Doggedly searching for the crux of the biscuit.
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It seemed like a good idea at the time...
For $10,000 and a brighter future for her son, Kari Smith on Wednesday became a real life pop-up ad for a virtual casino.
"It feels like someone is taking a pin and just stabbing you with it," Smith told her son, Brady, seated nearby on the floor as tattoo artist Don Brouse — in permanent black block letters — branded her forehead with the Web site domain GoldenPalace.com.
The 30-year-old Bountiful mother, who put the space up for auction on the Web, will be promoting the multinational gambling site, which makes the claim — using a little more color and a lot more flash — to be the No. 1 online casino. [...]
Smith said she talked to several companies and received multiple offers, but she decided Goldenpalace.com would be the best choice.
"We decided to go with these guys because they work with a lot of charities," she said. "I want this to mean something." [oh, it means something alright, just not what you think -'r]
Jon Wolf of the company's marketing department said skin is not an uncommon spot for the casino to advertise: It already has another forehead, more than 100 arms, legs, chests and backs.
Mm-hmm. In case you don't remember, Golden Palace is the same outfit that ponied up to name the titi monkey. Of course, it's her body and she can do with it whatever she likes, but something tells me the closing sentence of the article will prove to contain two very poor predictions.
Smith said she doesn't think she'll ever regret having the permanent logo on her forehead, and her son promised to get good grades.
No, you probably won't regret it any one of the next 500 unsuccessful job interviews. Also, promises from 11-year-olds have a great track record. I don't have 10 grand, but I'll pay for the tattoo if anybody wants to get "APOSTROPHER.COM" on your forehead. First come, first serve.
The White House has put up a very helpful page to remind everybody of the extensive history of good news from Iraq.
(mailed to me by a co-worker, but it looks like No More Mr. Nice Blog spotted it first)
Grizzly Bear-Size Catfish Caught in Thailand
Nearly nine feet long and 646 pounds, it's the largest freshwater fish ever caught. The link up there has a gallery of pictures.
Wutchoo talkin' 'bout, Willis?
Thinking he was sending an e-mail to an aide, Assemblyman Willis Stephens instead sent a note to nearly 300 constituents, making the following comment on their listserv: "Just watching the idiots pontificate." In the message, meant for aide Beth Coursen, Stephens wrote that he subscribes to the Brewster-based online discussion group to monitor area happenings, but he doesn't post messages.
Usually.
The accidental note went out early Monday morning. Within an hour, Stephens sent another e-mail apologizing for the first one. "To all who read and post on this group, I honestly enjoy reading most of what is exchanged on this site and do not direct my indiscreet characterizations to anyone in particular or to the group in general," he wrote. "In fact, now I most closely resemble the type of poster I described."
When reached for comment Tuesday, Stephens said he was embarrassed and reiterated what he said in his e-mailed apology. Michael Santos, a Brewster resident and Democratic village trustee who created the discussion group, said he's a longtime political adversary of Stephens. Stephens has called him a lot worse than a pontificating idiot, Santos said, laughing.
Oh, to have been a fly on Stephens' wall when that message appeared on the board.
Flash back to last August, when Bush administration officals (and their token Democratic lapdog) were outraged, outraged, that Howard Dean accused the Bush administration of having political motivations for the seemingly endless string of color-coded terror alerts.
Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut went so far as to say "nobody in their right mind" would believe that Bush would "scare people for political reasons."
Vice President Dick Cheney shot back directly Wednesday at a campaign rally in Missouri. "There have been some commentary from some of our critics -- Howard Dean comes immediately to mind -- saying somehow that this is being hyped for political reasons, that the data that we collected here, the casing reports that provided the information on these prospective attacks, is old data, four or five years old. That just tells me that Howard Dean doesn't know anything about how these groups operate." [...]
Responding to Dean's latest assertion, Bush campaign spokesman Terry Holt dismissed him as a "bizarre conspiracy theorist. This shameful display of angry partisanship from Howard Dean is more of the angry face of the Democratic Party, and it's not helping us win the war on terror."
Yeah, that nutjob Howard Dean. Care to guess how many terror alerts have been announced in the eight months since the election? Here's a hint: you can count them on no hands. Since "nobody in their right mind" could have believed that Bush would try to scare people into voting for him, I can only assume that we must have already won the war on terror, right?
I can't quite put my finger on it, but something in this story leads me to think this fellow isn't headed for a successful career as a criminal.
A 22-year-old man was wrestled to the ground in the Germantown Police Department Friday afternoon after threatening a dispatcher with a glass bong and a shotgun, police said. The man walked into the department and handed a threatening note to the dispatcher at a her window around 5 p.m., police said. As she read the note, he threw a glass bong at the bulletproof glass, police said. The bong shattered, but the window did not. He then pulled out a shotgun, but three officers using a taser and pepper spray were able to subdue him, police said.
"And if anybody tries to stop me, I'll temporarily blind 'em with a cloud of smoke and then poke their eyes out with my one-hitter."
During the last days before we invaded Iraq, I had several conversations with different people who stated that they had opposed the war, but that since we had committed to the action, "we can't afford to lose." My question at the time was: what would we lose? A long pause invariably followed. Thanks to the jackhammer-like repetition of that phrase in the media (and lord knows we were all watching a lot of it at the time), it felt like a question with obvious answers, yet they weren't obvious enough, at least, to be cited easily or in a straightforward fashion. Most of the answers tended to be variations on one of three themes:
The last one really doesn't need commentary at this point. The first one makes a certain intuitive sense, but by invading and finding ourselves badly undermanned, poorly received, and unable to provide anything resembling security, we've achieved exactly the same state, but on an entirely larger scale. We're more or less tapped out militarily and if anything, we've managed to forge better ties among formerly competing bad actors by presenting a nice, easily identifiable common enemy. In fact, we've established Jihad University.
As to the second, we'll soon have spent ten times that amount in less than three years and we're nowhere near the end of the bill. This Rumsfeld quote led most news outlets today:
The insurgency could go on for any number of years. Insurgencies tend to go on five, six, eight, 10, 12 years. Coalition forces, foreign forces are not going to repress that insurgency. We're going to create an environment that the Iraqi people and the Iraqi security forces can win.
I'm filing this one under E for "even a stopped clock," since the first three sentences are absolutely true. Oooh, but he should have stopped while he was ahead. It's nice that Ibrahim al-Jaafari says that two years will be more than enough time to achieve this, but I doubt he believes it. We've been there a little over two years and still haven't managed to secure the seven-mile road from the Green Zone to the airport.
So, the things we'd have lost by not invading, we have lost quite more severely by invading. A few other things have been lost, too: nearly 2000 Coalition soldiers, hundreds of contractors, thousands of Iraqi army conscripts, tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians, our moral compass*, our sense of community, and much of the world's goodwill.
Yet, for all that, we remain stuck hip-and-shoulder-deep in this Mesopotamian tarbaby, with the usual suspects screeching treason at all the liberal underminers who don't stand and cheer at how hard we punched that gooey bastard. I still think pulling out is the least bad of our options, but make no mistake: it's bad, and I don't share Professor Cole's optimism about the feasibility of an international force. However, if one organizing principle exists within the Bush administration, it is never admit you're wrong. Accordingly, I expect us to muddle along toward no discernible goal for the duration. Unless, of course, they really are insane, and that has yet to be disproven.
Flogging this horse may be bad form, but more than a few of us pointed out that entering Iraq would result in being stuck in a situation we couldn't control with no good options, an utterly sensible and obvious position that was derided as a bunch of commie hippie loserism by "responsible" Republicans and Democrats alike. I'm used to hearing that, so it wasn't exactly a surprise, but seeing retrospectively how the commie hippie loser brigade has happened to be right, oh, about 90% of the time in regards to expeditionary wars, you'd think the triumphalists would at least dial the volume back a bit and hedge their bets. You'd be wrong, of course, but you'd think it because you want to believe in the basic intelligence of your fellow citizens as badly as the War Party wants to believe in the omnipotence of American military might. Turns out we're both blinkered optimists in our own special, self-deluded ways.
So, if you still think we need to stay, sans timetable, until we "win," the question now is what do we win? Or rather, what milestone that remains in the province of the feasible would constitute a win?
*Man, can anybody look straight at you and lie - when he knows you know he's lying - like Alberto Gonzalez? "[T]he United States would never send terrorism suspects to countries where they would be tortured." Ladies and gentlemen, meet your next Supreme Court justice. He's gonna fit right in.
One of China's largest state-controlled oil companies made a $18.5 billion unsolicited bid for Unocal today, launching the first-ever big takeover battle by a Chinese company for an American corporation. The bold bid, by the China National Offshore Oil Corp., may be a watershed in Chinese corporate behavior, and it demonstrates the increasing influence of Wall Street's bare-knuckled hostile takeover tactics in Asia. The offer is also the latest symbol of China's growing economic clout and of the soaring ambitions of its corporate giants, particularly when it comes to the energy resources it needs desperately to continue feeding the nation's huge growth.
CNOOC's bid, which comes two months after Unocal agreed to be sold to Chevron for $16.4 billion, is expected to trigger a potentially costly bidding war over the California-based Unocal, a large independent American oil company. Moreover, the bid is likely to provoke a fierce debate in Washington, D.C., about the nation's trade policies with China and the role of the two governments in the growing trend of deal making between companies in both countries.
Wow.
You can safely ignore this post. I'm just seeing if the "fix" my hosting company implemented actually fixed anything.
Okay, everything seems to be working properly now, though God knows I've said that many, many times before only to have it rear its ugly head again. Please let me know if any of you get the dreaded 500 error when trying to post a comment.
Update: Nope. Still broken.
Could somebody please explain to me how this is not a call for fascism? I thought you were never going to trust this administration again, you pompous asshat.
"When it was on display in Rome two homeless people were said to have lived underneath it."
Police say a man who woke up with a serious headache walked 12 blocks to a hospital with a swollen lip and powder burns. Doctors discovered the problem. 47-year-old Wendell Coleman had a bullet lodged in his tongue. Coleman told police that a woman stuck a gun barrel in his mouth during a dispute around 2:30 Tuesday morning and that he heard the gun go off. Police say Coleman then went home to sleep.
How drunk would you have to be?
The thread is old, so some of the pictures have disappeared and you may have already seen it, but this Photoshop contest is awfully damn funny. Two warnings:
1. It runs for 50 pages or so, and I stopped at about page 25 last night as the quality was beginning to dip. Perhaps it got better from there, perhaps not. Your mileage may vary.
2. If an exposed butt is a violation for wherever you are surfing, well, there's an exposed butt in pretty much every picture.
Roy Edroso is "throwing a meme" (duck!) and invites us all to join him in the warm, soothing muck.
The theme is quotes. We all have favorites, but I'm going to pitch this high and inside. I would like to know what your truest quotes are. Let me explain. Some quotes you like because they're poetic or amusing or charming. They sound good to you. Some, though, stick with you because they really reflect your beliefs, and have done so through whatever life experiences you've had.
The true-quotes become obvious when you think about them in that light. You realize that these little scraps of mental paper have become your watchwords, the identifying labels on your ego. To name them is not always a pleasing thing, I have found, because those labels usually floated onto your ego long ago and only stuck because you never cared to brush them off. They have the persistence of habits, and most habits are bad. So they sting to note. But that sting is what makes this such an elevating enterprise!
Okay, I'm game, though I'll probably update this post about thirty times through the day as they occur to me.
"Most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be." - Abraham Lincoln
"To disagree with three-fourths of the [American] public is one of the first requisites of sanity." - Oscar Wilde, who actually said it about the British public.
"Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard." - H.L. Mencken
"All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." - Edmund Burke
"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter." - Martin Luther King, Jr.
"Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons." - Bertrand Russell
"Patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels." - Samuel Johnson
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." - George Bernard Shaw
"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts." - Bertrand Russell
"When ideas fail, words come in very handy." - Goethe
How many licks does it take...
Marijuana-flavored lollipops with names such as Purple Haze, Acapulco Gold and Rasta are showing up on the shelves of convenience stores around the country, angering anti-drug advocates.
"It's nothing but dope candy, and that's nothing we need to be training our children to do," said Georgia state Sen. Vincent Fort, who has persuaded some convenience stores to stop selling the treats.
The confections are legal, because they are made with hemp oil, a common ingredient in health food, beauty supplies and other household products. The oil imparts a marijuana's grassy taste but not the high. [...]
"There are more than 70 million people in the United States who smoke marijuana. We're catering to the audience of people who are in that smoking culture," said Rick Watkins, marketing director for Corona, Calif.-based Chronic Candy, which uses the slogan "Every lick is like taking a hit." An Atlanta company called Hydro Blunts markets a similar product under the name Kronic Kandy, which is made in the Netherlands.
Being, uhhh, somewhat acquainted with said grassy taste, I don't really think kids will be lining up for these any more than they would line up for rutabaga roll-ups. Hemp oil has precisely zero psychoactive properties (though it can still produce positive drug tests), so the big foofaraw is only about marijuana imagery in stores that usually sell alcohol, tobacco, and pornography alongside the gas, Slim Jims, and crappy coffee. Please, moralists, if you absolutely must get your panties in a wad (and clearly you're not happy otherwise), go find something worth the effort. You could at least focus on the dope that actually kills people.
In what is perhaps the most unintentionally funny post in the history of the internet, Marc at USSNeverMindDock has decreed that the odious, ultra-right, gay-bashing "Reverend" Fred Phelps is part of the liberal, Communist-Democrat treason brigade. Sorry, dude, but he's one of yours. I especially recommend the comments section. The most delicious irony, however, comes in his update, after his ass has been handed to him.
And what are they all upset about? Are they upset about a deranged protest at a military funeral? Do they denounce this lunatic? Nope.
Hmm. Not from around here, are you? A quick trip through google will show you that lefty denunciations of Reverend Phelps are about as common as sand on a beach. Enjoy your fifteen minutes of fame, Ms. Litella.
Update: I would give a via link for this, but my head exploded upon the first reading, so I don't recall how exactly I arrived at it and now it's being linked all over. Oliver Willis appears to have spotted it first, though, so I'll give him the credit.
Subway stations in South Korea are often decorated at different times of the year with children's art projects - fire safety, future jobs, home life, technology, and so on. The theme of this one appears to be "Fuck Japan!"
(via GoodieBagTV)
Pretty regularly, the news aggregators will fill up with stories about this or that operation in Iraq in which x number of insurgents were killed and y number arrested. Given that journalists are unable to venture much beyond the Green Zone in Baghdad for fear of their lives, these numbers are generally coming directly from CentCom headquarters without verification. That should be reason enough to take them with a grain of salt. A much more disturbing reason is shown in the following before and after pictures, where RPGs magically appear beside dead bodies.
Warning: the linked page contains many pictures of bullet-riddled teenaged corpses.
I've seen it before, you probably have too: for a few nights out of the summer, the moon appears freakishly huge when it rises. Here's the science behind it, and I wasn't aware that a camera will record the moon at normal size, not bizarrely inflated as we will see it. This is the week to watch for it in North America, and the full moon on Wednesday will hang "lower in the sky than any full moon since June 1987, so the Moon Illusion is going to be extra strong." American moonrise times can be found here. (via MeFi)
It's not quite typing the complete works of Shakespeare, but still...
Monkey business proved to be lucrative Monday when paintings by Congo the chimpanzee sold at auction for more than $25,000. The three abstract, tempera paintings were auctioned at Bonhams in London alongside works by impressionist master Renoir and pop art provocateur Andy Warhol. But while Warhol's and Renoir's work didn't sell, bidders lavished attention on Congo's paintings. [...] Congo, born in 1954, produced about 400 drawings and paintings between ages 2 and 4. He died in 1964 of tuberculosis.
Andy Warhol, chimpanzee
Can't tell 'em apart at a-a-a-all.
Six legs, very good.
A puppy with six legs and two penises was found sleeping outside a Chinese temple in a Malaysian town, and devotees are treating the freak find as a good omen, a news report said Sunday. [...] Devotees feel that the unusual dog is a bearer of good fortune and have named him Ong Fatt, or the Lucky One.
When I was growing up, the NC State Fair's sideshow had a five-legged dog that was there year after year. If I recall correctly, you paid fifty cents to look at it. Can't say that the ticket-takers ever seemed to be possessed of much extra luck.
Update: In the comments, GeoX provides the picture! Looks like a puppy with another puppy jammed up its butt.
German soldiers will now allowed to sport mullets and ponytails after a Bavarian court ruled differing hair regulations for male and female recruits to be "unconstitutional" and "incomprehensible." The ruling came in a case where an 18-year-old recruit was fined 150 euro and jailed for refusing to cut his 10 inch ponytail.
The fact that female soldiers could get away with wearing a wider range of hairdos as long as they didn't interfere with the correct placement of the hat was unfair, the soldier argued. It meant he didn't have the same freedom to develop his personality as the women.
Mmm-kay. What I would really love to see is a mullet brigade wearing Pickelhauben. That would rock.
Clever. Put google text ads on a web page and create a script that simulates human clicks. Another program deposits all the money made from the clicks into an e-banking account that automatically buys shares of google. Rinse, repeat as necessary. (via Sensory Impact)
National Geographic has the photo. The fishermen who caught it named it Springer.
"It's a phenomenon known as bilateral gynandromorphy, and it's been observed in butterflies, moths, and lobsters. Each half has all the characteristics of its gender, right down to divided reproductive organs. It's caused when the two halves develop separately due to a genetic error early in the process of cell division."
Well now, here's a story you don't see every day.
A Romanian nun has died after being bound to a cross, gagged and left alone for three days in a cold room in a convent, Romanian police have said. Members of the convent in north-west Romania claim Maricica Irina Cornici was possessed and that the crucifixion had been part of an exorcism ritual. Cornici was found dead on the cross on Wednesday after fellow nuns called an ambulance, according to police. [...]
Police say the 23-year-old nun, who was denied food and drink throughout her ordeal, had been tied and chained to the cross and a towel pushed into her mouth to smother any sounds. A post-mortem is to be carried out, although initial reports say that Cornici died from asphyxiation. [...]
Father Daniel who is accused of orchestrating the crime is said to be unrepentant. "God has performed a miracle for her, finally Irina is delivered from evil," AFP quoted the priest as saying. "I don't understand why journalists are making such a fuss about this."
Yeah, really. What's so weird about priests crucifying nuns?
Jesus' General is organizing Operation Yellow Elephant.
Objective: To motivate the College Republicans to vigorously defend the vital work they're doing defending the homefront by holding affirmative action bake sales, immigrant hunts, and subsidizing the Scaife funding of Ann Coulter, David Horowitz, and Michelle Malkin.
Method: Embarrass the College Republicans by challenging them to volunteer to fight in the war they demanded.
Excellent. If you live in the DC metro area, where their biennial convention will be held June 24-26, your orders are here. Everybody else, write the College Republican leadership and ask them to pass the following resolution:
WHEREAS, the College Republican membership has always fully supported the war in Iraq;
WHEREAS, we have encouraged the notion that the degree of one's patriotism is directly proportional to their support for the war;
WHEREAS, by word, by deed and by support of Ann Coulter, David Horowitz, and Michelle Malkin we have decreed that dissent against the war is the equivalent of treason;
WHEREAS, the military continually falls far short of meeting its recruitment needs resulting in a manpower crisis;
NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED THAT:
The College Republicans organization is officially disbanded until the end of the war;
BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED THAT:
The College Republicans membership immediately volunteer for military service as infantrymen.
Contact information is here and an excellent example is here. C'mon, tough guys. The military is desperate and we all know they can't count on a bunch of cowardly, treasonous, America-hating liberals to perform under pressure. Since most of us are queer anyhow, they won't even take us. So it's up to you, the best and the brightest, to help support the war you so loudly and vociferously insisted upon. Or was all that chest-pounding, finger-pointing, mine-is-bigger-than-yours patriotism just so many words devoid of any real conviction? Hmm?
"There is an ad for some Hyundai SUV that says, 'Leather seats impervious to spills and spit-up. Which also makes it perfect for Mom's night out.' Wow, 'Mom' has some wilder 'nights out' than we thought, if she is prone to urping up margaritas in the car."
I tell you, what these unruly kids today need is a good Times New Roman whacking.
The mob just ain't what it used to be.
In case you missed the first six thousand bloggers linking to them: Triumph the Insult Comic Dog at the Michael Jackson trial and the Best of Unnecessary Censorship.
Uh, no thanks, dude.
Random Shuffle on the iTunes:
"This Time Anything Finite at All" - Songs: Ohia
"Return of the G" - Outkast
"One Hit" - Suede
"Shock Body" - Talib Kweli
"Tempter" - Stereolab
"The Club Isn't Open" - East River Pipe
"Gone" - Doug Martsch
"Avalon" - Sigur Rós
"Worldwide" - Del tha Funkee Homosapien
"Serious" - Alice Cooper
Talking chimp gives his first press conference. Via, unsurprisingly, Monkeyfilter.
If this won't make you swear off drinking, it will at least give your kids nightmares. So that's something. (via boingboing)
I had a dream remarkably like this once, but it was a lot more titillating without the Chipmunks soundtrack. (via Chaos Digest)
For those of you keeping score at home, Noah has gone from an emaciated-looking burrito monkey to a tubby, happy, perfectly healthy baby.
What do you mean, "inappropriate"?
In the small rural town of Selma, folks are outraged. "They see it on TV and stuff like that but not right in our own little hometown school," said Bonnie Swingley, Selma resident.
Liberty Perry Community School Corporation Assistant Superintendent Alice McHaffey introduced the combined high school-middle school talent show. What she did at the end of the show stunned the audience.
"They were doing this YMCA dance show and she came down, and they picked her up and she had on these really short shorts and when they picked her up, her butt cheeks were hanging out. Then she started dirty dancing up on the floor and she ripped this guy's shirt off," said Katelyn Glaze, a student.
News 8 was unable to show the performance because people in Selma, fearing retribution, wouldn't share their tape. The man who provided News 8 with a tape didn't record the surprise ending. But Matt and Chris can describe it. They were on stage. "She came up and was dancing with us and booty dancing with me and I cuffed her and I guess it got kind of seductive," said Chris.
That this happened in rural Indiana makes it about three times funnier than it would be otherwise.
I was struck by this passage from a review in Harper's of an E.E. Cummings biography:
But Cummings, like Modernism itself, hasn't aged very well. Not his work, which remains enduringly filled with vigor, intelligence, and beauty; rather, his reputation. In different forms this has befallen many of his Modernist peers, and for each a different "reason" has been given. Joyce is now increasingly called a phony, one not worth the trouble the unpacking of his allusions demands. Pound, too, is dismissed as an incomprehensible fraud -- not because he is, but because he made it so hard for us to figure out what he was doing. And Cummings? His discrediting at the hands of what he preemptively called, in his commencement adddress, the critical "fakirs and fanatics" has been for the most unkind reason of all: not for the blight of aiming too high but for the shame of stooping too low -- for triviality. [...]
That one major critic might misread Cummings is understandable. That most of the popular critics of poetry of the twentieth century have done so is telling of the very trouble that Pound's imperative to newness was meant to address.
The review itself doesn't seem to be online, but it's by Wyatt Mason. The Joyce-Pound-Cummings bit is a hell of an insight. I wish I had something intelligent to add to it, but I couldn't even have come up with that, so I'll let it stand on its own merits. Just thought I'd share.
Sadly, No! is worth a look every day because, face it, you don't have the time to go trawling through the muck of the wingnet to harvest out the true jewels of lunacy on your own. Right now, however, I'd like to point you to one of today's posts, because they've found a ringer from right here in North Carolina, and it isn't Judson Cox! Say hello to Alan Teitleman, College Republican from Appalachian State University, who uncovered a "new low" of "liberal indoctrination" by "desperate" left wingers: "attempted brainwashing of students in clubs."
Oh dear. What clubs? The ASU Student Ambassadors? The Appalachian Macintosh Users Group? The Pagan Student Organization? No, it's much, much more sneaky and insidious than that. Sit down because this is going to make your head spin. The liberal indoctrination being shoved down the throats of unsuspecting conservative college students occurred at...wait for it...a Flavor Flav concert in Myrtle Beach during Spring Break. You have to read it to get a taste of the full devious horror of it all. Luckily, as Alan notes, "conservatives are far too smart to be taken in by such pathetically low tactics."
F**king liberals. Also, totally creepy cat picture.
Remember Sen. Bill Frist touting his experience as a medical doctor and diagnosing Terri Schiavo via television?
Bill Frist (R-Tenn.), a renowned heart surgeon before becoming Senate majority leader, went to the floor late Thursday night for the second time in 12 hours to argue that Florida doctors had erred in saying Terri Schiavo is in a "persistent vegetative state."
"I question it based on a review of the video footage which I spent an hour or so looking at last night in my office," he said in a lengthy speech in which he quoted medical texts and standards. "She certainly seems to respond to visual stimuli."
Hey look! The autopsy shows she was blind.
It would be redundant in my house, but I might get some for the car. Makes a great gift. (via)
A new "Steve, Don't Eat It!" is up, wherein fearless Steve brews and consumes prison hooch.
My old WXYC mate Carrie demonstrates the impressive mold resistance of McDonald's cuisine.
A new family of catfish was discovered in Chiapas, Mexico. While this is the 37th known family of catfish, the discovery marks only the third new family of fish announced in the last 60 years, following the coelacanth in 1938 and the megamouth shark in 1983.
The Washington Post's Walter Pincus notes the demonstrated financial savvy of our new president of the World Bank and let's hope it isn't an omen.
Testimony by then-Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul D. Wolfowitz, one of the chief architects of Iraq policy, before a House subcommittee on Feb. 28, 2003, just weeks before the invasion, illustrated the optimistic view the administration had of postwar Iraq. He said containment of Hussein the previous 12 years had cost "slightly over $30 billion," adding, "I can't imagine anyone here wanting to spend another $30 billion to be there for another 12 years." As of May, the Congressional Research Service estimated that Congress has approved $208 billion for the war in Iraq since 2003.
The Spirit rover snapped a lovely picture of the Martian sunset, while Cassini got a nice one of Saturn's moon Hyperion. Closer to home, it looks like this tornado is riding a rainbow.
Seriously, holy cow. Those are your balls.
Oops.
I gotcher old school DJing right here.
Surprisingly, of the list of the 22 senators who did not sponsor or co-sponsor the Senate bill apologizing for lynching, only six are from Dixie: two each from Mississippi and Texas, and one apiece from Tennessee and Alabama.
Update: The lynching list is a fluid beast, as senators apparently can add themselves retroactively once a bill has passed. John Aravosis has the latest roster.
Lamar Alexander (R-TN)
Robert Bennett (R-UT)
Thad Cochran (R-MS)
Kent Conrad (D-ND)
John Cornyn (R-TX)
Michael Crapo (R-ID)
Michael Enzi (R-WY)
Chuck Grassley (R-IA)
Judd Gregg (R-NH)
Orrin Hatch (R-UT)
Kay Hutchison (R-TX)
Jon Kyl (R-AZ)
Trent Lott (R-MS)
Lisa Murkowski (R-AK)
Richard Shelby (R-AL)
John Sununu (R-NH)
Craig Thomas (R-WY)
George Voinovich (R-OH)
Update 2: Along with Republicans Voinovich and Murkowski, Kent Conrad has signed on after the fact, making the list an all-GOP affair. Quelle surprise.
Robert X. Cringely thinks the announcement that Apple will move its computers to Intel processors is the first step toward an Apple-Intel merger aimed at screwing Microsoft. Hmmm.
Update: Matt McIrvin calls bullshit.
If you look very carefully, you can find a snapshot of a drunken apostropher flashing some titty in this comment thread. Turns out I take requests. Who knew?
Jesse Helms, my senator for 30 years, has "written" his memoirs. As is so often the case when a career bigot and hatemonger nears the end of his life, Helms is trying to soften his deservedly repulsive image and the news stories are mostly focused on his admission that he was wrong about AIDS. It's being played as an apology, but if you look at his words, he's pretty clear that he's only sorry that he opposed funding because it turned out not to be restricted to queers and junkies.
But in his final years in the Senate, Helms said his views evolved because of old friends such as North Carolina evangelist Franklin Graham and new ones such as rock singer Bono, both of whom got him involved in the fight against the AIDS epidemic in Africa.
"Until then," Helms writes, "it had been my feeling that AIDS was a disease largely spread by reckless and voluntary sexual and drug-abusing behavior, and that it would probably be confined to those in high risk populations. I was wrong."
Shorter Jesse: "My bad, y'all. I didn't realize that people God doesn't hate might get it. I guess not everybody deserved it after all." Anyhow, even when he's trying to burnish his image, the old racist still comes shining through the gauzy lens filter.
"I did not advocate segregation, and I did not advocate aggravation," Helms writes. "By that I mean that I thought it was wrong for people who did not know, and who did not care, about the relationships between neighbors and friends to force their ideas about how communities should work on the people who had built those communities in the first place. I believed right would prevail as people followed their own consciences."
"We will never know how integration might have been achieved in neighborhoods across our land, because the opportunity was snatched away by outside agitators who had their own agendas to advance. We certainly do know the price paid by the stirring of hatred, the encouragement of violence, the suspicion and distrust. We do know that too many lives were lost, businesses were destroyed, millions of dollars were diverted from books and teachers to support the cost of buses and gasoline. We do know that turning our public schools into social laboratories almost destroyed them."
You did not advocate segregation? Here's one of the ads Helms helped write for Willis Smith in 1950: "White people, wake up before it is too late. Do you want Negroes working beside you, your wife and your daughters, in your mills and factories? Frank Graham favors mingling of the races." Hmmm, sounds pretty segregationist to this alumnus of the school you referred to on air as the University of Negroes and Communists.
Helms' health has been awful for years and I doubt he's got much time before he checks out. As with Nixon, you'll be seeing plenty of glossing over the uncomfortable but well-documented truth in an attempt to try to paint him as an admired conservative statesman. Don't believe it. He is a disgrace to our state and an ugly stain on the federal government. Even a clearly-in-over-her-head empty suit like Elizabeth Dole is a vast improvement. Good riddance, Jesse. You won't be missed. Now just go away.
Update: More substantive reflections are over at The Stinging Nettle and Robust McManlyPants.
Phrasebook for Americans. Watch for the "non-standard" translations. (via Mimi Smartypants)
The European Space Agency's Mars Express Orbiter has snapped the first 3-D color image of water ice resting in a martian crater.
The shadow of the crater's rim, which towers 300 metres over the surrounding plains, prevents the ice from vaporizing in the planet's thin atmosphere. A dusting of frost survives inside the rim to the upper right, while the sun glimmers on its south-facing outer edge.
The 35-kilometre-wide crater sits 70° north of the martian equator, in a low-lying region known as Vastitas Borealis. Previous orbiters have spotted ice deposits in craters, but the High Resolution Stereo Camera on board the European probe is the first to return a three-dimensional colour image of an icy spot. The ice may be up to 200 metres thick, and lies over a dune field that has formed in the sediment on the crater's floor.
Sigh. I have come to hate Movable Type with a purple passion. My server has begun returning the maddeningly non-specific 500 error when attempting to post comments. The comments are still showing up, you just have to go the main page (or the individual post archive) and refresh. I'd like to say that I'll get this resolved shortly, but my trusty support guy left for a week in France last night and the last time I tried to fix this, I broke the whole damn site so I'm a bit gun-shy.
Sorry for the inconvenience. Let's hope it doesn't degenerate further.
While the United States has moved steadily rightward, South America has lurched hard to the left, much to the Bush administration's consternation. While most of the unfriendly attention has focused on Venezuela's Chavez, Brazil's Lula, and, of course, Fidel Castro for old time's sake, there are also Vasquez in Uruguay, Kirchner in Argentina, Lagos in Chile, and Palacio in Ecuador. In terms of land mass, it's practically the entire continent.
Now, Bolivia is coming to a boil.
Bolivia is on the verge of civil war, its departing president, Carlos Mesa, has warned. He also called for snap elections to be held to ease growing tension which his offer to stand down has done little to defuse. Congress is due to vote today on whether to accept Mr Mesa's resignation, which was prompted by mass protests that have brought the capital, La Paz, to a standstill.
Hormando Vaca Diez, a lawyer and landowner who heads the Senate, is first in line under the constitution to replace Mr Mesa, should his resignation be accepted. But the protesters who forced Mr Mesa to resign also demanded immediate polls, which could lead to the election of Evo Morales, the house deputy who leads a left-wing party, whose power base is drawn from Indian coca-leaf farmers.
That's certain to go over well in Washington. This article is a decent backgrounder on the volatile situation in Bolivia, though it was written for Socialist Worker Magazine, so you have to endure a lot of exhortatory flourishes. Still, it's a good, concise rundown of recent events in a situation that's gotten practically no news time in the US and could really go in any direction.
Everybody's all focused on the Mexican border right now, but I think maybe the northern border could use some tightening.
On April 25, Gregory Despres arrived at the U.S.-Canadian border crossing at Calais, Maine, carrying a homemade sword, a hatchet, a knife, brass knuckles and a chain saw stained with what appeared to be blood. U.S. cust
