Roy Scheider, 1932-2008. I always thought he was an actor with immense charisma, someone with, whatever reason, I always identified. While I know he must've had his fair share of klinkers in his career, I can't think of any. 75 is a pretty good run, but it's a shame he couldn't have stuck around longer. Another one who will be missed.

Musician and songwriter Dan Fogelberg has passed away due to prostate cancer, at the age of 56. I always liked his vocal arrangements, thought the lyrics were quite interesting.

What? I like pop music. Whaddayagonnadoaboutit?

Terry Pratchett has been diagnosed with a rare form of early-onset Alzheimer's. Details are pretty sketchy, but it would seem he's OK, at least for now.

Via Siflay.

Foiled again!

Briefly, SDV technology -- which is being aggressively deployed by Time Warner Cable and also by many other large and small systems -- requires two-way communications with the cable company servers to allow the customer to access all of the available channels. Without this capability, those channels on a cable system being managed via SDV would typically be inaccessible to the associated devices.

Since existing third-party CableCARD host devices of types including the new HD TiVo don't currently support the necessary two-way operations, users of these devices (including the new TiVo) could find themselves unable to watch or record channels of interest (the exact set of which will vary from system to system over time).

Looks like, instead of it being an actual interface issue, it's more along the lines of a pissing match between TiVo and the cable companies. Bah and humbug!

I am officially and completely fed up with the WYSIWYG (visual) web editor in Visual Studio 2005. There have been drag and drop "place the button anywhere you please" editors on the market since at least 1998. I know, I've used one of the oldest ones out there for years. And MS's latest visual web composing tool? I guess if you got a lot of formal training in CSS, the workflow might make sense, but it sure doesn't to me. All the crashes and bugs don't help much either.

I want to drag my control out and drop it on the damned page wherever I please. If I want to scoot it here, or scoot it there, I should be able to! The coding tools VS2k5 has are amazing. My coding productivity is through the roof. But their layout editor is a gigantic exercise in extreme frustration. If one part is that easy, the other has no business being that hard.

I know, I know. I'll eventually get my head around it and get over it. I'm just bitter that I'll have all this beautiful code with all these ugly interfaces sitting on top of it. I'm a better designer than this, but the tools won't let me show it.

Bah, I tell you. Bah.

Everyone's favorite loopy televangelist has stopped all cancer treatments, so it looks like she's on her way out. We watched the '04 season of Surreal Life, and as the article mentioned she came across as a quite warm and decent, if rather strange and unusual looking, person. Even then we both felt she'd more than paid for her past, so we wish nothing but the best for her and her family. It's a damned strange world, isn't it?

Another day, another "they'll never ever ever use it prediction about Windows Vista. Which is nearly identical to the stories they wrote when Windows XP came out, which were nearly identical to the ones they wrote when Windows 2000 came out, and on and on and on.

The truth is people don't buy operating systems. They purchase computers and then use the operating system that comes with it. While corporate users can (and will) specify which OS goes on their system after it's been purchased, home users won't, and so Vista, like XP before it, will slowly leach into the population through normal computer turnover. As people become more comfortable with it at home (and early adopters populate various documentation portals with advice), they will become more comfortable with it at work. Eventually someone will make the decision and the next big workstation upgrade in a company will be with Vista-equipped systems.

It won't happen overnight. It never has, and it never will. Long ago I took seriously the computer media's claims that the latest OS from Redmon was a complete flop due to slow uptake just after release. It was only after the fourth or fifth time they hailed that exact same OS as a crushing success a few years later that I realized they simply had no idea what they were talking about.

Microsoft's not called the Borg for nothing, you know?

The inventor of my wife's (and I think many others) staple college food has died at the ripe age of 96. He only retired last year! May the Top Ramen he finds in heaven be as tasty and cheap as it is on Earth.

You know your day starts off bad when someone who should have been here over a week ago to have their cat in intensive care, dies in the lobby.

Cynical, self-serving, elitist dirtbags with the morals of a meth-addled squirrel and the perspective of a goldfish is much better.

Actually, that's something of a slight on junkie squirrels and the goldfish nation.

Via Instapundit.

Population bomb: burst. Peak oil: purged. Fine! Fine! Laugh while you can, copper-boy:

Copper is used in everything from automobiles to ordnance ... So copper serves as an excellent metallic bellwether for potential future resource scarcity, according to a group of researchers who compiled data on its extraction, use, recycling and discard to estimate whether there is enough copper available to make a developed standard of living available to all the world's people. The short answer is: no.

The short answer is, as usual, misleading. The somewhat longer answer would be "not at present consumption levels."

As long as markets are allowed to work, we will not run out of copper. As copper becomes scarce, its price will rise. As its price rises, its consumption will decrease, reducing demand, and therefore price. If its price stays high, alternatives will be developed which will be cheaper than copper. This will further reduce demand, effectively increasing supply, thereby reducing prices even more.

The ultimate result? Over time, copper prices will fall. Not might, not should, will.

More neo-con pap? A fine example of what watching too much Fox News will do to a person?

Hey man, whatever helps you sleep at night.

Frey's book sold 1.77 million copies last year after being chosen by Oprah Winfrey's book club in September, but one investigative Web site now says his book was based on lies.

Read entire article here.

Ya know what. It was still a good book.

For proof of just how out-of-touch Washington-based journalists are, one need only look at this Washington Post article, wherein (in the print edition) the Post runs an above-the-fold headline and nearly two complete pages inside to the earth-shattering discovery that poor kids are more likely to enlist in the Army than rich ones.

The mind boggles.

I'm not sure who's dumber: the people in the story, or the people writing it:

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla., Oct. 25 -- For other hurricanes, Nate and Kelly Vedrani, 27-year-old newlyweds, fled their condo in a 16-story beach tower here to take refuge elsewhere.

But for Hurricane Wilma, authorities did not issue an evacuation order for the high-rises that line the beach here, so the couple and many other residents stayed put. It was a decision they regret.
...
"I kept thinking we wouldn't have been in that position if there'd been an evacuation order," she said.

That's right. Don't trust past experience, don't trust common sense, don't trust all the previous reports of fantastic devestation. Trust the government. Trust the weather service. It's not like they're ever, you know, wrong about anything.

The government is not your daddy, people, and I'm getting damned tired of everyone who thinks it is. The government is there to maintain infrastructure, maintain order, and ensure the stability of the currency. Expecting it to do anything else will at best ensure disappointment and at worst ensure a police state.

Naivete being the lietmotif of liberals that it is, I find it unsurprising they are the ones most often and most deeply disappointed by the failures and unintended consequences of government action. They're sort of like a cute but "challenged" child on a playground; as long as they keep the football helmet on, their continuous collisions with the scenery shouldn't result in too much damage. It's only when they get hold of the car keys that you should really start to worry.

Because, as demonstrated above, they require someone else to tell them to get out of the way of a coming storm.

Because Glen Campbell's Southern Nights is now officially 28 years old. Those of you tapping your toes, repeat after me: "GAH!!!"

All others: consider yourself smacked. Youngsters.

So, after spending three months wheedling management to get us a new server to host a mail group system on, then three days tinkering to get it all set up, guess what I found out?

Mailman, a sophisticated and popular mail list management software package, has a user interface that is an absolute horror. Absolute horror. My 2 year old could do better than that. I can do better than that. I would too, except the developers, as almost all open-source developers are wont to do, spent far more time building an elegant engine than they did an elegant UI. You can't change it without delving deep into a code base written in a language I don't know (Python). Utterly absurd.

But that's what you get when you mess with open source. Unfortunately, this is considered a "best-of-breed" list manager. I'm pretty sure it doesn't get any better.

I'm going to beat the next person I catch touting the beauty of open source software.

The good news: Halo 2 expansion coming soon.

The bad news: It's not going to address what we really want:

Call it Halo 2: Combat Expanded. After much speculation, Bungie today announced plans to release an expansion for its popular first-person shooter, Halo 2. It will not, however, contain a single-player portion that many hoped might wrap up Halo 2's abrupt campaign mode ending.

Basically, a pack of multiplayer maps. Which will be fun for the occasional Halo-day, but I'm not sure it'll be worth the $20 they're gonna charge.

Halo 3? No word on that, but Microsoft would be insane to use anything else to launch their upcoming X-box 2.

Damion gets a sad but tasty no-prize for bringing us news that Bubba the giant lobster has died:

The leviathan of a lobster died Wednesday afternoon at the Pittsburgh Zoo & PPG Aquarium about a day after he was moved from Wholey's Market, said zoo spokeswoman Rachel Capp and Bob Wholey, owner of the fish market.

Pardon me, I need to go tackle Ellen before she starts trying to clarify ten pounds of butter...

Problem 1: Maniacs running red lights cause thousands of injuries and deaths each year.

Problem 2: Law enforcement can't be everywhere at once.

Solution: Red light cameras, which leads to:

Problem 3: An increase in accidents at intersections:

[Nicholas Garber, a teacher at the University of Virginia] studied the best data available, from Fairfax County, and documented what for many is a counterintuitive finding: that the use of cameras at intersections resulted in more injuries. That's because while crashes from the side went down, rear-end accidents went up. His results, consistent with those of some other studies across the country, have poured fresh fuel onto the heated cost-and-benefit debate on the cameras in Virginia.

So essentially we've swapped one set of retards, the ones who think red lights happen to other people, with a different set who think trying to give the car ahead of them a proctology exam is a productive way to get said car to go faster. Listen up you mouth breathers: it doesn't work that way.

I don't want to mount a gatling gun on my car*, I want to turn my back bumper into a hydraulic battering ram. That way when Jonny Rocket and His Razzing Ricer screams up behind me and starts dodging around like his ass is on fire I can just push a button and WHAM!!!, his engine is now a passenger. But, since I'm sure somewhere in the Virginia state law books there's probably some sort of regulation that makes punching a tailgater's car in the face illegal, I guess I'll have to settle for the ol' "hit the brakes and smile" routine.

Yeah, that was me that time you idiot. Did you really think I didn't see you trying to kamikaze your way through traffic? Thought that by getting as close as you could to my bumper you'd intimidate me into moving faster?

I'm your worst freaking nightmare you chimpanzee... I've got a cheap car, low insurance rates, wear my seatbelt, and don't really give a damn. I enjoy stabbing the brakes and watching your car dive forward under its own like a charging rhino that's taken a bullet between the eyes. Because you see if you'd been a civil driver, maybe had just a wee bit of patience, and learned that the two second rule wasn't some sort of basketball drill, it would never have come to that.

Yeah, I'm an asshole. But if you're following close enough that you can't avoid a simple braking maneuver**, I'll be an asshole with a fat insurance check. And I'll be able to drive away. So do us all a favor... spot a signpost up ahead, wait for my car to pass it, and start counting. If you pass it before "two mississippi", slow the hell down. My nerves and your front end will thank you.

----
* Well ok, no, I do want a gatling gun on my car. To, you know, impress chicks and stuff.

** Calm down people. I don't stab the brakes for fun and profit when it's just normal commuter congestion. Well, most of the time anyway.

Do you think this person had a really shitty childhood?

I think so.

Maybe if you are good mommy and daddy will let you out of the corner. WEH!

Problem: Overfishing of ocean stocks.

Solution: Ocean-based fish farms, aka "Aquaculture", allow you to grow your own stocks.

Problem: that's not the solution we wanted you to come up with:

Gerry Leape, vice president for marine conservation at the Washington-based National Environmental Trust, said U.S. officials see that "the oceans are in crisis, and what's their response? To allow the enormous expansion of this industry that's proven to have a negative environmental impact."

The farmers do seem to have some technical problems, primarily with diseases and the methods used to combat them. But these are almost certainly engineering issues, technical problems with technical solutions that will be found in time by the farmers themselves*.

But this, of course, will not please the enviro-weenies. They don't want us to satisfy our wishes in our own ways, they want us to cleave to their agenda and force people into their solutions (reducing demand by raising taxes, "convincing" people to eat less fish, etc.) I also wouldn't be surprised at all to find a bit of "wild" commercial fishing industry money flowing into their coffers somehow. Competitors are, after all, only looking out for their own interests, and as far as the activists are concerned the money's the same color, right?

Then again, I'm a cynical old bastard. I'm far more interested in finding cheap, sustainable ways to feed people and simultaneously protect wild stocks than I am in preserving someone else's definition of "pristine" oceans. I mean, if "saving" the oceans for the fish means a few more thousand brown babies starve to death, that's just mother nature taking care of overproduction, right? I can still afford to go to Red Lobster, why can't they?

-------
* A position that I'm sure will evoke mighty guffaws from those convinced the only way toward true enlightenment is heavy-handed carefully-crafted government coercion regulation. Government beuracrats in offices thousands of miles from the sea after all have such a stellar record managing natural resources. Just ask the Soviets!

Oh... wait...

Time to take down the black cloth from the mirrors and stop sitting in front of the T.V sobbing about "why Bush sucks" people!

I haven't seen you pack to Canada yet! Talk, talk, talk is all you are.

I'm sure many of the most extreme members of the gallery (no, not you, the other guy) will nod their heads completely off at this slick five minute video.

Ok, this one twanged a nerve. I'll preface this by saying I'm damned grateful to the sane Britons and Poles and all the rest who see the real enemy and are hurting and dying beside us to crush it. This is not directed at you. It's directed at the freak sitting next to you.

I'm sick of this crap. Ok, let's take the gloves off for a second, shall we? The world ain't our fault, and I'm getting damned tired of everyone trying to imply it is, or that we should do something about it (but only when the rest of the world thinks we should.) You see, for the past sixty years we've just been the freaking janitors of the world, cleaning up the mess that Europe made.

We didn't get to this position by cheating, lying, stealing or killing. Europeans (including the British) did that some two hundred years ago, carving up the entire world as quickly as their sharp little knives could hack pieces off. Oh, and in case you hadn't noticed, my country happened to be one of those pieces too, and a really old one at that. We just happened to be lucky and mean enough to chop your greedy fingers off when they squeezed too hard.

The rest of the world wasn't so lucky. Beijing, Delhi, Saigon, Tehran, Istanbul, all and more became part of your not-very "Great Game." Remember that one? Oh, I'm sorry, that's right. We're not allowed to talk about what your grandparents and great grandparents did to the world, are we? We're not allowed to talk about opium dens in China and mass graves in Algeria, concentration camps in South Africa and tiny bullet-riddled bodies in Amristar. No, we can't talk about those things now, can we? Ancient history. Nothing to see here, move along.

And when it all got too boring and too complicated you went and did it to yourselves. Twenty thousand dead in a day at the Somme. Eight million dead overall. Twenty one million wounded. And you know what? We really didn't think it was any of our goddamned business. We let you keep killing each other, and making your colonial "subjects" kill each other for you, until some of your agents started talking our neighbors into messing with us, and your navies started to sink our ships.

So when our manpower and our guns and our tanks and our goddamned money won your stupid little war for you, we sent our president over there with a decent plan to make sure it all never happened again, and what did we get for our troubles? You just went back and started the mess all over again, expanding the empires that had gotten you into that meat grinder in the first place, humiliating the people that nearly took over your corner of the world, and treating everyone except the Bolsheviks as beneath your contempt.

So round it all came again, the sequel, only louder and longer this time. Fifty million people had to die, and again it took our people and our stuff and our cash to make sure you weren't all speaking German or Russian and wondering where the hell all the Jews had got to. Even then, we were prepared to let you all have at it for as long as you wanted, and were it not for some idiotic Japanese and a lunatic German you can be damned sure we would have.

Almost every single big conflict we've gotten ourselves into since then did not have ol' Uncle Sam at its start. No sir, it's Captain Euro all the way, hiding at the base hoping nobody sees him picking his nose.

What's that? Don't believe me? I'm a victim of neo-cons too? Well then, let's examine...

• Iraq: a duet of Ottoman provinces thrown together by Britain in the hope it would make it easier to ride a train from Suez to Delhi.
• Vietnam: Oh good lord, where to begin. Possibly the last time a European managed to talk an American into doing them a favor.
• Israel: What happens when idealistic British Liberal leaders decide to facilitate a little bit of escatology while their anti-semitic underlings grumble and grouse? I don't know either, but after promising the same chunk of real estate to two different sets of people, Britain and France ensured we'd all find out.
• Saudi Arabia: Understand a people so you can understand a conflict? You gotta be kidding me. These were Arabs, they weren't really human. And there was a war on! Just pay both sides until a winner floats to the top.
• Iran: Hello? We're trying to build a railroad to India, remember? Can't do that without passing through Persia. And those cheeky bastards were actually making treaties with the Bolsheviks! Find a strong man and give him whatever he wants, include the title "Shah."

Are we perfect? Oh hell no, we stink at this. Most of our attempts at fixing it have just made it worse. But that was because, again, we were busy making sure you Europeans didn't start going at each other with nukes. Building up a nation in some godforsaken corner or another of the world is kinda hard when you're trying to make sure nobody blows the whole damned thing up.

Even then, even then, we were willing to just let it all sort itself out

God damn you all. When dipshits do things like this I just want to spit on you all and lobby my president to pull every single soldier out of your stupid little bloodthirsty countries as soon as possible, pausing only to sow salt into the earth as we leave.

Because what you all seem to have forgotten is:

Q: What's the difference between a European buried in Normandy and an American buried there?
A: The European was dying for his country.

And now you're going to accuse us of fascism? Listen up sparky, we're not the ones who invented the goddamned thing. We are the only country in the world left who knows how to defeat it.

I'm sick of you all. I'm sick of trying to make you like us. I'm sick of feeling guilty because you don't. There's not a man or woman in France who cares if the rest of the world hates them or not. The British just expect it. The Germans and Japanese at least have a reason for it. Fuck you. You want a piece of us? Come and get it. Like my mom always said, life isn't fair. Life isn't nice. The world is a nasty, ugly place, filled with people who'll think nothing of shoving you and your baby into a pit, laughing because the little flopping, bleeding rag doll still clutched to your chest is still holding the only toy they'll ever know.

We're trying to stop all of this. While you and your compadres are sipping tea and cooking up clever ways of accusing us of genocide, we're the ones trying to stop it from happening. We're the ones dying to stop it from happening.You think we're too powerful? You think we're trying to dominate the world? Stop us. Stand in our way while we bleed our last into the dust of countries that were stillborn or crippled because of your grandfathers.

But until then, please, for your sake, just sit the fuck down and shut the fuck up.

New York 26, Dallas 10

I guess God wasn't watching the game today.

See the game stats here

Instapundit links up a nice roundup of the reaction to the "but this guy, this guy was lying!!!" that the recent WaPo article unleashed:

Something I said there that bears repeating -- the reason why the Christmas-in-Cambodia story is getting the media cold-shoulder, and why what SwiftVet coverage there is focuses on the medals, etc., is that the Christmas-in-Cambodia story is clear, and has already been proven false. It's easy to understand, and devastating for Kerry.

The medal stuff is complex, and can be spun in a way that makes people's eyes glaze over. So that's what we'll mostly get, along with "political" stories that will treat the SwiftVets stuff as partisan hackery in a way that Michael Moore never gets treated by the same outlets.

Ok, three time's the charm... I don't think any of it is important in and of itself. What I do think is absolutely scandalous is that the mainstream media just flat ignored one "screwed up memory" story and jumped on a different one like a drunken sorority girl on the star quarterback.

The difference? One of the stories was pushed by a candidate for the presidency, the other by someone who's not even tangental to running, let alone making their service record a central point of their qualifications. Tell me friends, which story is really more important?

Feh. Why bother. All I do is rouse rabble, no better than those I criticise. What the hell do I know...

Doesn't make me any less right.

Well, contrary to previous predictions, we haven't run out of metals, haven't run out of oil, and haven't run out of food. So, let's all start worrying we might run out of water:

World water supplies will not be enough for our descendants to enjoy the sort of diet the West eats now, experts say.

Which is, as with all other environmental apocalypse predictions, complete and utter crap. In a world run by markets, as water for various uses becomes more scarce its price will rise, forcing its users to become more efficient or stop using it entirely. By allowing producers to keep more of their profits through reduced taxation and better manage their risks through properly-regulated futures markets, strong incentives will be created for water consumers to use technology and knowledge to come up with innovations that will reduce consumption by orders of magnitude. In the end, water will, like all the other commodities the chicken-little enviroweenies have latched onto during the past forty years, get cheaper.

In a perfect world, that is, which we of course do not live in. Because, you see, western agribusiness is not run by markets, it's run by government subsidies and various regulatory protection rackets. This removes market pressures from farming, causing it to be far less efficient than it otherwise would be. The US isn't as bad as some countries (Japan is probably the worst), but to this day we pay billions of dollars more for our food than we should.

But you won't hear Greenpeace start advocating the removal of farm subsidies. Not sexy enough, doesn't blame enough white people. Even if they did, our bucolic illusion of farmer Ted and his six kids having to sell his tiny family farm because of... well... we never actually get to the reasons, do we? We just see those little kids, some has-been rockers hold a few concerts, and away goes our tax money, straight into the coffers of gigantic and politically powerful farming corporations. Corporations that now have no reason to innovate or become more efficient, because we are all guaranteeing their bottom line.

We'll still manage to muddle through, because (to the great disappointment of technocrats all over the world) a commodity's supply cannot be increased by legislative fiat. Eventually the cost will rise beyond the point it can be hidden by even government accountants. Democracies around the world will play the politician shuffle until they get a set willing to do what needs to be done*, while socialists (*cough* France *cough*) and dictatorships will face yet another economic collapse.

It won't be pretty, but it won't be the end of the world either.

-------
* And lose their jobs for it immediately. I mean, those guys will be responsible for killing the family farm!

Nobody said democracies were rational, just that they work. Eventually.

Ok, all you "Bush lied" believers, please feel free to (as we are fond of saying around here) sit the fuck down and shut the fuck up:

Bush had spoken the plain truth. Did Saddam seek uranium from Africa, evidence of his continuing illegal interest in a nuclear weapon? Here is Lord Butler's nonpartisan panel, which closely examined the basis of the British intelligence:

". . . we conclude that the statement in President Bush's State of the Union Address of 28 January 2003 that `The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa' was well-founded."

Debate your beliefs, disagree with my positions, but leave your propaganda at the damned door. It makes you look feebleminded and small. And the rest of you, the ones who believe the media is not liberal... where are the headlines? The 24 hours exposes? The documentaries? The Hollywood acceptance speeches?

Yeah. That's what I thought.

Next...

Don't you just hate it when you volunteer your time to help others,(ie veterinary questions since most people out there are too F*&ING cheap to call their vet) and all the people do is bitch at you?

I have stated several times in my bio on the volunteer site that I DO NOT replace your vet, nor am I a vet nor do I give out FREE medical advice that your veterinary office should. I merely give suggestions and what questions you should be asking your vet.

So for all of you cheap asses out there, learn to budget for your pets! Can't afford the vet once a year, then rethink the type of pet you have.

iTunes just played What About Me?, a song from what I must guess is a one-hit-wonder by the name of Moving Pictures. Probably around 1982, but that's just a guess. Hadn't heard the thing since then, but when it came on just now I instantly recognized the melody. I remember being deeply moved by it when I was 14, but 35 36*-year-old-me thinks it's stoopid. Just bad. We're talking "oh-my-god-my-eyes-are-dripping-sugar" awful. And yet I remembered every single lyric, could sing along with it no less.

I get yelled at because I can't remember where I put my keys from one day to the next, yet I could instantly recall the lyrics to an idiotic song I haven't heard in twenty years. How many more brain cells are being wasted storing the lyrics to various Wham! and Billy Ocean songs? Someone please tell me, how can I get them back?!?

~ Carribean Queen... ~

------------
* I quit counting after I hit 25, and now usually have to ask Ellen how old I am. Pretty sad when such a common question has me standing there concentrating and counting on my fingers.

Remember "Baby Jessica"? You know, the toddler who fell down the well? All the drama, the coverage, the movies, the documentaries? Well, guess what. She graduated high school a few days ago:

"Baby Jessica," who held the attention of the nation as a toddler when she fell into an abandoned well 17 years ago, is now a high school graduate, The Associated Press reports.

Oh don't worry K, D, J, C, et. al., I'll have your canes ready at the door.

So close, so close and yet so far.

Do you think if I told the Virginia DMV it was a 1995 164 they'd know the difference?

And from the "a foil hat a day keeps the feds at bay" corner we have this worthy post from a clothing store that didn't much like who was searching for what on their website:

It seems that the anti-terrorist division of our government is spending its time (and our tax dollars) doing web searches on people who disagree with their politics and have the audacity to say so on t-shirts.

Which of course lead to one of the better examples of affirming the consequent I've seen in awhile:

Progressive clothing = potential terrorist?

No you paranoid hippy freak, it only means someone working at DHS (and other various federal organizations) took a look at your site. Last time I checked, that wasn't illegal. We get visits all the time from people in Saudi Arabia. Does that mean we're a terrorist target?

Of course, this isn't much different than what the right-wing loonies were shrieking about during the run-up to the "impeach Clinton" fiasco. It's like belief is a circle... if you place yourself as far in one direction as you can, you end up meeting people coming from the other direction.

To me, as an unabashed member of said Great Right Wing Conspiracy, the pattern looks like an idle (and ideological) intern was poking around one afternoon and stumbled across your site. They then forwarded the link around to some buddies in a "hey, look! Another milquetoast left wing looney who thinks buttons make a difference!"* kind of spirit. Said buds then took a look and were, presumably, amused.

I know it's a lot more fun to think a bunch of modern-day Plumbers are plotting to tape up your door lock tonight, but the sad truth is you have about as much proof for your scenario as I do for mine. To put it in a more hippie-compatible way: Nixon was the president who had the enemies list and gave Liddy a job. Bush is quite simply no Nixon.

Slashdot brings us the latest example of "everything looks like a nail" government:

Monday the New Mexico House of Representatives passed a bill that would require every car sold in the state to have an ignition interlock. This device is essentially a breath analyzer that prevents the car from being started if the driver is drunk.

Which sounds all fine and dandy, until you read how the things actually work:

Ignition interlocks require a breath test, which takes 30 seconds to complete, to start the car as well as random 'rolling retests' to discourage others from taking the test for you. These rolling retests require the driver to take the test as the car is moving.

I can only imagine my mom or Ellen in one of these things, driving down the road, when suddenly it shoots out a tube and says, "you have 30 seconds to comply!" I'm not sure who would rip it out faster.

I normally expect propeller-headed "gee whiz" propositions like this to come out of the Federal government or the People's Republic of California. It's total lack of understanding of how human beings actually work is an absolutely textbook example of why government should always be seen as the solution of last resort.

It would take exactly five microseconds after this became law for someone to figure out a way to bugger or bypass the things. It might take a minute or two more before someone else cooked up a "Sobe-R-Lung" rebreather gizmo to fit over the end of the tube. There are thousands of Americans (I happen to be good friends with one) who can make a Honda Civic outrun an F-16. Having a gizmo like this stuck in their cars isn't an impediment... it's a challenge.

"Well, if they do tinker with it they'll go to jail! It'll be illegal to tamper with these devices!" Anyone who thinks along these lines obviously has no memory at all of the 1970s. The only reason rednecks aren't still hacking out emissions equipment is because it's too hard to get the car working right once it's gone. I'm sure anyone who thinks car companies should be required to embed this device that deeply into cars meant for a single state will happily pay the extra $10,000 per car it'll probably cost to do it.

California of course proved that if you pass nanny-state legislation like this and then back it up with serious muscle and funding, it can be made to work. Of course, their multi-billion-dollar budget deficit is also instructive. Look, I'm all for getting drunks off the road. But I wonder how many detox programs, educational opportunities, and police officer salaries it's going to cost to make this Rube Goldberg contraption a reality?

When someone comes up with a gizmo that can passively read blood alcohol content through the palms of the hands holding the steering wheel, I'll be interested. Until then I'd appreciate the politicians doing something useful, like fixing the damned roads, making sure schools actually work, and the cops get paid enough to do their jobs.

Politicians doing something useful. My God, I think Joshua really is rubbing off on me...

Bob Keeshan died today, he was 76 years old. Captain Kangaroo featured prominently in my early days, as I'm sure he did in many other kids's. He influenced several generations of children with simple, entertaining, and (as I recall) educational fare not much seen nowadays. He will be missed.

On Christmas Eve no less, my perfect GTV-6 (non-expiring pictures are here) comes up for auction. '85, lightly breathed-on 3.0L V6, suspension goodies and very little rust. A rice killer in a brown paper sack... what's not to love? Yarg!

Ah well. Somehow I don't think Ellen would appreciate it if I traded one slightly drippy baby for this really cherry ride. Not even if it had OLIVIA on the license plate.

Oh sit down mom, it's a joke.

The Post is reporting on new developments in the Greenpeace prosecution case. I especially love this part:

Greenpeace, which argued Friday for a dismissal of the charges in a Miami federal courtroom, accuses prosecutors of attempting to suppress the age-old American practice of civil protest. Although it is common to levy criminal charges against individual protesters, Greenpeace says a criminal indictment of an advocacy group is unprecedented and politically motivated.

Now, as I recall, the whole point of civil protest is to break laws and get arrested. That way you can holler your slogans at the cameras and impress Birkenstock-clad members of the opposite sex. If prosecutors don't use the laws, then what's the point? Greenpeace got caught with their lawyers around their ankles and is responding the way most western hard-left organizations do nowadays... they're whining about it.

"Help! Help! I'm being repressed!" Please. When the US government wants to "stifle political criticism", it doesn't use laws that allow publicity-heavy trials, it uses groups of incompetent hacks and wannabes creeping around inside hotels at night. And that's only because we're no damned good at it. Governments who take shutting up whiney greens seriously send squads of efficiently violent men to houses at three in the morning. Which is why you'll never see a chapter of Greenpeace in the People's Republic of China.

And complaining the opposition is politically motivated? Excuse me, but last time I checked the whole point of Greenpeace was to make political points by risking the lives of gullible sophomores and hippies who haven't had the decency to die yet.

Oh wait, I forgot. How silly of me. It's only political when the people we don't like do it. What we do is justice.

Michael Kamen, dead at 55. Yeah, I know, his orchestrations could be a little over-wrought, but really, would November Rain be the same song without him? Would Elton John be the rich poofta he is today?!?

Oh sit down. It's a joke.

Anyway, serious suckage tonight in the not-quite-pop music world.

CNN, the yellow-dog peanut gallery's favorite news outlet, is at it again:

CNN, which has marketed itself as an outlet for serious news, planted a question about computer preferences at last week's debate of the Democratic presidential candidates, according to the student who posed the query and on Monday wrote about it in an online forum of Brown University's Daily Herald.

The summary sounds innocuous enough, but read the article, it's worse than you think.

I actually don't watch Fox News all that much, but considering this is, what, the second or third time CNN's gotten caught doing something stupid this year, I think I'm probably going to stop tolerating people who hold FN up for ridicule. They may not say what you like, and they may not report the way you like, but I have yet to see them make any claim to be other than what they are... news from a conservative viewpoint.

Marlins win.

Yankees win.

Baseball as usual wins. So much for an interesting World Series. Wake me up when next season starts. *snore*

I've gone on record many times stating I still want to know when we're screwing it up in Iraq, not just when we get it right. Pointing fingers and counting bodies ain't informing me, because it gives me no avenues for change.

However, articles like this are important:

US soldiers driving bulldozers, with jazz blaring from loudspeakers, have uprooted ancient groves of date palms as well as orange and lemon trees in central Iraq as part of a new policy of collective punishment of farmers who do not give information about guerrillas attacking US troops

There is almost nothing more counterproductive to a "hearts and minds" campaign than pissing off farmers, and nothing pisses off a farmer faster than destroying fruit crops that can take decades to cultivate & mature. This is such a basic tenet in a counter-insurgency war I am simply flabberghasted that anything like this could actually happen.

Some rear-echelon MF'ing officer has decided to treat grownups like playground kids, without once realizing he's not taking away toys, he's taking away food and money. Again, according to this report at least, they're not hacking down trees to deny snipers cover, they're hacking them down to prove just who's "in charge".

So now we have at least one village out there, probably more, that just boiled over with new Ba'athist and al-Qaeda recruits with nothing more to show for it than an action report covering some tin star's ass. Good job guys, hope a family who's kid gets capped by a sniper from this village mails his purple heart to the Mr. Commanding F-up who thought this one up.

Riverbend over at Baghdad Burning does an excellent job describing the magnitude of this screwup.

Of course the media says almost nothing, because finding out about this stuff requires leaving the Palestine hotel and actually doing research. And besides, if it isn't reported in their daily press briefings from the Pentagon, it can't be that important, can it?

Sometimes I think we learned a lot from Vietnam. A lot. Then I read things like this and I realize some folks, important ones at that, have learned nothing.

Comment blaming it all on Dubya in 3... 2... 1...

I think this is the third time in six or seven years that my brother's underhanded attempts at biological warfare have succeeded. Thanks for the cold you barstard! Next time you sneeze around me I'm going to put on a moon suit.

Instapundit eventually lead me to this illustrative discussion about almost everything I dislike about the left.

I'm quite aware of the power of symbols, and know very well that artists sometimes like to use shocking images simply to make us think about an issue. The problem I have with these images isn't that they're shocking, or that they're radical... it's that they're stupid.

Comparing a psychotic holding a knife to the US, who bled its own blood dismantling an oligarchy that thought nothing of shooting women in soccer stadiums and a dictatorship that gassed children and fed people into wood chippers is ludicrous. Simply ludicrous. Calling people who feel this sort of imagery is appropriate willfully ignorant of their own country and the world around them is about as big an understatement as I know to make. Moronic **cktard is probably more appropriate.

Placing the image of an elected official who might be gone in a year and will be gone in five next to the images of two of the west's worst modern dictators again demonstrates a complete and utter ignorance of what they're talking about. Sticking the caption "hate=war" underneath it just adds a cherry of irony to the top of that particularly clueless confection.

The other three illustrations, of the Statue of Liberty, a bar code, and a vaguely anti-semitic flag of some sort, only cement my opinion of these people, and prove conclusively that watching TV and surfing the web are no substitute for actually thinking.

Those funny looking heavy things that fill a library are called "books". Hard to imagine I know, but by opening them up you can actually learn things. Even more difficult to comprehend, most of those things aren't covered by an MTV expose or an E! True Hollywood Story.

Here's a tip to all these artists: try reading a few books on the issues at hand before putting pen to paper, brush to canvas, or mouse to photoshop. Maybe then you'll be able to make a cogent argument instead of flinging sh*t like the shrieking chimpanzee you seem to have become.

Well, probably not, but definitely leaning out somewhere to the right of Darth Vader. What brought this on? This story about fat and government:

The left's view is that the food industry and advertisers are big bullies that practically force-feed people with gimmicks and high-calorie treats. They say Ronald McDonald is the cousin of Joe Camel.

The right's argument has been dubbed: You're fat, your fault. They say people can make their own choices about food and exercise.

It's gotten so bad that some legislators are introducing legislation to protect the food industry from obesity-related lawsuits. And you know what? I support them 100%. I completely, utterly, and unapologetically believe the only reason you are overweight is because of what you voluntarily put in your mouth.

Look folks, there's only one absolutely guaranteed way to lose weight, and it doesn't involve fancy diets, weird pills, or meditation. I know it will be real hard for some to hear, but the ultimate secret to losing weight is this, and only this:

Eat less. Exercise more.

I really do think the only reason we're even having this discussion is a collision between trial lawyer greed and the permissive "nobody's fault" liberal culture foisted on us by left-wing academics, overpaid and undereducated entertainment celebrities, and a democratic party more interested in making sure every single individual is happy than in helping anyone actually take responsibility for their own lives.

You might think the next thing I'd write would be, "and if we'd all just turn to Jesus and go back to church this'd be a much better place." Certainly far too many on the right do exactly that. I'm not that kind of conservative. Just as I think government has no damned business determining who I sleep with or how I worship, I also think they have no damned business trying to protect me from myself.

Look, I don't care if you're considered overweight by this image-obsessed culture. I have good friends, beautiful people, who most definitely fall into the "botticelli" range of body types. I think that's just fine, not that they'd care (and good for them too!) As long as you're happy with yourself, and can pay your own way, they can use a crane to move you around and all I'm going to do is ask if I can work the levers. I only have a problem with people who are unhappy with the way they look and think someone else owes them an apology for it.

And don't give me any of this "oppressed poor" crap. The first two things I look at when a homeless person is standing on a roadside holding a sign is their belly and their shoes. If they have either, and most have both, they are not in need of my help.

There are people out in the world who really are poor, who watch their children's bodies consume themselves as they die because there simply isn't enough to eat, who walk the streets naked or nearly so because they cannot afford clothes. None of them live here. I think people who drive themselves to protests wearing pants with waists larger than their inseams to scream about their poverty and plight are obscene.

The only things I find more revolting than a three hundred pound woman suing McDonald's is the lawyer who talked her into it and the blathering wing-nuts who think it's her right.

If you don't listen very closely to this NPR story about "opposition to the Iraq occupation" you might feel a little down, a bit discouraged, when you're done because it sure does make it seem as if they don't like us, a lot.

But listen more closely. Did you catch who they picked? In order:

• An Iraqi colonel (well, former Iraqi colonel, one of the reasons he's pissed is we felt we had to disarm and disband the army. We do have a lot of nerve you see, taking away the guns of a defeated combat force and sending all their ideologically comitted members home. But I digress...)
• The wife of a man who was a part of Uday's personal bodyguard detail (oh, yes, dear, absolutely your husband had no choice. And if you're willing to believe that, I imagine you also believed he stayed a good Muslim and a faithful husband around what nearly everyone agrees was one of the most depraved and decadent men to walk across the world's stage in a good long time. It never ceases to amaze me what some women will insist on believing just so they can keep a nice house.)
• The leader of a rural tribe whose members were thought so loyal they were recruited into the Republican guard.

"Tell me Mr. Fallwell, just what do you think of Hillary Clinton?"

"If you have some time, Ms. Streisand, could you talk a few minutes about your opinion of the Bush administration?"

I'm not saying that Iraqis don't dislike our occupation of their country. I would be quite surprised to find if any "regular" Iraqi liked it one little bit. But by picking such obviously and totally biased subjects for this story I can't help but wonder what, exactly, Ann Garrels really hoped to accomplish?

I don't think any journalist is actually capable of outright sedition, the few who are smart enough to understand the term covet their careers too highly. Far more likely, I'll wager, these were people who were wandering near the al-Rashid hotel (because you know it's just too hot to walk around this damned city. The listeners back home will never know where they came from anyway. You know most can't read a map) and were willing to have a microphone stuck in their face by an Infidel too old to still work her original TV news beat.

While cruising this Consumer Reports article on child seats, I came across this illuminating tidbit:

Car-seat instruction manuals may be part of the problem [of children being injured in accidents even when in car seats]. Such manuals are written at a 10th-grade reading level, on average, according to a study from researchers at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, Md. As such, the study says, the manuals are too hard for many parents to understand.

So, let's let that sink in for a bit. The reason why kids are getting hurt and killed, according to this study at least, is because people can't f-ing read at a high school level?!?

The tragic thing is, I can understand this. 80% of the people around here expect me to read the manual so I can teach them how to use a piece of software (which I, of course, have no other use for). Studies everywhere are showing something like 75% of VCR users don't even know how to set the clocks on the things. Yesterday I actually heard this conversation at a gas station:

Chick: "You want me to do what?"

Guy: "Pump the gas in your car while I fill up mine"

Chick: "But I don't know how to do that! How do I do it?"

Open up a book people. Read the letters. Those squiggly lines mean something. If you get confused, that means there's something wrong with YOU, not the instructions. Stop being stupid and start figuring shit out. Ok, just so we can all be clear on exactly how this works, let's do a little review here:

How to learn to read baby seat instructions in 7 easy steps

1. Open package. Do not eat contents, do not place head in bag.
2. Remove paper marked "INSTRUCTIONS." Do not throw away, do not use to wipe ass, do not stare quizzicaly at them like a Planet of the Apes extra.
3. READ THE FREAKING INSTRUCTIONS one step at a time.
4. NO, REALLY, JUST READ THE FIRST STEP. It's not a novel, skipping to the end won't help you.
5. Perform the first step. No, really, just the first step. Don't decide you know it all just from feel.
6. If you get confused, you're probably trying to do 3 steps at once, or you're just stupid. GO BACK AND JUST TRY THE FIRST STEP YOU MORON.
7. Now repeat with step 2, then step 3, until you run out of things to read.

And don't give me any of this [whine]"I tried really hard but it just didn't make any seeeeeeense"[/whine]. You didn't try hard enough you mouth breathing sack of sh*t! Missing "All My Children" because you're holding the instruction sheet upside down is one thing, but this is your kid here. Go to the damned "Babies R Big Bux" and find out when the next car seat inspection happens. If you ended up with one LATCH hook in your ear and the other in your ass, they'll get you all sorted out for free.

While you're at it, go read a book. One without pictures this time.

This little ditty over at NPR was pitched by the hosts over at morning edition as an examination of ethics in this era of NY Times exposes and accusations of bias in the media. What is NPR's response? A look at how unethical everyone is. "See folks! We're not ambulance chasing elitists lying to you because we think you're stupid... we're just regular folks like you."

Nope, sorry, doesn't wash. Any time anyone does something stupid, or simply disagrees with their values, the mainstream media do the old "magnifying glass in the sun" trick. Now that it's turned on them, they start scrambling for cover like the roaches they purport to protect us from.

Stop making excuses and start cleaning house. I'm sure it's not you being unethical, and you're just trying to do your job, but obviously that's just not working. The people at CNN who thought it was a good idea to cover up the brutality of the previous Iraqi regime because they didn't want to lose access are still there and making decisions. The New York Times published an obituary about a dead guy written by a dead guy and all they did was make excuses about how "that's just the way it's done."

So far the Post has managed to avoid this mess, but I'm not sure if it's because they're clean, better managed, or simply better at covering it all up. Obviously the Gray Lady still hasn't figured it out.

Sometimes I think it's a really good idea to rely on blogs to get your news. At least there the fact checking is quick and to the point. No surprise Big Media thinks they're just toys.

People never cease to amaze me. There are people out there so nice you want to drown them in cat urine and there are people out there that are so miserable you want to be the one to end their existance just because they are annoying you.

I was out and about today walking with Olivia around the neighborhood putting up my 'Cat Sitting Available' signs on the common mail boxes when I thought it would be a nice treat to stop at the 7-11 for a slushie. The humidity was getting to the both of us and stepping in to some airconditioning for a few minutes would be nice. Plus I had my eye on the bench across the street in the shade to enjoy my slushie and to give Olivia a cold bottle I brought along.

Mistake. Something bad always happens to me.

I purchased my Tropical Sprite slushie and was on my way out the door when the guy behind me, skips to the front as I am opening the door. Ok, this dude is in a bad mood. Do I say anything? Nope. Should I have? Yup.

"Jesus Christ! You fucking women and these fucking strollers are always in the goddamn way!!" as he slams the door on my right hand with the slushie in it.

This is where it gets better. As this asshole skips out the door with his 3 cartons of Winston cigarettes, a hot dog and a Big Gulp, I'm staring at what used to be a 44oz slushie that has managed to explode in my hand, all over the front of the stroller and onto Olivia.

So now I have no slushie, a wet, sticky stroller and a baby covered in Sprite flavored slushie ice that is screaming her head off, and I have nearly a mile to walk home.

So much for a nice afternoon. Does anyone in the 7-11 help? Nope, they just stood and stared. I didn't even get offered paper towels to clean Olivia up with. I just tossed my cup outside in the trash next to the door and left what what left of my slushie on the floor and walked out.

Pat gets a no-prize for sending us this little ditty from a media wonk trying a classic "Who's Laughing Now?" maneuver.

I tried to address this in Casualties, but I don't think I made my point very well. Ok, in crystal-clear terms, as far as I'm concerned:

Your opinion of Bush is irrelevant. Your opinion of the war is irrelevant. Whether or not the administration exaggerated evidence or outright lied to get its way is irrelevant. I will repeat: NONE OF THESE THINGS MATTER ANYMORE. THEY. DO. NOT. MATTER! We won the war. We're there. Stop bleating and whining about "should haves" or "might have beens" because those things don't make a single goddamn bit of difference right now. Every time anyone mentions anything like this I just keep seeing empty horse barns with open doors and a kitchen with milk all over the floor.

Stop trying to get Bush out of the Whitehouse and start paying attention. Two entire nations are relying on us to help them back from the abyss. If your opinions, suggestions, or criticisms of Iraq or Afghanistan do not directly address this fundamental fact then please make sure the door doesn't hit your ass on the way out. I have no time for you, and I hope to hell the people actually trying to get the job done don't either.

Let's play a little thought experiment. A condemned house two blocks down gets bulldozed because it's a crack house, full of gangstas and thugs, a murder happening there nearly every week. A drive-by shooting from one gang killed your neighbor's kid. The house is gone; the neighborhood is peaceful again. But you know the dealers are still out there.

There's an abandoned house right across the street from the bulldozed one. There aren't any drug dealers there. It's just empty. Suddenly the city bulldozes that one, claiming it has turned into a crack house as well.

Would you really be that upset when the papers revealed the next day the house was still empty? Would you blame the mayor when drug dealers and homeless people started to sabotage construction equipment and kill the workers trying to build new, free, houses for them? Would you really try to claim that if the abandoned house had just been left alone the neighborhood would be a better place?

Time to do a little dance, because cursive is on its way out:

Handwriting experts fear that the wild popularity of e-mail, instant messages and other electronic communication, particularly among kids, could erase cursive within a few decades.

For as long as I can remember I've been a practical guy when it comes to learning. Even when I was in kindergarten the teachers had a devil of a time getting me to outline my coloring books. "Why?" I'd ask, "they've already got outlines!" It was such a colossal waste of time.

Cursive writing was another teeth-grinding exercise in redundancy. I already knew how to write. If the way I was doing it was right in the first grade but wrong in the third, why the hell did you teach me the first way at all? The books I was reading certainly weren't in cursive, they were in print, something I'd already been taught. I watched secretaries on TV type things for crying out loud. They printed things, they didn't "cursive" them.

I very rapidly decided that, like math (when was the last time you did long division on paper?), cursive classes were just another mind-numbingly boring and unnecessary thing grownups forced children to do because that's what their grownups had forced them to do. To me, grade school wasn't about learning, it was about various kinds of revenge.

I know there are parents out there smiling condescendingly saying "oh you just wait mister, you'll see." I mean, look at this:

Parents who pride themselves on their penmanship often bemoan their children's cursive ... Many adults pine for a return to the Palmer Method or even its fancier predecessor, Spencerian.

"Cursive was so character-defining when I was in school," says Amy Greene, whose 9-year-old daughter and 11-year-old son prefer keyboards to cursive in their Palo Alto classrooms. "The way you wrote something was considered part of your inner being, your core, your worth. ... Now it's considered an anachronism."

Pardon me while I polish up your rose-colored glasses, I truely am sorry the world is changing right before your very eyes. Cursive was an anachronism thirty-five years ago, probably more. It's losing ground, dying out, not because kids are lazy (it takes real balls for someone born between 1946 and 1960 to say that), or because the teachers just don't take the time. It's dying out because it's inferior to the new way of doing things. I know, I know, it's such a damned shame anyway, isn't it? Such a shame that we're losing one of the very cornerstones of classic public education...

You know, that what you write is less important than the way it is put on the page.

And before you try some snappy comeback about "what good is what you write if people can't read it?" I want you to please explain to me how this is easier to read than this.

How stupid is this kid?

Typical stupid kid playing with a BB gun, then gets shot himself. What do you do? Blame it on the family pet.

Maybe the cat didn't try hard enough to cull the gene pool.

Most in the blogosphere by now know about the CNN chief news executive's confession, so we didn't link it up here, but in this article Larry over at the "new & improved fresh & tasty" Amish Tech Support gave me a reason, an email address. Read the article, then be sure to write an email message to Jordan Eason to let him know what you think about his "confession."

When Trent Lott said stupid things the press gnawed on it until "a change was made". Now those same self-appointed keepers of the truth have admitted they were lying to us just to get a fucking story, and are expecting the consequences to just vanish in the noise. So I'm going to do my part by pouring our own humble capful of gasoline on this smouldering fire.

They provide a platform for people who hate in the name of equal time and we remain quiet. They employ people who have the ethics of a rabid gerbil and we say nothing. Their "best and brightest" make egregious errors and then hide them on a back page, when they admit them at all, and we are silent. As my brother would say, "the line must be drawn here."

ARRRG! Unlike most of the dream cars I talk about, this is one I could probably swing. If I had that kind of green around, which I don't. Plus, I don't have that much garage space, and it'd be a shame to leave it out in the rain.

I know I know "what-are-you-thinking-this-is-an-old-hunk-of-junk-you-better-save-up-for-that-kid-mister" kind of thing. So I present it to you out there. If you're looking for a modern superfun 2nd car and live nearby, it don't get no better than this.

Two no-prizes in one day! Jeff brings us this unintentionally amusing whinefest from the press about how reporters are "wary of pentagon promises" for better access in future conflicts. Some choice comments:

"We got essentially zip, nothing of any value, during [the Afghanistan campaign]," CNN's Christiane Amanpour said.

"It just isn't fair... the press conferences the general gives us don't say anything interesting, the soldiers aren't allowing us to hitch rides on their jeeps, and the coffee is cold!"

Gee, last time I checked it was called "reporting" and "journalism", implying you actually have to get off your ass and nose around. Since when is the military obliged to cart your overpaid careerist machiavellian kiester anywhere? This isn't the President, they're not required to give you free rides like you get on Air Force One.

Amanpour ... said the military needs to balance its security concerns with "what we the press need to meet our responsibilities."

No you dumb twit, the military needs to balance its security concerns with what it takes to win. Your function is literally parasitic to them. Again, get off your asses and take a risk or two. Get dirty, walk around, talk to people. Especially disappointing coming from Amanpour, who has risked her fanny more than once to get a story, and should know better.

Tom Rosenstiel, a professor who directs the Project for Excellence in Journalism at Columbia University, said journalists understand that in war they must decide whether the information they gather might hinder the military.

Ah. Now academia opens its bowls to voice a typical opinion. Last I checked, sparky, it's the MILITARY'S job to decide what information might help or hinder their operations. Remember, they're here to win, not provide you with career opportunities. You see, if you or one of your pressmonkey colleagues make the wrong decision and hamper, say, a politician's secret plans to get some legislation passed, you will hinder that legislation. With most politicians, this is usually a good thing. If you or one of your pressmonkey colleagues make the wrong decision and hamper a battle, people fucking die.

Ah, but since it's not going to be one of your sons or daughters that's OK with you right? I mean, what's a few dumb grunts between friends? Most of these kids've never even been to college. You've got tenure to worry about!

"We can hear things and learn things that we must hold close to ourselves," added Kevin Klose, chief executive of National Public Radio.

No dumbass. If you hear something sensitive enough that it can effect an operation someone screwed up. The military cannot rely on the discretion of untrained civilians to maintain the security of its operations. You might be trustworthy and wise enough to know that reporting a bunch of tanks disappearing in the night might tip off a surprise attack, but do you really think all your colleagues are? Even the young punks who're looking to make a name for themselves? Are you willing to risk your daughter's life on that bet, you elitist freak?

"[The Pentagon] are saying the right things," [CNN news chief executive] Jordan said by video link from Atlanta. "Whether they do the right things remains to be seen."

So, lemme get this straight. In order for you to "trust" the military they must:

• Give you free access to pre-attack, attack, and post-attack intelligence and planning, and rely on "your judgment" as to what is sensitive and what is not.
• Provide transportation, lodging to you and your crew to allow you to go wherever, whenever you like, and allow you to talk to whomever you like. Oh, and enough protection to ensure you and your non-combat-trained crew don't have their names etched on a piece of glass.
• Let you be the final arbiter of what constitutes a successful engagement, battle, or war.

Sound about right sparky? Pardon me, I need to go vomit somewhere.

There has never been a war in history that has been won by the press, but there are several that have been lost by them. The military has a job to do, and it involves killing people and blowing things up and getting killed and getting blown up and when you get yourself in the middle of it all you're just getting in the fucking way.

The military's job is to win wars any way they can. There are no rules, in fact the best skirmishes, battles, and wars are usually won by being the sneakiest, cleverest, meanest bastard on the field. Even you people know at least one colleague that's just a talking head, a pretty face who happened to blow the right producer (and they're not all women) to get their job instead of clawing to the top like you guys.

These are the people the military is protecting itself from, and I'm sorry to say I'd rather the military keep busy trying to win the freaking war than figure out which press monkey is a "good guy" and which is just a lizard looking to get noticed by Peter Jennings.

Should the press be out there? Damned straight they should be out there. If it weren't for the press we'd probably still be in Vietnam counting bodies as success on the battlefield. If a press monkey can find out about excess, abuse, incompetence, and neglect in our armed forces then I damned sure want to know about it.

But it's not the military's job to help.

Nell Carter passed away today. Nice lady, great voice. 54 is way too early.

Scott made me stay home from work today. I was in the process of getting ready for work, since I slept on the couch again, when I started to feel dizzy and a bit green.

You know you and your significant other love each other when one can be in the shower and the other one retching over the toilet. "You OK?", he says? "Yeah, I will be". (hangs head back in the toilet for the second round)

Being sick on an empty stomach is not fun at all. "I want you to call work and call in. You've been sick all week, and I don't want to have to take you home early."

This is my second sick day this week.

My obgyn said my immune system has dropped quite a bit due to being pregnant and it will take longer for me to recover.

I have no appetite whatsoever. But I did manage to make myself eat a piece of toast and drink some grapefruit juice. I have drunk so much tea this week that I think I may be dehydrating myself from it.

Hopefully I'll start feeling better this weekend.

Ok, I'm sicker than I thought. I first thought since Sunday, that I had a mild cold. Just some congestion, sneezing and achiness in my head.

This morning I have been up since 3 am hacking and gaging and unable to be comfortable. Good thing Mama is usually up at this hour surfing the net, since she is really a cat and only sleeps in 2 hour incriments. :)

First sign things are not going good. I took that damn Robitussin because I started to cough. What came up? Green nasty shit. Green=no good. Mama, of course said to watch for rust colored yuck- could indicate pneumonia. Eww.

Secondly, I told you all I yack from Robitussin. Did I yack? Of course. An hour later. Not only that, but being pregnant, I can't sneeze and hold back my bladder anymore despite all the kegals I do. So as I bowed to the toilet god, I managed to pee in my pants. Nice right? I also got banished to the couch (which I don't mind- I love my couch)since Scott drives to and from work so I can cat nap on the way in and back, so the compromise is not bad. I really don't like to wake someone else up being sick. The downstairs is much cooler. The big plus is all the cats come and congregate with me.

Bad thing about cats joining you in the bathroom while I was busy trying not to vomit up my baby, was that Goblin was trying to stick her head in the toilet at the same time to see what was going on. She has been peed on before by Scott in the middle of the night, so I'm sure being hurled on would be nothing special to her. No..I didn't puke on the cat.

So now I have to call my obgyn again this morning and tell them what is going on since they have the most control in the meds I can take. Hopefully they can just call in a prescription for me.

I still a have to go to work this am. I am the only tech on today until 1 pm. Though, I don't know about tomorrow.

Yup, as expected, they've finally come out with a "fart pipe" for Alfas. Of course you know this thing gives you an extra 40 horsepower, right? Following that logic, why don't I just weld a coffee can to my muffler, that aughta be good for another 20, no?

Gah. Ricers. Gah.

Update: Didn't even notice that you can make the tailpipe flash in time with your turn signals. Considering the number of times I've been rear-ended in spiders (2x), hell, maybe...

Nah...

For those of you wondering, yes, Salam has stopped blogging. Details are here. Summary: His blog got mentioned in a major US wire story, and suddenly he wasn't under the radar anymore. We wish him luck and hope he re-cloaks successfully.

Update: I forgot to say this was a bank-shot from Reflections in D Minor.

Jim noted that his site didn't look right in old versions of Netscape, to which Joanie replied "Who Cares?" I started this as a reply on Jim's site, but figured a wider audience might be interested.

Who should care? You should, and you should, and you should too! The netscape browser is making a comeback now that it's been revamped, is stable, secure, and has more features than IE. It also follows the CSS rules more closely, and doesn't have as many quirks as IE.

The old Netscape browsers (4.x and lower) were written when CSS was in its infancy, and as a result they don't follow style sheets very well, if at all. Because of CSS's growing popularity, increasing numbers of sites are gradually becoming unreadable to these early browsers. It will be difficult to get your site to view correctly in 4.x.

As a web site administrator I consider it a duty to make sure my sites look correct in at least the two "big" browsers. Luckily, the MT writers think so too, and so it's quite rare for me to find an MT site that doesn't display properly in Netscape 6+ (yours, Jim, and yours, Joanie, both look fine, for example). Unfortunately blogspot doesn't work that way, and so Maru's site, for example, is almost unreadable to me at work, and Larry's is unreadable to Ellen at home (although that might be because Ellen's computer is schizophrenic "quirky"). We don't check those blogs as often as we want to because of this.

It's a free download folks. Take the time out to get the latest version and at least glance at your site in both versions when you make changes. Sure, it's a pain in the ass, and yes, there's nothing quite as frustrating as having everything look "just so" in the browser YOU use but having it get mangled in the browser someone else uses. But until IE catches up with Netscape's (actually Mozilla's) conformity to standards, you still have to do it.

Do you have to make your blog look perfect in both browsers? No. Ours looks perfect in Netscape but there are weird little details in IE (the text in the sidebars tends to run off the margins at times, for example). But it's quite readable. One of the points of blogging is to allow as many readers as possible to check you out. I, for one, will thank you.

P.S. Also keep in mind AOL is still making noises about switching its default browser to a Mozilla-powered system, making it essentially the same as Netscape. If that happens we Netscape users won't be such a small minority!

So I work at a non-profit. One of the "new" fundraising ideas is to get employees of the non-profit to donate some of their own salary back to the company.

So, like, am I being a mean cranky bastard when I think if they really needed the staff to donate they should just garnish our wages up front? I mean, that way at least we know what it is.

Gah. I'm in a nasty mood today, aren't I?

Also-ran over at uppity-negro.com thinks that just because he's never going to link to us again we might ever link to him. I tell you, as soon as I can remember how to work blogroll again I'm droppin his so fast Whitney Houston would think it was her latest record contract!

<Undertaker Voice>And if uppity-negro.com thinks he's gonna get any links from us just because we don't know Buffy... well, hey, lookit that, looks like floppity-igmo.com doesn't even know how to fix his referral stuff, 'cuz we're still there!</Undertaker Voice>

Ok, I admit it, I screwed up. I didn't really follow Buffy the Vampire Slayer when it started out, even though it looked interesting enough. The guy from the Taster's Choice commercials as professor was always a hard one for me to take.

So anyway, everyone around the blogosphere keeps talking about this show. And talking, and talking, and talking, giving me a serious case of pop-culture and SF envy. I've been wanting to give the show a second chance for a few years now, but seeing as the whole thing is in its, what, seventh or eighth year, figured I'd miss nearly all the nuances and be mostly lost.

So my question to you, dear Buffy-fan reader (no, not you mom, sit down. I already know what you're going to say), is what would you consider the best way to get into this series from this distance? Should I start catching it in syndication? Rent episode compilations on DVD? Go to some website and read up? Just start watching the new ones and figure it out as it goes along? Advice needed!

Here we have yet another instance of the monkey press being fed releases instead of getting off their asses and doing their jobs. This is not "shocking". This is not "worrying". This is acceptable, even expected, behavior of a diplomatic corps, and has widely been known as "legal spying" at least back to World War II (where I first encountered the term reading history books of the period).

Here's how it works: in order to function on the international stage, Freedonia must send representatives to Sylvania. Freedonia informs Sylvania of the names, addresses, functions, etc. of all the people it's sending to Sylvania. Sylvania is assumed to now know who these people are, and if they think they must, follow these members of Freedonia around while they are living and, presumably, working in Sylvania (certainly the one in the trench coat with the horn would be suspicious).

Countries are specifically prevented from restricting the mobility of diplomatic staff by at least two international treaties. Therefore, if Trentino and Rob Rolland want to take a stroll there's nothing the Sylvania can legally do about it. The idea being since they've been registered as part of the diplomatic corps it's Sylvania's job to keep an eye on them.

If their stroll happens to take them by, say, Acme Arms Incorporated while AAI was having a show-and-tell of Sylvania's new "widget-o-wonder" death ray, Trentino and Rolland would be well within their rights to stop and listen. They could even take pictures if they liked, and as long as it was legal for any citizen of Sylvania to do this there's not a damned thing Sylvania can do to stop them.

Even if it wasn't legal... lets say Trentino and Rolland happened to get caught paying someone to break into AAI's offices late at night to take pictures of the plans of the "widget-o-wonder", all Sylvania can legally do is send them home. That's one of the points of diplomatic immunity. We are not barbarians here in this world of nations, and if a diplomat gets loose and sees something he or she isn't supposed to it's the host country's fault (now, the someone they were paying, that's a different story).

The Soviets and Americans were famous for these hijinks during the Cold War. Both embassies had many times the number of required staff working there. And you can be darned sure everyone was keeping a really close eye on everyone else.

That's why this particular "shocking" report is so annoying. The only reason we know the diplomats are doing this is because they are diplomats and sometimes that's what diplomats do. Some Pentagon weenie or a spook over at Langley decided to "send Iraq a message" that we know they're watching us, and they used the press to do so.

The monkies freaked because, even though this isn't illegal spying, it kinda sounds like it and gosh darned it there isn't anything else going on in the world so why not?

I was heading out to work this morning and found my car was gone from the parking lot. So what do I do? I head back in the house and ask Scott where did he put it. "Dumbass, it's in the same spot we placed it yesterday", he says. "NO it's NOT!" I screamed back.

Shit.

It has either A. been towed, or B. been stolen. Of course the homeowners association does not post the number of the towing company on the signs out front. My car is perfectly legal to park there. I have the HOA sticker on it.

So now I have to wait till 9 am for the offices to open and see if it has been towed, and who decided to have it towed. If it was towed, is it wrong of me to tell the HOA that they have to pay for the towing and impoundment of my car? I mean they towed it with an HOA sticker on it and I checked the bylaws of the HOA book and it was perfectly legal for me to park there.

All I have to do is wait till 9, and find out.

Update: Cruiser got towed, we're still not sure why. Some busybody probably didn't like us taking "their" space and didn't see the permit in the window. --Scott

Sometimes I feel a little envious when I read about the latest stuff Jim, Aaron, or Jason is listening to, because I haven't purchased a new CD in probably five or six years now. Then I read things like this, and then I start to think they'll be joining me soon enough.

Want you all to listen up: if AOL can give away millions of CDs, that means they can be manufactured essentially for free. We're already being charged a "tax" on both blank tapes and CDs which goes straight to the record companies. The record companies cleared billions of dollars in net profit last year. Now they're breaking compatibility with existing players, meaning "upgrade or else".

Enough already. Vote with your pocketbooks and stop buying music. BOYCOTT is an ugly word to any industry, because it works.

Dr. Smith is no more! 87 is a pretty good run, but sounded like a pretty sudden way to go. I had no idea he was the voice of the old toy repair guy in Toy Story 2!

Ok, this story has just taken the cake for me. There are obviously far, far too many morons out there who are scared out of their wits about this thing. I live right next door and I AM NOT AFRAID OF THE SNIPER. I'm afraid of all the rest of you twits who are too busy looking and dancing around to actually drive straight down the goddamned road.

So, to show just how dumb you all are, some relevant statistics:

Unless otherwise noted all statistics taken from The National Vital Statistics Report, 1999-2000 from the Centers for Disease Control

And as far as worrying about kids:

* The lightening statistic was pulled from this website, and the sniper statistics I got from today's Washington Post.

In other words, almost 11 times as many people are killed on our nation's roads EVERY GODDAMNED DAY, 365 DAYS A YEAR than have been killed by this psycho in two weeks.

And, unlike our friendly neighborhood psycho, THERE ARE LOTS OF THINGS YOU CAN DO TO KEEP FROM GETTING KILLED IN OR BY A CAR. Easy, simple things like fastening seat belts, not getting drunk, and just paying the f*ck attention to the world around you are all proven extremely effective at preventing you from being killed by something 11 times more likely to off you than some wacko with a gun.

So, if you actually live in this area and actually have done something