July 01, 2005
Get ready for teh ugly.
"This is to inform you of my decision to retire from my position as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, effective upon the nomination and confirmation of my successor. It has been a great privilege indeed to have served as a member of the court for 24 terms. I will leave it with enormous respect for the integrity of the court and its role under our constitutional structure." - Sandra Day O'Connor
Bush replacing Rehnquist wouldn't have much changed the makeup of the court. O'Connor is often a swing vote, though, and the religious right has been quite open about what they expect: a hard-line anti-abortion nominee. If Bush goes that route, prepare for the mother of all nasty nomination battles.
Once a Tarheel, always a Tarheel.
I know the minutiae of the NBA draft will make most of my readers' eyes glaze over, but this is pretty funny.
George Karl and Julius Hodge already disagree about minutes. Not much of a surprise, considering one man is a Tar Heel and the other a member of the Wolfpack. Karl, the Denver Nuggets' head coach who played at North Carolina, doesn't plan on giving a rookie any significant playing time next season. Hodge, the N.C. State graduate who Kiki Vandeweghe selected with the No. 20 pick in Tuesday's NBA Draft, expects to contribute right away.
"Coach Karl, I'm not going to hold it against him being a North Carolina guy," Hodge said. "I played four years of college basketball, I'm young at 21, but I'm definitely experienced. I'm NBA ready."
The Nuggets, who went 32-8 after Karl took over in January, believe they are ready to contend for a Northwest Division title and a top-three seed in the Western Conference playoffs. Which explains why they used the rest of the draft to stockpile players with little experience but plenty of "potential." [...]
"I don't think we would have picked a Duke guy," Karl said when asked about acquiring a player from N.C. State. "They're a second-class citizen of the ACC. We accept that they do develop players once in a while and have good teams."
On Tobacco Road, old allegiances do not die. In case you've ever wondered why Duke-hating is such a widely popular national pastime, here's the Anti-Duke Manifesto.
Off
This afternoon, I'm making the long drive down to Hilton Head Island for a spell of getting drunk and watching alligators so no apostrophizing from me for the next week or so. Froz has been threatening to start posting here again (yay!) now that he and his family are all settled into their new home and new routines, but I've no clue whether that will commence before I return. I know the comments are still returning 500-type errors when you post them. Sorry 'bout that, but my hosting company is lame (and soon to be replaced). If you refresh the main page, they should still show up.
Anyhow, no parties in the house while I'm gone and stay out of the wine cabinet or you'll be grounded when I get back.
June 30, 2005
How to get ahead in advertising.
It seemed like a good idea at the time...
For $10,000 and a brighter future for her son, Kari Smith on Wednesday became a real life pop-up ad for a virtual casino.
"It feels like someone is taking a pin and just stabbing you with it," Smith told her son, Brady, seated nearby on the floor as tattoo artist Don Brouse — in permanent black block letters — branded her forehead with the Web site domain GoldenPalace.com.
The 30-year-old Bountiful mother, who put the space up for auction on the Web, will be promoting the multinational gambling site, which makes the claim — using a little more color and a lot more flash — to be the No. 1 online casino. [...]
Smith said she talked to several companies and received multiple offers, but she decided Goldenpalace.com would be the best choice.
"We decided to go with these guys because they work with a lot of charities," she said. "I want this to mean something." [oh, it means something alright, just not what you think -'r]
Jon Wolf of the company's marketing department said skin is not an uncommon spot for the casino to advertise: It already has another forehead, more than 100 arms, legs, chests and backs.
Mm-hmm. In case you don't remember, Golden Palace is the same outfit that ponied up to name the titi monkey. Of course, it's her body and she can do with it whatever she likes, but something tells me the closing sentence of the article will prove to contain two very poor predictions.
Smith said she doesn't think she'll ever regret having the permanent logo on her forehead, and her son promised to get good grades.
No, you probably won't regret it any one of the next 500 unsuccessful job interviews. Also, promises from 11-year-olds have a great track record. I don't have 10 grand, but I'll pay for the tattoo if anybody wants to get "APOSTROPHER.COM" on your forehead. First come, first serve.
The good news archive.
The White House has put up a very helpful page to remind everybody of the extensive history of good news from Iraq.
(mailed to me by a co-worker, but it looks like No More Mr. Nice Blog spotted it first)
We're gonna need a bigger skillet.
Grizzly Bear-Size Catfish Caught in Thailand
Nearly nine feet long and 646 pounds, it's the largest freshwater fish ever caught. The link up there has a gallery of pictures.
Is this thing on?
Wutchoo talkin' 'bout, Willis?
Thinking he was sending an e-mail to an aide, Assemblyman Willis Stephens instead sent a note to nearly 300 constituents, making the following comment on their listserv: "Just watching the idiots pontificate." In the message, meant for aide Beth Coursen, Stephens wrote that he subscribes to the Brewster-based online discussion group to monitor area happenings, but he doesn't post messages.
Usually.
The accidental note went out early Monday morning. Within an hour, Stephens sent another e-mail apologizing for the first one. "To all who read and post on this group, I honestly enjoy reading most of what is exchanged on this site and do not direct my indiscreet characterizations to anyone in particular or to the group in general," he wrote. "In fact, now I most closely resemble the type of poster I described."
When reached for comment Tuesday, Stephens said he was embarrassed and reiterated what he said in his e-mailed apology. Michael Santos, a Brewster resident and Democratic village trustee who created the discussion group, said he's a longtime political adversary of Stephens. Stephens has called him a lot worse than a pontificating idiot, Santos said, laughing.
Oh, to have been a fly on Stephens' wall when that message appeared on the board.
June 29, 2005
June 28, 2005
Bizarre and irresponsible conspiracy theories.
Flash back to last August, when Bush administration officals (and their token Democratic lapdog) were outraged, outraged, that Howard Dean accused the Bush administration of having political motivations for the seemingly endless string of color-coded terror alerts.
Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut went so far as to say "nobody in their right mind" would believe that Bush would "scare people for political reasons."
Vice President Dick Cheney shot back directly Wednesday at a campaign rally in Missouri. "There have been some commentary from some of our critics -- Howard Dean comes immediately to mind -- saying somehow that this is being hyped for political reasons, that the data that we collected here, the casing reports that provided the information on these prospective attacks, is old data, four or five years old. That just tells me that Howard Dean doesn't know anything about how these groups operate." [...]
Responding to Dean's latest assertion, Bush campaign spokesman Terry Holt dismissed him as a "bizarre conspiracy theorist. This shameful display of angry partisanship from Howard Dean is more of the angry face of the Democratic Party, and it's not helping us win the war on terror."
Yeah, that nutjob Howard Dean. Care to guess how many terror alerts have been announced in the eight months since the election? Here's a hint: you can count them on no hands. Since "nobody in their right mind" could have believed that Bush would try to scare people into voting for him, I can only assume that we must have already won the war on terror, right?
(Gr)assailant
I can't quite put my finger on it, but something in this story leads me to think this fellow isn't headed for a successful career as a criminal.
A 22-year-old man was wrestled to the ground in the Germantown Police Department Friday afternoon after threatening a dispatcher with a glass bong and a shotgun, police said. The man walked into the department and handed a threatening note to the dispatcher at a her window around 5 p.m., police said. As she read the note, he threw a glass bong at the bulletproof glass, police said. The bong shattered, but the window did not. He then pulled out a shotgun, but three officers using a taser and pepper spray were able to subdue him, police said.
"And if anybody tries to stop me, I'll temporarily blind 'em with a cloud of smoke and then poke their eyes out with my one-hitter."
What do we win?
During the last days before we invaded Iraq, I had several conversations with different people who stated that they had opposed the war, but that since we had committed to the action, "we can't afford to lose." My question at the time was: what would we lose? A long pause invariably followed. Thanks to the jackhammer-like repetition of that phrase in the media (and lord knows we were all watching a lot of it at the time), it felt like a question with obvious answers, yet they weren't obvious enough, at least, to be cited easily or in a straightforward fashion. Most of the answers tended to be variations on one of three themes:
- Threatening to use force then backing down would be a sign of weakness, emboldening other bad actors and reducing our ability to project force elsewhere.
- We had spent thirty billion dollars enforcing the no-fly zones over the previous dozen years, and we simply couldn't do that forever.
- Well, there's no doubt he has the weapons, so this is our one chance to eliminate them.
The last one really doesn't need commentary at this point. The first one makes a certain intuitive sense, but by invading and finding ourselves badly undermanned, poorly received, and unable to provide anything resembling security, we've achieved exactly the same state, but on an entirely larger scale. We're more or less tapped out militarily and if anything, we've managed to forge better ties among formerly competing bad actors by presenting a nice, easily identifiable common enemy. In fact, we've established Jihad University.
As to the second, we'll soon have spent ten times that amount in less than three years and we're nowhere near the end of the bill. This Rumsfeld quote led most news outlets today:
The insurgency could go on for any number of years. Insurgencies tend to go on five, six, eight, 10, 12 years. Coalition forces, foreign forces are not going to repress that insurgency. We're going to create an environment that the Iraqi people and the Iraqi security forces can win.
I'm filing this one under E for "even a stopped clock," since the first three sentences are absolutely true. Oooh, but he should have stopped while he was ahead. It's nice that Ibrahim al-Jaafari says that two years will be more than enough time to achieve this, but I doubt he believes it. We've been there a little over two years and still haven't managed to secure the seven-mile road from the Green Zone to the airport.
So, the things we'd have lost by not invading, we have lost quite more severely by invading. A few other things have been lost, too: nearly 2000 Coalition soldiers, hundreds of contractors, thousands of Iraqi army conscripts, tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians, our moral compass*, our sense of community, and much of the world's goodwill.
Yet, for all that, we remain stuck hip-and-shoulder-deep in this Mesopotamian tarbaby, with the usual suspects screeching treason at all the liberal underminers who don't stand and cheer at how hard we punched that gooey bastard. I still think pulling out is the least bad of our options, but make no mistake: it's bad, and I don't share Professor Cole's optimism about the feasibility of an international force. However, if one organizing principle exists within the Bush administration, it is never admit you're wrong. Accordingly, I expect us to muddle along toward no discernible goal for the duration. Unless, of course, they really are insane, and that has yet to be disproven.
Flogging this horse may be bad form, but more than a few of us pointed out that entering Iraq would result in being stuck in a situation we couldn't control with no good options, an utterly sensible and obvious position that was derided as a bunch of commie hippie loserism by "responsible" Republicans and Democrats alike. I'm used to hearing that, so it wasn't exactly a surprise, but seeing retrospectively how the commie hippie loser brigade has happened to be right, oh, about 90% of the time in regards to expeditionary wars, you'd think the triumphalists would at least dial the volume back a bit and hedge their bets. You'd be wrong, of course, but you'd think it because you want to believe in the basic intelligence of your fellow citizens as badly as the War Party wants to believe in the omnipotence of American military might. Turns out we're both blinkered optimists in our own special, self-deluded ways.
So, if you still think we need to stay, sans timetable, until we "win," the question now is what do we win? Or rather, what milestone that remains in the province of the feasible would constitute a win?
*Man, can anybody look straight at you and lie - when he knows you know he's lying - like Alberto Gonzalez? "[T]he United States would never send terrorism suspects to countries where they would be tortured." Ladies and gentlemen, meet your next Supreme Court justice. He's gonna fit right in.
June 23, 2005
Free Trade
One of China's largest state-controlled oil companies made a $18.5 billion unsolicited bid for Unocal today, launching the first-ever big takeover battle by a Chinese company for an American corporation. The bold bid, by the China National Offshore Oil Corp., may be a watershed in Chinese corporate behavior, and it demonstrates the increasing influence of Wall Street's bare-knuckled hostile takeover tactics in Asia. The offer is also the latest symbol of China's growing economic clout and of the soaring ambitions of its corporate giants, particularly when it comes to the energy resources it needs desperately to continue feeding the nation's huge growth.
CNOOC's bid, which comes two months after Unocal agreed to be sold to Chevron for $16.4 billion, is expected to trigger a potentially costly bidding war over the California-based Unocal, a large independent American oil company. Moreover, the bid is likely to provoke a fierce debate in Washington, D.C., about the nation's trade policies with China and the role of the two governments in the growing trend of deal making between companies in both countries.
Wow.
June 22, 2005
This is only a test.
You can safely ignore this post. I'm just seeing if the "fix" my hosting company implemented actually fixed anything.
Okay, everything seems to be working properly now, though God knows I've said that many, many times before only to have it rear its ugly head again. Please let me know if any of you get the dreaded 500 error when trying to post a comment.
Update: Nope. Still broken.
STFU
Could somebody please explain to me how this is not a call for fascism? I thought you were never going to trust this administration again, you pompous asshat.
Honey, I shrunk the Brits!
"When it was on display in Rome two homeless people were said to have lived underneath it."
Tastes like chicken.
Police say a man who woke up with a serious headache walked 12 blocks to a hospital with a swollen lip and powder burns. Doctors discovered the problem. 47-year-old Wendell Coleman had a bullet lodged in his tongue. Coleman told police that a woman stuck a gun barrel in his mouth during a dispute around 2:30 Tuesday morning and that he heard the gun go off. Police say Coleman then went home to sleep.
How drunk would you have to be?
My anaconda don't want none...
The thread is old, so some of the pictures have disappeared and you may have already seen it, but this Photoshop contest is awfully damn funny. Two warnings:
1. It runs for 50 pages or so, and I stopped at about page 25 last night as the quality was beginning to dip. Perhaps it got better from there, perhaps not. Your mileage may vary.
2. If an exposed butt is a violation for wherever you are surfing, well, there's an exposed butt in pretty much every picture.
True, true.
Roy Edroso is "throwing a meme" (duck!) and invites us all to join him in the warm, soothing muck.
The theme is quotes. We all have favorites, but I'm going to pitch this high and inside. I would like to know what your truest quotes are. Let me explain. Some quotes you like because they're poetic or amusing or charming. They sound good to you. Some, though, stick with you because they really reflect your beliefs, and have done so through whatever life experiences you've had.
The true-quotes become obvious when you think about them in that light. You realize that these little scraps of mental paper have become your watchwords, the identifying labels on your ego. To name them is not always a pleasing thing, I have found, because those labels usually floated onto your ego long ago and only stuck because you never cared to brush them off. They have the persistence of habits, and most habits are bad. So they sting to note. But that sting is what makes this such an elevating enterprise!
Okay, I'm game, though I'll probably update this post about thirty times through the day as they occur to me.
"Most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be." - Abraham Lincoln
"To disagree with three-fourths of the [American] public is one of the first requisites of sanity." - Oscar Wilde, who actually said it about the British public.
"Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard." - H.L. Mencken
"All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." - Edmund Burke
"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter." - Martin Luther King, Jr.
"Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons." - Bertrand Russell
"Patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels." - Samuel Johnson
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." - George Bernard Shaw
"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts." - Bertrand Russell
"When ideas fail, words come in very handy." - Goethe
Cheech & Chong Confectioners, Ltd.
How many licks does it take...
Marijuana-flavored lollipops with names such as Purple Haze, Acapulco Gold and Rasta are showing up on the shelves of convenience stores around the country, angering anti-drug advocates.
"It's nothing but dope candy, and that's nothing we need to be training our children to do," said Georgia state Sen. Vincent Fort, who has persuaded some convenience stores to stop selling the treats.
The confections are legal, because they are made with hemp oil, a common ingredient in health food, beauty supplies and other household products. The oil imparts a marijuana's grassy taste but not the high. [...]
"There are more than 70 million people in the United States who smoke marijuana. We're catering to the audience of people who are in that smoking culture," said Rick Watkins, marketing director for Corona, Calif.-based Chronic Candy, which uses the slogan "Every lick is like taking a hit." An Atlanta company called Hydro Blunts markets a similar product under the name Kronic Kandy, which is made in the Netherlands.
Being, uhhh, somewhat acquainted with said grassy taste, I don't really think kids will be lining up for these any more than they would line up for rutabaga roll-ups. Hemp oil has precisely zero psychoactive properties (though it can still produce positive drug tests), so the big foofaraw is only about marijuana imagery in stores that usually sell alcohol, tobacco, and pornography alongside the gas, Slim Jims, and crappy coffee. Please, moralists, if you absolutely must get your panties in a wad (and clearly you're not happy otherwise), go find something worth the effort. You could at least focus on the dope that actually kills people.
June 21, 2005
Way to go, Cap'n FactCheck!
In what is perhaps the most unintentionally funny post in the history of the internet, Marc at USSNeverMindDock has decreed that the odious, ultra-right, gay-bashing "Reverend" Fred Phelps is part of the liberal, Communist-Democrat treason brigade. Sorry, dude, but he's one of yours. I especially recommend the comments section. The most delicious irony, however, comes in his update, after his ass has been handed to him.
And what are they all upset about? Are they upset about a deranged protest at a military funeral? Do they denounce this lunatic? Nope.
Hmm. Not from around here, are you? A quick trip through google will show you that lefty denunciations of Reverend Phelps are about as common as sand on a beach. Enjoy your fifteen minutes of fame, Ms. Litella.
Update: I would give a via link for this, but my head exploded upon the first reading, so I don't recall how exactly I arrived at it and now it's being linked all over. Oliver Willis appears to have spotted it first, though, so I'll give him the credit.
June 20, 2005
And the world will live as one.
Subway stations in South Korea are often decorated at different times of the year with children's art projects - fire safety, future jobs, home life, technology, and so on. The theme of this one appears to be "Fuck Japan!"
(via GoodieBagTV)
Body counts.
Pretty regularly, the news aggregators will fill up with stories about this or that operation in Iraq in which x number of insurgents were killed and y number arrested. Given that journalists are unable to venture much beyond the Green Zone in Baghdad for fear of their lives, these numbers are generally coming directly from CentCom headquarters without verification. That should be reason enough to take them with a grain of salt. A much more disturbing reason is shown in the following before and after pictures, where RPGs magically appear beside dead bodies.
Warning: the linked page contains many pictures of bullet-riddled teenaged corpses.
The Moon Illusion
I've seen it before, you probably have too: for a few nights out of the summer, the moon appears freakishly huge when it rises. Here's the science behind it, and I wasn't aware that a camera will record the moon at normal size, not bizarrely inflated as we will see it. This is the week to watch for it in North America, and the full moon on Wednesday will hang "lower in the sky than any full moon since June 1987, so the Moon Illusion is going to be extra strong." American moonrise times can be found here. (via MeFi)
Abstract Chimpressionism
It's not quite typing the complete works of Shakespeare, but still...
Monkey business proved to be lucrative Monday when paintings by Congo the chimpanzee sold at auction for more than $25,000. The three abstract, tempera paintings were auctioned at Bonhams in London alongside works by impressionist master Renoir and pop art provocateur Andy Warhol. But while Warhol's and Renoir's work didn't sell, bidders lavished attention on Congo's paintings. [...] Congo, born in 1954, produced about 400 drawings and paintings between ages 2 and 4. He died in 1964 of tuberculosis.
Andy Warhol, chimpanzee
Can't tell 'em apart at a-a-a-all.
Two legs bad, four legs good.
Six legs, very good.
A puppy with six legs and two penises was found sleeping outside a Chinese temple in a Malaysian town, and devotees are treating the freak find as a good omen, a news report said Sunday. [...] Devotees feel that the unusual dog is a bearer of good fortune and have named him Ong Fatt, or the Lucky One.
When I was growing up, the NC State Fair's sideshow had a five-legged dog that was there year after year. If I recall correctly, you paid fifty cents to look at it. Can't say that the ticket-takers ever seemed to be possessed of much extra luck.
Update: In the comments, GeoX provides the picture! Looks like a puppy with another puppy jammed up its butt.
Die müllet ist nicht verboten.
German soldiers will now allowed to sport mullets and ponytails after a Bavarian court ruled differing hair regulations for male and female recruits to be "unconstitutional" and "incomprehensible." The ruling came in a case where an 18-year-old recruit was fined 150 euro and jailed for refusing to cut his 10 inch ponytail.
The fact that female soldiers could get away with wearing a wider range of hairdos as long as they didn't interfere with the correct placement of the hat was unfair, the soldier argued. It meant he didn't have the same freedom to develop his personality as the women.
Mmm-kay. What I would really love to see is a mullet brigade wearing Pickelhauben. That would rock.
Google will eat itself.
Clever. Put google text ads on a web page and create a script that simulates human clicks. Another program deposits all the money made from the clicks into an e-banking account that automatically buys shares of google. Rinse, repeat as necessary. (via Sensory Impact)
Tranny crab!
National Geographic has the photo. The fishermen who caught it named it Springer.
"It's a phenomenon known as bilateral gynandromorphy, and it's been observed in butterflies, moths, and lobsters. Each half has all the characteristics of its gender, right down to divided reproductive organs. It's caused when the two halves develop separately due to a genetic error early in the process of cell division."
June 19, 2005
The power of Christ compels you!
Well now, here's a story you don't see every day.
A Romanian nun has died after being bound to a cross, gagged and left alone for three days in a cold room in a convent, Romanian police have said. Members of the convent in north-west Romania claim Maricica Irina Cornici was possessed and that the crucifixion had been part of an exorcism ritual. Cornici was found dead on the cross on Wednesday after fellow nuns called an ambulance, according to police. [...]
Police say the 23-year-old nun, who was denied food and drink throughout her ordeal, had been tied and chained to the cross and a towel pushed into her mouth to smother any sounds. A post-mortem is to be carried out, although initial reports say that Cornici died from asphyxiation. [...]
Father Daniel who is accused of orchestrating the crime is said to be unrepentant. "God has performed a miracle for her, finally Irina is delivered from evil," AFP quoted the priest as saying. "I don't understand why journalists are making such a fuss about this."
Yeah, really. What's so weird about priests crucifying nuns?
June 18, 2005
Money, meet mouth.
Jesus' General is organizing Operation Yellow Elephant.
Objective: To motivate the College Republicans to vigorously defend the vital work they're doing defending the homefront by holding affirmative action bake sales, immigrant hunts, and subsidizing the Scaife funding of Ann Coulter, David Horowitz, and Michelle Malkin.
Method: Embarrass the College Republicans by challenging them to volunteer to fight in the war they demanded.
Excellent. If you live in the DC metro area, where their biennial convention will be held June 24-26, your orders are here. Everybody else, write the College Republican leadership and ask them to pass the following resolution:
WHEREAS, the College Republican membership has always fully supported the war in Iraq;
WHEREAS, we have encouraged the notion that the degree of one's patriotism is directly proportional to their support for the war;
WHEREAS, by word, by deed and by support of Ann Coulter, David Horowitz, and Michelle Malkin we have decreed that dissent against the war is the equivalent of treason;
WHEREAS, the military continually falls far short of meeting its recruitment needs resulting in a manpower crisis;
NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED THAT:
The College Republicans organization is officially disbanded until the end of the war;
BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED THAT:
The College Republicans membership immediately volunteer for military service as infantrymen.
Contact information is here and an excellent example is here. C'mon, tough guys. The military is desperate and we all know they can't count on a bunch of cowardly, treasonous, America-hating liberals to perform under pressure. Since most of us are queer anyhow, they won't even take us. So it's up to you, the best and the brightest, to help support the war you so loudly and vociferously insisted upon. Or was all that chest-pounding, finger-pointing, mine-is-bigger-than-yours patriotism just so many words devoid of any real conviction? Hmm?
Hooray for weekends!
"There is an ad for some Hyundai SUV that says, 'Leather seats impervious to spills and spit-up. Which also makes it perfect for Mom's night out.' Wow, 'Mom' has some wilder 'nights out' than we thought, if she is prone to urping up margaritas in the car."
I tell you, what these unruly kids today need is a good Times New Roman whacking.
The mob just ain't what it used to be.
In case you missed the first six thousand bloggers linking to them: Triumph the Insult Comic Dog at the Michael Jackson trial and the Best of Unnecessary Censorship.
Uh, no thanks, dude.
Random Shuffle on the iTunes:
"This Time Anything Finite at All" - Songs: Ohia
"Return of the G" - Outkast
"One Hit" - Suede
"Shock Body" - Talib Kweli
"Tempter" - Stereolab
"The Club Isn't Open" - East River Pipe
"Gone" - Doug Martsch
"Avalon" - Sigur Rós
"Worldwide" - Del tha Funkee Homosapien
"Serious" - Alice Cooper
