Times Wastes Too Fast
A remarkable, very readable Web-centric piece on Thomas Jefferson, warts and all. His Aunt Judith, his father's sister, was Mr. B's seven greats grandmother.
Via In Search of Jefferson's Moose.
July 05, 2009
July 04, 2009
Sarah: Happy Fourth!
From her FaceBook account today regarding her announcement Friday that she will be resigning:
"The response in the main stream media has been most predictable, ironic, and as always, detached from the lives of ordinary Americans who are sick of the 'politics of personal destruction.' How sad that Washington and the media will never understand; it’s about country."
Heh.
UPDATE: I laugh at all the "wise ones" who contend that her political career is over, etc. My bet is: She's going to become the campaigner who makes it possible for the Republicans to win back one or both houses of Congress, then use that IOU to take the nomination in 2012.
July 03, 2009
Run, Sarah, run
I'm still hopeful. Her resignation eliminates any claims of conflict-of-interest between running for the 2012 nomination and her job as Alaska's governor. The Left will continue to hate and mock her, as this low blow demonstrates. So what's new about their lack of taste? The Right will continue to love her, especially us commoners. The Independents, as always, will get to decide.
UPDATE: The Puffington Host pulled the mockery at the second link, which was, once again, about Sarah's retarded son. But Michele Malkin captured the page for, uh, "posterity."
June 26, 2009
Iran, Day Thirteen
If you won't miss Jacko (his best work was years ago) and Farah was never your cup of mocha nor Gov. Sanford of any particular interest, you can still keep up with the Iranian protesters as they get picked off one by one.
Iranian and some Western bloggers always have had the best reporting and aggregating on it, anyhow. Of course, the UN is useless, as always. Heck, it's the Dictator's Club. What, you thought it was the protector of humanity? Only the thug version.
June 25, 2009
Quagmire
South Vietnam is what this map reminds me of. Think of the red places as NVA-controlled Indian Country. Places where our forces didn't/don't go for very long. S. Warzistan on the left bottom is where that Predator's Hellfire missiles killed all those Talibani at the funeral the other day. Eighty-something. I expected to be reading of Lefty outrage about that by now. The fact I didn't sorta figures, though.This is Barry's campaign now. He campaigned for it. His Leftist pals wanted it. Now they've got it. Lotsa luck. They're sure going to need it.
I think they're all going to be very sorry before The One's first term is over. Iraq was/is the Left's hated campaign, but it's the one that made the most sense to me. Nevermind the WMDs and all that baloney. The point in going in there was/is that it's in the middle of the Jihadi swamp that needs to be drained. I also believe that whatever success we've had there had more to do with the recent Iranian uprising than anything Barry said in Cairo or anywhere else. (He's too longwinded, too on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand, to inspire anybody.) So let's see what he's going to do with Afghanistan. Wallow in the quagmire, I expect. Although that Predator strike on a funeral, of all things, was a good start. Wish we'd had more UAVs in South Vietnam. Apaches are nice, too.
June 16, 2009
Iran's green revolution
June 03, 2009
AF447 Update
This AP report is the most detailed on the automated transmissions from the Airbus to Air France I've seen. It apparently originated in a Brazilian newspaper and AP got it confirmed:
"The pilot sent a manual signal at 11 p.m. local time saying he was flying through an area of "CBs": black, electrically charged cumulonimbus clouds that come with violent winds and lightning. Satellite data has shown that towering thunderheads were sending 100 mph (160 kph) updraft winds into the jet's flight path at the time. "Ten minutes later, a cascade of problems began: Automatic messages indicate the autopilot had disengaged, a key computer system switched to alternative power, and controls needed to keep the plane stable had been damaged. An alarm sounded indicating the deterioration of flight systems. "Three minutes after that, more automatic messages reported the failure of systems to monitor air speed, altitude and direction. Control of the main flight computer and wing spoilers failed as well. "The last automatic message, at 11:14 p.m., signaled loss of cabin pressure and complete electrical failure, catastrophic events in a plane that was likely already plunging toward the ocean." As usual, this raises more questions. The first big one might be why, if you're flying thru a violent storm would you be on autopilot? Via Things With Wings.
Airbus down
When I was twelve in 1956, I got interested in the sinking of a passenger liner called the Andrea Doria off Nantucket. I remember staying up late listening to radio coverage of the rescue efforts for what was the flagship of the Italian Line. That was all there was then, late-night radio.
Today, of course, there's quite a lot of informed speculation available on the Web for almost anything, and so I have been at it, off and on, since word of AF447--including perusing this excellant weather blog analysis complete with plotted storm maps showing the flight path. I got it off the transcript of a Rush Limbaugh conversation with an Airbus pilot. He speculated that the tragedy could have begun with the reported electrical failure which could have taken out their weather radar. But that leaves the question of why/how the electricals failed, considering the Airbus has "four fully-redundant electrical systems."
Snagged this post title from the Seablogger whose speculation centers on a megabolt of lightning combined with hail damage to the flight deck windows, which could account for the reported depressurization. But the weather blog above discounts the possibility of hail. Plenty to wonder about, and, thanks to the Internet, plenty of sources to help in the wondering.
MORE: Mystery deepens. Not so much the bomb threat a few days before the flight, but discovery of the debris trail and fuel slick of miles across the ocean, suggesting the plane's breakup in mid-air. If Airbus wants to sell any more planes, they'd better figure out what caused such a calamity.
May 30, 2009
Thugs in the White House
It all starts with ACORN, the persistently corrupt and oft-indicted community organizers. Add a dose of the Chicago Way and bingo, there's corruption in Obamalot.
May 27, 2009
More St. Petersburg photos
Street corner beggars
"When I think of the people with serious physical or mental handicaps who nevertheless work, I find it hard to sympathize with able-bodied men who stand on the streets and beg. Nor can I sympathize with those who give them money that subsidizes a parasitic lifestyle which allows such men to be a constant nuisance, or even a danger, to others."
Thomas Sowell's Random Thoughts.
May 26, 2009
Happy Belated Towel Day
And, above all, whatever you do, as Douglas Adams would say (did say, in fact): Don't Panic.
Via Simply Jews.
Wings of Desire
Except this is not a scene from the 1987 Wim Wenders' movie (an old favorite of mine), but angel statues overlooking the rooftops of St. Petersburg, Russia, in a collection of extraordinary photos of the city.
Via The 8th Circle.
May 21, 2009
Aborted prayer of the Webdev
our browser, which art in memory, mozilla be thy name
onLoad run, thy layout done, exactly like the PSD.
render us fast this gmail thread,
and forgive us our standards violations,
as we forgive those who use IE against us,
and lead us not into quirks mode,
but deliver our content
for thine is the pingdom
and the browser and the glory,
forever and e
what():St9bad_alloc Abort trap (core dumped)
Via Dustbury.
May 15, 2009
Compassion in death
This is an idea I got today from the Seablogger, who is usually a good read. A thoughtful, lately-become-religious fellow. I share his belief in G-d, if not his particular creed. The expression refers to people who are able to go to their own death without continuing to blame others for perceived or actual wrongs. To forgive them, even reassure them, when one's own end is near.
My own father, despite his religious belief, was unable to do it. But I suspect it is not a common thing. Indeed, I've only known one who achieved it. He was a scientist, and so I could presume that he was not religious, since so few of them seem to be nowadays. But, then, I really don't know. If he wasn't, if he had nothing to gain, so to speak, that makes his compassion in death all the more impressive.
April 24, 2009
A simple cure for global warming
Even if you don't believe the globe is warming, painting roofs and roads white, or some other light color, would sure cut air-conditioning bills and go far in eliminating the heat-island effect. Not that I want the rancho's roof white. But I don't have to worry. Simple solutions never appeal to big government. They don't produce new jobs for the bureaucracy or more tax money for pet projects. Still... Painting roofs and roads white. What a concept.
Via Instapundit.
April 17, 2009
Boring journalism
The Seablogger makes a good point about the liberal media, which explains why FoxNews, the news that liberals and their running buddies in Big Media love to hate, has outstripped CNN and MSNBC combined in viewership: it is not boring. CNN, et al, have the same predictable la-de-da day after day. Comforting to the convinced, I suppose, but not very interesting to anybody else.
I've opined before that this could be one of the biggest problems newspapers have today: they are so predictable. Not only do they all look the same, having the same layouts, the same focus, etc., but they have the same NYTimes and WaPo stories on their front pages. We also know they're all for diversity, multiculturalism, affirmative action, gun control, abortion, illegal immigration from Mexico, and that they just love Barry and Michelle, and distrust Republicans. So where do those who argue with some or all of that stuff--which is a lot of people, altogether--go? Well, the Internet, for one. And FoxNews, for another.
I kind of like it when CNN, et al, attack FoxNews for whatever. That is the way American journalism used to be. Newspapers not only tried to outdo each other, they attacked each other. And made $$$. But that was before credential creep, where every journalist now needs a degree from similar liberal journalism schools to get a Big Media job. Pity them not their decline. They fouled their own nests.
UPDATE: A perfect example of how in-the-tank CNN is for Barry: You could compare W to Hitler and they'd never bat an eye. Do it to Barry and you get a microphone stuck in your face.
April 16, 2009
Austin's Tea Party
The liberal daily did a fair job of reporting the local conservative-libertarian rally against anticipated higher federal taxes, the pork-barrel "stimulus," and other "change," which tied up downtown rush hour traffic, drawing people (according to the selected quotes) who had never marched before.
There were none of the overhead crowd photos reported in the conservative blogosphere, however--including the estimated more than ten thousand marchers in San Antonio and St. Louis--which readily show crowd size. Instead, there was an enigmatic quote from the state police that they wouldn't estimate the size of the Austin crowd "for safety reasons." Huh? Interesting as it all is, I'm still not convinced that it will amount to much in the long run.
That DHS report
I got a little incensed when I read that the new, improved Dem-led Homeland Security octopus had singled out veterans as potential terrorists. Then I discovered the report was commissioned while Bush was in office and it only suggests that a small percentage of vets might be so disaffected.
And, of course, I recalled Timothy McVeigh, the wacko who the Army didn't trust to allow to be a Green Beret. LGF, who I admire for his pro-Israel stance, has a sensible take on this report which seems to be roiling the never-very-placid waters of the rightwing blogosphere. He thinks the upset is way overdone. Includes a link to a PDF of the report itself and points to other, hardly leftwing bloggers, who agree. Makes sense. I'm convinced. Except for one thing. The report should have been aimed at extremism, not just "rightwing extremism." The obvious political bias is what caused the trouble.
April 09, 2009
World's oldest statue?
Seems, at twelve thousand years old, to be. So far, anyhow. But there's more to come.
Via The Anchoress.
April 06, 2009
Mexican guns
Instapundit clings somewhat precariously to the military weapons wielded by the Mexican drug cartels to try to show that not all their guns come from the U.S. Fox News, to which he links, has apparently taken his side of the argument.Their concern, of course, is new gun sale restrictions here at home.
The San Antonio Express-News, while conceding that the military stuff probably didn't come from our side of the border, nevertheless makes a convincing case that most of the non-military stuff that has been traced did--much of it from Texas retailers. Michael Yon has uncharacteristly attracted more than a few irritated commenters for wading into the argument. I'm glad he did, though. I know more now about it now than I did before. On the other hand, as Instapundit notes, some of the guns probably have come from Mexican army deserters.
We used to run in boots
But the Army did not, and does not, make commercials as good as this Marine one. As the H.E.B. checker-military brat joked one time when she saw my ARMY cap: "Ain't Ready For Marines Yet?" Not on the recruiting score.
April 05, 2009
Why we kill Taliban
March 30, 2009
Strange search engine requests
Or, maybe, I should say, strange search engine results that bring the uncounted millions here.
Mercenary fighter in jeans. Why would these words lead to a picture of George Washington? Beats me.
How to make Texas Alamo out of paper. Hmm. Well, this is somewhat closer to what I had.
Mysterious rocks of the batholic. Now we're getting closer to the truth. So-called.
Do people drown in Canyon Lake? Uh, don't they drown everywhere?
Saloon northern Ontario. No, but you might be able to see it from here.
Saudi road sky eye. I qualified for two of the four. Not too shabby.
Importance of the flag raising in Iowa Jima. This was my fault, sending Iowa to the Pacific. Still.
Comic man falling from sky. I suppose it is comic, if you're in Hamas or Hezbollah.
Jack by the great horn spoon. Very curious, indeed.
The lovely Roberta Vasquez. This is a standing joke here and there by shameless traffic seekers.
I could go on forever. But that's more than enough for now.
Inspiration by Dustbury, who remembers to do it a lot more often than me.
March 28, 2009
Don't touch that light switch
The climate change sheeple want everybody to swtich off their lights for an hour at 8:30 p.m. tonight in protest. A far better idea would be to leave them on and, instead, watch this video.
Via Instapundit.
March 27, 2009
The Fargo, ND flood 2009
This is shaping up to be a major disaster for thousands of people. The Seablogger, having lived in the area and his mother still living there, has quite a bit to say about it--as well as correcting some of Big Media's usual laziness. You'd think they could get and read some topo maps. But noooo... Google it, you goofuses.
UPDATE: The river seems, mercifully, to have crested.
How you gonna keep 'em down on the ranch?
March 03, 2009
Night bombing
More on the B-29s, from Phil Crowther's 6th Bomb Group memorial site. This is from the log of navigator Don Kearney:
"Briefed at 1430 [2:30PM]. Took off at 1732 [5:32PM]. It got dark when we were out just a little ways. The APN-4 Loran inverter was out. Trouble, always trouble. However, the radar did work, although it wasn’t operating on beacon.
"As we passed Iwo, hit some rough weather just north of it. We flew close to the Jap islands going on up to the Empire so that we could check course with radar. We passed within visual distance of Hachijo Jima.
"Heard Birddog 1, a destroyer, talk to 4V705, a superdumbo, about lights.
"We made landfall on the Empire at Omaesaki at 2355 [11:55PM], turned up past the east side of Fuji again. It was easily visible outside the window. Same way we started in the night before last. Way out front Charlie [Lt. Charles Hall, Bombardier] saw a bright red light going down. At first he thought it was a ball of fire but later decided it must have been a B-29.
"As we rolled out of the turn we hit our first opposition, still 15 to 20 miles west of Tokyo...Within a minute we were in it thick. About 15 searchlights picked us up and they began throwing stuff at us. A plane out to our left had 20 lights on him and was catching hell. Still in the lights, we plowed on. We never had less than about 15 searchlights on us at any one time from then on. We flew though the remainder of the target area in a bright cone of lights..."
Read the rest. Go to the main page at the link, click on Air Crews in the left sidebar, then scroll down to crew #3909, Reamatroid, click on the number, then scroll down and start at the beginning of the log.
March 01, 2009
Police brutality
Not much doubt here. Amazing the cop did this knowing he was being videotaped. Throw the book at him.
February 24, 2009
Double heh
Via Simply Jews.
MORE: Whatever you hear, tho, even the best and most widely-read blogs aren't the reason for the newspaper industry's continuing demise. It's more like the death of paper. Just can't compete, economically, with pixels. The former is so expensive, the latter is so cheap. Tho obliging governments can slow it down.
February 20, 2009
Peggy Noonan is such a twit
When she started chewing on Sarah last fall, along with the rest of the worthless snooze media, I finally realized that Peggy Noonan wasn't the far-seeing iconoclast I had thought. Now, as the Seablogger suggests, when she can encounter a continent-spanning technology like wi-fi on a jet flight and somehow equate it to garage-level industry, it shows she's just another empty head with a deadline and no original (much less logical) thought.
Educational television
Dr. King's wiretapper
Used to be (and probably still is) that any appearance at the LBJ Library by PBS poohbah Bill Moyers drew an SRO crowd. Mainly aging, LBJ liberals yearning for the Great Society. They apparently never knew this side of the old Baptist hypocrite:
"His part in Lyndon Johnson and J. Edgar Hoover's bugging of Martin Luther King's private life, the leaks to the press and diplomatic corps, the surveillance of civil rights groups at the 1964 Democratic Convention..."
That's from CBS newsman Morley Safer's memoir Flashbacks. Liberal fascists do make strange bedfellows.
February 15, 2009
Colonoscopy
I get these things every five years, thanks to colon cancer running in my family via primary relatives, so I know they're worthwhile. They don't hurt, thanks to the drugs you get. The worst thing about them is the awful preparation fluid you have to swallow by the gallon. Tastes like motor oil.
But I really must demur when some bloggers, including the vaunted Instapundit, say they are foolproof at discovering colon cancer. My father had them for years and they didn't save him. Maybe it depends on the skill of the doc. That would figure. That's why they're called medical "practices."
February 12, 2009
Stimulate this!
I'm actually of two minds on the issue of whether Barry's client Big Media ought to be photographing the flag-draped coffins of fallen troops. On the one hand I do not like censorship, such as Barry's congressional minions are preparing to practice in forging a new law that has the effect of quashing right radio.
On the other hand, the CNN questioner at Barry's first presser put Big Media's real interest out there when he asked if the policy of not allowing photographs of the coffins could be overturned by The One: "Ed Henry with CNN, who asked the President whether he thought the arrival of American coffins at Dover should be accessible to the media to 'show America the real cost of the war....'"
If you want right radio to be allowed, then how can you argue for hiding the coffins? Well, one is free speech, the other is honoring the dead by not turning them into a political spectacle. Plus the coffin policy has been around since 1991. It was not created by Bushitler to thwart the NYTimes and Code Pink.
February 08, 2009
Rain, at last
Wind's really picking up at the rancho, gusting to twenty-five thirty-five out of the southeast whence normally cometh our rain-making Gulf moisture. Indeed, the forecast is for thunderstorms overnight. LCRA meteorologist Bob Rose thinks we may get some real rain over the next three days, possibly the most we've had since mid-November.
In fact, Rose, noticing that the southern Jet Stream is becoming more active (and thus capable of guiding Pacific storm fronts our way), is thinking something I was wondering about the other day: that the 2008 drought might just finally get busted later this month into March. If so, it would be by a flood, of course. Floods are the way droughts break hereabouts. But we'll take it.
UPDATE: By 9 a.m. Monday, according to LCRA's hydrologic system of rain gauges, one-half to three-quarters of an inch of rain seems to be the norm over the area since midnight. Nice to see water ponding in the gutters again.
February 07, 2009
The sun is still quiet
January 31, 2009
Tax cheatin' like the Dems do
Alas, Rancho Roly Poly is just a few miles south of U.S. Rep. John Carter's 31st District. It would be so cool to be represented by the author of the Rangel Rule, which won't pass but if it did, we'd all get to cheat on our taxes like New York Dem Charlie Rangel (not to mention Barry's appointees Tom Daschle and Tim Geithner). Nice try, John. Keep up the meaningful work.
Via Doug Ross @ Journal.
UPDATE: Then Carter tried the direct approach, asking the House to vote on forcing Rangel to step down from his, wait for it, tax-writing committee. Got that? He writes taxes for us. He just doesn't pay them.
January 25, 2009
Mason County, Texas
Scott at The Fat Guy, apparently already suffering from the noise and traffic of San Antonio, although he just recently moved there from Dallas, has taken up a casual comment I made about considering moving to Mason County. He likes winding, dark, two-lane roads, fly-fishing, hunting, and plenty of open spaces and few neighbors. The links he found and the comments he's drawn so far make me wish I could move tomorrow. That's the great thing about these Internets. You can go back to the country and still make a living, if you need to. But, until Mr. B. finishes school (about nine more years) and Mrs. Charm retires, it will probably not be possible for me.
January 19, 2009
Buy a gun
This is Instapundit's somewhat surprising advice for any Jew or their supporters who feel threatened by these mad Musslemen and their scum supporters who invade Jewish neighborhoods with threatening anti-Semitic demos. Fortunately most of this is going on in Britain, Australia and Canada. Gun laws are rather restrictive there. Not so here. Of course the laws differ from state to state on when you're allowed to shoot somebody. Generally speaking the perp has to be stealing or destroying your property on your property. But if it makes people feel better just to have some .45 Long Colts handy for use, it works for me.
MORE: Thou Shalt Not Kill? Try Nehemiah, chapter four, verse fourteen.
January 13, 2009
Computer solutions
I gotta admit, for sheer elegance nothing beats a few rounds from an SKS, .45 LC and a Mossberg Persuader.
Via The Fat Guy.
Press Clink
Somehow, in the course of showing why Big Media has lost its influence in the Internet Age, Press Think's Jay Rosen manages to make it sound like conservative war supporters get the media grease while anti-war liberals get left out. What planet is this guy on? He starts out belaboring the obvious, then turns reality on its head. If this is what passes for academic journalism these days, no wonder the newspaper industry is falling apart.
Via Instapundit.
January 04, 2009
Whuffie
Julius's rising and falling Whuffie is a form of constantly-tallied wealth in the reputation economy of the post-USA, Bitchun Society. In this world, all are online, never die (unless they want to) and are free to work ad-hoc at whatever they please. Their Whuffie determines whether they can get a hotel room, a car, or a meal, even whether people will talk to them.
Sometimes Julius's Whuffie is high enough, sometimes it isn't, in his ad-hoc job at Disney World. Either way is entertaining in Cory Doctorow's 2003 Down And Out In The Magic Kingdom, a so-called postcyberpunk novel bringing the Internet to SciFi. One thing's for sure, in my recent reintroduction to SF after years of ignoring it, I've found that I can't take seriously any plot without the Web in it. If you spend a lot of time online, you shouldn't either. It is the future, as much as the present, after all.
January 03, 2009
Leaflets, artillery may precede assault
It looks like the IDF is close to moving into Gaza, although the ground is wet from recent hard rains, because leaflets warning civilians to evacuate have been dropped and the mobile artillery prep appears to have begun. Good luck, guys.
UPDATE: So it begins. Tanks, engineers and infantry move into northern Gaza.
December 26, 2008
Hope instead of despair
No I don't mean Barry's Hopenchange campaign babble, which he will drop like a hot enchilada when it suits him. I mean the good old American urge to hope. For instance, that the recent economic diddle, however apparently catastrophic, won't necessarily lead to something truly awful in 2009 and beyond.
Like the Depressionistas fear it will. A commenter at the Seablogger also cites a new, despairing Spengler essay that I read but must frankly admit that I really don't understand. So I'll go on being optimistic. And with some good company. As Wretchard says in a similar context, we all have the right to worry, but no one is right to despair. The bears are out in force these days, true enough, but, hey, it just might surprise us all and actually get better.
Apollo VIII
“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”
Instapundit remembers hearing it on Armed Forces Radio as a teenager in Germany. I was twenty-four in 1968 when it was broadcast from the moon. I was duty officer that Christmas Eve night at squadron headquarters of the Sixth Armored Cavalry Regiment at Fort Meade, MD. The duty NCO and I were transfixed.
December 23, 2008
Sexual Harassment Co.
December 18, 2008
Mrs. Charm
I've been considering this for a while now and I've finally decided to give Mr. Boy's mom an anonymouse name of her own, instead of just referring to her as his mom, etc., which sounds sort of like I'm a stepdad, which is not the case. I will even give her a separate category of her own, so I can do posts on her doings, now and then. I did steal the name from the same nice blog where I filched the map of the "soler system," but there it's Mr. Charm, so, their being of different genders, I doubt we'll get them mixed up. In this blogosphere, we all learn from each other. More or less.
December 06, 2008
Centex drought continues
November ended very dry, putting Austin in the exceptional drought category, i.e. the worst possible. We're surrounded by an extreme drought area (the red on the map) with no end in sight. Our driest year since 1956. Odd combination: no rain and an early winter of chilly days andfrigid nights. Yech.
December 02, 2008
Camera hunt
Finally getting around to replacing the Nikon Coolpix S10 VR I had that got run over by a truck back in August. I had set it down on the top of the car while getting some bags in and forgot it was there. Halfway down the highway at seventy-plus I saw something black sail into the air behind us and realized immediately that it was the Nikon in its case.
I turned around and went back to it and ran out in the road to retrieve what turned out to be the cushioned case alone. The camera had somehow come out and smacked into the asphalt. I located it and started to dash out for it just as a semi approached. My prayer didn't work. The truck's front wheel ran over it. Not enough left for a souvenir. So far I like this Canon model the best. It's got some of the same features, has a viewfinder for use in bright sunlight, looks like it will fit in the old case, and it is a lot cheaper. In case it winds up getting run over someday.
Via Instapundit.
December 01, 2008
Green paint
What with the presumed new, federal "green" push for this and that, Cobb foresees lots of need for such non-environmentally-friendly minerals as chromium, copper and arsenic. Heh.
November 25, 2008
The real Hoovers
Reality check from Doug Ross @ Journal.
UPDATE: Meanwhile, the Dems and their state-run media are playing up the stock market jitters (largely over Barry's ascendency) while national output has declined just one half of one percent. But, hey, it's a great time to spend tax money in the name of "job creation," mainly for their buds.
November 22, 2008
High school Latin
Victor Davis Hanson, a classics professor, wants high school students to have four years of it:
"...such instruction would do more for minority youths than all the ‘role model’ diversity sermons on Harriet Tubman, Malcolm X, Montezuma, and Caesar Chavez put together. Nothing so enriches the vocabulary, so instructs about English grammar and syntax, so creates a discipline of the mind, an elegance of expression, and serves as a gateway to the thinking and values of Western civilization as mastery of a page of Virgil or Livy (except perhaps Sophocles’s Antigone in Greek or Thucydides’ dialogue at Melos)."
He's right, of course, though I don't think I'd want to take four years of it. I only had to take one year, in 1960-61, and I still remember how cool it was to translate text so old yet still recognizable in its human concern. My grandmother taught Latin at Southern Methodist University in Dallas in the 1920s. But that was college.
The vast waters of Mars
November 20, 2008
"The science is beyond dispute..."
What a laugher. No science is beyond dispute. Dispute is what science does. Only a pol would say something so stupid.
Via the Seablogger.
The first crook
Or, rather, the first facillitator of crooks: Barry's apparent nominee for attorney general. Eric Holder, Slick Willie's pardon-adviser. Well, he is black, and all that.
November 19, 2008
Today's pretty picture
A mosaic of astronomical images by Davide De Martin of Sky Factory, explained here. Via Bad Astronomy.
November 18, 2008
Attack of the carbon dioxide cult
Nevermind Barry's cult of personality, it's the global warmists we have to fear. The ones who want to remake our economy to resolve their notion of eco-pocolypse. Though Barry apparently will step up offshore drilling, he is also likely to back the EPA's impending enforcement of carbon dioxide reductions (better hold your breath), and maybe buy up Detroit for the UAW to make teenie, weenie greenie cars. (Just so long as the Dems don't require us to buy them.)
Meanwhile the Seablogger, freshly home from a blogged cruise to the Virgin Islands, sees perfidy behind the recent alleged NASA "blunder" in announcing October as the warmest month ever--when, in fact, it was one of the coolest. Anything to promote the Gorebot cult and Nancy Pelosi's green "recovery," don't you know. Big Media may get its long-touted depression yet if Barry and his party deepen the recession. At least we'd have the pleasure of seeing him voted out after one term. Or is he, perhaps, smarter than that? We're going to find out.
November 09, 2008
Dumbo, R.I.P.
Disney's incredibly inept coverup is finally, sadly, but voluminously (and, indeed, artfully) exposed.
November 08, 2008
Seablogger blogs a cruise
His Holland America cruise ship has "a nice deep sea heave," Alan Sullivan reports, as he sails into hurricane weather out of Miami. The water in the upper deck swimming pools is "jumping and sliding like limbo dancers." He had to pay one hundred dollars for two hundred fifty minutes of Web connection time via satellite, so he's limited in what he can do. But he's already promising photos soon. Click on the blog title at the top of the page to check for the latest post.
UPDATE: A nautical tracking map shows where his ship, the Noordam, is at the moment.
Obamalot
Hey, Barry did compare himself to JFK--minus the military service, war-hero part, of course:
"The terrorists won’t bother us again
Because everyone on Earth is now our friend
Charisma he has lots
Specifics he has not
But happily we really don’t care here
In Obamalot."
Chuckle.
Via Don Suber.
November 07, 2008
Wisdom for Mr. Boy
"...let your children overhear you saying complimentary things about them to other adults," is a bit of wisdom I've decided to try that comes from Treppenwitz in Israel, in an essay worth a read for the other good ideas as well.
November 05, 2008
Looking askance
Steven Den Beste, who I think of as the dean of conservative realists in the blogosphere, pretty much speaks for me:
"I think Obama is going to turn out to be the worst president since Carter, and for the same reason: good intentions do not guarantee good results. Idealists often stub their toes on the wayward rocks of reality, and fall on their faces. And the world doesn't respond to benign behavior benignly. But there's another reason why: Obama has been hiding his light under a basket. A lot of people bought a pig in a poke today, and now they're going to find out what they bought. Obama isn't what most of them think he is. The intoxication of the cult will wear off, leaving a monumental hangover."
The gullible are congratulating Barry for "his brilliant campaign." They are presuming, against all evidence, that he will govern as a bi-partisan centrist. They've already forgotten the fellow who flipped the bird to Hillary and Mac, and called Sarah a pig. Who helped ACORN commit vote fraud, intentionally gathered illegal foreign contributions, and etc., ad nauseum.
But me, I'm going to skip derangement and just look askance, stop writing about politics unless it affects me personally, as in whether Barry's coming tax and electricity hikes actually cost me money. Otherwise, I'm going to get back to the original war-supporting, eclectic intentions of this blog.
I'm taking my Holiday from History. Adios. Good luck. You're going to need it.
UPDATE: Well, that's a promise I'm not likely to able to keep. And to give the devil his due, here's a transcript of Barry's victory speech which I finally got around to reading. It's very Democrat, with all the historical Democrat tropes familiar to supporters of FDR and Truman, Carter and Clinton. Maybe he means it. We're going to find out.
November 02, 2008
DSL problems
Posting will be minimal, if any, for a while. My DSL modem is on the fritz. AT&T has promised to come Monday and check the line, if not necessarily replace the modem. The thing's warranty is out, and it seems to be the major difficulty, so I hope they replace it.
If not, I may consider switching ISPs, though that would be a major hassle and AT&T has provided good service up to now. We think a thunderstorm a couple of weeks ago, which knocked out the landline service (which contains the DSL connection) may have been the culprit here. The techs said the line was the victim of a power surge. We were thinking about having the landline disconnected anyhow. We use the cell phones most of the time.
ADDENDUM: Yes, we were disappointed by last night's Texas loss to Texas Tech. But Tech, a longtime in-state rival, played a great game and deserves to be No. 1, even if the BCS computers don't agree. The Horns also beat themselves, with too many dropped passes (and one almost-interception), costly penalties, an OL that couldn't stop Tech's D, etc. Hope Texas stays in the top five. They'll be back.
October 28, 2008
New Hampshire Dem Chief: Phony Soldier?
Turns out the chairman of the Democrat Party in New Hampshire may be another phony Vietnam War wannabee. Hey, there are more than thirteen million of them, according to the 2000 census. But why are so many of them Dumbocrats? Oh, right, now I remember. They protested or shirked at the time. But this guy, Ray Buckley, doesn't have that excuse. He was only twelve years old in 1972. Guess he's just another guy who would rather lie than try.
Via Black Five.
October 23, 2008
The crooked media
My former colleagues in the MSM, at least the ones who still have jobs, have no shame. Their pretense of "objectivity" in reporting is so far from reality that even their defenders can no longer ignore it. They have been bought and paid for by the Democrat party and exist only to please Barry--the most secretive candidate since Nixon. So they drill into each facet of Sarah's life, while ignoring Barry's pathetic, aging fratboy Joey Hairplugs. All the President's Men, this ain't. If it ever was.
UPDATE: Indeed, Big Media's attacks on Sarah are the best evidence that there is no standard of objectivity in American journalism--despite the journalism degree now required to get a job in it.
October 22, 2008
The polls are wrong
Best analysis I've seen so far, and there are more than a few out there. Be sure to vote, especially if you're voting for Mac and Sarah. The drumbeat "news" about Barry's juggernaut lead is highly suspect, as per usual in the Dems-media symbiosis. Including longtime Dem pollster Zogby International, to mention just one. Followed by this utterly contradtictory AP poll.
Could be the "news" audience is finally catching on. How else to explain this?
Closer to home, the rancho is in a precinct that, in recent years, has been solidly Democrat--unsurprising in Austin's blue anomaly in a very red state. Yet I have noticed this month quite a number of McCain-Palin lawn signs--a few of them already detached (accidentally?) from their supports. Something is up, and the national polls and the local "news" are not reflecting it.
Via Instapundit.
October 17, 2008
Two points is "a solid lead"?
October 16, 2008
They patted their wallets
Fellow Texan Beldar's take on the last formal debate before the looong election is over:
"John McCain did fine at the third debate, but he benefited mostly because Barack Obama's ordinariness became more obvious to more people. More people escaped the mass hypnosis tonight. They sat up suddenly, took a deep breath, and as they watched Barack Obama, do you know what they did next?"
(Check the headline) Heh.
October 03, 2008
Sixty-nine point nine million
Biden's (at least) fourteen lies
Come on, now. You didn't really think all that glib, white-toothed rattle was truth-telling, did you? LGF has the biggest one, and a link to some of the others. Check it out. It's for sure Big Media won't tell you. They'll be too too busy, as usual, kicking Sarah around.
Just a little carbon tax
The liars in the U.S. Congress snuck plenty of pork into their credit "crisis" giveaway, but none so obnoxious as the one that lays the groundwork for a carbon tax. The global warmists would never be able to get such a thing passed in open discussion, especially not during a recession. So they cheated.
September 27, 2008
I hate WordPress
If you have a WordPress site, here's why I either a) never visit it, or b) never comment on it. The login keeps asking me for a different username than the one it accepted from me a week ago. Just when things are working fine, they stop working at all. Pshaw. Keep your stinking WordPress. Count me out.
McCain won, I think
I didn't watch much of it live. I have seen several clips, and I followed some of the live-blogging, and read the conclusions of others--some of whom thought that, while Barry may not have won, he didn't lose, either. Mr. B.'s mom, whose job it is to watch such things, thought it was a tie. She thought Mac won on content but Barry won on style. Style. Like an Olympic gymnast. Sigh. In some of the clips I saw, he was clearly irritated. I thought it was Mac who was supposed to have the temper?
All in all, I don't think any of these "debates," are very meaningful, since the participants seldom say anything imaginative. Just their stump speech points. Nor do I think they have much impact on the elections. On the Big Media and the soundbite collections, sure, but how many people do they persuade? I think Biden and Palin will be more fun to watch and I won't miss that one.
September 26, 2008
The bogus polls
Hard as it may be to do, these last few weeks of the presidential election are the time to ignore the polls. Many of them will be phony from here on out, as the polling companies weight their results on the Dem side to satisfy their clients, usually partisan-Dem Big Media.
If mystery-man Barry somehow proves more compelling than "reporting-for-duty" Kerry did in 2004, and the turnout on election day is wholly different (packed, for instance, with bright-eyed Dem youth), then the polls might be meaningful. Otherwise, there'll be a repeat of 2004, when the polls showed right up until election day that Kerry was going to take it. Then he lost by three million votes. There's already some indication that Barry could lose by a lot more.
Dems use bailout for radical pork
I had a suspicion the Dems would want to prolong the economic agony as a way to help their presidential candidate. When the economy falters, as the saying goes, the voters turn to the party out of power. Hence liberal Big Media's partisan assertion all year that we are in a recession, despite the lack of statistical evidence for it.
But it never occurred to me the Dems were so cynical as to try to use the bailout bill to benefit the very groups whose radical missions (in pursuing no-money-down minority housing loans) helped create the mess. No, not Freddie and Fannie, but La Raza, ACORN, and the Urban League.
The Seablogger calls it "a kind of creeping civil war, conducted through politics, in accordance with revolutionary theory," which Mac probably knew about and was determined to thwart when he pulled his return-to-the-Capitol-to-look-presidential stunt. Presidential politics has always been fierce, and 2008 seems especially so, though I suppose if we'd lived in the 1850s, in the runup to the real, shooting Civil War, we might think this was all pretty tame.
September 18, 2008
Houston after Ike
The Texas Rainmaker, who did not evacuate, has a good post on the storm, the aftermath, and the continued deprivations in the old (1830s-40s) capital of Texas. His photographs tell the story of downed trees and signage, blocked roads and long lines at gas stations and groceries better than words. Our evacuated friends from Kingwood, on Houston's northwest side, are still in Austin, but not staying at the rancho as they have two dogs. A wonder they found a hotel that would take the dogs, but they did.
September 17, 2008
The six-gun tamed the West
September 14, 2008
Sitemeter, yech
I see I'm not the only one who dislikes the new Sitemeter. It's much harder to figure out than the old version, which I was used to digesting at a glance. No more.
UPDATE: Apparently overwhelmed with unhappy customers, they "rolled back" to the original. Yes!
September 11, 2008
Barry's intentions
In the verbal rugby at my OCS email group over why we should/should not vote for Barry, his champions have turned to CAPITAL LETTERS to express their indignation that the establishment media is wasting time over Barry's "allegedly" calling Sarah a pig, when it should be discussing "the issues." Good Dems always get exercised when the MSM steps (oh, so, momentarily) outside its habit of criticizing Republicans to criticize one of their nobles. It certainly is one of the few, if not the only times, the sycophantic media has questioned His Holiness.
I side with Treacher on this one. Barry certainly did mean to call Sarah a pig, and his audience certainly picked it up that way. Just as he meant to give Hillary the finger back in the spring when she dared to criticize him in a debate. He folds under pressure. Not a good sign for a wouldbe president. Moreover, after twenty years in the pews of his racist Chicago church, Barry'd probably like to whack Whitey a lot more than he has. But he knows that he can't do that and get elected. So he allows himself to wallow in the safer mud of sexism. As for "the issues," that's the standard Dem dodge, only trotted out when they seem to be in danger of losing. As, indeed, they certainly are. Surprise, surprise.
September 09, 2008
Waiting for Ike
Too soon to be sure but Lower Colorado River Authority meteorologist Bob Rose says we could be in for heavy rain and strong winds if, after going ashore near Corpus Christi Saturday morning, the remnants of Ike decide to head north to Austin. It's more likely now, as the new track has it coming to us as still a tropical storm. So we'll plan on battening the hatches.
Adios Joe?
Unlike the ridiculous idea of Sarah's self-destruction, Barry's dumping of aging political plagiarist Joe Biden in favor of, say, Hillary Rodham, doesn't seem so far-fetched. Some otherwise-sane people are betting on it. More likely, I think, is Barry finally accepting one of those town hall invitations that Mac has been extending since, oh, at least June--so I can retire the counter over there on the sidebar.
Via Instapundit.
UPDATE: Here's Spengler, in the Asia Times, predicting Barry surely will lose without HRC.
September 07, 2008
What media bias?
September 04, 2008
Fresh Bilge: Palin vs Obama
Alan Sullivan, the Seablogger, is a good writer and thinker. I don't always agree with him, but I always enjoy reading him. But this time he outdid his usual good work, so I'm posting it. An excerpt:
"The cultural contrasts of Obama and McCain are stark enough, but those of Palin and Obama are even more revealing, because these two are contemporaries: their clash will define America in the Twenty-First Century, while Biden and McCain are figures from a receding past. From this point on, it will really be Palin versus Obama. And she will win, because she is a formed and grounded grownup, while Obama is only a character in his own memoir."
Read the whole thing. Unless you dislike Palin. In which case, what are you doing here?
September 03, 2008
Watching the RNC
I said I might and sure enough I did. Couldn't resist Pajamas TV, so I signed up for the cheapie subscription for three months and enjoyed the RNC dog-and-pony show with conservative/libertarian comment, for a change. Excellant video and audio with rare delays, only two I recall.
Especially liked Fred Thompson's line about how Baby Barry will raise taxes, but not to worry, it won't be your taxes, just business taxes. So, he continued, if you don't buy bread, milk, or gasoline, or get a paycheck from a business, large or small, why, you have nothing to worry about. Heh.
But Lieberman was the best. Interesting wrinkle, having the passionate maverick Dem talk up his friend, the maverick Republican, and his maverick veep. I like the way he starts almost every sentence with "my friends," rather than "my fellow Americans," or some such. Or no salutation at all. Makes you feel like a friend.
Tonight, it's Sarah's turn, and I sure don't want to miss her. I'll be surprised if she doesn't top BB's reported forty million viewers for his Obamacles peroration.
September 02, 2008
That enthralling voice
Baby Barry as the corrupted wizard Saruman from LOTR? So says the Seablogger in what some might see as a stretch. But when it works, it works, and it sure works for me.
Is Mac inside Barry's OODA Loop?
Chet Richards, one of the guardians of the theories and memory of the late, great Air Force fighter-pilot and military strategist John Boyd questions this contention of Charlie Martin's in American Thinker re Mac's choice of Sarah Palin for veep. Martin uses the term too loosely, suggests CR who says it's too early to tell. CR's claim that the pick was predictable, however, is probably unique. No one else I know of expected Mac to pick a woman. I think the old Navy fighter pilot, indeed, has generally been inside Baby Barry's OODA Loop for some time now with his sharp, quickly-produced teevee ads. Whether he can stay there remains to be seen.
August 31, 2008
The Hostess With The Moosest
The incomparable Mark Steyn weighs in on the relative "experience" of Baby Barry vs Gov. Palin:
"Sarah Palin and Barack Obama are more or less the same age, but Governor Palin has run a state and a town and a commercial fishing operation, whereas (to reprise a famous line on the Rev Jackson) Senator Obama ain't run nothin' but his mouth. She's done the stuff he's merely a poseur about."
Read it and weep, Dems. Your historic moment done come and gone. Just like in '04. Heh.
August 30, 2008
Dems come unglued
They're desperate, I tell you. Absolutely desperate over Baby Barry and Old Joe having to face the combination of Mac and Sarah. Faux filmmaker and famous fatso Michael Moore is even celebrating Gustav. He doesn't care how many the storm kills so long as it disrupts the Repub convention. Old news actually, considering all the lies he's told in his "documentaries."
Via Instapundit.
UPDATE: A quick lesson in how an anti-Palin site was set up by one of Baby Barry's supporters. And, inevitably, she's being dissed for being a smalltown beauty queen. But by another woman?
MORE: MSM: Mac, "the underdog," is taking a big risk with Sarah. Yeah, $7 million worth in 24 hours!
August 29, 2008
Sarah's a lock
The Hilarity Clintonistas are gobsmacked. They should be. So is Reagan's old political director, Ed Rollins. He should be, too. Forget the nattering MSM. They get no votes and, increasingly, influence none.
Via Fresh Bilge.
Swatting flies
August 12, 2008
Live from the Georgian government
The Georgian Ministry of Foreign Affairs is live-blogging on Blogger, apparently as a solution to early denial-of-service hacking of its servers by the Russians. It helps to have a map, and Georgian news agency link, which, along with the blog entries, show that Russian talk of a halt to its invasion is mainly propaganda. Their bombing and killing continue.
UPDATE: Indeed, Georgia calls B.S. on Russian and media reports:
"Russian occupation forces are fully operational in Georgia with at least 12,000 troops throughout the country, many of them outside of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. This is in no way represents a 'halt to military operations' or a 'halt to war' as many media outlets are reporting."
CNN News Alerts
I knew the first time I got one of these new malware creations in the email that I hadn't signed up for it because I despise CNN. The second time I read some of the "headlines," stuff designed as grabbers, like the death of an entire major league baseball team in a plane crash. I Googled the item just to be sure, found nothing and spiked the email. Dustbury is getting a lot more of them than I am.
August 02, 2008
What's up with Explorer 7?
First it was FireFox freezing all the time. So I switched to IE7. Now it's refusing to load some pages, including my own here, throwing up "abort" messages. LGF says it's somehow related to Sitemeter. Swell. Well, there's always Safari, I guess. Or Opera, if push comes to shove. Could we please go back to Web 1.0? At least it worked, most of the time.
UPDATE: Seems to be fixed. Except for visits to Sitemeter, itself.
July 29, 2008
Referrals
A selection of search engine requests that bring some folks here:
Cow appreciation day Always glad to oblige.
How to extend battery leads for electric trolling motor Trust me, you really don't want to do that.
He influenced millions beyond his time He did, too. As opposed to some about whom this is said.
Texas Longhorn scroll saw pattern I could use one of those.
Honda single overhead cam exploded view This is something I definitely hope to avoid.
Alexander Fullerton The Gate Crashers One great book I heartily recommend.
Juridiction trasnslator english to arabic open porn free software Uh, uh, not here. Next door, maybe.
Which city in Texas is the first word that was ever spoken on the moon ? Hint, it starts with H and it's not Hereford.
Inspired by Dustbury.
July 27, 2008
Scooped
The Dinosaur Media continues to ignore the Edwards-Hunter sex scandal which every supermarket shopper is aware of and the conservative blogosphere has been chewing over for five days. Thus the DM is merely making itself look ridiculous. Not to mention double-standard. Even their Brit subsidiary, with a lot less to lose politically, is upstaging them. The "progressive" blogs--the so-called netroots, or nutroots if you disagree--also are out to lunch, so far.
UPDATE: Well, Fox is in.
July 20, 2008
Wrap rage solution?
I'm not sure this tool is much better than using a box cutter (which is cheaper) or even a pair of stout scissors. But it's an option. I have noticed that the clam shell wrapping has become somewhat easier to open, on some packages at least, by getting your thumbnail between the seams and prying it apart. Presumably it's the manufacturers who are making it easier to do that.
Via Instapundit.
June 28, 2008
Classical fluegelhorn
Soothing little Bach piece here, though I wonder at the guy's armature, bent over the way he is. That's it for a while, as we fly off to California this evening. See y'all next Saturday.
Via Rene's Apple.
June 27, 2008
Sure beats Doc Martens
June 24, 2008
Keeping it clean
I don't like reading it, and so I don't write it. And that's one reason I won't write an obit-hymn for George Carlin, who I think mainly contributed to the coarsening of our culture. If you disagree, you can join in the wake here, but to paraphrase some of the commenters there, he seemed to have become just an old liberal ranting at conservatives; I thought he was brilliantly funny when I was twenty-five, but I grew up. He didn't.
June 18, 2008
Ace-lanch
Gracias to Ace of Spades HQ for linking to this picture of bluebonnets. My Sitemeter is recording what (for me) is an unusual amount of traffic. Only a few hundred or so, thus far, but that's about twice what I normally see by this time of the day. Ace averages something like thirty-three thousand hits a day--he had more a million in May--so when he links to you you're bound to notice it.
June 16, 2008
Associated Mess
When I was a daily journalist I had to get used to Associated Press stealing a few paragraphs from my articles, slapping their own (frequently wrong) headline on the result and calling it journalism. It wasn't their journalism. It really wasn't mine, either, just parts of mine. But that was the way they did business. Still do, as far as I can tell, except now they've bought into (heck, they lead it sometimes) the Bush-bad, war-bad, economy-bad narratives. So I have to laugh when these frequently-inaccurate thieves threaten to sue over bloggers partially quoting from and linking to their stuff. This is probably the best solution: boycott 'em. This is a funny reply. This is a nice roundup. And this is worth thinking about. People in glass houses, etc.
June 11, 2008
Why oil is $140 a barrel
Texas, Louisiana & Mississippi have the only coasts where oil drilling is allowed--overlooking an estimated eighty-six billion barrels of oil. Enjoy your high gas prices, folks. Better sell the Volvo.
Via Rene's Apple.
May 17, 2008
Maybe Mahmoud ain't so mad
Afterall, he's getting away with murder in Iraq, and the Bush administration and Congress ain't doing nothin', while Barry talks about a sit-down to understand Mahmoud's pain.
UPDATE: So, when Bush does the only thing he ever does about this matter, i.e. talk, he manages to enrage Barry, Hilarity, Nancy, etc. For why? Because they won't do anything, either, and don't like to be reminded. Such unanimity.
May 16, 2008
Click like the Web depends on it
It might, in terms of old media's successful migration to the Internet, and new media's survival. So click on the ads, the ones some popular software is designed to squelch, and buy something now and then. Because, for the most part, paid subscriptions don't work, and so without the ads paying the way, poof, no more Web media.
Via Instapundit
May 15, 2008
Waiting to hear
May 09, 2008
Downtime
Case you tried to leave a message in the past twenty-four hours, or so, and found it impossible, it was because Yahoo's hosting service had a system-wide problem going on. It seems to be fixed now.
May 08, 2008
Old school
Sometimes when you can't do a piece exactly the way you want, giving up and just summarizing the main points is about all you need, as Cobb shows.
May 05, 2008
Stuff white people supposedly like
Hating their parents, for instance. Really? Marijuana, they say. Oh, please. Sarah Silverman. Who? This list has been getting a lot of play across the 'sphere. But it's bogus. Only liberals need take it seriously. If even them.
May 03, 2008
McCain: More conservative than you think
More Burkean than, for instance, Gingrich: "To movement conservatives, McCain represented heresy. But to the conservative movement, he represented a return to home truth." --Jonathan Rauch
May 02, 2008
Heresy: fair and balanced
This day in history: Democrat attacks black children with fire hose, dogs, and clubs, then jails them!
Via Instapundit
Selflessly orbiting Earth since 1957
Comrades. It's Laika the Space Dog, Hero of the Soviet Union (which, unfortunately, collapsed before the selfless mutt could return) with an official May Day signal to Obamunists, etc. Roll the tanks!
Visiting Israel
Had a nice chat this morning on Skype with Snoopy the Goon in Israel. It was almost like visiting the country itself, though, of course, I never left my chair in the study at the rancho. Mr. Goon, who prefers to remain anonymous, reminded me that I have said I want to visit in person, and I do, but there are too many complications at the moment. Mr. B.'s mom is afraid of going, hostage, I think, to the MSM's drumbeat of rockets and suicide bombings. Like the way they cover Iraq, all blood and guts, and no in-between. I doubt she would let me take Mr. B. by himself, and otherwise arrangements would have to be made for taking care of him while I was gone. So, for now, an actual visit will remain no more than a future intention. But Skype brought me a little closer. My voice, at least. About fifty kilometers (thirty-one miles) from Jerusalem, in fact.
April 30, 2008
American packaging, Part II
Even a box cutter couldn't penetrate the blister pack Miriam at Miriam's Ideas recently encountered on a product from Amazon. She finally got the staff at her local hardware store to get the plastic packaging off the product. Mr. B. and I have struggled with this as well. I had heard the problem was being solved by the manufacturers. Apparently not.
April 29, 2008
The new fascism
More, inevitably, on Barry, the Chicago hate-America crowd (Ayers & Wright) he surrounds himself with, and his nutty wife who talks about how he will save our souls, whether we like it or not:
"The primary question in my head about Obama is beginning to move beyond 'Is this guy a lightwight?' to a simpler one: 'Is this guy simply a walking lie, in a deep way and on multiple levels?'"
Either that or, like his terrorist pal and racist thug minister of twenty years, he's truly creepy. At best, I think, we can all Hope to Change the subject. Go ahead Dems, save your party from collapse. Pick the lying Hillary.
MORE: Occurs to me, reading these comments and links at Instapundit, that what Rev. God damn America was up to yesterday at the National Press Club might have been getting even with Barry for falling asleep in church once too often. But, hey, the NAACP loved it. They sure have changed.
April 28, 2008
Too beautiful to miss
Computer sewing machines
The only thing I could legitmately use a sewing machine for would be sewing some of the missing buttons back on my shirts. But there's hardly enough missing to justify buying one, much less paying $300 for a computer-driven one.
But it's tempting. Embroidery, for instance. The computer ones store digital templates, apparently. You can even design your own embroidery on your PC and run it through. I got on this idea from an ad at Miriam's Ideas. Then found this cool site that shows how a sewing machine works. I never used one. But I watched my maternal grandmother run a mechanical, push-pedal model years ago. I can still hear it and smell the lubricating oil.
April 27, 2008
The savage South
You'd think, the Civil War being over for, what?, one hundred and forty-three years, that the old North-South division would be healed by now, or at least papered over. Especially since immigration has seen to it that only a small fraction of the population (including me) can still claim ancestry to either side.
Uh-uh. Southern Appeal points out in commenting on this Newsweek column lamenting the "savage, unsophisticated" South's influence in national politics, that the split resurfaces in the MSM with every presidential election. It's a handy excuse, if you're a Northern liberal, as much of the influential MSM is. No Northern liberal has won the presidency since JFK in 1960--and it's becoming obvious, even to the most obtuse, that neither Barry or Hilarity is going to break the mold.
The Irish Brigade
Reading the History of the 29th Massachusettes Infantry Regiment, 1861-65, last night, I came to the part, in the summer of 1862, where they were assigned to the Irish Brigade. The 29th went through the battle of Antietam, or Sharpsburg, with the Irish. But they were transferred to another brigade right before Fredericksburg in early December. Putting the book aside for a bit, I went Web wandering and chanced upon this touching clip from Gods and Generals, at Southern Appeal, on the Irish Brigade's fateful charge at Fredericksburg. It took about fifty percent casualties. The 29th was luckily held in reserve throughout the battle.
April 26, 2008
Yellowstone NP
Cavorting elk, as the Seablogger puts it, on Yellowstone Lake. Just one of several good ones, including some he shot himself, on in a brief Panoramio photo trip through the park I've never been to. Is it too late to go, I wonder? Probably.
April 19, 2008
Happy Passover
Hag Pesah Sameach!
Picture (a photo?!) courtesy of Simply Jews
Some people ask for the moon
Bill Roggio, embed blogger/journalist in Iraq, for instance: Fair play? From the NYTimes? You've got to be kidding.
Via Instapundit
April 18, 2008
Gazan charity suicide
Interesting how radical a departure the blogosphere sometimes takes from the specific wording of a police press release that "foul play is not suspected," to "found dead, probably murdered," in this case of an Austin man who ran a charity for Gaza children said to be mainly interested in teaching them to hate Jews.
Via Instapundit, who also decided, against the police evidence, to call the death "suspicious."
UPDATE: Solomonia has now linked to the police release and changed his headline to "probably suicide." Of course, the police could be wrong, but with no evidence to the contrary...
April 15, 2008
Saving Windows XP
Glad to see somebody is trying to save it. I rather like XP, but I clung to Windows 98 until support for it was almost non-existent. I hope to do the same with XP. Microsoft doesn't like you to do this, of course, but doing it is more common than not--especially when Windows Vista already has spawned a book of workarounds for its various headaches. Yech.
April 13, 2008
Yank bashers
Among them, ah, yes, the famous ungrateful English. But these ones do have an excuse:
"Like many other Germanic and Scandanavian tribes, the English have been cowed by self-doubt in recent decades, and have turned from be[r]serking empire-hurlers into a nation of social workers, drones and emigrants."
Actually, they have many more than just one excuse. Quite a lot, really.
Via Simply Jews
April 10, 2008
Jamiel's Law
The killing of the Shaw boy--by all accounts a straight arrow with promise--by an illegal Mexican immigrant gangbanger just out of jail, is very sad. But, hey, L.A. is a "sanctuary city" with a Hispanic mayor and a liberal daily who both promote illegal immigration from Mexico. Undocumented workers, they want us to call them. When they work. Most of them do, here. Taking jobs whites don't want, they like to say. Bull, I say. But the street beggers here are always black or white. Never Hispanic. Gangs? A few. Nothing like East L.A., of course, but where else is like East L.A.? Calcutta, maybe. But while Austin is not officially a sanctuary city for illegals, that is definitely the political preference. This stuff is getting way out of hand, and, like so many other American trends, the backlash seems to be getting strongest in California. Maybe Shaw's death will do some good, so to speak. Bless his heart. Cobb, who prefers Mexican national to illegal immigrant (might as well be specific) has a lot more.
UPDATE: Austin, indeed, is not a sanctuary city in the sense that police jurisdiction over them is limited, but is in the sense that no public services may be denied them based on their illegality.
April 04, 2008
Barry: the lost first draft
"As far as I could tell, I was the only black man in the company, a source of shame for me, but, hey, let's face it: pretty good job security. After a while I realized I didn't even have to hide the Tetris games."
Much better than the rewritten autobio that was finally published. More true-to-life, you know?
Funny man in town
If the weekend show that starts today wasn't on the other side of town, I might actually drop by to see the satire master of the Web. As it is, I have Mr. B. to tote around to Little League stuff and etcetera. So I'll wait to read his followup post on how he found our fair city.
Meanwhile, you shouldn't miss this profile of the show's host, Continental Club owner Steve Wertheimer. For a hole-in-the-wall that's hard to turn around in even when it's not crowded, CC is an international legend.
March 25, 2008
Niggahz
Little Miss Attila seems to agree with Cobb, who says talk about race never works. He says it's because we can't get past our own self-interest. She would like to see a national shut-up about race, instead of the conversation Barry implies we're going to be having with him until November. As Cobb says, everyone else can rest easy, this is just a black-white thing. Lucky them. Barry has no choice, of course, having painted himself into a corner with what Hitchens calls his thug priest. He now has to run as a black candidate. But we don't have to listen to him. LMA, meanwhile, finds that some white kids are helping to undermine the ancient division by undercutting the famous racial slur. They go around calling each other "my niggah." It's all in the spelling, and the pronunciation. I agree with LMA, however, that Jeremiah Wright, Minister Farrakhan and O.J. Simpson are worthy of the original spelling and pronunciation.
Via Baldilocks
March 24, 2008
Barry's mountebank
You can believe the usual prevarication of the Democrat house organ MSM ("the pastor flap") that poor ole Rev. Jeremiah Wright's words were cherry picked or taken out of context by that nasty Fox News, whose alternative, contradictory voice they cannot stand. Or you can take the time to hear him out, in complete context, in his post 9/11 America-Had-It-Coming Memorial service. Courtesy of an obviously-angry Filipino, Wretchard of the Belmont Club, who mourns fifteen compatriots, ordinary folks lost in the Twin Towers.
March 22, 2008
Racial polarization
I agree with VDH that, if you think racial attitudes are divisive now, just wait, as he predicts, til you see the outcome of the Dems' Pennsylvania primary and the legacy of Obama's defeat for the presidency. I always thought the fellow might be nominated but never believed he could win the general election. That should be obvious now that he's taken to preaching to us about slavery and oppression and making offhand remarks about "typical white people." He was a novelty before, a black man running for office promising to transcend race. Now, with his refusal to disassociate himself from his anti-American, racist pastor, he's just another black scold in the JJackson, ASharpton race hustler mode, and white people aren't going to buy it. Oh, some of them will, sure. But there aren't enough of them to elect Barry. And the resulting black anger could be shocking--or would be if we hadn't already had the preview that started it all, the "KKK of A" rantings of Barry's paranoid pastor of twenty years and counting.
March 21, 2008
Return of the blood libel
Russians aren't just having trouble with democracy, folks. Passover is coming. So they've decided to turn back the clock on anti-Semitism and warn Christians to hide their children. Isn't that special?
March 17, 2008
Hold on to your Confederate money, etc.
The Seablogger, whose income has long been derived from his stock market investments, urges the rest of us, whose current income may be derived from 401K retirement accounts, not to panic this week as Wall Street goes wacko. "Keep calm, don’t throw good money after bad, or vice versa."
If Oprah left, why not Barry?
This, to me, is one of the most interesting aspects of the controversy over Sen. Obama and Rev. Wright--which might cost the O man the Pennsylvania primary. The famous television hostess was a Wright parishioner until she left the black-liberation theology congregation in South Chicago. Obama, whose half-white background would seem to make his membership more intellectual than emotional, never left. Cobb says we're unfairly focusing on Barry's membership, when we should realize that BLT is pervasive in the black church and not unusual at all. Then why did the easygoing Oprah see that it was not to her advantage, but Barry, the supposed unifying architect of "hope" and "change," did not?
March 06, 2008
Prosperity unimaginable
I always enjoy Victor Davis Hanson, but never more so than when he's comparing America's present to its past:
"Our 1972 Olds 98 (my dad bought it used) in terms of reliability, comfort, ease of driving, and safety was a relic, a deathtrap, a clunker compared to a 2007 Honda Accord or Toyota Camry. None of these considerations appear in statistics about income, unemployment, purchasing power, etc. After all, how do you measure the value of a lap-top with wifi, or the notion that you can sit at Starbucks and have a 10-million volume library at your fingertips? What does one pay for that privilege?"
He mentions a 1930s family with its wood-burning stove and prize-possession radio. Reminded me of my Mississippi grandmother, who still had both in the mid-1950s. I wonder, though, whether Americans today don't just take their affluence for granted and get upset when they can't afford more? Making the entitlement "promises" of a Barry or Hilarity attractive.
March 05, 2008
Stuff Black People Like
Get educated. Hell, get churched, as Cobb might have said, but didn't. Classic stuff here. A fun read.
February 24, 2008
Climate Debate Daily
Global warming threat or global warming bamboozle? Get both sides of the alleged anthropogenic issue, daily. I like this new site by two New Zealand professors so much that I blogrolled it. It's the very thing the poltroonish MSM should be giving us, but, having pretty much come down on the threat side, can't be trusted to do it consistently.
Morphing beauty
I like this intriguing look at how beauty in women is ever the same, even while different. It's about Hollyweird actresses, but we won't let that bother us. Especially not when most of them are the classic ones. I filed it under science, because it's really about genetics.
Via Instapundit
February 14, 2008
The multicult
91 Sharia is Englishe as tea and scones,
92 So everybody muste get stoned.
93 The pilgryms shuffled for the door
94 To face the rule of the Moor;
95 Poets, Professors, Starbucks workers
96 Donning turbans, veils and burqqas.
97 As they face theyr fynal curtan
98 Of Englande folk, one thynge is certan:
99 Dying by theyr own thousande cuts,
100 The Englande folk are folking nuts.
101 BURMA SHAVE
From Iowahawk's brilliant, fractured Chaucer: The Tale of the Asse-Hatte
February 12, 2008
Food for thought, etc.
My eyes have been bothering me lately. Getting old. Maybe I need to eat more carrots.
"A sliced Carrot looks like the human eye. The pupil, iris and radiating lines look just like the human eye...and science shows that carrots greatly enhance blood flow to and function of the eyes."
These kind of forwardings around the Web usually just get deleted. But I read this one.
Via Hodgepodge from the Geranium Farm
January 24, 2008
Anti-Jihadi comic book
January 17, 2008
"See Rock City"
There was a time, long ago in my vanished youth, when I would see these words painted in white on the sides of old barns on major arterial roads all over the South and as far north as Illinois. Dew on the Kudzu reminded me of it in a piece on the aging tourist attraction on Lookout Mountain, TN. The mountain, with its Lover's Leap, drew my paternal grandparents on their Chattanooga honeymoon in the winter of 1904. I know because I still have a little sewing kit with a yellowed plastic cover over a fading colored paper insert on the top that my grandmother kept as a souvenir. Rock City opened later, in 1932, and it's still trying to keep up with the times. Most of its painted ads have also vanished as the old barns have fallen down, but the place now has a Website, and a Webcam. Looks overcast this morning, up there in the clouds.
January 15, 2008
Defending prostitute dignity
The blogosphere--criticizing the NYTimes' chief cretin columnist Bob Herbert--boldly goes where few have gone before:
"Are doctors humiliated when patients show up and expect them to palpate and attend to their naked body parts?"
Beats me, but I hope not.
January 13, 2008
Israel banner
I seem to have lost my "I Stand With Israel" banner on the top left of this site's first page. Indeed, Jack Lewis dot net, from whence the banner came, seems to be off the air, as well. I had noticed that JL previously had tried to limit people using the banner, but now it's gone completely. I'll have to hunt around for a substitute. I've tried uploading thumbnails for the sidebar but no luck so far. I'm either too inept or Movable Type is too obtuse. Or something.
UPDATE: Then it returned, at least temporarily. Links to a dogs and cats site, now, instead of Lewis's.
MORE: Three days later, it's still wavering. Sometimes it's there, sometimes it isn't. I'm going to have to start seeking an alternative, I guess.
January 10, 2008
Another dumb S.W.A.T. raid?
Instapundit has an interesting post on the actions of sheriff's deputies in Denver, enforcing a court order. He takes pains to post both sides, the complainants and the cops, but then he can't resist ending it with a swiping bit of irrelevance more worthy of a snarling liberal than a dispassionate libertarian: "I doubt they'd have gone this route in a fancy neighborhood nearly as quickly as in a trailer park."
As an old cop reporter who has frequently been infuriated by police behavior, I must say they'd have to be terminally stupid not to treat a trailer park differently than a fancy neighborhood, considering they're statistically a lot more likely to be gunned down in the former than the latter. That Prof. Reynolds--whose good stuff I read every day--doesn't seem to realize this doesn't speak too well of his understanding of law enforcement. Or is it just another example of the blogosphere's tendency to go off half-cocked?
The gate keepers' lament
Columbia University, denying an Iranian report that some professors are enroute to Tehran to apologize to Mahmoud-the-mad for insults on his recent New York visit, includes an interesting little slap:
"We ask that a clarification be added....and that verification of the facts even during the era of Google's news value-neutral, digital age continues to be warranted."
Ah, yes, let's bemoan the end of the days when the gatekeepers got to decide "news value." Boo hoo.
Via Simply Jews
SGT Jill Stevens
January 06, 2008
The Year of the 6th Cav
My old Army bud Chuck Waldron and I like to recall our eight to nine months as platoon leaders in the Sixth Armored Cavalry Regt., 1968-69, before going to Vietnam as light-infantry advisors to SVN militia. Among other things we guarded Nixon's inauguration, though me and my guys got to sit in the warm armory while he and his had to be outside in the cold. I know he'll be interested in this Civil War enthusiast's plan to spend this year tracing the then-new regular Army regiment's activities through their annual returns for 1862. I wonder when the unicorn shoulder patch was authorized? Before, or after, the regiment served here in Austin under Custer in 1865-68 as post-war federal occupiers?
December 29, 2007
He's with Fred
Beldar, our favorite "trial" lawyer--even if he is in Houston--says it's time for us Texans to shell out for our fav GOP candidate, even if it 's just $25. In order to have any say in choosing the nominee, that is, since the choice is likely to have been made by the time the Texas primary rolls around. He's for Fred, of course, and makes a good case. I may be just a little too liberal for Fred since I still like Rudy. But I agree with him that the Reps are going to run the table on the Dems next year, whichever candidate is chosen.
Sharp humor ahead
Cobb vows to be funnier, skewier, in '08. I can relate. Also to his dismissal of a certain overcrowded city to our north as Fart Worth. But while I agree that Houston is an armpit, I would disagree that it's the one of the South. That label still goes to Atlanta, still the place everyone down South has to go through even on the way to hell.
December 18, 2007
That other Dec. 25 event
Some forget the historical significance of Dec. 25--other than being Christmas Day--as in Gen. Washington's crossing of the Delaware River in 1776 to attack the mercenary Hessians at Trenton, N.J. Well, Fred Thompson remembers, and he wants us all to commemorate the date by exercising our Second Amendment rights (thus far, anyway) by buying guns. Just think, we were one capsize away from losing our first president, who had this penchant for standing up in overburdened boats.
December 08, 2007
Happy Percanat
A shameless effort to attract hits, via Simply Jews and Linky Love. If you don't understand, don't worry.
December 06, 2007
Eat right, exercise, die anyway
Scott, The Fat Guy, is lamenting his newly-acquired healthy change of life. It sounds awful, especially the colds, the headaches and the insensate right hand. I did the diet already, I didn't drink to begin with or gamble, but I was steeling myself to start exercising again, take cholesterol-reducing pills and quit smoking. Maybe the last three require a rethink.
November 28, 2007
Missing Mark
As one of the recent commenters at Mark in Mexico says, the last post in July was politically provacative enough--a Puebla state reservoir lined with toxic sludge--to make you think the proprietor might have joined the list of Mexico's involuntarily disappeared journalists. In any case, the blog has been inactive for so long now that the spammers are trying to take it over. It had become so popular that it was regularly cited by Instapundit, so it's hard to believe that it would just stop, without an adios, and its author vanish into cyberspace.
November 06, 2007
Death of a young princess
November 01, 2007
Going ashore
The Seablogger has become the land blogger, selling his cabin cruiser and moving ashore:
"It is a burden shed, but also a grief acquired. I shall not forget this day."
I can't quite imagine selling the family sloop, a mere pocket cruiser, and I've never even lived on it.
Google's censors
The Seablogger says he feels dirty everytime he uses Google now. LGF notes the search giant's latest political move, leaving up anti-Semitic videos on YouTube but taking down a reasoned anti-Jihadi speech by Robert Spencer at Dartmouth--who has a link to the video elsewhere, though I must say it's of remarkably poor quality and so echoey it's hard to understand his words. These kinds of games can kill a business, even one as big as Google--the fifth most valuable corporation in the U.S. with a market value of $217 billion. Me, I'm making it a point to use other search engines, such as Yahoo, Ask, and MSN.
October 30, 2007
Gas-savers
Here's three tips for getting the most for your gas money at the station: Pump first thing in the morning, pump slow, and don't pump when the tanker truck is delivering the stuff. Sounds good.
October 26, 2007
Whew
Making the 1998 ban on Internet taxes permanent failed. Instead, it's to be four more years (House) or seven more (Senate), meaning they now need to work out a compromise on the length. Hope they split the difference. But why not permanent? Pols just never met a tax they didn't like, at least a little.
October 17, 2007
Sell out/buy in
I enjoy reading Cobb, a conservative black engineer, and descendent of a freed black Union soldier in the Civil War, who is decidedly not one of the race hustlers so prevalent these days. Particularly like his current post on who's a race sell-out and who isn't. And this remark by one his commenters:
"If you keep your credit clean, and save some money, you will have an easier time managing your financial life in America. If you don't commit crimes and treat people ethically so they don't sue you, you won't have to worry about the justice system. Them's the rules."
Yep. Worth the read.
October 13, 2007
Goin' campin'
We're off to Krause Springs with the Cub Scouts. No further posting until we return tomorrow. Adios.
October 12, 2007
Bloggin' from the hospital
The Seablogger, who is selling his boat-home and moving ashore, is temporarily hospitalized in his longtime struggle with leukemia. Yet he keeps on blogging. Dedication, or boredom? A little of both, it seems.
September 26, 2007
The gate keeper's lament
Pity the elite gate keepers of information. They're being usurped by the Internet and they just can't stand it. Tough.
Via Instapundit
September 23, 2007
Caution: race hustlers at work
How long could Jesse and Al and Maxine continue their shenanigan marches in Jena, La.? Not long if their allies in the MSM weren't securely along for the ride, playing up the emotions of the issue and downplaying the facts. Indeed, obscuring the facts.
September 19, 2007
Sailor far from the sea
All of us who have been reading the Seablogger's remarkably candid journal of his struggle to say farewell to his alcoholic and ill partner have learned more than we knew about dealing with sorrow. The proprietress of Just Muttering has a good summary of the story taking place in Fargo, a place I admit I pretty much thought of only as a movie before this. My mother's sister was an alcoholic whose behavior sometimes replicated what the Seablogger is going through. Unlike his partner, my aunt eventually killed herself. I didn't know what to think about that at the time, but now I think maybe she did us all a favor.
September 16, 2007
Rare readers
Welcome. Rare, indeed. My hit counter has dwindled to pathetic. Live by the search engines, die by the search engines, I guess. Oh, well, I have yard work to do, and other things. Enjoy what's here, RR.
September 11, 2007
Never forget
September 06, 2007
The perils of beauty contests
Pity Miss Teen South Carolina, the national laughing stock, because she got nervous. Don't we all? I'm sure the ugly ducklings are having the most fun laughing at her. They finally get to feel superior to someone who was born pretty instead of plain, or worse. The Seablogger has it just right, especially the poor gal's PC indoctrination, which certainly can get confusing if you're not a paid member of the race industry.
September 05, 2007
Here's good news
Bloggers can be as political as they want without restrictions from the FEC, at least.
"The Federal Election Commission announced today that it has unanimously resolved two complaints alleging that Internet blog activity is subject to Commission regulation, finding that the activity is exempt from regulation under the media or volunteer exemption."
Let's hear it for the First Amendment. Be sure to visit the John Kerry Sucks blog in my blogroll, and, uh, oh yeah, Go Fred!
September 01, 2007
Che-Mickey
This has been making the rounds of some of the conservative blogs, though I think it orignated with the Dissident Frogman blog which uses a small version in the flag. I rather like it and wanted to help perpetuate it. Someone should use CafePress to make up some T-shirts to compete with the loony Lefties who revere him. Afterall, even Fidel thought Che Guevara was stupid.
UPDATE: The coveted Che-Mickey shirts are coming to a keyboard near you! Details here.
August 27, 2007
Commenter missed
As inconvenient as it apparently has been for some of my rare but appreciated readers who have not noticeably returned, the TypeKey comment security system has done wonders for my productivity. I no longer have to waste time deleting scores of comment spam which were steadily rising into the hundreds every day. I gave up on trackbacks last year for the same reason, though I wasn't getting any trackbacks, anyhow. But Tom is one rare reader whose vanished comments I especially miss. A fellow OC-504er, who spent his time in Vietnam with the 1st Cav and now commands his local VFW, he was clever enough to track down my sister-in-law's funeral Aug. 6 in Indiana and surprise us by showing up, an hour or so away from his own Ohio River town. Hope you can eventually figure out how to make the registery work, Tom. I'd like to have you back.
August 24, 2007
Firefox blocked
Clicking on the "I Stand With Israel" banner in the upper left-hand corner of our main page, using the Firefox browser, now only gets a blocked page explanation, instead of Jack Lewis's banner page, which you can still get using Explorer or some other browser such as Opera. It seems he's only warring against Firefox, because some users have installed Ad Blocker, which his block page suggests how to defeat. But his pique is not unique. I had already noticed that blogger won't allow me to comment at a blog using the most popular version of their comment-verification software if I arrive with Firefox. Explorer is not a problem. I'm used to Firefox, after many moons of use, but this campaign against it may force me to use Explorer as my default browser again. Opera is too clumsy for my taste.
August 23, 2007
Another country
The past, as the Archenemy blog says, really is another country, and here's a new blog that will take you visiting for as long as you like. You won't get far beyond the haunting portraits of the victims of child labor. Be sure to click on Shorpy's Page for the poignant story of a child laborer at an Alabama coal mine.
UPDATE: Alas, it isn't only the past: There are child miners in Kyrgyz, a former Soviet republic on China's northwestern border, today.
August 22, 2007
Miss Cellania
Miss Cellania is two, after escaping blogger. As blogiversaries (blogaversaries?) go, this one is an event.
August 20, 2007
Top Ten Newspaper Web Sites
The daily made the cut, coming in at No. 8, even getting praise for letting anyone blog on its site. Despite still using what Instapundit calls "a lame and buggy registration scheme." Who knows, maybe they'll drop it, like I's Knoxville News Sentinal (also on the list at No. 6) did.
August 12, 2007
Off to Port A
Leaving tomorrow on our annual trek to the beach at Port Aransas, so no posts until we return on Friday. Only glitch might be the storm brewing in the western Caribbean, which Accuweather's Joe Bastardi, among other meteorologists, forsees sweeping into the Gulf of Mexico later in the week, possibly as a tropical storm. Maybe Dean unless an Atlantic one gets the name first. But he sees the chances of landfall as better for Mexico than the Texas coast. More tropical storm/hurricane argument here on what has been a quiet season so far. We will keep our fingers crossed that Bastardi's right. Not like in 2004 when Ivan, crashing into western Florida and Alabama, sent huge waves across the Gulf to hit and close the beaches at Port A. I remember one almost washed away a family from West Texas who had incautiously spread out their blanket on the sand. They were awash in an instant and struggled up a dune with what remained of their stuff to escape the water.
UPDATE It looks like the name Dean may go to another storm, first, making the Gulf one (if there is a Gulf one) Erin. Unless Dean goes into the Gulf first. Which might not occur before we are back in Central Texas, which would be good. We shall see.
August 10, 2007
Swiss Afghanistan
Imagine Afghanistan as brown and tan and rubble-strewn? Some of it is, certainly, but not the Switzerland-like 10,000-foot "foothills" of the Hindu Kush in these beautiful photos put up by Blackfive of a 91st Cav air assault. Clean out the jihadis, build some hotels and tourism could really take off.
August 02, 2007
A funny
A panda walks into a cafe.
He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires two shots in the air.
"Why?" asks the confused waiter, as the panda makes towards the exit.
The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder.
"I'm a panda," he says, at the door. "Look it up."
The waiter turns to the relevant entry and, sure enough, finds an explanation.
"Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves."
Via Head Butler who offers this serious note.
Road salt
August 01, 2007
The Christian Hallows
The Christian motifs of Book 7 in the Harry Potter series are pretty obvious, from Harry's willing sacrifice of himself to save the world, and his afterlife way-station conversation with the spirit of Dumbledore (Just because it's only in your head, Harry, doesn't mean it isn't real), notwithstanding his decision to return to life to defeat the evil Tom Riddle. Other interesting thoughts on these scenes are here, thanks to No Left Turns, and here at the Sword of Gryffindor and also LaShawn Barber. I was surprised by the intensity of the ideas in Book 7, but had to admit that much of the Potter books have, all along, mirrored Narnia and The Lord of the Rings, whose authors were serious Christians. I am not a Christian at all, but nevertheless find all three series inspiring in our, often oppressively, secular age.
July 14, 2007
Happy Blogiversary to me
It was a year ago today I began scribbling here an average of about three times a day. Despite an Instalanch last December, I still have only a small number of constant readers, who return almost every day. I thank you for your support. Try my book, at the Amazon link near the top of the front page. It's cheap, and you might like it. My hit count from search engines has gone up modestly, from a few dozen a day last summer and fall to eighty or more on many days now. I had even begun to attract more commenters, until last week when I decided I'd had enough of the daily hunt-and-delete for comment spam. I was attracting three hundred or more of them a day, mostly for porn and pills. So I went to a free registration, TypeKey system, the default comment security system for my blog software Movable Type. It completely eliminated the comment spam. I've used TypeKey myself, to comment on blogs like Roger L. Simon, and giving it my email address hasn't come back to haunt me. I don't get much email spam anymore, anyhow. The switch to TypeKey has made my life a lot easier. But, so far, none of my commenters has made the move with me. I regret that, y'all, but I'm sorry. I'm not going back. If Instapundit can do without commenters, except by email, I guess I can, too. If you prefer to do it that way, the address is scribbler AT texasscribbler DOT com.
July 07, 2007
Shameless self-congratulation
Akaky celebrates a milestone, aided and abetted by the lovely Roberta Vasquez:
"...from the day I first mentioned her, my site meter tells me, Roberta Vasquez has always been among the top five reasons why people come to "The Passing Parade," and I would like to take this opportunity to thank her for her help in getting this blog to its 30,000th visitor."
Just goes to show that you can fool Google and its brethren search engines from time to time.
May 10, 2007
Thought-control
"Islam vs Islamists," a taxpayer-funded documentary told novelistically by moderate and radical imams, is being withheld from the public, says Roger L. Simon, one of the few who has seen it:
"PBS is operating here in the manner of similar institutions in the former Soviet Union and in modern day Iran – financing artists and then withholding distribution of their work when it is not deemed ideologically 'correct'. It’s a form of thought-control..."
Well, they wouldn't want Bush's "scare tactics" to look justified, now would they? Read all of Simon's take, and watch the trailer. Then read more about the doc and sign the petition to make it available. What we really need is a petition to dismantle PBS.
May 08, 2007
Those Iranian weapons
You know, the ones killing American troops in Iraq? The ones the politicians never want to talk about and the MSM seldom reports? Pajamas Media serves up a good video interview with an EOD officer who knows the troubling details.
April 23, 2007
Golly, Lance
The blogosphere seems to be competing, here and here, to see who can post the smelliest jokes about former Lance Armstrong grilfriend, singer Sheryl Crow's suggestion that we all save the environment by using one sheet of toilet paper. Or three at the most. Typical celebrity solution. Unlike the jokers my guess is Crow would never, ever, practice what she preaches. Anymore than Al Gore will ever cut back on his electricity.
April 22, 2007
Compact Fluorescent Bulbs
The Fat Guy declines to mount the CFB bandwagon, begun by Instapundit. Scott says they cost a lot more and don't outlast an 89 center from Dollar General.
UPDATE We got a 60W CFB for free at HEB, but after a week of it in the laundry room, Mom doesn't like it. Not just the delay in coming on, which she finds annoying, but “it’s too cold,” she says. Not a warm light like incandescent. I think we’ll wait for LEDs to get cheaper.
April 21, 2007
New blogger mag
A magazine for bloggers and podcasters? A magazine? At least the computer format is interesting.
Via Instapundit.
April 16, 2007
Busy mom
Anne, at Just Muttering is a busy blogger. She has no less than seven blogs, including this one devoted to her knitting, which is pretty cool. But where does she find the time? I have trouble with one.
Conspiracy 101
Bill Whittle offers a long post that is nevertheless worthwhile when encountering celebrity Rosie O'Dim, or in my case an old Army friend I hadn't seen for thirty years when we exchanged email in 2002 and I discovered he thought space aliens were already here and controlling the government and us. Whittle thinks these people are far more commonplace than we know:
"What I am trying to do here is to build a chain of evidence to show a progressively deteriorating epidemic of world-wide insanity, of truly diseased thinking -- not just a misunderstanding or difference of opinion but real, diagnosable mental illness. I want to get to that disease in a minute -- and the cause of it too – but first let’s examine what some people claim to believe in and the mountains of sand one has to carry in order to bury one’s head so deep." (Whittle's emphasis)
Instructive, and entertaining. Via No Left Turns.
April 11, 2007
Computer insecurity
Scott Chaffin considers changing "my brain," The Fat Guy blog, to the Apple OS:
"Turns out that someone, somewhere got hold of my Amex and charged up $2000 worth of plane tickets this weekend. Which set me off in a panic, thinking that I’ve got a keylogger lurking somewhere on the TFG Mainframe from this latest round of virii. What to do, what to do? Run rootkit detectors, download updates from all over, scan deeply, etc., all with No Results Found. What to do, what to do?"
My advice: Get a new Amex card.
April 04, 2007
Thinking on the runway
A blogging first? Thinking on the Margin is blogging from the cabin of his delayed takeoff:
"I don't know if it's just me, but it seems like this kind of stuff is becoming more common. Does anyone else agree or know of any data on airline delays? I am much more prone to fly direct whenever possible than before."
Via Instapundit. The commenters are good, too.
March 26, 2007
The lump on Dr. Perper's head
A true, blogospheric success story. Only in Texas.
"All told, some 10,000 to 15,000 new readers from around the world have found The Brazosport News all because of the lump on Dr. Perper's head."
Writing from the underarm of the petrochemical industry. I kid you not.
March 11, 2007
Stealing content
February 24, 2007
No 1st Amendment in Eqypt
Where "contempt for religion" and "insulting the president" just got student blogger Abdel Kareem Soliman four years behind bars. Funny that the chief liberal American bloggers, who sometimes echo the folks who contend this is just around the corner in Amerika, haven't caught onto him yet.
Via Roger L. Simon.
February 21, 2007
Beat down
Comparing the good Professor Reynolds with a left wing looney over the subject of assassination is a great way to be made to look unlettered and stupid.
February 18, 2007
Messing with the "A" key
I.e., don't, as in do not. Alan Sullivan, the Seablogger, did, trying to retrieve a sesame seed and:
"When I tried to pry off the key cap, the whole delicate underpinning scattered in a shower of miniscule parts...There were three tiny interlocking bits of plastic under the cap. Four nubbets on the underside of the cap were supposed to fit into microscopic openings at the ends of a rectangular pad that was held in place by two harness-arms. These in turn slotted into almost invisible mounting fixtures on the laptop chassis."
A true-life horror story at Fresh Bilge.
February 09, 2007
Shameless political promotion
Akaky, he of (as he puts it) the Vampire State, has raised another $5.75 for his pursuit of the Democrat presidential nomination, after he crosses the street to redeem the bottles at the grocery. But the MSM is still ignoring him and Daily Kos hasn't even taken to sneering at his conservative views and demanding that he, like Joe Lieberman, be run out of the party. So he's taken to slyly including the name of former Playmate Roberta Vasquez in his political posts, a naked (as it were) attempt to raise his hit count. That's because he had previously noticed that his mentions of her had drawn an inordinate large number of search engine visitors.
February 08, 2007
Bessie Coleman
For Black History Month, Miriam at Miriam's Ideas comes up with a thoughtful look at the first licensed African-American pilot, Bessie Coleman, a Texas native who barnstormed across the state.
"Every Memorial Day, black men and women aviators fly in formation over the grave of Bessie Coleman, dropping bouquests of flowers on the grave of the first black woman ever to earn a pilot's license."
The manner of Coleman's premature death is a reminder of how much things have changed since the open-cockpit, wooden spar and wire-and-cloth days of the 1920s.
UPDATE Transcript of good 2002 Voice of America feature on Coleman. And this longer, very detailed feature about her flying in Lockheed-Martin's quarterly magazine Code One.
January 31, 2007
CBS News blogger link
I never heard of Melissa P. McNamara, a blogger for CBS News, until this morning when she posted a comment to this item from last week saying she was linking to it--scroll to the bottom of her blog to find her post on it. Appreciated, of course, but wish she hadn't indicated this was a liberal blog. I suppose it is in some ways, on some issues, such as gays. It certainly is not intended to be, otherwise. So I expect that anybody who follows her link thinking so is likely to be disappointed.
January 21, 2007
Spam-a-rama
Comment and trackback and email spam is really getting out of hand. It's becoming a fulltime job just to delete all the comment and trackback garbage I get on this site. Other bloggers have been complaining about it, too, lately, and we're not alone.
"There are 62 billion spam messages sent every day, IronPort says, up from 31 billion last year. Now, spam accounts for three of every four e-mails sent, according to another anti-spam firm, MessageLabs. Image spam is a big part of the resurgence of unwanted e-mail. By using pictures instead of words in their messages, spammers are able to evade filters designed to detect traditional text-based ads."
Image spam I have been spared so far. Stock-promotion email spam I'm used to, also pharmaceuticals promotions in comment and trackback spam. Movable Type catches a lot of it, but some slips through. But lately I've been getting email spam disguised as news, with a current events subject line, and an exe attachment. It's a chore to clear it all out.
Link via Slashdot
January 19, 2007
Site building
Sometimes you have to ignore all the wrappings and ribbon and just get on with it, especially after changing your template, like Just Muttering By Myself has done:
"I upgraded my template. I'm not happy with this but at least I'm not feeling as utterly stupid as I did over the weekend. I'm almost ready to think about writing about something interesting instead of about blogging."
Now if she'll just get Haloscan comments so I can add my two cents. I never could deal with Blogger comments. For some reason Blogger-Google won't let me register. Annoying.
UPDATE With a little inspiration from Just Muttering By Myself, I finally got registered at Blogger-Google, so I can use their comments now. Created a TexasScribblerBackup there, to facilitate the comments usage elsewhere, but don't expect to be using it. Unless MT craters.
January 15, 2007
Martin Luther King, Jr., 1929-1968
When I was fourteen, in 1958, my father and I rode a train to Mississippi and stopped at a depot near the little county seat where he grew up. I can still hear him shouting at the elderly black porter as we got down: "Boy! Boy!" And I still see the old man shuffling towards us to carry our bags. Today, practically every public office in that town is held by a black person. Courtesy and a lot more besides also has changed since Dr. King said these words the day before he was assassinated:
"Well, I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn't matter with me now. Because I've been to the mountaintop. And I don't mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land. And I'm happy, tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord."
Via Power Line
Water intoxication
A young mother in California is dead from water intoxication in a radio station's competition trying to win a Nintendo Wii video game system for her children. This caught my eye because I'm back on the induction phase of the Atkins diet, which means drinking about 80 ounces of water a day. The difference is I take time to urinate and that was exactly what the competition specified you could not do, while drinking quarts of water. Somebody's going to be sued, according to the science blog Respectful Insolence:
"Allthough I do not discount individual responsibility, most people are ignorant of how little it can take to cause water intoxication. It is not stated whether (1) contestants were warned that they could die from drinking too much water too fast or (2) qualified medical personnel were present to monitor the contest. In addition, it doesn't say whether the radio station had vetted its idea with a physician. I doubt that it did, because any competent physician would have told the organizers that this contest was a very bad idea and dangerous, to boot."
Some doctors also think the Atkins diet is dangerous, but I have not found it so. YMMV.
January 09, 2007
View from Somalia
A timely interview on events in Somalia at altmuslim.com, Austin's moderate Muslim digital magzine:
"Somalis, by nature, are very suspicious of foreign powers, especially those with a theological bent on ruling the country. Even though groups in Saudi Arabia were successful in funding and arming most of this [Islamic Courts] movement, they really did not succeed in convincing the Somali people to join their movement. As soon as they were defeated, music blasted in every radio station in Mogadishu and women again wore their traditional Somali dresses."
Worth a read. Unless you prefer your details from the Sunni News Service, otherwise called the BBC.
January 08, 2007
Keith Ellison's little snickup
"Snickup," is what Mr. Boy liked to say before he figured out people were saying "screwup."
Minnesota Muslim congressman Keith Ellison's use of Thomas Jefferson's two-volume copy of the Koran to take his oath of office was a pretty slick idea, until you consider that Mr. E. probably didn't take the time to turn a few of its pages and read what was written there. If he had, according to the Austin-based community Web site Altmuslim.com, he would have discovered that the translator, George Sale, "calls the Prophet Muhammad a 'criminal... imposing a false religion.'" Oops.
UPDATE More on this little gem at Elder of Ziyon, which I didn't see until two days after this post.
December 14, 2006
Bad pennies, etc.
They do, in fact, always turn up. Eason Jordan, for instance, the disgraced former president of CNN (known to American veterans as the Communist News Network) has a new Internet news site focusing entirely on Iraq. Which is odd (or appropriate, perhaps) considering he was best known for sucking up to Saddam before the 2004 liberation. Until, that is, he asserted at several foreign venues that the American military was purposely targeting journalists for death. Something tells me his new venture will not be far afield of his old employer and may even come to rival al Jiz for mendacity. But we shall see.
December 13, 2006
12th Man or 12th Imam? You decide.
While the mad Iranian president hosts his make-believe conference of the history-challenged discussing whether the Holocaust actually occurred, Roger L. Simon has come up with a brilliant idea: a counter symposium on whether the 12th Imam actually exists, or is this mythic religious figure proof of insanity in his believers--like the president of Iran? We already know he's mad.
I have just the venue, the Holiday Bowl in San Diego. Because it could be that a tragic misspelling has been at work here all along. In other words: is the 12th Imam a genuine religious figure? Or merely the misunderstood 12th Man of Texas A&M University football?
Will the 12th Imam (12th Man?) make an appearance at the 50 yard line at the upcoming game when Texas A&M surely will beat California? Will the mad president of Iran be in a luxury box? Will he be suited up in maroon to step in to aid the team? Or are his followers just maroons? Watch the game Dec. 28 and find out!
December 11, 2006
Those Christmas trees in Seattle
That rabbi who succeeded in getting fifteen Christmas trees banned from the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport might be attracting rousing cheers from some Muslims, a secular busybody or two, pushy atheists and the ACLU, but at least one Israeli Jew finds his behavior antithetical to the Hebrew bible.
"I would recommend that the learned rabbi...check [the] Torah, there definitely must be a mention of 'Love your neighbor as yourself' (by Moses, I believe?) or, in simpler words: 'What is hateful to you, do not to your fellow man' (Hillel). Unless there was a new edition I am not aware of."
Meanwhile, some Christmas trees are reappearing on airline counters at the airport. And the Orthodox rabbi, Elazar Bogomilsky, says he didn't mean to be a grinch, although he did threaten to sue. He only wanted a Hannuka menorah, in honor of the Festival of Lights which begins Friday, to have equal time with the trees, but airport officials chose to remove the trees, instead.
December 10, 2006
Hannukah, Hanukkah, or Channuka?
When you're translating to English from a language with a different alphabet (especially one without vowels), nobody can decide how to spell it. But that's no biggie. Not when the holiday begins only a few days from now (Friday, actually), and there's the first-ever blog carnival about it to attend. So attend.
Will the real Jamil Hussein please show up
Afterall, the Associated Press has based no less than 61 articles on this fellow, who they say is an Iraqi police captain. Meanwhile, CENTCOM and the Iraqi government deny that he even exists. AP insists he does, but so far hasn't persuaded him to go talk to either so they might change their tune. And the MSM's detractors among the blogosphere are having quite a time mocking AP. So will the real Jamil Hussein (assuming he does exist) please show up and put this controversy to rest. Otherwise, the AP has quite a few corrections to issue. Madison dot com weighs in with a fisking of AP's latest snippy "assurances," to put it kindly.
Via a host of blogs, including Instapundit, Black Five, and Confederate Yankee
December 09, 2006
Oil for the people
Mohammed at Iraq the Model reports the government is considering a move often suggested in the blogosphere, but which American officials seemed not to have taken seriously.
"...yesterday al-Sabah brought the news that the parliament is discussing a suggestion to set aside 30% of oil sales income to distribute among the citizens of Iraq. The draft law sets 3 classes of payments according to age and subsequent needs and responsibilities; from one month to 6 years, from 6 to 18 years and the third one 19 years and older. People who migrated from Iraq, those with salaries higher tha[n] 1 million dinars/month and convicted criminals will be excluded from the payment program, the report added. The people here met the news with some delight, hope and some skepticism too although the announcement came through the government's paper."
If it pans out--and Mohammed also reports that oil exports are up almost 15 percent from last year--the project would make Iraq a world model for fairness in the use of natural resources, as well as a regional one for democracy. It might even inspire a measure of sectarian peace.
December 05, 2006
Instaflop
Getting linked by Instapundit is supposed to be the sine qua non of free blogger publicity, producing a fabled Instalanche (Insta plus avalanche) of hundreds if not thousands of new unique visits. So imagine my surprise when my first such link, at about 5:45 a.m. today had, by just a few minutes ago, failed to produce one fifth of one hundred. Yep. Only fifteen, according to Sitemeter. There could be a few more which, for some reason unknown to me, failed to get listed as referrals by Sitemeter. After all, I did collect thirty-eight visits altogether, which is almost four times my normal daily average. But most of them came from people clicking on comments I had left on other blogs in the past few days, or the six three blogs which blogroll me, or referrals from Google searches on various subjects. Fourteen were counted as unknown referrals, a few of them daily constant readers plus some others checking in weekly, or whatever. Not that I am not grateful to be linked by Professor Reynolds (I am, I am), just puzzled at how far off the predicted result has been. Maybe it will improve overnight. I can't stick around to find out, as must arise early to get Mr. Boy to school. Mom, who usually takes him mornings, is away, traveling on business.
UPDATE And the overnight total? Wait for it. Two.
December 03, 2006
Blog symposium
Instapundit's Glen Reynolds figures the Iraq Study Group's conclusions will be "weak tea" and so he's trying to drum up new ideas for the war by hosting a blog symposium on Iraq, Iran and Syria, inviting posts with emailed links over the next three days, and tossing out this idea to begin.
"Here's just one example -- outright war with Iran is unlikely and probably a bad idea. But the mullarchy that runs Iran is corrupt and unpopular. What about targeting the mullahs -- personally, and more particularly in the form of their properties, their business interests both abroad and in Iraq, and their partners in such business interests. And maybe seeing if we can bribe a few while we're at it. The goal would be to bring Iran's interference in Iraq to a close. Is it a good idea? You tell me. And add some other ideas of your own."
Iran's mountainous terrain would be terribly univiting to an invading army, and bombing can only accomplish so much, so outright war is probably unlikely, as you say, unless they nuke somebody and we have to nuke them in return. I like the idea of hitting the mullahs (and their figurehead president) in their pocketbooks, but supporting the Iranian opposition (particularly their trade unions) with more vigor than we apparently are doing now, would also be ideal. But I think the best idea is what is already underway, according to some of CENTCOM's recent press releases, i.e. converting the patrolling of the big American units into a relatively small advisory effort. Call it training for the Iraqi army, if you want, but it would mainly be about providing them with American officers on the ground with access to our artillery, air support and medevac. Which is what we were doing in Vietnam by 1972, with more success than previously. True counter-insurgency operations. Only this time we must not cut off the funding. Indeed, we should adopt Josh Manchester's idea of a huge effort to train Arabic speakers and plan to stay in Iraq for a generation or two, maintaining at least a couple of the big forward operating and air bases we've built, to service the advisory effort, but also to provide logisitics for whatever overt operations against Iran or Syria might be needed. If the Iraqi government demands we leave? Well, we'd cross that bridge when we got to it, although if we can get them to eliminate Mookie Sadr (or do it for them covertly), that issue would probably evaporate. As for Syria, why not financially undermine Baby Assad the same way we do the mullahs, in fact the whole Syrian Bathhist elite? We certainly have the means, and with Iraq drawn down to a 30,000 or so ground troop advisory effort, we'd again have the forces for outright war with Syria. The terrain there is very inviting.
UPDATE Welcome Instapundit readers. While you're here, have a look around.
December 02, 2006
Adios, Fidel
"Cuban President Fidel Castro has missed a massive military parade held in his honour in Havana, fuelling more speculation about his health."
The political blog Free Frank Warner predicts the 80-year-old tyrant will be dead by the New Year or shortly thereafter. Will the last Cuban out of Miami please turn off the lights?
November 27, 2006
AP's bogus sources
Surprises me how far they've fallen in five years of war, but with CENTCOM denying and bloggers on their case, it looks like the narrative they've been pushing finally caught up with them--in the form of some bogus Iraqi cops who seem more likely to be insurgents spreading lies. Given AP's reach, however, the lies are already working memes across the rest of the MSM and may be impossible to reclaim.
But the Defense Department is trying, with this rebuttal site which can seem too picky, but ought to be taken seriously as more than just "the government position." It's unusual, to say the least.
UPDATE AP is fighting back by reiterating, etc. Austin Bay says an independent investigation is needed, and while you're at it, revive the National News Council to do it.
November 25, 2006
Salam Pax
The original (circa 2002) Baghdad blogger, who now works for BBC's Newsnight as an occasional video stringer, still has an interesting view of his city. Here he offers to help visitors stay alive by enumerating what not to wear.
"Let’s look at men’s fashions first. Things that can get you killed include:
Shorts
A goatee beard
Jeans that are a bit tight or are too fashionably 'distressed'
Colourful shirts
Hair Gel!!!
A necklace"
November 06, 2006
I am an American, too
Two months old but still revealing, and too seldom seen, this column in the Las Vegas Review Journal's online edition by Aslam Abdullah, the director of the Islamic Society of Nevada, addressed to al Q's new boss in Iraq.
"Don't think that just because we share the same religion, we would show some sympathy to you. You are not of us. You don't belong to the religion whose followers are trying to live a peaceful life for themselves and others serving the divine according to their understanding."
Via MEMRI
November 03, 2006
What is this thing called Web?
Improve it or be sorry, says Web's developer, Sir Tim Berners-Lee.
"He also said employers were now beginning to complain that there were not enough people who fully understood the web. 'There aren't any courses at the moment and it hasn't really been brought together. We're hearing complaints from companies when they need people that really understand the medium from both the technological and social side.'"
October 22, 2006
New link
We're moving on up to the big time, as the old TV line had it, or at least becoming available to the readers of a funny blog called "The Passing Parade--Cheap Shots of a Drive By Mind" in New York, as we previously did to those of SimplyJews, another satiric blog in Israel. Most of the links in my blog roll are just ones I like, not folks who actually link here. But Akaky Bashmachkin, of The Passing Parade (the first half of whose title reminds me of a Reader Rabbit computer game Mr. Boy used to play) said in his post New Blog: "If you are interested in what goes on down there deep in the heart of Texas, then I suggest you go over to Dick Stanley's fine TexasScribbler blog and take a look at what he has to say about life, politics, and other important things down Texas way and throughout this our Great Republic." Thanks Akaky, we'll try to live up to that. Akaky's nom de plume is taken from Russian writer Gogol's short story "The Overcoat."
September 24, 2006
Blogging from low orbit
Iranian Anousheh Ansari, the latest space tourist with enough bucks (a reported $25 million) to buy her own ride, is spending some time each day blogging her experience--with embedded YouTube videos.
"The launch was very smooth. The trip to the station felt long but it was worth it. I cannot keep my eyes off the windows. Earth is magnificent and peaceful from up here. You don’t see any of those awful things you hear on the news, from up here...As they pulled the hatch open on the Soyuz side, I smelled 'SPACE.' It was strange… kind of like burned almond cookie. I said to them, 'It smells like cooking' and they both looked at me like I was crazy and exclaimed:'Cooking!'
"I said, 'Yes… sort of like something is burning… I don’t know it is hard to explain…'”
Ms. Ansari has big plans for future $200,000-a-ticket suborbital jaunts in a mini-space shuttle.
September 13, 2006
The Religious Policeman
Another quickie post on a busy at-home dad day, with advice to go to this blog and enjoy the views of a rational Saudi with a bent for satire, who unfortunately quit blogging in June in order to write a book. Hey, you could do both. ;-)
September 11, 2006
Never forget
Melissa Doi, 32, spent more than twenty minutes on the phone with a 911 operator from the 83rd floor of the south tower.
She told the dispatcher: "I'm going to die, aren't I? Please God, it's so hot, I'm burning up."
UPDATE I didn't participate in the blogosphere effort to profile the WTC dead. Google lead me to Melissa. But this mil blogger chose her as part of the program, and did a memorable job.
"She loved her mother so much that she bought a condo in the Bronx large enough for both of them to live in together. She and her mother were leaving for a trip to Italy on that Friday, the 14th..."
August 11, 2006
Blogosphere in action
Intrepid blogger Michael J. Totten ventures to Tel Aviv and thence to Metulla in northernmost Israel, just in time for the big IDF offensive, for podcasting and other reporting. I donated $10 to his effort because he did a good job illuminating events in Iraq and Lebanon. But I did worry some when he described a shot of a C-130 with its wheels down over the Tel Aviv beach as a warplane enroute to bomb Lebanon.
UPDATE He may have a short journey and wind up interviewing disgruntled soldiers, because after a very confusing 24 to 48 hours, it seems that PM Olmert has accepted the UN's cease-fire deal. Which, if history is still on its tracks, probably means another, bigger war to come before much longer.
August 06, 2006
Psy ops II
What do you do when your war photo isn't dramatic enough to produce the desired outrage? A Reuter's wire service photographer added some buildings from a previous photo of Beruit to this new Israeli airstrike shot, and then cloned the smoke to spread it out. Only he got caught by these professionals and Charles Johnson's Little Green Footballs and, a few hours later, al Reuters retracted the photo. The photographer, Adnan Hajj, has been suspended fired.
UPDATE Another fake-a-roo from the prolific Mr. Hajj, and 918 others under scrutiny. And soon thereafter, the phenom spread to the NYTimes and its staffer Tyler Hicks. The blogosphere is on the case. And finds that Hicks says he didn't write the cutlines which make his work suspicious. Then Ynet weighs in with a piece on what is being called Fauxtography.