Cake Eater Chronicles

Ok, so the comments appear

Ok, so the comments appear to be down. As with everything else in
life---it appears you really do get what you pay for. Pfft. Moveable
type is looking better and better all the damn time. Which is sad
because a move to that sort of software will, undoubtedly, make me look
like an idiot and I would much rather avoid that if at all possible,
thank you ever so much.

--- Made yet another blogroll

--- Made yet another blogroll today. Woohoo. Right Wing News has added me onto their list of Daily News sites.

I don't know why you added me, but thanks! I appreciate it.

--- I might actually have

--- I might actually have to read this book.

Particularly after the husband read the first page to me. And the quote doth read:

Five hours' New York jet lag and Cayce Pollard wakes in Camden Town
to the dire and ever-circling wolves of distrupted circadian rhythm.
It is that flat and spectral non-hour, awash in limbic tides, brainstem
stirring fretfully, flashing inappropriate reptilian demands for sex,
food, sedation, all of the above, and none really an option right now.
Not even food, as Damien's new kitchen is devoid of edible content as
its designers' display windows in Camden High Street. Very handsome,
the upper cabinets faced in canary-yellow laminate, the lower with
some, unstained apple-ply. Very clean and almost entirely empty, save
for a carton containing two dry pucks of Wheatabix and some loose
packets of herbal tea. Nothing at all in the German fridge, so new that
its interior smells only of cold and long chain monomers.
She knows, now, absolutely, hearing the white noise that is London,
that Damien's theory of jet lag is correct: that her mortal soul is
leagues behind her, being reeled in on some ghostly umbilical down the
vanished wake of the plane that brought her here, hundreds of thousands
of feet above the Atlantic. Souls can't move that quickly, and are left
behind, and must be awaited, upon arrival, like lost luggage.
She wonders if this gets gradually worse with age: the nameless hour
deeper, more null, its affect at once stranger and less interesting?

Pattern Regcognition by William Gibson. Chapter 1, The Website of Dreadful Night. Copyright 2003. All Rights Reserved.

That is---hands down---the best description of jet lag ever written.

Maybe I'll just have to give it a go, even though I never in my life thought I would read a book by William Gibson.

--- Shuddap already. LONDON, England

--- Shuddap already.

LONDON, England -- Princess Diana's family, British media and the
prime minister have expressed outrage at a U.S. television network's
decision to broadcast pictures of the princess as she lay dying.
Diana's brother, Earl Spencer, said Thursday he was "shocked and
sickened" by the broadcast, which showed two grainy black-and-white
photocopies of photographs taken at the scene of the 1997 Paris car
crash in which Diana died.
So, everyone reportedly are getting their knickers in a twist over "two
grainy black and white photocopies of photographs" that were aired on
CBS. Well, here's what I have to say to that: grow the fuck up.
Princess Di chose to live in the public eye. Is it sad that she also
died in the public eye? Yes. There is no denying that and I'm saddened
that her boys had to see graphic proof of it. However, that seems to
come with the territory when you're a publicity whore like she
was---like the entire royal family is. I can hear the complaints now. Oh, but Kathy, the poor princess never did anything but good. Look
at all the attention she brought to children with HIV/AIDS; look at the
work she did on having landmines repealed? Why should she be exploited
so?
Why shouldn't she? She asked for it, after all. Why is everyone so damn
shocked that pictures of her while she lay dying made it onto TV? I
just don't get it. She exploited the media just as much as she was
exploited by it. Why is there a double standard? Oh, it's all right to
take photos of her taking her boys to an amusement park to promote the
greater good and worthiness of the monarchy, but it's not all right to
show two grainy photocopies of photos of her dying because that's
exploitative? Where's the damn line? It keeps changing.
I feel sorry for her sons. They shouldn't have to see things like that.
No child---small or grown---should ever have to see photos of their
mother dying---let alone have them eagerly consumed by the masses. That
is the sad part about this. But really if there's anyone to blame in
this scenario, it's Queen Elizabeth for forcing her family out there.
They have to prove their worthiness somehow, don't they? There's not a
whole lot the royal family does in terms of Divine Right rulership
anymore, except when the Queen opens parliament---and even then she's
reading a speech the party in power has written for her. They're
glorfied ribbon cutters. They use the media to justify their worth. Why
are they so surprised and shocked and outraged! when the coverage
doesn't go their way?

--- GODDAMNIT! Inhale. Exhale. Inhale.

--- GODDAMNIT!
Inhale. Exhale. Inhale. Exhale. Inhale. Exhale...
This deep cleansing breath shit isn't working to calm me down. I. Am.
So. Pissed. Off.
I am not particularly fond of the phrase "busting my hump," but it's
appropriate in this circumstance. I've been busting my hump to come up
with a good novel. And this isn't my first one. Nope. I've got two in
the bag already. But I'm trying something new; something different.
Something that will sell. I am a novelist. I'm no Hemingway and I don't
want to be one. I am spat upon by the establishment for my lack of
ambition in this regard. Novelists of the highest order, whose books
have no plot, sneer down upon those of us who write popular fiction
because our work doesn't "mean" as much as theirs. Well, fine. Never
mind that popular fiction affords those literary fiction writers their
lofty perch in the first place. It makes no nevermind to me. I can deal
with snottery. I've been dealing with it all of my life. I don't want
the National Book Award. I just want to be published. And I don't think
it's too much to ask that I have a fair shot of being just that, but
when I have to compete with the likes of a nitwit Gore daughter, who
has apparently written Bridget Jones Goes to Washington,
it makes me wonder why I work so goddamn hard in the first place. What
the hell am I doing this for if I haven't even got a shot? If some
ex-VP's daughter can weasel her way into a contract simply by
traversing the veritable freeway full of people whom she knows because
of her family? But I am a writer. I don't know how I could be otherwise
now that I've started, so let me clue you in on what that means.
This means struggling for originality. This means struggling with
prose. This means coming up with characters whose molds I am the first
to break. This also means being at a complete loss at times. This means
not being able to see the forest for the trees and having to whack away
at passages where I've gotten completely off track. This means work, in
other words. But the work doesn't stop there. Nosirreee. There's more
to writing than just sitting down with the laptop and whizzing off a
hundred thousand words. There's the business aspect of publishing and
it will suck at your soul like an Oreck. There's the searches. Agent
searches. Publisher searches. Then
there's the query letters that need to be sent out: a one page letter
that must seduce an agent into your bed with phrases like I believe this market has been underappreciated for quite some time....
Then maybe they'll ask for a synopsis. Maybe they'll ask for the first
three chapters. And if you're really lucky, well, they'll ask for the
whole enchilada---the entire manuscript. And you'll send it out---and
you'll also send a self-addressed stamped envelope for them to send the
thing back if they don't like it.
And chances are, they won't like it. They'll say you have potential,
but the new thing that you're trying to do won't sell well. For people
who deal with stories and storytelling, publishers and agents are a
pretty unimaginative lot. They want what sells. Period. New things
don't have a history of working well. What's worse, though, is when
they don't tell you what turned them off your work and so you're left
to wonder. You have no idea. It just wasn't for them. All the while
during this process, your heart and dreams and hopes are in the air,
just waiting for someone to field them. You try not to get your hopes
up. You know the odds aren't in your favor, but you hope anyway. You
can't seem to help yourself. And when you go down to mailbox and you
find one of your SASE's in the box, you know you weren't good enough,
but you don't know why.
This is why unpublished writers stick to people who have been published
like fleas to a dog. They've
made it. Maybe they'll take pity on you and they'll help you break into
the Skull and Bones fraternity that is publishing. So, some people
start stalking their favorite authors. I've never gone that far---thank
God---but I've been tempted. Oh, so tempted. You want to know where the
line between the unpublished and the published resides; you think that
they'll be able to give you a clue. But they don't. Because they don't
know either. Why? Because it's pure chance. Why do I do this? Because I
have a story to tell. I have a novel I want you
to read. I like my novel. I am completely sure that once it gets
published, it will sell. I'm sure of it. I don't want much from a
publisher. A lousy hundred thousand copies---paperback--- and I'm
pretty damn sure I'll make them their money back---and then some and
all the praise I would like in return is to be told that I kept someone
up until three in the morning because they just couldn't put the book I
wrote down. That's all I want. I'm not greedy. Did Gore Girl#2 have to
do any of this? Nope. She "just happened to run into Harvey Weinstein
one day" and she gets a goddamn book contract out of it. Not to mention
that the movie rights have been sold off and the book hasn't even been
published. The whole scenario just reeks of nepotism.
Let's just run the scenario through our minds, and take the fact that
she's Al Gore's daughter out of the equation. Would she be working for
"Futurama?" Maybe, maybe not. I don't know how talented the woman is.
"Futurama" is a good show, but let's be clear here---TV writers rarely
get contracts to write novels, because once you write for a genre,
you're pretty much stuck in that genre. It doesn't matter if you're the
next Steinbeck. If you write for "Futurama" your work will probably
wind up in a slush pile in some assistant editors office for the simple
reason that you're not published. And you'll still be writing for
"Futurama."
Now, let's look at Gore Girl#2's experience: she's twenty-six; she's
the daughter of the former Vice President of the United States; she
works in Hollywood writing for a television show; she's offered a fat
contract because Harvey thinks Miramax publishing is lacking in the
"chicklit" department and he hires her to come up with something---then
he snags the movie rights. Never mind the fact that Harvey owned "Talk"
Magazine and not only enployeed its editor, but is also buddy-buddy
with that Clinton/Gore whore, Tina Brown. You remember Tina, don't you?
She's the one who inaugurated that magazine with Hillary's first
post-First Lady interview---the one that convinced a lot of people it
was a good idea for Hillary to run for Senate. There's absolutely no
political bias going on here.
Goddamnit! It's. Just. Not. Fair.
This whole escapade proves once again, it's not what you know, but who
you know. And apparently if you're a Gore Girl, you know a whole hell
of a lot of people who can make your life so much easier. And you don't
even have to be original in the meantime.

--- Update on the whole

--- Update on the whole "The DaVinci Code Is Full O' Fallacies" thing.
In case you're new here (and a goodly number of you seem to
be---welcome), the husband's sister lives on the other side of town.
They're pretty conservative and are very into their church---Missouri
Synod Lutherans. We visited them for Easter, and whenever we have a
family gathering and their parents can't join us, the siblings call the
folks to say howdy. During the course of the sister-in-law's
conversation, she asked her father if "he'd watched those DaVinci Code
CD-Rom's?" There were little kids flying around the room, all hopped up
on chocolate bunny ears, so I wasn't really following the conversation,
but it sounded to me as if she was trying to convince her dad to watch
them, but he wasn't having it. When she handed the phone over to the
husband, I asked her what was the deal with "The DaVinci Code?" She
reported that her pastor---a history buff---had
been concerned with all of the "historical fallacies" in the book, and
had sponsored a series of lectures about how inaccurate the book was,
to, you know, make sure all of his church members didn't take the book
for the truth. Long story short---the father in law had read the book,
had raved about it and the sister in law wanted to make sure he knew
what the "real" truth was regarding that book.
Despite the fact the book is a work of fiction.
Despite the fact she's never actually read "The DaVinci Code." And I
mean that. She's never read it and when the husband dumps it on her
this week and demands that she does read it, she'll probably give it
back a few months down the road, saying she never found the time.
Anyway, fast forward to last Friday, the husband and I are eating
supper, watching Anderson Cooper as usual and suddenly there are two
authors on, plugging their book, "Cracking DaVinci's Code."
We were a little surprised to see it was an actual movement, but I
suppose we shouldn't have been. I'll lay you good odds that these
"lectures" came from the same group of people behind this book---and
the pastor was only following a carefully prepared and plotted lesson
plan, sold by these people. How did I get to this conclusion? It's the
word "fallacy." It should have tipped me off. After all, who uses the
word "fallacies" these days in common conversation. But the authors do.
As did the sister in law---and she was very careful to use that
particular word. Most people use "errors" or "mistakes." The sister in
law went to secretarial college, and she reads self-help books, not
fiction or the collected works of Noam Chomsky---it's definitely not a
part of her regular vocabulary. The picture becomes clearer the more I
think about it. Hmmm.
Read for yourself.

COOPER (voice-over): It begins with a murder in the Louvre. The
first clue comes in the form of Leonardo's best known drawing "The
Vitruvian Man." But as the mystery unravels, the reader is led to other
mysteries in other masterpieces, wheels within wheels, the secrets
revealed in "The Last Supper" and the "Mona Lisa" opened the doors to
the Catholic Church's secret societies, some real, some maybe not so
real.
It's no secret that the book is incredibly popular. It spent 56 weeks
on the best-seller list much of that time at No. 1, and it's no
surprise that some of the questions raised by "The Da Vinci Code" are
causing controversy among Christians.
What was Jesus' real relationship with Mary Magdalene? Was there such a
thing as the Holy Grail? The author says the book is a work of fiction,
so why then are some biblical scholars working so hard to crack the
code?
(END VIDEOTAPE)
COOPER: Well, joining us now are two of those scholars, James Garlow
and Peter Jones, two Christian researchers who say "The Da Vinci Code"
undermines the integrity of the Christian faith. They have just come
out with their own book in response called "Cracking Da Vinci's Code,"
appreciate you being on the program.
JAMES GARLOW, CO-AUTHOR, "CRACKING DA VINCI'S CODE": I like to be with
you.
COOPER: They say this is a novel. This is a work of fiction yet you say
the Da Vinci code book has a hidden agenda. What in your opinion is the
hidden agenda?
GARLOW: For one thing people are taking it seriously. It is a novel
admittedly and if people were only treating it as a novel we wouldn't
be writing books about it either but the fact is people are taking it
seriously and it is redefining the understanding of who God is.
COOPER: But you think the author, Dan Brown, has this hidden
anti-Christian agenda basically.
PETER JONES, CO-AUTHOR, "CRACKING DA VINCI'S CODE": He does say
apparently in public that he was convinced by a new spirituality and
that he felt called to make it known throughout the culture.
COOPER: Dan Brown though says that he is a Christian and that he, you
know, it may not be your view of Christianity but he considers himself
a Christian and that this book is really prompting theological
discussions and therefore is a good thing.
JONES: You know we are in the presence of sort of a watershed in the
culture as to what life means and essentially the question is who is
God? And you have two definitions of God going and I think people are
wondering which one is the right one and I think Dan Brown...
COOPER: When you say there are two definitions, explains.
JONES: Two definitions of God, one is that God is the transcendent
creator and redeemer, has his own existence.
COOPER: Is separate from the rest?
JONES: But separate from creation. The other is a more pantheistic view
of God where you find God within. And, though this is fiction, the
novel has this agenda within it and communicates that view of God and
there are Christians buying that view of God and so we felt like we
needed to, you know, right the ship.
COOPER: But I mean some will say you're being intolerant. I mean can no
novel be written which deviates from your interpretation of
Christianity?
GARLOW: He can write anything he wants. He has the right to do that.
The issue is one of historical accuracy or historical fallacies.
He makes such claims that Jesus was not considered divine until the
year 325 in (unintelligible).
The evidence is quite to the contrary. The original followers all saw
him as divine and all the early writers of the first and second century
saw him as divine.
COOPER: And it's things like, I mean one of I guess the characters in
"Da Vinci Code," which I have not read, talks about Jesus marrying Mary
Magdalene having children. That sort of thing is one of the things
that...
JONES: That's not so bothersome actually. Marriage is a good thing.
It's just that it's doubtful and all scholars will say that, that Jesus
was ever married.
COOPER: So what do you hope to do with your book? I mean what is the
objective?
GARLOW: Well, one of the things I hope to do is get people to reexamine
the issues that Dan Brown raises, which is a good thing, and that is,
is their New Testament reliable, yes or no?
COOPER: So, in that sense you agree almost with Dan Brown that bringing
up these theological issues is a good thing?
GARLOW: Well, I'm glad they brought up, unfortunately I think he has
written a document that's historically unreliable because he raises the
question is the New Testament reliable and was Jesus considered divine,
for example prior to the year 325 or did Constantine manipulate this
into existence as he contends?
Now the fact is he's in error historically on both those issues but the
good thing is a lot of people are going to look at that issue and try
to get answers for it and that's encouraging. COOPER: Well, I know the
book is doing really well. I look forward to reading it this weekend.
Jim Garlow thanks very much and Peter Jones as well. Thank you very
much.
JONES: You're very welcome.
GARLOW: It's an honor to be with you.
COOPER: All right.
So, these guys take issue with the areas Brown played with and
apparently that he had the temerity to bring up a different version of
God outside of creator/redeemer---one where God resides in all of us
and they felt the need to "right the ship." Apparently, you can't have
people believing that God resides within themselves because then they
might actually think they're God and henceforth aren't accountable to
anyone---let alone a church. It's straight-up, hard core,
fundamentalist Christianity. Skip to Saturday afternoon, the husband is
chatting with his father and they're talking about how whacko this
business is. A few years ago, if you looked up the word "agnostic" in
the dictionary, the husband's picture would have been part of the
definition. He was one of those "I need proof" guys. Fine with me. He
thinks all of this is completely ridiculous. But he wants to see those
CD-Roms, so the mother in law brought them with her and is going to
pass them off to us sometime this week. Apparently, the father in law
never got round to watching them...until Saturday afternoon, after he'd
hung up. When he popped a disc into the Cd-Rom---Norton Anti Virus came
up onto the screen, helpfully informing him that something was trying
to access his system. He shut the CD down and called the husband back.
The husband was positively livid when he heard this---he was working
out all the possible implications in his head as he ranted: "IF...IF...
that's just wrong!
If they're trying to insert spyware onto people's hard drives with this
crap, man is {insert sister in law's name here} gonna get it! If that's
what they're trying to do...oh, man! So on and so forth.
So, later on in the week, providing the handover goes smoothly and the
sister in law doesn't think we're trying to persecute her religious
beliefs, we should have some interesting commentary on what's actually
in those Cd-Rom's and if they're putting spyware onto people's
computers.

--- You probably didn't notice,

--- You probably didn't notice, but I performed a little spring
cleaning around here. Good thing, too. I got the urge to clean out of
my system without actually having to clean. HA! Take that Hazel!
Anyway, some links have been added, some have been deleted. And yes, I
did it all myself. The husband did not help me and, amazingly enough, I
didn't goof up any of the links or the formatting on the page. I'm
good. So, for the changes... - I'm not telling you what the new tag
line means. Learn Latin and you'll get a chuckle. - Mil's been delinked
because the bugger isn't updating his site anymore. If you haven't read
Mil, you can find him here,
courtesy of me, just this one last time. He's one of those people who
has translated their talent into something worthwhile---several book
contracts and a column for The Guardian. Talent, I might add, that if
it weren't for the internet, would have never made it into the
mainstream.
Sign up for his mailing list and you can still get an occasional update
from him. - There are a couple of new links to the right that you
should check out if you get the chance. I doubt Instapundit needs one
more link to his site, but what the hell. I read him every day---you
should too. He's got a really big brain. - Oh, and I delinked the
husband. Cry out for mercy, you children of the Lord. For behold, she
cometh and she will delinketh you for not writing on a regular basis.

I'm not going to get any for quite some time because of this, methinks.

Enjoy. An "About Me" page will be appearing sometime in the near future.

--- Well, guess who's coming

--- Well, guess who's coming to Cake Eater Land tomorrow?

Amazingly enough---there was not a single story about the fact the Prez is coming to town in the paper today.
Of course there's an article about it the day the visit is supposed to
occur. Not a single frigging one. And yes, I double checked. Nada in
the A Section. Nada in OpEx. Nada in Metro/State. WTF? Granted, I only
rarely watch the local TV news (like when I want to see what weather is
amassing off to the West) so they could have reported it there and I
just missed it. It could've been in the local paper, but hell, the only
time I ever read that is to see who's been burgled. But you'd think the
largest newspaper in the state would have published at least something
about the impending Presidential visit before the day it was set to
occur. I'm not going to bother lambasting that worthless organization
for completely dropping the ball and not informing the public of an
event it would much rather slip by unnoticed. My time is much more
valuable than that. Let's just say that it's called "The Enemy Paper"
for a reason. There are a few ways he could come into west Cake Eater
Land. He's coming from the Convention Center in downtown. He's speaking from 10:15-11:15 and from there on in, he should be on the road.

I do believe some stalking is in order. I just got new batteries for the digital camera.

Hmmm. Much thought is required.

--- Well, if there's something

--- Well, if there's something good in all this,
it's that Kerry never gets to skip Mass again.
Someone's always going to be watching to see if they're dishing him
communion. They're going to follow him to church every Sunday from here
on in. They're going to call the campaign office to see when he's
scheduled to go to Mass and where and at what time. In other words, the
media has just turned into my mother. {Insert Nelson Mundt HA-ha here}

--- "I don't think certain

--- "I don't think certain threats, that undoubtedly contribute to intensifying the climate of tension...are the right way,"
Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero told a news conference during a visit to Morocco.

He was responding to a question about threats by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon against the Palestinian president.

Honestly, is Zapatero the best and most qualified person to be telling anyone which threats are helpful and which ones aren't?

Pussy.

If I were Arafat, I would be trying to shove my fat ass into the biggest, widest, deepest hole I could find.

Got this postcard in the

Got this postcard in the mail today. A friend sent it to me and I
thought you might like to end your night on a happy, Gothic
Cathedral-ish note. (Ha ha! A happy GOTHIC cathedral. Yeah. Right.
Whatever.) I thought it was pretty, though, so I'm sharing.
This
is the Durham Cathedral, which is conveniently located in Durham,
England. Which is way up north---hell and gone from London---and
is---for all intents and purposes---practically Scotland. According to
the friend, they started work on the Cathedral in 1087---which for you
history buffs, would be a full year before that pesky Norman, William
the Conquerer, took a boat across the Channel and invaded in 1088. And
they say it took a Frenchman to tame the backwards English. HA. I think
not.

--- There's a blog for

--- There's a blog for the UNSCAM (heheheh) scandal. It's called Friends of Saddam: The UN Oil for Food Scandal, Saddam and His 270 Global Friends.

Heh.

It's a nice roundup of articles related to the scandale. Peruse at your leisure.

--- Bleh. That's just disturbing.

--- Bleh.

That's just disturbing.

So, you see, I'm not

So, you see, I'm not only the Queen of the Woodland Elves...

...I also happen to be a grammar god(dess).

You are a GRAMMAR GOD!


If your mission in life is not already to
preserve the English tongue, it should be.
Congratulations and thank you!


How grammatically sound are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

So, I'm a grammar goddess and
the Queen of the Woodland Elves. I have pointy ears, an English accent
and I'm a Queen. Of other pointy-eared people. They're immortal and
they gave me the job in perpetuity. This means I'm good.
Never mind the blantant overuse of the concept of manifest destiny in
the whole deal. My people trust me with the job. This also means I live
in Middle Earth. This means that nasty ass Smeagol/Gollum will cross my
path. This means that when he does and he starts talking about "nasty
hobbitses" I can give him the back of my hand and then rail about his
misuse of the plural for the word "hobbit." But that's just for
starters. This means I can also rail on about the fact he always forgets to use a goddamn pronoun when he is the subject of his sentence. Use
'I', Gollum. Do not say your bloody name when you refer to yourself,
you misguided little twit. It's not cute. It's ignorant. Do it one more
time and I'll send you off into grammar hell where a Balrog will teach
you to speak properly---with a whip of flame." (Oh, and don't tell
me Gollum's use of the English language didn't drive you nuts, either.
If people can rail on Jar-Jar Binks, I can certainly rail on Gollum.)

--- Go and read Sgt.

--- Go and read Sgt. Stryker.

It's mandatory and there will be a test.

--- Atkins gone wild. Isabelle

--- Atkins gone wild.

Isabelle Leota, 29, and her husband Sui Amaama, 26, both on the
no-carb diet, were dining Tuesday at a Chuck-A-Rama in the Salt Lake
City suburb of Taylorsville when the manager cut them off because
they'd eaten too much roast beef...
Not so, said Jack Johanson, the restaurant chain's district manager.
``We've never claimed to be an all-you-can-eat establishment,'' said
Johanson. ``Our understanding is a buffet is just a style of eating.''
The general manager was carving the meat, and became concerned about
having enough for other patrons, Johanson said. So when Amaama went up
for his 12th slice, the manager asked Amaama to stop.

You know, maybe---just maybe---if you're on the way up to the buffet for your twelfth helping of roast beef, diet or no diet, it's time to, you know, take control of your appetite?

Just saying.

--- Shocker. WASHINGTON (AP) -

--- Shocker.

WASHINGTON (AP) - The State Department on Wednesday denounced Sudan
for barring American aid experts from inspecting the humanitarian needs
in western Sudan, where a conflict has displaced more than 800,000
people.
``This we view as unacceptable,'' spokesman Adam Ereli said. The Bush
administration has been ready to send a 28-member assistance team to
Sudan to evaluate the situation in the Darfur region. Government-backed
militias have fought insurgents there for more than a year.
Gotbi el-Mahadi, an adviser to Sudanese President Omar el-Bashir, said
a high-level U.N. delegation that arrived in Sudan
on Tuesday to visit Darfur was all that was needed now. ``We do not
need such a (U.S.) visit at this time ... (while) a
United Nations delegation is to tour Darfur,'' el-Mahadi said,
according to a statement released by the official Sudanese Media Center.
How much do you wanna bet that the UN team never makes it out of
Khartoum, and if they actually do, their level of inspection will rival
that of the Red Cross when they visited Theresienstadt?

--- So what. Jesus Christ

--- So what.

Jesus Christ on a piece of toast! I have SO had it with this
muckraking about 9/11. These pseudo-Watergate investigations the
networks are currently running to see who knew what and when they knew
it and if they conspired to keep it a secret and
the Mossad was in on it to provoke the Palestinan suicide bombers so
that Saddam would rear his ugly head and we'd have a justification for
going to WAR, GODDAMNIT! are pissing me off beyond belief.

Let's just get one thing clear, shall we?

Anyone who read Tom Clancy's Debt of Honor knew that an airliner could be used as a weapon. In Debt of Honor
a grieving and vindictive Japanese commercial pilot decides to avenge
the loss of a family member who died in a short lived war between the
US and Japan. He steals a commercial airliner. Flies it across the
country. Loads up with fuel somewhere on the east coast and then slams
the plane into the Capitol Building during a joint session of Congress
where Jack Ryan is supposed to be sworn in as VP. Clancy made pains to
make sure the gas tanks on this jet were full, so as to have a big ass
fireball when the plane crashed. How many millions of people read
Clancy? It was a horrific scenario, but it was fiction---something we never thought would happen in real life.

But that's not the only example of this in modern media. Remember the X-Files spinoff, The Lone Gunmen? In one of their episodes, they actually had Byers, Frohicke and Langly on a shuttle that was on course to crash directly into the Twin Towers.
This episode aired in the spring of 2001. We'll never see that episode
again. Chris Carter took a page from Clancy, yet---of course---made it
into a government conspiracy that the uber-conspiracy geeks had to
prevent. But no one thought that this would ever happen in real life.
Let me repeat that just to make sure you got it down correctly: NO ONE EVER THOUGHT THIS SORT OF THING COULD HAPPEN IN REAL LIFE
Before 9/11, the jetliner-full tank o'gas-slam into building scenario
was straight out of an action movie or a suspense novel. Does it
surprise me that NORAD ran the scenario through the computers? Nope.
But it doesn't prove anything about what anyone knew and when they knew
it, either It is not the effing smoking gun the media has been looking
for to feed off the 9/11 Commission's hearings in an election year. It
is not the piece of evidence that is going to bring Kristin
Breitweiser's husband back from the dead, no matter how much she beats
her breast, wails and moans about the government's failures on CNN.
It's not any of those things.
Admit it, please, even though it means admitting something rather
unflattering about America's capabilities: we got caught with our pants
down on 9/11. It happens. It's a horrible thing to say, I know, but the
fault for 9/11 lies squarely at the feet of the nineteen terrorists who
planned, hijacked and maimed and murdered for the greater glory of
Allah. Despite our creative community's best efforts to tell us that
yeah, this is a plausible scenario, we didn't think this could happen.
The people didn't think this could happen. The government didn't think
this could happen. No one thought this could happen. We were caught
with our pants down. But right now it's important to pull our pants up.
We have to do this so we don't take one in the ass again. Make no
mistake about it, kids, this is where the zipper is getting stuck and
is leaving us even more vulnerable to another attack. If there's a
commission every time we have an attack, to learn what we did wrong,
well, it doesn't bode well for keeping the terrorists out of our
business, does it? Figure it out so another three thousand people don't
have to die.

--- The guy who was

--- The guy who was selling his ex-wife's wedding dress on Ebay now has his own site.

You can find it here, although his forwarding link doesn't seem to be working all that well.

Sheesh.

--- Where'd the money go?

--- Where'd the money go?

At least $1.1 billion was paid directly into UN coffers, supposedly
to cover the cost of administering the $67 billion scheme, while Saddam
Hussein diverted funds intended for the poor and sick of Iraq to bribe
foreign governments and prominent overseas supporters of his regime.
Claude Hankes-Drielsma, a management consultant and adviser to the
Iraqi Governing Council, who testified to the House Committee on
Government Reform in Washington last week, said that tracking what
happened to the estimated total of $1.1 billion in fees levied by the
United Nations was a "key" to untangling the corruption scandal.
The Telegraph has learned that UN officials are being asked to provide
detailed accounts of how the organisation's slice of Saddam's oil money
was used and how much went to companies which were supposed to monitor
the food and medicines imported by Iraq.
Although the UN Security Council approved the plan to levy a 2.2 per
cent commission on each oil-for-food transaction, the huge sums this
reaped for the UN have never been fully accounted for.
A senior UN official who is closely involved in uncovering evidence of
the scandal admitted: "The UN was not doing this work just for the good
of Iraq. Cash from Saddam's government was keeping the UN going for a
few years.
"No one knows exactly what sums were involved because an audit has
never been done. That is why they are wriggling and squirming now in
New York."

{Empahsis added by moi}

Of course, it gets better.

The new line of inquiry comes after Paul Volcker, the former
chairman of the US Federal Reserve, agreed to head the United Nations
investigation. He announced last week that he was hiring a team of
accountants, money-laundering specialists and lawyers to check
thousands of contracts authorised by the UN...
Mr Volcker's inquiry has the Security Council's backing, but has no
powers to compel witnesses to testify and will depend on co-operation
from foreign governments, UN staff and former members of the Saddam
regime.
I have a feeling the line "Your mother was a hamster and your father
smelt of elderberries!" will be shouted from the rooftops at the
investigators. After all, what organization is bigger and more powerful
than the UN and can compel them
to cooperate? There isn't one. International law is grand, isn't it,
when you're the one in charge of writing it and enforcing it?

--- And I was right!

--- And I was right!
{Insert cackle of maniacal laughter here}

--- It's Rochambeau Time in

--- It's Rochambeau Time in the Blogosphere!
Michele of A Small Victory and Dean and Rosemary of Dean's World
have decided to have stage a blogospere smackdown all in the name of
charity. They're forming alliances and I am squarely in Michele's camp
on this one. I will not support Dean because a. I don't read his site
and b. The one time I did read his site and left a comment there, it
mysteriously disappeared and no explanation was given. Hmmmph. Anyhoo,
the charity they're trying to help is The Spirit of America . They are going to purchase equipment to set up seven local television stations inside
the Al-Anbar province. The Marines will help to set the TV stations up.
Why are they doing this? I'll let them explain:
US Marines seek to equip seven (7) television stations serving
local communities within Al Anbar Province, Iraq. The Province includes
the cities of Fallujah and Ramadi. These stations will offer
information that is more accurate and balanced than existing
alternatives. The goal is to improve understanding between Americans
and Iraqis, build trust and reduce tensions. Current TV news in Iraq
often carries negative, highly-biased accounts of the U.S. presence.
Unanswered, its effect is to stoke resentment and encourage conflict.
The Marines seek to ensure the Iraqi people have access to better, more
balanced information. By equipping local television stations and
providing the ability to generate news and programming, the Marines
will create a viable news alternative - one owned and operated by local
Iraqi citizens. The donated equipment will be the property of the Iraqi
stations. The stations can create their own news and choose their own
programming with the agreement that they will prohibit airing of
anti-coalition messages that incite the local population. The stations
also agree to sell airtime at a fair market price so that the Marines
can communicate their information efficiently and quickly when needed.
For example, images were recently broadcast of a mosque in Fallujah
damaged during fighting. With these stations the Marines could have
provided the full picture by airing video of combatants firing on them
from the mosque grounds. These stations would have enabled Iraqis to
understand the complete picture. News of reconstruction projects and
humanitarian assistance that balances the news of conflict will also be
provided on these stations. The stations will be free to criticize the
Coalition.
This is our chance to help out with the Al-Jazeera problem. Spirit of
America is generously setting up a tallying system for Paypal, but it
won't be available until Monday. I'll let you know when it gets set up
so, if you feel so inclined, you can give some moolah.

--- er, that would be

--- er, that would be shamelessly rather than shamlessly.

{insert Guy Smiley head bash here}

--- Shamlessly pilfered from A

--- Shamlessly pilfered from A Small Victory, we have "How Jedi Are You?"

Pretty damn Jedi, if I don't say so myself.

:: how jedi are you? ::

--- More UN Oil For

--- More UN Oil For Food Scandale (hat tip: Instapundit}

Most prominent among those accused in the scandal is Benon Sevan,
the Cyprus-born U.N. undersecretary general who ran the program for six
years. In an interview with ABCNEWS last year, Sevan denied any
wrongdoing.

Wait for it.

But documents have surfaced in Baghdad, in the files of the former
Iraqi Oil Ministry, allegedly linking Sevan to a pay-off scheme in
which some 270 prominent foreign officials received the right to trade
in Iraqi oil at cut-rate prices. "It's almost like having coupons of
bonds or shares. You can sell those coupons to other people who are
normal oil traders," said Claude Hankes-Drielsma, a British adviser to
the Iraq Governing Council. Investigators say the smoking gun is a
letter to former Iraqi oil minister Amer Mohammed Rasheed, obtained by
ABCNEWS and not yet in the hands of the United Nations. In the letter,
dated Aug, 10, 1998, an Iraqi oil executive mentions a request by a
Panama-based company, African Middle East Petroleum Co., to buy Iraqi
oil — along with a suggestion that Sevan had a role in the deal. "Mr.
Muwafaq Ayoub of the Iraqi mission in New York informed us by telephone
that the abovementioned company is the company that Mr. Sevan cited to
you during his last trip to Baghdad," the executive wrote in Arabic. A
handwritten note indicated that permission for the oil purchase was
granted by "the Vice President of the Republic" on Aug. 15, 1998. The
second page of the letter contains a table entitled "Quantity of Oil
Allocated and Given to Mr. Benon Sevan." The table lists a total of 7.3
million barrels of oil as the "quantity executed" — an amount that,
if true, would have generated an illegal profit of as much as $3.5
million. "Somebody who is running the Oil-for-Food program for the
United Nations should not be receiving any benefit of any kind from a
rogue dictator who was perpetuating terror in his country," said
Hankes-Drielsma.
Again, I would like for someone to give me one good reason why the UN
is the organization best qualified to take over in Iraq.
I had this professor in college, who, while a serious liberal, always
told us in our International Organizations class to not put all of our
eggs in the UN's basket. He said he'd never seen a more corrupt place,
and one of his many examples was that of consultants being paid $60K
for a day's work. I took him at his word on this one, even though this
was in the years directly after GWI and all anyone could say was that
the UN had worked to bring people together to take care of a problem.
That the UN, while it had its flaws and wouldn't allow the coalition to
go after Saddam, was still a good organization---on the whole. The idea
was sound but there was room for improvement in the practicalities.
This was pre-Rwanda, of course, so there was still hope that the place
could be cleaned up.
But I never thought I'd see corruption on this level. It's naive of me,
perhaps, but this is beyond the pale. Millions of dollars worth of a
dictator's oil flowing directly into the pockets of the person who was
supposed to make sure that dictator's people were getting fed? Beyond.
The. Pale. I'm assuming now that ABC's got the story, it will get some
legs. Hopefully. It's been rumbling around the blogosphere for months
now, but for the most part has gone unreported by big media. Is there
going to be a scandal? I hope so. And I hope it's going to be BIG. This
crap has got to stop. There are going to be some hard questions that
the US government and others are going to want answered, and none of
them bode well for the current incarnation of the United Nations. a. Is
there room for improvement? Say if a hard ass Secretary-General was
appointed and cleaned house, would it be better or is that a pipe
dream?
b. Should we just scrap it? One could make the argument that the UN has
turned into another League of Nations and we all know how succesful
that organization was. When Libya is elected chair of the Human Rights
committee---well, what exactly does that say about the UN? c. The
British historian Paul Johnson commented in his Forbes
column back in February that the UN should bug out of New York. (Forbes
wants to charge me for the article...if the husband--a
subscriber---comes up with it, I'll post it.) The gist of his argument
was that the UN needs to get out of New York and should be closer to
perhaps Africa or some of its other needier countries to help keep the
focus on what the organization was founded to do in the first place. He
said that the current location in New York was encouraging the worst
behavior in the diplomats because of its general cushiness. Is this an
option? Where would the UN go? Would the US and NYC object? (I don't
think the meter maids would mind, though.) But most of all, would it
change the diplomats' behavior? Would such a move force them to keep
their eye on the ball, or would it just be switching ballparks?

--- Jeff Rules! God love

--- Jeff Rules!

God love the man who gleefully takes up a challenge!

--- Einstein, it seems, is

--- Einstein, it seems, is
being transferred from his itty bitty theoretical cubicle to a nice
office in the practical and applied section of the geek department at
Stanford.

Gravity Probe B is the relativity gyroscope experiment being
developed by NASA and Stanford University to test two extraordinary,
unverified predictions of Albert Einstein's general theory of
relativity.
The experiment will check, very precisely, tiny changes in the
direction of spin of four gyroscopes contained in an Earth satellite
orbiting at 400-mile altitude directly over the poles. So free are the
gyroscopes from disturbance that they will provide an almost perfect
space-time reference system. They will measure how space and time are
warped by the presence of the Earth, and, more profoundly, how the
Earth's rotation drags space-time around with it. These effects, though
small for the Earth, have far-reaching implications for the nature of
matter and the structure of the Universe.
The only way theoretical physics has ever interested me is if the math
is correct, most people will take these physicists work for the
truth---even though there is no practical way of proving their
theories. Seems Einstein's finally getting his lab time. I wonder what
will happen if the experiment doesn't prove the hypothesis, though.
Does that mean Hawking and all the rest are wrong? Hmmph.

--- The epidemiology of a

--- The epidemiology of a hoax.

Thanks to Insults Unpunished who got it from Spoons who got it from The Single Southern Guy who it seems was curious after reading the story Instapundit linked from Protein Wisdom who got it from Tim Worstall
and he did some checking on Operation Take One For The Country, and it
seems I need to print a correction. Christ! Do you need a cocktail like
I need a cocktail after listing all that out? Anyhoo, The Single
Southern Guy did the checking and there is no such organization. It be
a hoax. I, of course, didn't get this story from any of these people,
so not only am I out of the loop (really? shocker!) it seems as if I'm
also off the hook for being fooled, as well. Because, you know, I only
posted it because I thought it was really whacked and that my audience
would enjoy it. Truth forsooth! Not here, bub. Not on junk like this. I
told you the husband sent me some wierd stuff. Did you believe me?
Nooooooo. Well, now you know to take anything I claim he sent me with a
grain of salt, ok?

--- Wedding dress for sale

--- Wedding dress for sale on Ebay.

It's REAL cheap.

--- So, Spain's bugging out

--- So, Spain's bugging out earlier than planned.

Bono said Spain was not running from a fight. "The Spanish armies
never run, but they always obey their government," Bono said.

Spanish armies never run? Oh, please. Save your rhetoric for those who haven't finished grade school.

Is the Armada ringing a bell?

Question is: why does the Spanish Defense Minister feel the need to emphasize that the army always obeys its government?

Are there mutinous rumblings in the ranks about the withdrawal?

--- Ranting and lots of

--- Ranting and lots of nasty namecalling ahead. Forewarned is
forearmed.
Man.

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, in Geneva, Switzerland, to mark
the 10th anniversary of the Rwanda genocide, said ethnic cleansing may
be under way in part of Sudan.
If international aid workers are not allowed into the region,
"appropriate action" must be taken swiftly, he said, according to a
transcript of his speech provided by the United Nations. He added that
such a move could include international military intervention -- but
only as a last resort.
Oh, how convenient the Rwanda anniversary must be for you Kofi, you
corrupt, bureaucratic son of a bitch. It gives you the perfect excuse
to chat about genocide in Sudan, doesn't it? Particularly from the
diplomatic safe haven of Geneva, where all the little diplomats live in
oblivion of what is actually happening in the rest of the world and
what actually needs to be done about it. Geneva's where they draw up
"plans." Geneva's where they fundraise. Geneva's where they speak out
about human rights abuses, and then walk down the street to the bank
and deposit their kickbacks into a numbered account. What is today,
Kofi? The Offically Designated-UN-Chat-About-Africa Day? While the
other three hundred and sixty four days of the year, you look for the
best way to line your pockets with ill-gotten gains? It must be,
because you choose to use the anniversary of a genocide, trampling on
the backs of a half million butchered Rwandans, so you can push for
your diplomacy, your aid workers, the potential
of military intervention---as a last resort, of course. You're cruel,
you know that, don't you, Kofi? To dangle that all of that everlasting
UN mandated hope in front of those poor people when you probably won't
do a damn thing. You're all talk. You never have had the balls to walk
the walk in your life. When millions are slaughtered in Sudan, you'll
use the same excuse that you used after Rwanda: I'm sorry. That's what
you and that lame-o Clinton had the guts to tell those poor people
after they lost everything. I'm sorry.
We couldn't bring anyone else on board. Ten Belgium peacekeepers died,
so we pulled our troops. So sorry. Can't have any western military
deaths. Just can't have them. We can't let our blood be spilled because
it's so much more valuable than yours. That's the ultimate message of
Rwanda: if you were white you were allowed to leave and live; if you
were black and a Tutsi, you died; if you were black and Hutu, you were
allowed to slaughter the masses without any consequences. Whose blood
is more valuable? Well, let me tell you this, Kofi: all people bleed.
And all blood looks the same when it is spilled. Where's the UN
Resolution declaring that simple fact? Somewhere in between the ones
condemning Libya for the bombing of Pan Am 103 and the twelve
resolutions calling for the disarmament of Iraq that you failed to
enforce? Don't you DARE get up on your safe, fat, high horse in Geneva
and tell the world that something needs to be done about Sudan without
first getting off your fat ass and doing something yourself. But you
won't, will you? You're a diplomat. You're a lover, not a fighter.
You will hold a bunch of meetings while the world explodes for the
people in Sudan, like it's been exploding there for the past twenty
years because you can't pull your thumb out of your ass for a long
enough period of time to get member countries on board. When you'll
call member countries, they'll turn you down and you'll say thank you for your time and what contributions you have made.
And then you'll let it go. Because all you can do is talk. You can't do
a damn thing to pull that unweildy organization you purport to run in
line because you have no balls. You're no different than a parent who
has a pack of spoiled brats and lets them run around like wild animals
because you think "it's cute." Well, it's not cute. Your words are
empty, Kofi. Bashir is laughing at you. The UN can't do a damn thing to
stop him and rest assured he knows it. He'll keep on with the
offensives. He won't let in your aid workers. You, on the other hand,
are cruel. You dangle the potential of hope in front of those afflicted
and you'll actually offer none. You won't do it. And you'll wring your
hands in the meantime and make a good show of it. You'll talk to Frontline
when it's all said and done, saying you really wish you could have done
more but no one was ponying up. After all, the UN has no peacekeepers
of its own; they rely solely upon member states to provide them and if
the member states don't provide them, well, what can I do? And then
you'll walk down to Random House's offices to pick up your royalty
check from the sales of your memoirs. How dare you be so damn callous?
You know you can't do a damn
thing to stop what's going on in Sudan. You can't. Everyone knows it.
And everyone wishes it were different. The question remains, though, do you wish you could do differently, Kofi?
That's the real question here, isn't it? Is Total-Fina-Elf giving you a
kickback here, and a kickback there so you'll stay the hell out of it?
Because that's the corporation that has the biggest, most comprehensive
oil rights in Sudan---and in Darfur---right now. It wouldn't be in
their best interests for you and the UN to go intervening, would it?
Let's face it, Kofi, after Iraq, your motives are suspect. Don't you
dare use the victims of Rwanda for your Sudanese PR campaign. And don't
you dare offer hope to those in Sudan if you're not actually going to
bother doing something about it. You are, indeed, the worst
Secretary-General of the UN ever.
I may have said last week that perhaps the international community has
the right idea to stay out of these sorts of events, but that doesn't
mean I'm giving you a pass, Kofi. If you're going to do something---do
it. Don't sit on your hands and play "pass the blame." No one needs it.
Here's your opportunity to show the world that the UN can do some good.
That the idealism behind it isn't, in fact, dead. Or are you going to
play the whole "what is the legal definition of genocide" game again
because you weren't strong enough to force people to act? Because your
current actions sure as hell aren't going to cut it. "At the invitation of the Sudanese government, I propose to send
a high-level team to Darfur to gain a fuller understanding of the
extent and nature of this crisis, and to seek improved access to those
in need of assistance and protection," he said. "It is vital that
international humanitarian workers and human rights experts be given
full access to the region, and to the victims, without further delay.
"If that is denied, the international community must be prepared to
take swift and appropriate action."
What, exactly, is 'swift and appropriate action' to you, dear Kofi? A
rich dinner in Geneva where you'll lament the happenings in Sudan over
cognac and a cigar?

--- Jeez. Apparently it's not

--- Jeez. Apparently it's not a good thing to be the leader of Hamas.

Hah.

I'm done cleaning the apartment.

I'm done cleaning the apartment. It's sparkly, but I'm not. I'm either
really tired or am high on a. clorox clean up, b. scott's liquid gold
(that should be a brand name for tequila, not furniture polish) or c.
orange scented 409 glass and surface cleaner. It's a toss up, but the
end result is that I'm not myself right now and I'm not going to
subject you all to me being even more wierd than normal. No one needs
that, so there won't be any updates this evening.. Think of my absence
as a public service. Have a lovely night. I'm going to go and crash in
front of the TV. Ciao.

--- Cold. Oh, so cold.

--- Cold. Oh, so cold.

--- Finally. The UN hires

--- Finally. The UN hires someone who can kick some ass.

--- Here's the reason I

--- Here's the reason I missed my stalking opportunity.

Bush's motorcade left the airport around 9:07. He took the podium around 9:30.

They said the speech was supposed to start at 10:15 and was going to last until 11:15.

"Is your watch slow."
"No. We had three minutes."
"Why'd he do that? He's losing his money."
"Couldn't hold his wad? It's a common problem among middle-aged men---or so I'm told."
Dude wasn't supposed to start yakking until 10:15. I didn't get up
until 9:55. (Yes, last night was a late one. Again. Good book.) So, due
to the fact we have a President who is so punctual he's actually warped
the space-time continuum, by the time I finally clambered out of bed,
he was more than halfway through his speech. I hustled. Chatted with
husband about best place to go and find him. I threw on some jeans and
a fleece, grabbed my camera and fled. But there was a problem. Nellie
was low on gas. Sheesh. This means trip to ATM---but ATM has no cash.
Someone apparently used it to perform a overnight hostile takeover on
the Nikkei, hence no money in it first thing Monday morning. Sighing at
how the world seems to be conspiring against me, I cringe when the ATM
at the gas station busts me for $1.50 in fees, which will undoubtedly
be added to the $2.00 my bank will charge me for not using one of their
ATM's. So, I'm already down money on this venture, but I'm still going
to stalk the Prez. Things will undoubtedly get better.
Maybe. The guy who was hosting the party was listed in the Cake Eater
Community Phonebook and so I had his address. I'd pulled it up on
Mapquest, taken a good look at all the entrances and exits to their
streets, and while there were plenty of options to get to this
particular curvy suburban hell, the fastest would be to get off on 70th
Street from Hwy. 100. I was sure to see the motorcade there, right? One
in, one out? Right? Fastest way. Less chance of a moonbat encounter,
right? The husband concurred and he's always right about these things.
Wrongo reindeer.
I got on Hwy. 100 South, was chugging along nicely, and when I
approached Hwy 62---aka "The Crosstown"---there were state troopers
everywhere. They were completely blocking the westbound entrance and
just as I crossed the overpass, what to my wondering eyes should
appear? A frigging black limo, speeding west on the crosstown. I do
believe this was the lead vehicle in the motorcade. I couldn't see the
rest because a. 100 moves at a decent clip, state troopers or no state
troopers and b. I would have hit the car that was entering before me
from the eastbound side of the the crosstown if I'd slowed or pulled
over. Disaster averted.
So, the Prez is going west and will turn south. I'm heading south and
plan to turn west. We're bound to meet somewhere in the middle. Working
under this assumption, I continue along with my plan, and hope I'll
hook up with him on the other side. Nope. I wandered around curvy
suburban hell for about ten minutes, by which time, the Prez was
undoubtedly at his luncheon, and there was no chance of me getting a
glimpse of the man. I suppose I could have gone and staked out a
position for his inevitable trip back to the airport on the
crosstown---quickest way from this neck of the woods---but by that time
I decided I'd much rather go home, take a shower and put on some
underwear. Yep. You read that right. I wasn't wearing any underwear. I
completely forgot all about it when I was dressing. Amazing how I
remembered the ATM card, the camera, and the coffee the husband
lovingly put in my hand as I flew out the door, but completely
neglected to put on underwear. What the hell is wrong with me? Of
course this is the reason
I didn't see him. My underwear-less mojo was bad. The Fates said, "no,
my dear girl, you are not going to get to see the President today
because you're skivvy-less. This will teach you in the future to
remember such things."
I mean, how the hell can you argue with the Fates? Don't they have the
power to smite me or throw lightning bolts at me or have some natural
disaster strike me? I dunno, but you can see where they wouldn't have
wanted me to be anywhere near the Prez. I'm a freaking security risk.
Let me outline the scenario for you:
Underwearless Kathy---bad mojo---Fates intervene---to save GDub from my
punishment for not wearing skivvies. Quite simple, really and I can't
blame them one bit.

--- Here's yet another example

--- Here's yet another example of why JPII isn't in control of the Vatican.

In a news conference to announce the release of a document aimed at
a crackdown on possible abuses in celebrating Mass, Cardinal Francis
Arinze was asked if a politician who supports abortion rights should be
denied communion.
"Yes. Objectively, the answer is clear," Arinze said. "The person is
not fit. If he shouldn't receive it, then it shouldn't be given."
Ok, now if you're not a Vatican watcher, this probably doesn't make any
sense to you. Let me attempt to explain. A little over a year ago, my
dad sent me an article that chatted about Cardinal Ratzinger's latest
instruction, which was that he wanted bishops worldwide to instruct
their Catholic parishoner-politicians that if they declared themselves
to be pro-choice, they were no longer Catholic by the definition of the
Church. The main example touted was the bishop of Sioux Falls SD---he
was supposed to get on Tom Daschle to stop saying he was Catholic. Ok,
so this apparently didn't go anywhere, but the culprit was out in the
open: Cardinal Ratzinger, who could kindly be described as
"reactionary" in terms of what he believes is correct and proper
behavior for a Catholic. This idea apparently went over like a lead
balloon in 2003, but it's an election year in the US. With a Catholic
contending for Big Cushy Seat #1. The idea morphed into sacrament
denial, and here we are---Brouhaha Central. Now, good ol Cardinal
Ratzinger is the dude in charge of The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which, charmingly, used to be called The Sacred Congregation of the Universal Inquisition. (He was also in the Hitler Youth when he was a kid, too.) I have a feeling Cardinal Ratzinger would prefer that the old name be reinstated. The Inquisition
just sounds like a better motivator to get Catholics to do what you
want them to. In my opinon, Ratzinger's a blowhard, but more
importantly he's an opportunist. And he's taking advantage of JPII's
Parkinson's to get his own agenda out there. JPII, in my humble
opinion, is a caretaker Pope. God bless the man, but he hasn't really
done diddly squat in terms of pushing the Church forward. One could
easily argue that he didn't feel the need to push the Church forward,
since he was from Poland and we all know how conservative Polish
Catholics are (heh!). I don't think so because he hasn't been afraid to
tackle some issues, like the death penalty for instance, or the evils
of communism. It's just that I think he realized from the very
beginning that he was in a touchy situation because JPI had died so
quickly. Any overt moves to the right, and all those assasination
theories would gain some momentum. But the Vatican does not move in
normal time. They've been around for 2000 years---they'll be around
another 2000. They can outlast their critics. I also think that the
attempted assassination took a lot out of him, to a certain extent, and
the pedophile scandal finished him. He liked things just the way they
were. Think about it. There haven't been any big changes in doctrine
since 1979. He's tweaked a few things, but that's about it. So the
question would be, why all of the new teachings? As you might have been
able to tell from website the
Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith has been busy publishing all
sorts of teachings, where there hadn't been too many before Ratzinger
took over. Why all of the instruction regarding how we Catholics are
supposed to feel about gays and lesbians, not to mention this bit about
pro-choice politicians? The idea may have been voiced by Cardinal
Arinze, but it's definitely Ratzinger's idea.
I would also really enjoy knowing why, if JPII is actually in charge of
the show, wasn't there a bit in this latest teaching about refusing
pro-death penalty politicans the sacraments? JPII does not like the
death penalty. He didn't want to visit Missouri in the late 90's
because the state was about to execute someone. Now, my father would
tell you that all of JPII's statements about the death penalty were
made "ex cathedra"---which means infalliabilty isn't attached.
According to Daddy, this also means these statements don't mean jack in
the scheme of things: no essential Church teachings have been changed
because the Pope spoke out against it. My reply was that if JPII made
these statements in front of a CNN camera, he was
teaching. Why all of the protestations over the death penalty if he was
actually for it in practice? It doesn't make sense, unless you take
into account that Ratzinger is in favor of the death penalty. And he
is. I'm not going to say that Ratzinger is the puppet master, but it
seems as if he's working a hand up JPII's vestments. JPII isn't in
charge. He's just too ill to rule effectively and Ratzinger, et.al. are
taking advantage of the situation. Which, you have to admit, is not
really flattering behavior in a priest. I don't care if he's a member
of the Curia. I don't care if he's il papabili.
I don't care if he's a Cardinal. When it comes right down to it he's a
priest---no more, no less. It seems wrong of him to take advantage of
the situation.

--- Two years ago, for

--- Two years ago, for my birthday, the husband bought me this nifty little TV
for the kitchen. We have it hooked up to the DirecTV receiver in the
living room, so whatever we're watching on the main TV, we also watch
in the kitchen. It's not only great to be able to watch CNN whilst
cooking supper, but it's pretty damn sweet that I don't have to pay for
a third receiver as well because the husband wired it creatively (we'll
conveniently skip over the fact he stuck his foot through the ceiling
when he was wiring it). So, after dinner the other night, I was mildly
absorbed in trying to get an overload of pots and pans to fit into the
dishwasher and the TV was on, of course. Anderson Cooper had gone to
commercials. I wasn't really
paying attention, but then something made my head pop up: a male
announcer with a cheesy game show host voice uttered the words: "...Headquartered in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia..."
WTF? Who the hell in Saudi Arabia would be silly enough to advertise on
CNN? I wondered. Are the Saudis doing another one of their famous PR
campaigns? I watched and then picked up a pen and wrote down Kingdom Holding Company
when the name of the company flashed up on the screen and went back to
cleaning up, but my interest had been piqued.
Later on, I went and googled "Kingdom Holding Company," and was fairly
surprised to find there wasn't a website for it. This was really odd to
me. Everyone
and their brother has a website. It seems de rigeur to list your
website in any sort of advertising these days. Hmmph. So, with my
failure in mind, I set the husband on the project---he's a much better
surfer than I am. He finds all sorts of junk. This is what he came up
with, and I quote: Top story in basic search

"The objective of the Arab Decision site is
to make available to citizens and general public useful information on
the Institutions of the Arab World.The documentation was gathered with
the best efforts of researchers and scholars, in neutral and scientific
spirit. We welcome all clarifications, corrections and improvements for
best services." The WHOIS results for www.kingdom.net - reported as the
website (under construction) by ArabDecision.org. This was interesting,
I had to go to a deeper Whois search than the one provided by the main
companies like whois.com (you don't want to know), {because} they
turned up no results. Domain name: KINGDOM.NET Administrative Contact:
Amjad, Shaheen ams@kingdom.net Takhassusi Street Riyadh, 11321 SA
9661-442-0101 Fax: 9661-4811954 Technical Contact: Jisri, Mahmoud
noc@naseej.com.sa Sitteen St. P.O Box 20129 304 Riyadh, Riyadh 11455 SA
966114770477 Fax: 966114783512 Registrar of Record: TUCOWS, INC. Record
last updated on 29-Sep-2003. Record expires on 01-Oct-2004. Record
created on 02-Oct-1995. Domain servers in listed order:
NS1.AWALNET.NET.SA NS2.AWALNET.NET.SA twocows, Inc. Now THAT's
strange... More available about the owner than the company... The "Owner"

Kingdom Centre

Working with Mr. Gates

News links on His Royal Highness

From the Arab Banker's Association of North America

His Royal Highness Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Bin AbdulAziz Alsaud. We all remember this guy, right?

Now he's advertising on CNN. Attempting to garner US interest in his company.
Why? Because the Saudi infrastructure sucks and he wants us to help him
fix it via investment in his company. Pardon me, dear Prince, but don't
you have plenty of your own money to blow on fixing your backasswards
country? Forbes just listed you at being worth $21 billion---and that's
with a big Carl Sagan 'B.' If you're so big on looking at the root
causes of problem, particularly in relation to 9/11, then perhaps
you'll realize that it would be a bad
idea for any US investor to come in and spend moolah in Saudi right
now. After all, what's in it for us? A Democratic Saudi Arabia? Please.
But I will wish you a fond Inshallah in your efforts---with all of the underlying meanings that one word entails.

--- Politicians on reality tv?

--- Politicians on reality tv?
In the epicenter of all contrariness---France---yes, this does appear
to be the case. Just a random thought: she's being castigated for
"making a mockery of politics" by appearing on this show, yet isn't the
French political scene already a joke? How can you make a mockery of
something that's already a mockery in itself?
Just wondering.

--- Instead of having a

--- Instead of having a Silly German story today, we have a SILLY THINGS THAT COULD ONLY HAPPEN IN GERMANY story.

"I didn't know how I would be able to tell my parents about a holiday with him and I couldn't really say to him 'Listen, my
parents wouldn't approve'," the woman, 28, identified only as Marina B., told the Duesseldorf state court Wednesday.

"Then I had the idea that if the trip could somehow be blocked by someone else, for example a bomb threat, then that
would solve all the problems," she added. Her flight departed anyway, several hours late.

This is like saying you have Ebola when you don't want to go to work and call in sick.

Get a spine.

--- This is just so wrong on so many levels.

Shall we define what is wrong? Yes, lets.

1. ``Mr. Neil personally appeared out of respect for this court and this county. Now he's moving on.''
Vince "I'm a Bad, Bad Boy, So Spank Me" Neil has respect for a court
and a county? WTF? A man who has so little respect for women that he has to pay them to sleep with him hence no woman in her right mind will go to bed with him without pay, has respect for a court and a county? Again, WTF.

2. BunnyRanch
owner Dennis Hof said he was sorry to hear that Neil felt pressured to
enter a plea.``It's sad to see Vince do that because in my mind this
girl's an opportunist and I know that Vince did nothing wrong,'' Hof
told
the Nevada Appeal newspaper. ``I assume he did this to avoid having a
lengthy trial. I will support him to the end, because I know he didn't
do anything wrong.''
Ok, so let's see if we can delineate Mr. Hof and his position on the
matter:
a. He owns a brothel. He's a pimp. Yes, prostitution is legal in
Nevada, but the fact he peddles flesh for a living does not
automatically lump him in with other business owners in my book. He
runs a brothel, not a Pro Shop. He thinks because it's legal there's
nothing wrong with providing a place for men and women to pay for sex.
His word equals precisely squat.
b. Vince is probably a good client and hence he's sticking with the
person who spends the money, rather than the person who earns it.
c. He automatically assumes that the woman is trying to shake Vince
Neil down. I don't know, but the fact she filed a criminal complaint
for getting beaten up doesn't necessarily correlate with "shake down"
in my book. Besides, what money does Vince have? Didn't it disappear
somewhere in the vicinity of his sinus cavities in the late eighties?
d. There apparently doesn't seem to be anything wrong in Hof's book
with choking a woman and throwing her against the wall. It's all good fun apparently.

3. Judge
Bill Rogers suspended a 30-day jail sentence and ordered Neil to
complete anger management correspondence courses within 60 days. He was
fined $1,000 plus court fees of $132, and returned to his Las Vegas
home afterward
a. ANGER MANAGEMENT CORRESPONDENCE COURSES
???? I don't know about you, but if Vince can get in a car to go and
visit a brothel, he should---at the very least---have to drive to
Carson City to actually attend anger managment classes. Every
week. For the next year. b. Vince lives in Las Vegas. Need I say more?
I'm trying to keep myself from going off into a rant about the evils of
prostitution. But...I...CAN'T...SEEM...TO...HELP...MYSELF.
Aiiieee. The moment of regret seems to have passed and here we
go---WARP SPEED, MR. SULU!
I hate prostitution. I suppose this throws me into the "unenlightened"
sect. Fine with me. If it's unenlightened for me to care about women
and men thinking their genital region is the most worthwhile part of
their bodies, so be it. Because that's what it comes down to in the sex
trade: your penis, your vagina, your rectum, your breasts, your
mouth---your body---will ultimately earn you more money than your
brain, so use them. That's the lure. That's the essence of the pimp's
arguments. You'll get paid for something you'd do anyway, so why not?
Never mind that it's exploitative in the extreme. Never mind the human
trafficking that goes on to supply fresh new prostitutes to the street
for the paying customers. Never mind that most of the people that are
trafficked into prostitution are tricked into doing it. Never mind that
drugs always seem to be connected to prostitution, for many different
reasons. Never mind that people should value themselves more. Never
mind that it degrades the act of sex into groin-satisfaction-only
action. It's consensual. Lighten up. What does it matter to you what
happens behind closed doors?
It matters a lot to me. So much so that I throw away my libertarian
stance on this one issue. It is
my business when people suffer to make some random individual whose got
the coin to feel happy in the pants. It's everyone's business.
Apparently, though, I'm sure a few people will disagree with my stance
on this one. The essence of their arguments will relate around how it's
consensual; how it's been going on since the beginning of time; that by
legalizing prostitution, you're taking out the exploitation factor,
etc. You've all heard the arguments so I needn't waste my time listing
them out.
The essence of my argument is that prostitution is degrading to the
human race. It is. Just look at it. A person pays for sex. Perhaps they
will do this with the full understanding that they're simply going to
get their rocks off. But most of the time, they don't. Let's face facts
here, kids. Most people who pay for sex are simply not getting what
they want from their regular partners, if they have a regular partner
to begin with. It's a walk on the wild side
for them. For the average suburban man, it's one step up from visiting
a titty bar. It's paying to get what a lover isn't willing to give. It's a transaction.
Yet, it seems to me, that most people who visit prostitutes take it one
step further. They want to indulge in their fantasies; they want to
gain satisfaction from something that they perhaps think is too dirty
to suggest to their regular partners; they're perhaps ashamed to admit
they want something different. They bring more than their rocks into the situation,
in other words. Now, most therapists would say that this theoretical
person is repressing something. Perhaps homosexual tendencies. Perhaps
violent tendencies. You get what I'm saying. But the sex trade doesn't
care about about the mental health of their clients. They don't care
about what their clients might do to their employees---if you can call
them that---it's all about the money. They take advantage of the
taboos; taboos are their bread and butter. They don't want their
clientele to think with their brains; they want them to think with
their groins because once rational though stops and groin-thinking
takes over, they've won. They take advantage of the shame attached with
sex by offering a perfectly "legitimate" outlet for it, and by doing
so, their patrons are never forced to examine why they feel the way
they do in the first place. People who frequent customers are never
forced to be honest with themselves.
Which in turns sets us all back. Which is ironic, don't you think,
given all the arguments for the legalization of prostitution? Sex is
about so much more than getting your rocks off. Yes, there is no
escaping that sex is a physical need, but it's rooted in
reproduction---the pleasure was designed as a side benefit to keep the
human race going. You may have plenty of erogenous zones on your body,
but if you haven't figured it out by now, your mind is your most
important sexual organ. It is. Your mind heightens the experience into
something lovely, when if you take only your body into account, sex
between human beings is no more than two apes going at it in the
jungle. And we've all seen enough Discovery Channel to note that that
is not
what happens with human beings. Apes don't kiss for starters. And they
don't cuddle afterwards either. (Although, Polar Bears do---saw that at
the Omaha Zoo one day. Interesting.)
When you ignore the mind, or say that its irrelevant, you're degrading
the act of sex. Prostitution demands that people not think about the
mind when it comes to sex, or perhaps a better way of saying it is that
prostitution exploits the mind for its own ends---and that degrades us
as a species. ---Ok, and on that somber and depressing note, I will bid
you a'dieu. Have a Happy Easter and enjoy some ham on Sunday.

--- I actually wrote the

--- I actually wrote the last post YESTERDAY. Blogger was having a
goof-up in the publishing department. You could "post" all you wanted,
but publishing? Well, that's a different story.
My work here is done. I now need to nap off the very yummy pork
tenderloin we had over at the sister in law's house. Sleeeeeeeeepy.

--- More good news today.

--- More good news today. I made yet another blogroll and apparently
I'm a "celestial being." I like the sound of that! Woohoo!
Two in one week! My head is going to get really big here soon,
methinks.
Go and check out Miss Apropos when you get the chance. She said some very kind things about a post I made over at A Small Victory last week.

{Still Blushing, but doing the Happy Dance}

--- Ok, since not much was happening yesterday, the husband and I rented Revolutions
and had a film fest.
We watched all three films back to back and didn't wind up going to bed
until about one-thirty in the morning. I came to a number of
conclusions about this series---and we all know I have no shortage of
opinions regarding it, but to add to them, here we go.
1. You need to watch Reloaded and Revolutions back to
back for them to get the full-on Matrix frisson that we all got when we
watched the first one. The first one is a stand-alone. Numbers two and
three aren't. This was one of the few things the critics got right when
they reviewed Reloaded.
2. Monica Belluci really has some serious cleavage. (I still don't know how they squeezed her into that dress in Reloaded.
Methinks K-Y must have multiple uses.)
3. I still think the reason everyone was disappointed was because the
Wachowskis didn't spell the message out for their audience. And I do
believe there's proof of this: one of the Oracle's frequently repeated
lines was: "You just have to make up your own damn mind." I think this
is a hint to the audience from the brothers about what is or is not
right in regards to the conclusions their audience will inevitably draw
about the message of these films.
4. Keanu still has a really nice butt. 5. These movies got the shaft
from the Academy.
6. The attack on the dock was not too long. To my mind, it was
just the right length. 7. The "there are some things that will never
change," exchanges between Naiobi and Morpheus are tiring after the
first viewing.
8. These movies are not about a search for God. They are about faith.
The search for it; the finding of it; the acceptance of it; what it
requires of you; what sacrifices you will have to make, etc. All the
philosophical questions of the movie relate to this struggle. They
chose the Jesus archetype to tell the story, but that does not
necessarily mean that these movies are just one big Christian allegory,
and if you think they are, perhaps you should learn that organized
religion does not equal faith. When we were finished, I had the same
feeling in the wee hours of the morning as I did when we saw Revolutions
in the theater: I was satisfied. The story was complete---and more
importantly no one had wimped out in the telling of it. They pushed the
envelope. And I'm still having a hard time understanding why more
people just didn't get that this was an extraordinary achievement.
---Viewing recommendation for this coming week. Band of Brothers
is airing on The History Channel starting tomorrow and going for the
next ten days. If you haven't seen this miniseries, you need to sit
your butt down in front of the TV and watch it. Many people have sung
its praises, but I'll add my two cents to the cavalcade of praise:
this, I have to think, is the best description of what WWII was most
likely like for the American soliders that fought that war. If you're
not familiar with the story, it follows the trials and travails of the
men of Easy Company, a paratrooper company of 101st Airborne from
beginning to end. You meet them in training and you leave them in
post-war Austria. Easy Company was on the front lines of every major
European campaign, including D-Day up until the end of the war. They
took part in the failed Operation Marketgarden in Holland. They were
beseiged at Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge. They liberated a
concentration camp and were the first outfit into Bechetesgarden and
the Eagle's Nest. Their story is remarkable in that they were asked to
do much when it came to the war---they were always the first in and in
some cases, were the last to leave---and they almost always succeeded
in their tasks because they were so tight. Invariably there was a price
to be paid for their successes, and they did pay. Dearly, in some
cases.
Every episode begins with commentaries by the living members of Easy
Company, but they never said who was who. It's a very pleasant
realization at the end of the series when you can finally match up
characters in the series with the real individual. I'm not sure how
much The History Channel has sanitized this miniseries, but I'm
assuming they have. There was a reason---beyond the time limits---that
you would never see this on a regular network. They're gory and the
language is foul in some circumstances. But it's as close to real as
it's going to get without being there and it is so totally worth your
time to watch it. --- Ok, so I wrote this earlier today, but for some
reason it didn't publish---let's try that again!

--- The Apprentice finale is

--- The Apprentice finale is tonight. Just wanted to make one
prediction:
Kwame will pay and will pay DEARLY for picking Omarosa.

--- Ah, Andrew. I'm disappointed

--- Ah, Andrew. I'm disappointed in you.

BUSH'S RESPONSIBILITY: It's worth saying here what we now know the
president got wrong - badly wrong. There were never enough troops to
occupy Iraq. The war-plan might have been brilliant, but the post-war
plan has obviously been a failure. We needed more force and we needed
more money sooner. The president has no excuses for not adjusting more
quickly to this fact: he was told beforehand; he was told afterward;
but he and the Defense Secretary were too pig-headed to change course.
I still favor the war; but I cannot excuse the lapses and failures of
the administration in the post-war. Yes, this was always going to be
very very hard. And yes, Iraq was slowly imploding under Saddam and
some version of what we are now witnessing was inevitable - and,
without the war, it would have happened without our stabilizing
presence. Yes, balancing keeping order and winning hearts and minds is
not an easy operation to pull off. But with the troop levels we
maintained - especially given the limited international support - we
made things far harder than they might have been, and our beleaguered
troops are dealing with the aftermath. We can still win this. We must
still win this. But the president is in part responsible for making it
even harder than it might have been.

Fer cryin' out loud.

It be time for a Fisking.

It's worth saying here what we now know the president got wrong -
badly wrong. There were never enough troops to occupy Iraq. The
war-plan might have been brilliant, but the post-war plan has obviously
been a failure. We needed more force and we needed more money sooner.
I hate to say this Andrew, because you are a brilliant man, but you are
neither a financial analyst nor a military analyst. You are a pundit,
my friend. $87 billion---and that's BILLION, with a big Carl Sagan
'B'--- dollars apparently isn't enough money and Bush didn't push for
it soon enough. Well, my little fiscal conservative, did it not ever
occur to you that perhaps he waited until he had a better handle on
what the true costs of an unpopular war would be before he went to the
Congress to get it authorized? That maybe, just maybe, he was trying to
keep the authorization process from becoming a attention seeking
whore-fest? How much money would you have had him ask for, being the
true fiscal conservative that you are? As far as putting boots on the
ground, well, are you a military analyst, Andrew? I don't think so.
Hannibal you ain't. Leave the decisions about the elephants to those in
the know. You are not in Iraq. You are in D.C. What you do know about
troop strength you know from reading other pundits and from listening
to press releases. Is it fair to ask the men and women that are there
currently to have to pick up more slack? No, it's not and I'm sorry for
it. But I do know that I would prefer to have experienced men and women
in the field, fighting the battles, than replacement soldiers who are
green and are liable to get themselves killed in the meantime. The president has no excuses for not adjusting more quickly to
this fact: he was told beforehand; he was told afterward; but he and
the Defense Secretary were too pig-headed to change course.
Too pigheaded? It seems to me that just like the 9/11 commission,
perhaps hindsight is playing with your brilliant mind. The phrase If only
comes to mind. If only we'd done this differently. If only we'd done
that differently. Pffft. We hadn't invaded and then occupied a country
for a longer period than a few months since WWII. And we all know what
kind of a pain in the ass the German occupation was for the parties
involved. Things have changed since WWII. Might it have occurred to you
that switching course might have given our enemies exactly what they
wanted? Again, neither of us are military analysts. We should leave it
up to those in the know to decide what should have been done and when.
Yes there are lessons to be learned, Andrew. It hasn't gone off
swimmingly, but look at what has been achieved. There are schools and
roads and infrastructure and a Constitution.
Would any of that have happened as quickly if we hadn't invaded? Nope.
Patience, man. I have a feeling the occupation of Iran and Syria will
go much better when we invade them. (And that was a joke---maybe)
I still favor the war; but I cannot excuse the lapses and failures
of the administration in the post-war. Yes, this was always going to be
very very hard. And yes, Iraq was slowly imploding under Saddam and
some version of what we are now witnessing was inevitable - and,
without the war, it would have happened without our stabilizing
presence. Yes, balancing keeping order and winning hearts and minds is
not an easy operation to pull off.

You made my point for me, it seems.

But with the troop levels we maintained - especially given the
limited international support - we made things far harder than they
might have been, and our beleaguered troops are dealing with the
aftermath. We can still win this. We must still win this. But the
president is in part responsible for making it even harder than it
might have been.

Ahhhhh, you want the French in there after all, don't you? AIEEEEEE! What about the Germans? How about the UN? Because it's partly the President's fault because he didn't bring more support to the table in the first place!
Andrew, Andrew, Andrew. The President did not "in part" make it harder
for the US Military. You want know who did? The list is pretty freaking
long. Let's see. There's The UN. They made it harder because they
forced us to enforce their resolutions. They wouldn't do it. They
wanted more time for Blixie's Boys and Girls---even though it was on
Saddam to disarm in the first place. They were just there to verify
that he actually had done it. Then there's the French. They refused to
get on board---and the reasons why they didn't get on board aren't all
that altruistic, if you take my meaning. And Germany, after all, just
follows what the French do, as do the Russians. These countries and
international organizations wouldn't get off their fat asses to do
something about Iraq. We did. We knew this is what the level of
multilateral support we'd garnered would mean. I do believe the
President and Tony Blair said more than a few times the road would be a
difficult one, but one that must be traversed nonetheless. Don't tell
me you didn't know, too?
Yet you want these same countries. These same naysayers to come in and
help out. Well, forgive me, but I don't want their help. That's right. I don't want their help.
They had the balls to say we shouldn't go in. That we were violating
international law. That we were bad because we were doing this. They
have called for "regime change" here in the United States. Through the
EU and the UN they are actively trying to influence our election
because they don't like President Bush. And you want help from them?
What the hell? Figure it out. They don't like us. They don't like this
President. Why on Earth would he go to them for support? Such an action
would be, in essence, saying they were right all along. That we need
them to bail us out. Well, I don't think we do need them to bail us out
because we don't need to bailed out in the first place. We'll get the
job done. It may not be as pretty as you would have liked it to be,
like a remodel that didn't quite live up to your expectations, but it
will get done. Suck it up. Trust the people in charge. They know what
they're doing. And realize it's always darkest before the dawn.

--- So here's the conundrum

--- So here's the conundrum of the day. Mom, you're not allowed to read this.
I got a birth announcement in the mail today. A very nice little shot
of a cute chapeaued wee bugger who was born to a sorority sister of
mine on St. Patrick's Day. Appropriately enough, his parents decided to
use the name of that particular saint as one of his monikers. It's
always nice to know what's going on in old friends' lives. I haven't
chatted with this particular sorority sister since her wedding in the
autumn of 2002. She was actually my little sister in the house, and to
a certain extent I feel bad I haven't spent as much time with her as I
could, particularly since she moved to the Twin Cities in 2001. We've
had lunch, but she annoys me and the "little sister" designation will
only get you so far with me if you're an annoying individual. Little
sisters in my house were not like pledge daughters---you chose your
kid, your kid chose you. When you got a little sister, well, your job
was to welcome her in, show her the ropes, introduce her to people and
that was pretty much that. You handed her over to her pledge mom a few
weeks into the school year---who was someone she had chosen to hang out
with. And this is what happened with my little sister. However, I did
honestly like her. We were on our way to becoming pretty close friends
until she tried to lecture me about this certain guy I was seeing at
the time. She knew him well, but according to her, I didn't and I
should "Beware. He's a pig-dog." (Why she kept using that phrase I
don't know. She kept repeating it, like it was the best description she
had for this guy. Wierd. "Jackass" would have worked just as well.) Her
warning came a wee bit too late. It's the kind of thing that happens at
college. Girls fighting over guys. It's stupid in retrospect, but it
happens, and hard feelings result and last for quite some time,
surprisingly. The guy in question was pretty popular in my circle and
was relatively attractive and we'd been on and off again for six months
or so. Maybe I should correct that. "On and Off" seems to imply that we
had some sort of "serious relationship." We didn't. We were both busy
people. We had classes to attend and extracurricular activities to work
on. We never made the time to have a relationship. He had his friends.
I had mine and while our social circles overlapped, we weren't always
constantly in each others pockets. But I genuinely liked the guy. I
really did. I wouldn't have much minded putting things off to make time
for him, but he didn't want that and that was fine with me because the
relationship always and forever seemed to be stuck in "if only" land. If only we had more time. If only I hadn't already made plans. If only I didn't have this paper due tomorrow.
We got along just fine, but there wasn't a good deal of depth, if you
get what I'm saying. Every time I thought it was done, he'd do
something nice and romantic and I'd be hooked again. In retrospect, it
seems as if he couldn't make up his mind about me--whether I was worth
the extra effort of actual dating. And I made things nice and easy for
him by letting him in whenever he wanted in. Ah, if we could only go
back and do things differently, knowing what we know now, eh? This
event marks the ending of my relationship with this guy. It got nasty
and my little sister played a big part in shaping my feelings of the
entire event. Of course, the story is replete with the whole he
said/she said angle. After an eventful---or not so, you be the
judge---evening this guy was saying some not very flattering things
about me and word had spread. I'd already been tipped off by some other
friends, who, of course, believed my version of events, rather than
his. Everyone who knew me knew he was full of shit, but the little
sister thought the story was true and refused to take my word for it.
She thought I was trying to keep my virtue intact (ha! like I had any!)
by denying his version of events. The truth of the matter was that the
guy suffered from a medical problem called "whiskey dick." Yep. That's
right. He couldn't get it up. This was embarrasing to him and to salve
his wounded pride he made up a story about me being particularly
demanding. I'm not going to go into details about the story, but it's
pretty funny now. In the here and now, most men would flat-out LOVE the
things he told everyone I'd asked for. Back then, though, "my sexual
demands" were apparently out of line and he had to tell everyone that
he was the one who rejected me and why. Now, we all know male pride is
a fragile thing---like a particularly rare and delicate piece of glass:
it shatters easily and isn't easily replaced. Look at it from his
perspective: you finally manage to get a particular special someone to
come home with you, hence it doesn't look really great when the object
of your affection---someone whom you've ranted, raved and fretted over
for months on end---leaves in a huff ten minutes later. Particularly
after you begged and pleaded with her to come back to your house in
front of said roommates. I believe it's called "saving face." Roommates
have a tendency to be nosy---particularly when they're close friends.
His roommates were there when he asked me back to his house. They were
there when I left. They knew there was a story there and they wanted
the details. The guy was more than happy to give them the details. They
listened and sympathized, decided I was a slut and then spread the word
to everyone on campus. One of whom happened to be Jen, who fell for it
hook-line-and sinker. But because I decided to let it slide; to not
shoot my mouth off like he had, to her mind my version of the events
wasn't necessary, because she knew what really happened that night.
What really mattered to her was that I stayed away from him in the
future---like I was some kind of idiot who couldn't figure that out for
myself. I remember the conversation well. "Kathy, you don't have to do this with me."
"I'm not doing a damn thing, Jen."
"Kathy, don't cover up! You don't have to do that with me!"
"I know I don't have to, which is why I'm not! I was there. You weren't."
"Kathy, you don't have to do this with me! {insert vigorous hand flapping here} He's a pig-dog."
"Umm, yeah, I know. Which is why I won't have anything to do with him now. Why are you taking his word for it?"
"Kathy, you don't have to do this with me!"
"Am I suddenly a liar?"
"You don't have to do this with me. I know what happened!
UGH!
After about a half hour's worth of this bullshit, I finally cut her off
and kicked her out of my room. Her concern about what was being said
about me was touching, as was her worries that I wouldn't stay away
from him in the future. That was nice, but the fact that she refused to
believe my version of the event pretty much soured the friendship for
me and I kept my distance from her for the short amount of time I had
left at school. After all, if one of your friends decides to believe
hearsay about you, rather than your version of events, well, there's
not a whole lot of trust and respect going on there. What's the point
of keeping going under those circumstances? I knew her, but not that
well, it seems and she really didn't know me. So, keeping this scenario
in mind, I'm leery of her. She's stubborn and she's easily waylaid by
things "she's heard." But when she moved here I tried to put those
things in the past. We've had lunch. She's tried to recruit me many
times for sorority alumni stuff. I went to her wedding. I sent her a
very nice wedding present, for which she never sent a thank you note.
Now, she's had a kid and the proper and correct thing to do when one
receives a birth announcement is to send a wee gift and a nice note. I
do this every time I get one of these. No matter who it is or what sort
of relationship I have with them. It's the polite thing to do. But I
don't want to. Particularly not after I spent $70 bucks on a wedding
present for which I didn't receive a thank you note. I'm thinking on
this one. I'm not sure what to do. Do I send a note? A present? To send
something to this person who I don't know if I like strictly for the
sake of appearances when it's obvious that she doesn't really care. I
don't know. It's probably a waste of money. Oh, and just a side
note---the guy did apologize for what he'd done a few months after the
fact. He didn't think it would become the big deal it did and he was
sorry for it. Particularly when he finally realized I hadn't shot my
mouth off about him when I could have easily made his life a living
hell. It was very apparent that people would have believed my version
of events over his. His story was was a little too fantastical; mine
was based in reality. People would have believed me. I found out much,
much later---from Jen, no less, who is still in contact with him---that
for him, I was "the one that got away." Interesting, huh? I still don't
know what to make of that---or if I should even believe it knowing the
guy.

--- And without further ado,

--- And without further ado, here is Mr. H's commentary about the bus drivers' strike here in the Twin Cities.
- Okay, Mr. H. Here. I’m a little overdue on my “rant” about the
bus-strike here in Minneapolis. Sorry about that. Do I want this strike
to be over? Yes. Will I ride the bus again? More than likely. I moved
into a new place in the middle of January. I rode the bus to and from
work everyday. It made my life easier, I didn’t have to deal with
traffic and parking, and it saved me money. It saved me a lot of money.
When the strike started, I was keeping track of how much it cost me. I
was keeping track of how much MORE money I was spending (Parking, gas,
etc) because I couldn’t take the bus. I stopped keeping track when
the amount hit $150. That was back in mid to late March. It’s the
middle of April, and I don’t even want to know now. I do however feel
it when I am trying to make a decision about going out or buying
something. We here at work have been carpooling. So that has kept the
cost down, but it has its downsides. I’m an independent person by
nature; I don’t like being dependent on someone else. I especially
don’t like waiting. I get up in the morning, do my thing, and when
I’m ready to leave, I want to leave. Now, I have to wait – wait for
the person who meets me at my house every morning. I “can” be a
morning person, but I get really crabby when I’m standing around
waiting for someone in the morning. I hate wasting time. Then it’s
the same thing in the afternoon, but now we add one to two other
people. Waiting again. This thing has gone on for so long now I’ve
almost forgotten about it. I’ve kind of gotten used to the
Carpooling. I don’t like it, but what does that matter? Other than
seeing “LOT FULL” signs at almost every parking lot downtown and
seeing the picket line when I go to visit my friend who lives near
MTC’s main building, it has vacated my everyday consciousness. Now
– trying not to think of MY money and MY time, I don’t like this
strike. I don’t like it at all. I have a hard time feeling sorry for
a group of people whose starting salary is higher than mine (not much,
but still more). I have a hard time feeling sorry for someone who has a
right to yell at people, honk their horn, be downright nasty and still
have a job. There are some really friendly drivers but the bulk of them
are rude. Now, I don’t want their job. I don’t want to deal with
the people they have to deal with, but really, don’t take it out on
everyone. If I smile at you and say hello – respond. Your job is
technically a customer service job, but because you work for a union
AND the government, you think that you can be a prick and nothing will
happen. I plan to make good use of that comment line when you get up
and running. They were offered a raise---albeit a small 1%---but it was
a raise. We aren’t getting one here. We are all thankful we still
have our jobs. Their health insurance premiums are going up – well,
so did mine, so did my co-workers, so did my parents. It’s part of
life, expenses go up. What I have a problem with is unions in general.
I don’t like them, and I grew up in a union home – my father
retired at 50 – I know they have some good points. I do however,
believe the union’s time has come, and gone – I think it’s been
gone for a long, long, time. There are employment regulations right
now, there is a minimum wage, there are employment laws, age limits,
etc. What are they there for now? I’ll tell you they are there for
the easy money. Does a union care about its individual members? NO. Do
they care about their families? No. Do they care about your benefits?
No. Do they care about your wage? YES – BUT do you know why? Do you?
It’s simple – they want your dues, and the more your wages are, the
more your dues are. That’s what they want, so the Union guys can earn
a salary for working for “you”. Ha – they work for themselves. It
makes me sick really. I deal with a Union at work. The Union
“representing” Actors. Do they care about their actors? No. Do they
care about the financial state of the theater? No. Do they get their
undies in a bunch when I miscalculate their pension/health and dues
payments? Oh yes. If it doesn’t have anything to do with money coming
in to them, they don’t care. There are a few plusses to this thing
though: It’s amazing to me how clean downtown has been without the
busses. I never would have expected that. The people walking on the
streets have places to go, things to do and actually know how to use a
trashcan and an ashtray. The panhandlers actually seem to have almost
disappeared. I have been hit up for “spare change” (if I had any
spare change, I’d consider myself rich, I’m only a couple hundred
dollars away for asking for change myself) three times since the strike
started. On any given day, that would be the amount of times I’d get
hit up walking from the bus stop, to the coffee shop and then to work.
I guess without the busses running they can’t come downtown. I am
even finding that traffic is better WITHOUT the busses. Traffic down
Hennepin Avenue almost flows. When I drive into the office, or driving
home, it takes me 5-10 minutes LESS than it used to. It will be
interesting to see what it is like to drive around the city once the
busses are back running. When we have to deal with them cutting us off,
stopping a complete lane of traffic, pushing their way through red
lights, and just sitting on the side of the road, holding up traffic
and being rude. I guess we’ll have to see what happens today – when
they meet again. At this point in time, the drivers should be hurting
enough to come back to work. If they or their Union don’t want to
come back to work, hire someone else. There are plenty of people who
need jobs – and don’t forget – this is a “customer service”
position. Keep the shitty attitude for the airlines.

Courtesy of the husband: Blog

Courtesy of the husband: Blog Crusaders Needed.

BEIJING: China is targeting blogs -- diary-style personal pages for
Internet users -- in its latest attempt to censor the increasing
popularity of the Internet in the country, according to a rights group.
Two sites hosting blogs for thousands of people -- who express their
views about news, themselves or anything they want -- have been shut
down by the government, the Paris-based media rights group Reporters
Without Borders said One of the blogs, "BlogBus.com," hosted more than
15,000 blogs that have now been made inaccessible, the group said in a
statement.
The site was shut down on March 11 for allowing a letter to be posted
that was critical of the government.
This is basically the equivalent of the US government shutting down
Blogger for one inflammatory Bush Bashing post. In fact, Blogger and
TypePad are blocked in China. The crackdown on blogs coincides with the opening of the 60th
session of the United Nations Human Rights Commission, at which China
has a seat without respecting its international commitments, the
international press freedom organisation said.
It also comes days after China's legislature approved an amendment to
its constitution to say for the first time that the state respects and
protects human rights.
Ugh. I have an odd sort of appreciation for the PRC's ability to smile
cheesily while it's obvious to a blind man on a galloping horse that
they're lying, but this is beyond the pale. It's another attempt at
cracking down. It's just one more way for them to control the content
and to crush dissent. We bloggers can talk until the cows come home
about free speech. It's easy for us to take our rights for granted.
When we disagree with someone, we roll out Voltaire and quote, I may not agree with what you say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it. We BlogIran. We support average Iraqis who
are telling us a story that the mainstream media has patently ignored.
But we don't do much about China, do we? There's not much we can
do about China, it seems, to let them know we support their cause. They
control the internet there. They close off access to sites they don't
want people visiting. They cut off thousands of bloggers because of one
post.
I did a little research and I found Adopt a Blog.
It should be called Guerilla Blogging. This is for all of those
bloggers who have their own hosting and domain name and perhaps a
little extra space to share with a blogger who's been blocked by the
PRC so that they can keep writing. They can write about the fact that
their dog has fleas for all I care. Blatant political dissent isn't a
necessary content requirement. But those those of us who take our
freedom of speech for granted should care that people aren't allowed to
write that their dog has fleas in the first place.
I would do this in a heartbeat if I weren't on Blogger. When I move
this site, I will help out. In the meantime, the best I can do is to
get the word out.

--- No shit, Sherlock. "I'm

--- No shit, Sherlock.

"I'm covered with loser dust ... DREW (BARRYMORE) won't call me back. I can't even get an autographed 'Charmed' poster
for my daughter." -- embattled rocker COURTNEY LOVE, in the May issue of Blender magazine.
Could the fact that you're covered with loser dust, Courtney, be a
result of the fact that you are a loser? Take as much time as you need
to think about it Courtney. We all know your brain isn't up to snuff.
Take your time and think it through.
Let me be helpful and outline the scenario for you.
A. You're a druggie. You seem to think this is cool, but people your
age generally have figured out by now that drugs are bad, mmmkay? B.
You've been arrested more in the past year than most people get pulled
over in their lifetimes. You don't have a problem with this. You think
it shows off your edgy side. Well, from one who knows what it's like
when the law comes into your life, know this: normal people don't like
being around criminals---accused or convicted---no matter what the
crime. They just don't. It's one of those things you have to suck it up
and deal with. Abnormal behavior is cool for about fifteen minutes,
then people just don't want to deal with it. Sorry, but that's just the
way it is.
C. You are well over twenty-one and yet you continue on with a. and b.
Adults don't like hanging out with teenagers. Your moment of rebellion
should have ended years ago, but you're on the road to middle age and
you still act like you're eighteen. D. YOU HAVE A DAUGHTER. HER FATHER OFFED HIMSELF AND YOU ARE HER
ONLY PARENT. BE A PARENT AND ACT LIKE ONE FOR YOUR DAUGHTER'S SAKE OR
SHE WILL BE MORE SCREWED UP THAN YOU AND HER FATHER COMBINED.
You are a loser, Courtney. There's really no getting around that. But
what's really sad about the situation is that you don't even realize
the reasons why you're so low on the social totem pole when it's
obvious to a blind man on a galloping horse.
Duh.

--- "Mental Meaderings Between Sleeps"

--- "Mental Meaderings Between Sleeps" is what this blog should be
called.
Because I did wind up starting "Pattern Recognition" last night, and I
didn't get to bed until three. Hence, I now need a nap. (I'm liking the
heroine of this book. The Michelin Man gives her panic attacks, which
she fends off by repeating the phrase, "He took a duck in the face at 250 knots." What's not to like?)

Anyhoo, to keep you occupied, I have this amusing bit from the Sunday Strib (registration required, but honestly, this one is sooo worth it.)

Britney, you are no Pussy Galore.
A recent "Extra" TV report revealed that Britney Spears has had the
gall to approach Barbara Broccoli, a producer of Bond films, with a
view to becoming the next Bond Girl. (Broccoli is working on the 21st
installment of the film franchise, slated for a November 2005 release.)
The smackdown starts in the next paragraph. Enjoy.

--- And speaking of shoes...

--- And speaking of shoes...

Delish. Delightful. Oh, so NOT politically correct, but I want them anyway. Who needs more alligators around anyway? They eat people.

But most of all, I still want these.

AND I WANT THEM BADLY.

---Here are the correct answers

---Here are the correct answers to the big brain fart posted below.

Sigh.

Am such an idiot.

--- I made another blogroll

--- I made another blogroll today. Woohoo. Monsieur Goldstein at Protein Wisdom added me onto his list o' vintage blogs.

Have no idea why he put me on there. And I'm not going to ask lest I annoy him and he delinks me.

I will simply say this: thanks, dude. I appreciate it.

--- Well, Tom's heart is

--- Well, Tom's heart is in the right place.

An organization co-founded by actor Tom Cruise has raised $1.2
million to expand a treatment program for rescue
workers exposed to potentially hazardous materials after the collapse
of the World Trade Center.
The New York Rescue Workers Detoxification Project said it has treated
more than 200 workers who say they were suffering effects from
breathing the air filled with smoke, dust and debris after the Sept.
11, 2001, destruction of the trade center.
The money raised by Cruise and others would expand the project to treat
twice as many people, said Keith Miller, the project's director. The
treatment is provided at no cost.
Sounds like a pretty good deal, eh? That's nice that Tom's getting
behind the 9/11 workers. Wonderful. But there's something in the title
"New York Rescue Workers Detoxification Project," that's causing the
hairs on the back of my neck to rise.
And here it is: The project's program consists of a medically monitored regimen of
exercise, sauna sweat-out, vitamins and minerals to help rescue workers
cleanse their bodies of toxic residues. It was developed by L. Ron
Hubbard, founder of the Church of Scientology, of which Cruise is a
member.
It's faith based healing, in other words. A faith based initiative.
Because his group will probably, you know, try to convert a few people
to Scientology whilst all this detox is going on. Can't wait to hear
Hillary lambast Tom about this one. /sarcasm

--- Disaster averted. The husband

--- Disaster averted.

The husband recognized that the situation was only going to go downhill and handed the goods over.

And I only had to threaten to open the can of bitchcraft.

Heh.

--- I missed this one

--- I missed this one yesterday. Sharia in Canada (hat tip: Sully)

Almad and thousands of other Muslims, taking advantage of a
provision of the law in the province of Ontario, can now decide some
civil disputes under sharia, including family disagreements and
inheritance, business and divorce issues, using tribunals that include
imams, Muslim elders and lawyers. While it is less than full
implementation of sharia, local leaders consider it a significant step.
Muslim promoters of sharia arbitration said that no cases had been
decided but that the process is set. Islamic leaders created an Islamic
Court of Civil Justice last fall and that organization, in turn, has
chosen arbitrators, who have undergone training in sharia and Canadian
civil law, according to organizers and participants.

NO! NO! NO! NO! This is just so wrong on so many levels. And this would be one of them:

Although advocates of the sharia process stressed that participation
in the tribunal process would be voluntary, some critics expressed
concern that many Muslims would be labeled disobedient if they refused
participation in such sharia-based arbitrations.
"If I am a woman of faith, and the community of people who see
themselves as leaders say that if I do not follow the sharia court
here, the Islamic Institute, then I will be tantamount to blasphemy and
apostasy," Hogben said in a debate shown on Canadian television. "And
you know that in some countries, apostasy means death sentence."

Not to mention this:

Syed Mumtaz Ali , the president of the Canadian Society of Muslims,
began circulating the idea for the court two years ago. In a statement
on his organization's Web site, he said that the tribunals
would allow Muslims to practice freedom of religion. "Muslim minorities
living in non-Muslim countries like Canada are like wandering
Bedouins," he wrote. "Although they are free to live according to the
Divine Law to practice their faith unhindered in their homes" and
mosques, he said, "they have practically no say in the making of the
laws of the land and governmental institutions do not cater to their
needs." Ali said the creation of the Islamic Court of Civil Justice
would allow this "without violating any Canadian Law." Ali told the
Canadian Law Times that sharia tribunals were important for practicing
Muslims in Canada. He said that Muslims would no longer have an excuse
not to follow sharia because it would no longer be impractical in
Canada. "The concession given by sharia is no longer available to us
because the impracticality has been removed," Ali said. He has written
that Muslims who choose not to be governed by sharia "for reasons of
convenience would be guilty of a far greater crime." Ali said in a
telephone interview that no tribunal cases have been heard yet. He
would not elaborate.
{emphasis mine}
In other words, God's law trumps man's law and man's law has made
allowances for this in the name of sacrificing common sense to the God
of Multicultural Diversity. I despise Sharia. It's politically
incorrect to say this, but I don't really give a rat's ass. Like
anything, Sharia has its good points, but they do not overwhelm the bad
in a significant enough way to make it a system worthy of reform, let
alone actual use. It's medieval. It's completely neglects that the Age
of Reason ever happened; it negates that Western cultural values have
any worth and what makes this so enraging is that it's a democratic, Western country
that is allowing for the practice of this backwards legal system. Oh,
but it's only for family disputes, the advocates say. It's only for
property disputes. It's only for divorce. It's only for inheritance
disputes. In general I have the tendency to go worst case scenario, so
maybe this is a bit over the top, but what if a girl decides she
doesn't want to be genitally mutilated, but her dad decides that's just
what's needed to keep her knickers on? Which system holds the trump
card? What if a wife wants to divorce her husband because he's beating
the crap out of her? Which system holds the trump card? What if a woman
is the sole inheritor to a property---while this is completely legal
under Canadian law, if she's Muslim, that property will go to her
husband. Ah, but they do have a Canadian legal remedy, particularly for criminal cases..
Ok, so what if a woman is raped. By a Muslim man. The Canadian legal
system takes care of the man, but what happens to the woman? Is she to
be forced to go before the Sharia court if her husband wants to divorce
her on the grounds that she's been adulterous? What if she isn't
married, but is a young girl instead. What if her father decides to
disinherit her because she's been impure? How does the Sharia court
rule then? These are the exact areas of Sharia where discrimination
occurs. Justice in Sharia isn't blind. She looks to see if you have
tits or a cock before she passes her judgments. The scales are
overwhelmingly balanced in favor of Muslim men, not Muslim women. If
pious women feel they have to go before this court otherwise they're
going to hell, how are their rights, under Canadian law, being
protected? I'm just not seeing it.

--- The Rochambeau's on. Go

--- The Rochambeau's on.

Go here to
give money to Spirit of America for videocameras, dvd players and other
techie equipment so that Iraqis don't have to be subjected to the likes
of Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya for all of their news. I'm all about
choice---I like having ten pairs of black shoes. Give so that Iraqis
can do the same when it comes to watching the news. And here's a nifty
graphic that will get you nowhere if you click on it because I have
absolutely NO idea how to make it a live linkie and the husband is busy
crunching numbers. Enjoy my inadequacy.

--- It's laundry day at

--- It's laundry day at the Cake Eater Apartment. Woohoo, is what
you're saying. I know it is. Laundry is boring stuff. I apologize, but
honesty, other than running up and down three flights of stairs
repeatedly, I like doing laundry. Why, you ask, do I like this tedious
activity?
Well, mainly because I like the smell of the stuff I use to clean our
clothes. It's going to sound wierd, but the smell of these products
makes me happy. It's stupid, I know. But I really do get a kick out of
smelling laundry soap---the actual soap and
what it effect it has on the clothes when they come out of the dryer. I
also like fabric softener, too. I should declare right here and right
now that I'm a Downy Girl. I do like how Bounce smells, but I don't
like that prolonged usage of fabric sheets causes socks to
disentegrate. I personally think Fresh Start was the best smelling
laundry detergent EVER, but they no longer make it. Gain isn't bad, but
they don't sell it in bulk at Costco. I still remember what Dash
smelled like back before they made it into a lemon scented business and
then discontinued it entirely. My mom used Dash for years; now she's
relegated to using Tide, like the rest of us. Bounce has always smelled
the same---they just turned the smell up to eleven in recent years. But
there's another reason I like doing laundry.
There's just something about cleaning clothes that makes me feel like
I'm accomplishing something. At the beginning, you have piles of dirty
clothes. At the end, the hampers are empty, everything is folded, put
away and it smells good. I accomplish something with this task. And in
my life, where a goodly amount of effort is extended for minimal
accomplishment, it feels good that I have at least one task where I
know I'm the gold standard and there is a result. Writing, right now,
for me, is not about results. Those will come---one day. I know this.
But laundry, well, that takes a day, life is sorted, and there is a
measurable result at the end of it. It's so weird, I know, but I take
pleasure in this. It's not like cleaning for me. I hate cleaning. I
used to clean other people's domiciles, hotel rooms and condos for a
living. Ever since I gave up cleaning other people's toilets and
dealing with the hairballs they left in the bottom of the drain,
cleaning holds very little satisfaction for me. (You clean up a hotel
room after people have used it as a sex shack or a kegger house and
you'll know what I'm talking about.) For me, cleaning has morphed into
an activity you do for other people. I could live in a sty and I'd be
ok with it for a good long while. I don't need to clean for me; I do
need to clean when someone is coming over, though. I used to find some
satisfaction in cleaning, but no more. Now I want someone to clean up
after me. But laundry is an entirely different story. I could never
have someone other than myself or the husband wash my skivvies. Just
couldn't do it, mainly because I don't want someone commenting on said
skivvies, but because it's my task. And because I like sniffing laundry
soap. Someone book me an appointment at the pyschiatrist toute suite.

--- Well said.

--- Well said.

--- Was just looking at

--- Was just looking at the calendar and saw that Passover starts
today.
I like the story of Passover. It's one of those few dramatic stories in
the bible that actually made me pay attention in Old Testament class in
high school (the TWO times I had to take it---and no, I wasn't a dolt.
The Catholic school I attended switched around the religious education
requirements so that my class wound up taking it twice---once freshman
year and once senior year.) Let's face it: the OT lacks drama. Not much
happens in the OT. God created the world in six days and on the
seventh, he kicked back and had a beer. He decided, however, on day
eight that he needed some people so he created Adam, and then Eve. By
the end of that week, Eve was tempted into eating the apple and the
concept of original sin was created and God put the boot to their asses
and kicked them out of the Garden of Eden. Then you have the whole Cain
and Abel debacle; Isaac and Abraham; you learn about the Tower of Babel
and the Flood; then you finally get to the good stuff in Exodus. Upon
further thought, let me correct my previous statement: there's plenty
of drama in the OT; the writers just aren't good enough to make it
exciting when you actually have to read it. The stories are filled with
lots of "begats" as in so and so begat so and so who begat so and so.
There's very little dialogue, unless its with God and then it's a third
person account of what the individual chatting with the Big Man said
the Big Man said---hearsay, in other words. The story arcs are
lacking--- big time. Resolution of certain big events takes place in a
paragraph. It's just my opinion, but whomever wrote most of the
Torah---the first five books of the Bible---needed to attend a writing
seminar. But I love Exodus. It's great. It's jampacked with action and
adventure. Slavery in Egypt. A chosen one who had been raised by the
enemy. Plagues. Payback galore with the death of Pharoah's first born
son. Flight. Revenge. Jealousy. Sacrifice. Has this story got it all or
what? No wonder they made a movie out of it. Obviously I'm not Jewish,
but I have some Passover experience. A long time ago, the husband and I
cooked a Seder for an elderly Jewish friend and her family in Des
Moines. I've cooked Kosher, in other words. After hearing about the
traditions of the Seder for years during Holy Thursday mass, it was
interesting to finally see what one was like in real life. Lots of
wine. Lots of reading of the story of Passover. And lots of food.
Despite the fact I'm a "shiksa---a nice shiksa, but a shiksa
nonetheless" I apparently make a mean potato latke. (FYI for
gentiles---a latke is basically a hashbrown patty.) It was a grand
occasion for them, and it was special for me to be a part of it.
There's nothing really like this in all of the celebrations we have for
Christianity, and that's a shame. We don't pull out the Bible and start
reading sections of it while we say prayers and then make toasts with
the wine. Jews bring their religion into their houses and make their
homes an integral part of the practice of their traditions and beliefs.
We Christians don't do that. We're not required to. We keep our
religion low-key and in our churches, for the most part and I think
we're lacking something because of it.
Anyway---Happy Passover. --- Courtesy of the Cake Eater Mother we have
the Crane Cam! (You'll need Real One Player to view)

The cranes are Nebraska's version of the swallows coming to Capistrano. Go here to
learn more about it. Keep checking back to see the cranes. It's
impressive. They sleep on the river, as it protects them from other
beasts who would like nothng better than to eat them. The best times to
see them are in the morning and in the evening right around sunset. ---
Well, I guess her daughter can stop sending checks, eh?

Just goes to show, once again, anything other than a maximum bet on a slot machine is for suckers.

--- And speaking of media

--- And speaking of media bias.
I followed the links to the article in the Boston Globe and whaddya
know---it seems someone has been paying attention to the numbers put
out by the Project for Excellence in Journalism that I linked to last week.

There's lots of doubts about the motives of journalists," adds
Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center for the People and
the Press.
Kohut regularly polls people about the media, and the responses aren't
flattering. In a survey released last summer, 66 percent of the
respondents said news organizations tended to be biased when covering
political and social issues; only 26 percent thought they dealt fairly
with all sides. Seventy percent said news outlets were often influenced
by powerful people and organizations, while 23 percent considered the
media independent of such influences. Less than half those surveyed
thought news organizations were "moral," though only 32 percent were
willing to label the media as "immoral." Still, when that question was
asked in 1985, only 13 percent opted for the "immoral" characterization.
My questions remain:
a. What are the 1985 numbers and why hasn't anyone published a link to
them so we can compare and contrast the numbers? b. Why hasn't someone
checked to see why there was only a 14 point jump over seventeen years
in regards to the amount of bias? There seems to be plenty of
evaluation regarding journalists ethics, but there's no comparison in
this article about the bias numbers.
c. So, according to this, In a survey released last summer, 66
percent of the respondents said news organizations tended to be biased
when covering political and social issues I was right in saying that the numbers regarding bias were off, but we'll never know how
much they're off by because everyone seems to be comparing apples to
oranges when they talk about this study and the others that are cited.
d. Damnit! Why hasn't Instapundit linked me already on this one????
{obligatory blogging related whining for the day--sorry}

--- And they say the

--- And they say the media's not biased.

WASHINGTON (AP) - President Bush acknowledged a good deal of
introspection after all the questions lately about his government's
actions before the Sept. 11 attacks and in Iraq, but not a whiff of contrition. Bush was asked in his prime-time news conference if he had made any mistakes.
{Emphasis added by moi} What exactly is he supposed to have a "whiff of
contrition" about? 9/11? I hate to tell you this but OSAMA BIN LADEN is
the one who should be apologizing for 9/11. Iraq? We did what needed to
be done there. No apologies or contrition are needed.
It makes no nevermind to the media that if Bush had admitted to making
a mistake, he would have opened himself up to a full scale media
slaughter on his character. Make no mistake about it: that's ALL the
media would be reporting right now. The headline would appear something
like, Bush Admits He's Made Mistakes! then within twenty-four hours it would morph into Bush Admits Makes Mistakes: How Does This Affect The War on Terror? then the opposition would chime in and the next headline would be, Kerry Claims He NEVER Makes Mistakes. Ad infinitum, ad nauseam.

He refused to answer a leading question that he knew he would be twisted by the media and now the media is mad at him for not answering that leading question so they say he hasn't shown a "whiff of contrition.
Well, what the hell does he have to be contrite about? What does he
have to feel remorseful about? He's done the deal the best he could.
And even if he did feel remorseful, well, saying you feel remorseful is
playing into your enemy's hands. And by enemies I don't mean Kerry or
Ted Kennedy. I mean Al-Sadr in Iraq. I mean the mullahs in Iran. I mean
the remnants of Al-Qaeda. I mean Kim Jong-Il. It gets better too. To be sure, Bush acknowledged the difficulties of recent weeks in
Iraq, the horrible scenes of bodies on television and the sense that
the war has dragged on for a long time. ``It's been really tough for
the families,'' he said. ``It's been tough on this administration.''
He said he has asked himself repeatedly whether his administration
could have done anything to stop the Sept. 11
attacks. He did not directly answer his own question, saying only that
if he'd had an inkling about what was to happen, he would have done
anything to head it off.
There wasn't anything the man could do to head off 9/11. I'm sorry to
tell you this, but come on and get real about the situation. We may be
the United States of America, but this does not mean we're
infailliable. We're human. Shit happens. And most assuredly as much as
we wish it were different, shit happened on 9/11. Things were not
copacetic. And people died. It happens, I'm sorry, but it does. But in
this rush to play election year politics with this commission, we seem
to forget who really was responsible for 9/11: those 19 assholes who
thought this was the best way to make America bend to their will.
Bastards. By doubting this, by saying that there should have been more
we could do to stop 9/11, we're playing right into their hands. Their
overlarge game of three card monte is working. I'm tired of it and I
cannot blame Bush for not playing the media's game. As Sands so aptly
said in Once Upon a Time in Mexico "The best way to win the game is to rig it." The game is rigged---and not in Bush's favor.

--- We have SILLY GERMANS

--- We have SILLY GERMANS today.
I suppose this would be something that could happen to anyone who chose
to imbibe before taking a wife, but how badly would it have sucked to
have had your mother come and pick you up from the police
station---particularly on the day when she was probably looking forward
to handing those duties over to her son's bride?
Bleh.
--- RAM IT---HARDER.

How much fun would that be?

--- Interesting.

Now, if the military should want to revamp its uniforms, my sister Christi has some serious ideas for them.

--- I don't have a great deal of respect for a man who
took a massive dose of heroin, put a shotgun in his mouth and then
pulled the trigger. Not really brave, methinks, that he wanted to be
numb for the last few moments of his life when he wouldn't have felt
anything anyhow when that bullet hit his brain. If you're going to blow
your brains out, at least do it honorably and don't wimp out when the
time comes. I just don't have much respect for him as a human being.
Particularly when he had a child with a woman who was apparently too
unstable for even his tastes. That poor kid. God, I feel for her. He's
dead. Get over it already, would you? He was not "the voice" of a
generation. As a member of the generation of which he's claimed to be
the voice of, I can tell you there is not one single person in the
music industry who represents less of what I stand for than Kurt
Cobain. (Well, maybe Moby but...) He was a whiny, self-involved jerk
who blew his brains out because he would have rather burnt out than
faded away. I have very little respect for him as a human being, mainly
because he killed himself rather than see what his potential was
because the potential was painful for him. It's selfish in the extreme.
You would think that all of the people who worship him would see that
they're the ones who have suffered for his selfishness. You'd think
they'd be bitter about the fact he committed suicide. They're not,
though. They're just sad that he's still gone. Like I said, get over it
already.

--- Fun with 80's lyrics.

--- Fun with 80's lyrics. Courtesy of A Small Victory
Let's see just how much of my wasted MTV youth I remember. All those
hours spent watching MTV and VH1 on the sly, continuously risking the
wrath of my parents who hated MTV, have to be worth, something---right?
My answers are on the right. We'll see if I'm correct later on. Hey,
it's laundry day---I'm seeking serious distraction here.
1. Suckin on chili dogs outside the Tastee-Freez---Jack and Diane, John
"Cougar" Mellencamp 2. I've done no harm, I keep to myself---Land Down
Under, Men At Work
3. There's a freeway runnin' through the yard---Free Falling, Tom Petty
4. I've seen a million faces and I've rocked them all---Wanted Dead or
Alive, Bon Jovi
5. Your mom threw away your best porno mag---You Gotta Fight for Your
Right (To Parrrrrrtaaaaay!), Beastie Boys
6. Can you hear them? They talk about us, telling lies, well that's no surprise---Our Lips Are Sealed, The Go-Go's
7. One that won't make me nervous, wonderin what to do
8. Are you more than hot for me, or am I a page in your history (book)--- Straight-Up Paula Abdul
9. I can hear you comin, I know what you're after
10. And it's true we are immune when fact is fiction and TV reality---Sunday Bloody Sunday, U2
11. Don't go around breaking young girls' hearts---
12. I've got my back against the record machine---Jump, Van Halen
13. You take me by the heart when you take me by the hand---Mickey
14. A cloud appears above your head, a beam of light comes shining down on you
15. I'm lying in the rain, but I never wave bye-bye
16. He's the one that makes ya feel alright---Dr. Feelgood, Motley Crue
17. Are you happy, are you satisfied, how long can you stand heat
18. I think I thought you were someone else
19. I tried my imagination but I was disturbed
20. I tell you one and one makes three---Cult of Personality, Living Color
21. I'll be stretching my mouth to let those big words come right out---Big Time, Peter Gabriel
22. And though she will mess up your life, you want her just the same
23. You can listen as well as you hear
24. Think of the tender things that we were working on---
25. They gave you life and in return you gave them hell---Shout, Tears for Fears
26. Knew he must've been about seventeen---I Love Rock and Roll, Joan Jett and The Blackhearts
27. I am the maker of rules, dealing with fools
28. Can't get food for the king
29. Step on a crack, break your momma's back---Whip It, Devo
30. Her hair reminds me of a warn safe place where as a child I'd lie---Sweet Child O' Mine, Guns-n-Roses
31. You're like the sun chasing all of the rain away
32. Everyone you meet, they're jamming in the streets
33. I'm not internationally known, but I'm known to rock microphone (this one is bugging me!)
34. Every time I see you falling, I get down on my knees and pray---Bizarre Love Triangle, New Order
35. We'll take your car, yes we will, we'll take your car and drive it---Angel in the Centerfold, J. Geils Band
36. I said to my reflection "Let's get out of this place"---
37. Easy ready willing overtime
38. The five years we have had have been such good times---
39. Didn't know how lost I was until I found you---
40. People of the world today are we looking for a better way of life
41. You in that dress my thoughts I confess verge on dirty
42. I'm about to lose control and I think I like it---I'm So Excited, The Pointer Sisters
43. Write it on a pound note, pound note---Goody Two Shoes, Adam Ant
44. We are strong, no one can tell us we're wrong---Love is a Battlefield, Pat Benatar
45. Out on the road today, I saw a deadhead sticker on a Cadillac---Boys of Summer, Don Henley
46. Caught up in the action I've been looking out for you
47. An invisible man sleeping in your bed
48. But somewhere sometime when you're curious, I'll be back around
49. I know her love is true but it's so damn easy makin' love to you---
50. Oh mother dear we're not the fortunate ones
51. And incidents arose from circumstance
52. You know I like my girls a little bit older
53. You always live your life never thinking of the future
54. Now we're sharing the same dreams, and our hearts can beat as one
55. She don't need a man's touch---The Glamorous Life, Shiela E.
56. She'll get a hold on you, believe it---
57. You're everywhere, but you're so hard to find
58. You want your percentage, but I'm the fool paying the dues
59. No April rain, no flowers' bloom, no wedding Saturday within the month of June
60. There's a skeleton chokin' on a crust of bread
61. With my body and soul I want you more than you'll ever know
62. I used to think maybe you loved me, now I know that it's true---Walking on Sunshine, Katrina and the Waves
63. Animals strike curious poses
64. Religion is a light in the fog
65. I don't know where I'm goin' but I sure know where I've been
66. If you want to find all the cops they're hanging out in the donut shop---Walk Like An Egyptian, Bangles
67. And there's a heart that's breaking down this long distance line tonight---Missing You, Tom Waits
68. I'm always workin', slavin', every day
69. Feel like I could run away, run away from this empty heart
70. Kick off your Sunday shoes---Footloose, Kenny Loggins
71. Daddy says she's too young, but she's old enough for me
72. He turned to me as if to say, "Hurry boy, it's waiting there for you"---
73. You're not naive, you must be strong
74. Darken the city night is a wire, steam in the subway earth is afire
75. She had the body of a venus, Lord imagine my surprise---
76. I can't help recalling how it felt to kiss and hold you tight
77. Will you meet him on the main line or will you catch him on the rebound?
78. Watching every motion in this foolish lover's game
79. You make the sun shine brighter than Doris Day
80. Loving would be easy if your colours were like my dream, red, gold and green---Karma Chameleon, Culture Club
81. They threw an American flag in our face
82. When I'm dancing close to her, I can smell the chemicals
83. She told me to come but I was already there---Shook Me All Night Long, AC/DC
84. Streetlight people, living just to find emotion
85. It belongs to them, let's give it back---Beds Are Burning, Midnight Oil (I think that's the name of this song???)
86. Everything you do is quite angelicate
87. Rolling like thunder under the covers
88. I don't know what you expect staring into the TV set
89. My eyes dilate, my lips go green
90. I touch you once, I touch you twice---If You Leave, Orchestral Maneuvers in the Dark (OMD)
91. To have you with me I would swim the seven seas---
92. Crazy little woman in a one man show
93. Went the distance, now I'm back on my feet
94. Got in a little hometown jam, so they put a rifle in my hand---Born in the USA, Springsteen
95. There is freedom within, there is freedom without---Don't Dream It's Over (It's one of those damn Finn Brothers)
96. But whatever road you choose, I'm right behind you win or lose
97. I need fifty dollars to make you holler
98. So let's sink another drink `cause it'll give me time to think---Dancing With Myself, Billy Idol
99. Goddess on the mountain top---Venus, Banarama
100. Couldn't see how much I missed you (now I do)--
101. They even bother my poor father `cause he's down with me
102. Where can I find a woman like that---Jesse's Girl, Rick Springfield
103. Paul, I think I told you I'm a lover not a fighter---Ebony and Ivory, Stevie Wonder and Paul McCartney
104. Mine's an ordinary life, working when it's daylight and sleeping when it's night
105. I had a whiskey on the rocks and change of a dollar for the jukebox (INSANE---it's driving me insane!)
106. Just don't ask me how I am
107. Your lights are on but you're not home
108. Take your passion and make it happen
109. That little faggot he's a millionaire---Money For Nothing, Dire Straits
110. I was wrong, now I find just one thing makes me forget
111. So if you're feeling low, turn up your radio
112. It's no better to be safe than sorry
113. Darlin' in my wildest dreams I never thought I'd go
114. The road is long, there are mountains in your way
115. The Salvation Army band played and the children drank lemonade---Life in a Northern Town
116. The more you live, the faster you will die
117. I've got a secret I've been hiding under my skin
118. I love you though you hurt me so
119. Wouldn't wanna be swept away, far away from the one that I love
120. The sheik he drove his Cadillac---Rock the Casbah, The Clash
121. She showed me the beach, gave me a peach, and pulled out the suntan lotion
122. Two silhouettes saying goodnight by the garden gate
123. Have some more chicken, have some more pie
124. I asked the doctor to take your picture so I could look at you from inside as well
125. Well it's all right riding around in the breeze
126. I'm just going to keep on counting until you are mine
127. Every time you call my name, I heat up like a burnin' flame
128. This is it boys, this is war
129. I can't understand what makes a man hate another man---People Are People, Depeche Mode
130. I can't
sleep at night, I toss and turn
131. I know you really want to tell me goodbye
132. Food is served and you're stone cold munchin'
133. Don't let go while I'm hangin' on, `cause I been hangin' on so
long
134. We can dance, everybody look at your hands---The Safety Dance, Men
Without Hats
135. know a place where we can dance the whole night away underneath
electric stars
136. I know a good thing must come to an end but it's hard to take
losing a friend
137. Well Superman looked up at me, he said "You rock so naturally"
138. You can say anything you like, but you can't touch the
merchandise---
139. You want a piece of my heart, you better start from the
start---Working For The Weekend, Loverboy
140. But when the wrong word goes in the right ear, I know you been
lyin' to me---One Thing Leads to Another, The Fixx
141. I follow where my mind goes
142. What's your definition of dirty, baby---I Want Your Sex, George
Michael
143. We'll leave the TV and the radio behind---
144. All you sittin' in high places, the rain's gonna fall on you
145. I turn the switch and check the number, I leave it on when in bed
I slumber
146. So when the night falls, my lonely heart calls---I Wanna Dance
With Somebody, Whitney "Crackhead" Houston
147. So you better go back to your bars, your temples, your massage
parlors
148. Did you really think about it before you made the rules---
149. So you think my singing's out of time, well it makes me money
150. Across the north and south to Key Largo, love for sale---Smooth
Operator, Sade
151. Bermuda, Bahama, come on pretty mama---Kokomo, The Beach Boys
152. I swear that I could see forever in your eyes---
153. Nothing had the chance to be good, nothing ever could---
154. Take my license and all that jive---I Can't Drive 55, Sammy Hagar
155. Well by the force of will my lungs are filled, and so I breathe---
156. Dreams stay with you like a lover's voice fires the
mountainside---
157. No huggin' no kissin' til I get a wedding ring---Keep Your Hands
To Yourself, Mojo Nixon
158. I don't worry `cause my wallet's fat---
159. Sister's sighing in her sleep
160. Better make it fast or else I'm gonna get pissed
161. Wish I knew what you were looking for
162. What's your price for flight---Sister Christian, Night Ranger
163. I know a guy who's tough but sweet---I Want Candy, Bow-Wow-Wow
164. And I had a feeling I could be someone, be someone, be someone---
165. Why do I find it so hard to write the next line, oh I want the
truth to be said----True, Spandau Ballet
166. Every time he pulls me near, I just wanna cheer---
167. Put the needle on the record---
168. Whoa no, I've got to keep on moving---
169. Once upon a time there was light in my life, but now there's only
love in the dark---Total Eclipse of the Heart, Bonnie Tyler
170. I stain my sheets, I don't even know why---Blister in the Sun,
Violent Femmes
171. There were incidents and accidents, there were hints and
allegations---You Can Call Me Al, Paul Simon
172. I can't get any rest, people say I'm obsessed
173. She dances like she's never danced before--Maniac
174. Do your fancy dances
175. Your moves are so raw, I've got to let you know you're one of my
kind---I Need You Tonight, INXS
176. Get up, get up, get up, get up, let's make love tonight
177. But when I win your heart, I'm gonna paint it cherry red---Cherry
Red, Foreigner
178. All the doors I closed on time will open up again
179. Dream of better lives, the kind which never hate
180. You can feel the punishment but you can't commit the sin---No One
Is To Blame, Howard Jones
181. I'm not the one to tell you what's wrong or what's right
182. He wants me, but only part of the time---Voices Carry, Til Tuesday
183. People don't you know, don't you know it's about time
184. You were the first, you'll be the last---(SHIT!)
185. You think you're mad, too unstable, kicking in chairs and knocking
down tables---West End Girls, Pet Shop Boys
186. Your heart's been achin' but you're too shy to say it
187. The only one who'll hang out with me is my dear Old Granddad
188. Things are going great, and they're only getting better---The
Future's So Bright, I Gotta Wear Shades, Timbuk 3
189. So you better treat her right
190. It's time to bring this ship in to the shore and throw away the
oars forever
191. We are the ones who make a brighter day, so let's start giving---I
KNOW this one. It's eluding me.
192. We could dance and party all night, and drink some cherry wine
193. Dressed up like a million-dollar trooper
194. You've got to find a way, say what you want to say
195. Sail away with me to another world
196. I'll be your friend, I'll help you carry on---Lean on Me, have no
idea of the group who did this remake though.
197. Welcome to the big time, you're bound to be a star
198. Yo no soy marinero, por ti sere, por ti sere, por ti sere---This
is driving me insane! It's either Gloria Estefan or Madonna. I think
it's Madonna, but for the life of me, I can't remember the name of the
song!
199. Work all day to earn his pay, so we can play all night
200. Ever since you've been leaving me, I've been wanting to cry
201. Baby baby when I look at you, I get a warm feeling inside
202. And when we hear the voices sing, the book of love will open up
and let us in
203. Some of them want to abuse you, some of them want to be
abused---Sweet Dreams, Eurythmics
204. He's licking his lips, he's ready to win, on the hunt tonight for
love at first sting
205. I have a picture pinned to my wall
206. I can see a new horizon underneath the blazin' sky
207. You'll flow down her river, she'll ask and you'll give her
208. Earth below us drifting falling floating weightless
209. Ooh baby, do you know what that's worth?
210. I know when to pull you closer and I know when to let you loose
211. Let me hear your body talk---Physical, Olivia Newton-John
212. Won't you pack your bags, we'll leave tonight---You Can Sleep
While I Drive??? But I don't think so.
213. The beating of our hearts is the only sound
214. And if this world runs out of lovers, we'll still have each
other--- Nothing's Gonna Stop Us,Jefferson Starship
215. Is it so wrong to be human after all?
216. There is good and bad (mmmm-hmmm) in everyone
217. Who needs a heart when a heart can be broken?---What's Love Got To
Do With It? Tina Turner
218. It's gonna take money, a whole lotta spendin' money---
219. I'm not the kind of girl who gives up just like that
220. It must've been some kind of kiss, I shoulda walked away
221. You see it all around you, good lovin' gone bad---CRAP!
222. Ronny, Bobby, Ricky and Mike, if I like a girl, who cares who you
like---New Edition fer sure, but which song. My brain hurts. Email me
if you can come up with the rest. --- So, that appeasement vote worked out real well for you Spainards, eh?

--- Have a good weekend. I'm outta here.

--- Bless Mr. H. Yesterday,

--- Bless Mr. H. Yesterday, at our weekly tete-a-tete, I was related to
him the depths of my depression due to a lack of Silly Germans. Being
the good friend that he is, he sympathized. He agreed that he was
depressed at this as well. He resolved to help me with this problem and
as he's a reliable sort, he kept his word and came up with this for me.

Which, of course, leads to this excruciatingly poor bit of sarcasm: Tomatoes really do attack. And they're killer!

I can die happy now.

--- Uh-oh. Earlier Wednesday, news

--- Uh-oh.

Earlier Wednesday, news agencies quoted Prime Minister Leszek Miller
as saying Poland "cannot turn a blind eye" to the Spanish pullout that
his government was discussing the issue with officials in Washington.

Brought to you courtesy of that idiot Zapatero.

--- Damn. The secret's out.

--- Damn. The secret's out.
I cannot tell you how many people, every spring, would ask me for
espresso grinds for their gardens when I worked at for Caribou. I was
happy to give them away. After all, they were just going to go in the
garbage. If someone wanted the damn things, well, that was their
perogative. It was a messy business at first, because we hadn't quite
figured out how to line the bash box (the box where the barista smacks
out the dead grinds from the espresso machine brewheads) with a garbage
bag. But once we figured it out---whammo---everyone and their brother
wanted some grinds for their gardens. Reportedly there was some rumor
spreading about how much quicker a garden started growing once you used
the grinds. Which, here in Minnesota where the growing season is maybe
four months long if you're lucky, led to a rush on grinds every May.
While this is a cool thing overall, the baristas and the management
have my sympathy. Do the higher-ups at Charbucks have any idea how much
extra work this is going to mean for the people behind the bar? Idiots.
What an effing mess. Add it up. Every store will need another trash can
for the grinds. This, of course, is on top of the one for the regular
trash and the recycling. Then, of course, someone will have to actually
"do" something with the grinds. Can't just take the grinds out to the
trash. Nope. They've got to be picked up, the manager will have to set
that up and deal with the vagaries involved with one more person
picking something up from a store where there are already loads of
deliveries and pickups. The grinds probably have to go into a special
garbage bag, as well, because they're wet, and heavy and a regular 50
gallon bag full of grinds would break under the stress. I could go on,
but I think you get the gist.
If I were a manager still, I'd be pissed off at this one.

Ok, so you might have

Ok, so you might have noticed that I finally found some freebie software for comments.

Let me revise that: I finally got around to looking
for some freebie software for comments. I haven't been aflame with the
righteous zealotry of a blogger who lives for riveting discussions in
their comments sections. I'm lazy. Shoot me. Anyway, let me just
outline the Comments Policy quickly so you can get back to surfing
porn. 1. Abusive comments will be deleted---just as soon as I figure
out how to do that. What qualifies as abusive? Well, if you tell
another commenter (or me) that they should go and do certain things
with a donkey, your post will be deleted. It's really quite simple. See
#2 for guidelines on how not to have your comments deleted.
2. My mother reads my blog and the woman has no shortage of opinions,
so you might be hearing from her. Like mother, like daughter. However,
since my
mom is reading this thing, and knowing that she believes in the "it's
takes a village" concept, know that she will smack you down if you get
out of line. And I'll let her. She's my mother---she owns me. I have no
choice in this regard. So, it would seem that the best rule of thumb
for commenting here would be---ahem---if you wouldn't want your mother reading what you wrote, don't post it for my mom to read.

Clear enough? Post away.

--- Kinda hard to conduct

--- Kinda hard to conduct a case in the court of public opinion when you're under a gag order, eh Geragos?

Mark wants to get back to warming up the seats on Larry King's set.

--- Oh, no. In principle,

--- Oh, no.
In principle, I have a tendency to applaud remakes of films that sucked
the first time around. You would think that they could only go up,
right? Exhibit A--- Oceans' Eleven.
They couldn't freaking go anywhere but up on that one because the
original was awful. So, in principal, remakes of bad movies are a good thing.

Except when you have a movie like Back to School.
There was nothing worth redeeming in that piece o' excrement that would
make it worthy of a remake, let alone a vehicle for Cedric The
Entertainer. Because Cedric's actually quite funny, whereas Rodney
Dangerfield was only rarely funny. In small does. Cedric, do me a
favor, babe. Come up with your own scripts, please. You're better than
this.

--- Very funny. Apparently the

--- Very funny.

Apparently the Peeps put on a protest outside of the White House on Easter Sunday. Michele has the scoop---as usual.

--- Mr. H. has promised
to finally send me his submission about the ongoing bus drivers strike
here in the Twin Cities. I do believe I offered him the opportunity to
vent over a month ago, but he's been a wee bit busy at work and he
doesn't have a computer at home (poor man!), so I've waited patiently
and he finally promised to send it to me today. Still hasn't sent it
yet. He says he'll send it if, when he rereads it, it's up to snuff.
That is BS. Bubba needs to send it to me.
Am tempted to publish his email address here to get some of my loyal
audience to harrass him. But I won't because I'm a nice person and I
don't want his inbox to be inundated with penis enhancement spams. ---
Had a very nice easter over in Eagan at the sister and brother in law's
house. The kiddies were in happy form---very few tears shed and only a
few elbows were placed directly into the food on their plates. Life was
pretty sweet in that respect. I've mentioned before that, where the
husband's sister is concerned, religion is the proverbial loaded gun
sitting on the table, threatening everyone with its potential for
causing discontent. We try not to chat about religion. We really do.
I'm Catholic. The husband is agnostic, in the truest definition of that
word, and is not a big fan of organized religion. And the brother and
sister in law are Missouri Snyod Lutheran. There's not a whole lot of
common ground available for us to trod upon. But as much as we try to
stay away from talking about the loaded gun that's sitting on the
table, one of us invariably picks the damn thing up and starts waving
it around simply because they can't help themselves. (Talk about some
mixed metaphors! However, it works, so I'm leaving them!)
Now, the sister in law, bless her, is very religious. At the urging of
her husband, she has centered her family's life around their church and
what that church preaches. This is completely fine with me. But
what bothers me is that in this effort to be more Godly, she has, in
essence, used her religion as a shield to protect herself and her
family from ideas that she doesn't like. She homeschools the kids for
two reasons. One, she wants her kids to have a parochial education and
their church doesn't have a school. Two, she doesn't like the NEA's
liberal agenda, so she circumvents that agenda by homeschooling and in
the process eliminates the need to teach her children critical thinking
skills. But this effort to avoid ideas that she doesn't like isn't
present only in how she educates her children. It's present in
everything they do. She listens to the Christian radio station here in
town and loves it. They have speakers about how creationism is right
simply because evolutionism is a theory and has never been
proven---beyond a reasonable doubt---to be correct. She supported Judge
Moore last summer in his effort to keep his Ten Commandments monument.
She believes homosexuality to be wrong because it's in the bible as
being one of those forbidden activities (surprisingly, though, she
doesn't support the FMA for all the right reasons). I could go on but I
think you get the picture. She has a lot of religious books on her
shelf. And a lot of those books are put out by the Focus on the Family.
Well, yesterday, we were doing pretty good on avoiding religion
altogether. Of course, it was a religious holiday, so there were the
inevitable questions about Mass and services and the like. But we got
through it pleasantly enough and that was fine. What blew me away,
however, was when the sister in law called the inlaws down in Phoenix,
to extend the Easter greetings. She wanted to know if her Dad had
watched the CD-Rom's about "The DaVinci Code," that she'd sent them. I
was sitting right next to her and after she'd passed the phone over to
the husband, I asked her what the deal with the book was.
Apparently, she's concerned that her father was raving about that book.
She was concerned about this interest because her pastor---"a history
buff" as the sister in law described him---was concerned that people
would think the history in this work of fiction to be fact. The pastor
apparently held a few sessions at their church about this and put the
lectures on CD-Rom. Apparently, the sister in law was concerned and
sent the CD's to her father. Now, if she wants to rant and rave about a
book, that's fine with me, but what bothers me is that she hasn't even read The DaVinci Code.
Nor does she want to, from what I gather, because it has all sorts of
historical fallacies in it---or so her pastor says. The husband and I
were just dumbfounded by this one. She's suggested some pretty off the
wall junk over the years, but this one? To be concerned about what a
book---a work of fiction, mind you---presents simply because your
pastor said it had some historical inaccuracies in it? Nevermind that
the pastor is only a "history buff"--- but his word about the
truthfulness contained in this book is good enough testimony about the
worthwhileness of this book in the sister in law's mind. What the hell
is wrong with this picture?
I don't mean to rag on the sister in law. She's a nice person. She
really is. And I don't want to make it seem like I'm ragging on her
beliefs, either, but good grief, how can I help myself on this one? She
had never even read the thing and yet she's concerned about the
historical facts presented therein. What the hell? She actually asked
me what the plot was about. I told her it essentially turned the search
for the Holy Grail upon its ear and that the Holy Grail---in Dan
Brown's novel---was not what we typically thought of it as being. And
then there are clues and the characters follow those clues to get to
the resolution of the matter. "It's a good book," I said, but she
looked unconvinced. Then we chatted about "Angels and Demons," the
predecessor to "The DaVinci Code," and you could tell, simply by the
horrified look on her face when I told her the title of the book, that
it wasn't something she was ever going to read just because the title
turned her off. I tried to explain that Brown writes conspiracy novels.
That "Angels and Demons'" plot revolved about the Illuminati, a sort of
Masonic like sect.
The conversation then went like this:
SIL: "Oh, I heard that Masonry is rooted in satanic worship." {I do a
mental slap to the forehead at this point for using the Masons as a
point of reference. I should have known better.}
Me: "What? Who'd you hear that from?"
BIL: "She heard that from a pastor."
Me: "Huh? No, that's not right. The Masons were a secret society, yes,
but they have nothing to do with worshipping Satan. They were a
brotherhood that was formed to push society further---they weren't
allowed to chat about religion or politics. In essence, they were sort
of like a fraternity. A networking thing to help the members get
further in life. No one really knows what they're all about, but plenty
of rumors have circulated over the years, but I try and take the middle
of the road aspect about the rumors simply because we don't know one
way or another. I doubt they were satan worshippers, but I also doubt
that they were strictly all about pushing society further, either."
SIL: remains silent, but gives me an unconvinced look and then turns
away because one of the kids needed her.
The husband then got in on the act and the more we dismissed the sister
in law's position on the matter, the quieter the brother in law got and
the more entrenched she became in her opinion that this book was
historically inaccurate. Now, she never went over the line and said no
one should read it, but it was apparently fine with her that because
her pastor had said it wasn't a truthful book, well, she wasn't going
to bother reading it.
We left shortly thereafter and the minute we got home, the husband went
and found "The DaVinci Code" on the shelf and pulled it. He's going to
take it over to her and demand that she read it before she says another
thing to another person about it. He's her big brother---he apparently
can get away with that sort of behavior whereas I cannot. And that's
just fine with me. I would like her to read some fiction. All she has
on her bookshelves are self-help books and books about the Bible. I
just have to wonder though, why is she so afraid about books like this?
I don't want to knock her, but if she's really as strong in her faith
as she portrays herself to be, what's the harm in them? Why take an
activist stance against something you know nothing about simply because
you've heard certain things about its inaccuracies from someone who
isn't a trained history professor? It makes no sense to me. I want my
world to be bigger. I want to understand what this world and the people
who inhabit it are all about. The sister in law, however, wants the
world to be smaller. Yet, she wants a say in how the world is run. How
is it possible to understand the world and the people in it if you're
going to close yourself off from ideas that differ from yours if you
never look at those ideas in the first place?

Random thought for the day:

Random thought for the day: is sexual frustration part of the motivation of a suicide bomber?

They are promised 72 virgins after all and we all know Muslim girls don't put out much. There's no reason for them to.

Hmmm.

Solution to this problem: spank the monkey, my young headband wearing friends. The life you save could be your own.

Literally.

--- Pish Posh. NEW YORK

--- Pish Posh.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Franciscan friars in New York loved Mel
Gibson's hit movie "The Passion of The Christ," so much
they are petitioning him to follow-up with a film biography of the
order's founder, Saint Francis of Assisi.
More than 40,000 hits have been registered on the Franciscan Friars of
the Renewal's "open letter and respectful
petition" addressed to Gibson, and more than 8,000 readers have filled
out the online petition at www.franciscanfriars.com.
Father Glenn Sudano, head of the community of 82 friars in the New York
metropolitan area, had the petition posted after seeing "The Passion,"
believing it would be a natural sequel and high time for a realistic
portrayal of Saint Francis.
"They dip these people in plaster," Father Glenn said about perceptions
of the saints. "They are much more powerful, more
interesting, more engaging, much more human."

Come on. Yes, St. Francis did the wine, women and song bit rather well, but if "complete conversion" is what you're looking for look no further than this guy.
He had a girlfriend, a wife, a son born out of wedlock, was a mama's
boy---then he joined a cult before struggling with his faith, the
politicking of said faith, and becoming a leader in the Church. DRAMA
GALORE! And an interesting story about faith, too. St. Francis, God
bless him, always seemed a little "too good" to me. He never had doubts
about his faith. He never seemed to wonder if he was taking the right
path. Augustine, however, was human---and that's what I like about him.
Besides, if you're going to make a movie about Augustine, you have to
have some sex. After all, this was the man who said, "Give me chastity,
but do not give it yet." You don't get a whole lot of that with St.
Francis. His womanizing was strictly for pleasure. Augustine seemed to
have a deep respect for all things female. Make a movie about him and
you'll---gasp---actually get to have women characters in a Bible movie
who aren't one dimensional, solely supportive creatures. Augustine. Not
Francis. PLEASE.

--- You need to read

--- You need to read this.

It is a tribute to the new American-installed democracy in Iraq that
an Iraqi newspaper has been in the forefront of exposing the racket and
naming the 270 international power brokers who seem to have had their
hands in the till. Here's how the scam allegedly worked: Saddam sold
oil to his friends and allies around the world at deep discounts. The
buyers resold the oil at huge profits. Saddam then got kickbacks of 10
percent from both the oil traders and the suppliers of humanitarian
goods. Iraqi bean counters, fortunately, kept meticulous records.
Coincidence. If you wondered why the French were so hostile to
America's approach to Iraq and even opposed to ending the sanctions
after the 1991 Gulf War, here's one possible explanation: French oil
traders got 165 million barrels of Iraqi crude at cut-rate prices. The
CEO of one French company, SOCO International, got vouchers for 36
million barrels of Iraqi oil. Was it just a coincidence that the man is
a close political and financial supporter of President Jacques Chirac?
Or that a former minister of the interior, Charles Pasqua, allegedly
received 12 million barrels from Baghdad? Or that a former French
ambassador to the U.N., Jean-Bernard Merimee, received an allocation of
11 million barrels? Perhaps it was just happenstance, too, that a
French bank with close ties to then French President François
Mitterrand and one of the bank's big shareholders who is close to
Saddam became the main conduit for the bulk of the $67 billion in
proceeds from the oil-for-food program. All told, 42 French companies
and individuals got a piece of this lucrative trade. No matter how
cynical you may be, it's sometimes just plain hard to keep up with the
French.
But they're not alone. Russians received more than 2.5 billion barrels
of the cut-rate crude. Some 1.4 billion barrels went to the Russian
state. Not to be left out of the feeding frenzy, even the U.N. got in
on the action. It received administrative fees of about $2 billion for
the program, which may be fair, but the senior U.N. official in charge
of the program, Benon Sevan, is reported to have received 11.5 million
barrels himself. Cotecna, a Swiss-based firm hired by the U.N. to
monitor the import of the food and medicine to Iraq, hired Kojo Annan,
the son of U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, as a consultant during
the period when the company was assembling and submitting bids for the
oil-for-food program. All of these coincidences were reported by
Claudia Rosett in the National Review. None, surprisingly, were
disclosed by the U.N., Cotecna, or the senior or junior Annan. The
imposition of so-called smart sanctions on Iraq, several years after
the end of the 1991 Gulf War, allowed Saddam to purchase items besides
food and medicine. But some of the things approved by Kofi Annan seem
pretty far afield. There was the $20 million he authorized for an
Olympic sports city for Uday Hussein, Saddam's reprehensible (and now
deceased) oldest son. And then there was the $50 million for TV and
radio equipment for Saddam's ham-handed propaganda machine. This is
food? Gives new meaning to Kofi Annan's statement, in 1998, that Saddam
was a man "I can do business with." And how.

And yet, somehow, the UN is the organization that is the best qualified to take over running the show in Iraq.

How, precisely, would this be a good idea?

--- It's not often you

--- It's not often you hear someone in the government talking about long drops from very short ropes.

The blunt remarks by Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage to a
House subcommittee were the strongest comments the Bush administration
has made since accusations surfaced in January that Saddam Hussein
ripped off $10 billion from the program. But questioned by Rep. Jerry
Lewis (R-Calif.) about the United Nations' role in the scandal - and
whether the State Department did enough to stop the wholesale graft
from taking place - the tough-talking Armitage said the department is
taking the allegations seriously. He noted that the department has
taken what he called the "extraordinary" step of turning over sensitive
documents to investigators on the matter, "because we want to get to
the bottom of it as much as you do." "And if someone is found guilty they ought to hang," Armitage said.

{emphasis mine...all mine}

I can hear the soundbite on CNN already, can't you?

A prominent Bush Administration official threatened the use of the
death penalty on UN officials during a Congressional Hearing on
Thursday. Citing concerns over human rights,
the UN filed a diplomatic protest with the State Department and
released a strongly worded statement condeming Armitage's lack of
concern over the millions of people worldwide who unjustly face the
death penalty every year with little to no recourse. {cut to Kofi Annan
press conference}
"...Mr. Armitage is someone for whom we have a great deal of respect.
His words, however, are not very nice and we insist that he take them
back. Or we'll triple dog dare him to lick a metal pole in January. In
Canada. The Canadian Mission to the United Nations has agreed to find
the best locale for said licking and we strongly recommend that Mr.
Armitage take up this challenge on behalf of the millions of unjustly
accused individuals who face the death penalty every
year---particularly in his home country..."
{cut back to bubbleheadedbleachblondewhocomesonatfive}
"No word from the State Department as to whether or not Mr. Armitage
will indeed take his words back or
if he will respond to the triple dog dare. To further assess the
seriousness of the dreaded triple dog dare, we have renowned expert,
Billy Jackson, a seventh grader from St. Margaret Mary Grade School in
Omaha, Nebraska, on the line...Billy, can you hear me? "Uh, yes ma'am."
"Good, what exactly is a triple dog dare and what does it mean for Mr.
Armitage in practical terms?"

I think you get the gist.

--- Man, my sides hurt

--- Man, my sides hurt after reading this.

The U.N. Security Council voted unanimously Wednesday for a
U.S.-drafted resolution aimed at
keeping terrorists and black marketeers from obtaining nuclear,
chemical and biological weapons.
The measure would obligate all 191 U.N. member nations to punish
"non-state actors" dealing in components and technology for weapons of
mass destruction.

Oh, the hilarity.

--- On Saturday night I

--- On Saturday night I started a longish post about why Sullivan's gas tax proposal was
ridiculous. But, upon reading it when I was less inflamed, I realized
the piece was full o' outraged wind, hence I didn't post it and wound
up deleting it last night. And it's a good thing I did, too. Because,
as usual, Lileks got it down much better than I could have.

I'm thinking I should just leave the hard work to him from now on.

--- Oooh. Another stunning victory

--- Oooh. Another stunning victory for Kofi Annan!
Presented without commentary because I don't feel like blowing one of
my few remaining gaskets on this.

--- I should be cleaning

--- I should be cleaning right now, but I'm procrastinating. The mother
in law is arriving tomorrow for a visit. The father in law, once again,
can not make the trip due to work obligations. She's not staying with
us, because we have no place for her to sleep, but she'll make an
appearance over here once during the next week. Hence, the house will
need to sparkle. As you might imagine, this isn't doing anything to
elevate my mood.
I need to go and make my toilet sparkle so my mother in law keeps using
my bathroom, but I can't seem to motivate myself. Sigh.

--- And you didn't curse

--- And you didn't curse God for not striking you blind afterwards?

--- Just in case you

--- Just in case you read Lileks today and wondered what "micturation" meant, as in...

Of course, this hotel was vacant, and had been vacant for quite
some time. I used to walk past the front door once a week; the aroma of
micturation would burn the bristles off a boar.

Of course the next sentence gives you a clue, Then it stopped smelling, because everyone who lived there was kicked out, and they stopped peeing in the lobby.
but you don't know if that's what that means or if it means something
much, much worse. I went to the dictionary because I'm curious like
that.
Here's you're answer, courtesy of the Random House Dictionary of the English Language, 2nd. Ed. Unabridged:

micturition n. the act of passing urine; urination. {1715-25;
(L) micturi(re) to desire to urinate (see micturate and -tion)}
Lileks mispelled it, but---honestly---who cares about that? He went out
of his way to find a suitable euphemism for "taking a piss" and for
that I adore him. Well done. *Interesting bit of trivia for language
buffs: "micturate" is the only word in this behemoth of a dictionary
(which is currently sitting in my lap and is cutting off my
circulation) with "mict" as its prefix. So, it's not only obscure, but
linguistically unique as well.

--- Courtesy of the husband*

--- Courtesy of the husband*
Happiness and a spare.

Personally I much prefer "Prisoners of the Playtex Penitentiary."

Although, when they refer to Playtex, the first thought through my mind was not Playtex bras.

It was this.
*Just for the record. The husband claims he is more of a leg man than a
breast man. While he appreciates a fine set of mammary glands, he
always looks at the ankles first---or so he says. Sha. Whatever.

--- Ok, the new and

--- Ok, the new and improved A Small Victory is
up and running. While I will mourn the loss of Michele's political
commentary, I still like the fact she's turned it into a pop culture
blog. Last night she asked for homework.

More than happy to oblige, I posted this:

Shiny, happy songs that make you want to stick a fork in your
eardrum, eh?
Ok.
1. Anything from "Mary Poppins," particularly that damn spoonful of
sugar song
2. "My Heart Will Go On," Celine "I make myself vomit regularly and not
because I'm bulimic" Dion
3. "I Just Called To Say I Love You," Stevie Wonder. Stevie, what the
hell happened to you?
4. Anything by Elton John after he came out of the closet. Particularly
that "Candle in the Wind," piece o' crap.
5. "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun." Cyndi Lauper. 6. For the obligatory
"songs that mention jumping suck" category, we have "Jump," by Van
Halen and "Jump!" by The Pointer Sisters
7. Anything by Michael Jackson. EVER. And that includes the Jackson
Five, but specifically "The Man in the Mirror."
I think that's enough for now.
Happy to have vented, I shut down and went out to the living room to
eat the English chocolate that arrived with the postcard and watch TV.
This morning, wanting to see what everyone else had come up with, I
started scrolling through the comments and was surprised to see this
posted by Geezer---whoever the hell that may be.
Kathy: you obviously need a long, long vacation, somewhere completely out of sight and sound of any recording device...

So much pain... so much pain.

No shit, Sherlock. Talk about stating the obvious.

I'm not going to touch the Mets thing with a ten foot pole. Mike Piazza is going to heal my pain? I think not.

--- Lileks is en fuego.

--- Lileks is en fuego.

How will he bring our allies back to us? By waving the magic
ally-reassembling wand? No: by doing what they want us to do, not by
doing the things they don’t. It’s almost as if Kerry believes that
the point of a war is to have allies first and victory second. But I
think I know what he’s doing. It’s an appeal to those who always
say – always - that we “squandered” the goodwill of the world
after 9/11. But in certain quarters that “goodwill” was equal parts
pity, schadenfreude and the belief that we would now realize the errors
of our ways. And note how no one ever talks about how the Palestinian
Authority squandered the goodwill it got from the Oslo Accords. The
Squander, it would seem, is a bird unique to our nation, and we alone
are responsible for its care and feeding.

I want to write like Lileks when I grow up.

--- Nicholas Kristof is worried about genocide in Sudan, and the west's overall inability to stop genocide anywhere in Africa when it happens.

One lesson of the last dozen years is that instead of being purely
reactive, helpfully bulldozing mass graves after massacres, African and
Western leaders should try much harder to stop civil wars as they
start. The world is now facing a critical test of that principle in the
Darfur region of Sudan, where Arab militias are killing and driving out
darker-skinned African tribespeople. While the world now marks the 10th
anniversary of the Rwandan genocide and solemnly asserts that this must
never happen again, it is.
Some 1,000 people are dying each week in Sudan, and 110,000 refugees,
like Mr. Yodi, have poured into Chad. Worse off are the 600,000
refugees within Sudan, who face hunger and disease after being driven
away from their villages by the Arab militias.
Now, I can't really disagree with that statement, because it's the
humane thing to do, but since he's the one who brought up Sudan as his
prima facie evidence for more African intervention on the part of the
International Community, I'm going to have to go after him. Kristof
conveniently ignores what's been going on in Sudan for twenty
years---that the northern---Muslim---government has been trying to kill
off all the southerners. There's a civil war already
going on in Sudan. Not like you'd know about it because media coverage
is decidedly poor when it comes covering that continent: as far as the
media is concerned, well, Africa still should be titled "The Dark
Continent," because there sure as hell aren't any TV lights
illuminating the place. Easily half the continent's countries are
engaged in some sort of armed conflict right now. But does CNN cover
it? Nope. Martha Steward and Michael Jackson are much more important. I
digress. They're still fighting in Southern Sudan.
Despite a cease fire and a power sharing agreement between the northern
and southern factions. But Kristof declares the west should get more
involved---the United States in particular--- despite the fact we got
the two parties to the negotiating table after 9/11. In fact, President
Bush announced he was sending forth John Danforth to do something about
the problem in Sudan on 9/10.
Remember that? I'm sure you probably don't, but it's one of the most
tangible pieces of evidence that the Bush administration was doing
something about terrorism---and the countries that harbor said
terrorists---before 9/11. Sudan was the former home of such terrorist
luminaries as Illyich Ramirez Sanchez---aka Carlos the Jackal---and
Osama bin Laden. Carlos was caught and thrown into a French jail; Osama
fled when the Taliban took control in Afghanistan and offered him a
happy cave-dwelling existence in their country. Why the sudden change
of heart? Sudan had their hand slapped when Clinton sent thirteen
Tomahawk Cruise missiles carreering into a Khartoum aspirin factory.
This apparently was enough of a wakeup call for the Sudanese, who
promptly started ejecting terrorists from their borders. For once, it
seems, someone took the message correctly. The civil war in Sudan is
such a shame, because I truly believe if there was ever a country in
Africa that could not only survive, but thrive, it's this country. The
natural resources held within its borders are amazing. More oil than in
Saudi Arabia, scientists have estimated. But therein lies the problem:
the oil's down south, and the southerners don't like the northerners
very much and don't want them to have it. Not that I can blame them:
they tried to institute Shari'a on people who don't believe in Islam.
That's bound to rankle. The north, for the most part, is desert. What
arable land there once was in northern Sudan is being swallowed up by a
Sahara that seems to be marching at quick time. They need those
resources, so the prevailing theory that has ruled since Sudan became
independent of Great Britain back in the 1950's was to overwhelm the
rural southerners by means of war and to beat them into submission. And
maybe, just maybe they could convert a few to the ways of Muhammed in
the meanwhile. Despite the factions taking a few years off here and
there, you could argue that the civil war has been raging for almost
fifty years. The Bush Administration's involvement in Sudan has two
origins. First---stopping the north from harboring terrorists. They
followed the very rational assessment that if they worked to stop the
civil war, Sudan would become a stable regime. Second, there are more
than a few Christians in southern Sudan. Fundamentalist
Christians. The born-agains and their ilk have been busy converting
through the carrot and stick of humanitaritian aid for quite some time.
They wanted something done about the problem of slavery. Yep. You read
that right. Slavery. The capture of another human being and exploiting
them for free labor. This happens all the time in Sudan. Whether the
slaves be southern refugees who have fled to the relative safety of
Khartoum and are taken advantage of there, or if they were forcibly
removed from their homes and taken north makes no real distinguishable
difference in the matter: they're forced into slave labor. These
Christians were aligned with groups like Amnesty International (strange
bedfellows, eh?) to stop their brethren in southern Sudan from being
taken advantage of---and they lobbied for intervention on human rights
grounds. It's a non-starter to say which reasoning was stronger, but
either way it forced the two parties to get their collective asses to
the negotiating table to try and work it out. And all of it is due to
western intervention. So, for two years the northern government and the
SPLA---the Sudanese People's Liberation Army---have hashed their
differences out in Nairobi. They came to a power sharing agreement,
which went something like the south would have automomous rule over its
territories for six years, and then they could have a referendum if
they wanted to secede from the north. A cease fire was negotiated as
well, but, as you can see from the article above, it hasn't been really
successful in its implementation. People are still being forced into
slavery; people are still being killed. Where's the difference between
two years ago and now? There isn't much of one, unfortunately. But
Kristof wants to know when they'll stop the genocide being committed in
Darfur, which is in government held territory in western central Sudan.
Arab militias are killing black skinned people and are forcing them to
flee for the relative safe haven of Chad. It's genocide. Something
needs to be done. Admittedly, Kristof doesn't throw the blame at the
former colonial rulers for creating the situation in the first place
but he stops a hairsbreadth before reaching that conclusion. He speaks
of the International Community's hand-sitting experience in Rwanda, yet
he expects intervention when the parties involved aren't willing to do
anything other than allow for the slaughter their people. This is not a case when we can claim, as the world did after the
Armenian, Jewish and Cambodian genocides, that we didn't know how bad
it was. Sudan's refugees tell of mass killings and rapes, of women
branded, of children killed, of villages burned — yet Sudan's
government just stiffed new peace talks that began last night in Chad.
It's horrible, isn't it? People are being murdered left and right and
all we can do is sit on our hands and hope it works out. Every instinct
we have as human beings declares that this should be stopped. That it should never happen again.
But how can we do this? Do we send in peacekeepers? A military force
strong enough that it will stop the hostilities---until they pull out,
that is, and the flames are lit anew? This is the pattern. Look at
Kosovo, for example. Just a few weeks ago, three Armenian children
drowned, the locals blamed it on the minority Serb population and
rioting ensued. This was with peacekeepers present, mind you.
It happens over and over again. All over the world. It's sad to note
that this seems to be one of the uniting factors of the human race.
Hatred is as old as the Earth. People will hate. It's a part of human
nature. It seems illogical to me that we---here in the west---should
try to dampen that hate with our soft words and diplomatic actions and
think that this will do the trick. That we'll be able to stop Hutus and
Tustsis from despising one another simply because it suits our world
plans better than outright slaughter. It's arrogant---in the extreme.
Hate is illogical in itself, but that we would try to dampen the hate
with our highly educated views is even more illogical. I have no idea
what the average Muslim, Khartoum resident believes. Nor do I have any
idea as to what the average southern Sudanese goes through, either. I
can't get to that space they occupy with their thought processes
because I
haven't lived through what they've lived through. I haven't had
propaganda spouted at me about the source of their plight. I don't have
the common experience necessary to stop the violence. I am from the
West. I am from North America, not Africa. Why should some jerkoff at
the UN or the EU think that they've got the answers, either? I don't
know what to do about the problem in Sudan, but I simply cannot think
that more intervention in a place where they already despise intervention
would stop the violence. It's cruel and it slays me to say it---because
we all know how fond I am of international organizations---but perhaps
the international community has the right idea here when they stay out
of it.

--- Man, this is cold.

--- Man, this is cold.

CHICAGO (AP) - McDonald's Corp. chairman and CEO Jim Cantalupo, who
helped engineer a turnaround of the fast-food chain by focusing on
better food and service during 16 months at the helm, died unexpectedly
of a heart attack Monday. He was 60.
The company moved quickly to name Cantalupo's successors. Charlie Bell,
McDonald's 43-year-old president and chief operating officer, was
elected CEO by the board of directors and will keep the president's
title; Andrew J. McKenna, 74, the board's presiding director, was named
chairman.

Could they have waited until the man's body went into the ground before announcing a successor?

Brrrr.

--- Fair warning. I'm liable

--- Fair warning.
I'm liable to be cranky today. Under the premise that I've been smoking
much too much lately, the husband has hidden my stash of smokes. He
threw this edict down around eleven a.m. yesterday. I've already gone
24 hours on one pack---which is much better than my average, but...
...I have one cigarette to last me until seven p.m. CDT. Which is five
and a half hours from now. I would ask that you go to your local
church/synagogue/buddhist temple and pray that the husband survives
until he can hand over the next pack at seven this evening---CDT. I've
got a can opener handy. A can of bitchcraft is sitting on the desk,
just waiting to be opened. Will I take the opener and do the deal?

Well, you'll just have to wait and find out, eh?

--- I can take it

--- I can take it no longer. The apartment is a pit. It must be cleaned
and I'm just the girl to do it. Well, I'm the only girl to do it unless
the husband decides to go either LDS or Muslim and I suddenly have
three other Mrs. Nelsons to contend with.
{insert much pondering here}
Ah, anyway...
Since I'm going to be busy scrubbing the toity and other various
disgustingly dirty household appliances for the rest o' the day, here's
some linkies to keep you all entertained.
--- The husband sent me this link this weekend. I haven't read it but he says it's brilliant, so go and give it a looksee.

--- This doesn't bode well for the Athens Olympics.

--- The versatile 'F' word
Takes a while to load, but it's worth it.
Whilst cleaning, I will be compiling a list of movies that, when
they're on the boober, I simply cannot surf past them. "Rising Sun" was
on FX last night, and even though it was edited to hell, the husband
and I *had* to watch it. I'm sure everyone has a few of these---"Rising
Sun" despite the fact it's based on a frigging Chrichton novel, is one
of those films. I think, ultimately, we're spellbound by Sean Connery's
Japanese-inspired hairdo. So, the question of the day is: what movies
do you feel compelled to watch every time they're on cable? Even though
you've seen them a thousand times and know the plot and every line
uttered by heart? Have at it. Although, I have a feeling the next time
I check the comments section, it will still be woefully empty.

--- Terribly sorry for all

--- Terribly sorry for all the ranting and raving yesterday, but Kofi pissed me off.

There's really no getting around it: the man is a weener.

--- And on a weener related sidenote...

Go and check out the latest advancements in
penis enhancement.
Invariably, I'm the one in our household of two who receives the penis
enhancement spams. The husband gets all the breast enhancement spams. I
suppose this could be considered a refreshing change of pace where
these spams are concerned. And it's funny, too.
--- This Passion of the Christ thing has gone too far.

GLASSPORT, Pa. (AP) - A church trying to teach about the crucifixion
of Jesus performed an Easter show with actors whipping the Easter bunny
and breaking eggs, upsetting several parents and young children.
People who attended Saturday's performance at Glassport's memorial
stadium quoted performers as saying, "There is no Easter bunny," and
described the show as being a demonstration of how Jesus was crucified.
Melissa Salzmann, who brought her 4-year-old son J.T., said the program
was inappropriate for young children. "He was crying and asking me why
the bunny was being whipped," Salzmann said.

Wait for it. Wait for it...

Patty Bickerton, the youth minister at Glassport Assembly of God,
said the performance wasn't meant to be offensive. Bickerton portrayed
the Easter rabbit and said she tried to act with a tone of irreverence.

{emphasis added by moi}

Ummm, Patty, perhaps you shouldn't be the youth minister of a church when you don't know the difference between reverence and irreverance,
I mean, unless you were going for a
funny-bunny-flogging-really-is-painless sort of attitude to make it
amusing for the children when the bunny was being whipped. If that's
the case, you probably do mean irreverance, but what the hell
is wrong with you that you'd flog the easter bunny in the first place?
Contrary to popular opinion, most kids do know that the Easter Bunny
was not in on the Crucifixion. He had nothing to do with it. Leave him
out of it. You know, if I had some sort of organizing structure for
this blog, I would place this one in the "Death to Smoochy" file.
--- Watched the 9/11 Commission this morning. Condi, I thought, did
very well. The husband, however is pissed off about Bob Kerrey's
ranting and raving. I missed most of it because I couldn't take the
husband's screaming at the TV any longer so I went and took a shower. Here's the transcript.
What an ass. As a former resident of the great state of Nebraska, I
would like to make it well known that I never voted for Bob Kerrey. In
the past, there have been times I have appreciated his willingness to
cut through the crap and get down to the heart of the matter, but this
is not one of them. He was completely belligerent toward a witness who
didn't have to testify in the first place and did so because she was
under attack and felt the need to set the record straight. But, as Bob
Kerrey himself said, "...I'm not going to get the national security
adviser 30 feet away from me very often..." and he took the opportunity
to take some seriously cheap shots on national television. I wonder if
he's been this nasty in the private interviews they've had with Condi.
I doubt it. He was grandstanding. Yet another example of someone using
the 9/11 Commission for personal gain. Clarke did it to make sure his
book sold well; Kerrey, I would bet you my last dollar, still hasn't
ruled a run for the White House out, despite the fact he's no longer
active in everyday politics.

--- There really is a

--- There really is a God.
And he listens to my prayers.

Ah, Saturday. It's a nice

Ah, Saturday. It's a nice day here, but since I took yesterday off to
enjoy the very nice weather and to work on other things, I'll have a
few posties for you all...to keep you from spending your day outside,
enjoying the nice weather. You probably just looked outside and noticed
it's not very nice where you live. You may have some complaints that
it's raining. It's not "springy" enough for you, etc. Well, it's nice
here, hence I don't really care about if it's nice where you live or
not. The rest of the continental United States always
has nicer weather than we do. You would deny me the opportunity to crow
about the weather here when I had to read how nice and warm it was
where you live all winter long? I think not. The sun is shining, a nice
warm breeze is blowing in through the window that's next to me. The
warmth it brings is positively delicious after the long winter we've
had. I have no idea if spring is actually here or if we're going to get
slammed with another bout of cold weather, but today is good, and if
today is all I've got until Memorial Day, well, I'm going to take
advantage of it.

--- A rather disturbing thought

--- A rather disturbing thought woke me out of a sound sleep at 4:30 this morning.

YOU'RE AN IDIOT! IT'S 1066, YOU MORON, NOT 1088!This is just
another example for you, my devoted Cake Eater readers, of what it's
like inside my head. However, since all the computers in the household
were shut down and it would have required actual work on my part to get
connected to Blogger, which would have also meant that further sleep
would have been prevented if I moved out of bed....I rolled back over
and went back to sleep.
Accuracy is less important to me than being able to sleep. Particularly
since at 4:30, the husband wasn't snoring and reacquiring oblivion was
an easy task. Though, all the comments about England not needing that
damn Norman still stand.

--- There are times in

--- There are times in your life when you recognize that you could
happily live for the rest of your days without a great deal of money.
That life is what you make of it; that possessions are not what is
needed to make your life a happy one; that bunnies and puppies are cute
(but that kittens are evil); that children are the most precious
possession you'll ever have; ad nauseaum, ad infinitum.
This, however, is not one of those times for me. I want money. Lots of
it. I have stuff I want to buy. And the stuff is expensive and it's
being sold at Christie's, so undoubtedly I'll need to don about five
grand worth of Armani when I attend the auction---and that's estimating
conservatively.
Ahem
Doris Duke's jewelry collection is up for grabs.

While I love the jewelry---this bracelet is making my mouth water---it's that her foundation is also selling off her wine cellar that's really making me go gaga.

Included in the lot---a 1918 Chateau Latour Jeroboam.
There are also bottles from 1928 and 1929, but who gives a rat's ass
about those---they're not jeroboams. A jeroboam, for the uninitiated,
is about three times the size of a normal wine bottle. {Insert whining
here}
God, if you've got the coin, go for it. And then email me and let me
know how good it was so I can at least get some vicarious pleasure out
of it.

--- So, I went and

--- So, I went and tried to stalk the Prez this morning---didn't work out.

I'll post the details later.

--- And we have more

--- And we have more silly Germans!
What I don't understand is if you're in Germany, the land of BMW,
Mercedes and Porsche; you have the skills to break, enter and steal a
vehicle, and you steal a frigging bulldozer and you take it on a joyride through Berlin?

What the hell is the matter with you?

--- Oh, thank goodness. I

--- Oh, thank goodness. I was really beginning to wonder what the hell happened to my silly Germans.

Have no fear...the talking trash cans are here!

Ah, German tax dollars, hard at work.

--- Ok, Dorkafork. You win.

--- Ok, Dorkafork. You win. I spent yesterday trying to muster up
enough enthusiasm to go through the Federalist Papers to refute your
assertions and I just couldn't get there. I concede to you, oh,
magnificent eating utensil.
But...I'm going to get in one swipe about quoting the Federalist
Papers. They are not
the be all, end all, holy of holies as to what the writers of the
Constitution were going for. This would be blasphemy, I know, but let
me explain. You have three writers of the Federalist Papers. John Jay,
Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, who, one could easily say were
not the least popular members of the Constitutional Congress. Three
dudes who were there from the beginning, yes, but they are also three
guys who were from large, well populated states: Jay and Hamilton were
both from New York; and Madison was from Virginia. Their interests
would have---naturally---been different from those of the Carolinas or
Rhode Island. Despite their well-populated state origins, they also
manage to disagree with one another quite a few times, particularly
about the level of federalism that should be imposed with the
Constitution. The Federalist Papers were written and published in
various newspapers at the time to give the average, literate individual
an idea of the issues they were wrestling with and were an explanation
of why they were taking the tack that they took. They were never
intended to be the sole source of Constitutional intent that they have
become---meaning that they were written to put forward certain issues
with the intention of influencing the direction of the Constitutional
Congress. They're policy papers---in essence, political theory---hence
I take them with a grain of salt. Think of it this way: supposing that
some sort of Fountain of Youth serum is invented in the next fifty
years that allowed you to live for another two hundred: would you take
George Kennan's "X Article"
as the sole source of information as to why the United States took the
stance that it did against the Soviet Union, knowing that this is the
document that made people in Washington finally stand up and take
notice of what Stalin was doing and what the Soviets were all about?
Probably not, despite the fact Kennan coins the phrase "containment"
within its general wordiness. Remember, this is two hundred years from
now---there's going to be a lot of information out there for you to
refer to when you're lecturing your great-great-great grandkids about
how you lived through the Cold War (this of course is providing you
weren't born in 1989---at which point you can point your finger at me
and shout "ANCIENT HAG!") You'd use Kennan with other anecdotal
evidence---the Soviets ruthless take over of what would become the
Eastern Bloc; Stalin's purges; their defense capabilities, particularly
since they'd just been put on fresh display in WWII. Political theory
is just that: theory. The Federalist Papers are a brilliant example of
political theory---and some would argue the single, best example of
American political theory ever written. But theory, by its very nature,
is a fleeting thing; an idea about the way things work, put down with
pen and ink, to push the argument along until the next guy expands on
it. The Federalist Papers are just one more example of theory. They
pushed the argument along until the next guy expanded on it. And I
think that guy's name would be de Tocqueville, but it's been a long
time since my heady polisci days, so you'll forgive me if I've
forgotten someone, eh? This isn't to say the Federal Papers are not a
valuable resource. They are. But they're to be taken as a part of a
whole, as any political theory should be.

--- You know, the husband

--- You know, the husband sends me some wierd links, but I think this
one is a serious contender in the "Taking of the Cake" category.
Ahem. Operation Take One For the Country (you might have to hit refresh a couple of times if it doesn't show up right away.)

Presented without commentary because I'm effing speechless.

UPDATE: Protein Wisdom says
"God Bless America."

--- An example of Scrabble

--- An example of Scrabble night at the Cake Eater household.

Yes indeedy. It is
a mistake to allow foreign languages into the game. Particularly when
your opponent (the husband) has more foreign language skills than you
do. In German. Which means triple word score hell with lots of
consonants.

--- I keep forgetting to

--- I keep forgetting to link to this very interesting article in Forbes about Teddy Kennedy's namesake titled Ponying Up To Camelot. (registration required--it's painless and they don't spam you.)

Edward Kennedy Jr. is raising money from unions and public pension
funds--and socking investors with princely fees.
Edward M. Kennedy Jr. is quite the rainmaker. In less than two years
the scion of the stalwart U.S. senator from Massachusetts has raised
$100 million for the $325 million Intercontinental Real Estate Fund
III, tapping the pension boards of the labor unions that have supported
dad for years. Kennedy's Marwood Group will collect $1.2 million in
fees over three years for his efforts.

Rainmaker, eh? Yeah, thanks to daddy.

"Some people may insinuate that I am looking to trade on my family
name. This is definitely not the case," the junior Kennedy says in a
statement. Intercontinental's chief, Peter Palandjian, says Kennedy's
pay is money well spent. Intercontinental charges an annual 1.25%
management fee--plus an extra 0.9%, over three years, for marketing
expenses that include the Kennedy cut.

Yeah, we all know you don't want to trade on dear old dad's name, Ted. You Kennedys are all alike.
The name doesn't mean anything but what you can do for yourself, right?
You're a real bunch of bootstrappers. Mmmhmm. You worship at the altar
of Bootlegger Joe! You want to be just like him---before he dumped all
of his stock and crashed the market in '29! You're tortured by what
your surname has become. You really do wish you didn't have that last
name, because you want to make it on your own merits. You don't want your successes spoiled by charges of nepotism! In fact, you damn well declare that no one
should dare accuse you of such a thing, being the bootstrapper that you
are! The gall of it, you declare in your snooty Harrrvarrrd Yarrrd
accent, that anyone would even think such a thing! Pfft. But it seems
as if there's a whiff of something in dear old Camelot---and it doesn't
smell all that nice, either. Seems some of the "institutional
investors"---aka unions--- Junior's brought to the table don't appreciate Intercontinental's passing along of Junior's costs.

The $10 billionChicago Teachers' PensionFund, wooed by the younger
Kennedy, spent months mulling whether to invest $35 million with
Intercontinental. Jacob Silver, a 13-year veteran of the Chicago
pension board, learned about Intercontinental over dinner with Kennedy
at an Orlando conference last summer. Other Chicago trustees met with
Kennedy, and in November Intercontinental made a formal proposal to the
Chicago fund's board. The board's lawyer, JosephBurns, noticed the
marketing fee in the offering documents and alerted the board via
e-mail. "It took a lot of nerve even to ask us for the money," says
Silver. "Intercontinental hired him [Kennedy]--we didn't." He adds that
the pension fund had never before been asked to pay extra for a fund's
marketing costs.

I wonder if the husband's consultancy could get away with such a thing? Talk about a new source of revenue! Woohoo!

Chicago's board told Palandjian to drop the fee or forget about the
$35 million. Palandjian agreed to swallow the Chicago fund's portion.
Undeterred, Palandjian has re-upped with Kennedy to help raise a fourth
fund. The target:$250 million, for which Kennedy's firm could earn as
much as $4 million. Kennedy views the job as a public service: "I am
committed to building my company and providing the highest-quality
service to my friends in organized labor." He had better hope
prospective investors don't follow Chicago's lead.

God, what a scam. I can hear Junior's sales pitch to the guy at Intercontinental now---can't you?

Here, let me set you up with these unions. They support my dad, I
know these people, they've got tons of cash that's just waiting to be
invested by someone like you---particularly in this volatile market. I
have contact with them all the time. I'll chat with them and set up a
meeting for you with them. It's up to you from there, but to make sure
this isn't hurting you too much---rainmaking can be expensive, I know,
but to make money, you've gotta spend some---I'm sure they wouldn't
mind if you passed along my fee to them. They're a big investor. And
they'll love what you're trying to sell them. And after all,
they're a union, it's not like they care about spending money
anyway---it's all a free ride for them.
Sheesh. This guy has about as much charm as his father did when he took
nine hours to open up his date's door.*
*ruthlessly plagiarized from Dennis Miller. "Mr. Miller Goes To
Washington."

--- I don't know where

--- I don't know where the husband surfs most of the time. Haven't the
foggiest notion of where he pulls some of the stuff he comes up with.
He's very much like a ten year old boy on summer vacation when it comes
to the internet: send him out the door in the moring; expect him to be
filthy when he comes home at the end of the day, with a frog hanging
out of his pocket. He fills my inbox with links he thinks I'll find
interesting. Mostly, it's an exercise in hit and miss. Sometimes he
hits and sometimes he misses. He hit tonight. The State of the News Media 2004: An Annual Report on American Journalism. It was written by the Project for Excellence in Journalism. It came out in February, but I haven't seen much written about it so I thought I'd link to it.

I haven't read the whole thing, but I did hit the highlights. I found the Public Attitudes section to be surprising.

Public attitudes about the press have been declining for nearly 20
years.
Americans think journalists are sloppier, less professional, less
moral, less caring, more biased, less honest about their mistakes and
generally more harmful to democracy than they did in the 1980s.
Consider a few changes in the numbers between 1985 and 20021: The
number of Americans who think news organizations are highly
professional declined from 72 to 49 percent.
Those who think news organizations are moral declined from 54 to 39
percent, and those who think they are immoral rose from 13 to 36
percent.
Those who feel news organizations try to cover up their mistakes rose
from 13 to 67 percent. The number of Americans who think news
organizations generally get the facts straight declined from 55 to 35
percent.
Those who feel who feel news organizations care about the people they
report on declined from 41 to 30 percent.
Those who think news organizations are politically biased rose from 45 to 59 percent. {emphasis
added by moi}
What I find surprising is that there's only a 14 point jump in the
number of people who find the media to be biased from 1985 to today.
Given all of the discussion regarding bias in the media---and the
inception of FOX News---I would have thought that number would be much
higher, and let me see if I can remember enough from college statistics
to tell you why.
I have some issues with the methodology of these numbers. I'm no stat
professor, but I do remember a few things about my time in those
classes, and one of the few was that for comparison purposes, an apple
must indeed be an apple. Oranges will simply not work, or the result is
skewed. The 1985 numbers, it seems, came from one source, MORI (I
think--I can't find an actual source for the 1985 #'s), and the 2002
numbers came from a Pew Research Report that seems to have been done to
see what the public's support for the media was post-9/11. When you
follow the link provided in the bibliography to the study results at the Pew website
you can see they used numerous samples and their reporting seems to be
fine. The trouble here seems to be that I can't find that MORI report
anywhere, provided that's the report they used for the 1985 numbers.
If I want to compare apples to apples, I need to know that there are
indeed two apples, and not one apple and one orange. I want to know if
the sample sizes were the same. I want to know if they covered the same
geographic regions in the 2002 study as they did in the 1985 study. I
want to know what the margin of error was on the 1985 study. I want to
know if the the 2002 survey asked *exactly* the same questions as the
1985 survey. And it seems, to me at least, that they aren't. The data
was compiled by the authors of the study and compared from that point
on, which, as my Stat101 professor would have told you had you been in
class with me on day one is pretty much par for the course. I'll never
forget what the man said: The
first and most important thing you have to learn about statistics is
that the numbers can back up any assertion you want if you know how to
manipulate them to that end. This, I suppose, was his best effort
to bolster three hundred students who wanted nothing more than to be
back in their rooms, sleeping off the previous night's hangover, but he
had a point. Here you have a study conducted about journalism by those
in the profession. Which to me sort of sounds like all the arguments
that lawyers and doctors shouldn't regulate themselves. And as we all
know, journalists are forever crying out that there's no bias in their
reporting, so you can let your minds wander from there about some of
the preconceived notions they brought to this study. It's completely
conceivable that they thought that number was high. A fourteen point
jump in seventeen years? It doesn't ring right. That number should, by
all the evidence placed in front of us, be higher than a measly
fourteen point increase. Seventeen years where there was huge increase
in the number of cable news media outlets over that period of time?
Seventeen years where people went from getting their news from one of
three major networks and their local paper to perhaps jumping online
and hitting the news feeds directly? Most people, myself included,
didn't think twice about bias in the news media until we had other
outlets to compare and contrast our regular news coverage with. And it's only a fourteen point jump?
It seems specious to me. It just doesn't sound right. I would have
thought that number would be much higher, but I can't even check the
veracity of their claim because the 1985 numbers are not available.
It's too late to go into this any more. I'm barely staying awake. If
someone wants to run with this, by all means, go for it.

--- Anybody speak Spanish? Someone

--- Anybody speak Spanish?
Someone keeps typing the phrase "Zapatero bean morph" into Spanish
Google and it directs them here. Why, I have no idea, but it does.
What the hell does that mean?

--- Today's entry in the

--- Today's entry in the "Mental Slap to the Forehead" category. (Mr. H.---aka Mr. Actor's Unions Suck!---should enjoy this one.)

UNITED NATIONS (AP) - As Nicole Kidman and Sean Penn film ``The
Interpreter'' on location in the United Nations, many ambassadors are
mad - because all the diplomats in the movie are impostors.
``It was my dream that I was going to be in a movie with Sydney Pollack
directing. He's one of my heroes in the movie industry,'' said Spain's
U.N. Ambassador, Inocencio Arias, who has appeared in many Spanish
films and said he had lined up a part as a prime minister.
``But then the day before the shooting they called and said the union
had some reservation, some qualms,'' Arias said. ``I wasn't even going
to charge any money. If they had to give me some money, I was going to
give it to research, or to AIDS.''

Woooheeee. And it gets better.

``It's a great shame we weren't allowed to have bit parts in this
movie because we're very familiar with the setting,'' said the prince.
``We're very familiar with the work of interpreters. God knows there've
been enough mishaps on occasion - not too frequently thank goodness but
with open mikes - and we feel well attuned to do that sort of thing.
``After all, this is the great stage and we are part of the theater here, the permanent theater.''

{emphasis mine}

God, you just have to love it when UN officials denigrate their own worth so openly and so honestly.

--- I almost forgot to

--- I almost forgot to thank the husband for all of his wonderful work
installing the comments software. He totally went above and beyond the
call of duty and even made it pretty. Thanks, darling. You're a babe
and I completely appreciate the fashion in which you keep bailing me
out. Your efficacy rates for dealing with a completely incompetent wife
are off the charts. But I do have one question for you.
Are you sure you still want me to move over to Moveable Type? {Shudder}

--- I have good news.

--- I have good news. I finally made it on a blogroll! Could fame,
fortune and a fat book contract not be too far behind? Ah, screw it.
Someone likes me! They really, really like me!

WOOHOO!

Go to Spathic
and peruse at your leisure. It's intelligent and clever. Which, I think
we all know, are not mutually exclusive categories in a writer(s).
Contrary to popular opinion, it is possible to be a clever
idiot. Pfft. After all, if there's anyone who knows how to be a clever
idiot, it's me. I actually don't know "who" at Spathic likes my
writing. His/hers/their identities seem to be somewhat elusive. Not
like it matters. I'm grateful for the extra traffic. It's much
appreciated.

--- Who's strangling the cat?

--- Who's strangling the cat?

Does she do "Stand By Your Man"?

One can only hope and pray and pray and then hope some more.

--- Ok, so I'm completely

--- Ok, so I'm completely over the "I'm Rick James, bitch!" thing.

It's been done. Chappelle is funny, no doubts, but give it a rest already, would you?

--- Just another thought on

--- Just another thought on the looming Saudi oil glut.

What might this do for Venezuela? Would it weaken or strengthen Chavez?

Hmmmm.

--- I think I've chatted

--- I think I've chatted before about the Sunday newspaper ritual at
our house. But just in case you weren't reading this blog then, I'll
detail the process again. When I first met the husband, I did not
realize there were men out in this big, wide world of ours who did not
read the sports page first thing. I thought all men read the sports
page first simply because my brothers, my father and every other man I
knew did. I was pleasanly surprised to find that the husband did not.
He goes for the comic section, which I find damn sexy, let me tell you.
But...this creates a dilemma, because I, too, went for the comics
section first off. Every Sunday morning it was a race to see who would
get the comics first. Sometimes he would win. Sometimes I would. It was
a crapshoot with the odds being slightly in favor of the husband
because he generally rose before I did on the weekends. Now, the
process has changed a wee bit. He works. I stay at home. To prevent the
appearance of greediness, I chose to follow in the footsteps my mother
trod in before me: he pays for the paper, so he gets first shot at the
comics. I read the USA Weekend
section while he peruses the comics. He's a comic connoiseur---meaning
he takes forever and a damn day to read the frigging thing. And he reads it backwards, too. He starts on the back page with the kiddie games and Beakman and Jax, then moves on to Dennis the Menace and the like before---a half hour later---reaching For Better and For Worse on the front page. It's annoying, yes, but since it's the only
section of the paper that he reads, I try not to get too itchy and
settle down for prattle designed to be read only by the bleary eyed: USA Weekend.

This weekend the prattle revolved around The New Family Home.

You have a home. You have a family. But do you have a family home?
The answer isn't quite as simple as it seems. A house can either steer
members of a family into their separate worlds or bring them closer
together, something that seems ever more important in today's
overscheduled life. Recognizing this, a loose collection of authors,
architects and stylists is promoting designs and furnishings that can
truly turn a dwelling into a "family home."

Ok, here comes the new agey tripe. I can feel it coming.

The idea is to create rooms flexible enough to meet different needs,
encourage interaction and allow families to share space and activities
with a minimum of hassle. Call the "family home" a quiet revolt against
impracticality, a triumph of need over appearances. Call it a
recognition that if home is where the heart is, then a home should
gather together those closest to your heart. "A family home is a place
where every individual can feel relaxed, and that will mold itself to
everyone's needs over the years -- from baby and parents to teenagers,"
says Judith Wilson, the author of "Family Living: Creating the Perfect
Family Home."

Well, that's not so bad, I thought. It's actually a rather admirable goal...

That goal wins a hearty endorsement from experts who track family
life. Ellen Galinsky, director of the Families and Work Institute in
New York, conducted a study in 1999 of how children looked at their
world. "When you asked kids and parents what kids would remember from
childhood, parents guessed it was the big extravaganza -- the big trip
or whatever," Galinsky says. "But kids talked about the everyday family
traditions. That was what really mattered to them." A home that lets
family members coexist in the same spaces fosters the kind of everyday
togetherness kids consider so important, Galinsky says. It also can go
a long way toward protecting the sanity of their parents, who find they
spend less time keeping up appearances and more time on the things that
matter.

Hmmmm.

What makes a home a family home? Those who have studied the question
offer some underlying concepts to keep in mind: A family home is built
around the idea that rooms and furnishings should be practical. But
that doesn't mean you have to ignore style. Children can get as big a
kick as parents do out of that whimsical love seat or those brightly
colored walls or funky (yet sturdy) lamps

Practicality and style. I'm on the verge of liking this. This is interesting. I continue reading.

It means not letting style trump day-to-day usefulness. A
museum-exhibit living room that puts no one at ease doesn't make a lot
of sense in a family home. A formal dining table that does little but
collect dust for weeks on end might be replaced by a desk and a smaller
table that works well for family game night. Above all, a family home
focuses on informal, comfortable gathering places. A simple idea, but
not always easy to accept. "People fear not looking sophisticated,"
says Jane Gitlin, an architect and co-author of Taunton's "Family Home
Idea Book." "You have to get over that."

Ok, you've lost me people. Right here. This is where you lost me. I
just have to get over the idea of having a house that I can call mine
because it's better for the children the husband and I will one day
produce if we decorate said house in bright colors and have crappy
furniture that they can destroy because that's what kids do. Our house
should be a place where we will never have to tell our kids 'no.'
This is where you turned our potential castle into a house meant solely
for their education, entertainment and enlightenment. You suckered me
with the new agey crap after all. BASTARDS!

But of course, just to see how far these nutjobs will go, I read further.

How can you design a family room to accommodate everything from a
teenage party to a cozy night together after the kids have gone to bed?
Answer: You can't. But flexible spaces and furnishings can help.
Fold-up tables and extra chairs that can be pulled out when needed, a
sideboard that serves as a craft table, couches that can be rolled from
one part of the room to another -- all these things can make your house
a family home. An open floor plan helps, as does space that does double
or triple duty -- for instance, a guest room that serves as a computer
or hobby room.

No kid of mine is using MY Henredon
sideboard for a craft table, let me tell you. And why the hell do you
need wheels on your couches? To move them, would be the obvious answer,
but let me just pose this one question in reply: isn't that why God
gave parents the slave labor of their children in the first place? So
they can move stuff around and you don't have to throw your back out in
the meantime? Besides, I don't want my kids moving furniture unless
they ask me first: put wheels on it and you're taking yourself right
out of the process.
Flexibility is especially important in the kitchen, the heart and
soul of the modern home, because it's as likely to be used for
homework, TV viewing, bill paying and after-work conversation as it is
for cooking. Even in a small kitchen, provide several seating choices
if possible: a table, a bar with stools, a small desk.

Providing your kitchen is as big as the engine room on the Titanic.

A good kitchen also needs a "message center," a place near the phone
where family members can leave notes or otherwise communicate as they
come and go.

Yeah, it's called a refridgerator, you eedjits.

It makes sense to surrender a kid-height cabinet to homework and art
supplies. "FamilyFun Home," a book by Deanna F. Cook and the experts at
"FamilyFun" magazine, suggests setting up a snack station, a space in a
lower cabinet where the kids can serve themselves. (Feel free to set
rules such as "no eating within an hour of dinner.")
Now, I can understand the cabinet for art supplies, but food? No way in
hell. I'm no expert in the field or anything, but I do believe "DIY
snacking" is one of the contributing factors with all of the fat kids
we've got going in this country today. This says nothing of the fact
that by putting the food down low you're going to a. have messes galore
which your kids will clean up poorly, if they bother to clean things up
at all and b. you will have rodents. Mice. Rats. You know, those nasty
little things that do manage to come into houses---even in this overly
neat day and age---and forage for food. Any idiot knows that this why
cabinets were invented and was why they were put in places where mice
couldn't get to them easily---as in, up high. Dolts.

White carpets and linen furniture look great in glossy magazine
spreads. They look less great with ground-up crackers on them, but
that's the reality of life with children. Dark or patterned fabrics
hide more stains. Durable materials or easily laundered furniture
covers are part of the bargain in the family home.
First off, any idiot who has white carpet in their home and thinks
their children won't track mud all over it will not meet Kathy's #1
Rule for Reproduction: if
you can't teach a dog to sit, shut up, or come, you aren't allowed to
use your reproductive system. You will only bring more stupid people
into the world. Save us the trouble later on and just take the pill, ok? It's logical. Second, why anyone buys a pair of linen pants, let alone a linen couch is beyond me. Linen wrinkles. It does. You can't iron a couch, and why would you want to? Third: dark or patterned fabrics hide more stains. Talk about stating the obvious.

Nimrods. And it gets even better.

To create a room in which everyone feels at home, you need to see it
through your kids' eyes. Kids love to cocoon themselves, so casual
throws on the corner of a couch or love seat can give them a chance to
do that. "Think about flooring as your children would," says "Family
Living" author Wilson. "Children spend an incredible amount of time on
the floor. Think about the way things feel. Children are very tactile
creatures." In other words, that chrome-and-leather chair might look
great, but it could be cold and uninviting to the pajama-party gang.
If a kid wants to cocoon themselves, they can make a fort with couch
cushions. I see no reason why I should have to design my house around
the way my future children see the place. It will be MY house, not
theirs. They'll just live there for 18 years and if they're still there
at that age, they'll pay rent. Anyone with kids will sometimes feel as if home is a garbage dump.
The secret to making a house livable for adults is storage. However
much you think you need, you'll need more. Children's toys multiply in
the dark, and kids' momentary passions -- model planes, dinosaurs,
Barbie dolls -- can seize control of your home in mere days. The
answer: closets, cabinets, shelves, plastic bins. Lots of plastic bins.

Ever heard of---gasp!---throwing out the toys your kids don't play
with? Or giving them to the Goodwill or the Salvation Army? If you need
to "store" your children's toys, it's pretty apparent that they've got
too bloody many of them, not to mention that you're spoiling them
rotten by never saying "no" when they whine.
Store stuff as close as possible to where it's actually used. Give
kids storage space in every room where they have stuff. Then expect
them to put it away -- OK, put most of it away -- at the end of the
day. The broken toes you save may be your own

{SLAP TO THE FOREHEAD} Give kids storage space in every room where they have stuff??? I don't think so. Then it becomes their house and not yours. And for God's sake, make them pick up their own crap.

Even in the family home, everyone sometimes needs a retreat.
Bedrooms often provide a place for this, as do bathrooms, especially
ones with a big, comfortable tub. But Gitlin suggests also looking at
unused nooks. A stairway landing can be made into a quiet spot with the
addition of a built-in desk, or with an overstuffed chair and a reading
lamp. A dormer, an attic or even a walk-in closet can be transformed
into a getaway zone. A good retreat, whether for children or parents,
can give us a chance to recharge our batteries and find our better
selves at those moments when we feel overwhelmed. And that's critical
because, as Gitlin says, "a family home is a place that supports and
nurtures the family life we want to create."
Ok, so let me see if I've got this straight. You're telling me that
this supposed family home of the future is a place where everyone feels
at home in every single room. That there is no space within this
supposed home that no one person in the family will feel as if they
don't have some ownership. But
then you say that people need retreats. They need privacy; they need
their own space.
ARRRRRGGGGGGHHHHH!
Make up your goddamn minds, would you? Which is it? If I'm going to
hand over my home to my potential children with the notion that this
sort of family-friendly design will bring our family closer together,
they'd better not spend their entire time hanging out in their damn
rooms. What's the point then? So annoying. Oh so very annoying. I don't
even have kids and I'm annoyed. I can only imagine how annoyed actual
parents are about this article. People save up for homes. They work
hard. They make sure they pay their bills on time so their credit is
good. They save money for a downpayment. When they finally find their
own slice of heaven in a good neighborhood, with good schools and lots
of kids on the block, they run to a mortgage broker and fill out gobs
of paperwork and hold their breaths...waiting for approval, knowing
that if they charged one thing too many last month and carried the
balance, they could be refused. It's nerve wracking. And when they get
approved, their offer is accepted, they have to wait for the
closing---which might be held up for any number of reasons. It's the
old dog-jumping-through-the-hoop scenario. I find it scary in the
extreme. But when I find a house that I want and that fits our
requirements, we will go through it as well and I'll be sucking down
Maalox like it's water until we move in. I know I will be. But most
people get their little slice of heaven. They get a lawn that needs to
be mowed. They live, serene in their surroundings, immersing themself
in DIY projects until the itch to reproduce becomes too strong to
ignore. They scratch, and scratch and scratch and they get a wee one
nine months later. Life is good. This is when I have to think that it
becomes patently apparent that the wee one is going to take over their
life for the next eighteen years, so it's time to think of
sanity-saving options. One of those would be having a designated play
area. Another would be having a bedroom and barring the wee one entry,
so you can work on the itch that numero due is going to start forcing
you to scratch as soon as you can work up the energy to do so. Fast
forward a couple of years. You're going to want adults to come over to
your house. You're going to want to have someplace for them to sit
that's not stiff and crinkly from where wee one numero uno shat their
pants and/or puked and you failed in the stain removal department.
You're going to want to be able to walk through your living room
without tripping over some toy. The primary colors that you thought
would be so entertaining for the wee one when you painted the living
room are making you nostalgic for your first apartment---the one that
was painted in management approved eggshell. That spare room in the
basement where you've been keeping all the boxes looks like a really
good place to shove your kids and their mayhem causing ways right about
now. You'll be able to keep all the toys down there; the kids will
occupy themselves and you'll have your living room back and will be
able to enjoy snatches---albeit brief---of adult conversation whilst
keeping an ear open for sounds of mayhem coming from the nether regions
of your house. There is nothing wrong with having places for your
children in your house. It's only when you give your house over to
short people who don't pay the mortgage that I would doubt your sanity.
What message are you sending to your kids if you would do some of the
things suggested? You rule the homestead? You don't have to do what we say because I will cater to your every whim?
Far be it from me to suggest such a thing, but...damn. There is a line
after all. Adults on one side. Children on the other. That's the way
God intended it. Don't mess with the Man's rules.

--- Yep. The House of

--- Yep. The House of Saud is going to break with OPEC before the summer is over.

There was no ``quid pro quo,'' Prince Bandar bin Sultan told
reporters after a meeting with national security adviser
Condoleezza Rice about the latest terrorist strike in Saudi Arabia.
``The president has asked a few times that we should be helping to make
sure that oil prices don't go too high that would curb the world
economy recovery,'' Bandar added.

Here's the clincher.

Bandar said the Saudi efforts are ``not for the benefit of the
president's political needs. I think reasonable prices particularly
lower oil prices between $22 and $28 is good for the American people,
for the American economy, for the world economy and of course for the Saudi economy.''
{Emphasis added by moi.} Glug, glug, glug go the gas tanks as the
Saudis turn up the production nozzles and glut the market, making a
profit on the oil, but also making a pretty penny on selling short
their oil options (I think that's how that works---don't quote me on
that.). At $22 bucks a barrel, well, hello $.99 a gallon!

--- So, we have some

--- So, we have some delightful Hollywood ridiculousness for you this
evening. The Day After Tomorrow

You can view the trailer here
So, it seems as if one massive worldwide storm hits. Pandemonium
ensues. The world is saved by a weather geek whose predictions no one
heeded! All is well in the end. "We will survive. We will go on." And
so on and so forth. Why does this big storm hit the our home sweet
home?
Why, global warming, of course. Climate change. Duh.

Now, just to be clear, I'll probably go and see it because I like big disaster movies. No, I didn't like Earthquake! No groovy CGI in those mid-70's disaster flicks. But this is directed by Roland Emmerich, who directed Independence Day
and I liked that movie. The man is good with projects that have serious
scope. That said, the husband and I will probably laugh our asses of
through all of the really good propaganda parts. Because, you know it's
gonna have some seriously good propaganda if their website is any
indication. While I can't link to said propaganda because it's all
stupid popups with really annyoing music, go to the profile of Director
Roland Emmerich and there should be a wee box at the bottom that says
"Weather Gone Wild." Click on that and it will come up with a few
sections, titled "The Present," "Future Predictions" and "What you Can
Do"
The Present: They talk about the heat wave in Europe last year---they
claim 20,000 people died. They talk about how last year was the year
that the most tornadoes ever were recorded---and how that record isn't
going to stand for long! Deadly floods are on the rise, with most of
the deaths from Cyclones coming from---gasp---inland flooding! Future
Predictions: 1.25 million species of plants and animals will be extinct
by 2050 as a result of global warming.
The Ice Cap of Mt. Kilimanjaro---already 75% gone---will be entirely
gone in two decades as a result of global warming.
"Say Goodbye to the Colorado Ski Season" Alpine meadow in the Rocky
Mountains will likely disappear as a result of global warming.
The Oriole will be extinct in most people's lifetimes due to declining
habitats brought on by global warming.
Montana's Glacier National Park will be devastated as global warming
melts its most prized feature.
Malaria and Dengue Fever will spread due to increased temperatures that
will help these water borne illnesses spread. And it's due to global
warming!
Venice will soon be viewed solely by gondola as rising water levels
threaten it and other cities, like New York, Buenos Aires and Tokyo.
It ends with a lovely little page. GLOBAL WAKE UP CALL. THERE'S MORE TRUTH THAN HYPE!

Ok, my question is: sez who? The movie makers? Sha. Right. Like they're the best and most accurate source out there. Whaddya
mean Salome didn't behead John the Baptist? You mean she only had it
done? She didn't do it herself? Oh, shit. Well, we can work around
that. What if John struck down the guy she sent to kill him? Yeah. And
then she's forced to do it herself. Wow. More drama there. We should go
with that! From whom did they get their facts and can I really
consider them the best people to be blowing the horn on this when their
solution to the problem is to send me to this site? Where,for a whopping $504,
I can become "carbon neutral." Yes, by spending $504 they will plant
thirty trees to balance out my average North American excretion of 22
tons of CO2. Hence, I will balance out. Now, if I lived in Asia or India, I would only have to balance out 1.46 tons of CO2, hence it only costs $29.87. UK? 11 tons of CO2 at $252.13. Eastern Europe? 7.34 tons at $168.09. Middle East---surely
their CO2 levels are huge with all that cheap gas, right? Nope. 5.14
tons o' CO2 and a piddly $117.66 will rid them of any guilt they might
have over polluting the atmosphere and causing a rise in greenhouse
gases. Now, I don't know where they got their numbers and I really
don't care. It's not like I feel guilty over emitting CO2. I breathe. I
emit CO2 whether I want to or not. But I'm a pretty enviro-friendly
person on the whole, so why should I feel guilty in the first place? I
don't own a refinery. I rarely drive. I recycle. I turn off lights the
husband has left burning. I use mass transport. I've done more than my
fair share. I doubt I emit 22 tons of CO2 in a year, but it's not like
that matters. I'm still not going to pay good money to plant trees to
offset my very existence on this planet because Hollywood tells me I
should be worried about this problem. They can pucker up and kiss my
lily white ass. I do have a suggestion for Future Forests and the
makers of The Day After Tomorrow, however. If they really want to cut down on CO2 emissions: quit breathing. Yep. No more hot air from Hollywood. That should stop the problem right there and then.

--- I'm depressed. No Silly

--- I'm depressed.

No Silly German stories for over a week.

What? Has everyone suddenly wised up in Germany? Have they all made a pledge to not act stupid anymore?

What the hell is going on here?

--- Lileks is apparently making

--- Lileks is apparently making up for last week's lack o' bloggy goodness with a vengeance.

I wish I could have one of Lileks' off-days. It would be one of my better ones.

But this explains why there wasn't anything in the paper today about GDub's visit.

Today’s editorial page had a little squib: “National
Turn-off-the-Television week comes around every year. But as the
Hennepin County Board prepared to pass a resolution to make the county
a TV-free zone last week, Commissioner Mike Opat objected ‘My 3 year
old is a big Timberwolves fan and he needs to know what Kevin Garnett
is doing,’ Opat pleaded. The resolution’s author, Commissioner Gail
Dorfman, renented with a special dispensation for the NBA playoffs.
‘The Timberwolves are quality television,’ she conceded.”
My tax dollars at work. So why, exactly is the Hennepin County Board of
Panjandrums spending its time on resolutions concerning my television
usage? Is it now the official policy of the county that Tvs should be
off, and am I now doubleplus ungood because I refuse to go along with
this idiocy?
I smell an 'X-Files''-ish conspiracy going on. Yeah. Mmm-hmmm, she
mutters, while nodding knowingly.
The Board of Commissioners passes a resolution---sponsored by a
Democrat---to endorse "National Turn Off The TV Week," and it's covered
in the editorial section of the very same newspaper that failed to report the Prez is coming to town. They're going for complete media-blackout, I tell ya! But they
will control the media blackout. They're preemptively taking themselves
out of the picture because they *know* the Prez has the authority and
is just sneaky enough to do it before they can. They don't want to be
silenced by a man they hate, so they'll silence themselves!
Because you know what happens when the Prez declares a media blackout,
right? You don't? Good gravy, man!
FEMA comes in and takes over. Yep. FEMA. The Federal Emergency Management Agency.
You think 'disaster relief' when you hear that acronym. I think
organization that's fully funded and is now a part of the Department of
Homeland Security! They have power...and they're not afraid to wield
it. Before you know it, the Prez will have declared Martial Law over
the Cities! The so-called Hennepin County Commissioners won't be able
to commission squat. They'll be locked away as enemy combatants at
Guantanamo Bay. As will the editorial board of the Strib. You still
don't think FEMA can do this? Well, wise up, pal! FEMA can and will
do just about anything. FEMA will call in the National Guard, tanks
will roam the highways. Soldiers will police the streets. Are you ready
for that? They'll start asking you who had a Gore sign in their yard
during the last election. They'll encourage you to inform on your
neighbors. Even the kiddies over at Lake Harriet will be discouraged
from feeding those "socialist, no-good, never worked a day in their
lives" ducks, which of course, says nothing of the attitude they'll
take toward Mr. Little Guy.
He'll lose his beachfront property at Harriet because he had the
temerity to tell Pohlad---a big campaign contributor---to fuck off and
buy his own stadium and will have to hide over by the Lake of the
Isles, where the guerilla insurgency is bound to start. Wrack and ruin,
I tell you. That's what FEMA's really all about: not solving it, but
creating it. It's probably just best we follow our brave editorial
leaders at the Strib and The Hennepin County Board of Commissioners
when they tell us they'll be imposing a media blackout on the Prez's
visit. It's just best all around. We don't want to tempt fate, do we?

--- And here's today entry

--- And here's today entry in the "No shit, Sherlock" category.

WASHINGTON (AP) - Airport security remains lax despite billions of
dollars and thousands of federal employees added since the Sept. 11
attacks, lawmakers were told Thursday.
A pair of government investigations submitted to the House aviation
subcommittee found dangerous objects still get past
security checkpoints. And they said neither government nor privately
employed screeners performed their jobs well.
But we've spend billions of dollars right? They made me miss my plane
to Hawaii because I'd forgotten my toenail clippers were in my carryon
and I was subjected to a cavity search by a big guy named Bubba who
didn't use enough lube! We should be safe!
Nope. Wanna guess why?
The inspector general's report, as well as the GAO study, portrayed
the TSA as an unresponsive inflexible bureaucracy. For example, it does
not allow its own airport security directors or private contractors to
fill vacancies as soon as they arise, causing staff shortages. Instead,
the TSA sets up temporary assessment centers to process applicants.

Let me guess? Union rules right?

Is this what ransom demands

Is this what ransom demands have come to these days?

Many of the marchers said they were not giving in to blackmail but
were only calling for peace. Several hundred people who brought up the
rear carried banners calling for the government of Prime Minister
Silvio Berlusconi to withdraw Italian forces and cheered what they
called the victory of Iraqi guerrillas holding the city of Fallujah
against an onslaught of U.S. Marines. In an ultimatum issued Monday,
the kidnappers said that unless Italians marched in Rome within five
days, the three captives would be killed.
"..not giving into blackmail, but were only calling for peace."
Mmmhmmm.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure guys who run around shooting off AK-47's,
desecrating bodies and then setting them aflame for the sheer and utter
joy of it and who take their orders from an Imam understand your nuanced
approach to meeting their demands. I'm sure they understand your
conundrum quite nicely and are sympathetic to your needs. They won't
shoot those guns off now, will they? Now that you've given them exactly
what they wanted? How could they? That would be going against their
word!

--- Go and read this

--- Go and read this Jackson Diehl
piece in the Washington Post. (hat tip: Vodkaboy)
Just a random thought: it's rarely a good thing for anyone when Sharon
thinks he's got everyone by the short and curlies. Israelis included.
Bad things happen. They do. Just look at the man's track record.
Arrogance is not a position that helps his thought processes.
As far as the proposed deal? Eeugh. Revolting.
I've said before that I think that damn wall is a bad idea. I can
understand why Israelis feel they need it. If I thought that building a
wall around our borders would keep out the nutjobs that want to kill
us, I would want one surrounding our territory, too. But the rule of
"where there's a will, there's a way," reigns supreme and there's no
avoiding it. It's like locking your car. You want to protect your
possessions, but chances are if the thief is clever, they'll find a way
around your security system. It's the way of the world. There is no
foolproof security system; the only thing you can do is to make it so
difficult that people won't wan't to bother cracking your defense, like
encryption. Codes are so huge, so unwieldy, that it takes a good long
time to break them. But they can be broken.
Human beings are perverse in this way: we like a challenge. This is
what I see happening with the suicide bombers the Israelis are trying
to keep out with the wall: it's going to take some time, but they'll
get around it.
Sharon likes his wall, however, because not only is it keeping him in
office by limiting the suicide bombings---this, of course, is despite
the fact his son has been indicted and there are rumors that he's not
far from the dock either---but it also gives him a lot of territory.
It's a boundary. A boundary that he set up in the first place. If the
US helps to broker a deal with the wall demarcating the portions of the
West Bank that Israel will receive in a settlement it will be a bad
thing for US interests. We already can't get a fair shake in the Middle
East. We're firmly on Israel's side, and that's fine, but we do have
other interests in the region as well. Other Arab interests. If one of
the reasons to broker this deal would be to stop the circle of violence
in Israel because that affects how we're seen elsewhere in the Middle
East, how, precisely, would giving Israel everything it wants be a good
thing? Explain that one to me, will ya, because it just doesn't
compute. If part of the reasoning to get this deal done is that it will
help the success rate of the US's initiatives in the Middle East, how
does giving Sharon everything
he wants just to get it done help us in the long run? It doesn't. It
makes us even more the bad guy. Sure the violence will stop, but for
how long? And how will it resurface and in what form? As far as the
success of this plan? I think this was a leak intended to gauge
support. We'll see how well it flies in real time, though, if it ever
comes to pass.

--- I am now off

--- I am now off to bed.
I have successfully achieved two things today.
1. I made the husband cave to a demand
2. I avoided cleaning
A pretty good Saturday, all in all, but I don't know that I'm going to
keep up with the posts-up-the-wahoo thing. My life is boring. I don't
know that I should expect you all to read about how boring it is.
But at least I'm not catblogging. Thank heavens for small favors, eh?

Cake Eater position on cats: they're evil. EEEEEE-VIL, as in the D-EVIL made me do it.
I don't mind them all that much actually, but they make the husband's
sinus cavities produce copious amounts of snot and force him to use
industrial grade pharmaceuticals. Just don't need 'em.

--- One of these days

--- One of these days it would be nice if a resolution actually resolved something.

GENEVA, April 23 -- The U.N. Commission on Human Rights
overwhelmingly adopted a resolution Friday expressing concern about the
scale of reported abuses in Sudan's Darfur region and agreed to appoint
its own investigator.
whoop-de-freaking-doo.
Let's be logical about this just for one moment. 1. The legally
recognized Sudanese government is on the killing. Why would Bashir want
anyone to come and monitor for human rights abuses when he's the one
committing them? 2. Sudan is a bitch to enter, exit or traverse. Bashir
wants it that way. a. there's a snowball's chance in hell of Bashir
actually granting a UN official an entry visa into Sudan b. if an entry
visa does happen to be granted, well, don't expect to leave Khartoum.
c. Darfur is hell and gone from Khartoum, and just from a quick peek at
the Michelin map of Sudan that I have hanging on my wall, there are
only four main roads that lead into Darfur. And that's it. Roads, I
might mention, that are strictly in government held territory, where
the army roams around with actual goddamn Kalashnikovs, just hoping to
shoot someone, you know, since there's not as much action in the South
anymore. Are you actually trying to tell me that you wouldn't soil your
UN blue undies, Mr. Inspector, if by some strange twist of fate you
actually did manage to make it to Darfur? 3. This whole exercise in
logic is moot because Bashir doesn't want you talking to people who
might say unflattering things about him and his army. And no one will
say anything unflattering about him and his army because, if they had a
choice about it, they'd prefer to live, thank you ever so much.
The UN and the UNHCR: a modern comedy of errors. Unfortunately, their
blindness to the impracticalities of their ways mean people die. It's
not very funny, is it? I do wonder though. How many people have had to
die or were maimed, raped, tortured and abused simply because the UN
passed a resolution and didn't do anything to actually resolve the
issue? Do you think that for all the statisticians they employ at the
UN, the WHO, the UNHCR, UNICEF and the like, that someone has actually
tallied it up?

--- Aha. I always wondered

--- Aha. I always wondered what this was.

And now you know, too.

That's why you love this site, right? Because I never fear to edumacate y'all.

--- Apparently I have a

--- Apparently I have a life span of sixty-six years.

Interesting. My life is apparently half gone because of my chosen profession.

Kaufman has also studied poets and mental illness. "What I found was pretty consistent with the death finding
actually, female poets were much more likely to suffer from mental illness (e.g., be hospitalized, commit suicide, attempt
suicide) than any other kind of writer and more likely than other eminent women," he said.
"I've dubbed this the 'Sylvia Plath Effect."'

Sylvia Plath was a poet and novelist who killed herself in 1963 at the age of 30.

So, if female poets are subject to the Sylvia Plath effect, why can't female novelists be subject to the Agatha Christie effect?

Or do you, as a writer, only get to live to a ripe old age of eighty-five if you write mysteries?

--- Woolgathering. Feel free to

--- Woolgathering. Feel free to skip on by, if you so choose.
I'm really glad I'm not a Supreme Court Justice.I
have absolutely no idea how to tackle this one, but I do realize it's
important that someone---namely the court---suss this one out. Habeas
Corpus has been suspended. Citizens of this country---no matter how
nasty they might be---have been categorized as enemy combatants, but
instead of being tried for treason, they sit in jail cells, waiting for
the end of the war. And they belong there. In the Sunday paper, I was
treated to this article about
Jose Padilla. Jose does not sound like a very nice guy to me. He's
already murdered. He's familiar with firearms. He apparently has a
problem with law enforcement. That's his criminal side, but his
personal side is no different. He's an opportunist. He marries for not
for what he can give, but for what he can get. He mooches off his
mother, family members, his mosque. He lives in Egypt for a good long
time, hooks up with another woman before he divorces his neglected
wife, then decides to take a trip home. He deplanes in Chicago---and
because Abu Zubaydah ratted him out, he's captured and now sits in
jail. Classifed as an enemy combatant, despite the fact he's a citizen
of this country. Yaser Hamdi is also a citizen. Born here while his dad
was working in Louisiana. But he was raised in the Kingdom. He was
captured in Afghanistan by Allied troops and has been sitting in a brig
in South Carolina for the past two years. Neither of these men are
great people. You could call them any number of names, of which
"traitor" would be the most obvious choice. Yet, you have to ask, why,
if they're citizens, aren't they being allowed their Constitutionally
protected right to a speedy trial? But the government hasn't done that.
It's kept them locked up, without access to counsel for a time, and
it's said that if they were to have access to the legal system it would
be detrimental to the war on terror. The government, of course, has a
point. We are at war. The Executive branch does have to make hard
calls---this being one of them. I don't presume to know better than the
people in charge what is and isn't necessary when it comes to gathering
intelligence by means of interrogation. I just don't know, but neither
am I going to automatically assume that because there isn't any
regulation that, of course this means that there is
a car battery, a bucket of water and a pair of jumper cables involved.
There is middle ground. If, for instance, Hamdi had committed treason
against his home country, Saudi Arabia, he'd be dead by now. Beheaded.
They still do things old school in the Kingdom. I'd like to think the
US is a little more evolved that that. All these men are being deprived
of is their freedom. What they would choose to do with that freedom is
the issue under debate. I don't know how to resolve this one. It's a
damn good thing I'm not Solomon, because I sure as hell don't feel very
wise about this issue. They're citizens of this country: no matter what
they did, they deserve access to a speedy trial. If by their
citizenship, they have betrayed the country to which they are
traditionally supposed to be aligned, treason should be rather easy to
prove. Send them off to trial, find them guilty or not, but let the
system do the work it was intended to do. That's the way the founding
fathers set the gig up in the first place. But I also think that we need to make sacrifices, and our
liberty is one of the areas where sacrifices will need to be made for
the greater good. I don't think this has ever been more apparent than
now, with this war. But many people refuse to see this. They refuse to
acknowledge that we are, indeed, at war and that has a greater capacity
to harm our country than these two bozos ever will. These men
surrendered their liberty the minute they started playing for the other
side. Why should they get access to a fair trial, if it's in the best
interest for all of us that they stay exactly where they are
until the end of the war? I don't know and I'm no further in coming to
a better understanding of this issue than I was when I started
pondering deeply on this whole thing.

--- Kofi, don't get me

--- Kofi, don't get me started again.

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan says
the former head of the U.N.-run oil-for-food programme will cooperate
with an investigation into charges of bribes and kickbacks from Saddam
Hussein's government.
The name of Benon Sevan, an undersecretary-general, was discovered in a
document that alleged he had received payment in the form of an oil
allotment. Sevan has denied the charge.
"He should and will be available for the investigation, and we are
discussing how to make sure that he will be available," Annan told
reporters on Thursday. "If U.N. staff are found to be guilty, we will
deal with them very severely."

Sounds reasonable, doesn't it? I suppose so. Until you read further and get to this.

Annan said that if the Iraqi government sold oil outside the programme, this was not necessarily the fault of the U.N.

Lemme see if I've got this straight, Kofi. IF
the Iraqi government sold oil outside of the programme, this wasn't the
UN's fault. That's what you're saying? Well, far be it from me to point
out that the sanctions limiting Saddam from selling his oil to regular
buyers until he disarmed were set up by the UN in the first place.
After all, you set up the Oil For Food program to make sure that the
oil revenues would go to the people, rather toward lining Saddam's
pockets, right? This is what the whole frigging thing was there for in
the first place, right? Apparently, however, it's not the UN's fault
that some oil slipped out through the various cracks and crevices in
the scheme. Pffft. We can't hold the much vaunted UN responsible for
that, can we? We all know that organization has its limitations to be sure.

Let me point one thing out to you my dear Secretary General: it is the UN's fault. You set up the schema, don't expect to weasel out of the blame when the shit hits the fan.

"If the Iraqi government has smuggled oil and done all sorts of
things, I don't think it is fair to lump it all together and blame the
U.N. and the secretariat because there are things that were definitely
beyond our control," he said.
What sort of management system do you use at the UN, Kofi? Are you a
micromanager or are you a hands-off kind of guy? Do you run tight
meetings, where an agenda is laid out and is effectively covered in a
short period of time, or are you one of those managers who just sits
people around a table for a pow-wow that lasts forever? Do you praise
your employees sparingly, or do you really lay it on thick? What sort
of manager are you, Kofi, when you say "I
don't think it is fair to lump it all together and blame the U.N. and
the secretariat because there are things that were definitely beyond
our control," or doesn't the buck stop with you? You didn't have
control over things? What a shocker. You were supposed to be in control
of things. You set up the schema, it was your responsibility to make
sure it was run effectively---even if you delegated---because, ahem,
you're the boss. That's your responsibility.

Annan said "what has been lost" is the aid provided to Iraqis. "Every household was touched."
You're pulling the "I'm sorry for your half million dead because I
couldn't pull my head out of my ass in enough time to help" Rwanda
bullshit again, aren't you? Asshat. You are a sick, sick man, Kofi. A
very sick and awful man. God help you when you get to the afterlife,
Kofi. God should know better than to help you. It's not His
responsibility after all to make sure you get into heaven. He's just
the boss. What does he know about what his employees do? Would someone
please fire this horrific excuse for a man? Would that really be too
much to ask?

--- Ok, so I'm a

--- Ok, so I'm a wee bit late on this one, but what the hell.

Sullivan sez:
"The anti-gay backlash is in full swing in Iowa..." and then links to
this story. I hate to tell you this Sully, but there never was any
organized sort of movement to push forward gay rights in Iowa to begin
with. Hence, there can't be a backlash against it. This is par for the
course.
I lived there for six years. I know these things. In fact, I was there
for this: Jonathan Wilson was appointed by Democrat Gov. Tom Vilsack to
serve on the board. Wilson served on the school board in Des Moines for
12 years but lost re-election in 1995 after publicly announcing earlier
in the year that he was gay.
This guy represented my neighborhood in the school district. Not like I
voted in the school district elections at that point in my life,
because---honestly---I couldn't have cared less about the school
district. There aren't a goodly number of gay people in Iowa and if
there are it's because they're closeted and I don't know about them. A
pretty homogenous state, is Iowa. There are gays and lesbians, you just
have to know how to identify them. You can take a coastal definiton
like "sensible shoes" and apply it to every woman you meet in Iowa and
pick out who the lesbians are. Everyone---male
or female---wears sensible shoes. You have to look a little deeper, or
maybe you just have to look at what was staring you in the face the
whole time, but you never thought anything of it. You know what I'm
talking about, right? That bachelor uncle who takes a lot of trips to
Chicago. The spinster aunt who lives with "a very good friend." These
are the majority of the gays and lesbians you hear about in Iowa. There
was a big brouhaha about Wilson's sexuality. And everyone was up in
arms about it.
But it wasn't about the fact he was gay. It was that he was open and
honest about it. It was that he was "out" that was the problem.
Conversations went a lot like this, well, I don't personally think there's anything wrong with it, but honestly...
I think you get where I'm going with this. People in Iowa, for the most
part, aren't comfortable with homosexuality. Back in my day there was
one gay bar in Des Moines. "The Blazing Saddle." The place was packed
every weekend. I used to drive by it every day on my way back from my
court runs on the east side of the river. It was a tidy, nondescript
place with the usual neon beer signs in the window and it was about
three blocks away from the cop shop and one block away from City Hall.
Although there weren't any drag shows, it didn't look "scary," either.
But unlike here in the Cities---where no one has any reservations about
going to the Gay 90's for an evening out---no one would have gone there
unless you paid them. Particularly the straight males. It was like this
when the husband and I lived in Des Moines. And it was like that when
we lived in Ames and attended Iowa State. Being gay isn't a scandal.
Being out is. The husband could tell you all about this one: he grew up
there and scandale happened in his smallish town when the pastor of his
family's church came out. Turns out, if I'm remembering correctly, he'd
been having an affair with another man/or it was something like he went
to Iowa City or Cedar Rapids all the time and had "illicit" hookups. I
don't know. I can't really remember. Anyway, the pastor left the
church. He divorced his wife, who subsequently became the minister of
their church. Then
he moved to Des Moines, became a hairdresser became HIV positive and
died as a result. It's pretty apparent that no one would have had a
problem with the pastor's homosexuality if he'd stayed firmly shut in
the closet and kept on living the lie; what was a problem was when he
caused the scandale of the decade by coming out. Remember the Bridges of Madison County?
Same deal. Scandale is a no-no. Discretion's a big thing in Iowa.
Wilson's problem is that he isn't discreet about his homosexuality. But
it's not like the local chapter of the ACLU is going to come running to
his defense. They didn't the last time, if I'm remembering correctly,
because it's completely legal in Iowa to discriminate against someone
for their sexual orientation. The only reason I remember this is
because of my tenure on Government of the Student Body. My senior year,
I was the executive assistant to the Prez/VP and I took the minutes at
the senate meetings, so basically my role was equivalent to
masturbation without the payoff---I was there for hours, but I never
had a say because I wasn't elected to GSB. One night the senate went
round and round for hours
about a resolution supporting---and let me try to remember to get this
straight---equal housing benefits for same sex couples. You see, the
university had married housing. If you were a student and you were
married, you had the option to live in on-campus apartments set up for
married students. Given the fact this was over ten years ago, you're
probably saying Wow. It sounds like they were really ahead of their time!
Well, no, we weren't. It was legal for University---a Land Grant
university, operated with state funding---to follow the course of
action they were already taking. They weren't legally obligated to do
anything about it. It was a complete non-starter that level. And then
you have to take into account this was a non-binding resolution being
offered up in the student senate. A student senate who certainly didn't
have any power to do anything other than allocate the student fees the
administration hadn't already laid claim to. Which student organization
got the biggest share of the student fee pie? you ask. The hockey team.
Because the athletic department wouldn't sponsor them. So, there was
very little point to having this debate in the first place. But have a
debate we did because J.L. (I will never forget that guy) sponsored a
resolution on behalf of the GLBT student group. Man, did the arguments
fly forth that night. And just about every single one of debators began
with well, I don't think there's anything wrong with it, but...
The resolution was eventually voted in, not because people approved of
it, but because the debate had raged for hours and they were tired.
Senate meetings were held once a week and they went until they were
done. I remember the President of the Student Body---my pal
Hammy---being very cheesed about this vote. When it was done, and I was
packing up to go home, he kept asking me if my senators had voted the
way I wanted them to. He was pissed that people just caved and voted
'yes' because they were so tired. I remember telling him to put a sock
in it because I was tired and he needed to walk me home as it was close
to two in the morning. Hammy felt the senate let him down that night.
He wanted a resolution that resolved something; what he got was almost
unanimous consensus because people didn't want to talk about it
anymore. Then again, Hammy was from Chicago. He was ahead of his time;
he was already at the hearts and mind stage of the debate. Iowa, like
every other state, has been dragged into the hearts and minds stage of
this debate because of the controversy surrounding the issue of same
sex marriage and how its been played in the press. Contrary to popular
opinion, they do have CNN in Des Moines. The only problem is that
Iowans value discretion too highly to ever move past their reluctance
to accept gays and lesbians for who they are, and allow them to live
their life in the open without fear or adverse effects. And gays and
lesbians in Iowa, for the most part, value their discretion too highly,
too. I hate to say this, because I don't think anyone should be forced
or pressured to come out of the closet until they want to, but until
Iowan gays and lesbians come out in massive numbers and force people to
see around their prejudices, you will have snarky comments about "the
gay agenda" and perfectly qualified people being discriminated against
because of their sexual orientation.