imagine Michael Moore and his ego after dropping 300lbs on the Atkins diet and you’re close enough. By revealing the fact that Mrs Wilson is a cool blonde CIA agent, all you do is give her husband a credibility lacking in almost every aspect of his speech, mien and coiffure.

“Intimigate”? “Dronefest”? “Coiffure”? Man, none of these words would make it in any of the dailies in the US. Nor would compound sentances, or a paragraph that long, make it.

Eggheads like us Porchers is what this country needs, regardless of political stripe. Take it back from the short-bus types who look good, give easy answers, and edit anything over three syllables from the evening news and newspapers.

Viewtiful Joe

Check out this review for Viewtiful Joe at GameSpy. Pretty cool looking game and it’s getting really good reviews. (and if you’re a Simpsons fan and you get the ad for Hit & Run, click through and check out the trailer.)

Modern Drunkard Propaganda

A selection of mini-posters to help you in your support of your drinking habit. Here’s my two favorites.

You knew it was coming

As the resident backporchbeer feminist, I felt compelled to post this article about everyone’s favorite governator.

I swear this is the only Susan Faludi article I will ever post.

Livin in the City

There was a gang shootout on our corner today. A bus driver got shot and a 20-year-old got killed.

And I thought the biggest problem in the neighborhood was the chubby rat population

Blog Required Reading?

Here’s a collection of 47 tips from seasoned bloggers. It might be good reading for all of us.

Some highlights:

• Don’t try to please an audience, and don’t post simply because you feel like you ought to – only post when you have something to say.
• If someone were to start a blog tomorrow documenting the young life of an extremely photogenic kitten, I can almost guarantee a huge amount of traffic.
• Get a digital camera if you don’t have one. Photographs liven up a blog and, if they’re good, can really be worth 1000 words. [ Should we do more picture blogging… ]
• Remember that even though you think you’re writing to just friends and family, your words will have a global audience. You never know just who is reading your blog, and where they may be located when reading it.

FUFA: Ned's Atomic Dustbin - "brainbloodvolume"

File Under Forgotten Albums: Ned’s Atomic Dustbin - brainbloodvolume

A group of people are suing Limp Bizkit over a recent show in Chicago because they thought the show sucked. I’ll steal a joke here and say “What did they expect?” I am not a fan of most of the current angry teenage boy bands, although I really like testoterone filled music. Flipping through the quickly-approaching-200 albums on my iPod I pulled up NAD (heh — I said “nad”) and gave their 1995 release a re-listen.

Just as throbbing musically as LB — thanks mainly to Dan the fast drumming man — I had to question why I like NAD but not LB, POD, Linkin Park, etc. I think I have narrowed it down to one of my pet peeves: personal responsibility. The lyrics of current angry boy bands points the finger outward, while NAD’s lyrics are burdened by their 80’s/Smiths influence. Instead of blaming others and directing his anger outward, Jonn Penney is pissed at himself for screwing things up.

This album isn’t worth hunting down as a new purchase, but if you see it in a used bin it is a good second-hand buy. Stay tuned for more angry boy music in a future review when I introduce the backporch to stoner rock.

MoveOn.org - An Org of Smart-asses, Apparently

I just got this email from Eli Pariser over at MoveOn.org today:

…Today we’re giving you a chance to clear your name. We’re asking you and tens of thousands of other MoveOn members to sign an affidavit affirming that you didn’t leak the identity of an undercover CIA agent to the press last July…

I think that’s pretty funny, and I appreciate MoveOn’s humorous attempts at mixing-up the peaceful protest strategies. Recently the GOP hasn’t taken a shine to MoveOn and is stooping to MoveOn’s level in responding to these activists.

The progressive Internet organizing group MoveOn.org has reduced two pillars of the right-wing establishment to pulling petulant phone pranks. On Tuesday, the office of House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, angry that MoveOn members were wasting the staff’s time with complaints about DeLay’s handling of a House resolution on FCC regulation, started forwarding its phone calls to MoveOn organizer Eli Pariser’s cellphone.

The end of this article calls Tom DeLay’s responsibility to all Americans into question. DeLay thinks he shouldn’t have to answer to non-Texan constituents, but as House Majority Leader I think he might want to give that a second thought.

Either way, I appreciate MoveOn.org’s creative approaches to non-violent protest and activist activities. Their creation was based around the absurd special prosecutors and impeachment of Clinton, when they broke new ground creating a mass movement of interested citizens and providing a new way for donations to be collected and for Americans to be heard. It’s good to see them trying to keep their edge and their sense of humor.
p.s. Here’s a little more meat from Eli’s letter:

On finding Osama Bin Laden in Central Asia:
“We’re going to hunt them down one at a time… it doesn’t matter where they hide, as we work with our friends we will find them and bring them to justice.”
—President George W. Bush, 11/22/02

On finding Saddam Hussein in the Mideast:
“We are continuing the pursuit and it’s a matter of time before [Saddam] is found and brought to justice.”
—White House spokesman McClellan, 9/17/03

On finding the leaker in the close confines of the White House:
“I don’t know if we’re going to find out the senior administration official. I don’t have any idea.”
—President George W. Bush, 10/7/03

Offensiveness Is The New Pink

The hottest picture over at Yahoo!News is a group of urban citizens complaining about Urban Outfitter’s new boardgame called “Ghettopoly” which features game cards like ‘You got yo whole neighborhood addicted to crack. Collect $50…’

Anyone remember the Abercrombie & Fitch’s t-shirt entitled “Two Wongs”?

So I guess Rush, The Man Show and John Rocker are all “in”, now?

Food Ideas

Along with my desire to listen and learn more about Indian, Punjabi and Eastern Hemisphere music, I have developed a desire to try recipes from the same area. I love the food at the restaurants around town and feel up to the challenge of trying to make it at home. Here’s a couple sites that I will be perusing and choosing recipes from. If you get the urge and cook something from them, too, let me know and we can share our experiences.

• Indian Food Guide: Recipes
• FoodSPK.com

PTTC: This Is For the Gays and This Is For the Homos

I have been stewing over this post for several months trying to do research and come up with thought-provoking phrases that illuminate my desire for unity among mankind. I wanted to discuss my support for curches that choose to reject homosexuality and my disdain for a government that feels sexuality is within it’s purview. This clever post was going to center around the choice of legal verbiage of the religion-infused word “marriage” when the term “civil union” could be used as a religion-free designation. Seperation of church and state and all that.

I give up. I can’t be funny and interesting and say anything that you aren’t hopefully already thinking (and if you aren’t I won’t be able to change your mind.) So, maybe just a post to help out my fellow gay men.

Now that Texans can b-f in private without fear from The Man, there is hope that what consenting Americans do in private will have less government control placed on it. To prepare wives and girlfriends for the explosion of closet-exiting men around the state I offer this link to help you decide if your mate is straight, gay or just perverse. Here’s a sex column Q&A focused solely on the question “Is he gay?” (with a generous dollop of pick-on-Rufus-Wainwright on top.)

The Onion AV Club’s Savage Love column, Issue 39, Volume 39

p.s. I don’t agree that the last guy is gay, gay, gay but he is certainly at least bi, bi, bi.

I'll take some salt with my crow

As most of you know, I have been against this whole Arnold candidacy pretty much since day 1. I thought the dude was a sexist jerk who was running for office purely for the purpose of ego-aggrandizement, rather than out of a sincere desire to help my state.

It is time to eat some crow and give credit where credit is due. First, by picking up more votes than the robot Gray Davis, Arnold has destroyed any argument that this election was un-democratic. Put simply, the person with the most votes won, and that is the way it should be.

Second, by signing two idiotic bills over the last few weeks, Davis made even me think twice about the recall vote. I am pretty well camped out in left field, but even I know that giving drivers licenses to illegal immigrants makes no GD sense at all. Davis said that he was doing it so that illegal immigrants could comply with the law and get auto insurance. Right. I am sure that the poorest segment of the population feels really bad about breaking this particular law and has been dying for the chance to spend thousands of dollars on insurance. And I am also sure that Davis did not pass the bill simply to increase his support among Latinos.

His other accomplishment, requiring certain small businesses to provide health insurance to employees, will do nothing more than force employers to consider moving to Nevada and Arizona. It surely will not increase health-care coverage in the state.

Both bills were just pandering.

So here is a toast to Arnold. May he be wise, judicious, and proactive. And may he prove all of the naysayers (like me) wrong. Because California deserves nothing less.

(On a side note, I am thinking of hunting and shooting the 12,549 people who voted for Gary Coleman, but that is another post…)

Home town team? Who cares?

The NYT Editors want the Red Sox and the Cubs to meet in the Series.

With all due respect to our New York readership — Yankee fans among them — to George Steinbrenner and to the Yankees themselves, we find it hard to resist the emotional tug and symmetrical possibilities of a series between teams that seem to have been put on earth to tantalize and then crush their zealous fans. Together they account for 180 years of futility. The Cubs have not won a World Series since 1908. The Red Sox have not won one since 1918, a little more than a year before they shipped Babe Ruth to the Yankees, a famously bizarre transaction that ushered in the era of Yankee domination.

I agree completely with the sentiment, but want to bag on the NYT for 1) Dissing the home-town team, and 2) failing to disclose that the NYT owns part of the BoSox.

1) is slightly excusable - this is an opportunity to deprive sportswriters in one city of a decades old cliche and encourage a little bit of new thought in the writing boxes. 2) though, is a pretty decent violation of my (admittedly weak) knowledge of disclosure ethics.

Go Cubbies (That’s for you, Doc.)

German support for the war

Mmmmmm… Bier.

2,400 cases to be exact. Danakshein to the folks at Spaten.

Mental Exercise

This is way out on a limb-

Recent comments by Wes Clark recently put forth his personal belief that soon we’ll figure out how to travel faster than the speed of light. And while I was watching the Marlins beat the Cubbies last night, I started wondering about sports once we leave the earth.

Baseball, for instance - The game was developed and honed for men playing near sea level. Every aspect of the game is in pretty decent balance:

60’ 6” from the rubber to the plate is just far enough for a batter to get a glance at a 90-ish MPH pitch and figure out how to swing. The ball is the right weight, size, and texture to provide a balance between going obscenely fast, providing too much action (picture whiffle balls), or being too easy to hit. Once hit, the terminal velocity of the ball limits its potential travel to something pretty close to the fences in ballparks, and stays in play just long enough for a fit person to run about 90’. Etc, etc-

When you take the game out of the environment it was developed in, things change. Playing in Denver, above a fair portion of the rest of the atmosphere, the ball doesn’t have the same motion off a pitch as it has nearer sea level, and terminal velocity is higher allowing a given ball to travel further. Denver is a hitter’s park, and a pitcher’s nightmare. An obvious solution, pushing the fence back, wouldn’t help much as it’d increase the area the three outfielders would have to cover.

And the changes above are all due just to moving up about 5,000’ in altitude. Gravity hasn’t changed at all going from downtown Baltimore to Denver.

Not sure what I’m aiming at here; it was just a mental exercise. Of one thing I am sure, though- when we do break these bonds of Earth, we’re taking sport with us. Stronger, Faster, Higher is somehow in our genetic code. Leaving earth won’t change that.

I don’t think football would change much moving from an earth-like planet, but I think the changes to soccer and hoops would be pretty huge. Golf would require completely different sized courses and/or balls - even hitting a 7 iron in a bulky space suit, Apollo astronauts were able to hit a standard golf ball farther than they could see on the moon with no atmosphere and 1/6 of earth gravity.

Still Dense After All These Years

Seriously, with all the crappy little mind games that were played on me during my “GATEWAY” years, you would think this Gifted and Talented little mind of mine could solve simple puzzles. After compltely abandoning the riddle debacle finishing only 3 riddles without assistance, I came across this site and can’t even finish the first damn challenge.

Go ahead, Doc. Make me feel dum.

"The" RZA Does Kill Bill

Great interview on NPR yesterday where a lot of terminally caucasian folks talk about RZA’s foray into film soundtrack work.

p.s. Becky and I are catching a premiere of Kill Bill tomorrow night. We get a free t-shirt and Gordon Liu will be there.

No, no, no, no, no....

Phil Jackson has dropped hints that he may ask MJ to play for LA - Professional if Kobe Bryant can’t make games due to trials/prison/being bitch-slapped by his wife. This is a bad, bad, bad idea.

If I may have a moment’s indulgence:

Michael,

Look, we had some great times. The first three-peat and your extraordinary ability to take up the mantle of both the Basketball Jesus and Magic and extend the Golden Age of the NBA was incredible. We truly felt for you the first time you retired, were disappointed that your time with the Barons didn’t work out better, and honestly were happy when you made your first return to the NBA. Those of us in Texas are especially thrilled that your first sabattical coincided with the Dream and the Admiral’s peaks, and treasured the ‘94 and ‘95 post-seasons more than you’ll ever know.

Your first comeback - Man, it staved off some long, dark years, and killed off all the ‘Who’ll be the next Jordan?’ fluff in basketball broadcasting. Thank God. The second three-peat was an unexpected gift, and then your second retirement, avoiding the strike debacle of ‘99, allowing the San Antonio team to destroy the rest of the league in ‘00 were good.

And there was even hope with the Wizards. Coulda been great. The arguably greatest basketball player still playing teaching a new generation how to come through in the clutch. But be honest- it ended up being a sideshow. A carnival attraction without a barker. MJ, it was just ugly. Thankfully, Phil Jackson was keeping most of the media out on the left coast, so we true believers were spared. But the basketball nation breathed a collective sigh of relief when you decided to retire last year. Lots of love, but don’t let the door hit you…

Phil’s grasping this year. The triangle’s dead, and the Spurs, Mavs, Kings and the rest of the league knows that LA’s a sitting duck. He’s going to try to bring you back from a well-deserved retirement since he’s saddled with Shaq and Kobe, both of whom have issues, and a couple other solid veterans who should be joining you on the links smoking and joking.

Listen to Nancy Reagan, Mike - Just say no.

My generation grew up trying to ‘be like Mike.’ Your generation needs to take that to heart now, and leave the league. Sure, it’s tough seeing Malone retire without a ring. But that’s life. He’s in the Hall for sure, even without a ring. Make him face reality. Ditto for Phil.

Yours,
bq. Bill

Clinton in 2004

I don’t know if I believe this is credible re: Hilary’s running for pres, and I am too lazy to vet it since someone else will eventually.

1. Go to the Federal Election Commission homepage at www.fec.gov
2. On the left of their homepage is a link labeled “Campaign Finance Reports and Data”, click it.
3. Scroll down a ways to Image/Query System, under that choose “View Financial Reports”…
4. Under the intro paragraph choose “Search the Report Image System”
5. In the dialogue box type “Clinton” and click “Get Listing”.
20 entries down you`ll see “CLINTON, HILLARY RODHAM”, click on the blue number “P00003392” beside her name.
Guess what? “Presidential Candidate 2004 “.

Hillary Rodham Clinton filed late Friday, Oct 3rd, with the Federal Election Commission to run for President in 2004.

(stolen from linkfilter.net who stole it from rense.com)

One-Atmosphere Plasmoid

For anyone who has some free time this weekend.

How to build a stable plasmoid at one atmosphere

If I could use my One (1) NRO article a week card

It would be to recommend that y’all read this one. Herb Meyer has done a much better job of explaining why the war in Iraq was a critical step in the War on Terror, and tied it to past events.

When the world becomes unstable, sooner or later a lot of Americans get hurt. So our national objective is the restoration of global stability.

World War II actually began overseas. Japan had invaded Manchuria, Italy had attacked Ethiopia, and Germany had unleashed its blitzkrieg against Poland. In short, the world had become very unstable, very quickly. All we wanted was to stay out of it. But on December 7, 1941, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. We had no choice but to get involved. And what we said, in effect, was this: “Look, what all these Axis powers have in common is that they are destabilizing the world. And they will keep destabilizing the world until they are removed from power and stability restored. Perhaps we should have acted sooner to stop the rot. But we didn’t, and now we’ve paid the price. What’s the difference which one of the Axis powers hit us? They all want to see us destroyed. Okay, so it was Japan that carried out the first attack on our homeland, not Italy or Germany. But it would be foolish to go to war against Japan, win it, and then come home and wait for Germany or Italy to strike. So, since we’ve got to gear up and go into action, let’s do it right and get ‘em all.”

What we did not do in the aftermath of the Pearl Harbor attack was start arguing like a bunch of talking heads on cable television. We didn’t waste our time trying to prove whether the Italian ambassador in Tokyo knew about the attack before it happened, or whether the Luftwaffe provided any training to Japan’s bomber pilots. It didn’t matter. We understood the Axis powers all shared the same objective — to destroy Western Civilization, including us — so the only sensible thing to do was to go after them all. And we did. In the event Italy fell first, Germany second and Japan — which actually hit us — fell last. So what. When the shooting stopped, all three murderous regimes were gone. And we then spent years and literally a fortune helping to rebuild those countries — indeed, to restructure their societies — to assure that instability would be unlikely to return.

The rest of the article ties WWII to our current situation, and even goes so far as to provide ways in which the Democrats can help the war effort instead of doing nothing so much as trying to extricate ourselves from it (Until the next attack). Yep, it’s simplistic. Yep, it completely rules out any interests other than the preservation of the Union, and ignores completely the UN.

But I still see the UN as a dubious body, where non-democratic dictatorships such as Lybia, Cuba, China, etc, share equal status with the established and growing democracies of Asia, Europe, and North America. Wouldn’t a more effective body be one that included states from joining until they met certain minimum standards regarding human rights, political and economic freedoms?

Mmmmm.... Food on a stick

This weekend, you’ll be able to find me in a food coma, and the kiddo hopped up on cotton candy and goofballs riding the insanely expensive rides at the Katy Rice Festival. Past highlights have included fried shrimp on a stick, the ever-present (but unusually good) sausage on a stick, lots and lots of complimentary rice dishes, and a goat stealing my beer in the petting zoo.

Serial Groper - Vote Today

It’s election day in Cali and hypocrisy is rampant. The anti-Arnie camp is pointing out the two-faced journalists (and other women) who support Arnie but were out for blood a few years back with our former president. I don’t really care if they think misogyny is ok at governor-level but not president-level, or if they’re just partisan brown-nosers. I just hope the GOP earns the problems they deserve by pushing for Arnie to be gov’ner.

Good luck to the voters of Cali. It’s a tough choice on two categories. I am on the fence about the recall: Davis is sham and deserves to lose the next election, but the way this recall came to be is a sham, too. Then picking a candidate from the remaining pool is not going to be easy. The temptation to throw away your vote on Mary Carrey is awfully hard to pass up.

p.s. The SNL quality satire of Andy Borowitz (of the Jewish World Review) this weekend was quite good. (SNL quality — you know, the joke is spent at the very beginning but you watch the whole thing thinking there must be more.)

Mmm... Internet pie...

In honor of the arrival of Fall, allow me to present my first apple pie, still bubbling from the oven.

Perhaps some other lucky BpBer will get first taste in the morning. I’m off to bed.

You Throw Like a Girl

Page 2’s Whitney Casey tackles the oft used taunt of playground kids every where.

First Monday of October

Today is the traditional opening of the Supreme Court’s annual term. To help celebrate this event, check out this quiz.

The Court normally returns from their summer recess on the first Monday of October. This year, however, they returned on September 8, 2003 to hear oral arguments in McConnell v. Federal Election Commission .

Here is a run down of some of the more well known cases already on the Court’s 2003-2004 docket. As of now, the docket is not complete, but this site gives a list of all cases already accepted.

Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About by Mil Millington

This poor guy has a very long list of the things he has argued with his girlfriend on. Mil, also, has written a book based on the arguments (not actually a collection of things similar to this website, just a novel based on this life of his and Margaret’s.)

Margret thinks I’m vain because… I use a mirror when I shave. During this argument in the bathroom - our fourth most popular location for arguments, it will delight and charm you to learn - Margret proved that shaving with a mirror could only be seen as outrageous narcissism by saying, ‘None of the other men I’ve been with,’ (my, but it’s all I can do to stop myself hugging her when she begins sentences like that) ‘None of the other men I’ve been with used a mirror to shave.’
‘Ha! Difficult to check up on that, isn’t it? As all the other men you’ve been with can now only communicate by blinking their eyes!’ I said. Much later. When Margret had left the house.

NASA Invents "Solid Smoke"

Where do you think I can buy some of this, and how much do you think it costs?

Last Day

To register to vote in the November Elections in Texas.

For information in your county, check here

Ode du Frazz (de Tyler)

Tiger Quote of the Day

From the NY Times Sunday article about the tiger raised in a Harlem public housing project:

As hundreds of onlookers gathered on the street, some began to wonder if this urban big cat would get along so well in the less cosmpolitan reaches of Ohio.

“My concern is that the city cat won’t make it in the country,” said Lynnette Braxton, 49. “He’s going to have no jazz, no hip-hop. He’s going to miss the Harlem Renaissance.”

More Rush

From the WSJ.

… Over the years we’ve expended a great deal of ink on the idea that character matters in public life. But we have never bought the idea that moral credibility is predicated on moral perfection; if it were, even our Sunday pulpits would be thunderously silent. Character has as much to do with how we handle our failings as the failings themselves. …

Not really a review

So my long-suffering wife, Melissa, has been reading Love Me by everyone’s favorite radio show host (If you haven’t been, go check out a PHC show the next time it comes near you. Tons of fun.). I haven’t been able to pry it out of her fingers, but got this out of her:

‘There’s a lot of sex in the book.’
‘Oh, yeah?’ I asked.
‘Yeah, and it’s all right, except…’
‘Except what?’
She pauses. ‘Except that every time I read it, I see his face.’
“Eeeewww.” I say.

Poor Garrison.

Wives of Hemingway

NPR’s Morning Edition with Bob Edwards had a piece this morning on Martha Gellhorn who in her own right was an excellent war-time journalist over several wars, but is best known as the third wife of Ernest Hemingway. I haven’t read much Hemingway, much less any of his wives, but after hearing this story I had to do a bit of research to clear some of the clutter in my mind.

I am a huge fan of Dave Sim’s Cerebus comic books. For some that means waiting issue after issue for Dave’s never-on-time monthly book. I can’t bear that kind of pressure (not knowing how the story progresses or even when I will get an update on the story) but I faithfully purchase a copy of every collected series (called Cerebus “phone-books” by some because of the way they are printed).

The last phone-book released, number 14, is titled Form & Void and covers a (fictionalized) story line of Earnest Hemingway and one of his wives. I had to clarify that the NPR article was his third wife, but Form and Void is about Hemingway’s fourth wife. Part of the confusion comes from the fact that they both wrote about war. The other part comes from pictures of Hemingway hunting with his wives. Both wives hunted and were writers of war. Not so surprising, maybe, but you can understand my confusion

Dave Sim has done extensive research on Hemingway and his interpretation of Hemingway and his progression of Hemingway’s life and death throws suspicion on Mary (his fourth wife) for Heminway’s supposed suicide. Dave Sim is recognized by many critics as being a mysogonist, but his fans see him as the ultimate feminist. I think he somehow is able to achieve both simultaneously. His female characters are free to be strong, powerful women but Dave allows the victimization he has felt at the hand of women to taint them all as somehow cruel (either deliberate cruelty or cruelty by neglect.) I have been compelled to read everything he has written and I highly reccomend his work.

If you can find his phone-books in used book stores and buy them cheap, do so, but be sure to read through at least the first three. By then, Dave has found his voice and I think that was around the time where he announced that his designs for Cerebus would reach exactly 300 issues whereupon Cerebus would die. (It’s nice when you know that the serial book you are reading has a specific end.) Covering politics, philosophy, gender issues and more Dave is at some points laugh-out-loud hilarious with just a simple illustrated panel, and then he will write entire pages (ala novella) in the voice of a character covering the depths of human conflict and emotion.

Good stuff, so far. I can’t wait until the end.

Salon's Satire City

If you weren’t paying attention, you may have missed Fred Branfman’s opinion column on Saturday. Fred writes a disturbing satire piece pretending that Rummy resigned regarding all the lies he told. I can’t quite put my finger on why it’s disturbing other than to say it appears to come from a place of bitterness. A much better satire piece can be found in today’s Salon.com from Joyce McGreevy. She plays the White House cast as a group of girls going to a slumber party with Nancy News — and obvious parody of Nancy Drew . This one is actually funny and makes it’s point.

A New Item For My Wishlist

The Complete Far Side by Gary Larson.

A masterpiece of comic brilliance, The Complete Far Side contains every Far Side ever syndicated—over 4,000 if you must know—presented in (more or less) chronological order by year of publication, with more than 1,100 that have never before appeared in a book. Also included are additional Far Side cartoons Larson created after retirement: 13 that appeared in the last Far Side book, Last Chapter and Worse, and six cartoons that periodically ran as a special feature in The New York Times’ Science Times section as The Far Side of Science. Creator Gary Larson offers a rare glimpse into the mind of The Far Side in quirky and thoughtful introductions to each of the 14 chapters. Complaint letters, fan letters, and queries from puzzled readers appear alongside some of the more provocative or elusive panels. Actor, author and comedian Steve Martin offers his pithy thoughts in a forward and Gary Larson’s former editor describes what it was like to be “the guy who could explain every Far Side cartoon.”

Yet another mouth to feed...

Gang,

Sorry I haven’t emailed in a few days, as you might have imagined, we’ve been busy. I’ll make this as short as possible as I have to shower and get back up to the hospital. The delivery was a bit tough and Alex wasn’t too small at 7lbs. 14 oz. Both mother and baby came out fine … He is incredibly adorable and he has his mother’s grimace! :) Don’t tell her I said that! :) Hopefully St. Francis (Monroe) will put his picture up on their webpage for all to see and you’ll understand.

Candi is well. She was banged up a bit during delivery, but I am incredibly amazed at how strong she was! Yesterday wasn’t a good day for her as she recovered, but today is new and she has even gotten up and walked around.

We deeply appreciate your thoughtfullness and prayers. I’m on my way to clean up and get our other babies (Zoe and Sidney) some dog biscuits. Then I’m off to the hospital.

Trey

All our best to Gordo’s clan.

Get your polyethylene rainbarrels here!

City rain barrel sale set for Nov. 1
City of Austin water utility customers may purchase up to four 75-gallon, polyethylene rain barrels. Quantities are available on a first-come, first- served basis. The first two barrels are $45 each; the third and fourth barrels are $75 each. Retail price is normally $120 per barrel.

Customers who receive water from the City of Austin qualify to receive barrels through the Water Conservation Program. Wholesale customers also may qualify.

To purchase a barrel, bring a copy of your utility bill and photo identification to 4005 Airport Blvd. from 9 a.m. to noon Saturday, Nov. 1, 2003. Money and applications will be accepted in advance. A receipt will be mailed to you and required at the time of pick up. Only cash or checks will be accepted. You may fill out the forms and purchase the barrel the day of the sale.

Even though you may have paid for a barrel in advance, distribution of barrels will be first-come, first-served. Barrels will not be held for advanced orders.

TreeFolks will be giving away free tree seedlings at the time barrels are distributed. For more information or to see if you qualify, call (512) 974-2199. Additional information, including an application is available at www.cityofaustin.org/watercon/rainbarrel_sale.htm.

BPB Pumpkin Carving Contest

Check out ideas and how-to’s at ExtremePumpkins.com and get your pumpkins ready. Post a picture of your pumpkin on October 31st. I will arrange for an arbitrary judge and come up with a trinket for a prize.

So That's How The Cookie Crumbles

Finally a scientist doing important research.

As a biscuit cools, moisture diffuses from its centre to its edges, say Qasim Saleem, of Loughborough University, and colleagues. The shrinking centre and expanding edges create a build-up of stress that can lace a cracker with tiny cracks.

This Means Geek War!

Yesterday at PVP Online Scott Kurtz posted this dead-on strip:

and today the Penny-Arcade boys fired back:

(click on the strips to see a full sized version.)

Geeks around the net are surely lining up to take sides.

“i will never read another p\/p0nl1n3 strip until sh1t hurts apologizes!” -rotflmao_man@thewell.net

“Penny-Arcade only comes out three times a week. How can they expect to keep up?” - lear_aragorn@aol.com

p.s. I realize that by posting this I am falling face first into the gag that Scott’s making fun of.

p.p.s. Being the wishy-washy man that I am, I will continue to read both comics.

p.p.p.s. Being the stats guy that I am, I wonder if the P-A stats are inflated because they have their strip and blog on seperate pages where as PVP is on the same page.

Wireless Protable Gaming

Take that , nGage! Check out this baby. I can’t wait to get my hands on this and play portable head-to-head GBA Madden.

[ drool ]

Stupid KUHF

Strike another blow for my support for listener-subsidized broadcasting. KUHF stopped carrying Talk of the Nation as of 1 October. More frickin’ classical music. Bleh. The ironic thing is there’s no real way to let them know that I’m not donating again since they dropped TotN.

Another reason to thank God for the iPod and WeFunk .mp3 files.

Ask the Porch: Building a shot luge

I’m hoping our assemblage of geeks, engineers, creative thinkers, and depraved alcoholics will be able to provide some help with a certain party puzzle, a drinker’s dilemma …

My friend Schmitty throws a legendary Oktoberfest party every year with a shot luge as one of its centerpieces.

Shot Luge — a long, large (100 to 200 pounds) block of ice propped or graded to an angle on the top of which a serpentine channel is carved. Liquors and liqueurs are then poured into the channel at the top and flow down to the bottom of the block where the drinker places either his or her mouth or a shot glass to receive the super-cooled shot.

I’ve helped prepare the luge for the past few years, but we are perennially bedeviled by one of the luge’s intrinsic flaws. As shots are poured, the ice melts away, leaving a smoothly curved surface at the drinking point at the bottom of the block. It becomes harder and harder to catch a good amount of drink because the shot starts doing a laminar flow thing.

We’ve tried a few different solutions involving carving or attaching metal or plastic mouthpieces to allow a cleaner shot, but in all cases, melt wins after a shot or two.

Now, the impact and joy of the luge isn’t really lessened by this problem. It’s just assumed that you’ve got to slurp as much as you can get and that the floor is going to be a sticky mess before the night is over.

But, improvement is always welcome.

Does anyone have any suggestions or personal experiences to share?

(read
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More Forearms in Afghanistan

It really is a crazy universe.

Afghan girls pass a billboard of Arnold Schwarzenegger in an advertisement for a bodybuilding club in Kabul, Afghanistan Thursday. The U.S. Republican from California appears to be a clear frontrunner in polls released Wednesday with 40 percent support. The former bodybuilder and movie star is a popular hero in Afghanistan. (AP Photo/Richard Vogel)

Blood in the water!

Maybe I’m imaginging it, but Katie Couric and Tim Russert seemed positively GIDDY as they reviewed todays top 3 stories: Arnold is a womanizer, Bush has a leak, and Rush has resigned. Tim actually closed the interview with a big smile and “What a day!”. I don’t like to think of myself as a conspiracy theorist, but I do feel like most mainstream media has a slight tilt ot the left, which is one reason that Rush & Fox News are successful - they are an alternative.

We’ve covered the Bush leak thing pretty extensively. My $.02 on the other two items - the fact that the L.A. Times waits just long enough to have an impact, but not too far ahead of the recall to allow for a thorough investigation by other parties to release this simultaneous batch of revelations is more than a little fishy. Why didn’t they run the story of the first woman when she ‘came forward’? Reminds me a little of the Bush DWI thing from 3 years ago. I’m not saying the GOP would never act in the same fashion - I know better than that - but I do like to point it out when it happens in reverse. :-)

Rush shouldn’t have resigned, and if ESPN pressured him to do so, they are wrong to do so. What Rush said was incorrect and inflamatory, but that is WHY THEY HIRED HIM! He should have come on next week (to record ratings) and addressed this head on. I am pleased to see that the same people who were defending the Dixie Chicks’ right to say what they wanted are also defending Rush’s right to express his opinion - for the most part. Katie was REALLY trying to get J.C. Watts and Doug Williams to say that they were glad Rush resigned, but they weren’t taking the bait. She was clearly dissapointed…

Son-o Strikes again!

Hold on to your Texas quarters!!! They may become collector’s items. The
United States Treasury has announced they are recalling the new Texas
quarters.

“We are recalling all of the new Texas quarters that were recently
issued,” Treasury Undersecretary Russell Shackelford said in a press
conference Monday. “This comes in the wake of numerous reports to this
agency that the quarters will not work in parking meters, toll booths,
vending machines, pay phones, or other coin-operated devices. We believe
the problem lies in a design flaw,” said Shackelford.

The winning design for the Texas quarter was submitted by Texas A&M
student William Doutrieux.

“Apparently, the duct tape holding the two dimes and a nickel together
keeps jamming the coin operated devices.”

Possible discovery of chemical weapons in Kuwait

The Kuwaitis may have just saved GWB’s reputation. The Hindustan Times is reporting that a bunch of chemical and biological weapons have been seized coming out of Iraq towards an undisclosed European country (France? This could be a neocon’s wet dream…)

Hydrogen - the Safer Fuel?

Here’s an interesting article about a(n apparently fairly unscientific) study done a t a University comparing a gasoline car fire to a hydrogen fuel car fire.

while the gasoline fire started as the result of a simple, small hole in the fuel line, for the hydrogen fire to occur, it would have taken the catastrophic failure of four separate safety systems, all at the same time, a highly unlikely occurrence

More Hindsight on Afghanistan

The Guardian hardly a right-wing rag, has an article on Afghan President Karzi’s speech to the Labor Party (probably in an effort to help embattled Tony Blair )

“The result of that cooperation today for Afghanistan is that we have now had a government for two years. We are liberated. We have political freedom. We have freedom of the media. We have, only in Kabul, 80 newspapers printing and all critical of us.”

More than two million refugees had returned to the country and 4.2 million children were now going to school, he added.

Mr Karzai conceded that civil disorder and drugs were still major problems in Afghanistan, adding: “Terrorism and extremism is still challenging our life.”

But he said: “The end result of the cooperation of civilisations for Afghanistan will be democracy, prosperity, peace and dignity for our people and by extension for the region and, by extension, peace for the rest of the world. We are sure that help from the rest of the world, the UK as well, will continue to be with us. We supported the operation in Iraq because we want exactly the same thing for the Iraqi people. We want the Iraqis to be free from oppression, from the tyranny of Saddam Hussein and his regime.”

Patriot Act Used Against Citizen (Hacker)

A follow-up to cynthia’s post about the fed’s use of the Patriot Act against non-terrorists. Adrian Lamo is not considered a saint by many in the IT security world, but I haven’t heard of him doing any direct damage to any site that he’s hacked. As best I can tell, he’s just a really bright kid who has never found his place in the business world and made a bad choice to publish data after companies have ignored his warnings about thier lax secuirty. The FBI have decided to violate some of the cardinal precepts of American justice by using the Patriot Act to get information on Lamo from journalists.

Finding Sushi

This pic will be stolen (as I have done) and blogged (as I have done) and emailed (as I have yet to do) many thousand times I am sure…because it’s freakin’ hilarious.

Potentially Happy Day

I got a call from Gordo Gibson (Occasional contributor on the porch) yesterday as I drove home. There’s a decent chance that he and Candi will be parents sometime today, as her OB has decided to induce delivery about a week early for non-life threatening issues. Regardless, here’s hope for a safe and eventless delivery, and fond wishes for the start of a happy family.

My advice was to sleep now and stock up on coffee, as the kiddo isn’t going to have any appreciation for day or night until about Christmas.

Thud! Thud! Thud!

(That’s the sound of a dead horse being beaten)

NRO, bless their souls, doesn’t want to let this new-found respect for security go un-noticed, so they’re dragging up a couple of older cases which have gone un-punished.

The first, and IMO the most egregious as far as Nat’l security is involved, is good old Sen. Bob (the Torch) Torrecelli’s (D-NJ) leak in a letter to Pres. Clinton and the New York Times of the identity of a Guatamelan citizen working undercover for the CIA. Ultimately, the operative was cleared of the charges The Torch leveled at him, and a bi-partisan report by the House on the topic (Torch was a Congressman then) concluded The CIA has given the Committee evidence that the disclosures concerning Guatemala have resulted in the loss of some contacts around the world, who feared their relationship with the United States would be disclosed as well

(Just to rub a little more salt in the wound - this is the same Sen. Torecelli who dropped out of the NJ Senate race in 2001?, after the filing deadline, when it became apparent from polls that his seat was going to go to a Republican due to questions about the Torch’s ethics. The liberal dominated NJ Supreme Court, in clear violation of that state’s campaign laws, allowed another Dem into the race with about a month before the election, making the previous campaigning by the Repbulican candidate moot.)

Just to ensure we’re still ‘Fair and Balanced’, let’s not forget Sen. Orrin Hatch (he of the singing career, and R-somewhere out west) who, on 9/12, leaked that US intelligence services “have an intercept of some information that includes people associated with [Osama] bin Laden who acknowledged a couple of targets were hit” Talk about keeping sources secret…

Regardless of which side of the aisle we’re on, leaking intel is a huge problem both before and after 9/11. NRO featured a CIA report that stated “Information obtained from captured detainees has revealed that al Qaeda operatives are extremely security-conscious and have altered their practices in response to what they have learned from the press about our capabilities. A growing body of reporting indicates that al Qaeda planners have learned much about our counter-terrorist intelligence capabilities from U.S. and foreign media.”

“Loose lips sink ships” was true in WWII, and is true now.

Freakin' Genius

I’ve gone on about this dude before, and I’ll do it again, but Dr. Leinhard over at the Engines of our Ingenuity strikes a similar nerve today as Grieder did the other day.

He observes that political power, which once flowed vertically, now flows horizontally, and the growth of mass media has been a major force in bringing this state of affairs about … Today, we look to our peers for the signposts that guide our actions. We tell one another that any of us can make a difference and that any child can grow up to be president. … (The automobile) represents the good in us — efficacy, physical beauty, and a kind of buoyancy of spirit. It represents the bad as well — pollution, danger, congestion… But (it) is also emblematic of our ability to create and build… And so … a part of our modern horizontalness is that we no longer wait upon kings and satraps to build a better world. We expect no less from one another.

Leinhard references The Horizontal Society by Lawrence Friedman. It’s available as an e-book from both the Harris County Public Library and the Houston Public Library. (Pretty cool service in it’s own right)

RIAA Suits working?

Caught this over at Wired

Since the week ending June 29, traffic to Kazaa has fallen 41 percent to about 3.9 million unique visitors from 6.5 million in the week ending September 21. … Traffic to Morpheus fell to 261,000 unique visitors in the week ending September 21 from 272,000 in the week ending June 29.

Sure, it’s heavy handed on the part of the RIAA, but suits appear to be working.

One of the reasons I find compassion a hard virtue to have

So I’m driving into work today, going down a major 4 lanes each way w/ a suicide lane road. There’s a bunch of traffic, but it’s moving decently, as opposed to the interstates around here which were their usual parking lots. I look over into the minivan next to me and the CRAZY LADY driving it is DOING NEEDLEPOINT ON THE STEERING WHEEL! Dear God, how is this woman able to have a driver’s license? And, of course, she’s driving a larger vehicle, most likely so she’ll be safe in the event of an accident…

What the hell is wrong with folks? My dear mother, who was already known to be a couple of cups short of a keg, was leaving our house the other weekend to head back to the Pit. I was putting her stuff into the trunk of her car, and she told me to leave some papers on the front seat. I asked her if she was going to stop for lunch and read, and she answered “No, sometimes I read while I’m driving.” My jaw hit the ground. I begged her not to, explained a little bit about momentum and reaction time, but none of it seemed to sink in.

So, when my dear mom, or the lady doing needlepoint, wraps her car around a tree, or ends up in a ditch, or (God forbid) kills a family of four as she drifts over the center lane, I’m going to find it hard to find an ounce of compassion in my heart, as it’s their own darn fault.