Category Archives: Blogosphere

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

So what could have caused the collapse of that highway bridge in Minnesota? Try salt, says the Seablogger, who used to live up there in the land of the looong winter. Makes sense to me.

UPDATE More from James Lileks, via Instapundit. And: it could also happen to you!

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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.