Convention of the Living Dead

Braaaaains!

"Most candidates take on the traditional campaign baby-eating contest reluctantly, but Bush is really starting to enjoy the work."

No... wire... hangers... EVER!!

World o' Crap riffs on a bit from an article about the Bush family dynamics down in (Joan) Crawford, Texas.

Here's some info on the program from an A.P. article:

Twins Jenna and Barbara Bush have no doubt about the secret to their father's success: their mother.

True enough. Because without Laura, it's likely that George would be passed out in a gutter somewhere. Or dead.

[Dr. Hibbert: If you want him to live through the night, I suggest you roll him onto his stomach.

Marge: Thank you, I will, Dr. Hibbert.

Dr. Hibbert: Remember, I said "if." ]

But let's read some more of the girls' tribute to their mother.

Their mother is "bizarrely clean," Jenna said. "And organized," Barbara added.

And animatronic!

For years their mother ordered their father to take off his shoes in the house, to the point that their father himself now points out if a towel lies on the floor.

"He always jokes that he would take off his shoes to walk on the carpet because he didn't want to mess up, like, the vacuum lines on the carpet," Barbara said.

No, Laura doesn't sound like she's wound too tight and is ready to snap at any moment. And the dynamics in that family sound perfectly healthy and wholesome. Yes, indeedy.

"Don't f*ck with me fellas. This ain't my first time at the rodeo."

Political fringe, meet lunatic fringe.

The Laroucheites are down in Harvard Square promoting Loony Lyndon's eighth run for president, according to Charles Dodgson, who spotted the following signs being carried:

• If Americans understood Beethoven, would George Bush be President?
• No algebraic formula can prove the necessary existence of five Platonic Solids!
• Only classical singing can get Bush and Cheney the fugue out of the White House.

and this rhetorical coup de grâce:

• If you can't double the cube, your degree is worthless.

It really is hard to beat the LaRouche folks for political humor. They don't much seem to be in on the joke, which, of course, doubles the yuks. Anyhow, just for fun, this is from the beginning of his address two weeks ago to his East Coast Cadre School, bearing the unassuming title, "This Planet Will Never Forget Me." The italics are from the original transcript.

All right, so, the three subjects are: First of all, how I changed history—all three of them—one, how I changed history from 1971 on; number two, how I changed world history, including causing the opportunity, which occurred in Germany, in Saxony, in 1989, which I caused in the period between 1977 and 1983. So, I made history.

You don't understand, what's happening in Saxony, today, in terms of what happened in Saxony in 1989, in the death of the D.D.R. [East Germany] unless you understand the combined effect of what I personally did, to change history in such a way, that these events have happened, in the way they've happened.

Short version: he and his wife Helga personally reunified Germany. And Schachtians are quackademics.

A little less crazy, but a much bigger stage: watch Alan Keyes flip out during a television interview. You know, as long as we're laughing at hopeless, nutball candidacies. I hereby declare the political silly season underway!

World Bog Snorkelling Championship

The World Bog Snorkelling Championship is being held today in Llanwrtyd Wells, Wales, the UK's smallest town.

The event is a time-trial, in which competitors, wearing mask, snorkel and flippers, must swim the length of a 60 yard trench, four foot-deep trench cut through a dense peat bog and back again to the start/finish line, a total distance of 120 yards in stinking bog water, without using conventional swimming strokes in the quickest time possible. For the first competitors the water is remarkably clean, but it soon becomes muddy and visibility is reduced to zero. The brave souls taking part also face sharp reeds poking from the sides of the trench and glue-like mud on the bottom.

And of course, peat bogs are filled with creepy crawlies, including leeches, water scorpions, and all manner of biting insects. It's not quite Fear Factor ("Was eating the reindeer testicles and 100-year-old eggnog a big accomplishment for you?"), but still: shudder. On the other hand, house prices around the bog-snorkel zone have risen about 30% over the past year thanks to the publicity, though you have to wonder what housing by a bog was going for previously.

Pyrrhic Victory

Guess she showed him.

"This is how you drive crazy," Victoria A. Zell allegedly told the two passengers in her sport-utility vehicle July 20 as she sped away from a SuperAmerica store in south Minneapolis. Minutes later, after speeding through a stop sign on 17th Av. S., Zell's vehicle crashed into a pickup truck at E. 46th St., according to criminal charges filed this week. Joshua Schmidt, 30, of Stillwater, who had been in the back seat of Zell's vehicle, was killed. Amity Dimock, 31, of Minneapolis, who was in the front seat, was permanently paralyzed. Zell stumbled away from the accident clutching her broken shoulder, witnesses said. She was later found lying in a patch of tall grass a few blocks away.

[...]

According to the court documents, Zell, Schmidt and Dimock left a bar together on July 20. Schmidt was driving, and he and Zell argued "about who could drive the craziest," the complaint said. They stopped at a SuperAmerica store at Cedar Av. S. and Minnehaha Pkwy., and Zell slid behind the wheel when Schmidt went in to buy ice cream. As they left, Zell accelerated and drove over the curb and boulevard, the complaint said. "This is how you drive crazy," she allegedly said. Police found Zell's vehicle rolled over onto the driver's side with Schmidt and Dimock trapped inside. The pickup driver was not injured.

(via The Obscure Store)

Update: She's a former Powerball winner, too.

Pretzel Logic

Putting the moron back in oxymoron.

In similar comments to Time magazine, published on Sunday, Mr. Bush called the insurgency the result of the "catastrophic success" of the military operation in the early days of the invasion. In both interviews, he took the position that victory was so swift that Mr. Hussein's loyalists had time to melt back into the cities and towns and re-emerge for the insurgency.

A "catastrophic success," you say? Hmm. The reason we are losing the war is that we won it too quickly. Okay. As for "Mr. Hussein's loyalists," one could hardly blame Moqtada al-Sadr for his loyalty after Saddam had his father and uncle murdered and forced Moqtada to go into hiding for four years.

So which is the case: is Bush really this stupid or does he think we are?

He has a message.

Three miles from the end of the men's marathon competition at the Olympics, a 57-year-old defrocked Irish priest ran out of the crowd and tackled the leader, Brazilian runner Vanderlei Lima, who ended up coming in third. The former priest, named Cornelius Horan, was wearing a red kilt with a green beret and green knee-high socks. Taped to his back was a piece of paper bearing the words: "The Grand Prix Priest Israel Fulfillment of Prophecy Says the Bible."

In July 2003, Horan, in a costume similar to Sunday's, ran onto the track at the British Grand Prix in the middle of the race and stayed there for more than 20 seconds, forcing Formula One racers traveling at more than 200 mph to swerve around him. He was carrying a sign that said: "Read the Bible - the Bible is always right." British authorities said Horan also attempted a protest on Wimbledon's Center Court during a rain break, and tried to disrupt cricket and rugby matches.

Maybe Horan will get to be cellmates with Rollen Stewart.

Aluminum Beer Bottles

You've got to be kidding me.

How much better is blogland at rapid response than Kerry's campaign? This much better. The Bush campaign has now officially become the undisputed heavyweight champion of up-is-downism. What chutzpah.

Sure, guys. Kerry has obviously a tool of the banks during his Senate career.

Next up: Bush denounces Kerry for being too beholden to Big Oil and fundamentalists.

And now for something completely different.

Meet Cuddles, the big-nosed, red, furry shark that hops like a frog.

New forms of marine life are usually found in such waters as those around the Great Barrier Reef or in the Red Sea. But a new species of "furry" shark, which hops like a frog rather than swims, has popped up in a German aquarium.

The 70-centimetre female shark, nicknamed Cuddles, is covered in red hairy bristles, has big nostrils and an extra gill that set her apart from the 405 known shark species. According to the many marine biologists who have flocked to inspect Cuddles, her fins are smaller but more muscular than those found on similar-sized sharks. She claps them together in order to hop across the bottom of her tank in the Sea Star aquarium in Coburg.

"She leaps over the seabed like a frog rather than swimming gracefully like most sharks," said Peter Faltermeer, a marine biologist and the aquarium's curator. [...] "This is the first time a totally new species of shark has been found, not in the wild but in a fish tank," he said. "It is amazing."

He believes that because Cuddles does not have sensory organs at the front of the head, as do other sharks, she uses the bristles that cover her from head to tail to provide an early warning of possible predators, or prey. "She lets algae grow without trying to rub it off, which is gradually turning the bristles bright red," said Mr Faltermeer. "We believe the bristles pick up movements in the water, and the algae help to thicken the bristles and lengthen them."

Unlike other sharks, the irises of Cuddles' eyes are fixed open. She also has very wide nostrils and a fifth gill to filter plankton. "Other sharks filter plankton, but these don't also chase fish," he said. "But Cuddles has a full set of teeth and the main ones are extraordinarily long. He believes the shark has adapted to hunting in the dark - probably in a cave rather than in deep water. Most of the biologists believe Cuddles came from somewhere around southern Africa. "The eyes that are not designed to cope with light, the all-body hair, the wide nostrils and the way she uses her fins more like legs, all indicate she is used to a dark cave environment."

Now they have to figure out where she is from, so that a male can be found to breed with her. When regular nurse sharks that share the tank with her laid eggs, she ate them.

Tuckered

Best kitten porn ever.

Full Immersion

I'm a thrill junky. However, I'm lazier than lazy, so anything that could be termed an extreme sport just doesn't make the agenda. Having mostly aged out of psychedelics, I generally feed my jones by being flung around by creaky metal machines. I'm a sucker for state fair rides, and ones that have a body count get bonus points. What I really love, though, are roller coasters. Oh god, how I love roller coasters.

I got it in my head to take the junior apostropher to either King's Dominion or Carowinds this weekend, since he gets the same thrill from the threat of cracked vertebrae and sprained shoulders. Unfortunately, the really boffo coasters have a minimum height requirement of 52 inches, and the little fellow tops out at 50. Instead, we went to the Emerald Pointe water park over in Greensboro for the day. It was shoulder-to-shoulder up in there and I had a flashback to a day about ten years ago.

My ex-wife (pre-ex at the time) and I had driven up to King's Dominion and it was crowded in a way I'd not seen previously. As soon as we stepped through the turnstiles, the first person I saw was Joe Smith, who had just finished up his basketball career at the University of Maryland and would soon be the first overall pick in the NBA draft. That was pretty cool. Looking around, the crowd seemed much, uh, blacker than usual. Not a problem, but you do notice. Turned out it was Black College Day at King's Dominion and judging by the lines for everything from rides to funnelcakes to urinals, every black college student on the eastern seaboard was there.

Well, as either luck or divine intervention would have it, today turned out to be Christian Youth Day at Emerald Pointe. Again, not a problem, but you do notice. Particularly when the soundstage in the center of the park (conveniently located where you can't help but hear it) is pumping out the whitest, least booty-shaking, Jesus-inspired soft rock you could imagine. They'd drop into unobtrusive grooves in the middle of songs while the singer gave earnest talks about the power of the lord and admitting you're a sinner and, appropriately enough, the cleansing waters of salvation. And all about us in line for the Double Barrel Blast or the Raging Rapids, folks would break out into applause in response. Then the band would swing back into the final impassioned chorus ("He bled for youuuuu-ah!"). I couldn't see the stage, but I pictured the singer with a squinched up face and his fist in the air at this point.

So it was strange. Fun, but strange. Despite my haphazard applications of SPF60 sunscreen (which, before today, I didn't know even existed - I figured burlap would only run about 57 or 58), my back and shoulders are burnt to a crisp. I'd like to say I had some deep insight gained by an entire day of marinating in pools with thousands of bright-eyed Christian youths, but the only real conclusion I came to was this: teenaged girls should wear bikinis every day.

"...mentally awake, and morally straight."

The Boy Scouts of America says homosexuals are out, but retarded inmates are just fine. Well, okay.

'Bout damn time.

With only three days left in National Catfish Month, I was beginning to think that maybe the catfish weren't really into the whole thing. I mean, no pride marches, no press releases, nothing. I haven't even seen a single catfish make the news. Wait - what's this I see?

Catfish Eats Dog

There we go. That's better. It was a dachsund, by the way.

Me too, love. Me too.

But for the cooking bit, this could well be my own obituary one day.

Cooking Diva Julia Child Loved Red Meat, Gin

Putting the virtue back in virtual.

And if you get sick of listening to her, just set her to vibrate.

A Hong Kong company has developed a "virtual girlfriend" for new cell phones with video capability. Artificial Life Inc.'s electronic love interest - sort of a Tamagotchi for adults - will appear as an animated figure on a telephone screen and respond by voice to text messages you send. But she'll require a lot of attention, involving virtual flowers and diamonds, company spokeswoman Ada Fong said. Though gifts are nothing but data, suitors will have to pay cold, hard cash.

Fong said prices have yet to be determined. If she's neglected, "she'll be unhappy and she won't talk to you," Fong added. Calling the game "suitable for all ages," Fong said the game won't allow sexual interaction.

Wouldn't that make her a virtual wife?

Well, whaddayaknow?

The White House has finally admitted that humans are responsible for the global warming of the past several decades (sidebar: Rush Limbaugh's head explodes). Press conferences are scheduled for just after the Republican National Convention to announce the White House's further admissions that species evolve and that the Earth is round and might just be older than 6,000 years after all. An official decision as to whether the sun is pulled across the sky by a chariot has been postponed pending further committee hearings. Now, you might be tempted to call the global climate change position switch a flip-flop. In fact, you might be tempted to call a whopping lot of policy reversals flip-flops.

But lo, let us not hold back any longer. Let us now laugh out loud, hold our sides in pain, gasp for air as we look at the BushCo "flip flop" record, in sum. Let us observe the short list of issues about which BushCo has either completely reversed his position, or has simply openly lied to the nation about to further his administration's shockingly small-minded, self-serving corporate agenda:

The creation of the 9/11 commission. The Iraq WMD investigation. The Israeli/Palestine conflict. Nation building. Same-sex marriage. Veterans' benefits. The value of Osama bin Laden. The Saddam/al Qaeda link. North Korea. The U.N. vote on Iraq. "Mission accomplished." Ahmed Chalabi. Steel tariffs. The Department of Homeland Security. Campaign-finance reform. Energy policy. Hybrid cars. The deficit. Assault weapons. Abortion. Science. Global warming. The environment.

And the list, as they say, goes on. And on. And on.

Yes, you might be tempted. However, the final score isn't in yet, as you also might recall the last time the Bush administration put out a scientific document acknowledging that human emissions were warming the atmosphere with potentially catastrophic results, the president himself then dismissed it as "a report put out by the bureaucracy." That would be his bureaucracy, of course, but then he's admitted he's not a detail guy and doesn't "do nuance." David Kay, the man Bush put in charge of the WMD search in Iraq, has gone on record admitting that they were wrong wrong wrong about the existence of said weapons, but that hasn't slowed Bush down much on that front either. Bush's appointment to head the FDA's panel on women's health opposes prescribing contraceptives to single women and recommends scripture for headaches, eating disorders, and PMS.

Forget all the rest of the million reasons Bush shouldn't be president of the United States. This one should be enough: beyond not just understanding science (which he clearly does not, in spite of all that fancy-pantsed Ivy League schoolin'), he's downright hostile to it. It's the 21st century for crying out loud. The Renaissance happened 500 years ago. He has every right to wallow in his own ignorance, but if wants to do that, he should be running for office in Kansas, not to lead the country.

Salon scoops Bush's acceptance speech.

Elect me once, shame on... shame on you. Elect me-- can't get elected again.

I also want to thank a boatload of veterans with whom I have no association. Bible says the race is not always to the swift. We'll see about that. Bunch of you pointed out that if John Kerry doesn't want his record of admirable service in Vietnam to be attacked, he shouldn't have had a record in the first place. He kind of set himself up for that one by serving admirably and then testifying to the Senate about the lessons of Vietnam. You didn't see me doing that.

Then John Kerry gets himself another record by serving admirably in the Senate and there you go again. If you got a record of admirable service, folks is naturally going to attack it. Look what happened to John McCain, and he's a friend of mine. And Max Cleland, and he is not. But they had a record. So you shouldn't have any. I sure don't. Or maybe you had records, but someone kept inadvertently expunging them, so what is the point? Records threaten the security of this country.

I'm not even running on a record of my first term as president. Why should I? Would you? We should just keep it positive. So let's turn a corner, any corner, and spread the good word that America is now so much safer that terrorists could attack us at any minute, and you might be one of them.

[...]

That's why when I travel this great country of mine telling you about its many threats, I want you to round up everybody who needs compassion. Because launching the compassion agenda comes right after finding weapons of mass destruction. Which a poll says we did, kinda. Poll says weapons of mass destruction now exist in the belief systems of our favorite voters. They're in our hearts, our minds.

It's worth sitting through the ad.

Crackdown

Naked protesters block 8th Avenue in midtown Manhattan outside Madison Square Garden, site of the Republican National Convention, August 26, 2004. As to the girl on the left, what's the point of a naked protest if you're going to wear a bathing suit?

Let there be light.

My uncle sent me the following email:

A new movement is starting so everyone can show which candidate they want to be the next president of the US. The national display will take place on September 1, 2004.

If you support John Kerry, drive with your lights on in the daytime.

If you support George Bush, drive with your lights off at night.

Update (8/27, 10:44 am): If you support Michael Badnarik, turn your wheel all the way to the left (you know, to the point where it becomes the same as the right) and drive in a tiny circle going nowhere, blowing your horn incessantly and insisting that you're leading all the other traffic in the proper direction. But not on any government-maintained roads. Keep your gun on the dash.

If you support Ralph Nader, the Republican National Committee will loan you a car. Nobody cares what you do with the lights, but they will generally be dim bulbs.

I Want One

The Spacehouse. Using technology first envisaged for space exploration, German (of course) engineers have forwarded plans to design the ultra-environmentally sensitive abode for construction at a research station in Antarctica.

I wonder. Can you grow sunflowers in Antarctica?

Frozifornia

In my travels across this great land I have listened to the American people, and they have spoken so loudly and clearly. In a great chorus their voices have risen o'er the punctuated din with a glorious refrain...

That'll be thirty-three, forty-seven, hon. Debit or credit?

On my last day of work before leaving on the relocation-road-trip I woke early enough to catch my favorite part of the day: that brief period when the landscape is barely lit but coasting toward the eastern horizon and the still-hidden sun. Breaking the hum of a slight, steady rain Bear erupted in barking and running toward the edge, if you could call it that, of the yard. I glimpsed a small deer's silhouette, anticipating the almost daily routine of flashed white tails and scampering followed by Bear's self-pleased prance back to the house.

But a second later the deer was still there, standing. As Bear approached it, I recognized the fawn as one of two in a family of seven or so deer that live in our barely-still-rural neighborhood. As it stood still, looking rather sluggish and obviously miserable from the two straight days of rain, Bear was overcome by a look of pure confusion as he slowed to a stop perhaps four feet from it. He extended his muzzle quizzically and the deer turned and mirrored him. Their noses came within a foot of each other. Bear started wagging.

I also came to the deer and it expressed no fear. It was limping slightly. Fawns are instructed often to lay low while older sisters and aunts forage. I suppose that they venture off disobediently as part of their development and that those wanderings are regulated by natural selection. An injured, orphaned deer certainly must run some risks. I wished her (she just seemed female) good luck, my desire to eat her outweighed by the needs of my morning routine, and went on about my business. Bear was unsuccessful in convincing her to pick up and throw his tennis ball.

Among my vanities is a predisposition to delusions of grandeur. But I will consider that episode as a little goodbye from the place I've called home for 35 years. My home is now California, not the southeastern woodlands and a rainy July morning to set the moment just isn't in the forecast around these parts.

Part setting roots and part rediscovering them, making my new home is full of little fish, big sea lessons. And although the address on my mail stating "CA" looks perfectly natural and the people and the weather are delightfully welcoming, I'll always smile answering "Where are you from?" with "North Carolina." So with that, Apostropher now has the country surrounded. You should not make any sudden movements. Hold nozzle upright, squeeze, and move in a slow, sweeping fashion. Lay flat to dry. Walk with light and stay of the grass.

When I turned down my road a day or two before leaving I surprised the family of deer and they dashed into the woods. It was the chance to see if the wayward fawn had managed to reunite with them. Two fawns and she made it, only one and she didn't. As they scurried away I only counted one.

I thought about dumb luck, about unfortunate decisions, about how simultaneously beautiful and merciless the world is. I wished I had shot and eaten her. I hoped a quick and painless death had followed her. I reflected on paths I'd worn. I hungered for new adventures. I came at ease on a balance of all these.

Then I saw her bound across the road.

It's a bird! It's a plane!

It's SuperEarth!

European astronomers announced they had found a "super-Earth" orbiting a star some 50 light years away, a finding that could significantly boost the hunt for worlds beyond our Solar System. [...] The so-far unnamed world, which whizzes around mu Arae in just 9.5 days, is the smallest of the estimated 125 so-called extrasolar planets that have been detected so far.

"This new planet appears to be the smallest yet discovered around a star other than the Sun. This makes mu Arae a very exciting planetary system," French astronomer Francois Bouchy was quoted in a statement issued by the European Southern Observatory (ESO). With few exceptions, the extrasolar planets spotted so far have approximated the size of Jupiter, the giant of the Solar System. But this latest find is far smaller, with a mass of only 14 times that of the Earth, which puts it in the same ballpark as Uranus for size.

Jake pointed me toward this story in the comments of the last post (thank you, sir). What makes the discovery exciting is that this is a rocky planet with an atmosphere instead of a gas giant like the other extrasolar planets found so far. Whether it lies in the system's sweet spot where water wouldn't boil away or freeze solid is the next big question. Nonetheless, you know that any article that namedrops Uranus is going to be good for a sophomoric chuckle, right? Right.

The big difference, though, is that Uranus is an uninhabitable hell, a gassy planet on the far frigid fringes...

Insert Beavis laugh here.

Mars' Tattoo Tear

More cool pictures from the Mars Express Orbiter.

New Scientist: Dark, rippling dunes of volcanic ash - similar to Hawaii's black sand beaches - cast a teardrop shape in an ancient Martian crater, reveal the latest images from Mars Express. Wind is likely to have carved the 12-kilometre-long tear shape a million or more years ago when the Martian atmosphere was thicker, says Gerhard Neukum, principal investigator of the High Resolution Stereo Camera on Europe's Mars orbiter. Now, the atmosphere has thinned so much that the dune's shape is likely to remain fixed for at least hundreds of thousands of years, he says. [...] Right now the camera is taking images for just 10 minutes during each of Mars Express's seven-hour orbits. That is because the closest part of the spacecraft's orbit, which takes an elliptical path around the planet's poles, changes with time. Now the closest approach is relatively far from the planet and occurs over the planet's night side, limiting photo opportunities. But the geometry will begin to improve again in September.

Weeee are the Persians, my friend.

Queen just became the first rock act to have an album released in Iran.

Western music is strictly censored in the Islamic republic, where homosexuality is considered a crime. [Freddie] Mercury, who died in 1991, was proud of his Iranian ancestry, and illegal bootleg albums and singles made Queen one of the most popular bands in Iran.

The greatest hits album contains hits such as Bohemian Rhapsody, The Miracle and I Want to Break Free, but reportedly omits a number of Queen's love songs. The cassette, costing less than $1 (55 pence), comes complete with translated lyrics and an explanatory leaflet. It tells Queen fans that Bohemian Rhapsody is about a young man who has accidentally killed someone and, like Faust, sold his soul to the devil. On the night before his execution he calls God in Arabic, "Bismillah", and so regains his soul from Satan.

I had no idea Freddie Mercury was Iranian. Must have been the big Ba'athist moustache that threw me off.

Ax-iomatic

Why are there no great female lead guitarists?

She ain't heavy...

...she's my mother.

Village womenfolk consider him a saint as he trudges along the national highway leading towards India's technology hub, Bangalore, in the southern state of Karnataka. Some of them prostrate themselves before the saffron-clad 32-year-old, Kailashgiri Brahmachari.

Swami, as he is described, is on an epic mission - he is carrying his aged, blind mother, Kethakdevi, on his shoulders on an all-India pilgrimage. He has already covered more than 6,000km (3,750 miles), beginning the journey in his native village of Piparia, near Jabalpur in the northern state of Madhya Pradesh eight years ago. If all goes well, Kailashgiri's grand plan is to end his spiritual quest at the next Kumbh Mela Hindu festival in the holy city of Varanasi in 2013.

And all I did for Mothers' Day was paint my mom's garage. Talk about getting shown up.

The stars go out.

Another piece of my childhood goes up in smoke.

The Starlite Drive-In, a Durham landmark, was heavily damaged Sunday afternoon when a blaze consumed the movie screen and storage building that held old movies and thousands of movie posters. [...] The fire destroyed more than 5,000 movie posters, including "Star Wars" and "Gone With the Wind" posters, and hundreds of old movies. [...] Meanwhile, the Starlite's gun shop [god, I love NC -apos.] and video club, which Groves started around 1987, will remain open. [...] There are currently 417 drive-ins open across the country, just 10 percent of the number that existed at the industry's height in 1958, according to drive-ins.com, an online industry database and resource. Eight remain in North Carolina, including the Starlite.

The theater was insured and owner Bob Groves says he will rebuild, perhaps within a month.

Update: The Starlite did reopen a year later but Bob Groves died in early 2007, and the Starlite with him.

Neither Swift Nor Truthful

My latest column is up at The American Street.

Bad Parenting

Even grate parents sometimes let things fall through the quacks.

He's a poet and he doesn't know it.

But his tee shots show it. They're Longfellows.

Toward the end of an article about Britain requiring "proper" English classes for Australians seeking citizenship, David Campbell drops this quote from Tiger Woods:

I blistered that drive. That was a high bleeder. I really hit good shots, yes, but they were not stoning. They were not kick-ins. I played safe, say, little chunk-and-run. Played a flop-shot down there to about 10 feet. I squirted that one. It was a quick duck, a quacker. That drive was ... blue.

Yo, Tiger. Lawrence Ferlinghetti called. He wants his clubs back.

Who's up for seafood?

There are older and fouler things than orcs in the deep places of the world.

(via All Night Surfing)

I have no Madonna and I must scream.

Edvard Munch's most famous paintings, The Scream and Madonna, were stolen in broad daylight in front of Oslo museum patrons yesterday.

Police spokeswoman Hilde Walsoe said the two or three armed men threatened a museum employee with a handgun to give them the two paintings, including "The Scream" -- Munch's famed depiction of an anguished figure with its head in its hands.

"No one has been physically injured, and the suspects escaped in an Audi A6. We are searching for the suspects with all available means," Walsoe told The Associated Press. Many museum visitors panicked and thought they were being attacked by terrorists.

This is the second time in a decade that The Scream has been stolen. In 1994, it was recovered from a hotel near Oslo after going missing for three months.

Moons rise o'er the rings.

Saturn and its rings are prominently shown in this color image, along with three of Saturn's smaller moons. From left to right, they are Prometheus, Pandora and Janus. Prometheus and Pandora are often called the F ring shepherds as they control and interact with Saturn's interesting F ring, seen between them. This image was taken on June 18, 2004, with the Cassini spacecraft narrow angle camera 8.2 million kilometers (5.1 million miles) from Saturn. It was created using the red, green, and blue filters. Contrast has been enhanced to aid visibility.

Flip Flop

Reuters:

A Vietnam veteran who worked with President Bush's campaign has left over his appearance in a commercial by a group challenging Democratic candidate John Kerry's war record, a campaign spokesman said on Saturday. Bush campaign spokesman Steve Schmidt said Ken Cordier was a Bush supporter during the 2000 election and served as a member of his a steering committee to help reach out to veterans during this election. [...] The disclosure of Cordier's involvement came one day after White House spokesman Scott McClellan and Bush campaign chairman Marc Racicot denied the campaign coordinated with the group on the ad.

Shameless coward.

Subtle.

It took me a minute to get the joke in this French ad for personal lubricant.

Up to his old tricks.

Check out the Kerry campaign's latest ad. More like this, please. And the next one should be about George Bush's military service (or lack thereof). This wasn't a fight you should have picked, Dubya. Now pick yourself up off the floor and take the ass-kicking you've got coming like a man.

Update (10:00 pm): Josh Marshall adds that the five senators who demanded an apology from Bush in 2000 were Chuck Hagel, Charles Robb, Max Cleland, Bob Kerrey, and John Kerry. Then he lowers the boom.

I say this is exactly where the Kerry campaign needs to go because it very powerfully captures a truth about President Bush -- namely, that he's a coward who truly lacks shame.

I don't say he's a coward because he kept himself out of Vietnam three decades ago. I know no end of men of that age who in one fashion or another made sure they didn't end up in Indochina in those days. (I quickly ran through both hands counting guys I talk to on a regular basis.) And they include many of the most admirable people I know.

He's a coward because he has other people smear good men without taking any responsibility, without owning up to it or standing behind it. And when someone takes it to him and puts him on the spot to defend his actions -- as McCain does in this spot -- he's literally speechless. Like I say, a coward.

Coward. Yes, that's the word I've been looking for all along. A shameless coward.

If you want something done right...

...you have to do it yourself. Can't find a woman willing to give you a swift kick in the nuts? BlueCaller feels your pain. Or he wants to, anyhow.

Some of you may be sitting there thinking "Why not use something heavier than an apple? Like a baseball for instance?" Well, whatever you strike your own testicles with is entirely up to you!

(via CSotD)

"Good luck and good riddance."

So Zell Miller, the Democrat-in-name-only retiring Senator from Georgia, will deliver the keynote address at the Republican National Convention, one supposes to burnish Bush's uniter-not-a-divider credentials. Of course, nobody but nobody in the Democratic Party considers Zell Miller anything but a Republican, but never you mind that. Ben Jones, a Democratic Georgia Congressman from '89-'93 (and amusingly, Cooter on The Dukes of Hazzard), has a few words on the matter, including these: "I've been a Zell watcher since back during the civil rights movement, when I was getting whacked upside the head by bigots and he was calling the Voting Rights Act a Communist plot." The AJC link there requires registration and bugmenot.com seems to have vanished, so I'm going to brazenly violate copyright law and just repost the op-ed.

Miller untrue to donkeys and turtles
Ben Jones, 8/20/04

Zell Miller has a serious credibility problem. Around home, Miller is affectionately known as "Zig Zag Zell" for his decades-long broken field run through the shifting minefield that is Southern politics. But now, in his new role as the head cheerleader and snarling pit bull for the Bush campaign, he is attempting something that has exceeded even his own legendary talents at shape shifting. These days, Zell is insisting that despite his apparent treachery, he is in fact a loyal Democrat and it is all the other Democrats who are not really Democrats anymore.

Like Captain Renault in "Casablanca," Miller is "shocked" that special interests have great influence in the Democratic Party and that the party has lost resonance in America's heartland. His clever solution to this very real problem is to trashtalk his colleagues, to attack the party regulars who have carried him on their shoulders through countless elections, and to become the media darling of the same folks who have vilified him for years.

Never mind that his new best friends in the GOP have mastered the art of government by political action committee contribution and have rammed through reactionary legislation created by and for their corporate cronies. Miller knows that and he knows, too, that if he were truly honest and honorable and changed his party affiliation to Republican, he would no more be asked to speak at their convention than would Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.). It is the big "D" he unproudly wears on his chest that gets him the attention he craves.

Now, I've been a Zell watcher since back during the civil rights movement, when I was getting whacked upside the head by bigots and he was calling the Voting Rights Act a Communist plot. Having done a little politickin' myself, I fully understand the way certain "public servants" can argue things flat or argue them round, can put a finger in the air and know unerringly which way the wind is blowing, and can feel that ancient call of the siren, the one that whispers: "You ain't getting enough attention. Go out there on 'Meet the Press' and stir things up."

Zell has always been a legend in his own mind, but now he has become like the old rooster that crows and crows cause he thinks the sun has come up just for him. Once these guys get one motorcycle escort, they are hooked forever.

Miller is forever going on and on about what a tough Marine he is, and that he learned about loyalty in the Corps. And you've probably heard him give the talk about being the turtle on the fence post. You have surely heard it: "If you ever see a turtle up on a fence post, you can bet your life it didn't get up there by itself."

He means, of course, that he owes his career and his success to the folks who supported him and got him elected. In his case, that would be the Democratic Party. I know a whole lot of Georgia Democrats who put Zig Zag up on that fence post who would leave him up there for the buzzards right now.

Since ol' Zell loves country music and is always sprinkling his speeches with quotes from Nashville songs, I thought I'd throw in a few here that might remind him of home.

And now, friends and neighbors, here is my own composition, "The Saga of Zig Zag Zell."

"Well he zigs and he zags and he makes a lot of heat,
He's got big ol' boots on his little bitty feet,
He's just a huffin' and a puffin' from his Senate seat,
Zig Zag Zell.
We know you well,
Watched your head just swell and swell.
Got so big it's about to bust,
Now you done played hell with the public trust,
Zig Zag Zell."

I know it needs work, but it's a start.

Bye, bye, Zell. Good luck and good riddance.

Head for the mountains.

Pansy-assed black bear can't handle a case and a half of beer. Lightweight.

When state Fish and Wildlife agents recently found a black bear passed out on the lawn of Baker Lake Resort, there were some clues scattered nearby — dozens of empty cans of Rainier Beer. The bear apparently got into campers' coolers and used his claws and teeth to puncture the cans. And not just any cans.

"He drank the Rainier and wouldn't drink the Busch beer," said Lisa Broxson, bookkeeper at the campground and cabins resort east of Mount Baker. Fish and Wildlife enforcement Sgt. Bill Heinck said the bear did try one can of Busch, but ignored the rest. The beast then consumed about 36 cans of Rainier.

Heh.

Underground Animation

Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines is placing advertisements in the Boston subway. No big deal there; subways are packed with advertising. So much so that most people tune it out just like they do flourescent lights humming. How do you get your placement to stand out?

Think frame-by-frame animation: 400 still images have been placed on a 1,000-foot stretch of tunnel wall, between the Harvard and Central stations. Timed so riders see 24 images per second, lights flash on and off as a train passes, transforming the images into a moving montage of cruise-goers snorkeling, jet-skiing, and rock-climbing aboard a Royal Caribbean ship.

The ad technology, which makes its New England debut tomorrow, first appeared three years ago in such cities as Atlanta, Budapest, and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Since then, the underground ads have spread to more than a half-dozen subway systems, including Tokyo's and Hong Kong's. They have also been seen from Port Authority Trans-Hudson trains, which run between New York City and New Jersey.

(via AdRants)

Do not taunt Happy Fun Cow.

This is just about the funniest thing I've ever read. Via fark.

First Crack in the Dam

Kos notes the first GOP Congressman to admit the Iraq War was a mistake.

"I've reached the conclusion, retrospectively, now that the inadequate intelligence and faulty conclusions are being revealed, that all things being considered, it was a mistake to launch that military action," Bereuter [R-NE] wrote in a letter to constituents in the final days of his congressional career.

That's especially true in view of the fact that the attack was initiated "without a broad and engaged international coalition," the 1st District congressman said. "Knowing now what I know about the reliance on the tenuous or insufficiently corroborated intelligence used to conclude that Saddam maintained a substantial WMD (weapons of mass destruction) arsenal, I believe that launching the pre-emptive military action was not justified." As a result of the war, he said, "our country's reputation around the world has never been lower and our alliances are weakened."

Bereuter, who is not running for re-election, is a senior member of the House International Relations Committee and vice chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. Sit back and watch the denunciations of him by his fellow Republicans roll forth.

I'm famous!

Well, not really. A 16 year old picture of me in full mullet regalia scored as the bizarre google search of the day at Das Blög. Strangely enough, it shows up on the first page of hits from Google's image search for "Whistling Dixie." In related news, a picture of the junior apostropher practicing his playa skills is the second hit returned if you do an image search for mackdaddy.

Dungeons & Dragons Turns 30

Despite the milestone birthday, the fantasy role-playing game still lives in its parents' basement and is still a virgin. D&D announced it would be throwing a joint party with the Fonz.

I smell a rat.

Sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.

Government informants who rat people out to the authorities are having the tables turned on them at a newly-launched website. WhosARat.com founder Sean Bucci says the purpose of the site is to help innocent folks like himself who have been turned in on fictitious drug charges by junkies who are just looking to make quick cash from government drug informant programs. [...] Users of the snitch site provide pictures, names and hometowns of allegedly unethical narcs.

Is that a snake in your shorts...

...or are you just happy to see me? "I was standing out in the water when I suddenly felt something moving in my pants." Yeah, that happens to all of us.

The General saith to the bishop...

Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, thy head is in thine own ass?

The Most Reverend John M. Smith, Bishop of Trenton

Dear Bishop Smith,

I've been an admirer of your work ever since you announced that pro-abortion politicians cannot receive communion. It's good to see that there are still a few Bishops out there who have the balls to stand beside Our Leader in this election season.

My faith in your leadership was confirmed again the other day when I learned that you had revoked a little girl's first communion because she partook of a wheat-free host. It does not matter that a normal wafer might have killed her. She'd have met our Lord in Heaven. Now, thanks to you, she faces an eternity in Hell unless she chooses the death and resurrection embodied in the wheat-based host.

Sure, some might argue that it is the act that is important--not the Church law governing the constituents of the wafer--but they are ignoring the most important issue, transubstantiation.

Wheat was the grain that built the Church, and by extension, Western culture. It was no accident. Our Lord commanded it to be so. Therefore, it would be heretical to use any other grain in the wafer. Indeed, other grains might corrupt our Savior's flesh as the host undergoes transubstantiation. A rice or corn based wafer might even result in worshipers eating the flesh of Buddha or Wankantanka, thereby releasing Hell's legions of demons to feast upon our souls in an orgy of apocalyptic destruction.

You're all that is standing between us and those demons. Thank you for being strong.

Heterosexually yours,

Gen. JC Christian, patriot.

Salute.

Only $3.95!

Can I use it to replace my Go-F*ck-Yourself Valve? "Does not drip or leak and delivers large amounts of flow."

Present arms!

Indonesia is celebrating its 59th Independence Day with a wide variety of parties, state ceremonies, and military marches, like the one pictured below.

If this scene hasn't appeared in one of my dreams yet, I'm pretty sure it will soon. Ma'am, yes ma'am!

Tandoori Clinical Trials

Now it's my own industry shipping jobs to India.

Girish Virkar doesn't sleep much these days. "I've got a lot to do," he laments, as he settles into a 6 A.M. flight from Frankfurt to Milan. His mission: to drum up business for his company and cash in on the latest trend in outsourcing to India--drug research and clinical trials.

First they came for the factory workers
and I did not speak out
because I did not work in a factory.
Then they came for the programmers
and I did not speak out
because I was not a programmer.
Then they came for the call centers
and I did not speak out
because I avoid telephones anyhow.
Then they came for me
and there was no one left
to speak out for me.
So I started learning Hindi.

Update (3:55 pm): It gets worse.

The sky is falling!

No, wait - that's just rock star feces. I swear, Mabel, this is the worst architecture boat tour ever.

Compare and contrast.

One of the Bush campaign's favorite tropes is that John Kerry specifically and Democrats generally are "out of the mainstream." The claim is an odd one, considering that this year should mark the fourth straight presidential election where the Democrat receives more votes than the Republican nationwide. Anyhow, I thought I'd re-post a couple of pictures from Kos of each candidate's recent Oregon stop.

Bush, of course, is exercising strict control over who can attend his events, so afraid of dissent that sub-literate loyalty oaths have been passed out at some events as a prerequisite to entrance ("I, (full name) ... do herby (sic) endorse George W. Bush for reelection of the United States."). Here's what the crowd looked like at the most recent invitation-only stop:

Not bad. But here's what Kerry's event looked like:

Um, yeah. Hey George, I gotcher mainstream right here, buddy.

The Symbolic Politics Olympics

With so few tangible achievements to note, I expect Bush to start flogging the issues over which a president has no control instead. Get ready to start hearing a lot from the Bush campaign about Florida's voucher program.

A Florida law that allows students at failing public schools to attend private religious schools at taxpayers' expense is unconstitutional, a state appeals court ruled Monday. The 2-1 decision by the 1st District Court of Appeal upholds a ruling by a trial judge saying the state constitution forbids the use of tax money to send youngsters to religious schools.

"Courts do not have the authority to ignore the clear language of the Constitution, even for a popular program with a worthy purpose," Judge William Van Nortwick wrote in the decision.

How clear is that language? Florida State Constitution, Article 1, Section 3: "No revenue of the state or any political subdivision or agency thereof shall ever be taken from the public treasury directly or indirectly in aid of any church, sect, or religious denomination or in aid of any sectarian institution."

"No revenue...ever...directly or indirectly...any church." You really can't put it more plainly than that. Florida can't run this program unless they amend their constitution. As much as I sympathize with parents in bad schools, there's a basic principle at work here: the state doesn't tax your church and in return, your church gets no state funds. Give unto Caesar and all that. The right of individual states to refuse to fund religious programs constitutionally and statutorily was upheld most recently 7-2 by the Supreme Court in February (Locke v. Davey).

The legal reasoning in both the Washington and Florida cases is air-tight, and if you can't get more than two votes out of this Court, you'll not be seeing it overturned in the foreseeable future. Nonetheless, that won't stop this from being picked up, oversimplified, and recast into a campaign issue - Guv'ner Jeb and Big Brother POTUS going to battle for Jesus and poor parents against the wicked, vote-counting Florida Supreme Court and hammer-and-sickle-wielding teachers' unions. Check your watches; it should be starting any minute now.

Leave aside the fact that reviews of the Florida voucher program so far are decidedly mixed. Leave aside the ugly racial history of school vouchers in the South. Leave aside the facts that the private schools get to cherry pick their own admissions and that the programs are overwhelmingly dominated by middle-class families. The real issue in both states is that funding religious programs is expressly against the law and has been for longer than any of us have been alive.

Bush has to run on something. The economy isn't cooperating. Iraq is a nightmare. Osama bin Laden has become He Who Must Not Be Mentioned. We are detested and distrusted around the world as never before. Karl Rove's vaunted slime machine hasn't made a dent in Kerry's support. The grand juries are heating up. Gay marriage and fear of Arabs are about his only cards left, and that's a shaky scaffolding on which to construct an electoral majority. However, nuanced constitutional arguments that can be misportrayed as Pope Dubya protecting the flock from liberal secular humanist judges, well, now he's playing on his home field. Never you mind those pesky states' rights notions Republicans once touted so fiercely. That was before they owned DC, don't you know. And after, one presumes.

I can't imagine the strategy will ultimately work to sway voters, but Bush seems to be banking on getting out his base instead, as independents keep breaking hugely toward Kerry. Look for the voucher trial balloons and related winks and nods to the fundamentalist base over the next few weeks while the Party plays all friendly and moderate for the convention cameras.

Imagine that.

Bush has a new feather to put in his cap: the first modern president so offensive that he's driving anarchists to vote. The mind reels...

(via Unfogged)

Universal truth: everything is funnier with monkeys.

The missus, obviously laboring as diligently at her job as I am at mine, sent along this Village Voice article that really shouldn't be missed.

Every human endeavor is enriched by the addition of a screaming, leg-humping, ass-biting primate. Even, say, sex education. "I beg your pardon?" you might ask. Clearly you're not acquainted with the strangest children's book of the 19th century—Sammy Tubbs, the Boy Doctor, and Sponsie, the Troublesome Monkey (1874). [...] [Volume five is] a Victorian sex-ed manual. For children. Starring a monkey.

Suh-weet. Insert your own spanking joke here. Interestingly, the series also has some startlingly progressive (for the 1800s) takes on racial issues, including "perhaps the first positive representation of an interracial kiss in nineteenth century American illustrated fiction" and an adolescent son of freed slaves going on to win a full medical school scholarship. However, fate isn't so kind to the two monkeys.

Sponsie 2 gets accidentally sealed alive under some floorboards—his starvation being a handy segue into a lecture on Digestion. He gets his rectum shot off after playing with a gun, all the better to explain incontinence. Ultimately, the unfortunate fellow is accidentally disemboweled by the belt drive of an industrial knife sharpener—"torn all to strings," a witness sadly notes. And Sponsie 1? We are informed that he "contracted a taste for malt liquors while living in Hoboken"; the instructive result of his addiction is that the alcoholic simian tries to hang himself in the attic. After being revived, he turns into a pickpocket, a kidnapper, a Central Park carriage thief; his life of prehensile crime only ends when he gets shot in the head in a duel with the other Sponsie.

Damned dirty apes.

Greener Energy

I've written a couple of times about the use of underwater turbines to harness tidal flows to generate electricity. The first experimental turbines, rated at 300 kilowatts, were deployed off the coast of England and near Hammerfest, Norway. Next month, Verdant Power intends to sink six smaller turbines in New York City's East River.

The project is a modest one in electricity terms: the suite of turbines will generate just 200 kilowatts of power at their peak, enough to power perhaps 200 houses. Initially, the energy will be used to run some lights and machinery in a local supermarket and parking garage, avoiding the expense of transmission cables. But if everything goes according to plan, company president Trey Taylor says he hopes to grow the field to 200-300 turbines stretched along the river. The UN headquarters in Manhattan is among those who have expressed interest in tapping into the environmentally friendly energy that would be produced by the project, he says.

While these pilot programs get evaluated, the Department of Energy is touting building techniques that produce "near-zero-energy" buildings.

While the fourth Near-Zero-Energy Habitat for Humanity House was just completed, the first house has been occupied by a family of four since November 2002. The daily cost for heating and cooling this house with an air source heat pump was 45 cents. Adding the cost of operating the water heater and all of the appliances brought the total average daily energy cost for this all-electric house to 82 cents. This number takes into account $291 for solar credits that are part of the Tennessee Valley Authority's Green Power Generation program. In comparison, a conventional house in Lenoir City would use between $4 and $5 of electricity per day.

The latest house cost less than $100K to build and is six times as airtight as a normally constructed house. All pretty intriguing.

Double your pleasure...

...double your fun. Then double it again.

Geana Morris, a 34-year-old fraternal twin, was implanted with two embryos 29 weeks ago in the hopes that one would survive to birth. Instead, both split into identical twins, producing quadruplets born Friday in Philadelphia - two identical twin boys and two identical twin girls. Moreover, Mrs. Morris delivered the quartet on her own 34th birthday. Her doctor put the odds of twinned identical twins at about one per one million quadruplet births. Given that in 2002, there were fewer than a thousand sets of quadruplets of any age alive worldwide, that makes the odds approximately once ever.

Medical Marijuana

It's high time we finally started looking at the potential of marijuana as medicine. Preliminary results in mice and humans show that the plant's main psychoactive ingredient, delta-9-THC, may shrink brain tumors by blocking the formation of the blood vessels that feed them.

They found the marijuana extract inhibited the expression of several genes related to the production of a chemical called vascular endothelial growth factor. VEGF is critical for angiogenesis, which allows tumours to grow a network of blood vessels to supply their growth. The cannabinoid significantly lowered the activity of VEGF in the mice and two human brain cancer patients, the study showed. The drug did this by increasing the activity of a fat molecule called ceramide, suggests the study, as adding a ceramide inhibitor stifled the ability of the cannabinoid to block VEGF.

"We saw that the tumours [in mice] were smaller and a bit pallid," adds Blázquez. The paleness of the cancer reflected its lack of blood supply as a result of the treatment. In the human patients, she says: "It seems that it works, but it's very early."

Shirts or skins?

Take a wander through this mindbending photo gallery by Nicole Tran Ba Vang. But, you know, not if you're at work. It will put the lotion on its skin.

(via Horklog)

Big Blue Wave

Dick Vitale's extremely pre-season basketball Top 30 is out and UNC, Kansas, and Kentucky go 1-2-3. The old school bluebloods crowd the roost. It must have caused Vitale great psychic pain to pick Duke as low as he did. The ACC represents, claiming fully half of the top ten slots:

1. UNC
4. Wake Forest
7. Georgia Tech
9. Duke
10. Maryland
20. NC State
30. Florida State

Heels, baby. The prospect of this level of competition in the conference should help ease the shame of what promises to be one painfully awful UNC football season, compounded by the ACC's addition of Miami and Virginia Tech. Ugh.

(via Saltwater Pizza)

Making an impact.

When we said it would stop drunk drivers, we didn't mean it quite that literally.

Attention Deficit Reporter

Eric Boehlert has a good article at Salon (non-subscribers have to sit through the ad blah blah blah) about the precipitous drop in media coverage of the situation in Iraq since the handover of so-called sovereignty.

"I've talked to friends who served in the CPA, and I don't know anybody with on-the-ground experience in Iraq who doesn't think the situation there isn't completely screwed up," adds Cook.

"Iraqis are so embittered and [have] completely lost any faith in us, even the most pro-American Iraqis," says the Philadelphia Inquirer's Dilanian, who says he has had a profound change of heart on the topic. Last April, fresh from reporting in Iraq, an optimistic Dilanian wrote that the press was ignoring improvements in Iraq and underplaying the chance for a real turnaround. In late June he returned to Baghdad to cover the sovereignty hand-over. Summing up his new grim impressions in an Aug. 1 article, Dilanian admitted his earlier prediction was wrong and wrote, "The situation in Iraq right now is not as bad as the news media are portraying it to be. It's worse. Most Iraqis aren't seeing the improvements they had hoped for, and they're not blaming the guerrillas -- they're blaming the Americans. Sovereignty seems to have had zero effect on this equation."

That's the key story many American news outlets have missed since June 28.

In the 424 days from the end of major combat operations to the handover of sovereignty, coalition deaths averaged 1.89 per day. In the 45 days since the handover, that average is 1.93 per day.

Hands-on learning.

Been pounding the books, son?

Not so much the books, dad, but we've been pounding...

Students are suing a schoolteacher in Brazil for asking them to masturbate during a biology lesson. The teacher asked three 15-year-olds to masturbate so the class could study sperm under a microscope, reports La Prensa.

I can not tell a lie.

No problem, sir, just doing my duty as a citizen. You say I get one phone call? Could you find me the number for the IRS? I've got some 'splainin' to do there, too.

"He pulled up behind me, rolled down the passenger side window and said he was looking for a police officer to arrest him," Ian McCollin, chief of police in Vernon, VT, said in an interview on Wednesday. "When I asked him why, he replied 'I'm drunk.'" To make matters worse, the drunk driver was operating on a suspended license, which was taken away after a previous drunk driving charge, McCollin said. [...] Police discovered Condo, a resident of North Pownal in Western Vermont, was four times over the legal limit and charged him with driving under the influence as well as driving without a license. [...] "This guy was hilarious," McCollin said. "And he was very cooperative and polite, unlike your average drunk driver."

Honky Got Back

Sloane Crosley pens a paean to big white butts.

Randomly Spotted

Farm-raised salmon are more flame-retardant than wild ones.

Turkmenistan's batshit insane President Niyazov wants to build a giant ice palace in the middle of one of the world's hottest deserts. "Our children can learn to ski," Mr Niyazov enthused, "we can build cafes there, and restaurants."

From the Japan Defense Agency's website: Everybody get on board on the Seaman Ship!

Call me sophomoric (you'd hardly be the first...today), but this is one very funny comment thread. "Actually, the term 'crotch trophy' should not be hyphenated."

The W stands for Woody Hayes.

Bob Harris provides photographic evidence that Bush was already a cheap shot artist years before you ever heard of him. Also, from the LATimes article to which he links:

As president of his chapter of the DKE fraternity, Bush sounded a classic bad-boy note when he said he "didn't learn a damned thing" at Yale. "The reason was that he didn't try," Jacob Weisberg reported this spring in Yale Alumni Magazine. "One year, the star of the football team spotted him in the back row during [course-] shopping period. 'Hey, George Bush is in this class!' Calvin Hill, '69, shouted to his teammates. 'This is the one for us!' "

I was in that room that day. Bush gave them a grinning thumbs up and, I have to admit, everyone laughed.

(For those of you too young to remember Woody Hayes, look here.)

Return Fire

Jim Rassmann, the man John Kerry pulled out of the water under hostile fire in Viet Nam, defends Kerry against the Swift Boat smear artists in the Wall Street Journal.

I am neither a politician nor an organizer. I am a retired police officer with a passion for orchids. Until January of this year, the only public presentations I made were about my orchid hobby. But in this presidential election, I had to speak out; I had to tell the American people about John Kerry, about his wisdom and courage, about his vision and leadership. I would trust John Kerry with my life, and I would entrust John Kerry with the well-being of our country.

Nobody asked me to join John's campaign. Why would they? I am a Republican, and for more than 30 years I have largely voted for Republicans. I volunteered for his campaign because I have seen John Kerry in the worst of conditions. I know his character. I've witnessed his bravery and leadership under fire. And I truly know he will be a great commander in chief.

The entire Swift Boat Veterans campaign smacks of desperation; they know this is now Kerry's campaign to lose. However, if the Republicans would like to turn this election into a contest over the two men's military service and honesty, I say more power to 'em. That one's an easy win for the Democrats. Currently, the sweat-drenched right wing is all a-twitter like a Southern belle with the vapors over a supposed debunking of Kerry's claim to have been five miles inside the Cambodian border for Christmas 1968. While they struggle to get their hoop skirts back on straight, Steve Gilliard debunks the debunking.

I'm Mike Wallace...

...and I'll kick your punk ass. 60 Minutes veteran Mike Wallace was arrested last night outside Luke's Bar and Grill in New York City. His driver had reportedly double-parked while Wallace went inside to get a takeout order, and parking officials were questioning the driver and inspecting the vehicle when Wallace emerged, meatloaf in hand.

Wallace then approached the two inspectors, Fromberg said, in an "overtly assertive and disrespectful manner." Wallace was asked to step away three times by the inspectors. Wallace did not comply. After the third request to step aside, Wallace "[lunged] at one of the inspectors," Fromberg said. The second inspector handcuffed Wallace and placed him in an unmarked TLC vehicle. Wallace was then escorted to the 19th precinct and "issued a summons for disorderly conduct."

I wasn't there so of course I can't evaluate the veracity of either side's claims, but I kind of admire any 86-year-old man who can still "lunge" at anybody. Tune in next week when Helen Thomas piledrives an airport security officer.

Sodada

Mountain Dew wants you to add a little Halloween spookiness to your caffeine jitters.

Mountain Dew Pitch Black [picture]combines the great taste of Mountain Dew with a blast of black grape flavor. [...] In addition to Mountain Dew Pitch Black's spooky package graphics and in-store displays, a theatre commercial -- parodying "B" horror movies -- will support the new brand in 4,000 movie theatres. Additional marketing support includes an Internet "Dewsletter" and product sampling at General Growth Properties malls and at this week's ESPN X Games in Los Angeles.

"Mountain Dew Pitch Black"? I guess if Jones Soda Co. can talk folks into paying money for turkey and gravy soda, this should be a fair sight easier. Still, as PRBop notes, "if I see a Mountain Dew bottle with black liquid in it, the first thing I'm wondering is who used it for an ashtray." However, that's only the tip of the Technicolor Mountain Dew iceberg.

I've seen Mountain Dew Code Red and Mountain Dew Live Wire (orange) in stores. Of the latter, Bevnet reports "if you feel the need to purchase a Pepsi product, it's definitely among the less offensive tasting. Nothing special, but not offensive either." Apparently the spectrum also is set to include a Mountain Dew Blue Shock and Mountain Dew Baja Blast - a "Mexican-inspired tropical lime flavor" (not to be confused with the rarer temperate and tundra lime flavors) that will only be available at Taco Bell.

As a sideline to the kaleidoscopic Dewsplosion, Pepsi is also rolling out for November and December a limited release of Pepsi Spice, which is old school Pepsi plus (probably artificial) ginger and cinnamon flavors along with, it appears, a healthy dose of Red No. 7. All this, however, is just tinkering around the edges. Where shall we find fresh new marketing concepts for colored sugar water?

Well, Nelly's Pimpjuice is still out there, currently touting itself as a safer mixer for alcohol than Red Bull. But honestly, I'm more amused by the good fellows at Bong Water Energized Soft Drinks (drinkbongwater.com). Available flavors include The Original 420 Chronic Tonic, Cottonmouth Quencher, Green Dreams, Purple Haze, Jamaican Sunrise, Rasta Cherry, Mowii Wowii, Bell Bottom Blooz, Lucid Lemon, Doo Whut?, Creeper Cola, Mellow Melon, Orange Sunshine, Johnny Chronic's Private Stash, Panama Red, Ganja Grape, Apple Poco Gold (groan), Coco Loco, and Ganjachino Mocha Hazelwhat. Ripped Razzberry and Julie Netherton's Treehugger Chugger are listed as being in development.

Their site also sports the 420 Manifesto, which seems to have mostly to do with jury nullification, and a "Bong Water Buds and 420 Honeys" section. The latter section "will be dedicated to our friends, known as the Bong Water® Buds and 420 Honeys™, and to the hardcore waterheads™ we call 'the chroniphiles™'. We will include photos and bios and other cool info as we can work it in." Can you really trademark "waterhead"? Sadly, they only seem to have one friend so far. Or, more likely, nobody can remember the password to the website.

The Froz Report

My worthy but recently silent co-blogger, the mysterious Froz Gobo, has safely arrived in California along with his moving truck full of belongings. I emailed yesterday to ask whether the transcontinental transfer had gone smoothly.

Yes. Made it here after 8 long days on the road. Satellite internet hookup project got delayed (short term only, I hope); currently sitting in the children's section at Calaveras County Library in San Andreas. Cool puzzles while waiting my turn, though.

Hopefully he'll be back online forthwith.

Keyes sees through the disguise.

On Sunday, Alan Keyes gave his acceptance speech for the Illinois GOP senatorial nomination, offering himself up as the sacrificial lamb against the Barack Obama juggernaut. He closed with the following lines:

The battle is for us. But I have confidence, because the victory is for God.

See? I told you Obama is the anti-Christ.

Unfit to Resuscitate

Swift Boat Veterinarians for Truth debunk the hamster CPR story. "John Kerry has besmirched the honor of every dog who ever served."

Searching high and low.

High:

Japan's Institute of Space and Astronautical Science succeeded in deploying a big thin film for solar sail in space for the first time in the world. [...] A solar sail is a spacecraft without a rocket engine. It is pushed along directly by light particles from the Sun, reflecting off its giant sails. Because it carries no fuel and keeps accelerating over almost unlimited distances, it is the only technology now in existence that can one day take us to the stars.

Low:

After 40 years of scientific research that led to the discovery of new life forms, helped confirm the theory of plate tectonics, and enthralled schoolchildren around the world with seafloor images and video, the research submersible Alvin will be replaced by a new, deeper-diving vehicle. [...] The replacement vehicle will be capable of reaching more than 99 percent of the seafloor to depths of 6,500 meters (21,320 feet) and conducting a broader range of research projects around the world. When completed in 2008, it will be the most capable deep-sea research vehicle in the world. Alvin, which has undergone nearly continuous upgrades since its launch in 1964, dives to 4,500 meters (14,764 feet).

Tell us what you really think.

Regarding the nomination of Rep. Porter Goss to be director of the CIA: "This is the worst appointment that's ever been made to the office of director of central intelligence because that's an office that needs to be kept above partisan politics." -- Retired Admiral Stansfield Turner, CIA Director 1977-81.

They have sharp teeth.

"Very aggressive" kitten forces down Belgian airliner. No, I'm not kidding. Annie Jacobsen suspects a terrorist dry run.

David and Goliath

Check out the picture attached to this story. Holy moly.

Father Knows Best

You’ve probably seen this passage from A World Transformed by George H.W. Bush and Brent Scowcroft about why they didn’t topple Saddam in 1991:

We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq. The coalition would instantly have collapsed, the Arabs deserting it in anger and other allies pulling out as well. Under the circumstances, there was no viable "exit strategy" we could see, violating another of our principles. Furthermore, we had been self-consciously trying to set a pattern for handling aggression in the post-Cold War world. Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the United Nations' mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression that we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the United States could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land. It would have been a dramatically different — and perhaps barren — outcome.

Makes you stop and wonder about this, doesn't it? Thirteen years ago, a Bush who had spent his life in the foreign policy arena recognized the perils of 1) unleashing a power vacuum in as fractured a society as Iraq and 2) standing in the middle of it afterwards. Last year, a Bush who had spent six years in the weakest governorship in the nation and had only travelled abroad three times in his adult life (excluding next-door Mexico) decided he knew better than the rest of the world, saddled up, and charged into battle. His invasion of Iraq will go down in history books as one of the most damaging foreign policy mistakes in American history.

I'll be happy beyond words on November 2 when I hear the following sentence float out of my television set: "It looks like it's going to be a long night at RNC headquarters." However, the presidency in 2004 has begun to look like quite the booby prize. I don't envy John Kerry one bit.

(cross-posted at The American Street)

They call him Flipper...

...Flipper, Flipper, faster than lightning.
No-one you see, speaks less honestly,
And we know Flipper, speaks with a mouth full of blunders,
Puppet boy wonder, under Cheney!

The next time somebody uses "Kerry" and "flip-flop" in the same sentence, send them here for some Egregious Dubya Waffles™. Kerry can't begin to keep up with Bush in the flip-flopping contest. Not even close.

Circuitous Messenger

The Guardian has a cool click-through presentation of NASA's Messenger mission to Mercury, including an overview of the equipment on board and a nice animated depiction of why it will take six and a half years to get there - about as long as it took Cassini to get all the way to the much more distant Saturn. Messenger will orbit the Sun 15 times before entering Mercury orbit.

A face full of Love.

The Green Bay Packers have signed undrafted free agent and former Duke football and basketball player Reggie Love. The details of the contract don't seem to be public yet, but team management would be wise to put in a rider that he can't attend parties in Minnesota.

Supply and Demand

As I've said before, penile self-amputation news stories are so common that the practice is threatening to become banal (and yet I dutifully continue to link to them). The latest version comes from Morocco, where a 70-year-old man demembered himself "in protest at his wife's long refusal to have sex with him." Perhaps I'm just less committed to civil disobedience than I am to Brigadier Genital Spanky Johnson, but I'm certain I'd try the affair or hooker route first.

Anyhow, now that the familiar maybe-this-was-a-bad-idea feeling has probably settled in good and hard, perhaps he should visit Romania. There's a fellow there who's looking to sell one.

You got your pitta in my dosha!

Uhhhhh, okay.

Every dosha has strengths and weaknesses but Coffey claims too much "pitta" is a bad thing for the Bush-Cheney ticket since both are "pittas" that could add up to too much fire and anger. Meanwhile, Coffey says John Kerry -- a mellow "vata" -- was smart to pair up with John Edwards, and take advantage of his "pitta" power.

Coffey is the author of a new book, "What's Your Dosha, Baby?"

You got served!

John and Teresa Kerry throw down the robot dancing challenge to the Bush/Cheney campaign. Oh, it's on.

"And I say to you now: won't you...take me down...to Funkytown?"

The Horn of Jericho

I can't find confirmation anywhere else, but Tim Riley writes "This Just In: Word of a televised Central Park concert during the RNC. (Not yet posted.)" He adds a link to the Vote for Change tour schedule. New York is looking more and more like a bad choice of venues for this convention.

Reason #5,127

...to vote for John Kerry.

Clarence Thomas has been interviewed by White House lawyers as a possible choice to be the next chief justice of the United States, says the author of a new biography. Thomas says he isn't interested but could find it hard to turn down an opportunity to be the first black man to lead the Supreme Court, said biographer Ken Foskett. [...] Thomas is the youngest of the justices at 56 and could remain on the court for decades. Whether he is elevated to chief justice "all depends on Bush being re-elected," Foskett said.

I'm Rick Shelby, bitch!

Digby skewers Sen. Richard Shelby on intelligence leaks and gravity-bending hypocrisy. As with the Khan leak, I'll be waiting for the Sandy Berger Cassandra chorus to chime in any day now.

Unfortunate Associations

Mimi Smartypants: "There is a flyer for Barack Obama where his face is sort of floating in the background (unfortunately I have not been able to find it online), and I think he is supposed to be in mid-oration but to me it looks more like mid-ejaculation, with a half-open slack mouth and really faraway eyes. I think he would make a terrific senator, but ever since I saw this I can't help associating "Barack Obama" with "orgasm face." Also I keep singing "Obama" to the tune of the terrible Toto song "Rosanna." Which is even more unfortunate. If I accidentally conflate the two associations, and start thinking about Barack Obama masturbating to Toto, I may have a nervous breakdown in the voting booth."

I played trombone in high school marching band back in the mid-80s and we performed Rosanna. It was one of the only pieces where the trombones played the lead. That didn't make it suck any less, though. Now when I hear the name Barack Obama, I'll involuntarily think about stiff hats with giant pink feathers, not having a date, and vomiting under bleachers. Thanks, Mimi.

Fun stuff I found wandering around her site follows.

Stoned? Here, space out for a bit.

This is wrong on so many levels.

They crucified Santa Claus in a gin bottle! You bastards!

Awww, cuddly Nazis.

Well now, there's a fetish that's awfully . . . specific (and from North Carolina!).

How in the world wasn't she on my blogroll already? Ya got me. Situation fixed.

And the totally random link, here's Walter the Farting Dog reviewed : K-Gr. 3. Yes, Walter is back, as gassy as ever. This time, he is at a yard sale, but Father doesn't sell anything, because Walter drives away the customers. Then a man wants to know if Walter is for sale, and while the children, Betty and Billy, are away, Dad makes the deal. The new owner takes Walter home and hooks him up to a "fart catcher," blowing up balloons, which the man assures Walter will be used at a children's party, where he works as a clown. "'Well, at least it's for the children,' thought Walter, who farted." But it's not! The clown, who is really a robber, bursts the balloons in a bank, and the odor is so bad that the loot is readily given up.

Dastardly.

Dannybot

A one-song musical by Frank Lesser.

(via cup of chicha)

More referral log fun.

Some lucky soul chanced upon this site via an AOL search for inability to urinate in teens. I doubt they got the information for which they were searching. I wouldn't call myself an expert on the topic and it's been a lot of years since I last tried it, but boy did those teens complain about it. Every last one of them. I guess it's really one of those "better to ask forgiveness than permission" situations. Good luck!

Geek Call to Action

I'm no kind of help here, but I know several folks reading this are. Between shifts of putting your formidable powers to use for The Man, you could do worse than volunteering for this.

TechWatch volunteers will receive training and participate in important non-partisan election monitoring activities, observing and documenting:

• Logic & Accuracy testing of voting technology by election officials prior to Election Day
• Poll Watching on Election Day (assigned to a single polling place or central election office)
• Election Incidents on Election Day (on dispatch from an Election Incident Reporting system to polling places within a given county)

By applying technical expertise to mind the polls, TechWatch volunteers can chronicle election problems at this upcoming election and future elections, as well as for follow-on litigation and policymaking, in a way that most poll watchers cannot.

More than 750 technologists have already volunteered, but it will take thousands of TechWatch volunteers to cover priority states and key counties, starting with the Florida primary on August 31 and continuing through to the November 2 general election.

Edible Saran Wrap

I know a couple of fetishists that are going to be beside themselves.

Scientists have developed a wrapping that not only keeps food fresh but can also be safely eaten. The film, which contains natural preservatives, can be fortified with vitamins and minerals. Used in liquid form, it can also be sprayed on fresh foods such as fruit to keep them fresher.

The clingfilm is made from chitosan, an ingredient in crab and shrimp shells, and lysozyme, a protein found in egg whites. It's a brave new world...

Gross Incompetence

Jesus H. Christ.

The al-Qaida suspect named by U.S. officials as the source of information that led to this week’s terrorist alerts was working undercover, Pakistani intelligence sources said Friday, putting an end to the sting operation and forcing Pakistan to hide the man in a secret location. [...] A Pakistani intelligence source told Reuters on Friday that Khan, who was arrested in Lahore secretly last month, had been actively cooperating with intelligence agents to help catch al-Qaida operatives when his name appeared in U.S. newspapers.

This really is a f***up of the first order. Absolutely unbelievable. The real question, though, is who leaked this originally? The confirmation of Khan as the source of the 3-year-old intelligence leading to the security upgrades in New York came in response to a NY Times article on Monday. So where did the Times reporters get the name? Unless a third party exists that I can't think of, it came either from a U.S. official or from a Pakistani official. If it came from a U.S. official, somebody should be facing criminal charges and the administration that hired them should be considered unfit to prosecute this war.

Note the typical Friday evening release time for damaging news. This is an entirely more serious breach than Valerie Plame, regardless of the motives involved in either.

Know Your Enemies

The right-wing commentariat, including those who oh so earnestly denounce hate-filled liberals for allowing personal animus to cloud their political judgment, has latched on to Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry. They have not yet examined the authors' credibility with as fine a lens as they did for Richard Clarke, Joe Wilson, Paul O'Neill, et.al. Let us be generous and assume the sole reason for this is that the book has not yet been released. We'll wait for you to get through it.

John O'Neill, as you may know, is an honest-to-god career professional Kerry-hater, given his first job in the business and trained by none other than Richard Nixon and Charles Colson. Both men, of course, sport fine reputations for honesty, integrity, and fair play to this day. He is also partner in the law firm Clements, O'Neill, Pierce, Wilson & Fulkerson. Margaret Wilson was GWB's 1998-2000 general counsel, and was then appointed by Bush to be deputy general counsel of the Commerce Department. Another partner at the firm, Tex Lazar, ran for lieutenant governor of Texas on the ticket with Bush in 1994. See Conason, Digby and the disinfopedia for more.

In the meantime, Media Matters took a look at the co-author, Dr. Jerome Corsi. Corsi has a PhD in political science from Harvard, a lofty credential that carries with it an assumption of a certain level of sophistication in political discourse. At least I assumed it. However, he also is a regular over at the FreeRepublic.com loonybin forums and the one thing about the internet: it's forever. Here are some samples of Corsi's rapier wit and political insight.

Isn't the Democratic Party the official SODOMIZER PROTECTION ASSOCIATION of AMERICA -- oh, I forgot, it was just an accident that Clintoon's first act in office was to promote "gays in the military." RAGHEADS are Boy-Bumpers as clearly as they are Women-Haters -- it all goes together.

Anybody ask why HELLary couldn't keep BJ Bill satisfied? Not lesbo or anything, is she?

Let's see exactly why it isn't the case that Islam is a worthless, dangerous Satanic religion? Where's the proof to the contrary?

Mullah Ali'Gore-ah is very proud of his new Bin Laden beard and he hopes others in the Democratic Party will follow his lead. Hell-ary is disappointed she cannot grow a beard, but her press secretary reminds us she can still enroll in flight school.

Nice, objective, sane source you've got there. Not. Like I said, we'll give you the time to read the book. After that you can even spend some time bashing Michael Moore as a hate-filled partisan, just for fun. Then come back and tell me how much credibility you place in these guys.

The AirCar

A French company called MDI plans to start production by next year on the AirCar, a small, urban vehicle with an engine powered by compressed air. They claim a top speed of 110 km/hr (68 mph) and the ability to run for about 10 hours in an urban environment on a full tank (90 m³ at 300 bars). It has a built-in air compressor that allows the tank to be fully charged by plugging into a wall socket for 3-4 hours. All the electronics are run off a single cable that uses radio transmitters to communicate with microprocessors in the components. Emissions? Just cold air.

Pretty groovy concept, all in all. But I'd still rather have one of these.

(via Scrutiny Hooligans)

Excuse me?

Following President Bush's address to the UNITY: Journalists of Color Convention, Mark Trahant, the editorial page editor of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and a native American, asked Bush what he thought "tribal sovereignty" means in the 21st century. Bush's response:

Tribal sovereignty means that, it's sovereign. You're a -- you've been given sovereignty, and you're viewed as a sovereign entity. And, therefore, the relationship between the federal government and tribes is one between sovereign entities.

By the powers vested in me by the State of Confusion, I hereby award George Walker Bush the Apostroscout Merit Badge for Tautology.

No more Super Freak.

Rick James found dead in Los Angeles at age 56.

Undersea Mysteries

Scientists are studying the submerged peak of the mid-Atlantic ridge, "the world's tallest mountain range, which zigzags across the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean from Iceland to the Azores where the ridge rises above sea level." New Scientist reports the researchers have discovered what they believe to be 40-50 new species, including a bright red squid and "colossal spinning ring-like plankton structures." Even more curious, though, is this set of straight tracks found at a depth of 2000 meters that the scientists cannot explain.

James Hart Update

NewsDay: Unabashed Racist Wins GOP Primary in Tennessee

With 86 percent of the primary vote counted Thursday, write-in candidate Dennis Bertrand had just 1,554 votes compared to 7,671, or 83 percent, for James L. Hart, a believer in the discredited, phony science of eugenics. In November, the GOP candidate will oppose Rep. John Tanner, a Democrat who has represented the northwest Tennessee district for 15 years.

Hart, 60, vows if elected to work toward keeping "less favored races" from reproducing or immigrating to the United States. In campaign literature, Hart contends that "poverty genes" threaten to turn the United States into "one big Detroit."

The L Word

How many points do I get for "idiotic"?

It wasn't a four-letter word, but it was close enough to cause a stir at the National Scrabble Championship Thursday. In the final round, eventual champion Trey Wright played the word "lez," which was on a list of offensive words not allowed during the tournament. Normally, no word is off-limits, but because the games were being taped for broadcast on ESPN, certain terms had been deemed inappropriate, including the three-letter slang for lesbian. [...] "The ultimate absurdity is that you can't play the word 'redskins' on ESPN," he said.

Is Barack Obama the Anti-Christ?

Well, is he?

When I first heard of Barak, a few days ago, the first thing I heard is that he is a guy who came out of nowhere and now many flock to his side. When my wife and I heard this, we both thought the same thing, the anti-christ. [...] If he turns out to not be the antichrist, then his message is a good thing.

And if John Edwards turns out not to be the Hamburglar, then that whole Two Americas thing is probably okay, too.

Set your VCR.

The Daily Show's coverage of the Democratic National Convention tied MSNBC overall for the time slot, and beat all of the cable news networks for the 18-34 demographic. Want to know why Jon Stewart is pulling in viewers at such a staggering clip? Watch him call bullshit on Texas Congressman Henry Bonilla. This is what the "real" news anchors should be doing every interview, but almost never do. How sad of a statement is it that a comedian on a fake news show exhibits higher journalistic standards than nearly all of the serious news media?

By the way, Bill Clinton will be on the show Monday night.

Comment Spam

Since installing MT-Blacklist, my activity logs are showing hundreds of blocked spam comments here every day. Despite performing beautifully, I'm having to add new addresses to the blacklist on a nearly daily basis, as new sites are flogged. Instead of gradually constructing a blacklist long enough to reach from here to the moon, I am going to block any comments that list an email from the yahoo.com domain, since most of the spam that gets through comes attached with a fake yahoo address.

This means that if you are posting a comment and list yahoo as your email address, it will be blocked. There is an easy workaround for this: don't include an email address with your comment. I don't require them and you don't want yours floating around the web for spambots to find anyhow. Now we return you to your regularly scheduled agit-prop, already in progress...

Eye rolling or aisle rolling?

Political humorists across the country fell to their knees and proffered their thanks to the gods this morning after the Illinois Republican Party announced they have selected a candidate to oppose Barack Obama in the Senate race. As you probably remember, Jack Ryan withdrew after his divorce proceedings turned up sex club allegations. Mike Ditka was considered next, but withdrew his name when he realized that he was singularly unqualified for the office. Ted Nugent's name was bandied about, but perhaps the less said about that, the better. How do you possibly pick a headliner after three warm-up acts like that have kept audiences clutching their sides and gasping for breath?

Ladies and gentlemen, give a big Laugh Factory round of applause for Maryland's own Quintessential American, Alan Keyes, the man who "is capable of leading our country to widespread moral and political renewal, once all of America has a chance to see and hear, first-hand, his self-evident brilliance." First up, his self-evidently brilliant disavowal of this statement from three years ago: "I deeply resent the destruction of federalism represented by Hillary Clinton's willingness go into a state she doesn't even live in and pretend to represent people there, so I certainly wouldn't imitate it."

So give it up folks and remember to tip your waitress.

Hoover Junior

The July employment numbers were released this morning, and they were quite a bit worse than expected.

U.S. employers added a paltry 32,000 workers to payrolls last month, the government said on Friday in a report that was far weaker than expected and unwelcome news for an election-bound President Bush. The Labor Department also cut its tally of job growth in May and June by a combined 61,000, adding to the report's weak tenor.

[...]

The Bush administration was likely to look on the positive side as the report showed 1.5 million jobs have been created in 11 straight months of hiring gains. However, Democratic White House hopeful John Kerry could accurately argue that the economy is still down 1.1 million jobs since Bush took office, despite the recent gains. [...] Wall Street economists polled last week had looked for a payroll gain of 228,000, although a weak employment reading from a service sector survey on Wednesday had some bracing for a weaker number. Still, they were stunned by July's lackluster figure.

That's a mighty weak positive side for the Bush administration to trumpet. 1.5 million jobs over 11 months works out to a bit over 136,000 a month. 150,000 per month are needed just to keep pace with population growth. He'll need to average about 220,000 new jobs a month from here 'til Kerry's inauguration just to get back to where he started in 2001, and that still will be a net loss against population growth. Add onto this the fact that real wages are not keeping up with inflation and last month's drop in production workers' wages was the steepest since the height of the 1991 recession.

Bush may come to regret laying down this yardstick last week: "When it comes to improving our economy and creating new jobs, results matter."

Size Matters

Even to Vikings.

Only you can silence yourself.

Pretty jarring set of PSAs about voter registration from Declare Yourself.

(via BAGnewsNotes)

Mission Accomplished

British hit by 'Holy War' as Basra erupts
Uneasy truce evaporates in Najaf
US helicopter downed amid heavy fighting
Insurgents go on rampage in streets of Mosul
Iraq Explosion Kills Five, Wounds 24 in Mahawil
Violence sweeps Iraq as Sadr ceasefire ends

"Results matter." - George W. Bush

Swift Boat Gibletsian

"After cravenly fighting in Vietnam for his country, John Kerry then returned to his country to OPPOSE the war in Vietnam - a war that history has proven to be not only justified, but overwhelmingly popular and morally courageous! We Swift Boat Veterans for Trooth™ stood on the right side of history along with Nixon and Agnew and Kissinger and McNamara! Where did John Kerry stand?"

And I'm in awe of this.

Tax breaks for buggy makers!

The Republican Party is targetting the Amish vote in the swing states of Ohio and Pennsylvania. You may recall that it was during a private meeting with an Amish group in Lancaster, PA that Bush is reported to have said, "I trust that God speaks through me." While the religious community forgoes such domestic comforts as automobiles, telephones, and electricity, they do have mechanical lever voting machines, though it's estimated that fewer than 10% of Amish use them. I would think this election would pose an unresolvable clash between their abortion/homosexuality tenets and their pacifism tenets, leaving their usual electoral abstention the only justifiable option. But then I own an electric razor that plugs into my car lighter so what the hell do I know?

The bearded Stolztfus proudly says the Amish are "sort of swept up with Bush fever. You could hold up a dead mouse with a sign 'I love Bush' and we'd still probably think twice about stomping that mouse underfoot."

I'm not quite sure why you'd want to stomp an already dead mouse underfoot, regardless of its party affiliation, but again: I'm not Amish. The Kerry campaign's response?

"If I know Republicans and their grass-roots operations, they’ll spend most of their time trying to phone bank the Amish," said Kerry spokesman Mark Nevins.

I think the legal term is...

..."ripping him a new one." I don't think Ron Reagan Jr. is going to get any invitations to state dinners this year.

But image is everything in this White House, and the image of George Bush as a noble and infallible warrior in the service of his nation must be fanatically maintained, because behind the image lies . . . nothing? As Jonathan Alter of Newsweek has pointed out, Bush has "never fully inhabited" the presidency. Bush apologists can smilingly excuse his malopropisms and vagueness as the plainspokenness of a man of action, but watching Bush flounder when attempting to communicate extemporaneously, one is left with the impression that he is ineloquent not because he can't speak but because he doesn't bother to think.

What's wrong with us?

David Raffin ponders aloud the question: Why aren't we killing more politicians?

Campaign Financing

Yesterday, the presidential race descended upon the residents of Davenport, Iowa. Thousands of Democrats cheered John Kerry, while Bush rallied Republican supporters three blocks away. Meanwhile, independent voters went on a bank-robbing spree. Damn you, Nader!

Princess Tick-Tock

Black people are OK around 6:00.

It has a sharp flavor.

Yes, I'd like to order off the light menu, please. No, not the lite menu, the light menu.

A Pakistani man says that he has had many marriage proposals turned down because of his eating habits. Allah Wasayo claims that he eats carpets, lights, teacups, glass and grass. He claims relatives turned down the proposals because they feared he would eat his wife.

The 55-year-old from Pingrio can also eat large amounts of food. At a recent buffet at a five-star hotel in Karachi, he asked for his plate to be re-filled 15 times. It is reported that after having a "hearty" meal at the hotel, he then went on to eat lights and broken pieces of teacups at another venue.

I'm staying away from the obvious carpet-eating reference, but right next door to Wasayo in India is another glass-eater who has become something of a tourist attraction.

An Indian man in the northern city of Kanpur says glass and empty liquor bottles are a regular part of his diet. Dashrath, 40, claims he first consumed crushed glass with alcohol in a suicide attempt during a depression. A fisherman by profession, Dashrath says he not only survived the suicide attempt, but realized that he had a taste for glass. "I have been eating glass for the past fifteen years and I have not had any problems," he said, adding he also eats lead bullets. But he has some trouble eating thick soda bottles.

Of course, the practice isn't just restricted to the Indian subcontinent. Philadelphia Eagles linebacker and actor Tim Rossovich was known for chewing glass and it became a short-lived fad on college campuses in (predictably) the 1970s. So toss aside your bourgeois preconceptions and order up a case of Shards O' Glass Freeze Pops today! But watch the commercial first. Videos of the entire production process are here.

Freudian Slip

Atrios spots the latest Bushism.

Bush misspoke as he delivered a speech at the signing ceremony for a $417 billion defense spending bill. "Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we," Bush said. "They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we."

Ain't that the truth?

The Call of the Wild

This story took place about a mile and a half from my job.

Someone called police to a residence on Willow Drive Saturday night because of a suspicious person seen outside. What the officer saw was a man sitting in a chair, reading a Bible and baying at the full moon, according to a police report. The man told the officer that he was a nature lover. No further action was taken. Baying at the moon is not a crime, said Jane Cousins of the Chapel Hill Police Department.

But urinating on fire hydrants will get you arrested. Go figure.

Springsteen in the NY Times

"It is through the truthful exercising of the best of human qualities - respect for others, honesty about ourselves, faith in our ideals - that we come to life in God's eyes. It is how our soul, as a nation and as individuals, is revealed. Our American government has strayed too far from American values. It is time to move forward. The country we carry in our hearts is waiting."

Favored Races

Lesson: you should always bother to field a candidate.

Republican congressional candidate James L. Hart acknowledges that he is an "intellectual outlaw." He is an unapologetic supporter of eugenics, the phony science that resulted in thousands of sterilizations in an attempt to purify the white race. He believes the country will look "like one big Detroit" if it doesn't eliminate welfare and immigration. He believes that if blacks were integrated centuries ago, the automobile never would have been invented. He shows up at voters' homes wearing a bulletproof vest and carrying a gun, and tells them that "white children deserve the same rights as everyone else."

Despite his radical views, Hart may end up winning the Republican nomination because he is the only GOP candidate on the ballot in Thursday's primary.

Nice. This is in a mostly rural, safely Democratic Tennessee district represented by John Tanner. The local GOP is pretty embarrassed about it and a fellow is organizing a write-in campaign to try to deny Hart the nomination. The primary is tomorrow. In the meantime, Hart's website shouldn't be missed.

The Gay Agenda™ Exposed

Hang around with the Family Values Lynch Mob for any length of time and you will inevitably hear references to a shadowy and sinister Gay Agenda™ that has as its main goal infiltrating the schools, parks, and libraries in order to recruit innocent, heterosexual children into a life of anonymous bathhouse sex, crystal meth, and track lighting. I've always just laughed it off, but my buddy Rick was reading to his three-year-old daughter the other night and spotted this devious recruitment ad, which was clearly vetted and approved by the Gay Star Chamber. Have they no sense of decency, at long last?

In the spirit of full disclosure, though, I should probably admit that sometimes I push my nuts under to hide them, too. Then I dance.

Make a joyful noise.

"I felt like I couldn't have written the music I've written, and been on stage singing about the things that I've sung about for the last twenty five years and not taken part in this particular election." -Bruce Springsteen

Kerrypalooza is official. Except it's called Vote for Change, and the tour is being organized by ACT, the same folks who produced the hilarious Will Ferrell ad. They are fanning out over the course of a week to do "approximately 34 shows in 28 cities in 9 [swing] states." This is brilliant and will be more effective than many suspect. Between ACT and MoveOn.org, the 527s are doing big, big things this election.

The tickets are:

1. Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, REM, John Fogerty, Bright Eyes
2. Dave Matthews Band, Ben Harper and the Innocent Criminals, Jurassic 5, My Morning Jacket
3. Pearl Jam, Death Cab for Cutie
4. Jackson Browne, Bonnie Raitt, Keb Mo, others to be announced
5. John Mellencamp, Kenneth "Babyface" Edmonds
6. Dixie Chicks, James Taylor

Here's the schedule as of yesterday:

It's my party...

...and I'll cry if I want to.

I fear I may stand in a small minority in expressing the following: I actually like the two-party system. Sure, it has its flaws just like every other electoral scheme, and those flaws have been pointed out often enough that I’ll not repeat them here. However, it also has proven amazingly stable. Stability for stability's sake is nothing to write home about, of course; Alfredo Stroessner and Kim Il Sung both hung around for a long time as well and neither could be considered a fortunate tenure. However, in the American case, that stability has made no small contribution to building the strongest, richest country in human history and that is a difficult legacy to overlook, whatever black marks may accompany it.

The two-party system pushes groups to band together into large electoral coalitions; it rewards compromise and punishes single-issue puritanism. Now, I should admit that I'm a bit of a single-issue voter myself. I vote for whichever candidate is more likely to jam a pencil in Pat Robertson's eye. Kind of lends itself to straight ticket voting, don't you know? But I digress. The two-party system has a cohesive effect on American political society, and while I sympathize with those who bemoan the narrow spectrum of American politics, I appreciate the fact that it tends to marginalize the American equivalents of Jean-Marie Le Pen or Joerg Haider.

Third parties have a long history in the United States, though that history is mostly one of futility. The electoral calculus of our system consigns third parties to irrelevancy unless and until one of the two major parties implodes. Rail against the essential unfairness of that predicament all you like, but the reality remains: the two powers that be ain't about to change the system that ensures their seats at the table. You can accept this fact and work within those constraints or you can wander in the political desert.

For the most part, the only real impact a third party can have, as amply demonstrated four years ago, comes when the electorate is fairly evenly divided, and then only to the detriment of most of their policy goals. The Libertarians, god bless 'em, are the true party of optimism, hoping against hope that this will be the year they recreate the glory year of 1980 and break through the 1% ceiling (or do it one better and clear the 1.1% bar). Or maybe the salad days of 1972, when they got one Electoral College vote. Meanwhile, eschewing the shackles of ideological consistency, the Reform Party has had Ross Perot, Pat Buchanan, and Ralph Nader as their last three standard bearers. What do we want? Uhhhhh... When do we want it? This is an open bar, right?

Which bring us to the Green Party (hey, you knew it was coming). The Greens have had some successes in European countries because niches are available in parliamentary systems. Once you establish that foothold, you can work on party building. That opportunity simply doesn't exist in the United States, quite aside from any question of intrinsic fairness. So the Green Party soldiers on. I know plenty of Greens and we agree on more issues than we disagree, as long as we're discussing policy. However, policy alone doesn't carry the day in 21st century America; it takes politics as well, and at politics, the Greens are just about hopeless.

Best I can figure, their electoral philosophy is that the power of the great, unmobilized mass of non-voters could be harnessed if only a sufficiently left-wing party existed to lead them. Never mind that poll after poll indicates that non-voters would divide roughly the same way voters do, if they truly cared … which they don't. The current incarnation of the Greens seems to believe that the Democratic Party is hopelessly corrupt and beholden to big money interests, so a progressive movement must be built from the ground up. That philosophy just makes me shake my head in wonder. Do you build a car every time you have to go to the grocery store?

The operative analogy here is the religious right. The Republican Party didn’t represent them well a few decades ago, so what did they do? They acted as a caucus within the GOP and began working on the grassroots level to change the party. They used the GOP vehicle to get themselves onto school boards and city councils and county commissions and platform committees. In doing so, the religious right transformed itself into a national political power that eclipsed, for instance, unions. They don’t always get their way and they complain mightily about that, but they've gotten much further with the GOP than they ever will with the Constitution Party.

If you’d like a more progressive Democratic Party (and who among us doesn’t?), it takes more than voting and bitching about your lack of choices. Get involved with the party and work toward promoting your issues within the coalition. Hell, announce your candidacy for office. Sure, it’s less immediately gratifying than proclaiming a pox on both houses and establishing your ideological purity with a minor party. But ideological purity and a buck will get you a cup of coffee. Maybe.

Don't get me wrong. Everybody has the right to join and support whatever party they choose. However, if you're more interested in efficacy than philosophy, the minor party route is going to be supremely frustrating. Nader's attempt this year to run as an independent uniting the third parties has beached on the rocks of 1) Nader's ego, and 2) the impossibility of uniting splinter groups each convinced of the innate, unquestionable superiority of their own platform.

The Left in this country has a reliable history of only stopping their forming of circular firing squads long enough to eat their young. They seem to have (at least temporarily) put that on hold to oust GWB. Hopefully, it's the beginning of a trend rather than an aberration, and a dawning realization that, creaky and ponderous though it may be, the Democratic Party is the only horse progressives have that can get them over the finish line. Unless, of course, you like getting outsmarted by the fundamentalists.

(Cross-posted at The American Street)

More than a theory.

Over at Catch.com, Kevin issues the challenge to Photoshop Michelle Malkin's new book. My before and after:

Better ones in the comments at Kevin's.

Good Deed for the Day

This is totally on the up-and-up. Charlotte is an old friend, and just look at the Corn Dog's eyes.

Lock up your sons!

Every sixth-grade boy's dream teacher, Mary Kay Letourneau, is getting out of prison in a few days and she sounds crazier than ever.

National Catfish Month

August is National Catfish Month, and the Tennessee Aquarium in Chattanooga seems to be leading the celebrations. If you grew up in the South, the catfish likely still holds a honored place in your fish pantheon. They can get absolutely enormous, with the largest one caught in North America on record coming in at 150 pounds. The one in this picture is only about 90 pounds (scroll over to the diver to get a sense of perspective). In Thailand, the giant catfish can reach 10 feet and 650 pounds.

Catfish come in over 2000 different species across 31 families, including the walking catfish that sometimes travels over land to nearby water bodies. All of them have scale-free skins and the characteristic "whiskers" called barbels, which are covered with thousands of tastebuds, allowing them to find food in even the murkiest waters. The billygoats of the shallows, they'll eat damn near anything. Despite this, they are tasty, and I'm not even much fond of freshwater fish. If you want recipes, The Catfish Institute has you covered.

Several species can inject painful toxins through their pectoral spines, so you want to be careful getting them off the hook. Some catfish you probably want to avoid altogether, though. The electric catfish of Africa is capable of generating up to 350 volts and the tiny Southern American candiru catfish is the only known vertebrate parasite of humans, known to swim up the urethras of bathers and swimmers when they urinate in the water. Eek.

Update (2:15 pm): In the comments, Tripp points out that no catfish article should be considered complete without a reference to noodling, where you wiggle your fingers in a catfish hole until it clamps down, then pull it out. Snopes has more on the odd and dangerous pastime, along with some more pictures of gargantuan catfish.

Carolina to California

Froz hasn't been posting here much recently, because he has been packing his entire life into boxes. No posts from either of us this weekend because I was helping him load it all into a truck. And you won't hear from him for a while yet, since he and the dog are driving all of it all clear across the country this week. Once he gets unpacked, settled in, and back in posting form, apostropher.com will be a bicoastal operation. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Anyhow, aside from a two-year period when Froz and his lady were living in Asheville, he and I have have lived no more than a county apart since we were nine or ten years old and shared apartments on several occasions through our six-year extended undergrad careers. Through marriages, children, mortgages, divorces (just me), and re-marriages, he has been the guy I've called on and vice versa. In short, we've been more brothers than friends, so it was a sad scene for me when he pulled the door down on the back of that 15-foot truck and backed it down the driveway.

On the other hand, he's heading out for the job he's been building toward for a decade, and I'm happy for and proud of him. Here in NC, Froz worked for a local government agency, which is why he's remained nominally anonymous. I'll let him decide whether that will remain the case, since the new gig involves some government contract work and some of the opinions expressed here are a little, ummm, unorthodox. Yeah, that's the word.

So, North Carolina's loss is North California's gain. Travel safely, old friend, and hopefully we'll see you posting from apostropher.com's West Coast headquarters in a few weeks.